Five: Riding the Spume

The Dream was vastness embodied. It was time and space, clotted by backwaters and choked with doldrums.

The distances between worlds were filled with storm and serpent, but the greatest enemy was time.

Ships often languished in the ways and roads, struggling against the vagaries of that mystical ocean.

And so it was that sailors prayed for the perfect spume.

They were currents of dream-stuff that could lift a ship and carry her pell-mell across the void.

The spume that erupted from the Mother Storm looked for all the world like a glowing river that laced a sea of cloud.

It was an impossible thing, beautiful beyond words.

The more so because Captain Marsh and his First Mate, a great Lycian eunuch named Falconer, took a reckoning and found that this particular spume was aimed directly at Melicont.

"It's almost too good to be true," said the Captain.

"Aye, and paid for at a miserable price," grumbled Falconer.

For while the Blue Oriole soared across the Dream, swept along on the current, her crew prepared for a funeral.

The Hoodanese had pulled a sort of gunnysack over his head that was pierced with holes for his yellow-egg eyes.

The sack was decorated with shells and bits of stone that clacked and rattled as he danced.

There were no bodies to be dealt with -- the gyrwights had seen to that. Instead, the sailors had laid out thirteen small bundles.

They were the personal effects of those who had gone overboard.

The children's rucks were pitifully meager: a few haphazard treasures, bound up in bits of kerchief cloth.

There were dolls and faded letters and mementos of their lives ashore, when they had parents and homes and families.

The soothsayer capered around these objects, chanting his Hoodan rhythms and calling out the names of his Hundred-and-One deities.

This was the tradition aboard the Blue Oriole, that those who died would be remembered one last time and their lost futures honored.

One by one, the old man danced forward and snatched up a souvenir in both hands. He held up up a comb or a blurred daguerrotype or a bit of ribbon.

Then he would tell what had been lost:

"This one," he said, "would have opened a tavern on Marspoor and had three bairns."

And then: "This would would have turned to vice and murder and died in Gaitskill Prison."

And then: "Ah, now, this one had poetry in him and would have composed joyous and truthsome songs."

And so on, through the twelve children and the one adult who had died at the margin of the storm.

The rest of the crew looked on, some sorrowful, others impatient.

The surviving children watched from above, dangling like wild creatures in the low rigging. Their faces were hard and weary and frightened.

There among them, with his falsely young face, was Marcus Barkle.

He had seen many a remembrance in his day. He always wondered if the soothsayer was making it all up, inventing these lives that had been pinched off at the root.

"This one would have suffered from lungrot," said the Hoodanese, "but only after falling truly and well in love."

When the old fellow had finished his dance, Captain Marsh collected the bundles one by one and carried them to the rail.

He dropped them over and for a long time, as the spume carried them spinward toward Melicont, there was a trail of debris in the Oriole's wake.

Barkle retreated to his crow's nest. As he climbed the rope ladder, he felt that he had a great burden on his shoulders.

That day, he watched through his spy glass until the last bit of chaff had vanished astern.

Next: Melicont