by Fritz Leiber
‘Yes, but where are your feelings keeping?’ Fafhrd prompted. Heart-touched in turn and momentarily impelled to seek to share deepest and least definable difficulties, the Mouser drew Fafhrd to the lane-side and launched out, ‘If you said I were homesick for Lankhmar, I’d call you liar! Our jolly comrades and grand almost-friends there, yes, even those good not-to-be-trusted female troopers in memory revered, and all their perfumed and painted blazonry of ruby (or mayhap emerald?) lips, delectable tits, exquisite genitalia, they draw me not a whit! Not even Sheelba with her deep diggings into my psyche, nor your spicedly garrulous Ning. Nor all the gorgeous palaces, piers, pyramids, and fanes, all that marble and cloud-capped biggery! But oh…’ and the underlook of sadness and wonder became keen in his face as he drew Fafhrd closer, dropping his voice, ‘…the small things—those, I tell you honest, do make me homesick, aye, yearningly so. The little street braziers, the lovely litter, as though each scrap were sequined and bore hieroglyphs. The hennaed and the diamond-dusted footprints. I knew those things, yet I never looked at them closely enough, savoured the details. Oh, the thought of going back and counting the cobblestones in the Street of the Gods and fixing forever in my memory the shape of each and tracing the course of the rivulets of rainy trickle between them! I’d want to be rat size again to do it properly, yes even ant size, oh, there is no end to this fascination with the small, the universe written in a pebble!’
And he stared desperately deep into Fafhrd’s eyes to ascertain if that one had caught at least some shred of his meaning, but the big man whose questions had stirred him to speak from his inmost being had apparently lost the track himself somewhere, for his long face had gone blank again, blank with a faint touch of melancholia and eyes wandering doubtfully upward.
‘Homesick for Lankhmar?’ the big man was saying. ‘Well, I do miss her stars, I must confess, her southern stars we cannot see from here. But oh…’ And now his face and eyes fired for the brief span it took him to say the following words, ‘…the thought of the still more southern stars we’ve never seen! The untravelled southern continent below the Middle Sea. Godsland and Nehwon’s life pole, and over ’em the stars a world of men have died and never seen. Yes, I am homesick for those lands indeed!’
The Mouser saw the flare in him dim and die. The Northerner shook his head. ‘My mind wanders,’ he said. ‘There are a many of good enough stars here. Why carry worries afar? Their sorting is sufficient.’
‘Yes, there are good pickings now here along Hurricane Street and Salt, and leave the gods to worry over themselves,’ the Mouser heard himself say as his gaze dropped to the nearest puddle. He felt his flare die—if it had ever been. ‘Things will shake down, get done, sort themselves out, and feelings too.’
Fafhrd nodded and they went their separate ways.
14
And so time passed on Rime Isle. Witches Moon grew full and waned and gave way to Ghosts Moon, which lived its wraith-short life in turn, and Midsummer Moon was born, sometimes called Murderers Moon because its full runs low and is the latest to rise and earliest to set of all full moons, not high and long like the full moons of winter.
And with the passage of time things did shake down and some of them got done and sorted out after a fashion, meaning mostly that the out of the way became the commonplace with repetition, as it has a way of doing.
Sea Hawk got fully repaired, even refitted, but Fafhrd’s and Afreyt’s plan to sail her to Ool Plerns and fell timber there for wood-poor Rime Isle got pushed into the future. No one said, ‘Next summer,’ but the thought was there.
And the barracks and warehouse got built, including a fine drainage system and a cesspool of which the Mouser was inordinately proud, but repairs to Flotsam, though hardly languishing, went slow, and Cif’s and his plan to cruise her east and trade with the Ice Gnomes north of No-Ombrulsk even more visionary.
Mog, Kos, and Issek’s peculiar curses continued to shape much of the Twain’s behaviour (to the coarse-grained amusement of those small-time gods), but not so extremely as to interfere seriously with their ability to boss their men effectively or be sufficiently amusing, gallant, and intelligent with their female co-mates. Most of their men soon catalogued it under the heading ‘captains’ eccentricities,’ to be griped at or boasted of equally but no further thought of. Skor, Pshawri, and Mikkidu did not accept it quite so easily and continued to worry and wonder now and then and entertain dark suspicions as befitted lieutenants, men who are supposedly learning to be as imaginatively responsible as captains. While on the other hand the Rime Islers, including the crusty and measuredly friendly Groniger, found it a good thing, indicative that these wild allies and would-be neighbours, questionable protégés of those headstrong freewomen Cif and Afreyt, were settling down nicely into law-abiding and hardheaded island ways. The Gray Mouser’s concern with small material details particularly impressed them, according with their proverb: rock, wood, and flesh; all else a lie, or, more simply still: Mineral, Vegetable, Animal.
Afreyt and Cif knew there had been a change in the two men, all right, and so did our two heroes too, for that matter. But they were inclined to put it down to the weather or some deep upheaval of mood as had once turned Fafhrd religious and the Mouser calculatedly avaricious. Or else—who knows?—these might be the sort of things that happened to anyone who settled down. Oddly, neither considered the possibility of a curse, whether by god or sorcerer or witch. Curses were violent things that led men to cast themselves off mountaintops or dash their children’s brains out against rocks, and women to castrate their bed partners and set fire to their own hair if there wasn’t a handy volcano to dive into. The triviality and low intensity of the curses misled them.
