The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  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.

  Soon he moved along. He wanted nothing more than to curl up under a bush and close his eyes—he had had only an hour or two of sleep and at his age he needed a good deal more than that, and the strain and shock of the night’s events were exacting their toll—but it was a wise idea, Joseph knew, to put as much distance as he could between himself and what might be taking place back at Getfen House.

  His notion of where he was right now was hazy. In the three weeks he had spent at Getfen House his cousins had taken him riding several times in the park, and he was aware that the game preserve itself, stocked with interesting beasts and patrolled against poachers by wardens of the House, shaded almost imperceptibly into the untrammeled woods beyond. But whether he was still in the park or had entered the woods by now was something that he had no way of telling.

  One thing that he feared was that in the darkness he had unknowingly looped around and headed back toward the house. But that did not seem to be the case. Now that the sun had risen, he saw that it stood to his left, so he must surely be heading south. Even in this northern continent, where everything seemed upside down to him, the sun still rose in the east. A glance at the compass that he found in his utility case confirmed that. And the wind, blowing from his rear, brought him occasional whiffs of bitter smoke that he assumed came from the fire at Getfen House.

  There came a thinning of the forest, which led Joseph to think that he might be leaving the woods and approaching the village of Indigenes that Thustin had said lay on the far side.

  She had said nothing about a highway, though. But there was one, smack in his path, and he came upon it so suddenly, moving as he was now in such a rhythmic mechanical way, that he nearly went stumbling out onto the broad grassy verge that bordered it before he realized what he was looking at, which was a four-lane road, broad and perfectly straight, emerging out of the east and vanishing toward the westward horizon, a wide strip of black concrete that separated the woods out of which he had come from a further section of forest just in front of him like a line drawn by a ruler.

  For a moment, only a moment, Joseph believed that the road was devoid of traffic and he could safely dart across and lose himself among the trees on the other side. But very quickly he came to understand his error. This present silence and emptiness betokened only a fortuitous momentary gap in the activity on this highway. He heard a rumbling off to his left that quickly grew into a tremendous pulsing boom, and then saw the snouts of the first vehicles of an immense convoy coming toward him, a line of big trucks, some of them gray-green, some black, flanked by armed outriders on motorcycles. Joseph pulled back into the woods just in time to avoid being seen.

  There, stretched out flat on his belly between two bushes, he watched the convoy go by: big trucks first, then lighter ones, vans, canvas-covered farm wagons, vehicles of all sorts, all of them pounding away with ferocious vehemence toward some destination in the west. Instantly a burst of hopeful conviction grew in him that this must be a punitive force sent by one of the local Great Houses to put down the uprising that had broken out on the Getfen lands, but then he realized that the motorcycle outriders, though they were helmeted and carried rifles, did not wear the uniforms of any formal peacekeeping-force but rather were clad in a hodgepodge of Folkish dress, jerkins, doublets, overalls, tunics, the clothing of a peasantry that had abruptly been transformed into an improvised militia.

  A shiver ran through him from nape of neck to base of spine. He understood completely now that what had happened at Getfen House was no mere outburst of wrath directed at one particular family of Masters by one particular band of disgruntled Folk. This was true war, total war, carefully planned and elaborately equipped, the Folk of High Manza against the Masters of High Manza, perhaps spreading over many provinces, perhaps over the entire northern continent. The first blows had been struck during the night by Jakkirod and his like, swingers of scythes and wielders of pitchforks, but armed troops were on the way to follow up on the initial strike.

  Joseph lay mesmerized, horror-stricken. He could not take his eyes from the passing force. As the procession was nearing its end one of the outriders happened to turn and look toward the margin of the road just as he went past Joseph’s position, and Joseph was convinced that the man had seen him, had stared directly into his eyes, had given him a cold, searching look, baleful and malevolent, bright with hatred, as he sped by. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was only his imagination at work. Still, the thought struck him that the rider might halt and dismount and come in pursuit of him, and he wondered whether he should risk getting to his feet and scrambling back into the forest.

  But no, no, the man rode on and did not reappear, and a few moments later one final truck, open-bodied and packed front to back with Folkish troops standing shoulder to shoulder, went rolling by, and the road was empty again. An eerie silence descended, broken only by the strident ticking chirps of a chorus of peg-beetles clinging in congested orange clumps to the twigs of the brush at the edge of the woods.

  Joseph waited two or three minutes. Then he crept out onto the grassy margin. He looked to his left, saw no more vehicles coming, looked to his right and found that the last of the convoy was only a swiftl
y diminishing gray dot in the distance. He raced across and lost himself as fast as he could in the woods on the south side of the road.

