“Now’s our chance,” Skilluck whispered. “And—and thank you, Wellearn! Much more of this, and I’ll come to think you are as smart as you imagine!”

  A few moments later, the crew were able to pry Tempestamer’s cold-stiff tentacles free of their mooring and goad her towards open water. Such was the violence of the wind, she was already tossing before she quit the harbor-mouth.

  “What a disgusting spectacle that was!” shouted Wellearn against the blast.

  “There’s nothing wrong with them that a mawful of decent food wouldn’t cure,” Skilluck replied. “If only more of the Hearthomer seeds had taken …!”

  “How could they,” Wellearn sighed, “in a year when even the pumptrees are chill?”

  They stood in a grove at the center of Ushere; it had been because of them that the Wego made their original decision to settle here, rather than the harbor, which was like half a score others nearby. Their taproots were known to reach an underwater spring, far below the level where a storm could stir the sea, which brought heat from deeplying rocks. Carefully pierced and plugged, they furnished a year-round supply of warm fresh water. It was said that in the old days the chaplains denied that heat could come from any source except the sun, holding the stars to be cool because the spirits of the righteous dead departed thither after separating from the unrighteous in the moon—whose phases showed the division taking place—and that it had been the start of their decline when brave divers wearing capsutes under their mantles for a store of air reported that the sea-bed was warmer than the surface at this spot … a fact for which they had no explanation.

  Accordingly the seeds and spawn from Hearthome, all of secondary and parasitic or symbiotic plants, had been carefully planted in crevices of pumptree bark, not because that was the species most resembling their usual hosts but because they were the only trees likely to remain sap-swollen.

  However, the diet didn’t suit the strangers; some died off completely, some seemed to be lying dormant, and of those which had sprouted, none yielded the harvest that could be relied on at Hearthome.

  Still, any extra nourishment was welcome …

  Already, though, as the chaplains bore witness, voices were being raised against Skilluck and his crew, blaming them for what was not in their control: bringing the wrong sort of seeds, not insisting on being given more creshban, wasting space on spyglasses and articles of metal instead of food. It would be hard to keep their tempers in face of such taunting. Nonetheless it must be done. No other plan made sense than removal to Hearthome; no briq but Tempestamer could lead the fleet thither. There were no charts for her storm-distorted course.

  So she must be fit and lively four-score days from now. Or they were doomed.

  VII

  For a while longer the fact that Skilluck and his comrades—surviving on what they had stored during their season of good eating but otherwise, save mentally, in little better shape than anyone else—struggled along the frost-rimed branchways to deliver doses of creshban, together with what scraps of fruit or leaf or funqi-pulp their exotic plantings on the pumptrees yielded, counted heavily in their favor, while the chaplains, who had disgraced themselves by their affray on the wharf, lost countenance.

  Then the creshban started to run out, while the number of victims multiplied, and even some who had declared support for the idea of emigration took to accusing Skilluck of lavishing the medicine on himself at others’ expense. By that stage it was useless to argue. People were taking leave of rationality and slumping into stupor from which a few at least would never revive.

  The sole consolation was that, undernourished and sickly as they were, none of the Wego any longer had the energy for fighting. But that meant, of course, they would have none to prepare for a mass exodus when the weather broke, either.

  “Why did we come home?” Wellearn mourned more than once. But Skilluck strictly reprimanded him.

  “We had no way of knowing how bad this winter was to be! Nor would we have felt easy in our minds had we abandoned our folk to face it without help!”

  “At least we needn’t have found out until next summer,” Sharprong grumbled.

  “By which time our kindred and our young’uns could have been dead! As things are, we stand some slender hope of keeping a clawful of the folk alive.”

  “Slender …” Strongrip muttered, gazing at the drifts which blizzard after day-long blizzard had piled against the bravetrees. Many upper branches and almost all their fronds had frozen so hard the wind could snap them off, and every gust was greeted with their brittle tinkling.

