“Bring me the briq you want to swim to heaven on, and I will personally pith her! Me, with a northfinder I can trust and Tempestamer under me, I’ll be content. Now let’s go find a herd of wild briqs and start recruiting our new fleet. It’s going to be the grandest ever seen!”
But despite the hotness of his words and the bright rays of the morning sun, the wind struck chill from the north.
PART THREE
THE
OUTPOURING
I
When northern summer ceased, the weight of ice leaned hard on those gnarled rocks which fearful wanderers had named The Guardians of the Pole. Slanting up either side of an underwater shelf that grudgingly permitted the highest tides to wash over it, they resembled prongsmen turned to stone, their mantles drawn aside and weapons clutched in both their claws.
Few were the mariners who braved the channel they defined; fewer still the ones who returned to tell of a colossal valley surrounding a landlocked sea so salt that what ordinarily ought to sink there was buoyed up. It was a foul and poisoned zone, though life endured. Chill and salt conspired to make its growths disgusting in the maw. Desperate commanders who imagined their junqs would nourish themselves off such weed as the water sustained watched in horror how first the drink-bladders burst, then the floats, and finally the major tubules, so they died.
By then, of course, the crews that clung to their haodahs were for the most part much too mad to care.
For a while after the last summer the Salty Sea remained liquid, roiling under hail and gale. At length, however, ice filled the valley and beset the Polar Guardians, shattering the rock they were composed of, and down it sped to gather on the shelf. In a single season boulders and ice were too high-piled for any wanner Sow to pass. After that glaciers shed bergs until the isolated sea was covered; then it froze also.
The last foolhardy travelers who let a poorly-pithed briq carry them into such latitudes, thinking that because they had rounded Southmost Cape they were safe from the enmity of the stars, unaware that the briq knew nothing of this ocean dominated by junqs and was lost and panicking, struggled ashore on a desolate beach with the precious secrets it was their task to spread around the world, and sought shelter in a cave which became their tomb.
II
The water was rising, or the land was sinking. Either way the event spelled trouble for the people of Ripar, despite the work of their far-famed inventor Yockerbow.
Some of the inhabitants claimed that their city was the oldest in the world. Others, more cautious, admitted that its records might have been—as it were—revised, because the rotting trunks of sweetwater trees had been found too far out in the lagoon for them to date back to the age of the alleged foundation, when salt tides rolled a long day’s walk inland and Ripar River was as yet unfed by its giant tributary, the Gush.
It was thanks to the latter’s change of course that the city had flourished. Reason, and relics exposed when mud was being pumped away from the harbor, combined to suggest that originally it had been a mere hamlet, huddled on a narrow flood-plain constricted between dry plateaux. Only when (and this was attested not by legend alone but by recent discoveries) a ball of blazing rock fell out of the sky and blocked the old channel of the Gush was there enough fresh water for dense roots to lock up silt and build a delta, forcing back the sea.
Now a score-of-score-of-scores of people, at the lowest estimate, swarmed along its branchways, got on one another’s pith and cursed and sometimes fought and always schemed to secure more than their proper share of the goods attracted to this uniquely sited entrepot, whether they arrived by junq or were carried by a caravan of droms. The majority cared nothing for the past and little for the future. Their homes grew of their own accord, did they not? There was always sustenance, though it be dull, to be snatched from an overhanging bough or filched from a plot of funqi or—if all else failed and they must endure actual work—dragged up on a line from the lagoon. Fish did not abound as formerly, of course, but even mudbanks supported crupshells and other edible mollusqs.