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.
“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.