The Longest Way Home

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 faзade 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 him boy , 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.

“You were 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 even look 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 have been a carefully coordinated onslaught that took in the entire continent of Manza, or even Manza and Helikis both. For all he knew he was the only Master still left alive anywhere on Homeworld this night, though that was a thought too terrible and monstrous to embrace for more than a moment. He could not believe that the Folk of House Keilloran would ever rise against his father, or, for that matter, that any of the Folk of any House of Helikis would ever strike a blow against any Master. But doubtless Gryilin Master Getfen and his sons Wykkin and Dorian had felt the same way about their own Folk, and Gryilin and Wykkin and Dorian were dead now, and—this was a new thought, and an appalling one—the lovely Mistress Kesti of the long golden hair must be dead as well, perhaps after suffering great indignities. How many other Masters had died this night, he wondered, up and down the length and breadth of Homeworld?

As Joseph walked on and on, following his nose southward like a sleepwalker, he turned his thoughts now to the realities of the task ahead of him.

He was fifteen, tall for his age, a stalwart boy, but a boy nonetheless. Servants of his House had cared for him every day of his life. There had always been food, a clean bed, a fresh set of clothes. Now he was alone, weaponless, on foot, trudging through the darkness of a mysterious region of a continent he knew next to nothing about. He wanted to believe that there would be friendly Indigenes just beyond these woods who would convey him obligingly to Ludbrek House, where he would be greeted like a long-lost brother, taken in and bathed and fed and sheltered, and after a time sent on his way by private flier to his home in Helikis. But what if the Ludbreks, too, were dead? What if all Masters were, everywhere in the continent of Manza?

That thought would not leave him, that the Folk of the north, striking in coordinated fashion all in a single night, had killed every member of every Great House of Manza.

And if they had? If there was no one anywhere to help him along in his journey?

Was he, he asked himself, supposed to walk from here to the Isthmus, five or six thousand miles, providing for himself the whole way? How long might it take to walk five thousand miles? At twenty miles a day, day in and day out—was such a pace possible, he wondered?—it would take, what, two hundred fifty days. And then he would have five thousand miles more to go, from the Isthmus to Keilloran. At home they would long ago have given him up for dead, by the time he could cover so great a distance. His father would have mourned for him, and his sisters and his brothers. They would have draped the yellow bunting over the gate of Keilloran House, they would have read the words for the dead, they would have put up a stone for him in the family burial-ground. As well they should, because how was he to survive such a journey, anyway? Clever as he was, quick and strong as he was, he was in no way fitted for month after month of foraging in the wilderness that was the heart of this raw, half-settled continent.

These, Joseph told himself, were useless thoughts. He forced them from his mind.

He kept up a steady pace, hour after hour. The forest was dense and the ground uneven and the night very dark, and at times the going was difficult, but he forged ahead notwithstanding, dropping ultimately into a kind of automatic robotic stride, a mindless machinelike forward movement that made a kind of virtue out of his growing fatigue. His progress was punctuated by some uneasy moments, mysterious rustlings and chitterings in the underbrush, and a couple of times he heard the sound of some large animal crashing around nearby. From the multitude of things in his utility case Joseph selected a cutting-tool, small but powerful, and sliced a slender stem from a sturdy many-branched shrub, and used the utility’s blade to whittle it into a stick to carry as he walked. That provided some little measure of reassurance. In a little while the first pale light of dawn came through the treetops, and, very tired now, he halted under a great red-boled tree and went rummaging through the pack that Thustin had assembled for him to see what sort of provisions she had managed to collect from the assembled Folk in that underground chamber.

It was Folkish food, rough simple stuff. But that was only to be expected. A long lopsided loaf of hard grayish bread, a piece of cold meat, pretty gray also, some lumpy biscuits, a flask of dark wine. She had particularly asked for wine. Why was that? Did the Folk think of wine as a basic beverage of life? Joseph tasted it: dark and sour, it was, a sharp edge on it, nothing whatever like the velvety wine of his father’s table. But after his first wince he became aware of the welcome warmth of it on the way down. The air here in early morning was cold. Gusts of ghostly fog wandered through the forest. He took another sip and contemplated a third. But then he put the stopper back in and went to work on the bread and meat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph waited close to an hour for the refugees to finish going past. Then, when the last few stragglers had disappeared and the road was empty, he sprinted across, heedless of the protests of his aching leg, and plunged into the heavy tangle of brush on the other side.

