Robert Silverberg: The Longest Way Home

He hesitated. It seemed like an abomination to abandon her here, bleeding and probably half in shock, while he made his way on his own. He wanted to minister to her wound. He knew a little about doctoring; medicine was one of his father’s areas of knowledge, a pastime of his, so to speak, and Joseph had often watched him treating the Folk who belonged to House Keilloran. But she was right: if she went with him she would not only hinder his escape but almost certainly would die from loss of blood in another day or two, but if she turned back now and slipped quietly into Getfen House by darkness she would probably be able to get help. And in any case Getfen House was her home. The land beyond the woods was as strange to her as it was going to be to him.

So he leaned forward and, with a spontaneity that astounded him and brought a gasp of shock and perhaps even dismay from her, he kissed her on her cheek, and squeezed her hand, and then he got to his feet and slipped the pack over his back and stepped lightly over the little brook, heading south, setting out alone on his long journey home.

He realized that he was, very likely, somewhat in a state of shock himself. Bombs had gone off, Getfen House was burning, his cousins and his servants had been butchered as they slept, he himself had escaped only by grace of a serving-woman’s sense of obligation, and now, only an hour or two later, he was alone in a strange forest in the middle of the night, a continent and a half away from House Keilloran: how could he possibly have absorbed all of that so soon? He knew that he had inherited his father’s lucidity of mind, that he was capable of quick and clear thinking and handled himself well in challenging situations, a true and fitting heir to the responsibilities of his House. But just how clearly am I thinking right now? he wondered. His first impulse, when the explosions had awakened him, had been to run to the defense of his Getfen cousins. He would be dead by now if he had done that. Even after he had realized the futility of that initial reaction, some part of him had wanted to believe that he could somehow move unharmed through the midst of the insurrection, because the target of the rebels was House Getfen, and he was a stranger, a mere distant kinsman, a member of a House that held sway thousands of miles from here, with whom Jakkirod and his men could have no possible quarrel. He did not even look like a Getfen. At least to some degree he had felt, while the bombs were going off and the bullets were flying through the air and even afterward, that he could simply sit tight amongst the carnage and wait for rescuers to come and take him away, and the rebels would just let him be. But that too was idiocy, Joseph saw. In the eyes of these rebels all Masters must be the enemy, be they Getfens or Ludbreks or the unknown Keillorans and Van Rhyns and Martylls of the Southland. This was a war, Homeworld’s first since the Conquest itself, and the district where he was now was enemy territory, land that was apparently under the control of the foes of his people.

How far would he have to go before he reached friendly territory again?

He could not even guess. This might be an isolated uprising, confined just to the Getfen lands, or it might have been a carefully coordinated onslaught that took in the entire continent of Manza, or even Manza and Helikis both. For all he knew he was the only Master still left alive anywhere on Homeworld this night, though that was a thought too terrible and monstrous to embrace for more than a moment. He could not believe that the Folk of House Keilloran would ever rise against his father, or, for that matter, that any of the Folk of any House of Helikis would ever strike a blow against any Master. But doubtless Gryilin Master Getfen and his sons Wykkin and Dorian had felt the same way about their own Folk, and Gryilin and Wykkin and Dorian were dead now, and—this was a new thought, and an appalling one—the lovely Mistress Kesti of the long golden hair must be dead as well, perhaps after suffering great indignities. How many other Masters had died this night, he wondered, up and down the length and breadth of Homeworld?

As Joseph walked on and on, following his nose southward like a sleepwalker, he turned his thoughts now to the realities of the task ahead of him.

He was fifteen, tall for his age, a stalwart boy, but a boy nonetheless. Servants of his House had cared for him every day of his life. There had always been food, a clean bed, a fresh set of clothes. Now he was alone, weaponless, on foot, trudging through the darkness of a mysterious region of a continent he knew next to nothing about. He wanted to believe that there would be friendly Indigenes just beyond these woods who would convey him obligingly to Ludbrek House, where he would be greeted like a long-lost brother, taken in and bathed and fed and sheltered, and after a time sent on his way by private flier to his home in Helikis. But what if the Ludbreks, too, were dead? What if all Masters were, everywhere in the continent of Manza?

That thought would not leave him, that the Folk of the north, striking in coordinated fashion all in a single night, had killed every member of every Great House of Manza.

And if they had? If there was no one anywhere to help him along in his journey?

Was he, he asked himself, supposed to walk from here to the Isthmus, five or six thousand miles, providing for himself the whole way? How long might it take to walk five thousand miles? At twenty miles a day, day in and day out—was such a pace possible, he wondered?—it would take, what, two hundred fifty days. And then he would have five thousand miles more to go, from the Isthmus to Keilloran. At home they would long ago have given him up for dead, by the time he could cover so great a distance. His father would have mourned for him, and his sisters and his brothers. They would have draped the yellow bunting over the gate of Keilloran House, they would have read the words for the dead, they would have put up a stone for him in the family burial-ground. As well they should, because how was he to survive such a journey, anyway? Clever as he was, quick and strong as he was, he was in no way fitted for month after month of foraging in the wilderness that was the heart of this raw, half-settled continent.

These, Joseph told himself, were useless thoughts. He forced them from his mind.

He kept up a steady pace, hour after hour. The forest was dense and the ground uneven and the night very dark, and at times the going was difficult, but he forged ahead notwithstanding, dropping ultimately into a kind of automatic robotic stride, a mindless machinelike forward movement that made a kind of virtue out of his growing fatigue. His progress was punctuated by some uneasy moments, mysterious rustlings and chitterings in the underbrush, and a couple of times he heard the sound of some large animal crashing around nearby. From the multitude of things in his utility case Joseph selected a cutting-tool, small but powerful, and sliced a slender stem from a sturdy many-branched shrub, and used the utility’s blade to whittle it into a stick to carry as he walked. That provided some little measure of reassurance. In a little while the first pale light of dawn came through the treetops, and, very tired now, he halted under a great red-boled tree and went rummaging through the pack that Thustin had assembled for him to see what sort of provisions she had managed to collect from the assembled Folk in that underground chamber.

It was Folkish food, rough simple stuff. But that was only to be expected. A long lopsided loaf of hard grayish bread, a piece of cold meat, pretty gray also, some lumpy biscuits, a flask of dark wine. She had particularly asked for wine. Why was that? Did the Folk think of wine as a basic beverage of life? Joseph tasted it: dark and sour, it was, a sharp edge on it, nothing whatever like the velvety wine of his father’s table. But after his first wince he became aware of the welcome warmth of it on the way down. The air here in early morning was cold. Gusts of ghostly fog wandered through the forest. He took another sip and contemplated a third. But then he put the stopper back in and went to work on the bread and meat.