The Longest Way Home

5

Looking off toward the blankness on the horizon where the dark dot that was the truck had been before it passed from sight, Joseph felt as though he had just awakened from a wonderful dream, where only bits and pieces of recollection remain, and shortly even those are gone, leaving only a vague glow, an aura. Fate had taken him to Eysar Haven; fate had put him into the house where Thayle lived; fate had sent her into his bed, and now he was changed forever. But all that was behind him except the memories. He was on his own again in unfamiliar territory, with the same inconceivable journey of thousands of miles still ahead of him, even after having come all this distance since his escape from Getfen House.

He took stock of the situation in which he found himself now: dense woodlands, late summer, the air hot and torpid, no sign of a human presence anywhere around, no houses, no cultivated fields or even the remnants of them, nothing but the poorly maintained road along which he was walking. Were there other cuyling towns nearby? He should have asked her while he had the chance. How far was he from the Isthmus? From the nearest Great House? Would he find encampments of the rebels ahead? Was the rebellion still going on, for that matter, or had it been quelled by armies out of Helikis while he was spending the summer mending in Eysar Haven? He knew nothing, nothing at all.

Well, he would learn as he went, as he had been doing all along. The important thing now was simply not to let himself starve again. He knew only too well what that was like.

And the provisions Thayle had thrown together for him would last him no more than a day or two, he guessed. After that, unless he could learn to turn himself into an effective hunter or found a new set of hospitable hosts, it would be back to eating ants and beetles and bits of plants again.

He started off at a swift pace, but soon realized he could not maintain it. Although he had returned nearly to full strength during his time in Eysar Haven, he had also softened there from inactivity. His legs, which had turned to iron rods during the endless days of his solitary march down from the mountains, were mere muscle and bone again, and he felt them protesting. It would take time for them to harden once more. And he was beginning to feel stiff and sore, already, from the beating that Grovin had given him.

The land changed quickly as Joseph proceeded south. He was not even a day’s walk beyond the place where Thayle had left him and he was no longer in good farming territory, nor did his new surroundings offer the possibilities for shelter that a forest might provide. The woods thinned out and he began to ascend a sort of shallow plateau, hot and dry, where little twisted shrubs with sleek black trunks rose out of red, barren-looking soil. It was bordered to east and west by low, long black hills with ridges sharp as blades, and streaks of bright white along their tops, blindingly reflective in the midday sun, that looked like outcroppings of salt, and perhaps actually were. The sky was a bare, dazzling blue rind. There were very few streams, and most of those that he found were brackish. He filled his flask at one that was not, but he realized that it would be wise to use his water very sparingly in this region.

There was a vast, resounding quietude here. It was not hard to think of himself as being all alone in the world. No family, no friends, not even any enemies; no Masters, no Folk, no Indigenes, no noctambulos, nothing, no one: only Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph all alone, walking ever onward through this empty land. It was completely new to him, this solitary kind of life. He could not say that he disliked it. There was a strange music to it, a kind of poetry, that fascinated him. Such great isolation had a mysterious purity and simplicity of form.

Despite the increasing bleakness of the landscape, Joseph moved through his first hours in it in an easy, almost automatic way. He barely took notice of its growing harshness, or of the growing weariness of his legs; his mind was still occupied fully with thoughts of Thayle. He thought not only of the warmth of her embrace, the smoothness of her skin, the touch of her lips against his, and the wondrous sensations that swept through him as he slid deep within her, but also of their discussions afterward, the things she had said to him, the things she had forced him to think about for the first time in his life.

He had always assumed—unquestioningly—that there was nothing remarkable about his being a member of the ruling class by mere right of birth. That was simply how things were in the world: either you were a Master or you were not, and it had been his luck to be born not only a Master but a Master among Masters, the heir to one of the greatest of the Great Houses. “Why are you a Master?” Thayle had asked him. “What right except right of conquest allows you to rule over other people?” Those were not things that one asked oneself, ordinarily. One took them for granted. One regarded one’s rank in life as a matter of having been endowed by a stroke of fate with certain great privilege in return for a willingness to shoulder certain great responsibilities, and the inquiry stopped there. “You are Joseph Master Keilloran,” they had told him as soon as he was old enough to understand that he had such a thing as a name and a rank. “Those people are the Folk. You are a Master.” And then he had devoted the succeeding years of his boyhood to the study of the things he would have to know when he came—by inheritance alone, by simple right of birth—into the duties of the rank for which destiny had chosen him.

Out here everything was different. The identity that had been automatically his from the hour of his coming into the world had been taken from him. For these past months he had been only what he could make of himself—first a fugitive boy searching frantically for safety and gladly accepting the aid that a passing noctambulo offered him; then a valued tribal healer and the friend, no less, of an Indigene chieftain; then a fugitive again, a pathetic one, living along the desperate borderlands of starvation; then the welcome guest of a Folkish family who nursed him back to health as though he were of their own blood, and the lover, even, of the girl of that family. And now he was a fugitive again. He was created anew every day out of the context of that day.

How upside-down everything has become, Joseph thought. At home I never had to worry about where my next meal would come from, but I was aware constantly that when I grew up and succeeded my father I would have to bear the enormous responsibilities of running a Great House—instructing the overseers on what needed to be done, and by whom, and checking the account books, and looking after the needs of the Folk of my House, and many such things like that. Out here there are no responsibilities to think about, but there is no assurance that I will have anything to eat the day after tomorrow, either.

It was a dizzying business. There once had been a time when his life had been all certainty; now it was a thing of perpetual flux. Yet he did not really regret the transformations that had been worked upon him. He doubted that many Masters had been through experiences such as he had had on this journey. He had had to cope with unexpected physical pain and with severe bodily privation. His stay among the Indigenes and his conversations with the Ardardin had taught him things about that race, and the relationship of the Masters to it, that would stand him in good stead once he returned to civilization. Likewise his time at Eysar Haven, both the things he had learned in Thayle’s eager arms and the things she had forced him to confront as they lay side by side quietly talking afterward. All that had been tremendously valuable, in its way. But it will have been a mere waste, Joseph told himself, if I do not survive to return to House Keilloran.

Darkness came. He found a place to sleep, a hollow at the side of a little hill. It would do. He looked back nostalgically to his bed at Eysar Haven, but he was amazed how quickly he could become accustomed to sleeping in the open again. Lie down in the softest place you can find, though it is not necessarily soft, curl into your usual sleeping position, close your eyes, wait for oblivion—that was all there was to it. A hard day’s walking had left him ready for a night’s deep sleep.

In the morning, though, his legs ached all the way up to his skull, and he was aching from the effects of Grovin’s blows, besides. Not for another two days would any of that aching cease and his muscles begin to turn to iron again. But then Joseph felt himself beginning to regain the hardness that had earlier been his and before long he felt ready to walk on and on, forever if need be, to Helikis and beyond, clear off the edge of the world and out to the moons.

The road he had been following veered sharply left, vanishing in the east, a dark dwindling line. He let it go. South is my direction, Joseph thought. He did not care what lay in the east. And he needed no road: one step at a time, through glade and valley, past hill and dale, would take him where he wanted to go.

As the food Thayle had given him dwindled toward its end, he began to think more seriously about the newest metamorphosis in his steady sequence of reinvention, the one that must transform him into a hunter who lived off the land, killing for his food.

Though he was traveling now through a harder, more challenging environment than any he had encountered before, it was by no means an empty one. Wherever he looked he saw an abundance of wild animals, strange beasts both large and small, living as they had lived for millions of years in this unaccommodating land for which neither Masters nor Folk nor Indigenes had found any use. In a glade of spiky gray trees he saw a troop of long-necked red-striped browsing beasts that must have been thirty feet tall, munching on the twisted thorny leaves. They looked down at him with sad, gentle gray eyes that betrayed little sign of intelligence. A brackish lake contained a population of round shaggy wading animals that set up a rhythmic slapping of the surface of the water with their flat, blunt, hairless tails, perhaps because they were annoyed by his presence, as he passed them by. There was a squat, heavy, ganuille-like beast with an incongruous nest of blunt horns sprouting above its nostrils, and small, frisky, stiff-tailed tawny animals with dainty, fragile legs, and slow-moving big-headed browsers nibbling on the unpromising saw-edged reddish grass that grew here, and paunchy, jowly, furry creatures with ominous crests of spikes along their spines, creatures that walked upright and, judging by the way they paused in their wanderings to contemplate the stranger in their midst, might very well be at the same level of mental ability as the poriphars, or even beyond it.

Joseph knew that he would have to kill some of these creatures in order to survive. The noctambulo was not here now to do his hunting for him. Nor were there any streams conveniently provided with mud-crawlers, or with those tasty white tubers he remembered from his earliest days on the run, and it was not very likely that he would be able to find any of the small scrabbling creatures the noctambulo had so easily snatched up with quick swipes of its scooplike paws.

So he would have to do it himself. He had no choice. The idea of killing anything bigger than a mud-crawler seemed disagreeable to him, and he wondered why. At home and at Getfen House he had hunted all manner of animals great and small, purely for pleasure, and had never given the rights and wrongs of it a thought; here he must hunt out of necessity, and yet something within him balked at it. Perhaps it was because this was no hunting preserve, but the homeland of wild creatures, into which he was coming uninvited, and with murder on his mind. Well, he had not asked to find himself here. And he, just like any of the animals here that fed on the flesh of other beasts, needed to eat.

That night, camping among some many-branched crooked-trunked trees that had covered the ground with a dense litter of soft discarded needles, Joseph dreamed of Thayle. She was standing gloriously naked before him by moonlight, the white light of Keviel, that made her soft skin gleam like bright satin and cast its cool glow on the heavy globes of her breasts and the mysterious triangular tangle of golden hair at the base of her belly, and she smiled and held out her hands to him, and he reached for her and drew her down to him, kissing her and stroking her, and her breath began to come in deep, harsh gusts as Joseph touched the most intimate places of her body, until at last she cried out to him to come into her, and he did. And waited to go swimming off to ecstasy; but somehow, maddeningly, he awoke instead, just as the finest moment of all was drawing near, Thayle disappearing from his grasp like a popping bubble.

“No!” he cried, still on the threshold between dreaming and wakefulness. “Come back!” And opened his eyes and sat up, and saw white Keviel indeed crossing the sky overhead, and realized that he was in fact not alone. But his companion was not Thayle. He heard a low snuffling sound, and picked up a smell that was both sharp and musty at the same time. Elongated reddish-green eyes were staring at him out of the moonlit darkness. He could make out a longish thick-set body, a flattened bristly snout, tall pointed ears. The creature was no more than seven or eight feet away from him and slowly heading his way.

Joseph jumped quickly to his feet and made shooing gestures at the beast. It halted at once, uncertainly swinging its snout from side to side. His eyes were adapting to the night, and he saw that his visitor was an animal of a sort he had noticed earlier that day, fairly big, slow-moving grazing beasts with thick furry coats reminiscent of a poriphar’s, black with broad white stripes. Unlike the poriphars they had seemed harmless enough then, in all likelihood mainly herbivorous, equipped with nothing that looked dangerous except, perhaps, the strong claws that they used, most likely, for scratching up their food out of the ground.

Groping in his utility case, Joseph located his pocket torch and switched it on. The animal had settled down on its haunches and was looking at him in a matter-of-fact way, as though it were puzzled at finding Joseph here, but only mildly so. It did not seem like a particularly quick-witted creature. “You aren’t by any chance an intelligent life-form, are you?” Joseph said to it, speaking in Indigene. It continued to stare blandly at him. “No. No. I didn’t really think you were. But I thought it was a good idea to check.” Probably this was one of its preferred feeding areas, a place where it liked to dig by night for nuts hidden beneath the fallen needles, or insects that dwelled just underground, or some other such easy prey.

