Collected Short Fiction, page 1401
The plane, real or not, had reminded him of how easy it once had been to travel from one place to another on Homeworld, and how difficult, how well-nigh impossible, it had become. Heartsick, he thought of the vast curving breast of the world that lay before him, the great impossible span of distance. What madness it had been to think he could ever walk from Getfen to Keilloran! Joseph sank down against the ground, forehead pressing against his knees. His head swam with despair.
Up, he told himself sternly.
Up and get yourself moving. One step and another and another, and someday you will be home.
Perhaps.
But the last of the food he had brought with him from the Indigene village was gone. Joseph found himself thinking longingly of the stewed meat they ate in those villages, the porridges, the milky wine. He had not much liked the wine then, but now he tasted it in his mind and it seemed heavenly, the finest taste in the universe. He imagined a silvery shimmering in the air before him and a flask of the wine miraculously dropping out of nowhere at his feet, and perhaps a pan of the braised illimani meat too. That did not happen. All the euphoria of those early springtime days when he had first come down out of the mountains had disappeared. The carpets of pretty pink flowers, the green blush of new foliage, the sweet fresh spring rain falling on his naked body—that was all so far behind him now that it seemed like something he had dreamed. I am going to starve to death, Joseph thought.
He dug along stream-banks in the hope of finding mud-crawlers, but mud-crawlers did not seem to live here. He did find roots and bulbs that looked as though they might be safe to eat, and nibbled on them experimentally, making mental notes about which ones went down easily and which upset his stomach. He chewed the tender new shoots of bushes for their sweet juice. He broke into a nest of sash-weevils and coolly, methodically, ate the little yellow grubs. They had almost no taste; it was like eating bits of straw. But there had to be some nourishment in them somewhere, for they were living things.
You must not let yourself die of hunger, he told himself. You are Joseph Master Keilloran and you are on your way home to your family, and you need to maintain your strength for the long journey that lies ahead.
He no longer bothered to wash very often. The fresh, sparkling water of the streams felt too cold against his skin, now that there was so little flesh on his bones. His skin began to break out with little white-tipped red eruptions, but that seemed the least of his problems. He stopped washing his clothing, too, but for a different reason: the fabric had grown so threadbare and tattered that Joseph was afraid the robe would fall apart entirely if he subjected it to the stress of washing it.
He threw rocks at basking lizards, but never once did he hit one. They always seemed to come awake the moment he raised his arm and go scurrying away with astonishing speed. He ripped the bark from a tree and discovered brightly striped beetles underneath, and in a kind of wondering amazement at his own boldness—or perhaps, Joseph decided, it was only his own desperation—he put them into his mouth, one at a time. He ate ants. He broke a branch from a little tree and swung it through the air, trying to bat down insects with it, and actually caught some that way. He was surprised to observe how easily he could adapt to eating insects.
He talked to the animals that he met as he went along. They came out and stared at him without fear, and Joseph nodded to them and smiled and introduced himself, and asked whether they had heard anything about the war between Folk and Masters, and invited them to advise him on the edibility of the plants that grew nearby. Since they were creatures that were below the threshold of intelligence, they neither understood nor replied, but they did pause and listen. It occurred to Joseph that he should be trying to catch and kill some of them for their meat instead of holding these nonsensical conversations with them, but by this time he was too slow and weak to try that, and it seemed impolite, besides. They were his friends, companions of the way.
“I am Joseph Master Keilloran,” he told them, “and I would be most grateful if you would send word to my family that I am on my way home to them.”
He felt very giddy much of the time. His vision often became blurry. Hunger, he knew, was doing something to his brain. He hoped the damage would not be permanent.
One night Joseph was awakened by a blazing brightness on the horizon, a lovely red-and-yellow dome that quickly elongated to become a river of light climbing into the sky. Slowly he came to understand that it was a great fire somewhere very far off, and he wondered if the civil war was still going on, and, if so, who was attacking whom, and where. The brightness gave way to black smoke, and then he could see nothing at all.
Much later that same night, not long before sunrise, the thought came to Joseph as he lay in mazy suspension somewhere between sleep and wakefulness that if he were to hold his toes turned inward in a certain way as he walked he would be able to move two or even three times as fast as he usually did, and might even be able to leave the ground altogether and skate homeward two or three feet up in the air. It was an exciting idea. He could hardly wait for day to arrive, so he could put it to a test. But when he remembered it after he arose he saw the absurdity of it at once and was frightened to think that he had been able to entertain such a lunatic notion more or less seriously, even though he had not been fully awake at the time.
Whole days went by when Joseph found nothing to eat but ants. He did not even attempt to throw rocks at lizards any more, although they were abundant all around him, plump green ones with spiky red crests. Their meat, he imagined, was wonderfully succulent. But they were much too fast for him. And though he spent a great deal of time crouching beside streams trying to catch small darting fishes with his hand, they eluded him with ridiculous ease. He had stopped digging up roots or pulling green shoots from plants by this time, for he had begun to think they were poisoning him and was afraid to eat them.
