Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

Well, what did that matter? He would not have lived more than another day or two anyhow, even if they had not found him. But if they meant to kill him, why were they going to all the trouble of picking him up and carrying him somewhere? They could finish him off with one quick twist of his skinny neck, the way the noctambulo had killed the mud-crawlers in the Getfen forest.

Perhaps he had not really said anything out loud, then. So they had no hint of who or what he might be, other than some pathetic starving wretch asleep under a bush, a lost soul in need of help. For the first time since the really serious weakness and dizziness had come over him Joseph felt a faint glimmering hope that he might actually survive a little longer.

They were both holding him, the older man gripping him by the ankles, the other under his arms, as they swung him upward and gently lowered him into a vehicle of some sort, not an open wagon of the kind he had grown accustomed to during his travels between one Indigene village and the next, but an actual truck. They tucked him in so that he was sitting upright. Joseph leaned back and drew shallow breaths and waited for the next thing to happen.

“Have a bit of bread, will you?” the older one asked.

Joseph only nodded. His mind felt so muzzy that he did not want to attempt framing a sentence in Folkish just yet, and he was afraid to answer in Master.

The other one took Joseph’s hand and pressed something into it: a torn-off chunk of bread, it was, hard, grayish, much the same sort of rough peasant stuff that the Getfen woman—what was her name? Joseph was unable to remember, though he remembered her clearly enough—had given him the night that all this began. Hungry as he was, Joseph stared at it a long while before he put it to his lips. He was not sure that he could get it down. The thought came to him of that old Folkish man he had found cowering in the subcellars of Ludbrek House—Waerna, that was his name, he could at least remember that one—and how, offered food and drink for what perhaps was the first time in many days, the old man had looked at it timidly, afraid to try to eat. Now he was as close to starvation as Waerna had been then, floating in a dreamy half-world where swallowing a bite of bread was, perhaps, an impossible task. He knew he had to try. His two Folkish rescuers were softly urging him, in their odd, slurred Folkish, to have a little. But when Joseph attempted it he was unable to manage even one bite. The bread seemed as hard as stone against the tips of his teeth, and when he touched his tongue to it, purely to feel the flavor of it, disgust rose in him and something squirmed within his gut like a wild animal struggling to break free. Joseph turned his head aside, wincing.

“Very thirsty,” he said. “Drink—first. Can’t—eat.”

He said it in Folkish. Did they understand him? Yes. Yes. The older one put a flask to his lips. Water, it was. Joseph drank, cautiously at first, then more deeply. That was better. Once again he attempted the bread, and was able this time to take a tiny bite. He chewed at it unendingly, got it down at last, felt it almost immediately trying to come back up. Somehow he held it down. Had another bite. Another. Better, yes.

The younger one said, “A bit of meat, now?”

The mere idea made Joseph feel ill. He shook his head.

“You wouldn’t be wanting wine just now either, then.”

“No. No.”

“They can see after him in town,” the older one said. “We needs be going now.”

Joseph heard the sound of the truck’s engine starting up. He remembered then the things he had been carrying, his few possessions, his pack, his utility case, the fur mantle that he had brought with him from the Indigene village. He did not want to leave those things behind, forlorn and abandoned under that bush. “Wait,” Joseph said. “There were some things of mine there—my belongings—”

The younger man grunted something and jumped down from the truck. When he returned, only a few moments later, he was carrying everything with him. With curious delicacy he spread Joseph’s mantle out over his knees, and gave him the other things, not without a puzzled frown as he handed over the utility case. Then the truck started up.

Joseph realized from the swiftness of the man’s return that his recent resting-place must have been no more than a few yards off the road that they were traveling now. The traffic-sounds that he had heard while lying in his stupor had been no illusions, then. He had managed to make his way nearly back to civilization, or civilization’s edge, anyway, though the last of his energy had left him before he had actually reached it, and he would have died under that bush if these men had not found him. They must have gone off a short way into the underbrush to relieve themselves, Joseph thought, and by that little happenstance alone had his life been saved. If indeed it had been saved. His weakened body might not recover, he knew, from the stresses of his long solitary march. And even if he did regain some measure of health, it was still not at all clear what was going to happen to him now, a fugitive Master who has fallen into the hands of the Folk.

They drove for what might have been hours. Joseph drifted in and out of consciousness. From time to time he heard one of the men speaking to him, and he answered as well as he could, but it was hard for him to remember, a moment later, what they or he had said. Had they asked him where he was heading? Had he told them? He hoped that they were going south, in any event, and tried to reckon their direction from the position of the sun as he glimpsed it through the truck’s little side window.

He was not sure at first how to interpret what he saw. The sun seemed to be in front of them as they journeyed down the highway, and that felt wrong, somehow. But then Joseph reminded himself that in this hemisphere the sun was supposed to be in the southern part of the sky. So that was all right. If they were traveling toward the sun, they must be going south. He could see it out of the right-hand window, which meant that this must be afternoon, since the sun moved across the sky from east to west, and west had to be to the right if they were going south. Yes? Yes. His mind felt very clear, icy-cold, and yet it was so very hard to think properly: everything was a terrible effort. I have damaged myself through lack of food, Joseph told himself again. I have made myself stupid, perhaps permanently so. Even if I do get back to House Keilloran eventually I will no longer be qualified to do a Master’s work, and I will have to step aside and let Rickard inherit the House, and how he will hate that! But what else can I do, if I have become too stupid to govern the estate?

It was a painful thing to consider. He let himself glide into sleep, and did not awaken again until the truck had come to a halt and the two men were lifting him out of it, treating him as they had before, as though he were very fragile, as though any but the gentlest handling might shatter him.

Joseph could barely stand. He leaned against the younger of his two rescuers, locking his arm inside the man’s, and tried as well as he could to stay upright, but he kept swaying and beginning to topple, and had to be pulled back again and again to a standing position.

They had reached a village: a Folkish village, Joseph supposed. Its layout was nothing like that of the Indigene villages in which he had lived for so many months. This was no dense, dark warren in the Indigene style, tight rows of conical mud-and-wattle houses crowded together in hivelike fashion around a central plaza of ceremonial buildings with the village’s communal growing-fields beyond. Here Joseph saw scatterings of small squarish wooden buildings with thatched roofs and stubby stone chimneys rising above them, set widely apart, each house with a low picket fence around it and its own pleasant little kitchen-garden in front and what looked like stables for domestic animals to the rear. Untidy grassy strips ran between the villagers’ dwellings. Dusk was beginning to descend. Burning stakes set into the ground provided illumination. To one side ran a canal, spanned here and there by arching wooden bridges. Off the other way there was a big domed building standing by itself that was surmounted by the Folkish holy symbol, the solar disk with rays of sunlight streaming from it, marking it as the village’s house of worship. The closest thing to a main plaza was the expanse of bare, skinned ground where the truck had halted, but this was a mere parking area that could not have had any ceremonial significance. Vehicles of all kinds were scattered about it, wagons and carts and trucks and harvesting-machines.