“Thought so,” the captain said with satisfaction. “Always the way, isn’t it? When things get hard, instead of reasoning and working, you prefer to retreat into dreamness! Strongrip, make him drink a dose of creshban and see sense!”

  “Best thing any briq from Ushere ever carried home,” the seaman grunted, holding aloft a Hearthomer nutshell. “A certain remedy for cresh!”

  That provoked a stir of excitement among the crowd.

  “But,” Strongrip continued, “do you think we should waste it on this idiot? After all, he’s been starving himself like Blestar—deliberately—and Blestar was the only one of us it didn’t save!”

  “That’s a point,” said Skilluck ruminatively. “Very well, let them be the ones to go without. It’d be a fit punishment for the way they’ve insulted us.”

  “You have a cure for cresh?” Knowelkin whispered, voicing what all present wanted to hear.

  “Not we, but allies that we’ve made in the far south. They’ve offered us as much as we need—they have plenty!—in return for letting some of their wise’uns travel on our briqs to spread their knowledge. And don’t think creshban is the only trick they have under their mantles! Oh no! We’ve brought back marvels which … But move over, you! Senior chaplain or not, you’re a dreamsick fool and it’s your own fault and Wellearn is worth a score like you! Move, before I rip your mantle into tatters!”

  For an instant it seemed that Knowelkin would defy the captain out of pride; then he humbly crumpled to half normal height and padded aside. Wellearn found himself at a loss. Was he really meant to take over and preside at a bragmeet, youth that he was?

  “Well, go on!” Skilluck rasped. “Or I’ll start thinking you’re as silly as Knowelkin! Speak out!”

  “What shall I tell them?”

  “Everything! Everything! I never imagined things would come to so grievous a pass this year. Next year maybe, or the year after … but it’s upon us, and the land is in the claw of ice, and if another summer comes it could be our last chance to move to friendly country. The briqs which survive may already not be enough to shift us all! Hadn’t you thought of that?”

  Wellearn hadn’t, but he pretended, and gave a grave nod of acquiescence as he took over the spot vacated by Knowelkin. After so long among the Hearthomers he felt like a giant compared to his own people … as tall as Jing!

  And that gave him his opening. Maintaining his maximum height, trying to imitate in Wegan the style and manner of Burney and others who addressed council meetings at Hearthome, he began.

  “Teachers like Knowelkin—and even my late mentor Blestar who has gone, let’s hope, to make a star shine brighter!—told us to believe there never was a real person called Jing! They’ve encouraged us to be obedient and small-minded by saying there never was a man who understood the stars and made their nature manifest by transforming dull rock into marvelous new substances! With the evidence of spyglasses and metal blades to contradict it, we chose to accept this nonsense!

  “But we have met followers of Jing who actually possess his scriptures, and I’ve read them and copied extracts for our use! Thanks to what Jing taught, the city of Hearthome is the richest on its continent! By studying Jing’s principles the folk there have arrived at creshban and other medicines—they’ve bred mounts that go on land as our briqs swim the sea” (thank you, Embery! he added silently) “—they live in houses which make ours look like hovels—they have such wealth that a bunch of sick seafarers stranded there by accident might each repose in his own bower, recovering with the aid of a cure their own folk might not need in five-score years of which they yet keep stock for chance-come travelers …”

  Gradually, as he talked, Wellearn let himself be taken over by imagination, sure that in his present state of vitality it would not shade into mere dreamness. He painted a picture of a glorious future to grow from the joint seed of the Hearthomers and the Wego. Some of his audience, he noted with dismay, had ceased to listen the moment he spoke of Jing as a real person; others, however, less parched by cold and shrunken by privation, were clinging with their remaining strength to wisps of hope.

  Concentrating on the latter, he concluded with a splendid peroration that sent echoes ringing among the rigid branches and ice-stiffened foliage.

  Yet only a few of his hearers clacked their claws, and after a pause Toughide said, “So you’re asking us to pile aboard our remaining briqs and set forth now?”