“Am I in your way?” Joseph asked. “I’m sorry. I just needed a place to sleep. If this place belongs to you, I’ll go somewhere else, all right?”

He expected no reply, and got none. But the animal did not leave, either, and as it began to resume its snuffling search for dinner Joseph saw that he was going to have to find another camping-ground for himself. He was hardly likely to be able to fall asleep again here, not with a thing this size, be it harmless or not, prowling around so close by him. Gathering up his belongings, he moved a dozen yards away and settled down again, but that was no better; soon the animal was coming in his direction once more. “Go away,” Joseph told it. “I don’t want to be your friend. Not right now, anyway.” He made the shooing motions again. But it was hopeless. The animal would not leave, and Joseph was wide awake, probably irreparably so, besides. He sat up unhappily the rest of the night, watching the beast poking unhurriedly about among the needles.

Dawn seemed to take forever to arrive. From time to time he fell into a light doze, not really sleep. Somewhere in the night, he realized, the striped beast had wandered away. Joseph offered a morning prayer—he still did that, though he was not sure any longer why he did—and sorted through his bag of provisions, calculating how much he could allow himself for breakfast. Not very much, he saw. And the remainder would go at lunchtime. This was the day when he would have to start hunting for his food, or scratch around in the needles on the ground for whatever it was that the striped creature had been looking for, or else prepare himself for a new descent into famine.

Hunting it would be. Barren-looking though the land appeared, there were plenty of animals roaming hereabouts, a whole zoo’s worth of them, in fact. But he had nothing with him in the way of a real weapon, of course. What did castaways without weapons do when they needed to catch something to eat?

A sharpened stake in a pit, he thought. Cover it with branches and let your quarry tumble down onto it.

It seemed an absurd idea even as Joseph thought of it, but as he set about contemplating it as a practical matter it looked sillier and sillier to him. A sharpened stake? Sharpened with what? And dig a pit? How, with his bare hands? And then hope that something worth eating would obligingly drop into it and neatly skewer itself? Even as he looked around for something he could use as a stake, he found himself laughing at his own foolishness.

But he had no better ideas at the moment, and a stake did turn up after a lengthy search: a slender branch about five feet long that had snapped free of a nearby tree. One end of it, the end where it had broken off, was jagged and sharp. If only he could embed the stake properly in the ground, it might actually do the trick. But now he had to dig a hole as deep as he was tall, broad enough to hold the animal he hoped to catch. Joseph scuffed experimentally at the ground with the side of his sandal. The best he could manage was a faint shallow track. The dry, hard soil would not be easy to excavate. Perhaps he could find some piece of stone suitable for digging with, but it would probably take him a month to dig the sort of pit he needed. He would starve to death long before that. And he had wasted the whole morning on this ridiculous project, without having moved so much as an inch closer to his destination.

The last of his food went for his midday meal, as he knew it would. A prolonged search afterward for edible nuts or even insects produced nothing.

What next? He reached once more into his recollection of old boys’ adventure books. String a snare between two trees, he supposed, and hope for something to get entangled in it. He did have a reel of metallic cord in his utility case, and he spent a complicated hour rigging it between two saplings a short distance above the ground. The black-and-white burrowing animal of the night before came snuffling around while he worked. Joseph was fairly sure it was the same one. By daylight it looked larger than it had seemed in the night, a short-legged, fleshy, well-built creature that weighed at least as much as he did. Its thick white-striped pelt was quite handsome. The animal seemed entirely unafraid of him, coming surprisingly close, now and then pushing its flat bristly snout against the cord that Joseph was trying to tie to the saplings and making the task harder for him. “What is this?” Joseph asked it. “You want to help? I don’t need your help.” He had to shove it out of the way. It moved off a short distance and looked back sadly at him with a glassy-eyed stare. “You’d like to be my friend?” Joseph asked. “My pet? I wasn’t really looking for a pet.”

Finally the job of fashioning the snare appeared to be done. Joseph stepped back, admiring his handiwork. Any animal that ran into it with sufficient velocity would find itself caught, he hoped. Those lively little tawny-skinned animals that went frisking swiftly around the place in groups of five or six: they were just reckless enough, possibly, to be taken that way.

But they were not. Joseph hid himself behind a big three-sided boulder and waited, an hour, two hours. It was getting on toward twilight now. In this early dusk his snare would surely be invisible: he could barely see it himself, looking straight toward the place where he knew it to be. From his vantage-point behind the boulder he caught a glimpse of his furry striped friend browsing around nearby, scratching up large rounded seeds out of the ground and munching on them in a noisy crunching way. But he doubted that that would bother the little tawny animals. And at last they came frolicking along, a good-sized herd of them, a dozen or more this time, tails held stiffly erect, ears pricked up, nostrils flaring, small hooves clacking as they skipped over the rocky soil. They were moving on a path that seemed likely to take them straight toward Joseph’s trap. And indeed it was so. One by one they danced right up to it, and one by one as they reached it they launched themselves into the air in elegant little leaps, soaring prettily over the outstretched cord with two or three feet to spare and continuing on beyond, switching their tails mockingly at him as they ran. They went over his snare like athletes leaping hurdles. Scarcely believing it, Joseph watched the entire troop pass by and prance out of sight.

He waited half an hour more, hoping some less perceptive animal might come by and fall victim to the snare, one of the many wandering beasts of these unpromising fields. That did not happen. Darkness was coming on and he had nothing whatever to eat. In the morning things would be no better. He was looking at starvation again, much too soon. None of the parched, gnarly plants that grew in this dry land looked edible to him, though the grazing animals plainly did not mind them. He could not bring himself to eat the three-sided saw-edged blades of tough red grass that grew in sparse clumps everywhere around. There were no likely roots or tubers, no snails, perhaps not even ants. Somewhere beyond those white-edged hills there might be a land of tender fruits and sweet, succulent, slow-moving land crabs, but he might not live long enough to reach it, if indeed any such place existed. Nor could he hope that Folkish rescuers would come conveniently to his rescue a second time when he collapsed once again by the wayside in the last stages of hallucinatory exhaustion.

I must find something that I can kill and eat, Joseph thought, and find it quickly.

There was a familiar snuffling sound off to his left.

No, Joseph thought, aghast. I can’t! And then, immediately afterward: Yes! I must!

His new friend, his self-appointed companion. This slow-moving musky-smelling seed-eating thing, so trusting, so unthreatening. It was not just any animal; somehow this day it had turned into an animal that he felt he knew. That is sheer imbecility, he told himself. An animal is an animal, nothing more. And he was in dire need. But could he kill it, this harmless, friendly creature? He must. There was nothing else. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It was a horrifying idea, but so too was starving. He had experienced starvation once already, and once was more than enough: the steady melting away of his flesh, the shriveling of his muscles, the weakening of his bones, the blurring of his vision, the swollen tongue, the taste of copper in his throat, the quivering legs, the headaches, the giddiness, the craziness.

He picked up a wedge-shaped rock, a large one, the biggest one that he could hold. The animal was looking at him in a vague incurious way. Clearly it did not have the slightest awareness of Joseph’s intentions. Joseph prayed that there was little or no intelligence behind those dull eyes. Did you ever really know how intelligent any creature might be? No. You never did, did you? He thought of the poriphars who had shared their food with him beside that stream in the lovely springtime country just below the mountains. No one doubted that they were intelligent beings. Stand this creature on its hind legs and it would look a little like a poriphar, Joseph thought: a distant cousin, possibly. He hoped it was only a coincidental resemblance. “Forgive me,” he said foolishly, taking a deep breath, and raised the rock in both hands and brought it down as hard as he could across the striped animal’s wide flat forehead.

The impact barely seemed to register on it. It stared stupidly at Joseph and took a couple of wobbly uncertain steps backward, but did not undertake any real retreat. Joseph hit it again, and again. And again. He went on and on, to little apparent avail. The animal, staggering now, made a sorrowful rumbling noise. I must be unrelenting, Joseph told himself, I must be ruthless, it is too late to stop. I must carry this through to the end. He struck it once more and this time the thing fell, toppling heavily, landing on its side and moving its feet through the air in a slow circular path. The rumbling continued. There was a breathy whimper now, too. The reddish-green eyes remained open, peering at him, so Joseph thought, with a reproachful stare.

He felt sick. It was one thing to hunt like a gentleman, with a weapon that spat death cleanly and quickly from a distance. It was another thing entirely to kill like a savage, pounding away brutishly with a rock.

He went to his utility case and found his little knife, and knelt, straddling the creature, feeling strong spasms of some sort going through its back and shoulders, and, weeping now, drove the blade into the animal’s throat with all his strength. The rear legs began to thrash. But the knife was barely adequate to the task and it all took very much longer than Joseph expected. I must be unrelenting, Joseph told himself a second time, and clung to the animal, holding it down until the thrashing began to diminish.

He rose, then, bloodied, sobbing.

Gradually he grew calm. The worst part of it is over, he thought. But he was wrong even about that, because there was still the butchering to do, the peeling back of the thick pelt with the knife that was scarcely more than a toy, the slitting of the belly, the lifting out of the glistening abdominal organs, red and pink and blue. You had to get the internal organs out, Anceph had taught him long ago, because they decayed very quickly and would spoil the meat. But it was a frightful task. He was shaken by the sight of the animal’s inwardness, all that moist shining internal machinery that had made it a living, metabolizing thing until he had picked up his rock and begun the ending of its life. Now those secret things were laid bare. They all came spilling forth, organs he could not begin to identify, the sacred privateness of the creature he had killed. Joseph gagged and retched and turned away, covered with sweat, and then turned back and continued with what he had to do. Twice more he had to pause to retch and heave as he went about the work, and the second time the nausea was so intense that it was necessary for him to halt for some five or ten minutes, shaking, sweating, dizzied. Then he forced himself to continue. He had arrogated unto himself the right to take this innocent creature’s life; he must make certain now that the killing had not been without purpose.

When he was done he was slathered with gore, and there was no stream nearby in which he could bathe himself. Unwilling to squander his small supply of drinking-water, Joseph rubbed himself with gritty handfuls of the sandy soil until his hands and arms seemed sufficiently clean. Then he searched in his utility case for his firestarter, which he had not used in such a long time that he was not at all sure it still worked. The thought that it might be necessary for him to eat the meat raw brought Joseph to the edge of nausea again. But the firestarter worked; he built a little bonfire of twigs and dried leaves, and skewered a steak and roasted it until the juices dripped from it; and then, the culminating monstrous act, he took his first bite. The meat had something of the same sharp and musky taste that he had smelled in the animal’s pelt, and swallowing it involved him in a mighty struggle. But he had to eat. He had to eat this . And he did. He ate slowly, sadly, chewing mechanically, until he had had his fill.

It was dark, now, and time for sleep. But he did not want to use the same campsite that he had used the night before. That would summon too many memories of the animal that had visited him there. Instead he settled down not far from the dying ashes of his fire, though the ground was bare and uneven there. While he lay waiting for sleep to take him Joseph remembered a time he had gone with Anceph on a three-day hunting trip in Garyona Woods, he and Rickard and some of their friends, and on the second morning, awakening at daybreak, he had seen Anceph crouching over the faintly glowing coals of their campfire, staring at small plump animals, vivid red in color, that seemed to be leaping around and across them.

