“In here,” Rickard said.
Joseph glanced at him, and at Cailin, whose eyes were cast down, whose lips were tightly clamped.
There was a twilight dimness in the Great Hall. The heavy damask draperies were closed, here on this bright afternoon, and only a few lamps had been lit. Joseph saw his father seated at the far end of the room in his huge ornate chair, the chair of state that was almost like a throne. He sat in a strange unmoving way, as though he had become a statue of himself. Joseph went toward him. As he came close he saw that the right side of his father’s face sagged strangely downward, and that his father’s right arm dangled like a mannequin’s arm at his side, a limp dead thing. He looked twenty years older than the man Joseph remembered: an old man, suddenly. Joseph halted, horror-stricken, stunned, twenty feet away.
“Joseph?” came the voice from the throne. His father’s voice was a thick, slurred sound, barely intelligible, not the voice that Joseph remembered at all. “Joseph, is that you, finally?”
So this was the little problem that Cailin had alluded to when Joseph was in the hospital at Eivoya.
“How long has he been this way?” Joseph asked, under his breath.
“It happened a month or two after word reached here of the attack on Getfen House,” Cailin whispered. “Go to him. Take him by the hand. The right hand.”
Joseph approached the great seat. He took the dead hand in his. He lifted the arm. There was no strength in it. It was like something artificial that had been attached recently to his father’s shoulder.
“Father—”
“Joseph—Joseph—”
That slurred sound again. It was dreadful to hear. And the look in his father’s eyes: a frozen look, it was, alien, remote. But he was smiling, with the part of his mouth over which he still had control. He raised his left hand, the good one, and put it down over Joseph’s, and pressed down tightly. That other arm was not weak at all.
“A beard?” his father said. He seemed to be trying to laugh. “You grew a beard, eh?” Thickly, thickly: Joseph could barely understand the words. “So young to have a beard. Your grandfather wore a beard. But I never had one.”
“I didn’t mean to, not really. It just wasn’t easy for me to shave, in some of the places where I was. And then I kept it. I liked the way it looked.” He thinks I’m still a boy, Joseph realized. How much of his mind was left at all? Suddenly Joseph was wholly overcome with the sadness of what he saw here, and he drew his breath inward in a little gasping sound. “Oh, Father—Father, I’m so sorry—”
He felt Rickard kick him in the heel from behind. Rickard made a tiny hissing noise, and Joseph understood. Pity is not being requested here. My little brother is teaching me the proper way to handle this, he thought.
“I like it,” his father said, very slowly. Again the twisted smile. He appeared not to have noticed Joseph’s little outburst. “The beard. A new fashion among us. Or an old one revived.” Joseph began to realize that his father’s mind must still be intact, or nearly so, even if his body was no longer under its control. “You’ve been gone such a long time, boy. You look so different, now. You must be so different, eh?”
“I’ve been in some unusual places, Father. I’ve learned some strange things.”
Martin nodded slowly. That seemed to be a supreme effort, that slow movement of his head. “I’ve been in some unusual places too, lately, without—ever—leaving—Keilloran—House.” He seemed to be struggling to get the words out. “And I—look—different—too,” he said. “Don’t I?”
“You look fine, Father.”
“No. Not true.” The dark, hooded eyes drilled into him. “Not—fine—at—all. But you are here, finally. I can rest. You will be Master now, Joseph.”
“Yes. If that’s what you wish.”
“It is. You must. You are ready, aren’t you?”
“I will be,” Joseph said.
“You are. You are.”
He knew it was so. And knew also that he could not possibly think of abdication, not now, not after seeing what his father had become. All thought of it had fled. It had begun to fade from his mind the moment he had entered this room and looked upon his father’s face; now it was gone entirely. Now that you are back, I can rest , is what his father was saying. That wish could not be ignored or denied him. The doubts and uncertainties that had been born in Joseph during the months of his wanderings were still there; but still with him, too, was that inborn sense of his obligation to his family and to the people of House Keilloran, and now, standing before the one to whom he owed his existence, he knew that it was not in him to fling that obligation back in the face of this stricken man. Rickard had not been trained for this. He had been. He was needed. He could not say no. When his time came to be Master, though, Joseph knew he would be Master in a way that was different from his father’s.
The hand that was holding his pressed down harder, very hard indeed, and Joseph saw that there was still plenty of strength in what remained of Martin Master Keilloran. Not enough, though, to perform the tasks that the Master of the House must perform, and which, he saw now, would—in a month, six months, whenever—devolve upon him.
“But we need to talk, Father. When I’ve been home a little while, and when you feel up to it. There are things I need to ask you. And things I need to say.”
“We’ll talk, yes,” his father said.
Cailin nudged him. She signalled with a roll of her eyes that it was time for Joseph to go, that this was the limit of their damaged father’s endurance. Joseph gave her a barely perceptible nod. To Martin he said, “I have to leave, now, Father. I’ve had a long journey, and I want to rest for a while. I’ll come to you again this evening.” He squeezed the dead right hand, lifted it and kissed it and set it carefully down again, and he and Cailin and Rickard went from the room and down the hall, and into the family wing, and to the suite of rooms that had been his before his trip to Getfen, and where everything seemed to have remained completely as he had left it.
“We’ll leave you to rest,” Cailin said. “Ring for us when you’re ready, and we can talk.”
“Yes.”
“That was hard, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Joseph said quietly. “Yes, it was.”
He watched his brother and sister going down the hall, and closed the door, and was alone in his own bedroom once again. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his old bed that seemed so small, now, so boyish. As he sat there, letting the facts of his return wash over him, the bed became all the places that had been bed for him as he made his way across Manza, the rough hollows in the forest floor where he slept on bundles of dry leaves, and the stack of musty furs in the Ardardin’s village, and the hard cot, sharp as bone, in the prisoner compound, and the place under the bush where he had drifted into the hallucinations of starvation that he untroubledly believed heralded the end of his life, and the little bed in Eysar Haven that had taken on the fragrance of Thayle’s warm breasts and soft thighs, and all the rest of them as well, all flowing into one, this bed here, the little bed of his boyhood, the boyhood that now was done with and sealed.