  “Next time we take Tempestamer to sea we’ll hang a net while she feeds,” Skilluck sighed. “Even a load of sour weed could save another briq or two.”

  “Captain, you can’t keep our fleet in being single-clawed!” Strongrip began. Skilluck silenced him with a glare.

  “Name me another captain who’s fit enough to help?”

  There was a dismal pause. At length Wellearn ventured, “Maybe Toughide?”

  “One might well try him, sure. Wait on him and ask if he will join us. If he won’t, I’ll still do what I can to feed his briq, or anyone’s!” Skilluck stamped his pad. “How many summers to catch and pith and train the briqs we need to replace Stormock and Billowise and the rest? For all we know, there may not be another summer!”

  So it was done, and Toughide goaded his weak and weary Watereign forth in Tempestamer’s wake the next clear day, and though she was less elegantly pithed, a lucky mawful of fish revived her and he was able to make it back to shore with a mass of weed caught on curved prongs, lacking nets such as Skilluck had preserved.

  When it was noised abroad that those briqs too feeble to risk the winter ocean were nonetheless receiving fodder, a few score folk made their way to the wharf and watched the spectacle in silence. It was unprecedented. Never in history had any captain of the Wego acted to aid his rivals; rather, he should frustrate them so they would not win the wise’uns’ prize.

  It was a new strange thing. The onlookers dispersed and reported it. Next time the weather cleared not two but seven briqs put out: Riskall came, and Catchordes, and Shrewdesign’s Neverest, and two more so young their captains had not named them, which seemed barely strong enough to quit the harbor.

  Towards these last Tempestamer behaved most strangely, for she slowed her pace instead of exulting in the water, and kept them in her lee as though they were of her own budding. By now Wellearn was informed concerning the manner of pithing and breaking a briq, and therefore he exclaimed in amazement.

  “Captain, had I known when I first joined your crew that you’d left Tempestamer with those nerves intact …!”

  He left the rest unsaid. There was no need to explain he meant the nerves governing a briq’s response to briqlings. It was generally held to be a recipe for disaster to do as Skilluck had done, for such a briq might fall in with a wild herd and become ungovernable.

  Dryly Skilluck made reply, “Most likely my Tempestamer would cut younglings out of the herd without orders and drive them home with her! It’s something I’ve always wanted to try. Is she not huger, even now, than any wild’un?”

  It was true. There was no record, not even any legend, of a briq’s surpassing her, and she was still growing despite the dreadful winter.

  “We’ll find a wild herd off the coast near Hearthome,” said Skilluck dreamily. “We’ll let her pick the young’uns she personally likes. We’ll raise such a fleet as will conquer any ocean, any season. Before my time expires, I hope to see the Wego travel round the globe!”

  “Captain!” said Strongrip with a sharp reproof. “We have to live until the summer first!”

  “Agreed, agreed,” the captain sighed, and raised his spyglass to search for weed among the random floes.

  They returned with not only weed but plumpfish, for Tempestamer sensed a school of them and patiently circled until they had to approach the surface again where she and her companions could feed and nets haul up what was left. The other captains were loud in admiration, and Skilluck seized his chance to exact a pledge: were spring to be delayed, were the fields to lie under frost a moonlong past usual, they would take aboard whomever of the Wego wished to come and head south, following Tempestamer.

  Hearing the vow taken, Wellearn almost collapsed from relief.

  “Captain, we’re saved!” he whispered.

  “Didn’t I tell you? A few score days of hunger and cold, and then a mawful of good food … But we aren’t on course yet. So many of us are too lost in dreamness to work out what’s best for our salvation.”

  For at least a while, though, it seemed Wellearn’s prediction was assured of fulfillment. Revived by the gift of fish, half the Wego came to watch the next departure of the fleet—and help carve up the carcass of a briq that had died at her moorings, a tragedy for her captain but valuable food to the folk—and among them were Knowelkin and Grandirection, who had composed their quarrel. They made shift to chant a star-blessing on the departing briqs, and the crowd settled into familiar responses even though a few budlings, too young to have seen a clear sky, were heard to ask fretfully what stars might be.

