The Longest Way Home

by Robert Silverberg

  But the name did seem odd to the Folkish officer, as well it should have. He repeated it a couple of times, frowning over it, and observed that he had never heard a name like that before. Joseph shrugged and offered no comment. Then the officer looked up at him again and said, “Have you taken part in any of the fighting, Joseph?”

  “No.”

  “None? None at all?”

  “I am not a part of the war.”

  The officer laughed. “How can you say that? Everyone is part of the war, everyone! You, me, the Indigenes, the poriphars, everyone. The animals in the fields are part of the war. There is no hiding from the war. Truly, you have not fought at all?”

  “Not at all, no.”

  “Where have you been, then?”

  “In the forests, mostly.”

  “Yes. Yes, I can see that. You have a wild look about you, Joseph. And a wild smell.” Again the officer played with the things from the utility case. He ran his fingertips over them, almost lovingly, and smiled. “These are Master things, some of them. You know that, don’t you, Joseph?” Joseph said nothing. Then the officer said, switching for the first time from Folkish to Master, and with a sudden ferocity entering his voice, “What you are is a spy, are you not, Joseph? Admit it. Admit it!”

  “That is not so,” said Joseph, replying in Folkish. There was no harm in revealing that he understood Master—there was no Folker who did not—but he would not speak it here. “It is just not so!”

  “But what else can you be but a spy?”

  “It is not so,” Joseph said again, more mildly. “I am not in any way a spy. I told you, I am not a part of the war. I know nothing whatever about what has been going on. I have been in the forests.”

  “A mere wanderer.”

  “A wanderer, yes. They attacked Getfen House, where I was staying, and I went into the forests. I could not tell you what has happened in the world since.”

  “You did not fight, and you are not a spy,” the officer said musingly. He drummed on his desktop with the fingers of one hand. Then he rose and came around the desk to where Joseph was standing. He was surprisingly tall for a Folker, just a few inches shorter than Joseph, and the immense width of his shoulders made him seem inordinately strong, formidably intimidating. He stared at Joseph for an interminable moment. Then, almost casually, he placed his right hand on Joseph’s right shoulder and with steady, inexorable pressure forced Joseph to his knees. Joseph submitted without resisting, though he was boiling within. He doubted that he could have resisted that force anyway.

  The Folkish officer held him lightly by his ear. “At last, now, tell me who you are spying for.”

  “Not for anybody,” Joseph said.

  The fingers gripping his ear tightened. Joseph felt himself being pushed forward until his nose was close to the floor.

  “I have other things to do today,” the officer said. “You are wasting my time. Tell me who you’re working for, and then we can move along.”

  “I can’t tell you, because I’m not working for anyone.”

  “Not working for the traitors who come in the night and attack the camps of patriots, and strive to undo all that we have worked so hard to achieve?”

  “I know nothing about any of that.”

  “Right. Just an innocent wanderer in the forests.”

  “I wanted no part of the war. When they burned Getfen House I ran away. I have been running ever since.”

  “Ah. Ah.” It was a sound of annoyance, of disgust, even. “You waste my time.” Now he was twisting the ear. It was an agonizing sensation. Joseph bit his lip, but did not cry out.

  “Go ahead, pull it off, if you like,” he said. “I still couldn’t tell you anything, because I have nothing to tell.”

  “Ah,” said the officer one more time, and released Joseph’s ear with a sharp pushing motion that sent him flat on his face. Joseph waited for—what, a kick? A punch? But nothing happened. The man stepped back and told Joseph to rise. Joseph did, somewhat uncertainly. He was trembling all over. The officer was staring at him, frowning. His lips were moving faintly, as though he were framing further questions, the fatal ones that Joseph was dreading, and Joseph waited, wondering when the man would ask him what he had been doing at Getfen House, or what clan of the Folk he belonged to, or which towns and villages he had passed through on his way from High Manza to here. Joseph did not dare answer the first question, could not answer the second, and was unwilling to answer the third, because anything he said linking him to Eysar Haven or the Indigene villages might lead to his unmasking as a Master. Of course, the man could simply ask him outright whether he was a Master, considering that he looked more like one than like any sort of Folker. But he did not ask him that, either: he did not ask any of those obvious things. A course that seemed obvious to Joseph was apparently not so to him. The officer said only, “Well, we are not torturers here. If you’re unwilling to speak, we can wait until you are. We will keep you here until you beg us to question you again, and then you will tell us everything. You can go and rot until then.” And to the guard waiting at the door he said, “Take him back to the enclosure.”

