The Flying Sorcerers

by David Gerrold

  Instead, they argued about the Cathawk. Trone took credit for it by saying that it was his generators that made the gas that put it into the air. The pumping crews said that the generators wouldn’t have done any good at all without their effort. Lesta laughed at them both, saying that it was his cloth that had done the job. Nonsense, said the weavers, it was their effort in weaving the cloth. Yes, agreed my apprentices, but they couldn’t have done it without my loom-teeth. Grimm claimed it was his work in sewing up the airbags, the thread-dippers claimed it was their housetree blood, and even the women murmured about the thread they had spun. But the heights of idiocy were reached when the ballast-stuffers claimed it was their sand that allowed the Cathawk to fly — it flew when Purple threw it out.

  It would have been funny; except that they were all taking it so seriously! Ang was making a small fortune selling dried fish — the same kind, he said, that Purple had taken with him on his historic flight.

  The speculation went on about the flight itself. I wondered if they had used Shoogar’s sails. Wilville and Orbur believed that Purple’s airpushers didn’t need sails, but —

  I was bathing in the ocean, on a hot still day, when a shout rose up. The Cathawk is returning! The airship is coming back!”

  I didn’t bother to dry myself, but snatched up my robe and ran for the Crag. Others had the same idea. A great crowd materialized out of nowhere, and streamed up the hill, shouting and cheering. As I rounded the crest I could see it — slender boatframe and great swollen bags bright against the sky.

  I wondered why the Cathawk was flying backward.

  Then I saw that there were no sails. Purple’s method of airpushing had worked! Wilville and Orbur were right again!

  As the boat approached I could see my two sons pedaling wildly on the windmakers, pushing the boat closer and closer. Occasionally one of them would stop or pedal backwards for a few seconds, and the Cathawk would shift ever so slightly in its direction.

  Purple was hanging in the rigging again. He was fiddling with the neck of one of his airbags — apparently he was releasing the gas in calculated amounts to control their descent.

  He was shouting too: “Where is my ground crew?!! Where is my ground crew?!!” The boat sank sideways through the air.

  On the ground, Trone and his men were running around wildly, the big Coppersmith shouting orders, the others trying to take up positions around the landing cradle.

  “Okay,” Trone was shouting. “Bring “er in — right over the cradle — and we’ll grab the ropes!”

  “No! No!” Purple shouted back. “You bloody blind fools! You have to come out and grab the ropes where they fall and pull the boat over the landing rack! Then you pull it down! We can’t control it that fine!” He swung around in the rigging, “Wilville, Orbur, throw down the mooring ropes!”

  Trone shouted at his crew, “Move out! Move out! They can’t get it over the landing rack — we’ll have to do it for them.” His ragged group of men ran down the slope toward the Cathawk’s trailing ropes. They were waving gaily in the wind. Wilville and Orbur were pedaling as hard as they could just to keep the boat in place.

  “Grab the ropes! Grab them!” Purple exhorted the ground crew. “We’ve got to come down on the landing cradle or we’ll snap the keel.” Boys and men were running hither and thither, trying to catch the trailing ends of the ropes, but the constant wind across the Crag kept snatching them away.

  One boy, very light, grabbed onto a rope only to find himself lifted into the air. He let go, and fell back to the ground.

  Other controllers were having troubles too. They would seize a rope only to find themselves dragged across the hill. It was Trone who saved the day, by pouncing on one of these men — four other controllers pounced on top of him, and the Cathawk came to a jarring halt in the air.

  The other ropes were slowed enough then to allow other men to grab them. It was great sport, with ground crew and villagers alike chasing after every rope still waving free, but at last nearly every rope had a controller or two hanging breathlessly onto the end of it.

  Trone released his rope then — there were three other men on it — and shouted to his crew, “All right, pull it up the slope — over the landing rack!”

  Shouting and cheering, the men dragged the Cathawk along, like a child with one of Purple’s tiny airbags. The villagers waved excitedly at the heroes above. Wilville and Orbur had ceased their pedaling and were waving back, big foolish grins across their faces.

  The flight controllers were just positioning the airboat above the landing rack when one of them called, “Wait! — If Purple leaves in this boat, our tokens won’t be worth anything.”

  The others looked at him, “So what?”

  “We’ve got to do something about it —”

  Meanwhile, Purple was shouting, “The landing cradle! The landing cradle! Pull us to the landing cradle!”

  They ignored him while they argued amongst themselves. Trone was insisting that they obey his orders, but the others were too insistent and they ignored him. Finally one of the men shouted skyward, “We’re going on strike, Purple!”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  The flight controllers are going on strike —”

  “The what?!!”

  “We want you to guarantee your tokens!”

  “Of course, of course! Anything —”

  Suddenly we saw Shoogar’s head over the railing. He had a ball of itching balls in his hand, and he was taking careful aim at us below. Three of the flight controllers started to let go of their ropes, but their leader marshaled them back. “If you drop it, Shoogar, we’ll let go and you’ll never get down!”

  I backed away. I knew Shoogar.

  Sure enough, he dropped it. It struck and burst and tiny flecks of black spotted the air, alighting on the nearest people — the ground crew.

