Robert Silverberg - Longest Way Home

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For Mark and Janet
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Contents
PerfectBound e-book extra: Speculative Fictions: An Interview with Robert Silverberg
Epigraph All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train . . .
1 THE FIRST EXPLOSIONS SEEMED VERY FAR AWAY . . .
2 A WAVE OF DIZZINESS CAME OVER HIM . . .
3 ONCE MORE HE RODE IN A WAGON . . .
4 THEY DROVE FOR WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN HOURS . . .
5 LOOKING OFF TOWARD THE BLANKNESS . . .
About the Author
By Robert Silverberg
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
THE FIRST EXPLOSIONS SEEMED VERY FAR AWAY: A STRING OF DISTANT,muffled
bangs, booms, and thuds that might have been nothing more than thunder on the horizon. Joseph, more
asleep than not in his comfortable bed in the guest quarters of Getfen House, stirred, drifted a little way
up toward wakefulness, cocked half an ear, listened a moment without really listening. Yes, he thought:
thunder. His only concern was that thunder might betoken rain, and rain would spoil tomorrow’s hunt.
But this was supposed to be the middle of the dry season up here in High Manza, was it not? So how
could it rain tomorrow?
It was not going to rain, and therefore Joseph knew that what he thought he had heard could not be the
sound of thunder—could not, in fact, be anything at all. It is just a dream, he told himself. Tomorrow will
be bright and beautiful, and I will ride out into the game preserve with my cousins of High Manza and we
will have a glorious time.
He slipped easily back to sleep. An active fifteen-year-old boy is able to dissolve into slumber without
effort at the end of day.
But then came more sounds, sharper ones, insistent hard-edged pops and cracks, demanding and getting
his attention. He sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. Through the darkness beyond his
window came a bright flash of light that did not in any way have the sharpness or linearity of lightning. It
was more like a blossom unfolding, creamy yellow at the center, purplish at the edges. Joseph was still
blinking at it in surprise when the next burst of sound erupted, this one in several phases, a low rolling
roar followed by a sudden emphatic boom followed by a long, dying rumble, a slow subsiding. He went
to the window, crouching by the sill and peering out.
Tongues of red flame were rising across the way, over by Getfen House’s main wing. Flickering shadows
climbing the great gray stone wall of the façade told him that the building must be ablaze. That was
incredible, that Getfen House could be on fire. He saw figures running to and fro, cutting across the
smooth, serene expanse of the central lawn with utter disregard for the delicacy of the close-cropped
turf. He heard shouting and the sound, unmistakable and undeniable now, of gunfire. He saw other fires
blazing toward the perimeter of the estate, four, five, maybe six of them. A new one flared up as he
watched. The outbuildings over on the western side seemed to be on fire, and the rows of haystacks
toward the east, and perhaps the field-hand quarters near the road that led to the river.
It was a bewildering, incomprehensible scene. Getfen House was under attack, evidently. But by whom,
and why?
He watched, fascinated, as though this were some chapter out of his history books come to life, a
reenactment of the Conquest, perhaps, or even some scene from the turbulent, half-mythical past of the
Mother World itself, where for thousands of years, so it was said, clashing empires had made the ancient
streets of that distant planet run crimson with blood.
The study of history was oddly congenial to Joseph. There was a kind of poetry in it for him. He had
always loved those flamboyant tales of far-off strife, the carefully preserved legends of the fabled kings
and kingdoms of Old Earth. But they were just tales to him, gaudy legends, ingenious dramatic fictions.
He did not seriously think that men like Agamemnon and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and
Genghis Khan had ever existed. No doubt life on Old Earth in primitive times had been a harsh, bloody
affair, though probably not quite as bloody as the myths that had survived from that remote era
suggested; but everyone was quite sure that the qualities that had made such bloodshed possible had long
since been bred out of the human race. Now, though, Joseph found himself peering out his window at
actual warfare. He could not take his eyes away. It had not yet occurred to him that he might be in actual
danger himself.
