The Flying Sorcerers

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