  “Of course not!” Skilluck roared. “But next year could see our last and only chance to move to a warm and welcoming land! If you won’t hark to the boy—excuse me, Wellearn!—if you won’t hark to the young man, then trust in me who came home after Knowelkin told you I was dead!”

  For a moment Wellearn thought his forcefulness had won the crowd over, but the idea of quitting the land where the Wego had lived since time immemorial was too great to be digested all at once, and the assembly dispersed without reaching a decision. Vastly disappointed, Wellearn slumped to four-fifths height while watching them depart.

  “Excellently done,” said Skilluck softly at his side.

  “I thought I’d failed!” Wellearn countered. “At any rate I don’t see them clustering around us to vote Tempestamer the wise’uns’ prize for the past summer!”

  “Oh—prizes!” Skilluck said contemptuously. “To be remembered in a score-of-score years: that’s something else. Until I saw how few briqs had made it back to Ushere, all I could think of was how the Hearthomers might cheat us. Now I’ve felt in my tubules how right they are about the grip of ice. It’s time for a heroic gesture, and since someone’s got to make one, it might as well be us. If we can get enough of the folk to emigrate next spring, one day they’ll talk of us as we do of Jing. I felt this as truth. I couldn’t have expressed it. You did. That’s why I say you made a great success of it.”

  “Captain,” Wellearn muttered, “I never respected anything so much before as your present honesty. I’m glad to find I guessed right after all, but what you’ve just said—”

  “Save it,” Skilluck broke in. “And don’t worry about persuading the rest of the folk around to our course. A few score days of cold and hunger will take care of that.”

  “I wish I could share your optimism,” Wellearn sighed. “Yet I greatly fear that some of those who refused to listen did so not because they suspected us of lying, but because misery has already taken them past the reach of reason.”

  VI

  “Uncle,” Embery said musingly to Chard, “do you think Wellearn will come back?”

  Grousing at the annual need to adjust the mountings of his telescopes because the branches they rested on had swollen in the rainy season, her fat and fussy uncle finally pronounced himself satisfied with the work of his apprentices. Since it was again too cloudy at the zenith for serious star-study, he ordered the instruments to be trained on the skyline.

  “Hush, girl,” he said absently. “In a little I can show you moon-rise like you never saw it before.”

  “But do you?” Embery persisted.

  “With all the joint advantages that will flow from our alliance with his folk, why not?”

  “Father says he doesn’t think the captain trusted us.”

  “Just as long as that briq carried them home safely—and who’s to say she couldn’t if she lived out the awful storm which drove her here?—then you may rely on the powers of persuasion displayed by your young friend to bring more of their fleet here, and, if nothing else, the captain’s greed … Ah, thank you!”—to the senior apprentice for advising him that the first telescope was properly set. “Now, my dear, come here. Before moon-rise, because this direction is fairly clear, I’d like to show you what they used to call the New Star. Ever since, more than a score-of-score years ago—”

  Embery stamped her pad. “Uncle, I’m not some ignorant youngling from the city school, you know!”

  He blinked at her. “No need to be offensive, niece! Of course I know you’ve looked at it before, but I want to share a new discovery with you, and I don’t believe you’ve understood half the implications of what I’ve tried to teach you.”

  “I have so!”

  “Then tell me how the world can grow cooler even though the sun seems to be getting warmer—and I’ve worked out why!”

  “For the same reason it’s better in full sunlight to have a light mantle than a dark one! Reflection!”

  But Embery’s mood changed even before he could compliment her on a lesson well remembered, and she said, “You think you’ve worked out why? You never told me that! Go on!”

  And she cuddled up alongside him much as she used to do when she was barely strong enough to stand upright, so that he had to lift her to the ocular of his telescopes.

  Chuckling, Chard said, “That’s more like my Baby Rainbow! I used to call you that, you know, until you took offense and said it was ridiculous to use the name of Jing’s lady—”

  “I still think so!” she interrupted. “Come to the sharp end of the prong!”

