“Not at all!” cried Shine. “You tell me what I most need to be told!”
“Believe it when I’m gone, and you’ll do well,” Jing said. Already he could feel the sac he had exposed starting to throb. “Now, take the future in trust. You here—you, Shine; you, Scholar Twig; you, Keepfire, who made us the tools to reveal unknown truth; you, my lady, who bear something of me which would otherwise be as hopelessly lost as Ntah itself—all of you must listen to my words and cherish what I say as proudly and as fiercely as when we took our oath. And by the way, Shine!”
Humbly the ex-sacerdote looked a question.
“Don’t ever speak again of killing. Qat will die young; he was weakened anyhow by his suffering. Or it not, some crazy fool with a mindful of lunatic dreams will dispose of him. But this is neither justice nor vengeance. No, we must speak always and forever of life instead of death; we must fight the foolishness of dreams and concentrate on sanity. We must feed and shelter and educate our people, until the day dawns when we know how to conquer sickness and famine, blight and murrain. Then, and only then, shall we be fit to understand the message of the sky. Then, and only then, will the tools Keepfire created for us fall into the proper claws. And yours too, Twig, and mine—the star-charts created by my people … my former people.”
He was briefly silent, and the pause was full of sorrow.
“But let nothing that has been well done go to waste!” he resumed at length. “Not that it can, if it’s recorded in the stars … but we don’t speak that language yet, and maybe it will be a long time before we do. Knowing now how many more stars there are than we believed, we must never be arrogant again! In all humility, going as it were in a mental crouch, we must patiently await the time when we are entitled to stand up to our full height, and that height shall reach the stars to take them in our grasp like ripened fruit! I say to you—”
At that moment he felt the sac under his mantle rupture.
Inward.
While they looked at him in wonder, for his peroration had been charged with the same power which persuaded them to join him in their common pledge, he said gently, “I am as good as dead, my friends. Tomorrow I shall surely be insane. I speak to you with the last vestige, the last shred, of what was Ayi-Huat Jing, court astrologer to His Most Puissant Majesty Lord Waw-Yint of Ntah, who set forth upon a journey longer than any of his nation previously, and must now die as my nation died. Dream of me. Make others dream of me. Or all my work will go for naught.”
He added silently, “Would I had said that in my own speech. I could have expressed it so much better…”
X
The day after the Count’s death, another of the regular barqs came to the castle wharf. Her steersman was horrified to learn that the plague was here ahead of him, and was in mind to put about at once and risk her starving under him on the return trip. But Twig ceded him all the pearl-seeds left in Jing’s store—enough to buy the barq and her crew a score of times over—and he was reassured that at least this journey would not be as fruitless as he had feared. The peasants were in the grip of delirium; only the precarious loyalty of Sturdy and the other prongsmen kept them at bay while Rainbow and Shine, in obedience to Jing’s order, scrambled on board with the precious parchments.
“But where shall we go?” the steersman cried. “Forb is rotting like a blighted fungus! I saw its bravetrees lean towards the river as though they had been snapped by gigants!”
“Any place the water carries you away from plague!” Twig retorted. “Do they not tell of folk who ply the ocean aboard barqs that make yours look like half-grown pups?”
“We’d have to chance the rapids of the Sheerdrop Range!”