It came—but he felt only a blow, not a stab. The throwing prong skidded away into the undergrowth.
"Someone called my name!" he heard ... or did he? Had tension allowed him to mistake imagination for reality? Straining perception to the utmost, he waited.
And almost rushed to dreamness with relief. No doubt of what he heard this time.
"No, daughter, it isn't possible. The stress has been too much for you—"
"Embery! Shash! Chard!"
Wellearn had to straighten out again to deliver his words with maximum force, and for an instant could imagine the prong that was going to lodge in his mantle. But he went on, "The Wego are here! The Wego are here! Don't—!"
One of the defenders high in the observatory's treetops heard the warning too late. He had taken aim and let go. Wellearn screamed.
But the prong sank into soft ground ... so close, he could feel the quivering impact. After a little, he was able to recover himself and return to normal pressure as Shash and Embery and half a score of their friends rushed to meet him.
Shamelessly embracing Embery under his mantle, as though they were about to mate in public—but she was showing his bud, his bud!—and anyway nobody would have cared if they had, Wellearn translated the conversation going on softly among the trees of the observatory, trying to make himself believe in his own heroism. That was what they were all calling it, Skilluck too ... but it wasn't, it was just that he had done what the situation called for, and anyway most so-called heroes turned out to have been temporarily crazy, living a dream instead of reality.
He forced aside the relics of the chaplains' teachings about reliance on visions, and composed himself to concentrate on his duties as interpreter.
"We saw no signs of organization on the way here," the captain was saying. "Does it break down at night, or is it always the same?"
"At the beginning there was some semblance of order among the invaders," Shash said. He was tired but coherent; his older brother Chard was slumped to the point where he looked as though he needed a sitting-pit, and paying scant attention. "They were able to confront us and— well, that was how we lost Burney. We were fit and rational, and thought they would be too. We now believe they must have been the first of their folk to work out what was happening, to decide that they must leave home and take over someone else's territory. And we assume that others fell in behind them when they realized this was their only hope, but by then they were—well—disturbed. And on the way I guess they infected others with their craziness."
"That fits," Skilluck muttered. "Any idea how far north they came from?"
"What few people we've been able to capture and feed up to the stage where they can talk normally—and there aren't many of those—all agree that the cold weather reaches down to the very pith of this continent. If my brother were better he could tell you more. But he's exhausted." Shash spread his claws helplessly. "The further from the sea, it seems, the worse the cold! We know that water retains heat longer than dry land, but even so, this is terrifying! Are we due for frost and snow here in Hearthome? We've never seen such things! One could imagine the whole world turning into a frozen ball!"
"I don't think we have to fear that," Wellearn said, a little surprised at himself. He parted from Embery and leaned forward. "The way Chard explained it to me, warmth at the equator turns water into vapor, so clouds turn into ice at the poles. But if the sun goes on getting warmer—"
"Quite right!" said Chard unexpectedly, and lapsed back into distraction.
"Forget the theories!" Skilluck snapped. "We need to decide on a plan of action! I have one. We should simply—"
"But what about the Blade of Heaven?"—from Toughide.
"Oh, that!" Chard roused himself completely. "We know about such phenomena. When a star—like the famous New Star—explodes, it throws off gobbets which cool down in the interstellar void. If one approaches another sun, it warms up and boils off part of itself. All this follows from the teaching Jing bequeathed."
"Is this going to save our lives?" Skilluck shouted, erupting to full height. "Are you coining with us? Are you prepared to give us what you want to preserve from Hearthome? Make your minds up now!"
He was so patently correct, Wellearn found himself upright alongside him.
"Yes! And whatever else you give us, we must have the whole of Jing's scriptures!"
"Creshban!" Skilluck shouted, and the other captains echoed him. "If nothing else, we must have the secret of creshban!"
The wind had shifted; there was something menacing in the air that affected their weather-sense, making tempers raw, and it wasn't just smoke.
After a pause filled only by the noise of the crazy folk smashing and ripping through the city, Shash said heavily, "There's no secret to creshban. We don't know why, but fresh sour juices of new-budded fruits or even new-sprouted leaves will do the job so long as they have no animal matter at the roots. Nothing from a briq's back—nothing from a cemetery—only shoots that spring from new bare ground. I'll give you seeds that produce the most suitable plants, but ... Well, essentially it's like eating a proper diet at home, instead of wandering across a desert or an ocean and living on stored food."
"That simple?" Skilluck whispered. "If we'd known—"
"If you'd known you'd never have come back," said Chard unexpectedly. "You said that in Forbish, didn't you?"
There was a thunderstruck pause, while Wellearn registered the fact that he had not actually translated the last statement, and the rest of the Wego captains were looking blank.
"When you first came here, I thought you were better informed than you pretended," said the fat old astronomer. He squeezed himself upright, and even though the effort slurred his speech he overtopped luck, for his was the taller folk. "Did you wonder on the way home last year why we didn't give you all of everything at once? Did you wonder whether we realized your intention was to cheat us if you could?"
Skilluck cowered back in a way Wellearn had never imagined he would see, not in his wildest fantasies. Chard blasted on.