  Joseph did not bother counting the days. Perhaps a week went by, perhaps two. He was feverish some of the time, shaking, sometimes uncertain of where he was. Then the fever left him, but he still felt weak and sickly. The strength that he had regained at Eysar Village was going from him again, now that he had to depend on the miserable prison-camp food. He was losing what little weight he had managed to put on in the weeks just past. Familiar sensations reasserted themselves: giddiness, blurred vision, mental confusion. One afternoon he found himself once again quite seriously considering the proposition that as the starvation proceeded he would become completely weightless and would be able to float up and out of here and home. Then he remembered that some such thought had crossed his mind much earlier in the trek, and he reminded himself that no such thing must be possible, or else he would surely have attempted it long before. And then, when he felt a little better, Joseph was amazed that he had allowed himself even to speculate about such an idiotic thing.

  Several times on his better days he approached men in the enclosure to ask them why they were here, who their captors were, what was the current state of the civil war. Each time they turned coldly away from him as though he had made an obscene proposal. No one ever spoke to anyone in this compound. He called out to the three Indigenes that he was a friend of the Ardardin and had worked as a doctor among the people of the mountains, but they too ignored him, and one day they were removed from the enclosure and he never saw them again.

  I will die in this place, he thought.

  It is an absurd end to my journey. It makes no sense. But what can I do? Confess that I’m a spy? I am not a spy. I could give them no useful information about my spying even if I wanted to.

  I suppose that I can confess that I am a Master, Joseph thought, and then they can take me out and shoot me, and that will be the end. But not yet. I am not quite ready for that. Not yet. Not yet.

  Then one morning a guard came for him, very likely the same one who had come for him that other time, and gave him the same wordless gesture of beckoning as before, and led him up the long aisle of important-looking structures to the office of the burly man with thinning reddish-gold hair who had interrogated him earlier. This time the man’s desk was bare. Joseph wondered what had become of his possessions. But that probably did not matter, he thought, because this time they would ask him the fatal questions, and then they would kill him.

  The officer said, “Is your name Joseph Master Kilran?”

  Joseph stared. He could not speak.

  “Is it? You may as well say yes. We know that you are Joseph Master Kilran.”

  Joseph shook his head dazedly, not so much to deny the truth, or almost-truth, of what the man was saying, but only because he did not know how to react.

  “You are. Why hide it?”

  “Are you going to shoot me now?”r />
  “Why would I shoot you? I want you to answer my question, that’s all. Are you Joseph Master Kilran? Yes or no.”

  It would be easy enough to answer “No” with a straight face, since he was in fact not Joseph Master Kilran. But there could be no doubt that they were on to the truth about him, and Joseph saw no advantage in playing such games with them.

  He wondered how they had found him out. Were descriptions posted somewhere of all the missing Masters, those who had escaped being slain when the Great Houses of Manza were destroyed? That was hard to believe. But then he understood. “Kilran” was his clue: Thayle had never managed to pronounce his surname accurately. This man must have recognized all along that he was a Master. Probably in the past few days they had sent messengers to the people of all the towns in the vicinity, including the people of Eysar Haven, asking them whether any fugitive Masters had happened to come their way lately. And so they had learned his name, or something approximating his name, from Thayle. It was a disquieting thought. Thayle would never have betrayed him, he was sure of that: but he could easily picture Grovin betraying her, and Governor Stappin forcing a confession out of her, by violent means if necessary.

  It was all over now, in any case.

  “Keilloran,” Joseph said.

  “What?”

  “Keilloran. My name. ‘Kilran’ is incorrect. I am Joseph Master Keilloran, of Keilloran House in Helikis.”

