Collected Short Fiction, page 1403
He guessed that it was probably about noon. Very few townsfolk were around, just some very small children playing in the dust and a few old people busy on the porches of their houses. The rest were working in the fields, Joseph assumed, or accompanying their herds through the pastures. A peaceful scene. The dog that had been sleeping out here last night was still curled up on the ground, and again it gave him one quick one-eyed inspection and a soft little growl before subsiding into sleep. It was not easy to believe that elsewhere on Homeworld a bloody war was going on, estates being pillaged and burned, people driven into exile.
“What is this village called?” Joseph asked, after a little while.
“It’s a town, not a village,” Thayle said.
Evidently that was an important distinction. “This town, then.”
“You don’t know? Its name is Eysar Haven.”
“Ah. Eysar Haven.”
“Originally it was called something else, though that was so long ago that nobody remembers what. But then the name was changed to Eysar Haven, because he actually came here once, you know.”
“He? Eysar, you mean?”
“Yes, of course, Eysar. Who else? He was really here. Some people don’t even believe that Eysar truly existed, that he’s just a myth, but it isn’t so. He was here. He stayed for weeks and weeks, while he was making the Crossing. We know that to be a fact. And after he left the town was named for him. It’s wonderful to think that we walk on the very same ground that Eysar’s feet once touched, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It certainly is,” said Joseph carefully.
He felt that he was in dangerous territory here. There was a note of reverence and awe in Thayle’s voice. Eysar must be some great Folkish hero, whose name was known to one and all in the Folkish world. But Joseph had never heard of him. He stayed for weeks and weeks, while he was making the Crossing. What could that mean? A Master’s education did not include a great deal of Folkish history, nor Folkish mythology, for that matter. For all Joseph knew, Eysar had been a great Folkish king in the days before the Conquest, or the leader of the first Folkish expedition to land on Homeworld, or perhaps some sort of charismatic wonderworking religious leader. The thought that the Folk once had had great kings of their own, or glorious heroes, or revered religious leaders, and that they still cherished the memory of those great men, was a little startling to him, simply because it had never occurred to him before. And certainly it would not do at all for Thayle to find out that he had no knowledge of who this Eysar was, or the Crossing, or, for that matter, of any significant datum of Folkish life or culture.
He searched for a way to change the subject. But Thayle did the job for him. “And where is it you come from?” she asked. “Ludbrek House, you said. Where is that?”
“Up in the north. On the other side of the mountains.”
“That far? You’ve come a very great distance, then. It’s hard to believe anyone could travel as far as that on foot. No wonder you suffered so much.—That’s a strange name for a town, Ludbrek House.”
“That’s not the town name. It’s the name of the Great House that ruled the district.”
“A Master-house?” Thayle said. “Is that what you mean?”
She spoke as though the system of Great Houses with satellite towns of Folk around them was nearly as unfamiliar to her as the deeds of Eysar were to him.
“A Master-house, yes,” he said. “We all belonged to Ludbrek House, many hundreds of us. But then the rebels burned it and I ran away. You don’t belong to any House here, then, is that right?”
“Of course not. You are among cuylings here. You mean you didn’t realize that?”
“Yes—yes, of course, I don’t know what I could have been thinking—”Cuylings.
That word was new to him also. It must refer to free Folk, Folk who had managed to stay clear of the rule of the Masters, holding themselves somehow apart from the dominant economic structure of the world. Again Joseph saw how little he knew of these people, and what risks that posed for him. If he allowed this conversation to go on much longer she was bound to find out that he was an impostor. He needed to interrupt it.
He shook his head as though trying to clear it of cobwebs, and swayed, and gave a deliberate little lurch that sent him stumbling into her. As he came up against her he began to let himself fall, but she caught him easily—he was so light, so flimsy—and held him, her arm encircling his ribcage, until he had found his footing again. “Sorry,” Joseph muttered. “Very dizzy, all of a sudden—”
“Maybe we should go inside,” she said.
“Yes. Yes. I guess I’m not strong enough yet to spend this much time on my feet.”