  “Very well.” Chard settled back comfortably. “My line of reasoning goes this way. We have seen, in the place of the so-called New Star, nothing but a cloud of bright gas for many generations. Yet every now and then we have recorded a sort of wave passing through it, and comparison of notes made recently with those made just after the first proper telescopes were constructed allows us to hypothesize that the sudden addition of a large amount of new fuel to the fire of a star causes an outburst of colossal proportions, as when one drops a boulder into shallow water. There are splashes!”

  “You’ve told me this before!” Embery complained.

  “Ah—but what about the matter that gets splashed?”

  She thought about that for a little. Eventually she said, frowning with concentration, “It must spread out, over huge distances. And it must get thinner as it goes.”

  “Correct! Even so …?”

  “Even so, when it reaches another star—Oh!” She stared upright in excitement. “You think a splash from the New Star has got this far?”

  “It would explain a lot of things,” Chard murmured, looking smugger than an astronomer of his age and distinction had any right to. “Above all, it would explain very well indeed why there are more and more stars falling from heaven—which of course aren’t actually stars—at the same time as the sun is growing warmer.”

  “But this could be terrible!” Embery exclaimed. “Because the matter must have spread out very thin on its way here, so if it’s only the first bit that’s got to us, then—”

  “There may be more to come,” Chard confirmed. “And we have no way of telling whether there will be so much that it screens out sunlight, or enough to heat up the sun so that ice will melt again, or as much as we’ve had already with nothing to follow. Whatever happens, though, the Wego are due for the most appalling trouble. So could we be if the ice melted after forming, all at once. We’d need their help to rescue us if the level of the sea rose. Who knows how much water has already been frozen up? But we keep hearing from the fisherfolk that they have to go further and further every year to cast their nets deep … Oh, every way it makes sense to ally ourselves with the Wego! Whether they agree is another matter. I mean, they may be as ignorant of the effects of a polar melting as most of our own folk are of the effects of freezing! When I climbed the Snowcap Range …”

  Embery sighed. Her uncle was about to launch into one of his self-congratulatory reminiscences. There was no hope of hearing more, as yet, about his new theory, so it would be best to distract him.

  “Isn’t it time for me to look through the telescope?” she offered.

  “Of course! Of course! And I want you particularly to take note of—”

  He bustled about, issuing orders to the apprentices, but they were superfluous; all her life, Embery had been accustomed to sighting and using a telescope. She applied her eye.

  And tensed. The tropical night had not yet fallen; the sun, behind a patch of western cloud, still turned the sky to blue. In a few moments it would vanish, but for the time being its rays slanted across the ocean.

  “That’s not the New Star rising, or the moon either!” she exclaimed.

  “Patience, my dear!” said Chard indulgently. “Wait for nightfall. Then, just above the horizon—”

  “Not above! On!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, don’t be so silly! Look, quickly!”

  Sliding aside, she almost dragged him into position behind the eyepiece.

  After a long pause he said, “My dear, I owe you an apology.”

  Upside-down in his field of vision was something like a giant fang, neither white nor blue nor green but a shade between all three.

  “I wish them well in the far north,” he muttered. “That’s all I can say.”

  “Why?” Embery was almost crying.

  “I never saw one before, but I recognize it from the descriptions I’ve read and heard.” Chard glanced at his niece. “I think you must have done the same.”

  “Yes, but I was so much hoping you would say I’m wrong!” Embery clenched her claws. “Is it—”

  “I’m very much afraid it must be. Further south than anybody has ever met one: that’s an iceberg.”

  “You mocked me publicly before the folk!” charged Knowelkin.

