Embery guided Wellearn to the top of the highest tree in the house, which offered a clear view in all directions. The moon was down and the sky was clouding over in a way that upset his weather-sense, but he was too eager to worry about the risk of a lightning-strike. From here the outline of the city was picked out by glowing creepers and funqi, and he was shaken by its huge extent. It even marched over the crest of a hill inland, beyond which faint redness could be seen.
“That’s where the fireworkers live,” Embery explained. “They make glass and metal—they made the mirror you’ve seen. The area is sheltered, the wind almost always carries the smoke away from us, and it’s easy to find fuel in that direction. They use vast quantities, you know. Some of their furnaces … But you have to see them.”
Over and over she said the same, when describing the outlying farms, the giant nets which fish-hunters hurled by means of weights and long poles far out to sea from the nearby capes and islands, the work of those who bred mounts and draftimals—”like your briq,” she added merrily, “only smaller and going on land!”—those who trained new houses to replace old ones or spread the city on fresh ground, and more and more until Wellearn could scarcely contain himself. How desperately he wanted to explore every nook of—
“I haven’t asked your city’s name!” he exclaimed.
“Hearthome.”
It was apt. “How many people live here, do you know?” he pursued, thinking perhaps not a great number, if each of five sick strangers could be allotted a separate bower, and then yes a great number, if so many extra houses had been sown.
“Nine score-of-scores, I think, though some say ten.”
It was unbelievable. The Wego numbered perhaps a fifth as many. Oh, this must be a better land to live in!
“But there are far larger cities inland and all along the coast,” Embery said. “Many have a score-of-score-of-scores. None is as rich as Hearthome, though.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we are the folk who work hardest at discovering new things. Travelers from a moonlong’s journey away come to learn from people like my father, and my uncle who lives yonder”—she pointed in a direction diametrically opposite the furnace-glow—”and devotes his time to studying the stars.”
Among Wellearn’s people the stars were of little save religious interest. During his entire life at home he had seen a clear sky so seldom he could almost count the total. Before the adoption of the northfinder—a creature which, properly pithed, would always seek out the pole—it was said mariners had been guided by the stars on outward voyages. The return, of course, was never a problem; briqs like Tempestamer could be relied on to retrace their course. Though after such a tremendous storm even she…
Dismissing such gloomy thoughts, albeit making a firm resolution to utter thanks, just in case, to the ancestors who—according to the chaplains—must have been watching over him during the voyage, he made shift to repeat a traditional Forbish compliment which Blestar had taught him when he was first apprenticed to the trade of interpreter, and of which mention of the stars reminded him.
“Ah!” he said. “Starbeams must shine on Hearthome even when the sky is cloudy!”
“Why not?” Embery returned. “After all, we are honest followers of Jing.”
Wellearn drew back, startled.
“But he was only a legend! Tales about him are compound of dream-stuff!”
“Oh, no!” She sounded scandalized. “True, there is a great dream in his scriptures, but even that is in perfect accord with reality. Have you never studied his teaching?”
At the same moment thunder rolled, but it was not the shock to his weather-sense which made Wellearn’s mind reel.
“Your father was right after all about my need for rest,” he husked. “Kindly lead me back to my bower.”
Where he spent long lonely hours wondering what—after teaching and believing all his life that tales about folk who conjured secrets from the stars were mere superstition—Blestar was going to say when he discovered himself in a land where Jing was real.
III
Skilluck’s shattered mind crawled back together out of pits of madness and he could see a figure that he recognized. It was Wellearn, addressing him anxiously: “Captain, you’re alert again, aren’t you?”