The Flying Sorcerers

by David Gerrold

  “Go back?” said Shoogar. “You are jesting. You will not bring this craft down to the ground again until the airgas gets tired of working and sneaks out of the balloons. Besides, we are moving strongly north —”

  He was right, of course. I left him at the railing and moved to another part of the boat. It swayed sickeningly under my every step. Wilville called across to Orbur, “I think we should put the keel back on!”

  “Me too!” he answered.

  “No,” said Purple, “all you need do is rearrange the rigging. Spread it our farther at the bottom. It will give the hoist a wider stance.”

  “The who a what?” they called.

  He sighed. “Never mind.”

  The wind was strong this high in the sky. Idiot’s Crag had shrunk to a spear of black on the horizon. Below us the sea was many colors. Spots were brown and opaque with mud. In some places reefs showed through. There were groves of submerged trees as well, spines of mountain rock, and even a tall cairn to Musk-Watz. You could see them all sticking out of the water. There were churning whirlpools and vast rippling tides, and the surface of the water was gray and foamy.

  Purple was sighting against the sun and marking something on a skin which had been stretched across a framework. Strange lines speared out from the center of the skin to its edges. “It’s a direction-telling spell,” explained Purple.

  We re headed almost directly east.”

  “I could have told you that,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  I pointed below. “See that spine of land there? That’s the way we followed on our migration. It leads directly to the old village.”

  “It does?” Purple leaned far over the edge and tried to follow it with his eyes. I feared for his balance, but even more I feared for Shoogar who watched us with eyes gleaming.

  He straightened then. “Wilville, Orbur! We want to change course. Unsling your airpushers!”

  They nodded and began to do so. First one of the bladed wheels swung down to hang a manheight below the precarious outrigger, then the other on the other side. I shuddered as I watched. I would not trade places with either of my sons. You would not get me out there, with nothing between me and the sea but empty air.

  “We have to come about,” called Purple. Turn toward the west — left about ninety degrees.” I didn’t understand that last, but the boys apparently did. Wilville began back-pedaling while Orbur pedaled forward. Slowly the Cathawk turned in the sky. The red sunlight seeped through the rigging, and the shadows shifted across our face.

  Purple watched carefully on his measuring skin. A small rod stuck up from the center, and he watched the position of its shadow. He called, “All right, stop!” He waited until both airpushers were still, then checked the shadow again. “Not enough,” he called, “another ten degrees.”

  When we were finally pointed in the right direction he gave another order. “Quarter speed,” he called. The two boys began chanting and pedaling. They had removed the extra twist in the pulleys, so that the airpushers blew their wind sternward again and the boys faced in the direction they were going.

  The chant was at a set rhythm, and they pedaled in time to it. Purple watched them for a while, then he peered over the side again. After a bit he said, “Ah.” He straightened. “We are on the right course. We are traveling parallel to that spine of land you pointed out, Lant. If the wind lets up at all, we will try to get directly over it”

  He went to the back of the boat then and stretched out on a cot of aircloth over a wide frame. “You know, Lant,” he called, “if I didn’t have my responsibilities elsewhere, I might almost be willing to settle down here. This is a very relaxing way of life.”

  “Oh, no, Purple,” I reassured him. “You would not be happy living with us. You had best return —”

  “Fear not, Lant. That’s what I intend to do. But I tell you, I have truly enjoyed myself here.” He pounded himself on his stomach. “Look, I think I may have even lost a few pounds.”

  “Have you looked behind you?” muttered Shoogar.

  “Sh,” I hissed. “We are all going to be together for a very long time. At least try to get along.”

  “With him?!!”

  “You didn’t have to come, Shoogar!”

  “I did too! How else can I ever —”

  “Never mind! If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. At least so long as we’re in the air!”

  Shoogar snarled at me and went forward to the front of the boat. I sank down tiredly on a pile of supplies and blankets.

  For a while I watched my sons as they pedaled. It was a funny sight, a bicycle so high in the air — with no wheels at all, yet they were pedaling so steadily, I had to laugh. They glared at me, but kept chanting and pumping.

  Above us the clustered windbags were like a distant roof. Large enough to be covering, but high enough so that they were not oppressive. It was a feeling like being sheltered, but also one of being strangely free.

  Occasionally the boys rested — and then all was silent. That was the most peculiar thing about the airship. Once in the sky, it neither creaked nor shuddered. There were no sounds at all, except perhaps that of our own heartbeats.

  We had stopped rising now. And a good thing too. The air was cold — almost biting. Purple pulled out some blankets and passed them around. Wilville and Orbur were wearing extra layers of clothing. It had been tied to their outriggers so they could pull it on as they wished. They also had water bottles and packs of hardbread. There was no need for them to come into the boat itself at all, if they did not wish to.

  The last of the red sun finally seeped below the horizon.

  “Are they going to pedal through the dark?” I asked Purple.

  “Uh huh. As long as the wind keeps up, someone has to keep pedaling. You see, Lant, the wind is blowing us north-east. If we pedal west, then we cancel out the east and go only north. But the wind doesn’t stop at night, so neither can we. The only other choice is to land — and that means letting air out of the bags.”