  A sky full of racing black clouds leaned over Ushere; a bitter gale lashed the wharf, the harbor; snow turning to hail battered land and water like a forestful of spongids uttering their pellets of spawn in an evil season. Behind him ranged the muster of surviving chaplains: those who sacrificed bulk to tallness, who had been infuriated when Skilluck and his companions overtopped them. And all of them were exuding combat-stink of such loathsomeness that even the frigid blast of the wind did not suffice to protect those nearby.

  What could protect anybody in the clutch of this terrible winter, when not even seaqs or dugonqs were to be trapped beneath the ice because there were no floes thin enough to stab through, when icefaws and snowbelongs rampaged into the middle of Ushere?

  The chaplains said: the stars. But nobody had seen a star in four-score days …

  Somewhat reduced from the great height they had attained at Hearthome, Skilluck and his comrades confronted them. The crew were at the wharf perforce, for Tempestamer had to be taken to sea once in a while to eat, there being no pickled weed or fish to spare from feeding folk. To the surprise and satisfaction of his captain, Wellearn too had volunteered to turn out, regarding himself now as a full member of the company.

  More than one briq was unlikely to live until spring, being already too weak to face open water thanks to the neglect of her captain, but Tempestamer remained fat and energetic, and they meant to ensure she stayed that way.

  “Who did the insulting?” Skilluck rumbled, rising to the bait. “Who declared that Tempestamer was too weak to swim through storms? Who said I was too bad a navigator to find a way home?”

  “Who said we were crazy to trust to visions sent by the stars?” Knowelkin countered. “Who brought a benefit for all the folk and now is keeping it himself?”

  “We’re doling out our creshban to those most in need!” roared Sharprong, clenching into fighting posture. “Those who have nothing to offer the folk may mock—like you!—and we shan’t care!”

  “Scores will! Scores-of-scores! You’re traitors to the Wego!” Knowelkin shrieked.

  Standing a little apart, Wellearn suddenly realized what made the chaplains’ stink so harsh: fanaticism. They were so far into the maw of dreamness, reason would not convince them. And already they had deranged Skilluck, normally so self-controlled …

  “Captain!” he shouted. “They’ve taken the windward of us! Shift round—shift round or they will make us mad!”

  Startled, Skilluck shook himself as though emerging on land after a swim. “You’re right, by Jing!” he exclaimed. “Sharprong! Strongrip! Quickly! Follow Wellearn!”

  And with short but menacing strides they marched into the snap of the gale before turning and confronting the chaplains anew.

  That put a very different color on the mantle of the situation. The exudate of righteous anger was accessible to those not breathing their own wafts of madness. It made the chaplains think again.

  “How fragile is our sanity!” Wellearn whispered, not meaning anyone to hear.

  “Once more you’re ahead of the rest of us,” Skilluck muttered. “But most of them are well and truly dreamlost!”

  “Dreamlost?” Wellearn cried, straining to make himself heard against the howling of the wind. “No! They’re frightened! And I’ll tell you why! It’s because if we steer the only sensible course and remove to Hearthome, they’ll meet people who can contradict their lies about Jing!”

  Skilluck clutched at his mantle. “If you provoke them any more—”

  “They outnumber us,” Wellearn returned softly. “Surely our best hope is to make them quarrel among themselves?”

  Skilluck’s eye widened. “Neat!” he approved, and went on at the top of his voice.

  “That’s right! Now suppose instead of Knowelkin, someone like you, Lovirtue, or you, Grandirection, had been in charge of the bragmeet: you’d not have insulted me, would you? You wouldn’t be so afraid of meeting strangers, either, I’m sure!”

  “Of course not!” they both exclaimed.

  “Nonsense!” Knowelkin roared, turning on them. It very probably was nonsense, but all their tempers were set to snap like saplings in the path of a gigant.

  Grandirection, whom Skilluck had picked on because he was visibly near breaking-point, immediately raised his claws and bared his mandibles and began to pad around Knowelkin seeking an opening for attack. In the meantime, several people had emerged from nearby houses and were gazing in wide-eyed astonishment at these chaplains making ready to disgrace their calling.

 

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