He leaned on her shamelessly as they returned to the house. She would be more likely to overlook his little lapses of knowledge if she could ascribe them to his general state of debilitation and exhaustion. He clambered gladly into his bed. When she asked him if he wanted anything to eat, Joseph told her that he did, and she brought him some of last night’s stew, which he ate with steadily increasing enthusiasm. Then he told her that he wanted to sleep for a while, and she went away.
But he was wide awake. He lay there thinking over their conversation—Eysar, cuylings, the Crossing—and remembering, also, the interesting sensations that the pressure of Thayle’s breast against his side had evoked in him. He enjoyed her company. And she seemed eager to make herself responsible for his welfare. Joseph saw that it would be only too easy to give himself away, though. There were only great gulfs of ignorance in his mind where the most elementary facts of Folkish life and history ought to be.
Stappin, the town governor, came to Joseph late that afternoon. Joseph was still in bed, sitting up staring idly at nothing at all, wishing he dared to take one of his books from his pack and read it, when the intense little man with the astonishingly broad shoulders and the bullet-shaped head entered his room. Joseph was instantly ill at ease. If he had come so close to revealing the truth about himself to Thayle in the course of the most casual sort of conversation, what chance did he have of concealing it from this hard-eyed, ruthless-looking man, who plainly had come here for the purpose of interrogating him? And what would happen to him, he wondered, once Stappin discovered his secret?
The governor had been doing a little research, too. He wasted no time on pleasantries. And he let it be known right away that he had his suspicions about Joseph’s story. “Ludbrek House, that is where you came from, is what you told us yesterday. How can that be? There are people here who have heard of that place. They tell me that Ludbrek House is such a very great distance from here. Beyond the mountains, it is.”
“Yes,” Joseph said impassively. He met the stony little eyes with an even stare. I am Joseph Master Keilloran, he told himself, and this mam, formidable as he is, is only the governor of a Folkish town. With a little care he would get through this. “On the other side, in High Manza.”
With a little care, yes.
But he had let the words “High Manza” slip out without thinking. He regretted that at once. Did the Folk, he wondered, use that term for the northern third of the continent, or was that in fact purely a Master designation?
With his very first statement he had quite possibly placed himself in peril. He saw that he must be more sparing in his replies. The less he said, the less likely was it that he would stumble into some blunder that would disclose the truth about himself. It had been a mistake to remind himself a moment ago that he was Joseph Master Keilloran: right now he was Waerna of Ludbrek House, and he must be Waema down to his fingertips.
But Stappin did not seem to be bothered by the phrase itself only by the improbability of the journey. All he said was, “That is many hundreds of miles. It was winter. It rains up there in the winter, and sometimes there is snow, also. There is little to eat. No one could survive such a journey.” Joseph indicated his emaciated form, his wild tangled beard. “You can see that I very nearly did not.”
“No. You could not have survived, not on your own. Someone must have helped you. Who was that?”
“Why, it was the Indigenes,” Joseph said. “I thought you knew that!” Stappin appeared genuinely startled. “They would not have done that. The Indigenes are concerned only with the Indigenes. They will have nothing to do with anyone else.”
“But they did,” Joseph said. “They did! Look, look there—” He indicated the ragged Indigene robes that he had been wearing when he arrived in Eysar Haven. Saban or Thayle had washed them and stacked them, neatly folded, in a comer of the room. “That cloth—it is Indigene weave. Look at it, Governor Stappin! Touch it! Can it be anything other but Indigene weave? And that fur mantle next to it. They gave it to me. They took me in, they fed me, they moved me from village to village.”
Stappin spent some time digesting that. It was impossible to tell what was going on behind those cold, hard eyes.
Then, unexpectedly, he said, “Why is it you speak so strangely?”
Joseph compelled himself to meet the governor’s gaze steadily, unflinchingly. “What do you find strange about my speech, Governor Stappin?”
