“Of course not!” they both exclaimed.
“Nonsense!” Knowelkin roared, turning on them. It very probably was nonsense, but all their tempers were set to snap like saplings in the path of a gigant.
Grandirection, whom Skilluck had picked on because he was visibly near breaking-point, immediately raised his claws and bared his mandibles and began to pad around Knowelkin seeking an opening for attack. In the meantime, several people had emerged from nearby houses and were gazing in wide-eyed astonishment at these chaplains making ready to disgrace their calling.
“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 deep-lying 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 sapswollen.
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.