“Ask the storm-lost,” someone muttered.
“They’re not here—we are!” Skilluck snapped. “So are what’s left of the Wego. Must they stay and starve because the bravetrees are frosted and nothing grows on them, because the fields are hard as rock and all seeds die at the sowing?”
“To risk cresh on a crazy course to nowhere?” another cried.
“To suffer cresh right here, when creshban is to be had at Hearthome and Tempestamer can guide us thither?” Wellearn countered.
Of all the various arguments advanced, that struck deepest in his listeners’ tubules. Even those who had best planned to cope with the winter were showing creshmarks now, and saw little hope of escape before the sickness claimed their powers of reason.
“We’ll follow you,” said Toughide finally. “With all the family and friends our briqs can carry. And let those who choose the other way be cast upon the mercy of the stars.”
“Then get to work!” Skilluck rose to what was left of his former height, and despite his shrunken mantle still overtopped the rest. “Tomorrow’s dawn will see the Ushere fleet at sea, and our landfall will be in a kind and gracious country where we shall be helped by allies—helped by friends!”
“Uncle!” Embery cried, rushing up the slope that led to Chard’s observatory. “Uncle, great news!”
Worried, absent-minded, owing to old age and the problems of the past few months which had so much interfered with his study of the stars, the old man nonetheless had time to spare for his brother’s daughter. He beamed on her indulgently.
“Good news is always welcome! What have you to tell me?”
“Strangers are coming over the northern hills! It must be Wellearn’s people at last! Did you not calculate that their spring must have begun by now?”
“Yes, at least a moonlong ago!” Suddenly as enthused as she was, Chard ordered one of his telescopes trained on the high ground to the north, and exercised an old man’s privilege by taking first turn at its ocular.
And then he slumped. He said in a voice that struck winter-chill, “My dear, were you not expecting the Wego to arrive by sea?”
“Well, sure! But given how many of them there are, perhaps they had to ferry their folk to the nearest landfall and…”
She could hear as she spoke how hollow her words rang.
“This is no question of perhaps,” her uncle said. “This is a fact. The fireworkers’ district is being attacked. If that’s the Wego’s doing, neither you nor I want any truck with them!”
VIII
Heavier-laden than ever before, yet seeming utterly tireless, and with her back sprouting trencher-plants and vines as luxuriant as though this were an ordinary summer voyage, Tempestamer beat steadily southward on the trail which only a briq could follow through the currents of the ocean. Some said it was a question of smell; some, a matter of warmer or colder water; others yet, that briqs could memorize the pattern of the stars though they were invisible by day or cloud-covered at night. After all, maintained these last, a northfinder could be carried anywhere, even in darkness, and always turn the same unfailing way.
But most were content to accept a mystery and exploit it.
Certainly Tempestamer had learned from last year’s storm. Now, if clouds gathered threateningly, she altered course and skirted them without Skilluck needing to use his goad, or when it was unavoidable hove to and showed her companions the way of it, even to locating masses of weed shaken loose by gales from coastal shallows. This gave much food for thought to both Skilluck and Wellearn, who served this trip in guise of chaplain because the passengers they had aboard would not have set forth without one. The former wondered, “Perhaps one shouldn’t pith a briq at all. Perhaps there’s a way of taming them intact. Could we be partners?”
While Wellearn mused, “The directions she chooses when she meets a storm: they imply something, as though the storm may have a pattern. At Hearthome I must study the globe that Chard offered to explain to me, because watching the sky…”
The other captains, though, grew afraid on learning how much of Tempestamer’s weather-sense had been left intact. All of them had had the frustrating experience of trying to drive a briq direct for home when bad weather lay across her path, but rations had run so low that only a desperate charge in a straight line would serve the purpose of survival.