  “And you don’t want to do that, do you?”

  “Right. We know the boat will float in water, but I’d rather not have to depend on it. Besides, even if we did come down on the sea, the wind might still push us. So we might as well stay in the air and keep pedaling all night. The boys know how to pace themselves. As long as we stay near that spine of land under the water, I won’t worry.”

  In the dark the steady chanting and pumping was an eerie thing — coming, as it did, from outside the boat. Fortunately, the time till blue dawn was little more than an hour away — we would have naught but a brief flash of darkness at this time of year. Followed by seventeen hours of pure blue sunlight, an hour of double sunlight, and another seventeen hours of red sunlight. Then darkness again. Later in the year the darknesses would stretch, as would the times of double sunlight. The single-sun hours would shrink as the suns moved closer and closer in the sky — toward the inevitable red conjunction.

  We pedaled on through the darkened sky.

  Far to the east the horizon’s edge was limned by a faint blue glow. Blue Ouells was sneaking up behind it, soon to shout and leap and flash brightly over the edge.

  Below, the sea was a dark platter, greasy and wrinkled. A cold wind whipped around us. I pulled my blanket tighter against it. The boat rocked gently. The swollen balloons seemed motionless above; the sea motionless and flat so far below.

  My sons pedaled steadily. I fancied I could see the churned air stretching out in a line behind us, but that way was as dark as the way ahead. Their pumping was a steady sound, sensed rather than heard — constant vibration filled the boat.

  And then it was morning, sharp and blue — bright Ouells was a pinpoint at the edge of the world, sleeting light sideways across our eyes.

  Wilville and Orbur rested then, while Purple sighted for the spine of land under the water. It was a barren range of hills, barely higher than the land around it. Beneath the risen ocean it would
appear with a lighter color.

  At first he thought we had lost it, then sighted it off to our right. Apparently, during the dark, the wind had slackened somewhat. The boys, having no way of knowing this, had kept pedaling, and so had carried us farther west than Purple had wanted us to go.

  Fortunately the wind was still blowing northeast, so Purple told Wilville and Orbur that they could rest until such time as we were again over our guide. The boys climbed into the boat, but did not remove their waist ropes until they were safely inside.

  They sucked eagerly at a skin of Quaff, passing it back and forth between them, then each stretched out on a cloth-lined framework, the Cathawk’s equivalent of a cot. Within moments they were asleep.

  I picked my way forward, past bundles of supplies. Shoogar was just stretching and yawning. He greeted me with a surly grunt.

  “Haven’t you slept,” I asked.

  “Of course not, Lant. We only had an hour of darkness. I was watching for the moons. The moons,” he yawned grumpily, “I need the moons.”

  “Shoogar,” I said, “you do not need the moons —”

  “Yes, I do — do you want me to lose my duel?”

  I could see that he was unapproachable. “Go aft,” I said. “Go aft and get some sleep.”

  He was fumbling in his sleeve, but all he found was a damp husk-ball. “Curse it,” he said, “they ruined it, your sons ruined it. I had hoped it would dry out, but —” he shrugged and tossed the sodden mass over the side. “I’m going to sleep, Lant,” he mumbled and tottered off.

  I moved to the front of the boat and peered out. Here was a view, unobstructed by either balloons or rigging. I was suspended above a silvery-blue sea, miles above it. I seemed to be floating in silence. The stillness was overpowering. Deafening.

  The air was crisp and, at the same time, hot. Blue Ouells was already heating up the day.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I looked around. Purple had come up beside me. He placed his hands on the rail and looked out at the ocean blueness on all sides. “I love the way it changes,” he said. “The changing light of the suns keeps changing the look of the water.”

  I nodded. I did not particularly feel like talking yet. My bones still ached from the cold of the night, and the sun had not yet begun to bake that out.

  “Lant,” he said, “tell me about your journey again. I am trying to figure out how far you traveled, and how long it will take us to cover that distance in the flying machine.”

  I sighed. We had been over this many times already. It was on the basis of our migration that Purple had calculated the number of balloons and amount of supplies he would need. “We journeyed for a hundred and fifty days, Purple. We followed that range of hills because the seas were rising so fast. We needed every advantage we could get.”

  He nodded, “Good, good,” then fell silent and became lost in thought, as if he were making figures in his head. After a while he brought out his measuring skin again and began sighting the sun. “We will be drifting over our course line again,” he said. “I had better go and wake up the boys.”

  Afterward, when we were again vibrating to the tune of the whining bicycles, I tottered aft and joined Purple for a bite of breakfast, my first meal since coming aboard the aircraft. Shoogar was snoring loudly on a cot.

  Purple bit into a sour melon. He said, “For some time I have wondered, Lant. Why do you call me Purple?”

  “Huh? That is your name.”

  He cocked his head at me, “What do you mean? I knew you had a word for me in your language, but it wasn’t until my speakerspell was destroyed that I found out it was your word for purple.”

  “But you told us that was your name, long ago.”

  “I couldn’t have. It isn’t.”