All was chaos down below. No moons were in the sky this night; the only illumination came from the
flickering fires along the rim of the garden and up the side of the main wing of the house. Joseph struggled
to make out patterns in the movements he saw. Bands of men were running up and down the garden
paths, yelling, gesticulating furiously to each other. They appeared to be carrying weapons: rifles, mainly,
but some of them just pitchforks or scythes. Now and again one of the riflemen would pause, drop to
one knee, aim, fire into the darkness.
Some of the animals seemed to be loose now, too. Half a dozen of the big racing-bandars from the
stable, long-limbed and elegantly slender, were capering wildly about, right in the center of the lawn,
prancing and bucking as though driven mad by panic. Through their midst moved shorter, slower, bulkier
shapes, stolid shadowy forms that most likely were the herd of dairy ganuilles, freed of their confinement.
They were grazing placidly, unconcerned by the erupting madness all about them, on the rare shrubs and
flowers of the garden. The house-dogs, too, were out and yelping: Joseph saw one leap high toward the
throat of one of the running men, who without breaking stride swept it away with a fierce stroke of his
scythe.
Joseph, staring, continued to wonder what was happening here, and could not arrive at even the hint of
an answer.
One Great House would not attack another. That was a given. The Masters of Homeworld were bound,
all of them, by an unbreakable webwork of kinship. Never in the long centuries since the Conquest had
any Master struck a blow against another, not for anger’s sake, not for greed’s.
Nor was it possible that the Indigenes, weary after thousands of years of the occupation of their world by
settlers from Old Earth, had decided finally to take back their planet. They were innately unwarlike, were
the Indigenes: trees would sing and frogs would write dictionaries sooner than the Indigenes would begin
raising their hands in violence.
Joseph rejected just as swiftly the likelihood that some unknown band of spacefarers had landed in the
night to seize the world from its present masters, even as Joseph’s own race had seized it from the Folk
so long ago. Such things might have happened two or three thousand years before, but the worlds of the
Imperium were too tightly bound by sacred treaties now, and the movements of any sort of hostile force
through the interstellar spaces would quickly be detected and halted.
His orderly mind could offer only one final hypothesis: that this was an uprising at long last of the Folk
against the Masters of House Getfen. That was the least unlikely theory of the four, not at all impossible,
merely improbable. This was a prosperous estate. What grievances could exist here? In any case the
relationship of Folk to Masters everywhere was a settled thing; it benefited both groups; why would
anyone want to destabilize a system that worked so well for everyone?
That he could not say. But flames were licking the side of Getfen House tonight, and barns were burning,
and livestock was being set free, and angry men were running to and fro, shooting at people. The sounds
of conflict did not cease: the sharp report of gunfire, the dull booming of explosive weapons, the sudden
ragged screams of victims whose identity he did not know.
He began to dress. Very likely the lives of his kinsmen here in Getfen House were in peril, and it was his
duty to go to their aid. Even if this were indeed a rebellion of the Folk against the Getfens, he did not
think that he himself would be at any risk. He was no Getfen, really, except by the most tenuous lines of
blood. He belonged to House Keilloran. He was only a guest here, a visitor from Helikis, the southern
continent, ten thousand miles away. Joseph did not even look much like a Getfen. He was taller and more
slender than Getfen boys of his age, duskier of skin, as southerners tended to be, dark-eyed where
Getfen eyes were bright blue, dark-haired where Getfens were golden. No one would attack him. There
was no reason why they should.
Before he left his room and entered the chaos outside, though, Joseph felt impelled by habit and training
to report the events of the night, at least as he understood them thus far, to his father at Keilloran House.
By the yellow light of the next bomb-burst Joseph located his combinant where he had set it down at the
side of his bed, thumbed its command button, and waited for the blue globe betokening contact to take
form in the air before him.
The darkness remained unbroken. No blue globe formed.