The hour was growing late and he was starting to think about finding a safe nest in which to spend the upcoming day when he realized that someone or something was following him.

He was aware of it, first, as a seemingly random crashing or crunching in the underbrush to his rear. That was, he supposed, some animal or perhaps several, moving about on their nightly rounds. Since it was reasonable to expect the forest to be full of wild creatures, and since none of them had presented any threat to him so far, he did not feel any great alarm.

But then, when he halted at a swift little brook to refill his flask with fresh water, he noticed that the crashing sounds had ceased; and when he resumed his march, the sounds were resumed also. After ten minutes he stopped again, and the sounds stopped. He started, and immediately the sounds began again. A foraging animal would not behave that way. But these were not the sounds that any human who might be pursuing him would make, either, for no serious attempt at concealment was being made. Something—something big , Joseph began to think, and probably not very bright—was crashing blithely through the underbrush behind him, tramping along in his wake, matching him step for step, halting when he halted, starting up again when he started.

He had nothing that could serve very well as a weapon: just his flimsy walking-stick, and the little cutting-tools in his utility case, which only a fool would try to use in hand-to-hand combat. But perhaps he would not need any weapon. The rhythmic pattern of the footsteps behind him—crash crash , crash crash , crash crash —made it seem more likely that his follower was a two-legged creature than some low-slung brutish beast of the forest. If there was any truth whatever to Thustin’s tale of there being an Indigene village down this way, he might well have entered its territory by now, and this might be a scout from that village, skulking along behind him to see what this human interloper might be up to.

Joseph turned and stared back into the darkness of the forest through which he had just come. He was fairly sure that he could hear the sound of breathing nearby: slow, heavy breathing.

“Who’s there?” Joseph asked, saying it in the Indigene tongue.

Silence.

“I call for an answer,” Joseph said crisply, still using Indigene. He spoke with the unmistakable tone of a Master. Perhaps that was a mistake, he thought, but there was no helping it now. An Indigene would not care whether he was Master or Folk, anyway.

But still no answer came. He could still hear the sound of hoarse breathing, though. No question about that, now. “I know you’re there,” said Joseph. “I call on you to identify yourself to me.” Only a Master would have spoken that way, and so, when the silence continued, he said it again in Master-speech, to underscore his rank. Then, for good measure, he repeated the words in Folkish. Silence. Silence. He might just as well have called out to the creature in the language of Old Earth, he realized. Joseph had studied that language under Balbus’s tutelage and after a fashion could actually speak a little of it.

Then he remembered that there was a pocket torch in his utility case. He groped around for it, drew it out, and switched it on, putting it on widest beam.

A looming massive noctambulo stood before him, no more than twenty feet away, blinking and gaping in the light.

“So you’re what’s been following me,” Joseph said. He spoke in Indigene. He knew that in his home district that was a language noctambulos were capable of understanding. “Well, hello, there.” One did not fear noctambulos, at least not those of Helikis. They were huge and potentially could do great damage as they blundered about, but they were innately harmless. “What is it you want with me, will you tell me?”

The noctambulo simply stared at him, slowly opening and closing its long rubbery beak in the silly way that noctambulos had. The creature was gigantic, eight feet tall, maybe nine, with a narrow spindling head, thick huddled shoulders, enormously long arms that culminated in vast paddle-shaped outward-turned hands. Its close-set red eyes, glistening like polished garnets in the diffuse light of Joseph’s torch, were saucer-sized. Its body was covered with broad, leathery pinkish-yellow scales. The noctambulos of Helikis were a darker color, almost blue. A regional difference, Joseph thought. Perhaps this was even a different species, though obviously closely related.

“Well?” Joseph said. “Will you speak to me? My name is Joseph Master Keilloran,” he said. “Who are you?” And, into the continuing silence: “I know you can understand me. Speak to me. I won’t harm you. See? I have no weapons.”

“The light—” said the noctambulo. “In my eyes—” Its voice sounded rusty. It was the clanking sound of a machine that had not been used for many years.

“Is that it,” Joseph said. “How’s this, then?” He lowered the beam, turning it at an angle so he could continue to see the noctambulo without blinding it. The great shambling being flapped its loose-jointed wrists in what might have been a gesture of gratitude.