He began to have headaches. His tongue seemed swollen and had a coppery taste. He could hear the blood pounding insistently in his temples. He shook constantly and walked with his arms wrapped tightly about his body as though he were still contending with the cold rain of the wintry highlands, though by all the outward signs he could tell that the days were growing steadily warmer, that it must be getting practically to be summer. Sometimes when Joseph had walked no more than half an hour he found it necessary to sit down and rest for ten or fifteen minutes, and occasionally longer. And then came a day when he could not continue at all after one of those rest-periods, when he simply settled down under a bush and let the time stretch on and on without getting up.
As he lay there he tried to conjure up a meal for himself out of nothing more than his imagination, a plate of sweet river-crabs followed by roast haunch of heggan in mint sauce, with baked compolls on the side, and a steaming brisbil pudding afterward. He had almost managed to delude himself into believing that he had really done it, that he had just enjoyed a rich, tasty dinner and was feeling much the better for it, when he regained enough clarity of mind to realize that it had been nothing more than a pleasant fantasy, that his stomach was still empty, that in fact he was on the verge of dying of starvation. He knew he was dying and almost did not care.
He lay back and closed his eyes. It seemed to him then that he heard the sounds of rumbling wheels nearby, of swiftly moving vehicles, as though there might be a highway just beyond the hedge across the way. But that had to be a delusion too. He had walked through this beautiful countryside for days, weeks, maybe even months, without ever finding any trace of civilized life other than the hunters’ camp that he had come upon on his very first day down from the mountains. The nearest settlement of any kind was probably still a hundred miles away. He would not live to see it.
He realized then that he did care, at least a little, that his life was reaching its end.
How embarrassing it is, Joseph thought, to be dying like this, not even sixteen years old, the heir to House Keilloran transformed into a ragged bundle of skin and bones lying under a bush in some unknown comer of Middle Manza. He had always been so competent, so very good at looking after himself. What were they going to think back in Keilloran when the news finally reached them of what had happened to him? Martin would not weep, no. One quick wince, perhaps: that would be all the outward sign of emotion he would permit himself to show. His father had not even wept when his own beloved wife had died, so suddenly and senselessly, of the bite of that harmless-looking little red toad that had fallen from a tree and landed on her arm. Probably he had never wept in his life. But Joseph knew what her death had done to his father inside, and he knew what his own death would do to him, too.
And his brother Eitan, who was six years younger than Joseph was and had always worshipped him—Eitan would simply not be able to believe that his wondrous brother Joseph had perished in this idiotic way. Eitan would deny the news; he would be angered by it, he would pound the messenger furiously with his fists, he would turn to his father and say in that solemn old-man manner of his, “This is not true, Joseph would never have allowed such a thing to befall him.”
And Rickard, three years older than Eitan—he would be angry too, but not for the same reason. Rickard, who now would have to become the heir to House Keilloran: how he would boil with rage at the realization that those responsibilities were unexpectedly going to be dumped upon him! Rickard was not the sort to run a Great House: everyone knew that, Rickard best of all. He was a clever boy, too clever for his own good, so bright that his intelligence worked against him. Rickard could always find ways to avoid handling anything difficult. Either he would sidestep any real challenge or he would simply allow it to flow around him like water around a boulder in a riverbed, whichever was easier. But it had never been necessary for him to be otherwise. He was only the second son. Joseph was the heir; Rickard knew he could look forward to a life of ease.
Perhaps Rickard would change, now that there was no Joseph and he was going to be the first in line to inherit. Now that he could see the duties that went with being the Master of House Keilloran heading toward him like an avalanche. Joseph hoped so. Perhaps Cailin would help him. She was fourteen, old enough to understand these things, old enough to show Rickard that it would no longer suffice for him to slide by on mere cleverness, that he must take the trouble now to put that cleverness of his to responsible uses, inasmuch as his older brother was dead and he would someday be the Master of the House in his own right. She was a wise girl, Cailin, much undervalued by everyone, as girls tended to be. He wished now that he had treated her better.
Of course Joseph thought of his father, too, that stem, serious, studious man whom Joseph had never come to know as closely as he would have liked to. He never would, now. One thought led to another and he saw other and more ghostly members of his family standing before him, his mother the Mistress Wireille, who had betrayed them all by dying so young, and then his father’s father, old Master Eirik, who had always seemed so forbidding of mien with his great white beard and jutting nose and tight-damped scowling lips, but who actually had been the warmest and most kindhearted of men, the ruler of the House for sixty years and beloved by all. Joseph remembered how fond his grandfather had been of telling tales of the Keilloran Masters of times gone by, the whole long line, an earlier Joseph and an earlier Martin and an earlier Eirik, far back into the first days of the Masters of Homeworld, the same names over and over, bold visionary men who had carved out the family domain in the bounteous subtropical Southland and ruled it with wisdom and foresight and justice. Joseph, only a small boy then, had felt an enormous sense of pride at hearing those stories, at knowing that he was descended from that long line of Keillorans, that one day he would sit where they had sat, and would discharge the awesome duties of his post in a way that showed that he was worthy of his inheritance, and would in his turn continue the line by engendering the Masters who would follow him—
“Easy with him,” someone was saying. “Will break in pieces if you handle him too rough, that one.”