  From the air came Shoogar’s voice, “If you want to be cured, pull us down!”

  Some of the men were trying to rub the black flecks away. Others had let go of their ropes and were rolling on the ground. The Cathawk swung out of position.

  Shoogar called, “In about an hour you’re all going to be screaming for a magician!”

  That did it. They swarmed for the ropes and started pulling.

  Shoogar apparently wanted to drop more itch balls, but Purple was climbing down from the rigging and motioning frantically. Wilville and Orbur, no longer needed on the airpushers, slung them up into the outriggers exactly as planned, and began climbing back into the boat proper. They too were remonstrating with Shoogar.

  “No more itch balls! We’re pulling! We’re pulling!” called the flight controllers.

  Shoogar, Wilville and Orbur vanished below the side of the boat. There were curses and muffled noises. Purple was peering over the side and directing the landing manuever, “All right, all right — easy now. Watch the keel, the keel! Pull us to the landing cradle — the cradle! Don’t snap the keel!”

  Grumbling and cursing the men pulled the boat down and into the cradle. They looped their ropes loosely around stakes in the ground. Gradually the boat was hauled down out of the sky. The keel slid into its slot in the landing frame, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

  A gust of wind caught the clustered windbags then, just at the right angle and the wrong moment — there was a cra-a-ack! of bambooze. The keel had snapped.

  Purple leapt out of the boat cursing. It bounced back into the air, but the men pulled it down again. Others dragged sandbags over, and quickly tossed them into the boat. It hit the cradle with a thump.

  Wilville and Orbur got off Shoogar then. They had been holding him down on the floor of the boat. The three scrambled out.

  Even the sandbags were not enough then. A sudden gust of wind caught the boat and swept it down the slope, bouncing and gliding. It was too heavy to fly with the sandbags in it, but too light to resist the force of the wind. It swept down the slope and into the water.

  Ang’s fisherboys had to r
ecover it.

  When he saw it bobbing in the water, its outriggers balancing it gently against the waves, Purple’s only comment was, “H’m, I guess it didn’t need a keel after all.”

  The next few days were busy ones indeed.

  The waters had risen higher than ever, even to the middle slopes of the Upper Village. The tents which had served us so well in our journey across the desert were brought out again, so that affected families could move up to the Crag itself.

  Trone and his crew of ground controllers carried the airboat back up to the Crag. They had little difficulty because the airbags offset most of the boatframe’s weight.

  After some additional modifications and repair work by Wilville and Orbur, the last four balloons were added. This time there was more than enough ballast in the boat, and extra mooring ropes to hold it down.

  We did not slow down the generator teams though. Purple attached the lead wires to his battery, and the output of all four machines was stored in that tiny device. Once I asked Purple about it, and he explained that as far as we were concerned the battery could hold an almost infinite amount of power.

  There were advantages to its use. For one thing, Purple could release power at any rate he chose. It might take two hundred men five days to pump up all sixteen balloons, but if Purple had stored all that pedaled electrissy in his battery, he could fill the airbags almost as fast as we could add water to the pots and change the fittings on the funnels.

  So it did not matter that the balloons up on the Crag were starting to droop. Purple would recharge them just before his departure. He planned to leave after two more hands of days had passed. That way, he estimated, he would have enough power to recharge the balloons two and a half times — maybe more.

  Also, he said, he did not want to recharge the balloons before then because so much stored hydrogen could be dangerous. And this would give him a chance to measure their rate of leakage even more accurately.

  “Danger?” I asked, when he said this. “What kind of danger?”

  “Fire,” he said, “or sparks. That’s why we can’t even take a bicycle type electrissy maker with us. Besides not being fast enough — even with four people working it — it makes sparks. A spark could set everything off.”

  A spark, he explained, was a very small dot of lightning. “Remember the way my housetree exploded?”

  Lightning? Was that what we were working with? Was it lightning that fought back when we turned the pedals of the generators?

  I shuddered — lightning! — Purple was definitely not one for half-measures!

  He had proven it now. While the teams of men continued their roaring competitions on the generators, while Wilville and Orbur tended to the further provisioning of the Cathawk, Purple went about healing every sick person he could find.

  “It looks like I can replace my first-aid kit pretty soon,” he told me. “I was saving it because I might need it myself, but now — might as well make use of it.” He cured Hinc the Hairless and Farg the Weaver; both began to grow new hair. Other men lost the sores they had carried for so many hands of hands of days — Purple blew wet air onto their skins from a tiny cylinder in his medicine kit, and within hours their flesh began to heal.

  He didn’t stop with the men. He cured the wives of their hairlessness too. He treated Little Gortik, a boy of four conjunctions, whose arm had been small and withered from the day he was born. “Forced regeneration,” Purple had chanted over the boy, and had made him swallow two oddly translucent capsules. Now the boy’s bones had gone soft, and the arm seemed to be straightening out.

  Purple moved daily about the Upper Village and among the tents above the timberline, with his spell kit in his hand and a fierce, eager light in his eyes, as if he suspected sick people were hiding from him.

