I continued to stare, frozen.
One of the little moons, the tail of the crooked cross, was drifting out of alignment.
I looked toward the shore. Did Purple suspect?
He was a doll-sized silhouette capering wildly on a darkened mound. Yes, he must be trying to force it back into the sky. Even now as we watched, he was jumping and crying — but this was Shoogar’s home ground.
I glanced over at him as he leaned out the back of the boat. His teeth gleamed as he watched. My sons pedaled furiously, frantically. Our wake was a churning froth.
The moon grew larger.
At first it was a bright dot against the black sky like the other moons — but moving, always moving — faster than any moon had a right to move! Then it was a clear disk like the major moons, red on one side and blue on the other. It was the largest moon in the sky now.
And still it grew!
It should have been sinking toward Purple — should have been. Instead, it seemed to hover overhead growing steadily.
The blue-white side suddenly darkened, now dimmed to almost black. The moon grew faster, and the red side commenced to dim also.
In the middle of the nearly black globe a yellow eye stared down at us.
And the moon grew huge, huge, and huger still!
“Pedal! Curse you! Faster! Faster!” Shoogar and I were both screaming.
He had miscalculated, the blithering toad — a moon is too big a thing for one man’s revenge! Its weight would destroy a world for one man’s pride!
And then it was drifting down, down like a monstrous soap bubble — Shoogar hadn’t miscalculated — down to where Purple capered on the black-scarred hill.
It stopped over Purple’s head — and directly over Shoogar’s design.
“Well, don’t stop now!” Shoogar shrieked. He practically leapt out of the boat. “Crush him! Crush him! Another two manheights, is that too much to manage? Arrrgh!” For the moon would fall no further. Instead, Purple was rising, rising toward the yellow eye. He disappeared into it.
“It ate him!” Shoogar was flabbergasted. “Why did it do that? It wasn’t in any of the runes.”
“Maybe it was in Purple’s runes,” said Wilville.
“Yes! He’s right,” I said. “I see it now! Your moon and Purple’s mother egg are one and the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s going home in it,” I said. “Home. I’m glad.”
“Purple? In my moon? He can’t I won’t let him! Boys, turn around!”
“Do it,” I told them. As the boat swung slowly around, Shoogar stamped toward the bow. I followed to reason with him.
“He’s probably going to wait for us,” I said quietly. “He told me he’d make sure we could get home before he left. What are you going to tell him?”
“Tell him? I’ll tell him to get his hairless rump out of my moon! What else would I tell him?”
“And what do you think he will answer?”
“What do you mean ?”
There’s only one thing Purple can say if he wants to keep the moon. He’ll have to say that this is his vehicle; that he brought it down; that you had nothing at all to do with it.”
“But that’s a black lie!”
“Of course it is, Shoogar. But he needs the moon to get home. He’ll have to say it. And as your only witness,” I explained softly, “I’ll have to tell the villagers that Purple denied your claim that you brought down a moon.”
“But it’s a lie, a black outrageous lie!” Shoogar was flabbergasted at the mad magician’s perfidy. “I did too bring it down! And they’ll know it, too! Who will the villagers believe, me or that insane bald magician?!!”
“They will believe their Speaker,” I said.
For a moment Shoogar glared at me. Then he stamped back to the stern to sulk. We were twenty minutes pedaling back to shore.
The great black moon waited for us, shedding yellow light on the sand.
“I never thought he could do it,” Orbur kept repeating as he pulled the boat onto the shore. “Imagine Shoogar bringing down a moon! And he couldn’t even cure baldness.”
“Perhaps he had help,” I said, jumping out of the boat, splashing into ankle-deep water. “Orbur,” I complained. “Couldn’t you have beached it a little higher? Look at my robe.”
“Sorry, Father,” said Orbur. He. gave another tug at his outrigger. “You think Purple brought the moon down?”
“Not by himself. Obviously he had to wait for Shoogar’s spells. But they both wanted the same thing: a falling moon and Purple’s departure. Two such powerful magicians working in concert, is it surprising that they succeeded?”
Wilville came up on the other side of me. There was a splash from behind as Shoogar stamped grumpily from the boat. We turned to look at him.
He returned our stare, pulled himself up to his full height of half a manlength, and stamped forward. He brushed imperiously past us.
“Shoogar!” I called.
He stopped, folded his arms and surveyed the giant glowing sphere at the top of the hill. As I came up beside him, he said, “Let him keep my moon, then, if it will take him home! My oath binds me to drive him from my territory, and that I have certainly done!”
“Well said,” I bellowed, “you’re a generous magician, Shoogar!”
With not another word the four of us trudged up the hill to where Purple waited. His mood was one of frantic impatience — but the lines of worry seemed to have vanished from his face and he beamed with a smile as wide as the world.
We approached cautiously. That great dark mass hung over us like the Doom of the Gods, and we could see nothing holding it up. It was no windbag, that was for certain — it neither behaved nor looked like one.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Purple. “It’s safe.”
We advanced into the cone of the peculiar yellow light that poured from Purple’s moon. It was that same colour that turned green into something eye-hurtingly bright, and I wondered how anyone could stand it for long. The moon towered brightly above us, seeming as high as Idiot’s Crag, perhaps higher.
Shoogar leaned back, back as far as he could, to peer up at its height. Absent-mindedly, he brought out a cavernmouth egg and began scratching a rune into it.
Purple reached behind him then — I noticed a huge stack of items lying there — and handed Orbur a new battery. It was identical with the one Purple had used to charge our windbags, but this one, Purple said, was fully powered. There was no danger at all of our running it down. It would fill more windbags than we could make before it would even begin to weaken. “It has enough power to make a dozen Journeys like this, Lant. This dial, Orbur, shows you how much power you have left in it. This knob controls the rate at which you use it.”
He handed the device to Wilville to examine, and reached behind him for another. This was a large box with a hinged opening on its top. “This is a chest of emergency rations. I have given you five of them. There is enough food here for a one-month journey.” He shoved the box forward and reached again. We crowded forward, interestedly. These are blankets, of course,” said Purple. “You will need new ones for the upper atmosphere and — let’s see, what else?”
He rummaged happily through his pile, presenting things to Wilville and Orbur. One by one he would hand them to the boys, who would pass them on to me. After examining each one, I put them in a stack behind me. His pile shrank while ours grew.
Shoogar was not at all interested. He kept wandering around and around the base of the giant egg, scratching runes on the cavernmouth rind.
“Here are the flashlights, and this is a simple medkit. I have labeled the sprays in here that you will want to use for hairlessness and things. You should be careful with this, even though there’s nothing here that can kill you.” Purple picked up one or two last items, meaningless things. One was a flat folder of odd pictures — Purple called it a book — we would have to examine it later. But Shoogar gasped when he saw it, “Spell images!”