“Ah, you were the wrong side of the cape. People rarely visit that bay except for glassmakers needing sand or fisherfolk like the ones who spotted your briq.”

  “Tempestamer!” Wellearn clenched his claws. “What of her?”

  “We have small knowledge of matters of the sea, but we have guarded against her wandering off by fixing strong cables across the mouth of the bay. However, she’s so huge … Will it be long before she needs to feed again? She’s practically cleared the bay of weed.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the captain. Usually she only feeds by night as she swims along, but she must have been half-starved after the storm that drove us here.”

  “Hope then that the captain recovers shortly. We’re doing our utmost for him. Look, here come curers with more creshban.”

  Wellearn turned in the indicated direction, but almost literally while Shash was speaking, it grew dark. He gasped. Then festoons of luminous creepers reacted, faster than any gleamers he was used to, coming up to full brightness nearly before his vision adapted to the lower light-level, and he saw two husky youths each bearing a round object like an immense nut. There was a sudden pungent smell, which reminded him of a taste that had haunted his long period of dreamness. Also he recalled terrible hunger, and having to be restrained for fear he might attack those who were holding him … But that belonged to the past, and in the present Shash was saying, “You must continue the medicine for several days yet. Drink some more now.”

  Wellearn complied. The nuts were hollow, and contained a bitter liquid of which he managed a few gulps.

  “If we could only plant such nut-trees on a briq!” he muttered.

  “It’s not their natural juice,” said the curer who had given him the drink. He spoke without Shash’s deliberateness, but by this time Wellearn was adjusting to the local accent. “It’s mixed with sap from half a score of plants.”

  Visions of saving the lives of countless future mariners bloomed and wilted in Wellearn’s imagination. He said grumpily, “And I suppose not one of them grows in the north?”

  “Later we can show them to you and let you find out,” Shash promised. “But now I think you should return to rest.”

  “I couldn’t! I’m too eager to see the marvels of your city, and meet more of its people!”

  “In two or three days’ time, perhaps. Not right away.”

  “May I not at least look out at the city, and question someone about it?”

  “I’ll oblige him, Father,” Embery said, and added self-mockingly, “That is, if he can understand me.”

  “In my young days,” Shash sighed, “people your age were wise enough to know when their elders were giving them advice for their own good … Oh, very well! But remember, both of you, that the workings of cresh are insidious, and over-excitement is as fast a route as any into dreamness!”

  Embery guided Wellearn to the top of the highest tree in the house, which offered a clear view in all directions. The moon was down and the sky was clouding over in a way that upset his weather-sense, but he was too eager to worry about the risk of a lightning-strike. From here the outline of the city was picked out by glowing creepers and funqi, and he was shaken by its huge extent. It even marched over the crest of a hill inland, beyond which faint redness could be seen.

  “That’s where the fireworkers live,” Embery explained. “They make glass and metal—they made the mirror you’ve seen. The area is sheltered, the wind almost always carries the smoke away from us, and it’s easy to find fuel in that direction. They use vast quantities, you know. Some of their furnaces … But you have to see them.”

  Over and over she said the same, when describing the outlying farms, the giant nets which fish-hunters hurled by means of weights and long poles far out to sea from the nearby capes and islands, the work of those who bred mounts and draftimals—“like your briq,” she added merrily, “only smaller and going on land!”—those who trained new houses to replace old ones or spread the city on fresh ground, and more and more until Wellearn could scarcely contain himself. How desperately he wanted to explore every nook of—

  “I haven’t asked your city’s name!” he exclaimed.

  “Hearthome.”

  It was apt. “How many people live here, do you know?” he pursued, thinking perhaps not a great number, if each of five sick strangers could be allotted a separate bower, and then yes a great number, if so many extra houses had been sown.

  “Nine score-of-scores, I think, though some say ten.”

  It was unbelievable. The Wego numbered perhaps a fifth as many. Oh, this must be a better land to live in!