“Ember-toads,” Anceph explained. “You find droves of them in the morning whenever there’s a fire burning down. They like the warmth, I suppose.” He was holding a little net in one hand; and, as Joseph watched, he swept it swiftly back and forth until he had caught a dozen or more of the things. “Plenty of good sweet meat on their legs,” said Anceph. “We’ll grill ’em for breakfast. You’ll like the way they taste.” He was right about that. Rickard refused indignantly even to try one; but Joseph had had his fill, and recalled to this day how good they had been. He wondered if there would be ember-toads hopping about what was left of his fire in the morning, but he did not think there would—they were found only in Helikis, so far as he knew—and indeed there was nothing but white ash in his fire-pit when he woke. No ember-toads, not here, and the body of good-natured Anceph, who knew so much about hunting and all manner of other things, lay in some unmarked grave far to the north at Getfen House.

The task for this morning was to cut and pack however much of the striped creature’s meat he could carry with him when he resumed his march. Joseph could not say how long the meat would last, but he wanted to waste as little of it as necessary, and perhaps in this dry climate it would be slow to spoil.

He got down to the job quickly and in a businesslike manner. It did not make him suffer as the killing and the first stage of the butchering had made him suffer: this part of it was just so much work: unpleasant, messy, slogging work, nothing more. He was greatly relieved not to feel any but the faintest vestige of last night’s grief and shame over the killing of that harmless, friendly animal. Everything has to die sooner or later, Joseph told himself. If he had hurried the event along for the striped animal, it was only because his own life would have been imperiled if he could not quickly find food, and in this world those who are quicker and stronger and smarter end up eating those who are not: it was the rule, the inflexible rule of the inflexible universe. Even Thayle, who thought it was wrong that the Masters should have set themselves up as overlords over the Folk, did not see anything wrong with eating the flesh of the beasts. It was a normal, natural thing. He had eaten plenty of meat in his life, just like everyone else, without ever once weeping over it before; the only difference this time was that the act of slaughtering it himself had brought him that much closer to the bloody reality of what it meant to be a carnivore, and for a moment in his solitude here he had let himself give way to feelings of guilt. Some part of him, the Master part that had been so rarely in evidence these recent days, found that unacceptable. Guilt was not a luxury he could afford, out here in this lonely wilderness. He must put it aside.

Joseph spent the first half of the morning cutting the meat up into flat strips, letting all residual blood drain away, and carefully wrapping them in the thick, leathery leaves of a tree that grew nearby. He hoped that that might preserve it from decay for another few days. When he had loaded his pack with all that it could hold, he roasted what was left of the meat for his midday meal, and set out toward the south once more. After a few dozen steps something impelled him to look back for one last glance at his campsite, and he saw that two scrawny yellow-furred beasts with bushy tails were rooting around busily in the scattered entrails of the animal he had killed. Nothing goes to waste, Joseph thought, at least not in the world of nature. Man is the only animal that countenances being wasteful.

The day was uneventful, and the one after that. Though there was no actual path for him to follow, the land was gently undulating, easy enough to traverse. Far off in the distance he saw mountains of considerable size, purple and pink in the morning haze, and he wondered whether he was going to have to cross them. But that was not something to which he needed to give much thought at the moment. The immediate terrain presented no problems. Joseph’s thighs and calves had shed the stiffness of a few days before, and he saw no reason why he could not cover twenty miles a day, or even thirty, now that he was in the rhythm of it.

He was pleased to see that the territory through which he was passing grew less forbidding as he continued onward: before long the soil became blacker and richer, the vegetation much more lush. Soon the ominous sharp-ridged salt-encrusted black hills dropped away behind him. There was more moisture in the air, and better cloud-cover, so that he did not have to endure the constant pounding presence of the summer sun, although by mid-morning each day the heat was considerable. He found water, too, a thin white sheet of it that came sluicing down over a mica-speckled rock-face from some clifftop spring high above, collecting in a shallow basin at the foot of the cliff; he stripped gladly and washed himself from head to toe, and drank deep, and refilled his flask, which had gone so low that he had been permitting himself only the most niggardly sips at the widest possible intervals. A bush not far away was bowed down under heavy clusters of fat, lustrous, shining golden berries that looked too attractive not to be edible. Joseph tried one and found it full of sweet juice, soft as honey. He risked a second, and then a third. That had become his wilderness rule, three berries and no more, see what happens next. By the time he had built a fire to roast his evening meat, no harmful effects had manifested themselves, so he allowed himself another dozen with his meal. When he resumed his journey after breakfast he took three big clusters with him, but later he saw that the bush was common all along his path, wherever a source of water was to be found, and he did not bother carrying such a large supply. Within a couple of days, though, the berry-bushes were nowhere to be seen, and when he tried a smaller, harder red berry from a different bush it burned his mouth, so that he spat it quickly out. Even that one taste was enough to keep him awake half the night with a troublesome griping of the abdomen, but he felt better in the morning.

An hour into his morning march Joseph came up over a gentle rise in the land and saw a road cutting through the valley below him, looping down from the northeast and aligning itself with the route that the position of the sun told him he must take. Quite possibly it was the same road that Thayle had left him on, the one that he had abandoned when it seemed to turn eastward. It did at least look similar to that one, rough and narrow and badly in need of maintenance. There was no traffic on it. He had never realized how sparsely populated so much of the northern continent was.

After only a few days back in the purity of the wild Joseph felt a strange reluctance to set foot again on anything so unnatural as an asphalt highway. But the road did seem to run due south from where he was, and therefore was probably his most direct course toward the Isthmus. There was no harm in following it by day, he thought. He would go off into the bush each evening when it came to be time to settle down for the night.

It was not pleasing to be walking on a paved surface again, though. The highway felt harsh, even brutal, against his sandaled feet. He was tempted to go take the sandals off and go barefoot on it. I am becoming a creature of nature, he thought, a wild thing, a beast of the fields. My identity as a civilized being is dropping away from me day by day. I have become a shaggy animal. If I ever do get home, will I be able to turn myself back into a Master again? Or will I slip away from House Keilloran when no one is looking, and go off by myself to forage for berries and roots in the wilderness beyond the estate?

There were traces in this district of former settlement: a scattering of small wooden houses of the sort he had lived in at Eysar Haven, but isolated ones, set one by one at goodly distances from each other at the side of the road. They were the homes of individual Folkish farmers, he supposed, who had not wanted to live in a village, not even a cuyling village. None of them was occupied, though there was no sign of any destruction: apparently their owners had just abandoned them, he could not tell how long ago. Perhaps the war had come this way, or perhaps those who had lived here had just gone away: it was impossible to tell.

Joseph prowled around in one that had a wire bird-coop alongside the main building, the sort in which thestrins or heysir would have been kept. There was at least the possibility that some remnants of the farmer’s flock might still be in residence there. His supply of meat was nearly at its end and it would be splendid to dine on roast thestrin tonight, or even an omelet of heysir eggs. But Joseph found nothing in the coop except empty nests and a scattering of feathers. Inside the farmhouse itself a thick layer of dust coated everything. The building had been emptied of virtually all it had once contained except for some old, shapeless furniture. Joseph did discover a single incongruous unopened bottle of wine standing at the edge of a kitchen counter. He had nothing with which to open it, and finally simply snapped its neck against the side of the rust-stained sink. The wine was thin and sour and he left most of it unfinished.

That night a light rain began to fall. Joseph decided to sleep inside the house, but he disliked the confined feeling that sleeping indoors produced in him, and the drifting clouds of dust that he had stirred up were bothersome. He slept on the porch instead, lying on some bedraggled old pillows that he found, listening to the gentle pattering sound of the rain until sleep took him.

The morning was bright, clear, and warm. He allowed himself a quick, minimal breakfast and set out early, and soon was beyond the last of the abandoned farmhouses. He was moving into a terrain that was neither forest nor meadow, dominated by immense stately trees with steeply upturned branches, each standing in splendid isolation, far from its nearest neighbor, amidst a field of dense, rubbery-looking pink-leaved grass. A myriad of small round-bodied hopping creatures with fluffy grayish fur moved about busily below the trees, probably searching for seeds.

The sight of them in such a multitude made Joseph, who had begun to see that he would need to restock his food supply in another day or two, feel a burst of sudden hunger. He yearned for a rifle. The best he could hope for, though, was to try to bring one down with a well-aimed rock. But as he crept up on one group of them with what he hoped was something like stealth they melted away before him like winter fog in the bright morning sun, easily and unhurriedly drifting out of his range as Joseph approached them, and resumed their explorations at the far side of the field. A second group did the same. Joseph gave the enterprise up without casting a single stone.

His mood was cheerful, nevertheless. This was an inviting kind of countryside and he did not doubt that he would find something to eat somewhere, sooner or later, and his body felt so well tuned now, so smoothly coordinated in every function, that there was real joy to be had from striding along down the empty road at a brisk pace. The sun stood high in the sky before him, showing him the way to Helikis. Joseph felt that it did not matter if it took him another whole year to get home, three years, ten years: this was the great adventure of his life, the unexpected epic journey that would shape him forever, and however much time it required would be the span that his destiny had marked out for it to last.

Then he came around a curve in the road, still moving jauntily along, whistling, thinking pleasant thoughts of his nights with Thayle, and discovered that the road just ahead was full of military-looking vehicles, perhaps half a dozen of them, with a crowd of armed men standing alongside them.

A roadblock, Joseph realized. A checkpoint of some kind. And he had walked right into it, or nearly so.

Had they seen him? He could not tell. He halted quickly and turned about, meaning to slip back the way he had come, thinking to hide himself in the woods until they moved along, or, if they didn’t move along, to take up a lateral trail that would get him around them. He succeeded in covering about a dozen paces.

Then a voice from somewhere above him, a crisp, flat, nasal voice, said in Folkish, “You will stay exactly where you are. You will lift your hands above your head.”

Joseph looked up. A stocky helmeted man in a drab uniform stood on the hillside overlooking the highway. He had a rifle in his hands, aimed at the middle of Joseph’s chest. Several other men in the same sort of uniform were jogging around the bend in the road toward him. They were armed also.

Any movement other than one of surrender would be suicidal, Joseph saw. He nodded to the man on the hillside and held up his hands.

They came up to him and formed a little cluster about him. Rebel soldiers, he supposed, five of them altogether. Not one came up much higher than his shoulders. All five had the same flat broad noses, narrow grayish eyes, yellowish hair that looked as though it had been cut by snipping around the edges of an inverted bowl. They might almost have been five brothers.

He heard them chattering quickly in Folkish, arguing over him, trying to decide who and what he was. The prevailing belief among them seemed to be that he was a spy, although for whom they thought he might be spying was not something Joseph was able to determine. But one of them thought he was a wandering wild man of the woods, a harmless crazy simpleton. “Only a crazy man would come along this road right now,” he said. “And look how filthy he is. Did you ever see anyone who looked as filthy as this one?” Joseph took some offense at that. It was only a few weeks since he had last trimmed his beard and his hair, and not a great many days had gone by since he had last washed himself, either. He thought he appeared respectable enough, considering his recent circumstances. Yet these soldiers, or the one who had said it, at least, saw him quite differently. This latest sojourn in the wilderness must have left him far more uncouth-looking than he suspected.

He said nothing to them. That seemed the wisest policy. And they made no attempt whatever to interrogate him. Perhaps at their level of authority they had no responsibility for questioning prisoners. Instead they merely bundled him unceremoniously into one of the vehicles parked by the side of the road and headed off with him toward the south.

A sprawling encampment lay ten minutes down the road: wire-mesh walls encircling dozens of flimsy-looking, hastily flung-up huts, with scores of Folkish soldiers wearing the rebel uniform moving around busily within it. At the gate Joseph’s five warders surrendered him, with a muttered explanation that Joseph could not hear, to two others who seemed to be officers of a higher rank, and they gestured to Joseph to follow him within.

