by Fritz Leiber
Cif turned at that, and there true enough were Rill and Hilsa hurrying toward them through the heather, with Mother Grum plodding along behind, dark figure to their colorful ones. And although it was bright day three hours and more, Rill carried a lit torch. It was hard to see the flame in the sunlight. but they could mark by the way its shimmer made the heather waver beyond. And as the two harlots drew closer, it was evident that their faces were brimming with excitement and a story to tell, which was poured forth on their arrival and on the Mouser asking drily: ‘Why are you trying to light up the day, Rill?’
‘The god spoke to us but now, most clearly from the Flame Den fire,’ she began, ‘saying, “Darkfire, Darkfire, take me to Darkfire. Follow the flame—”’ Hilsa broke in. ‘“—go as it bends,” the god said crackingly, “turn as it wends, all in my name.”’
Rill took it up again, ‘So I lit a fresh torch from the Flame Den blaze for him to travel in, and we carefully marked the flame and followed as it leaned, and it has led us to you!’
‘And look,’ Hilsa broke in as Mother Grum came up, ‘now the flame would have us go to the mountain. It points toward her!’ And she waved with her other hand north toward the icefall and the silent black scoriac peak beyond with its smoke-plume blowing west.
Cif and the Mouser dutifully looked at the torch’s ghostly flame, narrowing their eyes. After a bit, ‘The flame does lean over,’ the Mouser said, ‘but I think that’s just because it’s burning unevenly. Something in the grain of the wood or its oils and resins—’
‘No, indubitably it motions us toward Darkfire,’ Cif cried excitedly. ‘Lead on, Rill,’ and the women all turned sharply north. making for the glacier.
‘But ladies, we have hardly time for a trip upmountain,’ the Mouser called after protestingly, ‘what with preparations to be made for the Isle’s defense and tomorrow’s sailing against the Mingols.’
‘The god has commanded,’ Cif told him overshoulder. ‘He knows best.’
Mother Grum said in her growly voice, ‘I doubt not he intends us to make a closer journey than mountaintop. Roundabout is nearer than straight, I ween.’
And with that mystifying remark the women went on, and the Mouser shrugged and perforce followed after, thinking what fools these women were to be scurrying after a burning bush or branch as if it were the very god, even if the flame did bend most puzzlingly. (And he had heard fire speak, night before last.) Well, at any rate, he wasn’t really needed for today’s repairs on Flotsam; Pshawri could boss the crew as well as he, or at least well enough. Best keep an eye on Cif while this odd fit was on her and see she—or her three strangely sorted god-servants—came to no harm.
Such a sweet, strong, sensible, ravishing woman, Cif, when not godstruck. Lord, what troublesome, demanding and captious employers gods were, never a-quiet. (It was safe to think such thoughts, he told himself, gods couldn’t read your thoughts—everyone had that privacy—though they could overhear your slightest word spoken in undertone—and doubtless make deductions from your starts and grimaces.)
Up from the depths of his skull came the wearisome compulsive chant, ‘Mingols to their deaths must go,’ and he was almost grateful to the malicious little jingle for occupying his mind troubled by the vagaries of gods and women.
The air grew chilly and soon they were at the icefall and in front of it a dead scrubby tree and a mounded upthrust of dark purplish rock, almost black, and in its midst a still blacker opening wide and tall as a door.
Cif said, ‘This was not here last year,’ and Mother Grum growled, ‘The glacier, receding, has uncovered it,’ and Rill cried, ‘The flame leans toward the cave!’ and Cif said, ‘Go we down,’ and Hilsa quavered, ‘It’s dark,’ and Mother Grum rumbled, ‘Have no fear. Dark is sometimes best light, and down best way go up.’
The Mouser wasted no time on words, but broke three branches from the dead tree (Loki-torch might not last forever) and shouldering them, followed swiftly after the women into the rock.
Fafhrd doggedly climbed the last, seemingly endless slope of icy stone below Mount Hellglow’s snowline. Orange light from the sun near setting beat on his back without warmth, and bathed the mountainside and the dark peak above with its wispy smoke blowing east. The rock was tough as diamond with frequent hand-holds—made for climbing—but he was weary and beginning to condemn himself for having abandoned his men in peril (it amounted to that) to come on a wild romantical goose-chase. Wind blew from the west, crosswise to his climb.