“No meat one’s bones, none. None. Half dead, he is.”
“Half and more. Easy, now. Up with him. Up.”
His mind was still full of thoughts of his grandfather, and of his grandfather’s grandfathers back through time. It seemed to him that one of the voices he was hearing, a deep, gruff one, was his grandfather’s voice, the voice of Eirik Master Keilloran, who had made a special journey to Middle Manza to rescue his errant grandson. Could that be? His grandfather was dead these ten years past, was he not? Perhaps not. Perhaps that was he, right here, now, his father’s father, that wonderful fierce-looking old man. Who would scoop him up, take him in his arms, stride easily from province to province with him until he was home again in Keilloran.
“Grandfather?” Joseph said. He did not open his eyes. “Is that really you, grandfather?”
There was no answer. He was not at all sure that he had actually spoken aloud.
But it definitely was true that he was being lifted, carefully, very carefully, cradled like a dangling cloak across someone’s outstretched arms. The stirring of fresh air around Joseph’s head brought him back a little way into conscious awareness, and he opened his eyes a bit, peering out through slitted lids. There were two men, neither of them his grandfather, though one, the one with the deep, gruff voice, was indeed old and bearded. But his beard was an untidy straggling thing and he was a short, heavy-set man wearing a tight yellow jerkin and loose-fitting trousers that flared at the cuffs, Folkish clothes, and his face, framed by his long unkempt grayish hair, was a pure Folkish face, coarse-featured, heavy-jawed, bulbous-nosed. The other man, the one who was carrying him, looked much younger, and Folkish also. And Folkish was what they were speaking, though it was a strangely slurred Folkish, very nasal, not at all familiar.
Joseph realized that he himself, when he had cried out a moment ago to his grandfather, would surely have spoken in Master. So if he really had spoken aloud they must know what he was, and thus all of his months of strenuous travail had been in vain. He had been captured by the rebels anyway, and now, he assumed, they were going to put him to death.
Well, what did that matter? He would not have lived more than another day or two anyhow, even if they had not found him. But if they meant to kill him, why were they going to all the trouble of picking him up and carrying him somewhere? They could finish him off with one quick twist of his skinny neck, the way the noctambulo had killed the mud-crawlers in the Getfen forest.
Perhaps he had not really said anything out loud, then. So they had no hint of who or what he might be, other than some pathetic starving wretch asleep under a bush, a lost soul in need of help. For the first time since the really serious weakness and dizziness had come over him Joseph felt a faint glimmering hope that he might actually survive a little longer.
They were both holding him, the older man gripping him by the ankles, the other under his arms, as they swung him upward and gently lowered him into a vehicle of some sort, not an open wagon of the kind he had grown accustomed to during his travels between one Indigene village and the next, but an actual truck. They tucked him in so that he was sitting upright. Joseph leaned back and drew shallow breaths and waited for the next thing to happen.
“Have a bit of bread, will you?” the older one asked.
Joseph only nodded. His mind felt so muzzy that he did not want to attempt framing a sentence in Folkish just yet, and he was afraid to answer in Master.
The other one took Joseph’s hand and pressed something into it: a torn-off chunk of bread, it was, hard, grayish, much the same sort of rough peasant stuff that the Getfen woman—what was her name? Joseph was unable to remember, though he remembered her clearly enough—had given him the night that all this began. Hungry as he was, Joseph stared at it a long while before he put it to his lips. He was not sure that he could get it down. The thought came to him of that old Folkish man he had found cowering in the subcellars of Ludbrek House—Waema, that was his name, he could at least remember that one—and how, offered food and drink for what perhaps was the first time in many days, the old man had looked at it timidly, afraid to try to eat. Now he was as close to starvation as Waema had been then, floating in a dreamy half-world where swallowing a bite of bread was, perhaps, an impossible task. He knew he had to try. His two Folkish rescuers were softly urging him, in their odd, slurred Folkish, to have a little. But when Joseph attempted it he was unable to manage even one bite. The bread seemed as hard as stone against the tips of his teeth, and when he touched his tongue to it, purely to feel the flavor of it, disgust rose in him and something squirmed within his gut like a wild animal struggling to break free. Joseph turned his head aside, wincing.
“Very thirsty,” he said. “Drink—first. Can’t—eat.”
He said it in Folkish. Did they understand him? Yes. Yes. The older one put a flask to his lips. Water, it was. Joseph drank, cautiously at first, then more deeply. That was better. Once again he attempted the bread, and was able this time to take a tiny bite. He chewed at it unendingly, got it down at last, felt it almost immediately trying to come back up. Somehow he held it down. Had another bite. Another. Better, yes.
The younger one said, “A bit of meat, now?”
The mere idea made Joseph feel ill. He shook his head.
“You wouldn’t be wanting wine just now either, then.”
“No. No.”
“They can see after him in town,” the older one said. “We needs be going now.”
Joseph heard the sound of the truck’s engine starting up. He remembered then the things he had been carrying, his few possessions, his pack, his utility case, the fur mantle that he had brought with him from the Indigene village. He did not want to leave those things behind, forlorn and abandoned under that bush. “Wait,” Joseph said. “There were some things of mine there—my belongings—”
