The Flying Sorcerers

strongest teeth possible.”

“I will carve you better ones out of bone.”

“Bone!” The old man was horrified. “You would desecrate the cloth with the soul of an animal? Cloth comes from trees and fiberplants. You must use the teeth of the tree, not the teeth of the animal.”

“But I can carve teeth four or five times as fine as these!”

At that Purple’s head perked up. “You can? Lant, that will be great. That would be almost as fine a weave as we need.”

“Hah!” said Lesta. “I can achieve a weave that fine already — if I wanted to.”

“How would you do that?” I demanded.

“I would compact the weave, that’s all.”

“Compact the weave?” asked Purple.

He nodded, “It is a simple process. We use the same number of threads, but we press them inward so they take up less width. You see that loom over there?”

We looked. The framework had a half-finished piece of cloth on it. It was a small piece of cloth, less than one half the width of the loom, but at its edges the threads stretched and spread evenly to every tooth on the frame.

“There,” said Lesta, “that cloth is compacted. You want a fine weave? That is how we will get it.”

Purple had gone over to examine the cloth.

Lesta followed. I jumped down from the platform and ragtagged over. Lesta was saying, “Of course, if we compact it, you won’t have as wide a cloth as —”

“I’m not concerned about its width,” Purple said. “If necessary we’ll weave more of it. I’m concerned about its tightness.”

Lesta shrugged. “As you will.”

Purple turned to him. “If Lant were to carve new loomteeth out of bone, could you compact that weave as well?”

“Of course — you can compact any weave you want,” said Lesta. “But you will not use bone on my looms,”

“But it’s the only way —”

There will be no bone teeth on my looms,” repeated the weaver.

Shoogar was standing right behind him. He said, “Do you want to get hit with the termite blight?”

The old man paled. He whirled on Shoogar, “You wouldn’t.”

Shoogar was rolling up his sleeves, “Want me to try…?”

“Uh —” Lesta eyed him warily. Obviously he didn’t. He took a step back, then another, a third and he bumped into Purple. He jumped away and looked at us, glanced nervously at his looms, then said, “Well, I suppose I should keep up with the latest developments in the craft, shouldn’t I …?”

“A wise decision, old man!” Purple boomed. He clapped the weaver on the back. “I am glad that is settled. Lant will begin carving the new teeth immediately.”

I was delighted. If nothing else, I would unload most of that runforit skeleton after all. What luck! The carving of the teeth would take care of most of the flat bones and all I’d have to worry about then would be the hundred and twenty-eight ribs.

Now, let’s see, I’d probably still have to sand some of the pieces flatter, then carve slits into them — the best way might be to use a cutting thread to slice very narrow lines. H’m, it would be like carving a bone comb, but faster because I would not have to carve so deep. I could use a framework of cutting threads, and cut all the slots in a section at once. If I measured it precisely enough, each section would be the same as every other one.

The same as every other one — that was an interesting thought! If one broke, you could replace it immediately; there would be no delay in carving a new piece to fit. You could always keep a couple of extras around. That seemed practical. Hmm …

I wondered; I might be able to finish the teeth even sooner if I could find some apprentices — but no, there was not enough free labor in either of the villages. The only thing we had an excess of was women — and most of them were less than useless.

We discussed some of the details for awhile longer, until at last Purple stretched his arms over his head and stared up into the sky. “Ah,” he yawned, “let’s call it a red day.”

“Good idea,” I said. “My wives will be preparing the midnight meal. Tonight I would like to get to it before darkness falls.”

We climbed toward the Upper Village. We were far enough past the interpassage that there would be a period of darkness between red sunset and blue dawn. Shoogar might even get a glimpse of the moons.

“I’m sure we would all appreciate a rest,” I said.

“I know I would,” Shoogar muttered. “I have a housetree cultivation ceremony to perform at blue dawn.”

“Why don’t you come?” I said impulsively to Purple. “You’ll enjoy it”

“I just might do that,” he said.

As we entered the Upper Village we could see Damd the Tree Binder preparing the virgin tree for cultivation. A wild housetree is a thick sturdy giant with pliable limbs; it must be bound and strengthened before it can hold a house. The lowest branches must be softened and treated, and then bent into the ground to grow into roots. The upper branches must be twined together to form a cradle for the nest. Within a hand of days the nest weaver can begin his work.

At Wilville and Orbur’s insistence, Purple ate with me and my family. Ordinarily, I would never have invited him anywhere near my nest, but the alternative was to publicly refuse — and that might have offended the men of the Lower Village.

As it turned out, I need not have feared. Purple and Wilville and Orbur were so excited about their project that they spoke of nothing else throughout the whole meal — and we were having fresh sea leeches too! The three of them argued back and forth about methods of construction and the principles by which the machine would work. I tried to follow as best as I could, but most of it was beyond me — at last I had to give up and turn my attention instead to calming my nervous wives. All this talk of flying machines and airbags was upsetting them enormously. The two of them twittered nervously in the background and refused to approach except at my sternest command. Finally, I had to threaten to beat them and refuse them our table scraps.

Shoogar had been invited to join us too, but he had declined. Instead, he had spent the whole twenty minutes of darkness up on Idiot’s Crag, straining to catch a glimpse of the moons. At blue dawn he was furious. Only one of the three largest moons had shown, and that only for a second as two clouds parted. Shoogar had been unable to tell which moon it was.

It was just as well. I knew what he wanted from the sky, and I would be just as glad if he never found it.

Purple had never seen a cultivation before. He stood and watched as Shoogar offered the seventeen blessings in Quaff borrowed from the Lower Village.

Shoogar was relaxed as I had not seen him relax since his confrontation with Purple. It did him good to get his mind off the complexities and unknowns of a flying spell. A cultivation is mostly a simple rote reciting, so basic and foolproof that even the position of the moons cannot change it.

Purple watched politely while Shoogar chanted in his brightly marked robe and heavy headdress, prayer shawl and beads. When Shoogar sprinkled the quaff at the base of the tree, he muttered something about comparative somethings and fertility rites. Demon words again.

At last we reached my favorite part of the ceremony. All of the women and children shed their clothes and began dancing around the newly sanctified tree, singing, and painting stripes round and round the trunk in bright colored dyes. Purple’s interest immediately perked up. “What spell is this?” he asked.

“What?” I didn’t understand his question.

“What is the purpose of this spell? Perhaps you hope to frighten away the red strangling crabvines, or the termite blight, or —??”

“No, Purple. They’re doing that for fun.”