"But it doesn't matter anymore, does it? You kept your pledge to return, and you didn't know you were going to find us in these straits! You've met your honorable obligation, and it remains for us to match the bargain! Take what you can—everything you can, including people!—from this doomed city! Take telescopes and microscopes, take vines and blades and seeds and tools and medicines, and flee at once! Until dawn the attackers will be sluggish, but if you delay past then—! Leave us, the old ones! Leave everything except what your briqs can carry without sulking! And above all, take Jing's scriptures! Wellearn, here!" He bowed himself to a dark corner and pulled out a glass jar.
"Take the originals! We salvaged them first of all, of course, and here they are. Now they're yours. Use them as best you can. If you must, leave them where they will freeze. But don't destroy them! As for us, of course ..."
"No! No!" Embery cried, hastening to his side. "I won't leave you, I won't leave father!"
"You'll have to leave me," Chard said gently. "But you'll go, won't you, Shash?"
"They've turned our healing-house into a jungle," the chief curer said. "They've rooted out our medicinal plants. If I stay, the stars alone know what use I could be to our folk."
"Go, then. Me, I'm much too old." Chard settled back comfortably where he had been. "Besides, I'm fat and I'd probably sink even a handsome briq like Tempestamer. Take your leave and let me be. And dream of me kindly, if you will."
Soberly, the visitors prepared to depart. As they were clasping claws with him, he added, "Oh, captain, one more thing, which might be useful to you in your navigation—that is, if you haven't already noticed it. The end of the comet which you call the Blade of Heaven always points directly away from the sun. It might amuse you, Wellearn, when you have nothing better to occupy your mind, to devise a theory which will account for that."
"I'll try," Wellearn said doubtfully. "But without the means to conduct experiments—"
<
br /> "There are always means to conduct experiments. And aren't you part of the greatest experiment of all?"
X
During the hours of darkness some of the briqs' passengers had indeed decided they would rather settle on shore and take their chances. As dawn broke they were heading south, together with several score refugees from Hearthome, in search of a site that would be easier to defend.
Meantime Skilluck's party was working out what of their loads—hastily collected in the city—would be least useful, and ruthlessly discarding whatever they did not regard as indispensable. Before the day's heat had fully roused the crazy invaders, the booty had been distributed and so had the two-score Hearthomers who were prepared to risk the ocean.
Skilluck prodded Tempestamer with his goad, and she withdrew her mooring tentacles and made for open water.
"What did uncle mean when he called us an experiment?" Embery asked her father.
"We're mixing like different metals, to see what alloy will result," Shash answered, clinging anxiously to the briq's saddle as they felt the first waves. "It's the start of a new age, whatever the outcome."
"I liked the old one," Wellearn muttered. "And I've been cheated of my share in it."
"Don't think like that!" admonished the old man. "Even the stars can change! And what are we compared to them?"
"We don't yet know," said Embery. "But one day we shall go there and find out."
Overhearing as he issued orders to his crew, Skilluck gave a roar of sardonic laughter.
"Bring me the briq you want to swim to heaven on, and I will personally pith her! Me, with a northfinder I can trust and Tempestamer under me, I'll be content. Now let's go find a herd of wild briqs and start recruiting our new fleet. It's going to be the grandest ever seen!"
But despite the hotness of his words and the bright rays of the morning sun, the wind struck chill from the north.
PART THREE
THE
OUTPOURING
I
When northern summer ceased, the weight of ice leaned hard on those gnarled rocks which fearful wanderers had named The Guardians of the Pole. Slanting up either side of an underwater shelf that grudgingly permitted the highest tides to wash over it, they resembled prongsmen turned to stone, their mantles drawn aside and weapons clutched in both their claws.
Few were the mariners who braved the channel they defined; fewer still the ones who returned to tell of a colossal valley surrounding a landlocked sea so salt that what ordinarily ought to sink there was buoyed up. It was a foul and poisoned zone, though life endured. Chill and salt conspired to make its growths disgusting in the maw. Desperate commanders who imagined their junqs would nourish themselves off such weed as the water sustained watched in horror how first the drink-bladders burst, then the floats, and finally the major tubules, so they died.
By then, of course, the crews that clung to their haodahs were for the most part much too mad to care.
For a while after the last summer the Salty Sea remained liquid, roiling under hail and gale. At length, however, ice filled the valley and beset the Polar Guardians, shattering the rock they were composed of, and down it sped to gather on the shelf. In a single season boulders and ice were too high-piled for any wanner Sow to pass. After that glaciers shed bergs until the isolated sea was covered; then it froze also.
The last foolhardy travelers who let a poorly-pithed briq carry them into such latitudes, thinking that because they had rounded Southmost Cape they were safe from the enmity of the stars, unaware that the briq knew nothing of this ocean dominated by junqs and was lost and panicking, struggled ashore on a desolate beach with the precious secrets it was their task to spread around the world, and sought shelter in a cave which became their tomb.
II
The water was rising, or the land was sinking. Either way the event spelled trouble for the people of Ripar, despite the work of their far-famed inventor Yockerbow.