  When Zone the Vender fell out of a tree and broke his back, Purple actually came at a dead run! He reached Zone before the man could finish dying; he sprayed Zone’s back with something that went right through the skin, and forbade him to move at all until he could wiggle his toes again. He was there now, beneath the tree that had nearly killed him, while his wife fed him and changed his blankets. He was not dying, but he was getting terribly bored, and Purple had taken all his tokens.

  They started trading Purple’s tokens for Shoogar’s at a ten-for-one ratio.

  About this time my first wife finally gave birth to the daughter Shoogar had predicted. She was red and ugly and totally bald — not even a fine layer of glistening down-fur. When Shoogar spanked the child to life, her skin gleamed with womb fluid only.

  He took the damp towel I held for him, and began cleaning the child’s eyes and nose and mouth. He handled her tenderly, and there was a strange expression on his face.

  “Is there something the matter, Shoogar?” I asked.

  He never took his eyes off the baby, “As I feared, she is a demon child; but in all my years, Lant, I have never seen a demon child such as this.”

  “Is she a good witch or a bad witch?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.” He maneuvered her around in his arms and continued rubbing softly. From her birthing cot, my wife watched wide-eyed. Most women fear to carry a demon child. My woman had born it stoically — I would have to reward her somehow.

  Shoogar said, “This much I do know — this child must be protected and cared for. Perhaps even treated as well as a male —”

  I stared at him in fear. “Shoogar —” I started, but he cut me off.

  “Lant, I do not know. This is something I have never seen or heard of. We can only watch and wait. If this child is a good demon, then for sure we will want to please her — if she is a bad demon, just as surely we will not want to anger her. In any case, it never hurts to take care in an unknown situation.”

  I nodded gravely. There had been cases of demon daughters before — the children had been treated as sons, named and consecrated, and in some cases even admitted to the Guild of Advisors. But there had also been cases where demon daughters had caused the destruction of whole villages.

  Both situations were rare, happening perhaps only once every hundred conjunctions. I had never expected it to happen in my lifetime though, let alone to my wife.

  When he heard the news, Purple came running. The villagers parted in awe, as his chubby bulk came pelting across the slope. Excitedly, the villagers trailed in his wake, gabbling eagerly. On top of all that had happened to us previously, this new development was merely one more topic for the gossipmongers.

  Purple burst into my nest and stood looking down at my bald red demon daughter. He was grinning all over his partially naked face. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said.

  Shoogar and I exchanged a glance. Perhaps to Purple she was — but to us she was a thing of fear. What did children look like where Purple came from that such a thing would be considered beautiful?

  He approached Shoogar tentatively, “May I hold her?”

  Shoogar backed away, shielding the child in his arms. His eyes glared angrily. Purple looked shocked and hurt.

  I touched his arm, “Purple, will she grow hair?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Will you cure her then?”

  “I can’t.”

  “My apology — I did not mean to insult you, but you have been doing such curing lately —”

  “Anything that will hold still long enough!” Shoogar snapped.

  Purple put out his hands. “You misunderstood. She is not sick, Lant. She is merely bald, like me.” He advanced toward Shoogar again, “Let me hold her, please.” He held out his arms.

  Shoogar refused to give up the child. He shook his head firmly.

  “But she is mine —” Purple said. “I mean, I sired her —”

  “So? Do you think that gives you any special rights? It was Lant’s wife who bore her. The child is his.”

  Purple looked at Shoogar and at me. He had an expression of confusion and hurt.
“I do not mean — that is, I only want to hold her — just for a little bit — Lant, please —”

  He looked so pitiful, I wanted to say yes, but Shoogar only shook his head. At last, Purple bowed his head in sad acquiescence. “As you wish. Will you at least let me insure her health with a —?” He used a word from his demon-tongue.

  “What kind of a spell is it?” asked Shoogar.

  “It is a spell of — luck,” answered Purple. “Luck and protection. It will make her stronger and more healthy. She will have a better chance to gain maturity —”

  At first, I thought Shoogar would refuse. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. I said, “Shoogar, remember, we must please her —”

  “All right,” said Shoogar. “You may approach.” And he let Purple spray essences through her skin with a thing from his medicine kit.

  Purple did not ask to hold her again, and when he left, his step was slow and confused. We did not see him for the rest of that day.

  In all, the villagers did not redeem a large percentage of Purple’s tokens — not even when the sick and crippled began arriving from the other four villages by the boatload. People who were already healthy preferred to keep the tokens, partly because they might be needed for some very strong act of magic later, and partly because they were magic in and of themselves. They would bring good luck.

  After they were cured many of the pilgrims decided to stay on. Intrigued by our flying boat and our electrissy generators, they formed an ever-present crowd of curious onlookers. They began trading for spell tokens so they could bet on the various pumping teams.

  Others came in hopes of joining our growing Clothmakers’ Guild, or of joining a bicycle put-it-together line or a generator team. Still others came to trade, and they were followed by those who prey on those who trade. Others came out of curiosity. They had heard of our flying machine and wanted to see it for themselves.

  Our combined Guild of Advisors had grown to a size almost unmanageable, and there were ominous mutterings from various elements who felt they had been slighted in its growth. Clearly we were going to need some reorganization.