This was what came of taking a girl on a dangerous expedition and listening to women—or one woman, rather. Afreyt had been so sure of herself, so queenly-commanding—that he’d gone along with her against his better judgment. Why, he was chasing after Mara now mostly for fear of what Afreyt would think of him if aught befell the girl. Oh, he knew all right how he’d justified himself this morning in giving himself this job rather than sending a couple of his men. He’d jumped to the conclusion it was Prince Faroomfar had kidnapped Mara and he’d had the hope (in view of what Afreyt and Cif had told about being rescued from Khahkht’s wizardry by flying mountain-princesses) that Princess Hirriwi, his beloved of one glorious night long gone, would come skimming along sightlessly on her invisible fish-of-air to offer him her aid against her hated brother.
That was another trouble with women, they were never there when you wanted or really needed them. They helped each other, all right, but they expected men to do all sorts of impossible feats of derring-do to prove themselves worthy of the great gift of their love (and what was that when you got down to it?—a fleeting clench-and-wriggle in the dark, illuminated only by the mute, incomprehensible perfection of a dainty breast, that left you bewildered and sad).
The way grew steeper, the light redder, and his muscles smarted. The way it was going. darkness would catch him on the rock-face, and then for two hours at least the mountain would hide the rising moon.
Was it solely on Afreyt’s account that he was seeking Mara? Wasn’t it also because she had the same name as his first young sweetheart whom he’d abandoned with his unborn child when he’d left Cloud Corner as a youth to go off with yet another woman, whom he’d in turn abandoned—or led unwittingly to her death, really the same thing? Wasn’t he seeking to appease that earlier Mara by rescuing this child one? That was yet another trouble with women, or at least the women you loved or had loved once—they kept on making you feel guilty, even beyond their deaths. Whether you loved them or not, you were invisibly chained to every woman who’d ever kindled you.
And was even that the deepest truth about himself going after the girl Mara?—he asked himself forcing his analysis into the next devious cranny, even as he forced his numbing hands to seek out the next holds on the still steepening face in the dirty red light. Didn’t he really quicken at thought of her. Just as god Odin did in his senile lubricity? Wasn’t he and no other chasing after Faroomfar because he thought of the prince as a lecherous rival for this delicate tidbit of girl flesh?
For that matter, wasn’t it Afreyt’s girlishness—her slenderness despite her height, her small and promising breasts, her tales of childhood make-believe maraudings with Cif, her violet-eyed romancing, her madcap bravado—that had attracted him even in far-off Lankhmar? That and her Rime Isle silver had chained him, and set him on the whole unsuitable course of becoming a responsible captain of men—he who had been all his days a lone wolf—with lone-leopard comrade Mouser. Now he’d reverted back to it, abandoning his men. (Gods grant Skor keep his head and that some at least of his disciplines and preachments of prudence had taken effect!) But oh, this lifelong servitude to girls—whimsical, innocent. calculating, icicle-eyed and hearted, fleeting, tripping little demons! White, slim-necked, sharp-toothed, restlessly bobbing weasels with the soulful eyes of lemurs!
His blindly reaching hand closed on emptiness and he realized that in his furious self-upbraiding he’d reached the apex of the slope without knowing it. With belated caution he lifted his head until his
eyes looked just over the edge. The sun’s last dark red beams showed him a shale-scattered ledge some ten feet wide and then the mountain going up again precipitous and snowless. Opposite him in that new face was a great recess or cavern-mouth as wide as the ledge and twice that height. It was very dark inside that great door but he could make out the bright red of Mara’s cloak, its hood raised, and within the hood, shadowed by it, her small face, very pale-cheeked, very dark-eyed—really, a smudge in darkness—staring toward him.
He scrambled up, peering around suspiciously, then moved toward her, softly calling her name. She did not reply with word or sign though continuing to stare. There was a warm, faintly sulfurous breeze blowing out of the mountain and it ruffled her cloak. Fafhrd’s steps quickened and with a swift-growing anticipation of unknown horror whirled the cloak aside to reveal a small grinning skull set atop a narrow-shouldered wooden cross about four feet high.