Silently, he obeyed. Any kind of resistance or even a show of reluctance to cooperate was likely to prove foolhardy. They conveyed him down an inner avenue between rows of the little huts and delivered him to one of the larger buildings, which, Joseph saw, was provided with an attached and fenced-in yard of considerable size: a compound for prisoners, he supposed. Wordlessly they directed him within.

It was a long windowless structure, a kind of dormitory, dark inside except for a few feeble lamps. The air inside was stale-smelling and stifling. Simple iron-framed cots were arranged along the walls. Most were empty, though half a dozen were occupied by Folk, all of them men, most of them sitting slumped on the edges of their cots staring off into nothingness. Joseph saw no one among them who might have been a Master. A door on the right led to the fenced-in outside area.

“This will be yours,” said one of his guards, indicating an empty cot. Wordlessly he held out his hand for Joseph’s pack, and Joseph surrendered it without offering objection, though he bitterly regretted being parted from his utility case and everything else that had accompanied him through all these many months of wandering. He owned so little that he could carry it all in that single pack, and now they were taking it away from him. The officer sniffed at the pack and made a face: the last of the wrapped meat was within, probably beginning to go bad. “They will come to speak with you in a little while,” the guard said, and both men turned and went out, taking the pack with them.

Not a single one of the slump-shouldered Folkish men sitting on the cots looked in his direction. They seemed as incurious about him as the cots themselves. Joseph wondered how long it was that they had been interned here, and what had been done to them during their stay.

After a little while he went out into the adjoining yard. It was a huge, barren, dreary place, nothing but bare dusty sun-baked ground, not even a blade of grass. At the far end Joseph saw what looked like a brick-walled washhouse and a latrine. There were some more Folkish men in the yard, each one keeping off by himself in a little zone of isolation, holding himself apart from any of the others, immobile, looking at nothing, almost as though he was unaware that anyone else was with him out there. All of them stood in a manner that gave them the same odd slumped, defeated look as the men on the cots inside. Joseph was surprised to see three Indigenes also, a little silent group huddled together in one corner. He wondered how this incomprehensible civil war could have managed to involve Indigenes. He understood nothing. But he had been on his own for more than a year, he calculated: from mid-summer in High Manza to late summer, or even early autumn, wherever he was now. A great deal must have happened in all that time, and no one here was going to explain it to him.

There seemed to be no harm in trying to find out, though. He went up to the nearest of the Folkers, who paid no more attention to the approaching Joseph than a blind man would, and said softly, “Pardon me, but—”

The man glared at Joseph for an instant, only an instant, a quick, hot, furious glare. Then he turned away.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph said bewilderedly. It did not seem at all remarkable to him just then to be apologizing to a Folker. “I’m new here. I only wanted to ask you a few things about—”

The man shook his head. He seemed both angry and frightened. He moved away.

Joseph got the same reaction from the next two men that he tried. And when he went toward the trio of Indigenes, they drifted silently away from him the way those little hopping creatures in the field had. He gave the project up at that point. It is not the done thing here, Joseph realized, to have conversations with your fellow inmates. Perhaps conversation was prohibited; perhaps it was just risky. You never knew who might be a spy. But again he wondered: spying for whom? For whom?

Noon came and went. In early afternoon three Folkish orderlies arrived with food for the prisoners’ meals, carrying it in big metal tubs slung between two sticks: cold gluey gruel, some sort of stewed unidentifiable meat that had the flavor of old cardboard, hard musty bread that was mostly crust. The inmates lined up and sparse portions were ladled out to them on tin plates. They were given wooden spoons to use. Hungry as he was, Joseph found it hard to eat very much. He forced himself.

The hours went by. The sun was strong, the air humid. He saw armed sentries marching about outside the wire-mesh fence. Within the compound no one spoke a word to anyone else. At sundown one of the guards blew a whistle and everyone who was in the yard went shuffling inside, each to his own cot. Joseph had forgotten which cot was his: he picked one at random in a row of empty ones, half hoping that someone else would challenge his taking of it so that he could at least hear the sound of a human voice again, but no one raised any objection to his choice. He sprawled out on it for a while; then, not finding it comfortable to lie on the thin, hard mattress, he sat up like the others, slumped on the edge of his cot. When it was dark the orderlies returned with another meal, which turned out to be the same things as in the earlier one only in smaller portions. Joseph could not bring himself to eat very much of it. He hardly slept at all.

The second day went by very much like the first. The food was, if anything, just a little worse, and there was even less of it. The silence in the yard grew so intense that it began to resound within Joseph’s head like a trumpet-call. For hour after hour he paced along the fenced border of the compound, measuring off its dimensions in footsteps. He envisioned his spending the next thirty years, or the next fifty, doing nothing but that. But of course he would not last fifty years on the sort of food that they served the prisoners here.

The question is, Joseph thought, will I starve to death before I go insane, or afterward?

It seemed foolish even to think of attempting to escape. And trying to stand upon his rights as a Master was an even sillier idea. He had no rights as a Master, certainly not here, perhaps not anywhere any more. More likely than not they would kill him outright if they found out who he really was. Better to be thought to be a vagabond lunatic, he thought, than the scion of one of the Great Houses of Helikis. But why was he here? What was the point of rounding up vagabond lunatics? Did they mean simply to intern their prisoners purely for the sake of interning them, so that they would not intrude on whatever military action might be going on in this part of the world? Why not just shoot us, then? he wondered. Perhaps they would; perhaps they were merely waiting for the order to come from some other camp. Joseph began to think he might almost prefer to be shot to having to spend an indefinite length of time here.

But on the third morning a guard entered the compound and indicated, in the curt wordless way that seemed to be the usual way of communicating with prisoners in this place, that Joseph was to follow him.

The guard marched him up the middle of the camp, turned left down an aisle of important-looking structures that were guarded by strutting sentries and appeared more solidly constructed than those Joseph had seen so far, and delivered him to a smallish building at the end of the row.

A Folkish officer with an air of great confidence and power about him that reminded Joseph of Governor Stappin of Eysar Haven was sitting behind a desk that had the contents of Joseph’s pack spread out on it: his utility case, his books, his flask, and all the rest. His shoulders were immensely broad, even as Folkish shoulders went, and he had his shirt open to the waist in the muggy heat, revealing a dense, curling thatch of reddish-gold hair. The hair of the officer’s head was of the same color and curling texture, but it was receding badly, laying bare the great shining dome of his forehead.

“Well,” he said, glancing from Joseph to the assortment of objects on his desk, and then to Joseph again. “These things are very interesting. Where did you get them?”

“They were given to me,” said Joseph.

“By whom?”

“Different people. It’s hard to remember. I’ve been traveling so long.”

“Traveling from where?”

“From the north,” Joseph said. He hesitated a moment. “From High Manza,” he added.

The officer’s gaze rested coldly on Joseph. “From where in High Manza, exactly?”

“A place called Getfen House, it was.” It was Joseph’s intention to tell as few lies as possible, while revealing as little as he could that might be incriminating.

“You came from a Great House?”

“I was there just a little while. I was not a part of House Getfen at all.”

“I see.” The officer played with the things on the desk, inattentively fondling Joseph’s torch, his cutting-tool, his book-reader. Joseph hated that, that this man should be touching his beloved things. “And what is your name?” the officer asked, after a time.

“Joseph,” Joseph said. He did not add his title or his surname. It would not do to try to masquerade as Waerna of Ludbrek House any longer, for that had not worked particularly well at Eysar Haven and was unlikely to do any better for him here, and he preferred to use his real name rather than to try to invent anything else. They would not necessarily recognize “Joseph” as a Master name, he thought, not if he held back “Master” and “Keilloran” from them.

But the name did seem odd to the Folkish officer, as well it should have. He repeated it a couple of times, frowning over it, and observed that he had never heard a name like that before. Joseph shrugged and offered no comment. Then the officer looked up at him again and said, “Have you taken part in any of the fighting, Joseph?”

“No.”

“None? None at all?”

“I am not a part of the war.”

The officer laughed. “How can you say that? Everyone is part of the war, everyone! You, me, the Indigenes, the poriphars, everyone. The animals in the fields are part of the war. There is no hiding from the war. Truly, you have not fought at all?”

“Not at all, no.”

“Where have you been, then?”

“In the forests, mostly.”

“Yes. Yes, I can see that. You have a wild look about you, Joseph. And a wild smell.” Again the officer played with the things from the utility case. He ran his fingertips over them, almost lovingly, and smiled. “These are Master things, some of them. You know that, don’t you, Joseph?” Joseph said nothing. Then the officer said, switching for the first time from Folkish to Master, and with a sudden ferocity entering his voice, “What you are is a spy, are you not, Joseph? Admit it. Admit it!”

“That is not so,” said Joseph, replying in Folkish. There was no harm in revealing that he understood Master—there was no Folker who did not—but he would not speak it here. “It is just not so!”

“But what else can you be but a spy?”

“It is not so,” Joseph said again, more mildly. “I am not in any way a spy. I told you, I am not a part of the war. I know nothing whatever about what has been going on. I have been in the forests.”

“A mere wanderer.”

“A wanderer, yes. They attacked Getfen House, where I was staying, and I went into the forests. I could not tell you what has happened in the world since.”

“You did not fight, and you are not a spy,” the officer said musingly. He drummed on his desktop with the fingers of one hand. Then he rose and came around the desk to where Joseph was standing. He was surprisingly tall for a Folker, just a few inches shorter than Joseph, and the immense width of his shoulders made him seem inordinately strong, formidably intimidating. He stared at Joseph for an interminable moment. Then, almost casually, he placed his right hand on Joseph’s right shoulder and with steady, inexorable pressure forced Joseph to his knees. Joseph submitted without resisting, though he was boiling within. He doubted that he could have resisted that force anyway.

The Folkish officer held him lightly by his ear. “At last, now, tell me who you are spying for.”

“Not for anybody,” Joseph said.

The fingers gripping his ear tightened. Joseph felt himself being pushed forward until his nose was close to the floor.

“I have other things to do today,” the officer said. “You are wasting my time. Tell me who you’re working for, and then we can move along.”

“I can’t tell you, because I’m not working for anyone.”

“Not working for the traitors who come in the night and attack the camps of patriots, and strive to undo all that we have worked so hard to achieve?”

“I know nothing about any of that.”

“Right. Just an innocent wanderer in the forests.”

“I wanted no part of the war. When they burned Getfen House I ran away. I have been running ever since.”

“Ah. Ah.” It was a sound of annoyance, of disgust, even. “You waste my time.” Now he was twisting the ear. It was an agonizing sensation. Joseph bit his lip, but did not cry out.

“Go ahead, pull it off, if you like,” he said. “I still couldn’t tell you anything, because I have nothing to tell.”

“Ah,” said the officer one more time, and released Joseph’s ear with a sharp pushing motion that sent him flat on his face. Joseph waited for—what, a kick? A punch? But nothing happened. The man stepped back and told Joseph to rise. Joseph did, somewhat uncertainly. He was trembling all over. The officer was staring at him, frowning. His lips were moving faintly, as though he were framing further questions, the fatal ones that Joseph was dreading, and Joseph waited, wondering when the man would ask him what he had been doing at Getfen House, or what clan of the Folk he belonged to, or which towns and villages he had passed through on his way from High Manza to here. Joseph did not dare answer the first question, could not answer the second, and was unwilling to answer the third, because anything he said linking him to Eysar Haven or the Indigene villages might lead to his unmasking as a Master. Of course, the man could simply ask him outright whether he was a Master, considering that he looked more like one than like any sort of Folker. But he did not ask him that, either: he did not ask any of those obvious things. A course that seemed obvious to Joseph was apparently not so to him. The officer said only, “Well, we are not torturers here. If you’re unwilling to speak, we can wait until you are. We will keep you here until you beg us to question you again, and then you will tell us everything. You can go and rot until then.” And to the guard waiting at the door he said, “Take him back to the enclosure.”

