The other villagers were considerably more demonstrative. Dozens of them, children and adults both, came running forward to swarm around Joseph. There was an endearing innocence to this unexpected enthusiasm. They pressed up close against him, narrow tubular heads butting at him like hammers, boldly bringing their faces within inches of his own, nose to nose. Their throat-pouches fluttered and swelled in flurries of spasmodic agitation. A few of the most courageous hesitantly put their hands for a moment or two to the dangling strips of his ragged clothing and lightly pulled at them, as though they found them amusing. As they encircled him they murmured excitedly to one another, but what they said was too indistinctly enunciated and too thickly colloquial for Joseph to be able to comprehend more than the occasional word.
One of them, carrying a little bag of woven cloth that contained a glossy black powder, solemnly poured some into the palm of its hand, dipped the tips of two long pliant fingers into it, and slowly and carefully rubbed a circle of the stuff onto each of Joseph’s cheeks. Joseph tolerated this patiently. He noticed now that the faces of most of the others were similarly adorned with patterns done in the black pigment, not just circles but in some cases whorls, triangles, crosses.
Ulvas, meanwhile, had entered into a conversation with a villager of substantial size and presence who, from the looks of things, was an important minister in the government of the triumvirs, though it was not clad in any of the symbols of authority itself. Joseph could not hear what they were saying, but it began gradually to become clear to him that what was taking place was not so much a conversation as a negotiation; Ulvas was the seller, the big villager was the prospective purchaser, and the primary topic of the conversation was the price that would have to be paid.
As for the commodity being sold, that, Joseph swiftly realized, was himself.
He was not meant to be a party to the transaction. The entire interchange was being carried on in low tones and quickly exchanged phrases, most of them words that were unfamiliar to him and all of it so rapid and cryptic that Joseph had no hope of following it. A good deal of the process was purely gestural. After each set of offers and replies the villager would go across to the triumvirate and report the details. This led to further palaver among the four of them, after which a signal would be given by one of the ruling three, and humbler citizens of the village came forth bearing merchandise: furs, beaded necklaces, bowls containing dried seeds and berries. Ulvas appeared to dismiss each offer as insufficient. New negotiations ensued, leading to new discussions between the rulers and their minister, and even more goods would be brought out: molded balls of vegetable meal, a brown bundle of dried meat, the blanched skull of some horned beast of the forest.
Ulvas was holding out for a steep price, it seemed. At one point there appeared to be a total breakdown of the dealings, huffy turning of backs, foreheads touched with splayed fingers in the emphatic gesture that meant negation. But perhaps all that was a signal of a climax in the negotiations, not a collapse; for almost immediately afterward came apparently conciliatory postures, signs of agreement, a series of new gestures clearly indicating that a deal had been struck. That seemed to be the case. Ulvas, Casqui and Paca began loading the wagon with the things that stood stacked all about in the center of the plaza.
The big minister signalled to Joseph in an unmistakable way. He belonged to them, now.
And now he knew just how little altruism, if indeed there had been any at all, there was in the Ardardin’s decision to pass him along to this neighboring village. The Ardardin had correctly seen that Joseph would be leaving its village as soon as he could; there was need of Joseph’s medical services at other Indigene villages along the route south; no doubt it had seemed merely efficient, rather than in any way morally virtuous, to provide a wagon to take Joseph on his way and simultaneously to turn a nice profit by selling him to the next village in the chain instead of just bestowing him upon them.
Ulvas and Casqui and Paca departed without a word to him. But Joseph had already learned not to expect sentimental leavetakings from these people.
His new hosts—his owners, Joseph corrected himself—showed him to his dwelling-place, a room much smaller than the one he had had before, and even more musty and dimly lit, with only a couple of tatty-looking fur rugs for his bed. On the other hand they had set out a generous meal for him, two bowls of their milky wine, an assortment of berries, stewed meats, and cooked grain, and a tray of knobby greenish-purple fruits of a kind he had never seen before. They were sour and tangy, not unpleasant, although after eating a couple he observed that the thick red juice of them had left his tongue puckered and the entire interior of his mouth very dry. He let the rest of them go untouched.
This settlement, too, had a backlog of medical tasks awaiting his attention in an infirmary set a little way apart from the village core. There were the usual sprained limbs and minor infections, which Joseph dealt with in the ways that had by now become familiar to him. One case, though, was more complicated. There had been a hunting accident, it seemed—the only other explanation, which he found too implausible to consider, was that one Indigene had actually attacked another—and the patient, a young male, had a small projectile point embedded in the upper right side of his back. Apparently this had happened some time ago, for the wound, though infected, had partly healed. No attempt had been made to extract the point. Joseph wondered how deep it was. The patient was in obvious distress: weak, feverish, barely coherent when Joseph questioned him. Joseph held his hand lightly over the wound and felt an insistent pounding throb beneath, as of something in there that must be let out.
Very well, he thought. I will operate.