  As midday approached there was still no sign of the promised Indigene village, or any other sort of habitation, and he knew he had to pause here and get some rest. The cold fogs of dawn had given way to mild morning warmth and then to the dry heat of a summer noon. It seemed to Joseph that this march had lasted for days, already, though it could not have been much more than twelve hours since he and Thustin had fled the chaotic scene at Getfen House. There were limits even to the resilience of youth, evidently. The forest here was choked with underbrush and every step was a battle. He was strong and healthy and agile, but he was a Master, after all, a child of privilege, not at all used to this kind of scrambling through rough, scruffy woodlands. Hot as the day now was, he was shivering with weariness. There was a throbbing sensation along his left leg from calf to thigh, and a sharper pain farther down, as though he might have turned his ankle along the way without even noticing. His eyelids felt rough and raw from lack of sleep, his clothes were stained and torn in a couple of places, his throat was dry, his stomach was calling out impatiently for some kind of meal. He settled down in a dip between two clumps of angular, ungainly little trees and made a kind of lunch out of the rest of the bread, as much of the meat as he could force himself to nibble, and half of what was left of his wine.

  Another try at contacting House Keilloran got him nowhere. The combinant seemed utterly dead.

  The most important thing now seemed to be to halt for a little while and let his strength rebuild itself. He was starting to be too tired to think clearly, and that could be a lethal handicap. The sobering sight of that convoy told him that at any given moment he might find himself unexpectedly amidst enemies, and only the swiftness of his reaction time would save him. It was only a matter of luck that he had not sauntered out onto that highway just as those Folkish troops passed by, and very likely they would have shot him on sight if they had noticed him standing there. Therefore stopping for rest now was not only desirable but necessary. It was probably better to sleep by day and walk by night, anyway. He was less likely to be seen under cover of darkness.

  That meant, of course, leaving himself open to discovery while he slept. The idea of simply settling down in bright daylight, unconcealed, stretched out asleep beneath some tree where he could be come upon unawares by any passing farmer or poacher or, perhaps, sentry, seemed far too risky to him. He would have liked to find a cave of some sort and crawl into it for a few hours. But there were no caves in sight and he had neither the will nor the means, just now, to dig a hole for himself. And so in the end he scooped together a mattress of dry leaves and ripped some boughs from the nearby bushes and flung them together in what he hoped was a natural-looking way to form a coverlet, and burrowed down under them and closed his eyes.

  Hard and bumpy as the ground was beneath his leaves, he fell asleep easily and dreamed that he was strolling in the gardens of Keilloran House, some part of the garden that he must never have seen before, where strange thick-bellied tree-ferns grew, striking ferns with feathery pinkish-green fronds that terminated in globular structures very much like eyeballs. His father was with him, that splendid princely man, handsome and tall, and also one of Joseph’s younger brothers—he could not be sure which one, Rickard or Eitan, they kept wavering from one to the other—and one of his sisters also, who by her height and her flowing cascade of jet hair he knew to be Cailin, closest of all the family to him in age. To his surprise his mother was strolling just ahead of them, the beautiful, stately Mistress Wireille, although in fact she had been dead these three years past. As they all proceeded up the soft pathway of crumbled redshaft bark that ran through the middle of the fern garden, various Folk attached to the House, chamberlains and other high officials, came forth and bowed deeply to them, far more formally and subserviently than his father would ever have tolerated in reality, and as each of the household people went by, some member of the family would hold out a hand to be kissed, not only the Master and Mistress, but the children too, all but Joseph, who found himself snatching back his hand every time it was sought. He did not know why, but he would not allow it, even though it appeared to be a perfectly natural kind of obeisance within the context of the scene. To his surprise his father was angry at his refusal to be greeted in this way, and said something harsh to him, and glared. Even while he dreamed Joseph knew that there was something wrong with that, for it had never been his father’s way to speak so harshly to him.

  Then the dream faded and was followed by others, more discordant and fragmentary than that one, a jumble of disturbing images and pointless conversations and journeys down long passageways, and then, suddenly, many hours later, he awoke and was bewildered to find himself lying in a shelter made of leafy boughs with the dark starry vault of the night above him, close and heavy. It was a moment before he remembered where he was, and why. He had slept past sundown and on into evening.

  The long afternoon’s sleep seemed to have cleared Joseph’s mind of many of its fears and doubts. He felt ready to move along, to do whatever might be needful to reach his distant home, to walk all the way to Helikis if that was what he had to do. No harm would come to him, of that he was certain—not because he was a Master of the highest rank, which would count for nothing in this hostile wilderness, but because he was quick-witted and resourceful and well fitted by nature and training to deal with whatever challenges might await him.