Joseph did not bother counting the days. Perhaps a week went by, perhaps two. He was feverish some of the time, shaking, sometimes uncertain of where he was. Then the fever left him, but he still felt weak and sickly. The strength that he had regained at Eysar Village was going from him again, now that he had to depend on the miserable prison-camp food. He was losing what little weight he had managed to put on in the weeks just past. Familiar sensations reasserted themselves: giddiness, blurred vision, mental confusion. One afternoon he found himself once again quite seriously considering the proposition that as the starvation proceeded he would become completely weightless and would be able to float up and out of here and home. Then he remembered that some such thought had crossed his mind much earlier in the trek, and he reminded himself that no such thing must be possible, or else he would surely have attempted it long before. And then, when he felt a little better, Joseph was amazed that he had allowed himself even to speculate about such an idiotic thing.

Several times on his better days he approached men in the enclosure to ask them why they were here, who their captors were, what was the current state of the civil war. Each time they turned coldly away from him as though he had made an obscene proposal. No one ever spoke to anyone in this compound. He called out to the three Indigenes that he was a friend of the Ardardin and had worked as a doctor among the people of the mountains, but they too ignored him, and one day they were removed from the enclosure and he never saw them again.

I will die in this place, he thought.

It is an absurd end to my journey. It makes no sense. But what can I do? Confess that I’m a spy? I am not a spy. I could give them no useful information about my spying even if I wanted to.

I suppose that I can confess that I am a Master, Joseph thought, and then they can take me out and shoot me, and that will be the end. But not yet. I am not quite ready for that. Not yet. Not yet.

Then one morning a guard came for him, very likely the same one who had come for him that other time, and gave him the same wordless gesture of beckoning as before, and led him up the long aisle of important-looking structures to the office of the burly man with thinning reddish-gold hair who had interrogated him earlier. This time the man’s desk was bare. Joseph wondered what had become of his possessions. But that probably did not matter, he thought, because this time they would ask him the fatal questions, and then they would kill him.

The officer said, “Is your name Joseph Master Kilran?”

Joseph stared. He could not speak.

“Is it? You may as well say yes. We know that you are Joseph Master Kilran.”

Joseph shook his head dazedly, not so much to deny the truth, or almost-truth, of what the man was saying, but only because he did not know how to react.

“You are. Why hide it?”

“Are you going to shoot me now?”

“Why would I shoot you? I want you to answer my question, that’s all. Are you Joseph Master Kilran? Yes or no.”

It would be easy enough to answer “No” with a straight face, since he was in fact not Joseph Master Kilran. But there could be no doubt that they were on to the truth about him, and Joseph saw no advantage in playing such games with them.

He wondered how they had found him out. Were descriptions posted somewhere of all the missing Masters, those who had escaped being slain when the Great Houses of Manza were destroyed? That was hard to believe. But then he understood. “Kilran” was his clue: Thayle had never managed to pronounce his surname accurately. This man must have recognized all along that he was a Master. Probably in the past few days they had sent messengers to the people of all the towns in the vicinity, including the people of Eysar Haven, asking them whether any fugitive Masters had happened to come their way lately. And so they had learned his name, or something approximating his name, from Thayle. It was a disquieting thought. Thayle would never have betrayed him, he was sure of that: but he could easily picture Grovin betraying her , and Governor Stappin forcing a confession out of her, by violent means if necessary.

It was all over now, in any case.

“Keilloran,” Joseph said.

“What?”

“Keilloran. My name. ‘Kilran’ is incorrect. I am Joseph Master Keilloran, of Keilloran House in Helikis.”

The officer handed Joseph a writing-tablet. “Here. Put it down on this.”

Joseph wrote the words down for him. The officer stared at what Joseph had written for a long moment, pronouncing the words with his lips alone, not uttering any of it aloud.

“Where is House Keilloran?” he asked, finally.

“In the southern part of central Helikis.”

“And what was a Master from the southern part of central Helikis doing in High Manza?”

“I was a guest at Getfen House. The Getfens are distant kinsmen of mine. Were .”

“After Getfen House was destroyed, then, what did you do, where did you go?”

Joseph told him, a quick, concise summary, the flight into the forest, the aid that the noctambulo had given him, the sojourn as a healer among the Indigenes. He did not care whether the officer believed him or not. He told of his escape in the mountains, of his trek back to the lowlands and his time of starvation, of his rescue by the inhabitants of a friendly cuyling town. He did not name the town and the officer did not ask him for it. “Then I left them and was heading south again, still hoping to find my way back to Helikis, when I was captured by your men,” Joseph concluded. “That’s the whole story.”

The officer, tugging obsessively at the receding curls of his forehead, listened with an apparent show of interest to all that Joseph had to say, frowning most of the time. He took extensive notes. When Joseph fell silent he looked up and said, “You tell me that you are a visitor from a far-off land who happened by accident to be in Manza at the time of the outbreak of the Liberation.” It was impossible for Joseph not to hear the capital letter on that last word. “But why should I accept this as true?” the man asked. “What if you are actually a surviving member of one of the Great Houses of Manza, a spy for your people, lying to me about your place of origin? One would expect a spy to lie.”

“If I’m from one of the Great Houses of Manza, tell me which one,” said Joseph. He had started speaking in Master, without giving it a thought. “And if I’m a spy, what kind of spying have I been doing? What have I seen, except some Indigene villages, and one town of free Folk who were never involved in your Liberation at all? Where’s the evidence of my spy activities?” Joseph pointed to the officer’s desk, where his belongings once had lain. “You confiscated my pack, and I assume you’ve looked through it. Did you find the notes of a spy in it? My records of troop movements and secret strategic plans? You found my school textbooks, I think. And some things I wrote down about the philosophical beliefs of the Indigenes. Nothing incriminating, was there? Was there?”

The officer was gaping at him, big-eyed. Joseph realized that he was swaying and about to fall. In his weakened condition an outburst like this was a great effort for him. At the last moment he caught hold of the front of the officer’s desk and clung to it, head downward, his entire body shaking.

“Are you ill?” the officer asked.

“Probably. I’ve been living on your prison-camp food for I don’t know how many days. Before that I was foraging for whatever I could find in the wilderness. It’s a miracle I’m still able to stand on my own feet.” Joseph forced himself to look up. His eyes met the officer’s. —”Prove to me that I’m a spy,” he said. “Tell me which House I come from in Manza. And then you can take me out and shoot me, I suppose. But show me your proof, first.”

The officer was slow to reply. He tugged at his hair, chewed his lower lip. Finally he said, “I will have to discuss this with my superiors.” And, to the guard who had brought him here: “Return him to the compound.”

Shortly past midday, before Joseph had even had a chance to confront whatever unsavory stuff they intended to give the prisoners for their afternoon meal, he was back at the big officer’s headquarters again. Two other men in officers’ uniform, senior ones, from the looks of them, were there also.

One, a hard-looking man who had a terrible scar, long healed but still vivid, running across his jutting cheekbone and down to the corner of his mouth, pushed a sheet of paper toward Joseph and said, speaking in Master, “Draw me a map of Helikis. Mark the place where you come from on it.”

Joseph made a quick sketch of the continent, and drew a cross a little past midway down to indicate the location of Keilloran House.

“What is your father’s name?”

“Martin Master Keilloran.”

“And his father?”

“Eirik Master Keilloran.”

“Your mother’s name?”

“Wireille. She is dead.”

The scar-faced officer looked toward the other two. Something passed between them, some sign, some wordless signal, that Joseph was unable to interpret. The officer who had twice interrogated him gave a single forceful nod. Then the second man, the oldest of the three, turned to Joseph and said, “The free people of Manza have no quarrel with the Masters of Helikis, and they are not interested in starting one now. As soon as it is practical you will be taken to the border, Joseph Master Keilloran, and turned over to your own kind.”

Joseph stared. And blurted: “Do you seriously mean that?”

At once he saw the flash of anger in the scar-faced officer’s eyes. The ugly scar stood out in a blaze of red. “We of the Liberation have no time for jokes.” The words were spoken, this time, in Folkish.

“I ask you to forgive me, then,” Joseph said, in Folkish also. “I’ve been through a great deal this past year, very little of it good. And I was expecting you to say that you were sentencing me to death.”

“Perhaps that is what we should do,” the scar-faced man said. “But it is not what we will do. As I said: you will be taken to the border.”

Joseph still had difficulty in believing that. It was all some elaborate ruse, he thought, a ploy intended to soften him up so that they could come at him in some unexpected way and extract the truth from him about his espionage activities. But if that was so, they were going about it in a very strange way. He was transferred from the prisoners’ compound to a barracks at the other side of the camp, where, although he was still under guard, he had a small room to himself. His pack and everything that had been in it were restored to him. Instead of the abysmal prisoner food he was given meals that, although hardly lavish, were at least nourishing and sound. It was the quality of the food that led Joseph at last to see that what was going on was something other than a trick. They did not want to send him back to Helikis as a creature of skin and bone. They would fatten him up a little, first, to indicate to the Masters of Helikis that the free people of Manza were humane and considerate persons. Perhaps they would even send the camp barber in to cut his hair and trim his beard, too, and outfit him with a suit of clothes of the sort a young Master would want to wear, too. Joseph was almost tempted to suggest that, not in any serious way, to one of his jailers, a young, easy-going Folker who appeared to have taken a liking to him. But it was not a good idea, he knew, to get too cocky with his captors. None of these people had any love for him. None would be amused by that sort of presumptuousness.

The fact that they were calling their uprising the Liberation told Joseph what their real attitude toward him was. They hated Masters; they looked upon the whole race of them as their enemies. They were not so much offering him assistance in getting back to his home as they were merely spitting him out. He was no concern of theirs, this strayed Master out of the wrong continent, and very likely if all this had been happening six or eight months before they would simply have executed him the moment they had realized what he was. It was only by grace of whatever political situation currently existed between the liberated Folk of Manza and the Masters who must still be in power in Helikis that he had been allowed to live. And even now Joseph was still not fully convinced of the sincerity of the scar-faced man’s words. He did not plan to test them by trying to enter into any sort of easy intimacy with those who guarded him.

Four days went by this way. He saw no one but his jailers in all this time.

Then on the fifth morning he was told to make himself ready for departure, and half an hour later two soldiers, uncongenial and brusque, came for him and escorted him to a waiting car, where a third man in Liberation uniform was at the controls. His two guards got in beside him. He was not riding in any clumsy jolting wagon this time, no open wooden cart, no farm truck. The vehicle was a smooth, sleek car of the sort that a Master might use, and probably once had.

The road went due westward, and then a little to the north. Joseph was in the habit by this time of determining his course by the position of the sun. Neither of his guards said a word, to each other or to him. After several hours they stopped for lunch at an ordinary public roadhouse: he was leaving the wilderness world behind, reentering the one he had once known, prosperous-looking farms on all sides, fields awaiting harvest, farm vehicles moving up and down the roads, everything seeming quite as it should but obviously under Folk control, no sign of a Master presence anywhere. The guards, silent as ever, watched him closely while they ate; when he asked to go to the restroom, one of them went with him. Joseph clearly saw that they had been ordered to prevent him from escaping, if that was what he had in mind, and probably they would shoot him if they thought that that was what he was trying to do. So, just as he still did not completely believe that he was being released, they did not completely believe that he was not a spy.