Joseph had come to accept his own medical masquerade so thoroughly that he felt no compunction about taking this project on. The man lying before him must already be in great discomfort, which would only increase if nothing were done, and finally the infection would spread to some vital zone and cost him his life. Joseph asked for and received the assistance of the village’s master of herbal remedies, who at Joseph’s direction administered a steep dose of the pain-deadening drug to Joseph’s patient. He laid out his pitiful little collection of medical instruments, and cleansed the wound with a piece of cloth dipped in wine, which he hoped would have some antiseptic properties, and gently parted the healed section of the opening so that he could insert the tip of his knifeblade as a probe.
The patient did not seem to complain as Joseph ventured into the golden interior tissues. He wondered how deeply he dared to go; but the essential thing was to seem confident and composed, and that was surprisingly easy for him to achieve. Perhaps in these weeks among the Indigenes he had begun to acquire some form of their overriding indifference to the trivial realities of the visible world. Under the pressure of his blade blood had begun freely to flow, scarlet blood with emerald highlights. The blood is only an illusion, Joseph told himself. The knife I use is an illusion also. Whatever pain the patient may be feeling is illusory. The weapon-point that I’m seeking is another illusion.
His hand was steady. His conscience remained clear.
He touched something hard within. Was it the point, or was it a bone? He wiggled the knifeblade and thought he felt motion against its tip. A bone would not move, he thought. It must be the weapon-point. Coolly he widened the opening. A hint of something dark inside there, was it? He washed away the blood and took a close look. The point, yes. Deep in the meat of the Indigene’s back.
Now came the hard part, for him, for his patient. He beckoned to two of the Indigene onlookers.
“Hold him down,” Joseph said, using the grammatical mode of a direct command, not a supplication. He was the most important person in this room, right now. He did not need to beg for the assistance that was required. “You, put your hand here, and you, hold him over here. Don’t let him move.”
There was no kindly way to do this. He inserted the blade, listened for the little scraping sound as it made contact with the hidden point
within, made a twisting motion with his wrist, brought the tip of the blade upward, involuntarily biting his lip as he did so. A great shudder went through the Indigene, who lay face down on the pile of rugs before him. The two villagers who were holding him did not waver.
“There it is,” Joseph said, as the head of the point came into view.
He eased it farther upward, bringing it out of the Indigene’s flesh with one smooth motion, and caught it for a moment in his hand, showing it around exultantly to his audience. Then he tossed it aside. Blood was flowing more heavily now than before. Covering the wound with his hand, he watched quizzically as it welled up between his fingers. He stanched, laved, stanched again. The flow began to slacken. Was it safe to close the incision at this point? He held the sides of the wound together, contemplated them, nodded thoughtfully, just as someone who really knew what he was doing might do.
“Hand that to me,” Joseph said, indicating the little machine from his utility case that served to stitch wounds. He was still not entirely certain how to operate it, but he had enough of a rough idea to make the attempt worthwhile.
Three stitches seemed to do the job.
He prescribed rest for the patient, and the pain-killing drug, and then, an inspired thought, some wine also. The Indigenes were passing the extracted weapon-point from hand to hand around the room. They were staring at him with what certainly must be looks of awe. Joseph wondered, as he had before, whether this time he might not have played the role too well; he wanted these people to move him along to the next village along his route south, after all, not lay claim to him as a permanent village treasure. But once again he had misjudged the way their minds worked. They kept him only until he had had the opportunity to examine every sick person in the village; and then, two or three weeks later, when he had set things to rights as much as possible, they let him know that the time had come for him to be sent onward.
He was not going to miss this place. Joseph had made a point of introducing himself by name to the chief minister and the herbalist and several others, but they had absorbed the information with no evident show of interest, and during his entire stay in the village no one had ever called him by name. He had no relationship there similar to the one he had had with the Ardardin, or even with Ulvas. It was strangely depersonalizing. He felt as though he had no existence for these people other than as a pair of skilled hands. But he saw a reason for that: he had come to the first village as a refugee, and they had taken him in the way they would take in a guest. But here he had been purchased. He was considered mere property. At best a slave, perhaps.
The route to the next village took Joseph through a district of abandoned farms. There were no indications of any Great House in the vicinity; this seemed to be one of the regions, common also in Helikis, where the Masters were absentee landlords and the farms were operated in their name by bailiffs who were themselves of Folkish blood. But the Folk who farmed here must have been loyalists, for the destruction that had been worked was complete, the rebels striking against their own kind with the vindictiveness and vehemence that elsewhere they had reserved for the Masters. Joseph saw the same sort of ruination he had looked upon at Ludbrek House, a sorry wasteland of burned houses, wrecked carts, dead animals, drowned fields. Seven such farms lay along one fifteen-mile stretch of road, all of them shattered in the same fashion. There was no sign of life anywhere.