Fafhrd moved backwards to the ledge, breathing heavily. The sun had set and the gray sky seemed wider and more palely bright without its rays. The silence was deep. He looked along the ledge in both directions, fruitlessly, then he stared into the cave again and his jaw tightened. He took flint and iron, opened the tinder-pouch, and kindled a torch. Then holding it high in his left hand and his unbelted axe gently a-swing in his right, he walked forward into the cave and toward the mountain’s heart, past the eerie diminutive scarecrow, his foot avoiding its stripped-away red cloak, along the strangely smooth-walled passageway wide and tall enough for a giant, or a winged man.
The Mouser hardly knew how long he’d been closely following the four godstruck females through the strangely tunnel-like cave that was leading them deeper and deeper under the glacier toward the heart of the volcanic mountain Darkfire. Long enough, at any rate, for him to have split and slivered the larger ends of the three dead branches he was carrying, so they would kindle readily. And certainly long enough to become very weary of the Mingols death-chant, or Mingol-jingle, that was now not only resounding in his mind but being spoken aloud by the four rapt women as if it were a marching, or rather scurrying song, just as Groniger’s men had seemed to do. Of course in this case he didn’t have to ask himself where they’d got it, for they’d all originally heard it with him night before last in the Flame Den, when Loki god had seemed to speak from the fire, but that didn’t make it any easier to endure or one whit less boresome.
At first he’d tried to reason with Cif as she hurried along with the others like a mad maenad, arguing the wisdom of venturing so recklessly into an uncharted cavern, but she’d only pointed at Rill’s torch and said, ‘See how it strains ahead. The god commands us,’ and gone back to her chanting.
Well, there was no denying that the flame was bending forward most unnaturally when it should have been streaming back with their rapid advance—and also lasting longer than any torch should. So the Mouser had had to go back to memorizing as well as he could their route through the rock which, chill at first, as one would expect from the ice above, was now perceptibly warmer, while the heating air carried a faint brimstone stench.
But at all events. he told himself, he didn’t have to like this sense of being the tool and sport of mysterious forces vastly more powerful than himself, forces that didn’t even deign to tell him the words they spoke through him (that business of the speech he’d given but not heard one word of bothered him more and more). Above all he didn’t have to celebrate this bondage to the inscrutable. as the women were doing, by mindlessly repeating words of death and doom.
Also he didn’t like the feeling of being in bondage to women and absorbed more and more into their affairs, such as he’d felt ever since accepting Cif’s commission three months ago in Lankhmar, and which had put him in bondage, in turn, to Pshawri and Mikkidu and all his men, and to his ambitions and self-esteem.
Above all, he didn’t like being in bondage to the idea of himself being a monstrous clever fellow who could walk widdershins round all the gods and godlets, from whom everyone expected godlike performance. Why couldn’t he admit to Cif at least that he’d not heard a word of his supposedly great speech? And if he could do that walk-widdershins bit, why didn’t he?
The cavernous tunnel they’d been following so long debouched into what seemed a far vaster space steaming with vapors, and then they were suddenly brought up short against a great wall that seemed to extend indefinitely upward and to either side.
The women broke oft their doom-song and Rill cried, ‘Whither now, Loki?’ and Hilsa echoed her tremulously. Mother Grum rumbled, ‘Tell us, wall,’ and Cif intoned strongly, ‘Speak, O god.’
And while the women were saying these things, the Mouser stole forward rapidly and laid his hand on the wall. It was so hot he almost snatched back his hand but did not, and through his palm and outspread fingers he felt a steady strong pulsation, a rhythm in the rock, exactly as if it were itself sounding the women’s song.
And then as if in answer to the women’s entreaty, the Loki torch, which had burnt down to little more than a stub, flared up into a great seven-branched flame, almost intolerably bright—it was a wonder Rill could hold it—showing the frighteningly vast extent of the rock face. Even as it flared, the rock seemed to heave under the Mouser’s hand monstrously with each pulsation of its song and the floor began to rock with it. Then the great rock face bulged, and the heat became monstrous too, and the brimstone stench intensified so they were all set a-gagging and a-coughing even as their imaginations envisioned instant earthquake and cave-brimming floods of red-hot lava exploding from the mountain’s heart.