When all four were together they talked once or twice of supernatural influences on human lives, speaking on the whole more lightly than each felt at heart.
‘Why don’t you ask augury of Great Gusorio?’ Cif suggested. ‘Since you are shards of him, he should know all about both of you.’
‘He’s more a joke than a true presence one might address a prayer to,’ the Mouser parried, and then riposted, ‘Why don’t you or Afreyt appeal for enlightenment to that witch, or warrior-queen of yours, Skeldir, she of the silver-scale mail and the short dry laugh?’
‘We’re not on such intimate terms as that with her, though claiming her as ancestor,’ Cif answered, looking down diffidently. ‘I’d hardly know how to go about it.’
Yet that dialogue led Afreyt and Fafhrd to recount the dreams they’d previously shared only with each other. Whereupon all four indulged in inconclusive speculations and guesses. The Mouser and Fafhrd promptly forgot these, but Cif and Afreyt stored them away in memory.
And although the curses on the Twain were of low intensity, the divine vituperations worked steadily and consumingly. Ensamples: Fafhrd became much interested in a dim hairy star low in the west that seemed to be slowly growing in brightness and luxuriance of mane and to be moving east against the current, and he made a point observing it early each eve. While it was noticed that the busily peering Captain Mouser had a favourite route for checking things out that led from the Sea Wrack, where he’d have a morning nip, to the low point in the lane outside, to the windy corner behind the council hall where he’d collided with Fafhrd, to his men’s barracks, and by way of the dormitory’s closet, which he’d open and check for mouseholes, to his own room and shelved closet and to the kitchen and pantry, and so to the cesspool behind them of which he was so proud.
So life went on tranquilly, busily, unenterprisingly in and around Salthaven as spring gave way to Rime Isle’s short sharp summer. Their existence was rather like that of industrious lotus eaters, the others taking their cues from the bemused and somewhat absentminded Twain. The only exception to this most regular existence promised to be the day of Midsummer Eve, a traditional Isle holiday, when at the two women’s suggestion they planned a feast for all hands (and special Isle friends and associates) in the Great Meadow at Elvenhold
’s foot, a sort of picnic with dancing and games and athletic competitions.
15
If any could be said to have spent an unpleasant or unsatisfactory time during this period, it was the wizards Sheelba and Ningauble. The cosmic din had quieted down sufficiently for them to be able to communicate pretty well between the one’s swamp hut and the other’s cave and get some confused inkling of what Fafhrd and the Mouser and their gods were up to, but none of that inkling sounded very logical to them or favorable to their plot. The stupid provincial gods had put some unintelligible sort of curse on their two pet errand boys, and it was working after a fashion, but Mouser and Fafhrd hadn’t left Rime Isle, nothing was working out according to the two wizards’ wishes, while a disquieting adverse influence they could not identify was moving northwest across the Cold Waste north of the Land of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. All very baffling and unsatisfactory.
16
At Illik Ving the Death of the Twain joined a caravan bound for No-Ombrulsk, changing their mounts for shaggy Mingol ponies inured to frost, and spent all of Ghosts Moon on that long traverse. Although early summer, there was sufficient chill in the Trollsteps and the foothills of the Bones of the Old Ones and in the plateau of the Cold Waste that lies between these ranges for them to refer frequently to the seed bags of brazen apes and the tits of witches, and hug the cookfire while it lasted, and warm their sleep with dreams of the treasures their intendeds had laid up.
‘I see this Fafhrd as a gold-guarding dragon in a mountain cave,’ his Death averred. ‘I’m into his character fully now, I feel. And on to it too.’
‘While I dream the Mouser as a fat gray spider,’ the other echoed, ‘with silver, amber, and leviathan ivory cached in a score of nooks, crannies, and corners he scuttles between. Yes, I can play him now. And play with him too. Odd, isn’t it, how like we get to our intendeds at the end?’
Arriving at last at the stone-towered seaport, they took lodgings at an inn where badges of the Slayers’ Brotherhood were recognized, and they slept for two nights and a day, recuperating. Then Mouser’s Death went for a stroll down by the docks, and when he returned, announced, ‘I’ve taken passage for us in an Ool Krut trader. Sails with the tide day after morrow.’
‘Murderers Moon begins well,’ his wraith-thin comrade observed from where he still lay abed.
‘At first the captain pretended not to know of Rime Isle, called it a legend, but when I showed him the badge and other things, he gave up that shipmasters’ conspiracy of keeping Salthaven and western ports beyond a trade secret. By the by, our ship’s called the Good News.’
‘An auspicious name,’ the other, smiling, responded. ‘Oh Mouser, and oh Fafhrd, dear, your twin brothers are hastening toward you.’
17
After the long morning twilight that ended Midsummer Eve’s short night, Midsummer Day dawned chill and misty in Salthaven. Nevertheless, there was an early bustling around the kitchen of the barracks, where the Mouser and Fafhrd had taken their repose, and likewise at Afreyt’s house, where Cif and their nieces May, Mara, and Gale had stayed overnight.