  Two calm days followed, and the nets were quickly filled, suggesting that warm water was working up from the south in earnest of springtime and bringing bounty with it.

  But on the fleet’s last night before returning home a fiery prong stabbed out of heaven and exploded on a berg, raising a wall of water high enough to swamp the smallest briq. There was a thunderclap, followed by a cascade of ice-chips, but this was not hail and that had not been lightning.

  Tempestamer gave forth a cry such as no tame briq had ever been heard to utter, and for hours ran out of control, seeking the lost young’un. Although Skilluck finally mastered her again, and set course for Ushere well before dawn, it was obvious that some captains were regretting their pledge. After all, if despite the chaplains’ blessing the sky signaled its enmity, what hope was there of carrying out Skilluck’s plan?

  “That was an omen!” was his retort. “If we don’t move south, that’s what we can look forward to more of! Wellearn, do the skies hurl such missiles at Hearthome?”

  “Not that I was ever told!” Wellearn asserted.

  “But you said the stars look down on Hearthome more than us! Maybe we should stay here, cowering under cloud!”

  Wellearn was taken aback until he saw what Skilluck was steering towards. Then he roared, “Safe? Did that prong strike from clear air? More likely the stars are warning us to move where we can see them and be seen, instead of hiding from them all the time!”

  The force of his logic told to some extent, but what counted most was that their weather-sense had given no warning of that blow from heaven. Had it been a lightning-strike, it would have been preceded by a sense of uncomfortable tightness and uncertainty. As things were, the discomfort had succeeded the impact. The sensation was weirdly disturbing.

  Shortly thereafter the chaplains, whose duties included keeping track of the calendar, marked the usual date of spring. Weather-sense contradicted that, too. Traces of a thaw did occur; many beaches were cleared of ice as warm water washed against them. But uplands to the north which ordinarily caught the early sun-heat remained capped with snow, and even in low-lying valleys there were places where the drifts endured. As for the ground where new crops should be planted, it was stiff as stone a moonlong later.

  “I hold you to your vow,” Skilluck said when that day dawned, and the other captains shuffled their pads noisily. “But for me, would your briqs be even as healthy as they are?”

  “Ask the storm-lost,” someone muttered.

  “They’re not here—we are!” Skilluck snapped. “So are what’s left of the Wego. Must they stay and starve because the bravetrees are frosted and nothing grows on them, because the fields are hard as rock and all seeds die at the sowing?”

  “To risk cresh on a crazy course to nowhere?” another cried.

  “To suffer cresh right here, when creshban is to be had at Hearthome and Tempestamer can guide us thither?” Wellearn countered.

  Of all the various arguments advanced, that struck deepest in his listeners’ tubules. Even those who had best planned to cope with the winter were showing creshmarks now, and saw little hope of escape before the sickness claimed their powers of reason.

  “We’ll follow you,” said Toughide finally. “With all the family and friends our briqs can carry. And let those who choose the other way be cast upon the mercy of the stars.”

  “Then get to work!” Skilluck rose to what was left of his former height, and despite his shrunken mantle still overtopped the rest. “Tomorrow’s dawn will see the Ushere fleet at sea, and our landfall will be in a kind and gracious country where we shall be helped by allies—helped by friends!”

  “Uncle!” Embery cried, rushing up the slope that led to Chard’s observatory. “Uncle, great news!”

  Worried, absent-minded, owing to old age and the problems of the past few months which had so much interfered with his study of the stars, the old man nonetheless had time to spare for his brother’s daughter. He beamed on her indulgently.

  “Good news is always welcome! What have you to tell me?”

  “Strangers are coming over the northern hills! It must be Wellearn’s people at last! Did you not calculate that their spring must have begun by now?”