  “But there are far larger cities inland and all along the coast,” Embery said. “Many have a score-of-score-of-scores. None is as rich as Hearthome, though.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because we are the folk who work hardest at discovering new things. Travelers from a moonlong’s journey away come to learn from people like my father, and my uncle who lives yonder”—she pointed in a direction diametrically opposite the furnace-glow—“and devotes his time to studying the stars.”

  Among Wellearn’s people the stars were of little save religious interest. During his entire life at home he had seen a clear sky so seldom he could almost count the total. Before the adoption of the northfinder—a creature which, properly pithed, would always seek out the pole—it was said mariners had been guided by the stars on outward voyages. The return, of course, was never a problem; briqs like Tempestamer could be relied on to retrace their course. Though after such a tremendous storm even she …

  Dismissing such gloomy thoughts, albeit making a firm resolution to utter thanks, just in case, to the ancestors who—according to the chaplains—must have been watching over him during the voyage, he made shift to repeat a traditional Forbish compliment which Blestar had taught him when he was first apprenticed to the trade of interpreter, and of which mention of the stars reminded him.

  “Ah!” he said. “Starbeams must shine on Hearthome even when the sky is cloudy!”

  “Why not?” Embery returned. “After all, we are honest followers of Jing.”

  Wellearn drew back, startled.

  “But he was only a legend! Tales about him are compound of dreamstuff!”

  “Oh, no!” She sounded scandalized. “True, there is a great dream in his scriptures, but even that is in perfect accord with reality. Have you never studied his teaching?”

  At the same moment thunder rolled, but it was not the shock to his weather-sense which made Wellearn’s mind reel.

  “Your father was right after all about my need for rest,” he husked. “Kindly lead me back to my bower.”

  Where he spent long lonely hours wondering what—after teaching and believing all his life that tales about folk who conjured secrets from the stars were mere superstition—Blestar was going to say when he discovered himself in a land where Jing was real.

  III

  Skilluck’s shattered mind crawled back together out of pits of madness and he could see a figure that he recognized. It was Wellearn, addressing him anxiously: “Captain, you’re alert again, aren’t you?”

  Beyond him, unfamiliar plants hanging on what were not exactly bravetrees, immensely tall strangers whose mantles were astonishingly pale … They coalesced into a reality, and he was himself and whole and able to reply.

  “Tell me where we are, and how Tempestamer is, and how these people treat us.”

  He was proud of being able to phrase that so soon after regaining normal awareness.

  Wellearn complied, but half the time he was almost babbling, plainly having been cozened by the wonders of his first foreign landfall. Skilluck was a mite more cynical; he had spent half his life traveling, and more often than not he had been cheated by the outlanders he tried to deal with. The harsh existence led in northern lands was no school for subtleties of the kind practiced by those who dwelt in southern luxury … and it had been obvious, when Tempestamer came to harbor, that she had been driven further than any of the Wego had wandered before, perhaps to the equator itself.

  So he merely registered, without reacting to, most of what Wellearn said, until a snatch of it seized his interest.

  “—and they have a certain cure for cresh!”

  At once Skilluck was totally attentive. Cautiously he said, “It works on everybody, without fail?”

  Mantle-crumpled, Wellearn admitted, “Not on all. Blestar, they say, may well not survive. But for me and you, Sharprong and Strongrip, it’s proved its worth!”

  “Do they understand what we’re saying to each other?”

  “N-no! And that’s something else amazing!” Wellearn blurted. “I have to speak to them in Ancient Forbish!”

  Skilluck was unimpressed. His explorations had often brought him to places where relics of that once widespread speech survived. Blestar even maintained that many Forbish words had found their way into Wegan, but since they all had to do with fire and stars—things everybody knew about, but in which the chaplains claimed a special interest—sensible people dismissed such notions as mere religious propaganda. Wego seafarers took chaplains along much as they carried pickles: just in case. The best trips were those where they weren’t needed.

