Robert Silverberg: The Longest Way Home

“Joseph?” came the voice from the throne. His father’s voice was a thick, slurred sound, barely intelligible, not the voice that Joseph remembered at all. “Joseph, is that you, finally?”

So this was the little problem that Cailin had alluded to when Joseph was in the hospital at Eivoya.

“How long has he been this way?” Joseph asked, under his breath.

“It happened a month or two after word reached here of the attack on Getfen House,” Cailin whispered. “Go to him. Take him by the hand. The right hand.”

Joseph approached the great seat. He took the dead hand in his. He lifted the arm. There was no strength in it. It was like something artificial that had been attached recently to his father’s shoulder.

“Father—”

“Joseph—Joseph—”

That slurred sound again. It was dreadful to hear. And the look in his father’s eyes: a frozen look, it was, alien, remote. But he was smiling, with the part of his mouth over which he still had control. He raised his left hand, the good one, and put it down over Joseph’s, and pressed down tightly. That other arm was not weak at all.

“A beard?” his father said. He seemed to be trying to laugh. “You grew a beard, eh?” Thickly, thickly: Joseph could barely understand the words. “So young to have a beard. Your grandfather wore a beard. But I never had one.”

“I didn’t mean to, not really. It just wasn’t easy for me to shave, in some of the places where I was. And then I kept it. I liked the way it looked.” He thinks I’m still a boy, Joseph realized. How much of his mind was left at all? Suddenly Joseph was wholly overcome with the sadness of what he saw here, and he drew his breath inward in a little gasping sound. “Oh, Father—Father, I’m so sorry—”

He felt Rickard kick him in the heel from behind. Rickard made a tiny hissing noise, and Joseph understood. Pity is not being requested here. My little brother is teaching me the proper way to handle this, he thought.

“I like it,” his father said, very slowly. Again the twisted smile. He appeared not to have noticed Joseph’s little outburst. “The beard. A new fashion among us. Or an old one revived.” Joseph began to realize that his father’s mind must still be intact, or nearly so, even if his body was no longer under its control. “You’ve been gone such a long time, boy. You look so different, now. You must be so different, eh?”

“I’ve been in some unusual places, Father. I’ve learned some strange things.”

Martin nodded slowly. That seemed to be a supreme effort, that slow movement of his head. “I’ve been in some unusual places too, lately, without—ever—leaving—Keilloran—House.” He seemed to be struggling to get the words out. “And I—look—different—too,” he said. “Don’t I?”

“You look fine, Father.”

“No. Not true.” The dark, hooded eyes drilled into him. “Not—fine—at—all. But you are here, finally. I can rest. You will be Master now, Joseph.”

“Yes. If that’s what you wish.”

“It is. You must. You are ready, aren’t you?”

“I will be,” Joseph said.

“You are. You are.”

He knew it was so. And knew also that he could not possibly think of abdication, not now, not after seeing what his father had become. All thought of it had fled. It had begun to fade from his mind the moment he had entered this room and looked upon his father’s face; now it was gone entirely. Now that you are back, I can rest , is what his father was saying. That wish could not be ignored or denied him. The doubts and uncertainties that had been born in Joseph during the months of his wanderings were still there; but still with him, too, was that inborn sense of his obligation to his family and to the people of House Keilloran, and now, standing before the one to whom he owed his existence, he knew that it was not in him to fling that obligation back in the face of this stricken man. Rickard had not been trained for this. He had been. He was needed. He could not say no. When his time came to be Master, though, Joseph knew he would be Master in a way that was different from his father’s.

The hand that was holding his pressed down harder, very hard indeed, and Joseph saw that there was still plenty of strength in what remained of Martin Master Keilloran. Not enough, though, to perform the tasks that the Master of the House must perform, and which, he saw now, would—in a month, six months, whenever—devolve upon him.

“But we need to talk, Father. When I’ve been home a little while, and when you feel up to it. There are things I need to ask you. And things I need to say.”

“We’ll talk, yes,” his father said.

Cailin nudged him. She signalled with a roll of her eyes that it was time for Joseph to go, that this was the limit of their damaged father’s endurance. Joseph gave her a barely perceptible nod. To Martin he said, “I have to leave, now, Father. I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while. I’ll come to you again this evening.” He squeezed the dead right hand, lifted it and kissed it and set it carefully down again, and he and Cailin and Rickard went from the room and down the hall, and into the family wing, and to the suite of rooms that had been his before his trip to Getfen, and where everything seemed to have remained completely as he had left it.

“We’ll leave you to rest,” Cailin said. “Ring for us when you’re ready, and we can talk.”

“Yes.”

“That was hard, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “Yes, it was.”

He watched his brother and sister going down the hall, and closed the door, and was alone in his own bedroom once again. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his old bed that seemed so small, now, so boyish. As he sat there, letting the facts of his return wash over him, the bed became all the places that had been bed for him as he made his way across Manza, the rough hollows in the forest floor where he slept on bundles of dry leaves, and the stack of musty furs in the Ardardin’s village, and the hard cot, sharp as bone, in the prisoner compound, and the place under the bush where he had drifted into the hallucinations of starvation that he untroubledly believed heralded the end of his life, and the little bed in Eysar Haven that had taken on the fragrance of Thayle’s warm breasts and soft thighs, and all the rest of them as well, all flowing into one, this bed here, the little bed of his boyhood, the boyhood that now was done with and sealed.

In the morning, Joseph thought, he would go out and walk about the estate and reacquaint himself with its land and with its people. He would pull its air deep into his lungs. He would reach down and dig his fingers into its soil. He would visit the farms and the factories and the stables. He would look at everything, and he knew that there would be much that he would be seeing as though for the first time, not just because he had been away so long but because he would be seeing it all through the eyes of a different person, one who had been to far-off places and seen far-off things. But all that was for the next day, and for the days to come. For the moment he just wanted to lie here atop his own bed in his own room and think back through all that had befallen him.

I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while.

A long journey, yes, a journey which had begun in thunder that had brought no rain, but only endless thunder. And now it was over, and he was home, and some new sort of journey was just beginning. He was not who he had been before, and he was not certain of exactly what he had become, and he was not at all sure who he was going to be. He was full of questions, and some of those questions might never have answers, though he wanted to think he would go on asking them, over and over, nevertheless. Well, time would tell, or maybe not. He was home, at any rate. He had come by the longest possible route, a journey that had taken him deep into the interior of himself and brought him out in some strange new place. He knew that it would take time for him to discover the nature of that place. But there was no hurry about any of that. And at least he was home. Home. Home.