“It is not like ours. Your tone of voice. The way you put your words together.” Calm, he thought. Stay calm. “I am of Ludbrek House in High Manza, and this is the way we speak there. Perhaps a little of the Masters’ way of speaking has come into our speech and changed it. I could not say.”
“Yes. Yes. I forget: you are stendlings, there.”
Another new word. From the context Joseph guessed it was the antithesis of “cuyling,” and meant—what? Serf? Slave? Vassal? Something on that order.
He simply shrugged. He was not going to get into a discussion of a word whose meaning was uncertain to him.
“And how came it to pass,” Stappin said, and there was still an ugly little suspicious edge on his voice, “that you and the Indigenes became such great friends?”
“The uprising happened,” Joseph said. “That was the first thing.”
He studied Stappin carefully. By now Joseph had concluded that these cuyling Folk of Eysar Haven not only had taken no part in the rebellion, but that they must know very little about it. Stappin did not question his use of the term. He did not react to it in any way. He remained standing as he was, motionless beside Joseph’s bed, legs far apart, hands balled into fists and pressing against his hips, waiting.
“It was in the night,” Joseph said. “They came into the Great House and killed all the Masters there.” He searched about in his memory for the names old Waerna had mentioned, the dead Masters, the leader of the rebels, but he could not remember them. If Stappin queried him about that, he would have to invent the names and hope for the best. But Stappin did not ask for names.
“They killed everyone, the men and the women both, and even the children, and they burned their bodies, and they burned the house also. The place is a complete ruin. There is nothing left there but charred timbers, and all of the Masters of Ludbrek House are dead.”
“Did you help to kill them?”
“I? No, not I!” It was easy enough to sound genuinely shocked. “I must tell you, Governor Stappin, I was of the Folk of Ludbrek House. I could never have struck a blow against the Masters of the House.”
“A stendling, yes,” Stappin said. His tone did not seem so much one of contempt as of simple acknowledgment; but, taken either way, it left Joseph with no doubt of the word’s meaning.
“It would not be in my nature to turn against my Masters that way,” Joseph said. “If that is a mark against me, I am sorry for that. But it is the way I am.”
“I say nothing about that.” And then, with an odd little flicker of his eyes: “What work did you do, when you were at Ludbrek House?”
Joseph was unprepared for that. But he did not hesitate to answer. I must not lose my way, he told himself. “I was in the stables, sir,” he said, improvising dauntlessly. “I helped care for the bandars and the ganuilles.”
“And where were you while they were killing the masters and burning the house?”
“I was hiding, sir. Under the porch that faces the garden. I was afraid they would kill me too. I have heard that many Folk who were loyal to their Houses were killed by the rebels, everywhere in High Manza, and elsewhere too, perhaps.”
“When the killing was over, what did you do then?”
“There was no one in sight when I came out. I fled into the forest and lived on my own for a few days. Then I met a noctambulo in the woods who took me to a nearby village of Indigenes. I had hurt my leg and was unable to walk, and the Indigenes took me in and helped me.”
There still was obvious skepticism in the governor’s expression. These stories must seem like children’s fairy-tales to him, Joseph thought. Since everything Joseph was telling him now was the absolute truth, though, he began to feel that he had passed a critical stage in the interrogation. So long as he had been making things up, or borrowing pieces of the other Waerna’s account of the uprising, there was always the risk that Stappin would catch him out in a lie. But from this point on he would not be making things up. Sooner or later Stappin would have to accept his narrative as the truth.
He said, “When I recovered, I went into the service of the Indigenes. That may sound strange, yes. But I have some skills at healing the sick, from my work with the stables. When they discovered that, the Indigene villagers used me as a doctor for their own people for a time.” Joseph went on to explain how they had sold him, finally, to others of their kind, and how he had been passed from village to village in the high country while the winter rainy season came and went. Here, too, the governor would not be able to find any chink of falsity in his tale, for it was all true. “At last,” he said, “I grew tired of living among the Indigenes. I wanted to be back among my own people. So I escaped from the village where I was, and came down out of the mountains. But I did not know that the land down here was as empty as it proved to be. There were no Great Houses, no villages of the Folk, not even any Indigenes. I used up the food I had brought with me and after a time I could find nothing anywhere to eat. There were many days when I ate nothing but insects, and then not even those. I made myself ready for death. Then I was found by two men of Eysar Haven, and the rest you know.”