The noctambulos of Helikis were stupid creatures, just barely across the threshold of intelligence, and there was no reason to think that those of Manza were any cleverer. But they had to be treated as something more than mere animals. They were capable of speaking Indigene, however poorly and inarticulately, and they had some sort of language of their own besides. And they had definite self-awareness, undeniable consciousnesses. Two apiece, indeed, for noctambulos, as their name implied, were creatures that prowled by night, but also remained active during their daytime sleep periods, and, insofar as Joseph understood it, had secondary identities and personalities that came into operation by day while the primary identity that inhabited their brains was sleeping. How much communication existed between the day and night identities of each noctambulo was something that no one had been clearly able to determine.

Intelligence had developed differently on Homeworld than it had on Earth: instead of one dominant species that had subjugated all others, Homeworld had several sorts of native races that qualified as intelligent, each of which had a language and the ability to form abstract concepts and even art of a kind, and the members of which had distinct individual identities. The race known as Indigenes, though they were more nearly humanoid in appearance than any of the others and were undoubtedly the most intelligent, had never shown any impulse toward dominance whatsoever, so that they could not really be regarded as the species that had ruled this world before the first humans came. No one had ruled this world, which had made it much easier for the firstcomers, the humans now known as the Folk, to take possession of it. And, since the Folk had been lulled to placidity after having lived here so long without any hint of challenge from the native life-forms, that had perhaps made it such an easy matter for the second wave of humans, the conquering Masters, to reduce them to a subordinate position.

Since the noctambulo did not seem to want to explain why it had been following Joseph through the woods, perhaps did not even know itself, Joseph let the point pass. He told the creature, speaking slowly and carefully in Indigene, that he was a solitary traveler searching for a nearby village of Indigenes where he hoped to take refuge from trouble among his own people.

The noctambulo replied—thickly, almost incoherently—that it would do what it could to help.

There was something dreamlike about conducting a conversation with a noctambulo, but Joseph was glad enough for company of any sort after the unaccustomed solitude of his sojourn in the forest. He could not remember when he had last been alone for so long: there had always been one of his servants around, or his brothers or his sisters.

They went on their way, the noctambulo in the lead. Joseph had no idea why the creature had been following him through the forest. Probably, he thought, he would never find out. Perhaps it had had no reason at all, simply had fallen in behind the wayfarer in a foolish automatic way. It made little difference.

Before long Joseph felt hunger coming over him. With the provisions that Thustin had given him gone, all that he had left was the water in his flask. Finishing the last of the meat a few hours before, he had not paused to consider what he would do for meals thereafter on his journey, for he had never had to think about such a thing before. But he thought about it now. In the tales he had read about lone wandering castaways, they had always lived on roots and berries in the forest, or killed small animals with well-aimed rocks. Joseph had no way of knowing how to distinguish the edible roots or berries from the poisonous ones, though, and there did not seem to be any fruit on the trees and shrubs around here anyway at this time of year. As for killing wild animals by throwing rocks at them, that seemed to be something that was possible only in boys’ storybooks.

He had to eat something, though. He wondered what he was going to do. From minute to minute the pangs increased in intensity. He had always had a hearty appetite. And in the short while since his escape from Getfen House he had called mightily on his body’s reserves of strength.

It did not occur to him to discuss the problem with the noctambulo. After a couple of hours, however, they came to another small brook, and, since these little forest streams were becoming less common as they proceeded southward, Joseph thought it would be wise to fill his flask once again, even though it was less than half empty. He did so, and knelt also for a deep drink directly from the brook. Afterward he stayed in his crouching position for a few moments, enjoying the simple pleasure of resting here like this. The thought came to him of the clean warm bed in the guest quarters of Getfen House where he had been lying half asleep when the first sounds of the rebellion reached his ears, and of his own comfortable little apartment at home, his bed with its coverlet of purple and gold, his lopsided old chair, his well-stocked bookcase, his tile-bordered washbasin, the robust breakfast that was brought to his door by a servant every morning. All those things seemed like the stuff of dreams to him now. If only this were the dream, Joseph thought, and they were the reality into which he would at any moment awaken.