Strange. Perhaps there was some little problem with the circuit. He nudged the “off” button and thumbed
the initiator command again. In the eye of his mind he tracked the electrical impulse as it leaped skyward,
connected with the satellite station overhead, and was instantly relayed southward. Normally it took no
more than seconds for the combinant to make contact anywhere in the world. Not now, though.
“Father?” he said hopefully, into the darkness before his face. “Father, it’s Joseph. I can’t see your
globe, but maybe we’re in contact anyway. It’s the middle of the night at Getfen House, and I want to tell
you that some sort of attack is going on, that there have been explosions, and rifle shots, and—”
He paused. He could hear a soft knocking at the door.
“Master Joseph?” A woman’s voice, low, hoarse. “Are you awake, Master Joseph? Please. Please,
open.”
A servant, it must be. She was speaking the language of the Folk. He let her wait. Staring into the space
where the blue globe should have been, he said, “Father, can you hear me? Can you give me any sort of
return signal?”
“Master Joseph—please—there’s very little time. This is Thustin. I will take you to safety.”
Thustin. The name meant nothing to him. She must belong to the Getfens. He wondered why none of his
own people had come to him yet. Was this some sort of trap?
But she would not go away, and his combinant did not seem to be working. Mystery upon mystery upon
mystery. Cautiously he opened the door a crack.
She stared up at him, almost worshipfully.
“Master Joseph,” she said. “Oh, sir—”
Thustin, he remembered now, was his chambermaid—a short, blocky woman who wore the usual
servant garb, a loose linen shirt over a half-length tunic of brown leather. To Joseph she seemed old, fifty
or so, perhaps sixty. With the women of the Folk it was hard to tell ages. She was thick through from
front to back and side to side as Folk often were, practically cubical in shape. Ordinarily she was a quiet,
steady sort of woman, who usually came and went without attracting his notice, but she was animated
now by distress. Her heavy-jowled face was sallow with shock, and her eyes had taken on an unnerving
fluttering motion, as if they were rolling about free in their sockets. Her lips, thin and pale, were trembling.
She was carrying a servant’s gray cloak over one arm, and thrust it toward him, urgently signalling to him
to put it on.
“What’s happening?” Joseph asked, speaking Folkish.
“Jakkirod and his men are killing everyone. They’ll kill you too, if you don’t come with me. Now!”
Jakkirod was the estate foreman, a big hearty red-haired man—tenth generation in Getfen service,
according to Gryilin Master Getfen, Joseph’s second cousin, who ruled here. A pillar of the house staff,
Jakkirod was, said Gryilin Master Getfen. Joseph had seen Jakkirod only a few days before, lifting an
enormous log that had somehow fallen across the mouth of a well, tossing it aside as if it were a straw.
Jakkirod had looked at Joseph and smiled, an easy, self-satisfied smile, and winked. That had been
strange, that wink.
Though he was bubbling over with questions, Joseph found his little hip-purse and began automatically to
stuff it with the things he knew he ought not to leave behind in his room. The combinant, of course, and
the reader on which his textbooks were stored, and his utility case, which was full of all manner of
miniature devices for wayfarers that he had rarely bothered to inspect but which might very well come in
handy now, wherever he might be going. That took care of the basics. He tried to think of other
possessions that might be important to take along, but, though he still felt relatively calm and
clear-headed, he had no idea where he might be heading from here, or for how long, or what he would
really need, and Thustin’s skittery impatience made it hard for him to think in any useful way. She was
tugging at his sleeve, now.
“Why are you here?” he asked, abruptly. “Where are my own servants? Balbu—Anceph—Rollin—?”
“Dead,” she said, a husky voice, barely audible. “You will see them lying downstairs. I tell you, they are
killing everyone.”
Belief was still slow to penetrate him. “The Master Getfen and his sons? And his daughter too?”
“Dead. Everyone dead.”
That stunned him, that the Getfens might be dead. Such a thing was almost unthinkable, that Folk would
slay members of one of the Great Houses. Such a thing had never happened in all the years since the
Conquest. But was it true? Had she seen the actual corpses? No doubt something bad was happening
here, but surely it was only a wild rumor that the Getfens were dead. Let that be so, he thought, and and
muttered a prayer under his breath.