  “It isn’t? But —” I thought hard. “But your speakerspell said it was —”

  “Oh,” he said, “the speakerspell.” As if that explained it. “Yes, Lant, sometimes we do have troubles with speakerspells.”

  “I thought so,” I said, “I sometimes wondered if it was working correctly. It said some very silly things.”

  “Just what did it say?”

  “It spoke wildly of dust clouds and other suns —”

  “I mean, about my name.”

  “Oh. It said that your name was As A Color, Shade of Purple-Gray. We thought it distinctly odd.”

  Purple looked distinctly confused. He wiped a bit of melon dribble off his chin. “As a color, shade of purple-gray? I don’t see how —” And then his eyes lit up behind his black bone frames. A delighted expression came across his face, “Ah, it’s a pun! A pun!” He began chortling hysterically. “Of course, of course — how right that I should have a translator that makes two-language puns! As a color, shade of purple-gray! As a mauve! Oh, how delightful.”

  I looked at him oddly.

  He explained. “It must have tried to translate the syllables individually, Lant, from my language to yours.”

  “Then Purple isn’t your real name?”

  “Oh, no, of course not — that’s just a poor translation. My real name is —” and he spoke in the demon-tongue.

  At that I felt a cold chill — no wonder Shoogar’s first curse hadn’t worked — he had used the wrong name!

  Behind us Shoogar’s snoring had stopped — he was lying on his back. His eyes were narrow slits — had he heard too?

  The wind had died completely.

  Purple signaled Wilville and Orbur to take a rest while he measured the suns again. “It’s very difficult,” he said. There s no north star in this world, and even a magnetic compass isn’t that much help. I have to rely mostly on the suns to tell me which direction is which.”

  The boys had climbed into the boat again and were thirstily swigging Quaff and chewing hardbread. “Relax,” Purple told them, “because we are becalmed, you can take all the time you need. We do not have to worry about being blown off course.”

  The boys stretched out for a short nap then. Shoogar was up at the front of the boat, offering a chant to Musk-Watz, trying to restore the wind, and Purple decided to climb up into the rigging to check his balloons.

  I climbed forward. So far, this journey had been very boring. There had been nothing to do but sit.

  Shoogar finished with his cantele and sat down on a bench. He began packing away his spell-chanting equipment. “Bung-smelling apprentices!” he cursed. “Forgot to pack my filk-singer flute.”

  “You should be grateful you even have apprentices,” I said. “They have been most hard to come by recently. Most of the young boys in the village want to become weavers or electrissy makers. There are few who want to follow the old ways.”

  “Hah!” snorted Shoogar. He looked at me. “And what will those others do now that the airboat is finished? Eh? There will be no more demand for aircloth, no more need to pump on the generators. All of a sudden there is no more work for them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Last hand I heard Gortik and Lesta discussing the possibility of building another flying machine, a bigger one, to carry trade goods back and forth between the village and the mainland.”

  Shoogar grunted. “It’s possible — but I still have yngvi-infested apprentices. They left out my locusts, my trumpets, my appas —”

  “Then you have not trained them properly, I said. I’ve had no trouble with mine.”

  “Hah, it is not so easy as you think, Lant, to train a magician. I remember my own training —” He trailed off suddenly.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You are right, Lant. I have not been beating them enough.”

  “I don’t understand.” . .

  “Of course not; training a magician’s apprentice is not like training a bonecarver or a weaver. First off, you must beat them three times a day so they do not become presumptuous. Then you must beat them three more times so they will pay attention. Then you must beat them three more times so as to instill in them a healthy fear
of you — else they will carry a grudge all their lives, may even one day turn against you.”

  “That’s a lot of beating,” I said.

  He nodded, “It’s necessary. The greatness of a magician is directly proportional to the amount of beating he had taken.”

  “Your training must have been frightful —”

  “It was. I was lucky to live through it. Old Alger would not rest until he had beaten all resentment out of Dorthi and me. We set over five hundred different spell traps for him. Not one of them worked — he saw through them all.”

  “You mean an apprentice magician keeps trying to kill ms teacher?”

  Shoogar nodded. “Of course, that’s how you get to be recognized as being better than he. It’s not necessary, but it is always tried by the apprentices because it is a short cut to greatness. It is easier than waiting for a formal consecration.”

  “But Shoogar,” I said, “your apprentices — they will try to kill you.”

  “Of course. I expect it. But I am greater and smarter than either of them can ever hope to be — I’m greater and smarter than both of them put together. I have no worries about them. They have not yet learned even how to curse a stream. Besides, every time they fail, I beat them for it, severely. Thus they are inspired to do better next time — it will force them to plan more carefully. They will fail, of course. They always do — but a contest of wits like this is always great fun for a magician.”

  I shook my head. I did not understand many things in this life — and this was one of them.

  I wobbled aft to get some sleep. The boat rocked gently under the swollen balloons, and within moments the cares of magicians had slipped away.

  We spent a miserable hour of darkness drifting, all five of us huddled together at the bottom of the boat. Keeping watch would have done little good. There was little to see but black water.

  After a while Purple gathered his blanket around him and stumbled off. We could hear him pacing back and forth at the stern of the boat, we could feel the pad-padding of his feet through the deck slats.