  Though night had arrived, he said the morning prayers. That was permissible, wasn’t it? He had just awakened, after all. For him, with day and night now reversed, it was the beginning of a new day. Then he found a pond nearby, stripped and washed himself thoroughly in the cold water, trying to scrub away the stiffness that the long hours lying on the ground had caused, and washed his clothing as well.

  While Joseph waited for his clothes to dry he tried yet again to make combinant contact with his father, and once more failed. He had no doubt now that the rebels had managed to damage the worldwide communications system and that he was not going to be able to get any message through to the people of House Keilloran or anyone else. I might just as well throw the combinant away, he thought, although he could not bring himself to do it.

  Then he gathered some stubby twigs from the forest floor, arranged them in three small cairns, and offered the words that were due the souls of Balbus, Anceph, and Rollin. That was his responsibility: he had not been able to give their bodies a proper burial but he must at least do what had to be done to send their souls on their way. They were of Master stock, after all, subordinate in rank but still in a certain sense his kin. And, since they had been good servants, loyal and true to him, the task now fell to him to look after their wandering spirits. He should have done it before going to sleep, he knew, but he had been too tired, too confused, to think of it then. As Joseph finished the third of the three sets of prayers, the ones for Balbus, he was swept for a moment by a powerful sense of loneliness and loss, for Balbus had been a dear man and a wise teacher and Joseph had expected him to go on guiding him until he had passed the threshold of adulthood. One did not look primarily to one’s father for guidance of that sort; one looked to one’s tutor. Now Balbus was gone, and Joseph was alone not merely in this forest but, in a manner of speaking, in the world as well. It was not quite the same as losing one’s father, or one’s mother, for that matter, but it was a stunning blow all the same.

  The moment passed quickly, though. Balbus had equipped him to deal with losses of all sorts, even the loss of Balbus himself. He stood for a time above the three cairns, remembering little things about Balbus and Anceph and Rollin, a turn of phrase or a way of grinning or how they moved when coming into a room, until he had fixed them forever in his mind as he had known them alive, and not as he had seen them lying bloodied in that courtyard.

  Afterward Joseph finished the last of the meat and wine, tucking the round-bellied flask back in h
is pack to use as a vessel for carrying water thereafter, and set out into the night, checking his compass often to make certain that he was continuing on a southward path in the darkness. He picked his way warily through this dark loamy-smelling wilderness of uneven ground, watching out for straggling roots and sudden declivities, listening for the hissing or clacking of some watchful hostile beast, and prodding with his stick at the thicker patches of soft, rotting leaves before venturing out on them. The leg that he seemed to have injured unawares had stiffened while he slept, and gave him increasing trouble: he feared reinjuring it with a careless step. Sometimes he saw glowing yellow eyes studying him from a branch high overhead, or contemplating him from the safety of a lofty boulder, and he stared boldly back to show that he was unafraid. He wondered, though, whether he should be afraid. He had no notion of what sort of creatures these might be.

  Around midnight he heard the sounds of another highway ahead of him, and soon he saw the lights of moving traffic, once more crossing the route he must follow but this time passing from west to east rather than east to west. That seemed odd, so much traffic this late at night: he decided it must be another of the rebels’ military convoys, and he approached the break in the forest with extreme caution, not wanting to blunder forth into view and attract some passing rebel’s attention.

  But when he was close enough to see the road Joseph discovered that its traffic was no grim purposeful convoy of roaring trucks, but a slow, muddled procession of humble peasant conveyances, farm tractors, open carts drawn by animals, flatbed wagons, pushcarts, wheelbarrows. Aboard them, or in some cases pulling or pushing them, was a desperate-looking raggle-taggle horde of Folkish refugees, people who had piled their household belongings and their domestic animals and anything else they could take with them into this collection of improvised vehicles and were, plainly, fleeing as hurriedly as they could from some horrifying catastrophe that was happening in the west. Perhaps that catastrophe was the work of the very convoy Joseph had encountered the day before. As Thustin had already demonstrated, not all the Folk of Getfen House were in sympathy with the rebellion, and Joseph began now to suspect that at some of the Great Houses there could be as many Folkish victims of the uprising as there were Masters—Folk striking out at other Folk. So what was going on, then, might be mere anarchy, rather than a clear-cut revolt of the underclass against its lords. And then a third possibility occurred to him: that the Masters in the west had already put the rebellion down, and were exacting a dread vengeance upon the Folk of their region, and these people were trying to escape their fury. He did not know which possibility he found more frightening.