An hour more of driving, after lunch, brought them to an airfield, a smallish one that nevertheless must have been a reasonably important commercial field before the Liberation but now looked somewhat run down. A solitary plane, with dull-toned Liberation emblems painted over whatever insignia it had borne before, was waiting on the runway. The sight of it was another powerful reminder for Joseph of the modern civilized world that was somewhere out there, that he once had lived in and would be returning to now. He wondered how easy it was going to be to fit himself back in. His guards led him aboard, taking him to a seat in the front of the cabin, where he could not see any of his fellow passengers.

Joseph wondered if this was actually a flight to Helikis. Could that be possible? Had everyone on Homeworld already settled into such a complacent acceptance of the new order of things in liberated Manza that normal air traffic between the continents had resumed?

He had his answer soon enough. The plane took off, soared quickly to its cruising altitude, moved off on a southerly course. Joseph, sitting in the middle of a group of three seats, leaned forward across the guard at his right to stare out the window, looking hopefully for the narrowing of the land below that would tell him that they were nearing the sea and approaching the Isthmus, the little bridge of land that separated the two continents. But he saw no coastline down there, only an immense expanse of terrain, most of it divided into cultivated patches, reaching to each horizon. They were still in Manza. And now the plane was starting to descend. The flight had lasted perhaps two and a half hours, three at most. They had gone only a relatively short distance, at least as aerial journeys went, though Joseph knew now that it would have taken him several lifetimes to cover that relatively short distance on foot, as he had with so much bravado intended to do. And he was still a long way from home.

“Where are we landing?” Joseph asked one of his guards.

“Eivoya,” the guard said. The name meant nothing to Joseph. “It is where the border is.”

It hardly seemed worthwhile to seek a more detailed explanation. The plane touched down nicely. Another car was waiting for Joseph at the edge of the runway. Once again the two guards took seats on either side of him. This time they drove about an hour more: it was getting to be late in the day, and Joseph was growing very tired, tired of this long day’s traveling, tired of sitting between these two uncommunicative men, tired of having things happen to him. He realized that he was probably as close to home as he had been in over a year, and that this day he had covered a greater distance toward that goal than he had managed to cross by his own efforts in all the time since the burning of Getfen House. Yet he felt no sense of mounting jubilation. He still did not know what further obstacles lay between him and Keilloran. He might not even get there at all. And he was weary to the bone. This is what it feels like to be old, he thought. To cease to care, even about things that you have sought to achieve. I have aged seventy years in just these few months.

The car pulled up at the edge of what looked like an untilled field. There was nothing in view anywhere around, no farms, no buildings. He saw a few trees a long way off. There was a scattering of gray clouds overhead.

“This is where you get out,” said the guard to his left. He opened the door, stepped out, waited.

“Here?” Joseph asked.

The guard nodded. He scowled and made an impatient backhanded gesture.

It made no sense. Here, in the middle of nowhere? This forlorn weedy field looked like exactly the sort of place where you would choose to take a prisoner to be executed, but if all they had wanted to do was kill him, why had they bothered to go through all this involved business of loading him on cars, flying him south, driving him around in the countryside? They could much more easily have shot him back at the camp. It would have caused no stir. Tens of thousands of Masters had been massacred in Manza already; the death of one more, even a stranded visitor from Helikis, would hardly make much difference in the general scheme of things.

“Out,” the guard said again. “This is wasting time.”

Very well, Joseph thought. Whatever they wanted. He was too tired to argue, and begging for his life was unlikely to get him anywhere.

The Folker pointed out into the field. “There’s the border marker, out there ahead of you. Now run. Run as fast as you know how, in the direction that I’m pointing. I warn you, don’t go in any other direction. Go! Now!”

Joseph began to run.

They will shoot me in the back before I have gone twenty paces, he told himself. The bolt will pass right through my pack, into my body, my lungs, my heart, and I will fall down on my face here in this field, a dead man, and they will leave me here, and that will be that.

“Run!” the guard called, behind him. “Run!”

Joseph did not look back to see if they were aiming at him, though he was sure that they were. He ran, ran hard, ran with all the determination he could summon, but it was a tough sprint. The ground was rough beneath his feet, and not even these last few days of decent meals had brought him back to anything like a semblance of strength. He ran with his mouth open, gulping for air. He felt his heart working too quickly and protesting it. Several times he nearly tripped over the extended ropy stem of some treacherous low-growing shrub, lurched, staggered, barely managed to stay upright. He thought back to that time, what seemed like a hundred years ago, when he had lurched and staggered and stumbled and fallen in the forest near Getfen and had done that terrible injury to his leg. He did not want that to happen again, though it was strange to be fretting about anything so minor as an injured leg when two men with guns might be taking aim at him from behind.

But the shot that he had expected did not come. A few moments more and he ascended a little rise in the field, and when he came down the far side he saw a broad palisade standing before him, a row of stout logs tightly lashed together set in the ground, and he realized that he had arrived at the dividing point that set the two worlds apart, the boundary between the territory of the Liberation and that which must still remain under the sovereignty of his own people.

There was a gate in the palisade and a guard-post above it. The grim faces of four or five men were looking out at him. Joseph thought he saw the metal face of a gun facing him also.

Bringing himself to a stumbling halt a few dozen yards before the palisade, he raised his arms to show that he intended no harm. He hoped that they were expecting him.

“Masters!” he cried, in his own language, with what was nearly his last gasp of breath. “Help me! Help! Help!”

Then the ground came rushing up toward him and Joseph seized it and held it, because everything was whirling around. He heard voices above him, saw booted feet standing beside him. They were lifting him, carrying him through the gate.

“What place is this?” he asked, speaking through a thin mist of exhaustion.

“House Eivoya,” someone said.

“You are Masters?”

“Masters, yes.”

He was lying in a bed, suddenly. There were bright lights overhead. They were washing him. Someone was doing something to his arm, attaching something to it. Someone else was wrapping a kind of collar around his left ankle. Joseph had the impression that they were explaining to him the things that they were doing to him, step by step, but none of it made much sense, and after a time he gave up trying to follow it. It was easier to go to sleep, and he did. When he awoke, sleep still seemed the easier choice, and he glided back into it. The next time he awakened there were two people in the room, a man and a woman, older people, both of them, watching him.

The woman, he discovered, was his doctor. The man introduced himself as Federigo Master Eivoya, of House Eivoya. “And what is your name?” the man said.

“Joseph. Joseph Master Keilloran. Am I still in Manza?”

“Southern Manza, yes. Just north of the Isthmus. —Can you tell me your father’s name, Joseph?”

“You don’t believe I am who I say I am? Or are you just trying to see whether my mind still works?”

“Please.”

“Martin is his name. Martin Master Keilloran. My mother was Mistress Wireille, but she’s dead. My brothers’ names—”

“You don’t need to go on.”

“So you believe me?”

“Of course we believe you. We needed to know, and now we do.”

The woman said, “You’ll want to rest for a while. You’re half starved, you know. They treated you very badly in that prison camp, didn’t they?”

Joseph shrugged. “I was in pretty bad shape when I got there. They didn’t make things any better for me, though.”

“No. Of course not.”

She gave him something to make him sleep again. He dreamed of Thayle, tiptoeing into the room, climbing naked into the bed beside him, taking his thin ruined body into her arms, holding him against the warmth of her, her firm abundant flesh. He dreamed he was in the village of the Ardardin, discussing the difference between the visible world and the invisible one. At last it all was clear to him. He understood what the Ardardin meant by the axis of the worlds upon which all things spin, and the place where mundane time and mythical time meet. He had never really managed to grasp that before. Then he was back in the forest with the noctambulo, who was reciting noctambulo poetry to him in a low monotonous voice, and then he was in his own room at Keilloran House, with his mother and his father standing beside his bed.

When he woke his mind was clear again, and he saw that there was a tube going into his arm and another into his thigh, and he knew that this must be a hospital and that they were trying to repair the various kinds of damage that his long journey had inflicted on him. A younger man who said his name was Reynaldo was with him. “I am Federigo’s son,” he told Joseph. “If you have things to ask, you can ask me.” He was about thirty, dark-haired, smooth-skinned, as handsome as an actor. Joseph had things to ask, yes, but he hardly knew where to begin. “Did the Folk conquer all of Manza?” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. That seemed like as good a starting-point as any.

“Most of it, yes,” Reynaldo said. “All but here.” He explained that the Masters had been able to hold the line at Eivoya, that the rebel forces in the far south had not been strong enough to break through it and eventually they had abandoned the attempt and worked out an armistice acknowledging the continued sovereignty of the Masters over the southern tip of Manza. The rest of the northern continent, he said, was in Folkish hands, and he supposed that most or all of the Great Houses had been destroyed. The fighting had ended, now. Occasional straggling survivors from the north still made their way down here, said Reynaldo, but they were very few and far between these days. He said nothing about any plans to reconquer the territory that had been lost, and Joseph did not ask him about that.

“And Helikis?” Joseph said. “What happened there?”

“There was no rebellion in Helikis,” said Reynaldo. “Everything in Helikis is as it always has been.”

“Is that the truth, or are you just telling me that to make me feel better?”

“You should have no reason to distrust me,” Reynaldo said, and Joseph let the point drop, though he realized that what Reynaldo had told him had not exactly been a reply to what he had asked.

He knew that he was very ill. In his struggle to survive, going again and again to the brink of starvation, he must have consumed most of his body’s resources. Perhaps he had been operating on sheer force of will alone, most of the time since he had left Eysar Haven. At his age he was still growing; his body needed a constant rich supply of fuel; instead it had been deprived, much of the time, of even a basic input of nourishment. But they were kind to him here. They knew how to heal him. He was back among his own, or almost so. Joseph had never heard of House Eivoya, but that did not matter: he had never heard of most of the Houses of Manza. He was grateful for its existence and for his presence at it. He might not have been able to survive much longer on his own. It was possible to take the position that his being captured by those rebel troops was the luckiest thing that had happened to him during his journey.

Once again Joseph began to recover. He realized that the innate resilience of his body must be very great. They took out the tubes; he began to eat solid food; soon he was up, walking about, leaving his room and going out on the balcony of the building. It appeared that the hospital was at the edge of a forest, a very ancient one at that, dark, primordial, indomitable giant trees with their roots in the prehistory of Homeworld standing side by side, green networks of coiling vines embracing their mammoth trunks to create an impenetrable barrier. For a moment Joseph thought that when he left here it would be necessary for him to enter that forest and cross it somehow, to solve all the terrible riddles that it would pose, the next great challenge on his journey, and the thought both frightened and excited him. But then he reminded himself that he had reached sanctuary at last, that he would not have to wander in dark forests any longer.

“Someone is here to see you,” Reynaldo told him, a day or two later.

She came to his room, a tall dark-haired young woman, slender, elegantly dressed, quite beautiful. She looked astonishingly like his mother, so much so that for one startled moment Joseph thought that she was his mother and that he must be having hallucinations again. But of course his mother was dead, and this woman was too young, anyway. She could not have been more than twenty and might even be younger. And only then did it occur to Joseph that she must be his sister.

“Cailin?” he asked, in a small, tentative voice.

And she, just as uncertainly: “Joseph?”

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

She smiled. “You look so good with a beard! But so different. Everything about you is so different. Oh, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph—”

He held out his arms to her and she came quickly to him, rushing into the embrace and then drawing back a little from it as though pausing to consider that he was still very fragile, that a hug that had any fervor to it might well break him into pieces. But he clung to her and drew her in. Then he released her, and she stepped back, studying him, staring. Though she did not say it, Joseph could see that she still must be searching, perhaps almost desperately, for some sign that this gaunt bearded stranger in front of her was in fact her brother.