  “Yes, at least a moonlong ago!” Suddenly as enthused as she was, Chard ordered one of his telescopes trained on the high ground to the north, and exercised an old man’s privilege by taking first turn at its ocular.

  And then he slumped. He said in a voice that struck winter-chill, “My dear, were you not expecting the Wego to arrive by sea?”

  “Well, sure! But given how many of them there are, perhaps they had to ferry their folk to the nearest landfall and …”

  She could hear as she spoke how hollow her words rang.

  “This is no question of perhaps,” her uncle said. “This is a fact. The fireworkers’ district is being attacked. If that’s the Wego’s doing, neither you nor I want any truck with them!”

  VIII

  Heavier-laden than ever before, yet seeming utterly tireless, and with her back sprouting trencher-plants and vines as luxuriant as though this were an ordinary summer voyage, Tempestamer beat steadily southward on the trail which only a briq could follow through the currents of the ocean. Some said it was a question of smell; some, a matter of warmer or colder water; others yet, that briqs could memorize the pattern of the stars though they were invisible by day or cloud-covered at night. After all, maintained these last, a northfinder could be carried anywhere, even in darkness, and always turn the same unfailing way.

  But most were content to accept a mystery and exploit it.

  Certainly Tempestamer had learned from last year’s storm. Now, if clouds gathered threateningly, she altered course and skirted them without Skilluck needing to use his goad, or when it was unavoidable hove to and showed her companions the way of it, even to locating masses of weed shaken loose by gales from coastal shallows. This gave much food for thought to both Skilluck and Wellearn, who served this trip in guise of chaplain because the passengers they had aboard would not have set forth without one. The former wondered, “Perhaps one shouldn’t pith a briq at all. Perhaps there’s a way of taming them intact. Could we be partners?”

  While Wellearn mused, “The directions she chooses when she meets a storm: they imply something, as though the storm may have a pattern. At Hearthome I must study the globe that Chard offered to explain to me, because watching the sky …”

  The other captains, though, grew afraid on learning how much of Tempestamer’s weather-sense had been left intact. All of them had had the frustrating experience of trying to drive a briq direct for home when bad weather lay across her path, but rations had run so low that only a desperate charge in a straight line would serve the purpose of survival.

  So too had Skilluck, as he said, and he preferred to come home late with vines and trencher-plants intact. What then of last year?—countered the others, and he could give no answer, except to say the fortune of the stars must have been shining on him.

  Knowing him for a skeptic, they dismissed that and went on worrying.

  Still, the weather continued fair. Despite the fact that they had met icebergs further south than even Toughide and Shrewdesign last summer, there had been whole long cloud-free days and nights, and the children had exclaimed in wonder at the marvels thereby revealed, especially the great arc of heaven composed of such a multitude of stars it never dwindled regardless of how many fell away in long bright streaks. Those riding Tempestamer kept begging for a peek through Skilluck’s spyglass, and Wellearn amused them with fantasies based on something Embery had said, about the time when folk would travel to not just another continent, but another world.

  One, though, acuter than the rest, demanded seriously, “Where do we find the kind of briq that swims thither?”

  “If we can’t find one,” Wellearn answered confidently, “then we’ll have to breed one—won’t we?”

  “She’s slowing,” Skilluck murmured. “That means landfall, if I’m any judge.” Keeping his spyglass trained on the horizon, he swung it from side to side.

  And checked.

  “Wellearn, did the Hearthomers mention a people around here who consign their dead to the sea?”

  Startled, Wellearn said, “That’s a custom of seafaring folk like us! They said there were none on this whole coast! That’s why when Blestar died we—”

  “Oh, I remember,” Skilluck interrupted. “But there are bodies floating towards us. Five of them.”

  It was in Wellearn’s mind to ask whether he was mistaking some unfamiliar sea-creature, when his own eye spotted the first of them. No chance of error. Here came five light-mantled people of the Hearthome stock, and none was making the least attempt to swim …

 

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