Finally he looked up and noticed that the noctambulo had moved a short distance upstream from him and was grubbing about intently in the mud of the shore with its great scooplike hands, prodding and poking in it, dredging up large handfuls of mud that it turned over and over, inspecting them with almost comically deep attention. Joseph perceived that the noctambulo was pulling small many-legged creatures, crustaceans of some sort, from nests eight or nine inches down in the mud. It had found perhaps a dozen of them already, and, as Joseph watched, it scooped up a couple more, deftly giving them a quick pinch apiece to crack their necks and laying them carefully down beside the others.

This went on until it had caught about twenty. It divided the little animals into two approximately equal groups and shoved one of the piles toward Joseph, and said something in its thick-tongued, barely intelligible way that Joseph realized, after some thought, had been, “We eat now.”

He was touched by the creature’s kindness in sharing its meal unasked with him. But he wondered how he was going to eat these things. Covertly he glanced across at the noctambulo, who had hunkered down at the edge of the stream and was taking up the little mud-crawlers one by one, carefully folding the edges of one big hand over them and squeezing in such a way as to split the horny shell and bring bright scarlet meat popping into view. It sucked each tender morsel free, tossed the now empty shell over its shoulder into the brook, and went on to the next.

Joseph shuddered and fought back a spasm of nausea. The thought of eating such a thing—raw, no less—disgusted him. It would be like eating insects.

But it was clear to him that his choice lay between eating and starving. He knew what he would have said and done if his steward had brought him a tray of these crawlers one morning at Keilloran House. But this was not Keilloran House. Gingerly he picked up one of the mud-crawlers and tried to crack it open with his hand as he had seen the noctambulo do. The chitinous shell, though, was harder than he had expected. Even when he pushed inward with both hands he could not cause it to split.

The noctambulo watched benignly, perhaps pityingly. But it did not offer to help. It went methodically on with its own meal.

Joseph drew his knife from his utility case and by punching down vigorously was able to cut a slit about an inch long into the crawler’s shell. That gave him enough of a start so that he now could, by pressing from both ends with all his strength, extend the crack far enough to make the red flesh show.

He stared down at it, quailing at the idea of actually putting this stuff in his mouth. Then, as a sudden wild burst of hunger overwhelmed him and obliterated all inhibition, he quickly lifted it and clamped his lips over the cracked shell and sucked the meat out, gulping it hurriedly down as if he could somehow avoid tasting it that way.

He could not avoid tasting it. The flavor was musky and pungent, as pungent as anything he had ever tasted, a harsh spiky taste that cut right into his palate. It seemed to him that the crawler flesh had the taste of mud in it too, or of the clay that lay below the mud in the bed of the brook. He gagged on it. A powerful shudder ran through him and his stomach seemed to rise and leap about. But after a couple of hasty gulps of water the worst of the sensations quickly subsided, leaving a reasonably tolerable aftertaste, and he realized that that first mouthful of strange meat had somehow taken the hard edge from his hunger. Joseph cracked open a second crawler and ate it less timidly, and a third, and a fourth, until it began to seem almost unremarkable to be eating such things. He still hated the initial muddy taste, nor was there any sort of pleasure for him in the aftertaste, but this was, at least, a way of easing the gripings of hunger. When he had eaten six of the crawlers he decided that he had had enough and pushed the rest of the heap back toward the noctambulo, who gathered them up without comment and set about devouring them.

A dozen or so mud-crawlers could not have been much of a meal for an entity the size of the noctambulo. Indeed, as the two of them went onward through the night, the big creature continued to gather food. It went about the task with considerable skill, too. Joseph watched with unforced admiration as the noctambulo unerringly sniffed out an underground burrow, laid it bare with a few quick scoops of its great paddle-shaped hands, and pounced with phenomenal speed on the frantic inhabitants, a colony of small long-nosed mammals with bright yellow eyes, perhaps of the same sort that Joseph had seen staring down at him the night before. It caught four, killing them efficiently, and laid them out in a row on the ground, once again dividing them in two groups and nudging one pair toward Joseph.

Joseph stared at them, perplexed. The noctambulo had its face deep in the abdomen of one of the little beasts and was already happily gnawing away.

That was something Joseph could not or at least would not do. He could flay them and butcher them, he supposed, but he drew the line, at least this early in his journey, at eating the raw and bloody meat of mammals. Grimly he peeled the skin from the limbs of one of the long-nosed animals and then the other, and hacked away at the lean pink flesh along the fragile-looking bones until he had sliced off a fair-sized pile of meat. For the first time he deployed the firestarter from his utility case, using it to kindle a little blaze from twigs and dry leaves, and dangled one strip of meat after another into it from skewers until they were more or less cooked, or at any rate charred on the outside, though disagreeably moist within. Joseph ate them joylessly but without any great difficulty. The meat had little flavor; the effect was certainly that of eating meat, however stringy and drab in texture, but it made scarcely any impact on the tongue. Still, there would be some nourishment here, or so he hoped.

