The Flying Sorcerers

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.