It rained for the first time that season on the day they passed the last of the dead farms. The three Indigenes who were transporting him took no notice whatever as it started. They said nothing, they made no attempt to cover themselves. But Joseph, riding unprotected in the back of the open wagon, was caught by surprise when the sky, which had been an iron gray for days, turned black and then silver and abruptly began pelting him with cold, hard, fierce rain. He was drenched almost before he knew what was happening. He managed to improvise a little shelter for himself out of some of the many fur mats that were lying about in the wagon and a few of the sticks that were there also, but it was a flimsy construction that did very little to keep the rain out, and he was soaked already anyway.
There was no letup in the rain all day, or on the one that followed. Joseph knew that rain in the eastern half of the northern continent was a highly seasonal thing, a dry season followed by a wet one, with the annual rains beginning in the south and working their way north to High Manza, but he had imagined the change from one to the other would be more gradual. This was like the tipping of a bucket over lands that had been parched for months, a vast bucket whose contents were infinite, inexhaustible. He had never felt so cold and wet in his life. He had not known that such discomfort was possible.
At first the rain disappeared into the ground as soon as it struck. But by the second day the land, which in these parts was coarse sandy gray stuff that had looked as if it had not felt rain for centuries, had been saturated by the downpour, was glutted by it, ceasing now to absorb it. Freshets and rivulets were beginning to make their way along the old dry watercourses that ran in multitudinous furrows across the sloping plains. Already little ponds were forming. Another few days of this, Joseph thought, and there would be lakes and rivers.
He wondered how the mud-and-wattle buildings that the Indigenes of this territory favored could stand up to such an onslaught. Rainfall like this ought to send them sluicing away. But they were hardly likely to build with such stuff if it came apart under the impact of the first rain, and indeed the village toward which they had been traveling, another one of conical towers crowded tightly together around a central plaza, was sloughing off the watery bombardment as easily as though its buildings were made of steel and concrete. They must add something to the mud to make it water-resistant, Joseph thought. The juice of one of their herbs, maybe. The entire science of these people appeared to be constructed out of a knowledge of the chemical properties of the plant life that grew about them. They had no physics, no astronomy, no technology, no real medicine other than the use of potions. But they could build houses out of twigs and mud that would stay intact in diabolical rainfall like this.
News of Joseph’s healing powers had preceded him here. The villagers seemed prepared to pay a heavy bounty for him, for they had filled one entire room of a building on the plaza with treasures to offer: not just the usual fur mats and beaded necklaces, but great branches of blue coral from the eastern sea, and pouches of polished turquoise stones, and the vivid blue-and-red feathers of birds of some tropic land far away, and a great deal more. Even so, the negotiations went on for an extraordinarily long time, and they did not seem to be going smoothly. Though they were conducted, as before, mostly with gestures, aided by quick spurts of conversation in what seemed to be a commercial patois using words unknown to Joseph, he could tell by the tone of voice and the looks of unmistakable exasperation that no meeting of minds was occurring. Huddling soaked and miserable while his soon-to-be former owners, Indigenes whose names he had never learned, bargained with these new Indigenes who sought possession of him over the price of his services, Joseph thought at one point that his current masters had found even this enormous pile of goods inadequate. It looked very much as though they were going to break off the discussion and set out for some village other than this before he had even had a chance to get dry.
Well, if they did, so be it, as long as the village that they would be taking him to was one that brought him closer to his home. But what if—it was his old, constant fear—they simply hauled him back to their own town and kept him as a permanent fixture there?
That did not happen. As abruptly as the dry season had given way to the rain, the contending hagglers reached an agreement and Joseph’s transfer was consummated. Staggering under mats and necklaces and coral branches and all the rest, his sellers went off in the rain to their wagon and his buyers crowded round him for what was becoming the familiar tribal welcome.
These people wanted Joseph not only to heal their sick but to bring holy blessings to the food supplies that
they had stored away during the harvest season. In a kind of weird pantomime they led him to their granaries and acted out a description of what it was they wanted him to do, until at last he said impatiently, “You can say it in words. I do understand your language, you know.”
But that seemed to bewilder them. They continued to point and nod and jerk their heads at him.
“Can’t you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
Maybe they spoke some dialect here so different from the Indigene he had learned in Keilloran that they regarded him as speaking some foreign language. But he saw he was wrong: he heard them talking among themselves, and the words they were using were, in general, understandable enough. Finally he did succeed in getting them to address him directly. It was as though they did not want to speak with him. His using their language made them uncomfortable. This village must not have had much contact with Masters, or with Folk either, for that matter, and looked upon him as some sort of alien thing, which had come their way as a kind of gift of the gods but which was not to be regarded in any way as fit to hold converse with. It was another step in his depersonalization, Joseph thought. As he moved southward he was getting farther and farther from the sort of existence he had had in the village of the Ardardin. Back there he had not had any such sense of solitude, of lostness, of thingness, as he was beginning to feel down here.
The Longest Way Home Page 12