He sat back, wearied by the long speech, and tried to ready himself for what Stappin was likely to ask him next, which he supposed would be a question about what he planned to do now. It would hardly be prudent to say that he was heading south, for what reason would he have for wanting to go in that direction? The best thing to reply, he guessed, was that he had no plan at all, that with his House destroyed he was without affiliation, without purpose, without direction. He could say that he had not taken the time to form any plan yet, since he would be in no shape to go anywhere for weeks. Later, when he was healthy again, he could slip away from Eysar Haven and continue on his way to Helikis, but that was nothing he needed to tell Governor Stappin.
The question that he had been expecting, though, did not come. Stappin confronted him again in inscrutable silence for a time, and then said, with a tone of finality in his voice, as though he had reached some sort of verdict within himself, “Once again your luck has held, young Waema. There will be a home for you here. Saban and Simthot are willing to give you shelter in their house as a member of their own family. You will work for them, once you have your strength again, and in that way you will pay them back the cost of your lodging.”
“That seems quite fair, sir. I hope not to be a burden on them.”
“We do not turn starving strangers away in Eysar Haven,” said Stappin, and began to move toward the door. Joseph, thinking that the interview was at its end, felt a sudden great relief. But the governor was not done with him yet. Pausing at the threshold, Stappin said suddenly, “Who was your grandfather, boy?”
Joseph moistened his lips. “Why, Waema was his name also, sir.”
“Is a Folkish name, Waema. I mean your real grandfather, the one whose blood runs in your veins.”
“Sir?” said Joseph, baffled and a little frightened.
“Don’t play with me. There’s Master blood in you, is it not so? You think I can’t see? Look at you! That nose. Those eyes. Small wonder you stayed loyal to your House when the uprising came, eh? Blood calls out to blood. As much Master blood in you as there is Folk, I’d venture. Stendlings!” There was no doubting the contempt in his voice this time.
And then he was gone, and Joseph sank back against his pillow, numb, empty.
But he was safe. Despite their suspicions, they had taken him in. And in the days that followed, his strength began quickly to return. They fed him well; Joseph felt guilty about that, knowing that he would never stay here long enough to repay Saban and Simthot for what they were providing for him, but perhaps he could do something about that when, if, he reached his homeland again. Meanwhile his only consideration must be to make himself ready for a continuation of his journey. As Joseph grew accustomed to regular meals again, he ate more and more voraciously each day. Sometimes he ate too much, and went off by himself to hide the nausea and glut that his greed had caused in him. But his weight was returning. He no longer looked like a walking skeleton. Thayle trimmed his hair, which was shaggy and matted and hung down to his shoulders, now, cutting it back to the much shorter length favored by the people of Eysar Haven. Then Velk brought him a mirror and a scissors, so that Joseph could trim his beard, which had become a bedraggled disorderly black cloud completely enveloping his face and throat. He had not seen his own reflection in months, and he was horrified by what the mirror showed him, those knifeblade cheekbones, those crazily burning eyes. He scarcely recognized himself. He looked five years older than he remembered, and much transformed.
No one said anything to him, yet, about working. Once he was strong enough to go out on his own, he spent his days exploring the town, usually by himself, sometimes accompanied by Thayle. He found it very pleasant to be with her. Her strapping Folkish physique, the breadth of her shoulders and her wide staunch hips, no longer troubled him: he saw that he was adjusting his ideals of feminine beauty to fit the circumstances of his present life. He did indeed find her attractive, very much so. Now and again, as he lay waiting for sleep, he let his mind wander into thoughts of what it would be like to press his lips against Thayle’s, to cup her breasts in his hands, to slide himself between her parted thighs. The intensity of these fantasies was something utterly new to him.