Some of the inhabitants claimed that their city was the oldest in the world. Others, more cautious, admitted that its records might have been—as it were—revised, because the rotting trunks of sweetwater trees had been found too far out in the lagoon for them to date back to the age of the alleged foundation, when salt tides rolled a long day's walk inland and Ripar River was as yet unfed by its giant tributary, the Gush.
It was thanks to the latter's change of course that the city had flourished. Reason, and relics exposed when mud was being pumped away from the harbor, combined to suggest that originally it had been a mere hamlet, huddled on a narrow flood-plain constricted between dry plateaux. Only when (and this was attested not by legend alone but by recent discoveries) a ball of blazing rock fell out of the sky and blocked the old channel of the Gush was there enough fresh water for dense roots to lock up silt and build a delta, forcing back the sea.
Now a score-of-score-of-scores of people, at the lowest estimate, swarmed along its branchways, got on one another's pith and cursed and sometimes fought and always schemed to secure more than their proper share of the goods attracted to this uniquely sited entrepot, whether they arrived by junq or were carried by a caravan of droms. The majority cared nothing for the past and little for the future. Their homes grew of their own accord, did they not? There was always sustenance, though it be dull, to be snatched from an overhanging bough or filched from a plot of funqi or—if all else failed and they must endure actual work—dragged up on a line from the lagoon. Fish did not abound as formerly, of course, but even mudbanks supported crupshells and other edible mollusqs.
So they were as content as the folk of any big city.
That was the majority. There were, however, others whose traditional obligation was to view Ripar in the context of the world: not only of the globe, but of the universe which comprehended all time and all space. It was said they possessed arcane knowledge dating back before the Northern Freeze. Always there were half a score of them; always they were presided over by the incumbent Doq; always they were collectively disliked because they levied duty on cargoes passing from sea to land or vice versa, and because they enforced the ancient laws with neither fear nor favor. Were one among their own number to succumb to a plague brought by strangers, for which no cure was known, he would quit the city himself before prongsmen came to expel him; were one of his relatives to enter into an unauthorized mating, he would be prompt to bring the new-budded youngling before a eugenic court to determine its fitness to survive; were it his own home that became infested with teredonts, or boraways, or a putrefying mold, he would be the first to pour the poison at its roots.
And it was among these notable and austere personages—short of their customary total by one, for the doyen Chelp had died a few days earlier—that the inventor Yockerbow was summoned to stand today, beneath the interlaced branches of the Doqal Hall, with water plashing underpad. Acutely conscious of being no more than half as old as anyone else present, he strove to reason out why he had been sent for. Surely it could not be, as his beautiful spouse Arranth insisted, that he was to be invited to replace Chelp! His weather-sense informed him that the idea was ridiculous, for the peers were exuding a distinct aura of incipient panic.
But the fact was in no way reassuring.
He sought some kind of signal from Iddromane, spokesman for those who worked with fire and metal, and the only one of the peers he could claim close acquaintance with, but the old fellow remained stolidly imperturbable.
Yockerbow trembled a little.
Then the period of waiting was over, and the Doq rose to his full height.
"Greetings to my brothers, and to Yockerbow the stranger, who is uninformed concerning the reason for his attendance. All will be made clear in moments.
"Since time immemorial"—catching on, Yockerbow glossed that as meaning, in practice, a few score-of-score years—"the Great Fleet of the Eastern Sea has enjoyed harborage rights at Ripar. It has been a considerable while since those rights were exercised. Today, however, notice has been s
erved that the Fleet is to call here very shortly."
So that was it! Making no attempt to maintain a stoical demeanor like the others, Yockerbow clenched his claws. He was schooled in history, and knew that there had been times when a visit by the Fleet was welcome; then the folk boasted how they on land shared ancestors with the People of the Sea, and clamored to trade and intermarry. On the other claw, there had been occasions when the Fleet arrived storm-bedraggled and half-starved, and crazed mariners stole what they could and spoiled the rest, whereupon the folk vowed they could never be called kin to such monsters.
Yockerbow's lifetime had elapsed without a sight of the Fleet; it was working the broadest equatorial waters. Reports from travelers indicated that it had a new commander—land-budded, they said as one—who, having deposed the former admiral, was interesting himself more than any of his predecessors in what the continents could offer.
His name, they said, was Barratong, and his shadow fell across the day-half of the world at every dawn. In Yumbit he had agents who seized the sharp spice remotaw and made it a monopoly for those he favored; in Clophical his prongsmen guarded the giant trees beloved of the spuder, and each autumn they rolled up as many webs as a junq could carry and used them for rope to snare wild junqlings and increase the Fleet; in fabled Grench—yes, he had ventured so far!—he held the sole right to export the fine wax known as cleb.
And he was coming here!
Briefly, alarm drove Yockerbow into imagining an unrealized threat. His lovely Arranth had never made any secret of how, as a youngling, she had dreamed of being traded to the Fleet, of touring the globe as the favorite partner of its admiral. Still, after so many years together ... He had never, though, quite understood why someone like her, so fascinated by the skies, so able to make the dead past come alive, should want to be a partner in his own mundane toil...