The noctambulo by this time had finished its meat and had excavated some thick crooked white tubers as a second course. These too it divided with Joseph, who began to push a skewer through one of them so he could hold it over the fire.

“No,” said the noctambulo. “No fire. Do like this.” And bit off a beakful from one without troubling even to brush the crust of soil from its sides. “Is good. You eat.”

Joseph fastidiously cleaned the dirt from the tuber as well as he could and took a wary bite. To his surprise the taste was superb. The tuber’s soft pulp was fragrant and fruity, and it detonated a complex mixture of responses in his mouth, all of them pleasing—a sugary sweetness, with an interesting winy tartness just behind it, and then a warm, starchy glow. It seemed a perfect antidote to the nastiness of the mud-crawler flesh and the insipidity of the meat of the burrowers. In great delight Joseph finished one tuber and then a second, and was reaching for a third when the noctambulo intervened. “Is too much,” it said. “Take with. You eat later.” The saucer eyes seemed to be giving him a sternly protective look. It was almost like having Balbus back in a bizarrely altered form.

Soon it would be morning. Joseph began to feel a little sleepy. He had adapted swiftly to this new regime of marching by night and sleeping by day. But the food, and particularly the tubers, had given him a fresh access of strength. He marched on steadily behind the noctambulo through a region that seemed much hillier and rockier than the terrain they had just traversed, and not quite as thickly vegetated, until, as the full blaze of daylight descended on the forest, the noctambulo halted suddenly and said, looking down at him from its great height, “Sleep now.”

It was referring to itself, evidently, not to Joseph. And he watched sleep come over it. The noctambulo remained standing, but between one moment and the next something had changed. The noctambulo had little ability, so far as Joseph could detect, to register alterations in facial expression, and yet the glint in its huge eyes seemed somehow harder now, and it held its beak tightly closed instead of drooping ajar as it usually did, and the tapering head appeared to be tilted now at an odd quizzical angle.

After a moment Joseph remembered: daytime brought a consciousness shift for noctambulos. The nighttime self had gone to sleep and the daytime personality was operating the huge body. In the hours just ahead, Joseph realized, he would essentially be dealing with a different noctambulo.

“My name is Joseph Master Keilloran,” he felt obliged to announce to it. “I am a traveler who has come here from a far-off place. Your night-self has been guiding me through the forest to the nearest village of Indigenes.”

The noctambulo made no response: did not, in fact, seem to comprehend anything Joseph had said, did not react in any way. Very likely it had no recollection of anything its other self had been doing in the night just past. It might not even have a very good understanding of the Indigene language. Or perhaps it was searching through the memories of the nighttime self to discover why it found itself in the company of this unfamiliar being.

“It is nearly my sleeping-time now,” Joseph continued. “I must stop here and rest. Do you understand me?”

No immediate answer was forthcoming. The noctambulo continued to stare.

Then it said, brusquely, dispassionately, “You come,” and strode off through the forest.

Unwilling to lose his guide, Joseph followed, though he would rather have been searching for a sheltered place in which to spend the daylight hours. The noctambulo did not look back, nor did it accommodate its pace to Joseph’s. It might not be guiding Joseph at all any longer, Joseph realized. For an hour or more he forced himself onward, keeping pace with the noctambulo with difficulty, and then he knew he must stop and rest, even if that meant that the daytime noctambulo would go on without him and disappear while he slept. When another stream appeared, the first he had seen in a long while, Joseph halted and drank and made camp for himself beneath a bower of slender trees joined overhead by a dense tangle of aerial vines. The noctambulo did not halt. Joseph watched it vanish into the distance on the far side of the stream.

There was nothing he could do about that. He ate one of his remaining tubers, made another fruitless attempt to use his combinant, offered up the appropriate prayers for bedtime, and settled down for sleep. The ground was rougher and rockier than it looked and it was not easy to find a comfortable position, and the leg that had given him trouble on and off during the march was throbbing again from ankle to knee, and for hours, it seemed, he could not get to sleep despite his weariness. But somewhere along the way it must have happened, for a dream came to him in which he and his sister Cailin had been bathing in a mountain lake and he had gone ashore first and mischievously taken her clothes away with him; and then he opened his eyes and saw that night had begun to fall, and that the noctambulo was standing above him, patiently watching.