  The officer handed Joseph a writing-tablet. “Here. Put it down on this.”

  Joseph wrote the words down for him. The officer stared at what Joseph had written for a long moment, pronouncing the words with his lips alone, not uttering any of it aloud.

  “Where is House Keilloran?” he asked, finally.

  “In the southern part of central Helikis.”

  “And what was a Master from the southern part of central Helikis doing in High Manza?”

  “I was a guest at Getfen House. The Getfens are distant kinsmen of mine. Were.”

  “After Getfen House was destroyed, then, what did you do, where did you go?”

  Joseph told him, a quick, concise summary, the flight into the forest, the aid that the noctambulo had given him, the sojourn as a healer among the Indigenes. He did not care whether the officer believed him or not. He told of his escape in the mountains, of his trek back to the lowlands and his time of starvation, of his rescue by the inhabitants of a friendly cuyling town. He did not name the town and the officer did not ask him for it. “Then I left them and was heading south again, still hoping to find my way back to Helikis, when I was captured by your men,” Joseph concluded. “That’s the whole story.”

  The officer, tugging obsessively at the receding curls of his forehead, listened with an apparent show of interest to all that Joseph had to say, frowning most of the time. He took extensive notes. When Joseph fell silent he looked up and said, “You tell me that you are a visitor from a far-off land who happened by accident to be in Manza at the time of the outbreak of the Liberation.” It was impossible for Joseph not to hear the capital letter on that last word. “But why should I accept this as true?” the man asked. “What if you are actually a surviving member of one of the Great Houses of Manza, a spy for your people, lying to me about your place of origin? One would expect a spy to lie.”

  “If I’m from one of the Great Houses of Manza, tell me which one,” said Joseph. He had started speaking in Master, without giving it a thought. “And if I’m a spy, what kind of spying have I been doing? What have I seen, except some Indigene villages, and one town of free Folk who were never involved in your Liberation at all? Where’s the evidence of my spy activities?” Joseph pointed to the officer’s desk, where his belongings once had lain. “You confiscated my pack, and I assume you’ve looked through it. Did you find the notes of a spy in it? My records of troop movements and secret strategic plans? You found my school textbooks, I think. And some things I wrote down about the philosophical beliefs of the Indigenes. Nothing incriminating, was there? Was there?”

  The officer was gaping at him, big-eyed. Joseph realized that he was swaying and about to fall. In his weakened condition an outburst like this was a great effort for him. At the last moment he caught hold of the front of the officer’s desk and clung to it, head downward, his entire body shaking.

  “Are you ill?” the officer asked.

  “Probably. I’ve been living on your prison-camp food for I don’t know how many days. Before that I was foraging for whatever I could find in the wilderness. It’s a miracle I’m still able to stand on my own feet.” Joseph forced himself to look up. His eyes met the officer’s. —”Prove to me that I’m a spy,” he said. “Tell me which House I come from in Manza. And then you can take me out and shoot me, I suppose. But show me your proof, first.”

  The officer was slow to reply. He tugged at his hair, chewed his lower lip. Finally he said, “I will have to discuss this with my superiors.” And, to the guard who had brought him here: “Return him to the compound.”

  Shortly past midday, before Joseph had even had a chance to confront whatever unsavory stuff they intended to give the prisoners for their afternoon meal, he was back at the big officer’s headquarters again. Two other men in officers’ uniform, senior ones, from the looks of them, were there also.

  One, a hard-looking man who had a terrible scar, long healed but still vivid, running across his jutting cheekbone and down to the corner of his mouth, pushed a sheet of paper toward Joseph and said, speaking in Master, “Draw me a map of Helikis. Mark the place where you come from on it.”

  Joseph made a quick sketch of the continent, and drew a cross a little past midway down to indicate the location of Keilloran House.

  “What is your father’s name?”

  “Martin Master Keilloran.”

  “And his father?”

  “Eirik Master Keilloran.”

  “Your mother’s name?”

  “Wireille. She is dead.”