It says much for the Mouser’s prudence that in that short period of panic and terrified wonder it occurred to him to thrust one of his frayed branches into the blinding flame. And it was well he did so, for the great god-flame now died down as swiftly as it had flared up, leaving only the feeble illumination of the burning branch of ordinary dead wood afire in his hands. Rill dropped the dead stub of her burnt-out torch with a cry of pain, as if only now feeling how it had burned her, while Hilsa whimpered and all the women groped about dazedly.
And as if command had questionless passed to the Mouser with the torch, he now began to shepherd them back the way they had come, away from the strangling fumes, through the now-bewilderingly shadowy passageways that only he had conned and that still resounded with the dreadful rock music aping their own, a symphony of doom-song monstrously reverberated by solid tone—away toward the blessed outer light and air and sky, and fields and blessed sea.
Nor was that the full measure of the Mouser’s far-sighted prudence (so far-sighted that he sometimes couldn’t tell what was its aim), for in the moment of greatest panic, when the stub of Loki-torch had fallen from Rill’s hand, he had thought to snatch it up from the rocky floor and thrust it, hardly more than a hot black cinder, deep into his pouch. It burnt his fingers a little, he discovered afterwards, but luckily it was not so hot that his pouch caught fire.
Afreyt sat on a lichened rock outside the litter on the broad summit-pass of the Deathlands (near where Fafhrd had first encountered the Mingols, though she didn’t know that) with her gray cloak huddled about her, resting. Now and again a wind from the east, whose chilliness seemed that of the violet sky, ruffled the litter’s closed curtains. Its bearers had joined the other men at one of the small fires to the fore and rear, built with carried wood to heat chowder during this evening pause in their march. The gallows had been set down by Afreyt’s direction and its base and beam-end wedged in rock, so that it rested like a fallen-over ‘L’, its angle lifting above the litter like a crooked roof, or like a rooftree with one kingpost.
There was still enough sunset light in the west for her to wonder if that was smoke she saw moving east above the narrow crater of Mount Hellglow, while in the cold east there was sufficient night for her to see, she was almost sure, a faint glow rising from that of Mount Darkfire. The eastwind blew again and she hunched her shoulders and drew the hood of her cloak more closely against her
cheeks.
The curtains of the litter parted for a moment and May slipped out and came and stood in front of Afreyt.
‘What’s that you’ve got around your neck?’ she asked the girl.
‘It’s a noose,’ the latter explained eagerly, but with a certain solemnity, ‘I braided it, Odin showed me how to make the knot. We’re all going to belong to the Order of the Noose, which is something Odin and I invented this afternoon while Gale was taking a nap.’
Afreyt hesitatingly reached her hand to the girl’s slender throat and inspected the loop of heavy braid with uneasy fascination. There, surely enough, was the cruel hangman’s knot drawn rather close, and tucked into it a nosegay of small mountain flowers, somewhat wilted, gathered this morning on the lower slopes.
‘I made one for Gale.’ the girl said. ‘She didn’t want to wear it at first because I’d helped invent it. She was jealous.’
Afreyt shook her head reprovingly. though her mind wasn’t on that.
‘Here,’ May continued, lifting her hand which had been hanging close to her side under her cloak. ‘I’ve made one for you, a little bigger. See, it’s got flowers too. Put back your hood. You wear it under your hair, of course.’
For a long moment Afreyt looked into the girl’s unblinking eyes. Then she drew back her hood, bent down her head, and helped lift her hair through. Using both hands, May drew the knot together at the base of Afreyt’s throat. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s the way you wear it, snug but not tight.’
While this was happening, Groniger had come up, carrying three bowls and a small covered pail of chowder. When the nooses had been explained to him, ‘A capital conceit!’ he said with a great grin, his eyebrows lifting. ‘That’ll show the Mingols something, let them know what they’re in for. It’s a grand chant the Little Captain gave us, isn’t it?’
Afreyt nodded, looking sideways a moment at Groniger. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘his wonderful words.’