Was this his noctambulo, or the unfriendly daytime self, or a different noctambulo altogether? He could not tell.

But evidently it was his, for the ungainly creature not only had come back to him but had solicitously set out an array of food beside the stream-bank: a little heap of mud-crawlers, and two dead animals the size of small dogs with red fur marked with silvery stripes and short, powerful-looking limbs, and, what was rather more alluring, a goodly stack of the delicious white tubers. Joseph said morning prayers and washed in the stream and went about the task of building a fire. He was beginning to settle into the rhythm of this forest life, he saw.

“Are we very far from the Indigene village now?” he asked the noctambulo, when they had resumed their journey.

The noctambulo offered no response. Perhaps it had not understood. Joseph asked again, again to no avail. He realized that the noctambulo had never actually said it knew where the Indigene village was, or even that such a village existed anywhere in this region, but only that it would do what it could to help Joseph. How much faith, he wondered, should he place in Thustin’s statement that an Indigene village lay just beyond the forest? Thustin had also said that she herself had never gone beyond the boundaries of the domain of House Getfen. And in any case the village, if indeed there was one, might be off in some other direction entirely from the one Joseph and the noctambulo had taken.

But he had no choice, he knew, except to continue along this path and hope for the best. Three more days passed in this way. He felt himself growing tougher, harder, leaner all the time. The noctambulo provided food for them both, forest food, little gray scuttering animals that it caught with amazing agility, bright-plumaged birds that it snatched astonishingly out of mid-air as they fluttered by, odd gnarled roots and tubers, the occasional batch of mud-crawlers. Joseph began to grow inured to the strangeness and frequent unpleasantness of what was given him to eat. He accepted whatever came his way. So long as it did not actually make him ill, he thought, he would regard it as useful nutriment. He knew that he must replenish his vitality daily, using any means at hand, or he would never survive the rigors of this march.

He began to grow a beard. It was only about a year since Joseph had first begun shaving, and he had never liked doing it. It was no longer the custom for Masters to be bearded, not since his grandfather’s time, but that hardly mattered to him under the present circumstances. The beard came in soft and furry and sparse at first, but soon it became bristly, like a man’s beard. He did not think of himself as a man, not yet. But he suspected darkly that he might well become one before this journey had reached its end.

The nature of the forest was changing again. There was no longer any regularity to the forest floor: it was riven everywhere by ravines and gullies and upthrust hillocks of rock, so that Joseph and the noctambulo were forever climbing up one little slope and down another. Sometimes Joseph found himself panting from the effort. The trees were different too, much larger than the ones in the woods behind them, and set much farther apart. From their multitude of branches sprouted a myriad of tiny gleaming needles of a metallic blue-green color, which they shed copiously with every good gust of wind. Thus a constant rainfall of needles came drifting through the air, tumbling down to form a thick layer of fine, treacherously slippery duff under foot.

Early one morning, just after the noctambulo had made the shift from the night-self to the day-self, Joseph stumbled over a concealed rock in a patch of that duff and began to topple. In an effort to regain his balance he took three wild lurching steps forward, but on the third of them he placed his left foot unknowingly on the smooth, flat upper surface of yet another hidden rock, slipped, felt the already weakened ankle giving way. He flung his arms out in a desperate attempt to stabilize himself, but it was no use: he skidded, pivoted, twisted in mid-air, landed heavily on his right elbow with his left leg bent sharply backward and crumpled up beneath his body.

The pain was incredible. He had never felt anything like it.

The first jolt came from his elbow, but that was obliterated an instant later by the uproar emanating from his leg. For the next few moments all he could do was lie there, half dazed, and let it go rippling up and down his entire left side. It felt as though streams of molten metal were running along his leg through tracks in his flesh. Then the effects went radiating out to all parts of his body. There was a stabbing sensation in his chest; his heart pounded terrifyingly; his vision grew blurred; he felt a strange tingling in his toes and fingers. Even his jaw began to ache. Simply drawing breath seemed to require conscious effort. The whole upper part of his body was trembling uncontrollably.