He too was searching for signs to recognize her by. That she was Cailin he had no doubt. But the Cailin that he remembered had been a girl, tall and a little awkward, all legs and skinny arms, just barely come into her breasts, her face still unformed. This one—a year and a half later, two years?—was a woman. Her arms, the whole upper part of her body, had become fuller. So had her face. She had cut her long, wondrous cascade of black hair so that it reached only to her shoulders. Her chin was stronger, her nose more pronounced, and both changes only enhanced her beauty.

They were little more than a year apart in age. Joseph had always been fond of her, fonder than he was of any of the others, though he had often showed his liking for her in perversely heartless ways, callous pranks, little boorish cruelties, all manner of things that he had come to regret when it was too late to do anything about them. He was glad that she, rather than Rickard or one of the House servants, had come for him. Still, he wondered why she was the one who had been chosen. Rickard would be old enough to have made the journey. Girls—and that was what she really was, still, a girl—were not often sent on such extended trips.

“Is everything all right at Keilloran? I’ve heard nothing—nothing—”

She glanced away, just for the merest instant, but it was a revealing glance none the less. And she paused to moisten her lips before answering. “There have been—a few problems,” she said. “But we can talk about that later. It’s you I want to talk about. Oh, Joseph, we were so sure you were dead!”

“The combinant was broken. I tried to get in touch, the very first night when they attacked Getfen House, but nothing would happen. Not then or later, and then I lost it. It was taken away from me, I mean. By an Indigene. He wanted it, and I had to let him have it, because I belonged to them, I was a sort of slave in their village, their doctor—”

She was staring at him in amazement. He covered his mouth with his hand. He was telling her too much too soon.

“Communications were cut off for a while,” Cailin said. “Then they were restored, but not with the part of Manza where you were. They attacked Getfen House—but you got away, and then what? Where did you go? What did you do?”

“It’s a complicated story,” he said. “It’ll take me quite a while to tell it.”

“And you’re all right now?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Thinner. A few scars, maybe. Some changes here and there. It was a difficult time. —How is Rickard? Eitan? The girls?”

“Fine. Fine, all of them fine. Rickard had a difficult time too, thinking you were dead, knowing that he was going to have to be the Master of the House eventually in your place. You know what Rickard is like.”

“Yes. I know what Rickard is like.”

“But he’s been coming around. Getting used to the idea. He’s almost come to like it.”

“I’m sorry to be disappointing him, then. —And Father?” Joseph said, the question he had been holding back. “How is he? How did he take it, the news that I was probably dead?”

“Poorly.”

Joseph realized that he had asked two questions in one breath, and that Cailin had given him a single answer.

“But he rode with the shock, didn’t he? The way he did when Mother died. The way he taught us all to do.”

She nodded. But suddenly she seemed very far away.

Something is wrong, he thought. Those “problems” to which she had alluded. He was afraid to ask.

And she wanted to talk about him, anyway, where he had been, the things that had befallen him. Quickly he told her as much as he could, leaving out only the most important parts. That he had lived among a family of Folkers as a guest in their house, dependent on their mercy, not as a Master but as a weary hapless wayfarer whom they had taken in, and thus that he had discovered things about the Folk that he had never understood before. That he had accepted aid also in his wanderings from even humbler races, noctambulos, Indigenes, poriphars, and had come to see those beings in new ways too. That he had eaten insects and worms, and that he had been brought to the verge of madness more than once, even death. And that he had slept with a Folker girl. He was not ready to tell her any of that. But Joseph did describe his gaudier adventures in the forests, his perils and his escapes, and some of his hardships and injuries, and his strange new career as a tribal doctor, and his final captivity among the rebels. Cailin listened openmouthed, awed by all he had been through, amazed by it. He saw her still studying him, too, as if not yet fully convinced that the stranger behind this dense black beard was the brother she remembered.

“I must be tiring you,” she said, when at last he let his voice trail off, having run through all the easy things he could tell her and not willing yet to attempt the difficult ones. “I’ll let you rest now. They say you’ll be ready to leave here in another two or three days.”

He wanted to go sooner, and told Reynaldo that. He insisted that he was strong enough to travel again. The doctors thought so too, Reynaldo told him. But the plane on which Cailin had arrived had already gone back to Helikis, and the next one would not be getting here until the day after tomorrow, or possibly the day after that, no one was quite certain. Joseph saw from that that the lives of the Masters of Homeworld must be far more circumscribed than they had been before the uprising, that even in supposedly untouched Helikis certain cutbacks had become necessary. Perhaps a good many of the planes that at one time had constantly gone back and forth between the continents had fallen into rebel hands and now served only the needs of the Liberation. But there was nothing to do except wait.

It turned out that the plane from Helikis did not arrive for five days. By then Joseph was able to move about as freely as he wished; he and Cailin left the building and walked across the hospital’s broad gleaming lawn to the place where the lawn ended and the forest abruptly began, and stood silently, hand in hand, peering in at that dim, primordial world, wonderstruck by its self-contained forbiddingness, its almost alien strangeness. There was no way to enter it. The strangler vines that ran from tree to tree made entry impossible. A thin grayish light lit it from within. Bright-feathered birds fluttered about its perimeter. Sharp screeching noises came from the forest depths, and the occasional deep honking of some unknown creature wallowing in some muddy lake. Joseph found himself thinking that that gigantic, brooding, immemorial forest, forever untouched and untouchable by human hands, reduced all the little quarrels of the human world, Masters and Folk, Folk and Masters, to utter insignificance.

He did not take up with his sister the question of whatever it was that had happened at House Keilloran in his absence. He almost did not want to know. She volunteered nothing, and he asked nothing. Instead he told her, day by day, bit by bit, more about his journey, until at last he came to the part about Thayle, which he related quickly and without great detail, but leaving no doubt of what had actually taken place. Color came to Cailin’s face, but her eyes were aglow with what seemed like unfeigned delight for him. She did not seem in any way shocked that he had yielded up his physical innocence, or that he had yielded it to a Folkish girl. She simply seemed pleased for him, and even amused. Maybe she knew that it was a common thing for Master boys to go to the girls of the Folk for the first time. He had no idea of what she might know about any of this, or of what she might have experienced herself, for that matter. It was not a subject he had ever discussed with her. He did not see how he could.

The plane from Helikis arrived. It stayed overnight for refueling, and in the morning he and Cailin boarded it for the return journey.

Joseph was carrying his pack. “What is that?” Cailin asked, and he told her that a Folkish woman had given it to him the night of his flight from Getfen House, and that he had carried it everywhere ever since, his one constant companion throughout his entire odyssey. “It smells terrible,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. He nodded.

The flight south took much longer than Joseph expected. They were over the Isthmus quickly—Eivoya, Joseph saw, was in the very last broad part of Manza before the narrowing of the land began, which told him just how little of the continent remained in Master control—and then, quite soon, he found himself looking down on the great brown shoulder of northern Helikis, that parched uppermost strip that marked the beginning of the otherwise green and fertile southern continent, and although he knew a Master was not supposed to weep except, perhaps, in the face of the most terrible tragedy, he discovered that a moistness was creeping into his eyes now at this first glimpse of his native soil, the continent that he had so often supposed he might never live to see again.

But then the stops began: at Tuilieme, at Gheznara, at Kem, at Dannias. Hardly did the plane take off and reach a decent altitude but it started to enter a pattern of descent again. Passengers came and went; freight was loaded aboard below; meals were served so often that Joseph lost track of what time of day it was. The sky grew dark and Joseph dozed, and was awakened by daybreak, and another landing, and the arrival of new passengers, and yet another takeoff. But then came the announcement, just when he had begun to think that he was fated to spend the rest of his life aboard this plane, that they were approaching Toroniel Airport, the one closest to the domain of House Keilloran, and Joseph knew that the last and perhaps most difficult phase of his journey was about to commence.

Rickard was waiting at the airport with a car and one of the family drivers, a sharp-nosed man whose name Joseph did not remember. He was startled to see how much his brother had grown. He remembered Rickard as a boy of twelve, plump, pouty, soft-faced, short-legged, still a child, though an extremely intelligent child. But he had come into the first spurt of his adolescent growth in Joseph’s absence. He was half a foot taller, at least, just a few inches shorter than Joseph himself, and all that childish fat had been burned away in the process of growing: Rickard was gawky, now, even spindly, the way Cailin had been before him. His face was different, also: not only leaner but with a far more serious expression about the eyes and lips, as though Joseph’s absence and presumed death had sobered him into a first awareness of what life now was going to be like for him as an adult, as the future Master of House Keilloran. Joseph felt a little shiver go traveling down his back at the sight of this new, changed Rickard.

They embraced in a careful, brotherly way.

“Joseph.”

“Rickard.”

“I never thought to see you again.”

“I never doubted I’d come back,” said Joseph. “Never. Oh, Rickard, you’ve grown!”

“Have I? Yes, I suppose I have. You look different too, you know. It’s been practically two years. That beard—”

“Do you like it?”

“No,” Rickard said. He gestured toward the car. “We should get in. It’s a long drive.”

Yes. Joseph had forgotten just how long it was. This was not Keilloran territory here, not yet. The airport was in the domain of House Van Rhyn. They drove off toward the west, through the broad savannahs thick with purplish quivergrass that Joseph had loved to set trembling, and through the immense grove of blackleaf palms that marked the boundary between Keilloran and Van Rhyn, and past hills of pale lavender sand that marked the ancient sea-bed where Joseph and Cailin had sometimes gone hunting for little fossils. Then they came to the first of the cultivated fields, fallow at this time of year, a series of neat brown rectangles awaiting the winter sowing. Even now it was a good distance to the Inner Domain and the manor-house itself. Rickard asked just a few questions of Joseph during the drive, the barest basic inquiries about the rebellion, his wanderings, the current state of his health. Joseph replied in an almost perfunctory way. He sensed that Rickard did not yet want the complete narrative, and he himself was not at the moment in the mood for telling it yet again. A great deal of chatter seemed inappropriate now anyway. Once they had settled into the car there was an air of reserve, even of melancholy, about Rickard that Joseph neither understood nor liked. And about Cailin too: she scarcely spoke at all.

Now they were in the Inner Domain, now they were going past the Blue Garden and the White Garden and the Garden of Fragrance, past the gaming-courts and the stables, past the lagoon, past the statuary park and the aviary; and then the airy swoops and arabesques of Keilloran House itself lay directly before them, rising proudly on the sloping ridge that formed a pedestal for the great building. Joseph saw that the Folk of the House had come out to welcome him: they were arrayed in two lengthy parallel rows, beginning at the front porch and extending far out onto the entrance lawn, hundreds and hundreds of them, the devoted servants of the clan. How long had they been waiting like this? Had some signal been given fifteen minutes before that the car bearing Master Joseph had entered the Inner Domain, or had they lined up in this formation hours ago, waiting here with Folkish patience for him to arrive?

The car halted on the graveled coachgrounds along the border of the lawn. Flanked by Rickard and Cailin, Joseph set out down the middle of the long lines of waiting Folk toward the house.

They were waving, grinning, cheering. Joseph, smiling, nodding, waved back at them with both hands. Some he recognized, and he let his eyes linger on their faces a moment; most of them he had forgotten or had never known, though he smiled at them also as he passed them by.

