Robert Silverberg - The Longest Way Home

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 He had never expected that he would feel so somber and withdrawn in the hour of his homecoming as in fact he was.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.