Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

Neither of them spoke until they were well outside the town. Joseph saw that it was not easy for Thayle to control the vehicle, that it took all her concentration to keep it from wandering off the road. Plainly she was not an experienced driver. But she was managing it, somehow.

It did not seem to him that the fight had caused him any serious injury. Grovin had hurt him, yes. There would be bruises. There would be painful places for some days to come. But his disorientation and bewilderment in the final stages of the battle, that weird helplessness, he saw now, had been the result more of simply finding himself personally involved in violence, finding himself in actual hand-to-hand combat, than of any damage Grovin had been able to inflict. Of course, it might all have become much worse very soon. If Grovin had succeeded in knocking him down, if Grovin had begun to kick him and stomp on him, if Grovin had jumped on him and started to throttle him—

Thayle’s intervention had saved his life, Joseph realized. Grovin might well have killed him. That might even have been what he was trying to do.

The truck rolled onward. Joseph was the first to break the long silence, with a question that had been nibbling at his soul since they had boarded the truck. “Tell me, Thayle, are we going to stay together?”

“What do you mean, Joseph?” She sounded very far away.

“Just what I said. You and me, together, on the whole drive south. To the Isthmus. To Helikis, you and me, the whole way.” He stared urgently at her. “Stay with me, Thayle. Please.”

“How can I do that?” That same distant tone, drawing all the life out of him. Her hand went idly to the cut and bruised places on her face, touching them lightly, investigating them. “I can take you as far as the crossroads.” They had already left the town behind, Joseph saw. They were back in forested territory again, on a two-lane road, not well paved. “Then I have to go back to Eysar Haven.”

“No, Thayle. Don’t.”

“I have to. Eysar Haven is where I live. Those are my people. That is my place.”

“You’ll go back to him ?”

“He won’t touch me again. I’ll see to that.”

“I want you to come with me,” Joseph said, more insistently. “Please.”

She laughed. “Yes, of course. To your great estate in the south. To your grand home. To your father the Master of the House, and your Master brothers and sisters, and all the Folk who belong to you. How can I do that, Joseph?” She was speaking very quietly. “Ask yourself: How can I possibly do that?”

It was an unanswerable question. Joseph had known from the start that what he was asking of her was madness. Come strolling into Keilloran House after this long absence, blithely bringing with him a Folkish girl, his companion, his bedmate, his—beloved? There was no way. She could see that even more clearly than he. But he had had to ask. It was a crazy thing, an impossible thing, but he had had to ask. He hated having to leave her.

A second road had appeared, as roughly made as the one they were on, running at right angles to it. Thayle brought the truck erratically to a halt. “That’s the road that runs toward the south,” she told him. “Somewhere down that way is the place where your people live. I hope you have a safe journey home.” There was something terribly calm and controlled about her voice that plunged him into an abyss of sadness.

Joseph opened the door and stepped down from the truck. He hoped that she would get out too, that they could have one last embrace here by the side of the road, a hug, at least, so that he could know once more the feeling of her strong body in his arms, her breasts pressing up against him, the warmth of her on his skin. But she did not get out. Perhaps that was the very thing that she wanted to avoid: to be drawn back into the whole unworkable thing, to have him reawaken in her something that must of necessity be allowed to sleep. She leaned across, instead, and took his hand and squeezed it, and bent toward him so that they could kiss, a brief, awkward kiss that was made all the more difficult for them by the cut on her lip, and that was all there was going to be.

“I won’t ever forget you,” Joseph said.

“Nor I,” she told him. And then she was gone and he was alone again.

He stood looking at the truck as it swung around and disappeared in the distance, praying that she would change her mind, that she would halt and come back and invite him to clamber up alongside her and drive off toward Helikis with him. But of course that did not happen.

Soon the vehicle was lost to view. He was alone in the stillness here, the frightening quiet of this empty place.

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.