But when he asked her for some sort of confirmation, Thustin only snorted. “Death is everywhere
tonight,” she told him. “They have not reached this building yet, but they will in just a little while. Will you
come, Master Joseph? Because if you do not, you will die, and I will die with you.”
He was obstinate. “Have all the Folk of House Getfen rebelled, then? Are you one of the rebels too,
Thustin? And are you trying to lead me to my death?”
“I am too old for rebellions, Master Joseph. I serve the Getfens, and I serve their kin. Your lives are
sacred to me.” There was another explosion outside; from the corner of his eye Joseph saw a frightful
burst of blue-white flame spurting up rooftop-high. A volley of cheers resounded from without. No
screams, only cheers. They are blowing the whole place up, he thought. And Thustin, standing like a
block of meat before him, had silently begun to weep. By the furious flaring light of the newest fire he saw
the shining silvery trails of moisture running down her grayish, furrowed cheeks, and he knew that she had
not come to him on any mission of treachery.
Joseph slipped the cloak on, pulled the hood up over his head, and followed her from the room.
The brick building that served as the guest quarters of Getfen House was in fact the original mansion of
the Getfens, a thousand or fifteen hundred years old, probably quite grand in its day but long since
dwarfed by the present stone-walled mansion-house that dominated the north and east sides of the
quadrangle surrounding the estate’s sprawling central greensward. Joseph’s room was on the third floor.
A great ornate staircase done in medieval mode, with steps of pink granite and a balustrade of black
wood bedecked every foot or two with ornamental knurls and sprigs and bosses, led to the great hall at
ground level. But on the second landing Thustin guided him through a small door that opened onto the
grand staircase and drew him down a set of unglamorous back stairs that he knew nothing about,
descending two more flights to a part of the building that lay somewhere below ground level. It was
musty and dank here. They were in a sort of tunnel. There were no lights anywhere, but Thustin seemed
to know her way.
“We must go outside for a moment now,” she said. “There will be risk. Say nothing if we are stopped.”
At the end of the tunnel was a little stone staircase that took them back up to the surface level. They
emerged into a grassy side courtyard that lay between the rear face of the main building and the guest
quarters.
The cool night air was harsh with the smells of burning things. Bodies were strewn about like discarded
toys. It was necessary to step over them. Joseph could barely bring himself to look into their faces,
fearing that he would see his cousin Wykkin lying here, or Domian, or, what would be much worse, their
beautiful sister Kesti, who had been so flirtatious with him only yesterday, or perhaps even Master Gryilin
himself, the lord of House Getfen. But these were all Folk bodies lying here, servants of the House.
Joseph supposed that they had been deemed guilty of excessive loyalty to the Masters; or perhaps they
had been slain simply as part of some general settling of old domestic scores once Jakkirod had let loose
the forces of rebellion.
Through a gate that stood open at the corner of the courtyard Joseph saw the bodies of his own servants
lying outside in a welter of blood: Balbus, his tutor, and Anceph, who had shown him how to hunt, and
the bluff, hearty coachman, Rollin. It was impossible for Joseph to question the fact that they were dead.
He was too well bred to weep for them, and too wary to cry out in roars of anger and outrage, but he
was shaken by the sight of those three bodies as he had never before been shaken by anything in his life,
and only his awareness of himself as a Master, descended from a long line of Masters, permitted him to
keep his emotions under control. Masters must never weep before servants; Masters must never weep at
all, if they could help it. Balbus had taught him that life is ultimately tragic for everyone, even for Masters,
and that was altogether natural and normal and universal, and must never be decried. Joseph had nodded
then as though he understood with every fiber of his being, and at the moment he thought that he had; but
now Balbus was lying right over there in a heap with his throat slit, having committed no worse a sin than
being tutor of natural philosophy to a young Master, and it was not all that easy for Joseph to accept such
a thing with proper philosophical equanimity.
