Shine had reclaimed the lenses and was staring through them again. Now he gave a gasp.
“I see half of Sunbride!”
“What?” The others turned to him uncertainly.
“Half!” he repeated obstinately. “Tiny, but perfectly clear—half a disc, like half the moon, and as far from the sun as she ever wanders! Our conclusions must be true! They must!”
VIII
Parchments in one claw, pearlseed in the other, the steersman of the barq about to depart said, “So you want this delivered to your doctor friend in Forb, do you?”
Something about his tone made Jing react with alarm. He said, “The price is fair, surely! If you doubt the quality of the seed, come and see what a jeweltree the Count sprouted from one I gave him last fall. Even during the winter—”
“So you can still grow jeweltrees, can you? When your trencher-plants rot in the ground!”
It was true; with the return of warm weather, the blight which had affected last year’s crop was spreading again, and trencher-plant was their staple diet.
“What does that have to do with—?” Jing began. The steersman cut him short.
“Your doctor had better be cleverer than most! We aren’t going as far as Forb this trip. The Maker knows whether anyone will want to go there ever again!”
“What are you saying, man?” Jing advanced, clenching his claws.
“The plain truth! Some filthy plague spawned of the far south is rife in Forb, and a murrain is abroad among the livestock, and the very brave-trees are wilting! We’ve been here three days—how is it this is the first you’ve heard?”
“I’ve … uh … I’ve been preoccupied,” Jing muttered.
“Dreamlost, more like it!” The steersman returned the parchments with a contemptuous gesture and—more reluctantly—the pearlseed too, adding, “You’ll need this to pay for medicine, I’ve no doubt! If you yourself plan on returning to Forb, which I don’t counsel!”
He turned away, shouting orders for his crew to pry loose the barq’s tentacles and head down-channel.
“Sure we came by way of Forb,” Qat husked. “I told you so. But we aren’t sick any more, none of us. Maybe I’m still softer than I should be, but that’s a matter of time.”
“Yes—yes, of course,” Jing muttered comfortingly. He nonetheless cast a worried glance at all three of them: Qat still limp enough to hobble rather than walk, and the boy and girl with their disfiguring scars. Not, according to rumor, that that had prevented their being taken up as curiosities by the younger members of the staff. When even the Count presently approved of outcrossing, and had let his own daughter choose a foreigner for her mate, it was the fashionable thing. Besides, the sacerdotes maintained that no plague could smite those who defied it boldly, so…
Their influence was rising again since news of Ntah’s downfall. Was this not, they declared, perfect proof of the Maker’s vengeance against those who defied His will? In any normal year, such a claim would have been laughed out of conscience; now, though, the blight on the trencher-plants meant that many families were facing a hungry summer, and famine went claw-in-claw with madness, even when no plague exacerbated the victims’ predicament.
Jing had witnessed, on his way hither from Ntah, how precarious was sanity among his folk—how a single year’s crop-failure might entrain surrender to the tempting world of dreams. When he paid full attention to his imagination, he was chilled by the all-too-convincing prospects conjured up. The Count’s illness was withdrawing one psychological prop from the minds of the people of the valley; it was certain that when he died some of his old rivals from Forb, or their descendants, would come to squabble over his legacy—that was, naturally, if they weren’t caught by the plague already. Hunger and sickness might withdraw the others, and then…
Jing trembled at the threat the future held.
Yet his companions declined to worry, even about a means of getting their knowledge spread abroad. If this barq’s crew refused to return to Forb, they said, another steersman could be found more susceptible to a handsome payment, more prepared to run risks. It was with some reluctance that they agreed to make extra copies of the parchments Jing had already drafted; Keepfire, of course, could not write, and Twig was constantly on call to administer medicine to the Count. Shine and Rainbow, however, did their best, and by the time the next barq arrived there were six copies of the report at least in summary outline—enough, with luck, for learned folk elsewhere to repeat their studies.