“Here’s your commission from the Council of the Jingfired, boy. You’re to make with all speed for the island Ognorit, and put yourself at Gveest’s entire disposal.”
“Did you say Ognorit?”
“I did indeed. What of it?”
“But that’s south of the equator, isn’t it—part of the Lugomannic Archipelago?”
“You’ve learned your geography well!”—with irony. “But I’ve never been into the southern hemisphere before!” “There’s a first time for everything,” Dippid snapped, and clacked his mandibles impatiently. “And if what Gveest is doing turns out wrong, it would be a great advantage to have the equatorial gales between us and Ognorit! Don’t ask what I mean by that. Just put to sea. You’ll find out soon enough.”
It was by far the longest voyage Tenthag had undertaken, and he often wished that Flapper were as swift as Scudder. But each bright-time she pursued her steady way, and each dark she fed and gathered strength anew. She might not be particularly quick, but she was trustworthy, and never turned aside, not even when all her instincts tempted her to run off with a school of wild’uns, or follow a sharq’s trail of murder across a shoal of errinq, or flee from the suspected presence of a feroq, the traditional enemy of porps. Little by little he was able to relax.
Cronthid went by, and Hegu, and Southmost Cape, and another day saw them entering the Worldround Ocean, that huge sea where currents flowed around the planet uninterrupted by continental masses. Once it had been different; the Great Thaw had altered everything. Tenthag watched the patterns in the sky change as they drove south, and felt in his inmost tubules, for the first time, that he did truly live on a vast globe adrift in space.
He had to apply all his navigational skills to the correction of Flapper’s course; her impulse was to follow odor-patterns and temperature-gradients. He was obliged to ply his goad more often than he liked, but she responded, though she grew a trifle sullen.
Stars he had never seen were their guide now. But he had been well taught, and felt relieved to find his instructors’ maps reflected in reality.
Islands loomed and faded, but he ignored them save to check his calculations. Then came a major problem: rafts of rotting weed, each alive with its own population of wild creatures, and uttering pestilential swarms of mustiqs. Someone had forgotten to advise him that it was the southern breeding-season … though, of course, he should in principle have known. Itching, swollen, worried by the way they clustered on Flapper’s mantle, he was overjoyed when he raised a squadron of free junqs belonging to the People of the Sea. They were much less pleased than he by the encounter, for they regarded the Bowocker courier service as having cheated them of their ancestral rights; for scores-of-scores of years it had been their sole prerogative to trade in information, ever since the days of the Greatest Fleet created by Admiral Barratong.
Tenthag, though, was empowered to issue certain credits redeemable at Bowock and its allied cities, and some of them ensured the chance of pairing. Like every other branch of the folk, the People of the Sea were growing frightened at the fewness of their buddings, so he was able to convince them to part with a couple of spuderlets. Within half a day Flapper was protected from prow to tail by a dense and sticky web, and so was he; it made life easier to watch the baffled mustiqs fidget and struggle in their death-throes. Also they were a useful adjunct to his stock of yelg, and rather tasty.
Then came a storm.
It blew and poured and pelted down for a dark and a bright and a dark, and when it cleared Tenthag was more scared than ever he had been in his young life. He had clung to Flapper—who seemed almost to exult in the violence of the waves—and his stores were safe under her saddle and the spuderlets had made themselves a shelter out of their own web-stuff, and all seemed properly in order but for one crucial point:
Where had the tempest driven them?
There were islands low on the horizon when dawn broke. It was self-insulting for a courier to ask the way, but there seemed to be no alternative. He goaded Flapper towards a cluster of small barqs putting to sea under the wan morning sky, their riders trailing lines and nets for fish.