Thustin took him on a diagonal path across the courtyard, heading for a place where there was a
double-sided wooden door, set flush with the ground, just at the edge of Getfen House’s foundation. She
lifted the right-hand side of the door and brusquely beckoned to Joseph to descend. A passageway
opened before him, and yet another stairway. He could see candlelight flickering somewhere ahead. The
sound of new explosions came to him from behind, a sound made blurred and woolly by all these levels
of the building that lay between them and him.
Halting at the first landing, Joseph allowed Thustin to overtake him and lead him onward. Narrow, dimly
lit tunnels spread in every direction, a baffling maze. This was the basement of the main house, he
assumed, an antique musty world beneath the world, the world of the Getfen servants, a place of the
Folk. Unerringly Thustin moved along from one passage to another until at last they reached a chilly
candlelit chamber, low-roofed but long, where fifteen or twenty of the Getfen house-Folk sat huddled
together around a bare wooden table. They all had a dazed, terrified look. Most were women, and most
of those were of Thustin’s age. There were a few very old men, and one youngish one propped up on
crutches, and some children. Joseph saw no one who might have been capable of taking part in the
rebellion. These were noncombatants, cooks and laundrymaids and aged bodyservants and footmen, all
of them frightened refugees from the bloody tumult going on upstairs.
Joseph’s presence among them upset them instantly. Half a dozen of them surrounded Thustin, muttering
harshly and gesticulating. It was hard for Joseph to make out what they were saying, for, although like all
Masters he was fluent in Folkish as well as the Master tongue and the Indigene language also, the
northern dialect these people used was unfamiliar to him and when they spoke rapidly and more than one
was speaking at once, as they were doing now, he quickly lost the thread of their words. But their
general meaning seemed clear enough. They were angry with Thustin for having brought a Master into
their hiding place, even a strange Master who was not of House Getfen, because the rebels might come
looking for him down here and, if they did, they would very likely put them all to death for having given
him refuge.
“He is not going to stay among you,” Thustin answered them, when they were quiet enough to allow her a
reply. “I will be taking him outside as soon as I collect some food and wine for our journey.”
“Outside?” someone asked. “Have you lost your mind, Thustin?”
“His life is sacred. Doubly so, for he is not only a Master but a guest of this House. He must be escorted
to safety.”
“Let his own servants escort him, then,” said another, sullenly. “Why should you risk yourself in this, can
you tell me that?”
“His own people are dead,” Thustin said, and offered no other explanation of her decision. Her voice had
become deep, almost mannish. She stood squarely before the others, a blocky, defiant figure. “Give me
that pack,” she told one woman, who sat with a cloth-sided carryall on the table before her. Thustin
dumped its contents out: clothes, mainly, and some tawdry beaded necklaces. “Who has bread? Meat?
And who has wine? Give it to me.” They were helpless before the sudden authority of this short plump
woman. She had found a strength that perhaps even she had not known she possessed. Thustin went
around the room, taking what she wanted from them, and gestured to Joseph. “Come, Master Joseph.
There is little time to waste.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“Into Getfen Park, and from there to the open woods, where I think you will be safe. And then you must
begin making your journey home.”
“My journey home?” he said blankly. “My home is ten thousand miles from here!”
He meant it to sound as though it was as far away as one of the moons. But the number obviously meant
nothing to her. She merely shrugged and made a second impatient gesture. “They will kill you if they find
you here. They are like wolves, now that they have been set loose. I would not have your death on my
soul. Come, boy! Come now!”
Still Joseph halted. “I must tell my father what is happening here. They will send people to rescue me and
save House Getfen from destruction.” And he drew the combinant from his purse and thumbed its
command button again, waiting for the blue globe to appear and his father’s austere, thin-lipped face to
glow forth within it, but once again there was no response.