His smiles were manufactured ones, though. Within his soul he felt none of the jubilation that he had anticipated. In his fantasies in the forests of Manza, whenever he let his mind conjure up the longed-for moment of his return to Keilloran, he had imagined himself skipping down this path, singing, blowing kisses to shrubs and statues and household animals. He had never expected that he would feel so somber and withdrawn in the hour of his homecoming as in fact he was. Some of it, no doubt, was the anticlimactic effect of having achieved something for which he had yearned for so many months, and which had so often appeared to be unattainable. But there was more to it than that: there was Rickard’s mood, and Cailin’s, their silences on the drive, the questions that they had not answered because he had not had the courage to ask them.

His youngest brother Eitan was waiting at the door, and his other two sisters, the little ones, Bevan and Rheena. Eitan was still only a small boy—ten, now, Joseph supposed, still round-faced and chubby—and he was staring at Joseph with the same worshipful look as ever. Then tears burst into his eyes. Joseph caught him up, hugged him, kissed him, set him down. He turned to the girls—virtual strangers to him in the time before his departure for High Manza, they had been, one of them five, the other seven, forever busy with their dolls and their pets—and greeted them too with hugs and kisses, though he suspected they scarcely knew who he was. Certainly they showed little excitement over his return.

Where is Father? he wondered. Why is Father not here?

Cailin and Rickard led him inside. But as the three of them entered the house Rickard caught him by the wrist and said in a low voice, almost as though he did not want even Cailin to hear what he was saying, “Joseph? Joseph, I’m so tremendously glad that you’ve come back.”

“Yes. You won’t have to be Master here after all, will you?”

It was a cruel thing to say, and he saw Rickard flinch. But the boy made a quick recovery: the hurt look went from his eyes almost as swiftly as it had come, and something more steely replaced it. “Yes,” Rickard said. “That’s true: I won’t have to. And I’m happy that I won’t, although I would have been ready to take charge, if it came to that. But that’s not what I meant.”

“No. I understand that. I’m sorry I said what I did.”

“That’s all right. We all know I never wanted it. But I missed you, Joseph. I was certain that you had been killed in the uprising, and—and—it was bad, Joseph, knowing that I’d never see you again, it was very bad, first Mother, then you—”

“Yes. Yes. I can imagine.” Joseph squeezed Rickard’s hand. And said then, offhandedly, “I don’t see Father. Is he off on a trip somewhere right now?”

“He’s inside. We’re taking you to him.”

Strange, the sound of that. He did not ask for an explanation. But he knew he had to have one soon.

There were more delays first, though: a plethora of key household officials waiting in the inner hall to greet him, chamberlains and stewards and bailiffs, and old Marajen, who helped his father keep the accounts, and formidable Sempira, who had come here from the household of Joseph’s mother’s family to supervise all domestic details and still ran the place like a tyrant, and many more. They each wanted a chance to embrace Joseph, and he knew it would take hours to do the job properly; but he summoned up a bit of the training he had had from Balbus, and smilingly moved through them without stopping, calling out names, waving, winking, showing every evidence of extreme delight at being among them all once more, but keeping in constant motion until he was beyond the last of them.

“And Father—?” Joseph said, insistently now, to Rickard and Cailin.

“Upstairs. In the Great Hall,” said Rickard.

That was odd. The Great Hall was a place of high formality, his father’s hall of judgment, his seat of power, virtually his throne-room, a dark place full of echoes. It was not where Joseph would expect a long-lost son to be welcomed. But his father was, after all, Martin Master Keilloran, the lord of this estate these many years past, and perhaps, Joseph thought, many years of lordship will teach one certain ways of doing things that he was in no position yet to comprehend.

Joseph and his brother and his sister went up the grand central staircase together. Joseph’s mind was spilling over with thoughts: things he would ask, once he had told his father the tale of his adventures, and things he must say.

He had it in mind to resign his rights as the heir to House Keilloran. It was an idea that had been lurking at the corners of his mind for days, only half acknowledged by him; but it had burst into full power as he came down that double row of smiling, waving, cheering Folk of the House. He would abdicate, yes. He would rather go to live among the Indigenes again, or as a peasant-farmer among the cuylings of Manza, than rule here as Master of the House, rule over the Folk of Keilloran like a king who has lost all yearning to be king. By what right do we rule here? Who says we are to be the masters, other than ourselves, and by what right do we say it? Let Rickard have the task of ruling. He will not like it, of course. But Rickard does not deny that we have the right, and he claims to be ready for it: he said that with his own lips, just a few minutes before. It is his, then, whenever the time comes for it. Let him be the next Master, the successor to their father, the next in the great line that went back so many centuries, when the time came.

“In here,” Rickard said.

Joseph glanced at him, and at Cailin, whose eyes were cast down, whose lips were tightly clamped.

There was a twilight dimness in the Great Hall. The heavy damask draperies were closed, here on this bright afternoon, and only a few lamps had been lit. Joseph saw his father seated at the far end of the room in his huge ornate chair, the chair of state that was almost like a throne. He sat in a strange unmoving way, as though he had become a statue of himself. Joseph went toward him. As he came close he saw that the right side of his father’s face sagged strangely downward, and that his father’s right arm dangled like a mannequin’s arm at his side, a limp dead thing. He looked twenty years older than the man Joseph remembered: an old man, suddenly. Joseph halted, horror-stricken, stunned, twenty feet away.

“Joseph?” came the voice from the throne. His father’s voice was a thick, slurred sound, barely intelligible, not the voice that Joseph remembered at all. “Joseph, is that you, finally?”

So this was the little problem that Cailin had alluded to when Joseph was in the hospital at Eivoya.

“How long has he been this way?” Joseph asked, under his breath.

“It happened a month or two after word reached here of the attack on Getfen House,” Cailin whispered. “Go to him. Take him by the hand. The right hand.”

Joseph approached the great seat. He took the dead hand in his. He lifted the arm. There was no strength in it. It was like something artificial that had been attached recently to his father’s shoulder.

“Father—”

“Joseph—Joseph—”

That slurred sound again. It was dreadful to hear. And the look in his father’s eyes: a frozen look, it was, alien, remote. But he was smiling, with the part of his mouth over which he still had control. He raised his left hand, the good one, and put it down over Joseph’s, and pressed down tightly. That other arm was not weak at all.

“A beard?” his father said. He seemed to be trying to laugh. “You grew a beard, eh?” Thickly, thickly: Joseph could barely understand the words. “So young to have a beard. Your grandfather wore a beard. But I never had one.”

“I didn’t mean to, not really. It just wasn’t easy for me to shave, in some of the places where I was. And then I kept it. I liked the way it looked.” He thinks I’m still a boy, Joseph realized. How much of his mind was left at all? Suddenly Joseph was wholly overcome with the sadness of what he saw here, and he drew his breath inward in a little gasping sound. “Oh, Father—Father, I’m so sorry—”

He felt Rickard kick him in the heel from behind. Rickard made a tiny hissing noise, and Joseph understood. Pity is not being requested here. My little brother is teaching me the proper way to handle this, he thought.

“I like it,” his father said, very slowly. Again the twisted smile. He appeared not to have noticed Joseph’s little outburst. “The beard. A new fashion among us. Or an old one revived.” Joseph began to realize that his father’s mind must still be intact, or nearly so, even if his body was no longer under its control. “You’ve been gone such a long time, boy. You look so different, now. You must be so different, eh?”

“I’ve been in some unusual places, Father. I’ve learned some strange things.”

Martin nodded slowly. That seemed to be a supreme effort, that slow movement of his head. “I’ve been in some unusual places too, lately, without—ever—leaving—Keilloran—House.” He seemed to be struggling to get the words out. “And I—look—different—too,” he said. “Don’t I?”

“You look fine, Father.”

“No. Not true.” The dark, hooded eyes drilled into him. “Not—fine—at—all. But you are here, finally. I can rest. You will be Master now, Joseph.”

“Yes. If that’s what you wish.”

“It is. You must. You are ready, aren’t you?”

“I will be,” Joseph said.

“You are. You are.”

He knew it was so. And knew also that he could not possibly think of abdication, not now, not after seeing what his father had become. All thought of it had fled. It had begun to fade from his mind the moment he had entered this room and looked upon his father’s face; now it was gone entirely. Now that you are back, I can rest , is what his father was saying. That wish could not be ignored or denied him. The doubts and uncertainties that had been born in Joseph during the months of his wanderings were still there; but still with him, too, was that inborn sense of his obligation to his family and to the people of House Keilloran, and now, standing before the one to whom he owed his existence, he knew that it was not in him to fling that obligation back in the face of this stricken man. Rickard had not been trained for this. He had been. He was needed. He could not say no. When his time came to be Master, though, Joseph knew he would be Master in a way that was different from his father’s.

The hand that was holding his pressed down harder, very hard indeed, and Joseph saw that there was still plenty of strength in what remained of Martin Master Keilloran. Not enough, though, to perform the tasks that the Master of the House must perform, and which, he saw now, would—in a month, six months, whenever—devolve upon him.

“But we need to talk, Father. When I’ve been home a little while, and when you feel up to it. There are things I need to ask you. And things I need to say.”

“We’ll talk, yes,” his father said.

Cailin nudged him. She signalled with a roll of her eyes that it was time for Joseph to go, that this was the limit of their damaged father’s endurance. Joseph gave her a barely perceptible nod. To Martin he said, “I have to leave, now, Father. I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while. I’ll come to you again this evening.” He squeezed the dead right hand, lifted it and kissed it and set it carefully down again, and he and Cailin and Rickard went from the room and down the hall, and into the family wing, and to the suite of rooms that had been his before his trip to Getfen, and where everything seemed to have remained completely as he had left it.

“We’ll leave you to rest,” Cailin said. “Ring for us when you’re ready, and we can talk.”

“Yes.”

“That was hard, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “Yes, it was.”

He watched his brother and sister going down the hall, and closed the door, and was alone in his own bedroom once again. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his old bed that seemed so small, now, so boyish. As he sat there, letting the facts of his return wash over him, the bed became all the places that had been bed for him as he made his way across Manza, the rough hollows in the forest floor where he slept on bundles of dry leaves, and the stack of musty furs in the Ardardin’s village, and the hard cot, sharp as bone, in the prisoner compound, and the place under the bush where he had drifted into the hallucinations of starvation that he untroubledly believed heralded the end of his life, and the little bed in Eysar Haven that had taken on the fragrance of Thayle’s warm breasts and soft thighs, and all the rest of them as well, all flowing into one, this bed here, the little bed of his boyhood, the boyhood that now was done with and sealed.

In the morning, Joseph thought, he would go out and walk about the estate and reacquaint himself with its land and with its people. He would pull its air deep into his lungs. He would reach down and dig his fingers into its soil. He would visit the farms and the factories and the stables. He would look at everything, and he knew that there would be much that he would be seeing as though for the first time, not just because he had been away so long but because he would be seeing it all through the eyes of a different person, one who had been to far-off places and seen far-off things. But all that was for the next day, and for the days to come. For the moment he just wanted to lie here atop his own bed in his own room and think back through all that had befallen him.

I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while.

A long journey, yes, a journey which had begun in thunder that had brought no rain, but only endless thunder. And now it was over, and he was home, and some new sort of journey was just beginning. He was not who he had been before, and he was not certain of exactly what he had become, and he was not at all sure who he was going to be. He was full of questions, and some of those questions might never have answers, though he wanted to think he would go on asking them, over and over, nevertheless. Well, time would tell, or maybe not. He was home, at any rate. He had come by the longest possible route, a journey that had taken him deep into the interior of himself and brought him out in some strange new place. He knew that it would take time for him to discover the nature of that place. But there was no hurry about any of that. And at least he was home. Home. Home.