“Nobody’s ever needed one. I’ll make one up. Am I not a magician?”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Best magician in this whole spiral arm, and two more besides.” He was trailing off into gibberish. What he needed was another bowl of Quaff. Me too.
We trudged up to the Upper Village, and climbed into my nest. I dug out a fresh bladder.
Purple took the first swig. Somewhere along the way he’d lost his bowl, so he drank it straight from the bladder.
“How are you going to deconsecrate the trees?” I asked.
Purple lowered the skin from his mouth. He gave me a dignified look of reproach and staggered to his feet, “Let’s go look at one and see.”
Somewhat unsteadily, he lowered himself from my nest and together we tottered through the village to one of the largest housetrees — that of Hinc the Lesser. Purple took another swill of the Quaff and surveyed it thoughtfully. “To which God is this tree consecrated?” he asked.
“Um, this is the tree of Hinc the Lesser. I believe that it is consecrated to Poup, the God of Fertility. Hinc has fourteen children — all but one of them girls.”
“H’m,” said Purple, “I would need to deconsecrate it with potions of sterility then, wouldn’t I? H’m, Quaff being alcohol is a cleansing medicine. Yes, Quaff can be used to make things sterile. Quaff should be used in the deconsecration spell. And let me see, we should use the petals of the prickly plant which blooms only once in fifty seasons, and …” He mumbled on and on like this. I took another drink of the Quaff and followed him back to his nest.
He disappeared up into it, still mumbling. A hail of objects, vials, potions and other magical devices began falling out of the nestdoor. “Junk!” Purple bellowed. “It was all Dorthi’s junk. I had to learn the names of each and every — Damn, I’m out of prickly plant petals. Can I substitute?”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Do you want to wait fifty family-making years?”
“No.”
“I don’t either. I’ll substitute.”
After a bit he dropped out of the nest himself, landing unsteadily on top of the by now large pile of spellcasting items. He started gathering them into a large pack. “It’s obvious to me, Lant, that we need to research this a little further. Let’s return to the village and look at the trees again.
Again we surveyed Hinc’s tree. The sun was red in the west. We had perhaps an hour before blue dawn. “Is this a I nighttime or a daytime spell ?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s make it a dawn spell, a five o’clock in the morning spell.” He took another drink of Quaff. The bladder was badly deflated by now.
He hiccuped and pulled out a clay mixing bowl. He began mixing a potion, changed his mind abruptly and discarded it. He started another, but poured that one out too — it sizzled on top of the first. Finally he started mixing powders and things in his pottery bowl.
Pottery. I wondered if I should be insulted.
Purple sniffed his mixture and wrinkled his nose. “Ugh! Almost — almost. This should do it, Lant. All it needs is —” Abruptly he straightened and announced, “I have an urge.” He lifted his robe and looked around for a bush to step behind. There were none. He looked at the bowl before him, shrugged, “Why not?”
There was a hot spattering into the bowl.
“Purple!” I cried, “That is sheer genius — defiled water will make the spell twice as powerful —
He lowered his robe modestly, “It was nothing, Lant. It comes naturally.” He reached for the Quaff, explaining, “I may need more later.” He drank, then returned the bladder to me.
He hefted his spell-potion bowl carefully. “Now, there is only one thing left to do.”
I lowered the skin and said, “What’s that?”
“Why,
I wondered if I should tell him that it was not a prickly plant he was deconsecrating, but a housetree, when suddenly Hinc shoved his head out of his nest and shouted, “What is that terrible noise?” He wrinkled his nose, “And what is that terrible smell?”
“It’s nothing,” Purple called as he came around again. “Go back to bed, Hinc. We’re only deconsecrating your house-tree.”
“You’re what?” Hinc’s neck-fur bristled. He dropped angrily out of the nest.
“Calm down, Hinc,” I said. “Have a drink of Quaff while we explain.” He did and we did. We told him how we were short of housetree blood, how Purple needed it desperately in order to complete his flying machine and leave this world. We told him how desperately Purple wanted to go home, and how he was doing Purple a great favor. We told him how it would only be for a day or two, and then Shoogar would be glad to reconsecrate the tree.
By the time we finished telling him, Hinc was almost as drunk as we.
He nodded agreeably as Purple gathered up his bowl again and began singing and dancing around the tree, sprinkling it gently with the potion. We watched for a bit and couldn’t help laughing.
Purple called out, “Don’t stand there laughing. Help me.”
We looked at each other and shrugged. Hinc dropped the robe he was holding about himself and easily joined Purple. After pausing for a moment to finish the Quaff I did too.
When we had finished deconsecrating Hinc’s tree, we found we had potion left, a lot of it, so we moved on to the tree of Ang the Fish-Farmer and Net-tender. He peered out of his nest at the noise and shouted, “A festival? Wait! I will join you.”
Almost immediately he dropped out of his tree, stripping off his clothes, but Purple had stopped singing. “No, it’s no good — we’re out of Quaff.”
“No! No, we’re not!” cried Ang. He disappeared back into his nest and reappeared almost immediately with another full bladder. “Here, let the celebration continue!”
After we had danced about his tree five times, Ang suddenly turned to me and asked, “By the way, Lant, what are we celebrating?”
I told him.
“Oh,” was all he said. Whatever the magician wanted was fine with him. We kept on dancing.
The noise awakened several other people nearby, and they joined us, with Quaff. We de consecrated their trees for them too, and were about to start on mine — when abruptly we were out of potion. “It’s not fair, Purple. You’ve deconsecrated everybody else’s tree — you’ve got to deconsecrate mine!”
So we made some more potion.
This time, though, we all provided the defiled water.
By this time the sun was close to rising, we could see the blue-black glare of it behind the horizon. Most of the men in the village were awake now and eagerly joining the line to put defiled water into the potion pots — of which there were several now. We passed around the ever present Quaff bladders. As soon as one was emptied, another full one seemed to appear from nowhere. The new arrivals kept bringing them. The wives watched nervously from the nests.
And then we were ready to resume the dancing and singing. We danced and sang around every tree we could, until the sun flashed over the horizon. We danced and sang in the harsh blue light until it disappeared behind a cloud bank and abruptly we were in the midst of a raging rainstorm.
“Hurrah! The deconsecration spell has worked!” We skipped down the slope and began to dance around Purple’s housetree and the seven giant airbags hanging over it. “The Gods are angry! The Gods are angry!” We sang, “It’s raining, it’s pouring! All the Gods are roaring!”
Lightning and thunder shattered the sky — the warm drops felt good against our naked fur.
And then —
A crackle of shattering brightness — our hair stood on end — a giant