  Of course, their services as interpreters …

  He forced himself to sound very polite when next he spoke to Wellearn.

  “It seems we should behave to our hosts in the friend-liest possible fashion. I guess at something we might do for their benefit. How goes it with Tempestamer?”

  “That’s what I’d just been asked to tell you! She has grazed the bay where we landed clean of weed, and the cables they’ve strung across its mouth won’t hold her much longer, and they fear for their inshore fishing-grounds.”

  “Let the cables hold but one more day, and I’ll put her to sea and feed her such a mawful as will content her for a week. And I’ll come back, never fear. A cure for cresh—now that’s something worth making a storm-tossed voyage for!”

  “There’s more,” Wellearn said after a pause.

  “So tell me about it! Anything we can trade for, I want to hear!”

  “I’m not sure it’s the sort of thing one can trade,” Wellearn said. “But … Well, these people have shown me Jing’s original scriptures. Or not exactly the originals, which might rot, but accurate copies. And they tell about how the stars are fire and our world will one day go for fuel to make the sun brighter and ourselves with it unless we—”

  Skilluck had heard enough. He said as kindly as he could, “Boy, your brush with cresh has affected your perceptions. I counsel you to concentrate on growing up. A little worldly wisdom would do wonders for you.”

  Wellearn bridled. “Captain, do you know Forbish?”

  “I’ve never taken lessons, if that’s what you mean!”

  “I have! And the documents I’ve been shown while you were lying sick have satisfied me that Jing was real!”

  Worse and worse … Skilluck forced himself to an upright position. He said as emphatically as he could, “Since you oblige me to prove that our people are not all crazy, tell our hosts that I shall at once reclaim command of Tempestamer!”

  “But you’re not fit!”

  “Let me be the judge of that!” Skilluck was struggling to bring his pads under control. “I must—”

  But his pressure failed him. He was compelled to slump back to a sitting position, whence he glared at Wellearn as though it were the boy’s fault he was so weak.

  There was a rapid exchange in Forbish, and Wellearn stated authoritatively, “Shash is the curer-in-chief here. He says you must drink creshban for at least another day before you leave this healing-house.”

  With a trace of mischief in his tone, he added, “I didn’t tell him that was how long you already estimated would be necessary.”

  At home, mocking his briq-captain in that way would have led to punishment—perhaps lasting punishment, such as having one of his tubules punctured where it would never heal. Since arrival here, though, Wellearn had regretted his oath of fealty, and decided that if all else failed, he could put himself under the protection of the Heart-homers. What did he have to look forward to if he went back to Ushere? More and more hunger, more and more misery! He had never seen cresh on land, as he had told Skilluck, but he had seen old folk lose their minds, reduced to such a state that they scarcely reacted except when they were fed like hoverchicks or barqlings, or when some young’un was brought to them to be mated because a wise’un claimed there was still virtue in that line despite appearances. It had been happening to Wellearn since it became obvious that he was among the lucky bright few, and there were no memories so revolting in his short life as those which reminded him of the foul mindless gropings he had undergone with starvation-crazy ancients. Not one—praise the stars!—of his encounters had so far led to offspring, but if he went home he would certainly be compelled to do the same again, and once the smell and touch took over …

  He shuddered. And wondered much about the nature of the stars which could dictate so cruel a doom for a person as well intentioned as himself, then pay him back—for it seemed to him to be a reward—with the gentle sweetness of Embery. She had received him twice already, and her father thoroughly approved, for as he said, “We too in this delicious land are plagued by forces we don’t understand, and it has been nearly a score of years since one of our family bred true: myself with the lady who gave me Embery and died.”

  What, on the other claw, they did understand had not yet ceased to astonish him.

  Leaving Skilluck’s bower, he was overcome by memory.

