Robert Silverberg: The Longest Way Home

Before he left his room and entered the chaos outside, though, Joseph felt impelled by habit and training to report the events of the night, at least as he understood them thus far, to his father at Keilloran House. By the yellow light of the next bomb-burst Joseph located his combinant where he had set it down at the side of his bed, thumbed its command button, and waited for the blue globe betokening contact to take form in the air before him.

The darkness remained unbroken. No blue globe formed.

Strange. Perhaps there was some little problem with the circuit. He nudged the “off” button and thumbed the initiator command again. In the eye of his mind he tracked the electrical impulse as it leaped skyward, connected with the satellite station overhead, and was instantly relayed southward. Normally it took no more than seconds for the combinant to make contact anywhere in the world. Not now, though.

“Father?” he said hopefully, into the darkness before his face. “Father, it’s Joseph. I can’t see your globe, but maybe we’re in contact anyway. It’s the middle of the night at Getfen House, and I want to tell you that some sort of attack is going on, that there have been explosions, and rifle shots, and—”

He paused. He could hear a soft knocking at the door.

“Master Joseph?” A woman’s voice, low, hoarse. “Are you awake, Master Joseph? Please. Please, open.”

A servant, it must be. She was speaking the language of the Folk. He let her wait. Staring into the space where the blue globe should have been, he said, “Father, can you hear me? Can you give me any sort of return signal?”

“Master Joseph—please—there’s very little time. This is Thustin. I will take you to safety.”

Thustin. The name meant nothing to him. She must belong to the Getfens. He wondered why none of his own people had come to him yet. Was this some sort of trap?

But she would not go away, and his combinant did not seem to be working. Mystery upon mystery upon mystery. Cautiously he opened the door a crack.

She stared up at him, almost worshipfully.

“Master Joseph,” she said. “Oh, sir—”

Thustin, he remembered now, was his chambermaid—a short, blocky woman who wore the usual servant garb, a loose linen shirt over a half-length tunic of brown leather. To Joseph she seemed old, fifty or so, perhaps sixty. With the women of the Folk it was hard to tell ages. She was thick through from front to back and side to side as Folk often were, practically cubical in shape. Ordinarily she was a quiet, steady sort of woman, who usually came and went without attracting his notice, but she was animated now by distress. Her heavy-jowled face was sallow with shock, and her eyes had taken on an unnerving fluttering motion, as if they were rolling about free in their sockets. Her lips, thin and pale, were trembling. She was carrying a servant’s gray cloak over one arm, and thrust it toward him, urgently signalling to him to put it on.

“What’s happening?” Joseph asked, speaking Folkish.

“Jakkirod and his men are killing everyone. They’ll kill you too, if you don’t come with me. Now!”

Jakkirod was the estate foreman, a big hearty red-haired man—tenth generation in Getfen service, according to Gryilin Master Getfen, Joseph’s second cousin, who ruled here. A pillar of the house staff, Jakkirod was, said Gryilin Master Getfen. Joseph had seen Jakkirod only a few days before, lifting an enormous log that had somehow fallen across the mouth of a well, tossing it aside as if it were a straw. Jakkirod had looked at Joseph and smiled, an easy, self-satisfied smile, and winked. That had been strange, that wink.

Though he was bubbling over with questions, Joseph found his little hip-purse and began automatically to stuff it with the things he knew he ought not to leave behind in his room. The combinant, of course, and the reader on which his textbooks were stored, and his utility case, which was full of all manner of miniature devices for wayfarers that he had rarely bothered to inspect but which might very well come in handy now, wherever he might be going. That took care of the basics. He tried to think of other possessions that might be important to take along, but, though he still felt relatively calm and clear-headed, he had no idea where he might be heading from here, or for how long, or what he would really need, and Thustin’s skittery impatience made it hard for him to think in any useful way. She was tugging at his sleeve, now.

“Why are you here?” he asked, abruptly. “Where are my own servants? Balbu—Anceph—Rollin—?”

“Dead,” she said, a husky voice, barely audible. “You will see them lying downstairs. I tell you, they are killing everyone.”

Belief was still slow to penetrate him. “The Master Getfen and his sons? And his daughter too?”

“Dead. Everyone dead.”

That stunned him, that the Getfens might be dead. Such a thing was almost unthinkable, that Folk would slay members of one of the Great Houses. Such a thing had never happened in all the years since the Conquest. But was it true? Had she seen the actual corpses? No doubt something bad was happening here, but surely it was only a wild rumor that the Getfens were dead. Let that be so, he thought, and and muttered a prayer under his breath.

But when he asked her for some sort of confirmation, Thustin only snorted. “Death is everywhere tonight,” she told him. “They have not reached this building yet, but they will in just a little while. Will you come, Master Joseph? Because if you do not, you will die, and I will die with you.”

He was obstinate. “Have all the Folk of House Getfen rebelled, then? Are you one of the rebels too, Thustin? And are you trying to lead me to my death?”

“I am too old for rebellions, Master Joseph. I serve the Getfens, and I serve their kin. Your lives are sacred to me.” There was another explosion outside; from the corner of his eye Joseph saw a frightful burst of blue-white flame spurting up rooftop-high. A volley of cheers resounded from without. No screams, only cheers. They are blowing the whole place up, he thought. And Thustin, standing like a block of meat before him, had silently begun to weep. By the furious flaring light of the newest fire he saw the shining silvery trails of moisture running down her grayish, furrowed cheeks, and he knew that she had not come to him on any mission of treachery.

Joseph slipped the cloak on, pulled the hood up over his head, and followed her from the room.

The brick building that served as the guest quarters of Getfen House was in fact the original mansion of the Getfens, a thousand or fifteen hundred years old, probably quite grand in its day but long since dwarfed by the present stone-walled mansion-house that dominated the north and east sides of the quadrangle surrounding the estate’s sprawling central greensward. Joseph’s room was on the third floor. A great ornate staircase done in medieval mode, with steps of pink granite and a balustrade of black wood bedecked every foot or two with ornamental knurls and sprigs and bosses, led to the great hall at ground level. But on the second landing Thustin guided him through a small door that opened onto the grand staircase and drew him down a set of unglamorous back stairs that he knew nothing about, descending two more flights to a part of the building that lay somewhere below ground level. It was musty and dank here. They were in a sort of tunnel. There were no lights anywhere, but Thustin seemed to know her way.

“We must go outside for a moment now,” she said. “There will be risk. Say nothing if we are stopped.”

At the end of the tunnel was a little stone staircase that took them back up to the surface level. They emerged into a grassy side courtyard that lay between the rear face of the main building and the guest quarters.