  The scar-faced officer looked toward the other two. Something passed between them, some sign, some wordless signal, that Joseph was unable to interpret. The officer who had twice interrogated him gave a single forceful nod. Then the second man, the oldest of the three, turned to Joseph and said, “The free people of Manza have no quarrel with the Masters of Helikis, and they are not interested in starting one now. As soon as it is practical you will be taken to the border, Joseph Master Keilloran, and turned over to your own kind.”

  Joseph stared. And blurted: “Do you seriously mean that?”

  At once he saw the flash of anger in the scar-faced officer’s eyes. The ugly scar stood out in a blaze of red. “We of the Liberation have no time for jokes.” The words were spoken, this time, in Folkish.

  “I ask you to forgive me, then,” Joseph said, in Folkish also. “I’ve been through a great deal this past year, very little of it good. And I was expecting you to say that you were sentencing me to death.”

  “Perhaps that is what we should do,” the scar-faced man said. “But it is not what we will do. As I said: you will be taken to the border.”

  Joseph still had difficulty in believing that. It was all some elaborate ruse, he thought, a ploy intended to soften him up so that they could come at him in some unexpected way and extract the truth from him about his espionage activities. But if that was so, they were going about it in a very strange way. He was transferred from the prisoners’ compound to a barracks at the other side of the camp, where, although he was still under guard, he had a small room to himself. His pack and everything that had been in it were restored to him. Instead of the abysmal prisoner food he was given meals that, although hardly lavish, were at least nourishing and sound. It was the quality of the food that led Joseph at last to see that what was going on was something other than a trick. They did not want to send him back to Helikis as a creature of skin and bone. They would fatten him up a little, first, to indicate to the Masters of Helikis that the free people of Manza were humane and considerate pers
ons. Perhaps they would even send the camp barber in to cut his hair and trim his beard, too, and outfit him with a suit of clothes of the sort a young Master would want to wear, too. Joseph was almost tempted to suggest that, not in any serious way, to one of his jailers, a young, easy-going Folker who appeared to have taken a liking to him. But it was not a good idea, he knew, to get too cocky with his captors. None of these people had any love for him. None would be amused by that sort of presumptuousness.

  The fact that they were calling their uprising the Liberation told Joseph what their real attitude toward him was. They hated Masters; they looked upon the whole race of them as their enemies. They were not so much offering him assistance in getting back to his home as they were merely spitting him out. He was no concern of theirs, this strayed Master out of the wrong continent, and very likely if all this had been happening six or eight months before they would simply have executed him the moment they had realized what he was. It was only by grace of whatever political situation currently existed between the liberated Folk of Manza and the Masters who must still be in power in Helikis that he had been allowed to live. And even now Joseph was still not fully convinced of the sincerity of the scar-faced man’s words. He did not plan to test them by trying to enter into any sort of easy intimacy with those who guarded him.

  Four days went by this way. He saw no one but his jailers in all this time.

  Then on the fifth morning he was told to make himself ready for departure, and half an hour later two soldiers, uncongenial and brusque, came for him and escorted him to a waiting car, where a third man in Liberation uniform was at the controls. His two guards got in beside him. He was not riding in any clumsy jolting wagon this time, no open wooden cart, no farm truck. The vehicle was a smooth, sleek car of the sort that a Master might use, and probably once had.

  The road went due westward, and then a little to the north. Joseph was in the habit by this time of determining his course by the position of the sun. Neither of his guards said a word, to each other or to him. After several hours they stopped for lunch at an ordinary public roadhouse: he was leaving the wilderness world behind, reentering the one he had once known, prosperous-looking farms on all sides, fields awaiting harvest, farm vehicles moving up and down the roads, everything seeming quite as it should but obviously under Folk control, no sign of a Master presence anywhere. The guards, silent as ever, watched him closely while they ate; when he asked to go to the restroom, one of them went with him. Joseph clearly saw that they had been ordered to prevent him from escaping, if that was what he had in mind, and probably they would shoot him if they thought that that was what he was trying to do. So, just as he still did not completely believe that he was being released, they did not completely believe that he was not a spy.