Yockerbow, after a second’s pause, admitted, “It is in the records of the city that Ripar came close to that.”
“As did our Fleet,” the admiral rasped. “How think you I—a landsider—was able to assume command? I was better fed than old Grufflank, and that’s all! He dreamed away his days in nonsense visions! There was I fit and strong and offering suggestions so practical the captains’ meet recognized the common sense of them. Yet, given a season’s decent diet, any of them might have done the same, and more, for they had sea-experience, while I did not…”
He brooded for a moment; then he concluded, “At least I can say this. I’m still in the domain of imagination and not dreamness; my weather-sense assures me of it, and that’s the sense that fails us last, even though the eye or the very mantle may be fooled. A sweet taste may deceive you; a fair odor; a sleek touch … but weather-sense extends into your very pith and being, and even if you starve it’s last to go. Moreover it’s what leads us to trust out junqs more than ourselves. At Ripar, do they know the legend of Skilluck?”
Yockerbow looked blank, but to his surprise Arranth, standing by as usual but less bashfully than before, said, “If the name is Skilq, we have the same tale, probably.”
“Who swam a wild briq across the western ocean when all others had lost their way, and salvaged something of a now-lost city?” Barratong rounded on her with excitement.
“They say he saved the telescope for us,” Arranth concurred. “All younglings at Ripar are told the story.”
Having dismissed fables of that sort from his conscious mind because his preceptors so ordered him when he entered into adult phase, Yockerbow was acutely embarrassed. He said, “I too of course heard such stories, but in the absence of evidence—”
“To starfire with your ideas of evidence!” roared Barratong. “For me, it’s enough that someone in the Fleet should remember hearing a vague tale! It’s because I want to turn the legends of the past into a new reality that we are here! Those which don’t stand up to present discoveries may be dismissed as spawn of dreams! But anything I take in claw and hold and use—!”
He broke off, panting hard, because he had involuntarily tallened again. Relaxing, he concluded in a milder tone, “Besides if the same tales survive on land as we know among the People of the Sea, there’s a double chance of them being based on fact. Do inland folk recount the stories, too? If so, are they just borrowed from contact with mariners?”
The ebb and flow of talk surrounding Barratong was such as Yockerbow had never dreamed of. Once he dared to ask what mix of ancestry had given him rise, and met with a curt—though plainly honest—answer.
“I inquired about that, right up until I found I was a muke, and got no details; there was a famine which affected memory. And after I discovered that my line won’t take, there seemed no point in pursuing the matter. I can only suggest and instruct; I cannot breed.”
Timidly Yockerbow ventured, “A—a—what did you call yourself?”
“A muke! Take junqs from a northern and a southern herd, and they will mate eagerly enough, and often throw a bunch of first-class younglings. Yet when you try to make the strain continue, it’s like me, and you, and—given she’s tried me and Ulgrim and a score of others in the Fleet—Arranth as well. We call those mukes, and hope against hope the wild strains will continue to furnish us with the next generation…”
With an abrupt shrug of excitement, he added, “Yet there is hope! Suppose our heritage has lain under a mantle of impotence as the northern continent lay under ice: the end of the Northern Freeze may signal salvation for us mukes! I couldn’t begin to tell you why I foresee this; it may be leaked from dreamness to my mind. Still, the border between dreams and imagination might very well fluctuate just as the boundary between ice and ocean does … Oh, time will judge. Now watch the way the land is changing on this coast. Look not just for the flighters that bore back southern seeds when they quested their prey into these waters, because as you know some seeds pass clear through the digestion of a flighter and are nourished by the dung they’re dropped in, nor for what they brought when it foliates and blossoms, but for what lay hid till now when the sun came back and released it … Ah, but darkness falls. Tomorrow, though—!”