Gradually the initial shock abated. He caught his breath; he damped down the trembling. With great care Joseph levered himself upward, pushing against the ground with his hand, delicately raising his left hip so that he could unfold the twisted leg that now was trapped beneath his right thigh.

To his relief he was able to straighten it without enormous complications, though doing it was a slow and agonizing business. Gingerly he probed it with his fingertips. He had not broken any bones, so far as he was able to tell. But he knew that he had wrenched his knee very badly as he fell, and certainly there had been some sort of damage: torn ligaments, he supposed, or ruptured cartilage, or maybe the knee had been dislocated. Was that possible, he wondered—to dislocate your knee? It was hips or shoulders that you dislocated, not knees, right? He had watched his father once resetting the dislocated shoulder of a man of House Keilloran who had fallen from a hay-cart. Joseph thought that he understood the process; but if he had dislocated one of his own joints, how could he ever manage to reset it himself? Surely the noctambulo would be of no help.

In fact, he realized, the noctambulo was nowhere to be seen. He called out to it, but only the echo of his own voice returned to him. Of course: at the time of the accident it was the day-self, with whom Joseph had not established anything more than the most perfunctory relationship, that had been accompanying him. Uncaring or unaware, the big creature had simply gone shuffling onward through the woods when Joseph fell.

Joseph lay still for a long while, assessing the likelihood that he would be able to get to his feet unaided. He was growing used to the pain, the way he had grown used to the taste of mud-crawlers. The first horrendous anguish had faded and there was only a steady hot throb. But when he tried to rise, even the smallest movement sent startling tremors through the injured leg.

Well, it was about time for sleep, anyway. Perhaps by the time he awoke the pain would have diminished, or the noctambulo would have returned, or both.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the fiery bulletins coming from his injured leg. Eventually he dropped into a fitful, uncertain sleep.

When he woke night had come and the noctambulo was back, having once again brought food. Joseph beckoned to him. “I have hurt myself,” he said. “Hold out your hand to me.” He had to say it two or three more times, but at length the noctambulo understood, and stooped down to extend one great dangling arm. Joseph clutched the noctambulo’s wrist and pulled himself upward. He had just reached an upright position when the noctambulo, as though deciding its services were no longer needed, began to move away. Joseph swayed and tottered, but stayed on his feet, though he dared not put any but the lightest pressure on the left leg. His walking-stick lay nearby; he hobbled over to it and gathered it gratefully into his hand.

When they resumed their march after eating Joseph discovered that he was able to walk, after a fashion, although his knee was beginning to swell now and the pain, though it continued to lessen, was still considerable. He thought he might be becoming feverish, too. He limped along behind the noctambulo, wishing the gigantic thing would simply pick him up and carry him on its shoulder. But it did not occur to the noctambulo to do any such thing—it seemed entirely unaware that Joseph was operating under any handicap—and Joseph would not ask it. So he went limping on, sometimes falling far behind his huge companion and having to struggle in order to keep it in view. Several times he lost sight of it completely and managed to proceed only by following the noctambulo’s trail through the duff. Then at last the duff gave out and Joseph, alone again, could not guess which way to go.

He halted and waited. He barely had the strength to go any farther just now, anyway. Either the noctambulo would come back or it would not, but either way Joseph needed to pause here until he felt ready to go on.

Then after a time he saw the noctambulo reappearing up ahead, haloed in the double shadow of the light from the two moons that were in the sky this night, great bright ruddy Sanivark high overhead with the littlest one, white-faced Mebriel, in its wake. There was a phosphorescent orange lichen here too, long flat sheets of it clinging to the limbs of the nearby trees like shrouds, casting a ghostly purple glow.

“Not stop here,” the creature said, making a loose, swinging gesture with its arms. “Village over there.”

Village? By this time Joseph had given up all hope of the village’s existence.

The noctambulo turned again and went off in the direction from which it had just come. After a dozen steps or so it turned and plainly signalled to Joseph to follow along. Though he was at the edge of exhaustion, Joseph forced himself to go on. They descended a sloping plateau where the only vegetation was low sprawling shrubbery, as though they really had reached the far side of the forest at last, and then Joseph saw, clearly limned in the moonlight, row upon row of slender conical structures of familiar shape set close together in the field just before him, each one right up against the next, and he knew beyond doubt that he had finally come to the Indigene village that he had sought so long.