  … Behind the inland hills, a valley lined with smoke-blackened rock; heaps of charcoal, even blacker, surrounding cone-shaped furnaces; piles of sand and unknown minerals, green and brown and white and red; sober folk all of whose names ended in -fire, claiming spiritual if not physical descent from Jing’s legendary friend who lived underground yet brought the light of heaven forth from a cave—Wellearn knew all the stories, for he had been told them as a child, but later he had been taught to think them fabulous, whereas the Hearthomers took them literally, and by their guidance produced incredible ingots of metal and unbelievable quantities of pure glass. Beyond, a desolation as complete as though a hurricane had laid the vegetation low for a day’s walk or more, which was being systematically replanted with oilsap trees that grew quickly and burned hotter than even the best charcoal.

  … In a fine house overlooking the sea, an elderly couple possessed of tiny miracles in the shape of roundels of glass no larger than a raindrop, but perfectly shaped, through which they showed him the secret structure of plant-stems, funqi, his own skin, immensely magnified, as though a telescope were to look down to the small instead of upward to the large.

  … In a grove just outside the city, folk who selectively bred meatimals, burrowers, diggets, mounts, draftimals, and a score of creatures he could put no name to, seeking to make them fatter or more docile or in some other way more useful. Their cleanlickers were said to be unique, capable of ridding any wound of its poison within days and making a swift recovery . To take a few of those home to the lands where so often a daring fish-hunter died for his temerity in defying a rasper or a voraq: that would be an achievement! But what to trade for breeding-stock? Did Embery know about northfinders? It seemed not; alas, though, Tempestamer carried only one, which wasn’t in brood-phase this year. Besides, they seldom bred true, a problem that plagued the Hearthomer animal-breeders too.

  … On the highest of the nearby hills, the one Embery had pointed to from the crown of the healing-house, her uncle Chard—older and fatter than his brother—complaining about the difficulty nowadays of studying the stars because the sky was cloudy so much more often than in his youth, and boasting about the knowledge of ice which he had acquired only a few days’ journey from Hearthome. There was, apparently, a range of mountains whose peaks were snowcapped even in these latitudes, a fact which dismayed Wellearn, for if the mountains were closer to the sun, how could they be so much colder than the land below? Surrounded by telescopes which made Skilluck’s look like a toy, Chard launched into a lengthy lecture concerning reflectivity and absorption, conduction and convection, aurorae and shooting stars and a score of other concepts which Wellearn failed to grasp but which filled him with tantalizing excitement: so much knowledge, so much to be found out!

  … In a giant tree at the heart of the city, hollowed out deliberately and ornamented with the finest and handsomest secondary plants, a glass container sealed with wax, through which could be glimpsed the original of Jing’s scripture. It was uncapped only once in a score of years, so that a fresh copy might be made, but even so it was starting to rot, and next time they planned to make two copies, of which one would be incised on rock instead of perishable wood. In any case, though, by this time the Hearthomers had added many new discoveries to those of Jing and Twig. Everything he was told fascinated Wellearn, and above all he was seized by the tales of the New Star which Chard and Shash and Embery recounted. And, over and over, he pondered the central teaching of Jing’s followers: that the stars were fire, and one day the planets would go to feed them, as charcoal was added to a furnace, to make them blaze up anew.

  “We do not believe,” Embery told him soberly, “that we are here solely to endure until the world falls into a dying sun. We believe it is our duty to escape that fate. Out there are countless worlds; until the end of time, some will remain for us to live on.”

  “But how can one travel there?” was Wellearn’s natural riposte.

  “We don’t know yet. We mean to find that out.”

  Everywhere he went Wellearn had a sense of being watched and weighed and scrutinized. Until the captain regained his health, he was the Wego’s sole ambassador; he did his best to behave accordingly.

  And the day after Skilluck took Tempestamer to sea and brought her back content with what she had engulfed in open water, he found out that his conduct had impressed the citizens. For Shash came to tell the strangers they were invited to a gathering of the general council, to discuss a mutually advantageous proposition.

 

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