The Flying Sorcerers

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.

“He’s restless and impatient,” murmured Orbur.

“Let’s hope a wind doesn’t come up for a while,” said Wilville. “It’s cold enough without having to go out and pedal.”

I pecked out from under my blanket. Purple was peering upward at the balloons. They were illuminated by the eerie glow of his flashlight. They shone brightly in the dark, ominous and impassive. He was muttering something about hydrogen leakage.

Wilville and Orbur exchanged a glance. “He doesn’t want to land,” said one.

“We’ll have to,” replied the other. “If we have to recharge the balloons, we’ll have to.”

I shivered. Below, we could hear the water lap-lapping, and the occasional splash and groan of a cavernmouth fish. Best we do not land at all, I thought — although, if the hydrogen was leaking, we would have no choice at all in the matter.

I longed for a fire, blessed warmth, but Purple would allow us none — no flame, no fire, no spark-making device of any kind. Nothing that might endanger the violently explosive hydrogen.

Had it not been for the ample supply of Quaff, we would have been twice as unhappy and twice as cold. But Shoogar and I passed the flask back and forth between us, and after a while the sun came out and we didn’t care any more.

Purple sighted our course then, and Wilville and Orbur climbed out onto the outriggers. They turned us in the proper direction and began pedaling across the sky. Purple retired to his sleeping cot in the back of the boat. He snored like an awakening mountain.

Shoogar was grumpy again. The few times he had poked his head out from under his blanket during the darkness, there had still been no moons. The first time of dark, there had been mist. The second time had been clear, but there were still no moons! It was annoying and frustrating: the sign of Gafia, when all the gods have stopped listening.

Shoogar was unapproachable. He climbed up into the rigging, onto a little platform Purple called a bird’s nest, and sat there moodily.

Later, when Purple awoke, he asked why Shoogar was so angry. I told him that it was the moons. Shoogar needed them and he could not see them — I didn’t tell him why he needed them though.

Purple called up to him, “Shoogar, come down — I will , explain to you about the moons.”

“You?” he snorted. “You explain about the moons?”

“But I can tell you about them,” Purple insisted.

“It wouldn’t hurt to listen,” I called.

“Humph,” said Shoogar to me, “what do you know?” But he began climbing down.

Purple pulled out an animal skin and began marking lines on it. “Before I brought my flying egg down, I studied the paths of your moons, Shoogar. Apparantly they are all fragments of one larger moon and they stay close together in its orbit. At least they are all together now. I suppose there are other times when they are all far apart”

Shoogar nodded. This much at least was correct. They change their configurations often,” he said. “But they go in cycles of close configurations alternating with loose ones.”

“Ah,” said Purple. “Of course, they interfere with each other too, and some get lost, and others get picked up from the stream of rocks that follows in your sign-of-eight orbit; but for a while, at least, the moons should behave like this. Especially this one, which is very important to me —”

I stopped listening and wandered to another part of the airship. I am no magician and shop talk generally bores roe.

Later though I noticed that Shoogar had kept the spell chart that Purple had made, and was poring over it interestedly. He had a fierce look in his eyes, and was muttering grumpily and happily to himself.