Thustin clamped her lips together and shook her head in annoyance. “Put your machine away, boy. There
is no strength in it anymore. Surely the first thing they did was to blow up the relay stations.” He noticed
that she had begun calling himboy , suddenly, instead of the reverential “Master Joseph.” And what was
that about blowing up relay stations? He had never so much as considered the possibility that the
communications lines that spanned the world were vulnerable. You touched your button, your signal went
up into space and came down somewhere else on Homeworld, and you saw the face of the person with
whom you wanted to speak. It was that simple. You took it for granted that the image would always be
there as soon as you summoned it. It had never occurred to him that under certain circumstances it might
not be. Was it really that simple to disrupt the combinant circuit? Could a few Folkish malcontents
actually cut him off from contact with his family with a couple of bombs?
But this was no moment for pondering whys and wherefores. He was all alone, half a world way from his
home, and he was plainly in danger; this old woman, for whatever reason, was planning to guide him to a
safer place than he was in right now; any further delay would be foolish.
She put the heavy pack between her shoulders, turned, plodded down toward the far end of the long
room. Joseph followed her. They went through a rear exit, down more drafty passageways, doubled
back as though she had taken a false turn, and eventually reached yet another staircase that went
switching up and up until it brought them to a broad landing culminating in a massive iron-bound doorway
that stood slightly ajar. Thustin nudged it open a little farther and peeped into whatever lay beyond.
Almost at once she pulled her head swiftly backward, like a sand-baron pulling its head into its shell, but
after a moment she looked again, and signalled to him without looking back. They tiptoed through,
entering a stone-paved hallway that must surely be some part of the main house. There was smoke in the
air here, an acrid reek that made Joseph’s eyes sting, but the structure itself was intact: Getfen House
was so big that whole wings of it could be on fire and other sections could go untouched.
Hurriedly Thustin took him down the hallway, through an arched door, up half a flight of stairs—he had
given up all hope of making sense of the route—and then, very suddenly, they were out of the building
and in the forest that lay behind it.
It was not a truly wild forest. The trees, straight and tall, were arrayed in careful rows, with wide avenues
between them. These trees had been planted, long ago, to form an ornamental transition to the real
woods beyond. This was Getfen Park, the hunting preserve of House Getfen, where later today Joseph
and his cousins Wykkin and Dorian were to have gone hunting. It was still the middle of the dark
moonless night, but by the red light from the buildings burning behind him Joseph saw the tall trees at his
sides meeting in neat overhead bowers with the bright hard dots of stars peeping between them, and then
the dark mysterious wall of the real woods not far beyond.
“Quickly, quickly,” Thustin murmured. “If there’s anyone standing sentinel on the roof up there, he’ll be
able to see us.” And hardly had she said that but there were two quick cracks of gunfire behind them,
and—was it an illusion?—two red streaks of flame zipping through the air next to him. They began to run.
There was a third shot, and a fourth, and at the fourth one Thustin made a little thick-throated sound and
stumbled and nearly fell, halting and dropping to one knee instead for a moment before picking herself up
and moving along. Joseph ran alongside her, forcing himself to match her slow pace although his legs
were much longer than hers.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Were you hit?”
“It only grazed me,” she said. “Run, boy! Run!”
She did not seem really to know which way to go out here, and she seemed under increasing strain
besides, her breathing growing increasingly harsh and ragged and her stride becoming erratic. He began
to think that she had in fact been wounded. In any case Joseph was beginning to see that he should have
been the one to carry that pack, but it had not occurred to him to offer, since a Master did not carry
packs in the presence of a servant, and she probably would not have permitted it anyway. Nor would
she permit it now. But no further shots came after them, and soon they were deep in the wilder part of
the game preserve, where no one was likely to come upon them at this hour.
He could hear the sound of gurgling water ahead, no doubt coming from one of the many small streams
that ran through the park. They reached it moments later. Thustin unslung her pack, grunting in relief, and
dropped down on both knees beside the water. Joseph watched in surprise as she pulled her shirt up
from under her tunic and cast it aside, baring the whole upper part of her body. Her breasts were heavy,
low-slung, big-nippled. He had very rarely seen breasts before. And even by starlight alone he was able
to make out the bloody track that ran along the thick flesh of her left shoulder from its summit to a point
well down her chest.
“Youwere hit,” he said. “Let me see.”
“What can you see, here in the dark?”
“Let me see,” Joseph said, and knelt beside her, gingerly touching two fingertips to her shoulder and
probing the wounded area as lightly as he could. There seemed to be a lot of blood. It ran down freely
over his hand. There is Folkish blood on me, he thought. It was an odd sort of thought. He put his fingers
to his lips and tasted it, sweet and salty at the same time. “Am I hurting you?” Joseph asked. Her only
response was an indistinct one, and he pressed a little more closely. “We need to clean this,” he said, and
he fumbled around until he found her discarded shirt in the darkness, and dipped the edge of it in the
stream and dabbed it carefully about on both sides of the wound, mopping away the blood. But he could
feel new blood welling up almost at once. The wound will have to be bound, he thought, and allowed to
clot, and then, at first light, he would take a good look at it and see what he might try to do next, and—
“We are facing south,” she said. “You will cross the stream and keep going through the park, until you
reach the woods. Beyond the woods there is a village of Indigenes. You speak their language, do you?”
“Of course. But what about—”
“They will help you, I think. Tell them that you are a stranger, a person from far away who wants only to
get home. Say that there has been some trouble at Getfen House, where you were a guest. Say no more
than that. They are gentle people. They will be kind to you. They will not care whether you are Master or
Folk. They will lead you to the nearest house of Masters south of here. Its name is Ludbrek House.”
“Ludbrek House. And how far is that?”
“I could not say. I have never in all my life left the domain of House Getfen. The Ludbreks are kinsmen of
Master Getfen, though. Heaven grant that they are safe. If you tell them you are a Master, they will help
you reach your own home.”
“Yes. That they surely will.” He knew nothing of these Ludbreks, but all Masters were kinsmen, and he
was altogether certain that no one would refuse aid to the wandering eldest son of Martin Master
Keilloran of House Keilloran. It went without saying. Even here in far-off High Manza, ten thousand miles
to the north, any Master would have heard of Martin Master Keilloran of House Keilloran and would do
for his son that which was appropriate. By his dark hair and dark eyes they would recognize him as a
southerner, and by his demeanor they would know that he was of Master blood.
“Until you come to Ludbrek House, tell no one you encounter that you are a Master yourself—few here
will be able to guess it, because you look nothing like the Masters we know, but best to keep the truth to
yourself anyway—and as you travel stay clear of Folk as much as you can, for this uprising of Jakkirod’s
may reach well beyond these woods already. That was his plan, you know, to spread the rebellion far
and wide, to overthrow the Masters entirely, at least in Manza. —Go, now. Soon it will be dawn and
you would not want the forest wardens to find you here.”
“You want me to leave you?”
“What else can you do, Master Joseph? I am useless to you now, and worse than useless. If I go with
you, I’ll only slow you down, and very likely I’ll bleed to death in a few days even if we are not caught,
and my body will be a burden to you. I will go back to Getfen House and tell them that I was hurt in the
darkness and confusion, and they will bind my wound, and if no one who saw us together says anything,
Jakkirod will let me live. But you must go. If you are found here in the morning, you will die. It is the plan
to kill all the Masters, as I have just told you. To undo the Conquest, to purge the world of you and your
kind. It is a terrible thing. I did not think they were serious when they began speaking of it. —Go, now,
boy!Go! ”
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 evenlook 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
摘要：

 ForMarkandJanetAllfixed,fast-frozenrelations,withtheirtrainofancientandvenerableprejudicesandopinions,aresweptaway. . . .Allthatissolidmeltsintoair,allthatisholyisprofaned,andmanisatlastcompelledtofacewithsobersenseshisrealconditionsoflife,andhisrelationswithhiskind.Contents   PerfectBounde-bookext...

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