Soon the fiery sun, shooting his rays from the northeast as he began his longest loop south around the sky, had burnt the milky mist off all Rime Isle and showed her clear from the low roofs of Salthaven to the central hills, with the leaning tower of Elvenhold in the near middle distance and the Great Meadow rising gently toward it.
And soon after that an irregular procession set out from the barracks. It wandered crookedly and leisurely through town to pick up the men’s women, chiefly by trade, at least in their spare time, sailorwives, and other island guests. The men took turns dragging a cart piled with hampers of barley cakes, sweetbreads, cheese, roast mutton and kid, fruit conserves and other Island delicacies, while at its bottom, packed in snow, were casks of the Isle’s dark bitter ale. A few men blew woodflutes and strummed small harps.
At the docks Groniger, festive in holiday black, joined them with the news. ‘The Northern Star out of Ool Plerns came in last even to No-Ombrulsk. I spoke with her master and he said the Good News out of Ool Krut was at last report sailing for Rime Isle one or two mornings after him.’
At this point Ourph the Mingol begged off from the party, protesting that the walk to Elvenhold would be too much for his old bones and a new crick in his left ankle, he’d rest them in the sun here, and they left him squatting his skinny frame on the warming stone and peering steadily out to sea past where Sea Hawk, Flotsam, Northern Star, and other ships rode at anchor among the Island fishing sloops.
Fafhrd said to Groniger, ‘I’ve been here a year and more and it still wonders me that Salthaven is such a busy port while the rest of Nehwon goes on thinking Rime Isle a legend. I know I did for a half lifetime.’
‘Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colours,’ the harbormaster answered him, ‘while truth plods on in sober garb.’
‘Like yourself?’
‘Aye,’ Groniger grunted happily.
‘And ’tis not a legend to the captains, guild masters, and kings who profit by it,’ the Mouser put in. ‘Such do most to keep legends alive.’ The little man (though not little at all among his corps of thieves) was in a merry mood, moving from group to group and cracking wise and gay to all and sundry.
Skullick, Skor’s sub-lieutenant, struck up a berserk battle chant and Fafhrd found himself singing an Ilthmar sea chanty to it. At their next pickup point tankards of ale were passed out to them. Things grew jollier.
A little ways out into the Great Meadow, where the thoroughfare led between fields of early ripening Island barley, they were joined by the feminine procession from Afreyt’s. These had packed their contribution of toothsome edibles and tastesome potables in two small red carts drawn by stocky white bearhounds big as small men but gentle as lambs. And they had been augmented by the sailorwives and fisherwomen Hilsa and Rill, whose gift to the feast was jars of sweet-pickled fish. Also by the witch-woman Mother Grum, as old as Ourph but hobbling along stalwartly, never known to have missed a feast in her life’s long history.
They were greeted with cries and new singings, while the three girls ran to play with the children the larger procession had inevitably accumulated on its way through town.
Fafhrd went back for a bit to quizzing Groniger about the ships that called at Salthaven port, flourishing for emphasis the hook that was his left hand. ‘I’ve heard it said, and seen some evidence for it too, myself, that some of them hail from ports that are nowhere on Nehwon seas I know of.’
‘Ah, you’re becoming a convert to the legends,’ the black-clad man told him. Then, mischievously, ‘Why don’t you try casting the ships’ horoscopes with all you’ve learned of stars of late, naked and hairy ones?’ He frowned. ‘Though there was a black cutter with a white line that watered here three days ago whose home port I wish I could be surer of. Her master put me off from going below, and her sails didn’t look enough for her hull. He said she hailed from Sayend, but that’s a seaport we’ve had reliable word that the Sea-Mingols burned to ash less than two years agone. He knew of that, he claimed. Said it was much exaggerated. But I couldn’t place his accent.’
‘You see?’ Fafhrd told him. ‘As for horoscopes, I have neither skill or belief in astrology. My sole concern is with the stars themselves and the patterns they make. The hairy star’s most interesting! He grows each night. At first I thought him a rover, but he keeps his place. I’ll point him out to you come dark.’
‘Or some other evening when there’s less drinking,’ the other allowed grudgingly. ‘A wise man is suspicious of his interests other than the most necessary. They breed illusions.’
The groupings kept changing as they walked, sang, and danced—and played—their way up through the rustling grass. Cif took advantage of this mixing to seek out Pshawri and Mikkidu. The Mouser’s two lieutenants had at first been suspicious of her interest in and influence over their captain—a touch of jealousy, no doubt—but ho
nest dealing and speaking, the evident genuineness of her concern, and some furtherance of Pshawri’s suit to an Island woman had won them over, so that the three thought of themselves in a limited way as confederates.
‘How’s Captain Mouser these days?’ she asked them lightly. ‘Still running his little morning checkup route?’
‘He didn’t today,’ Mikkidu told her.
‘While yesterday he ran it in the afternoon,’ Pshawri amplified. ‘And the day before that he missed.’
Mikkidu nodded.
‘I don’t fret about him o’er much,’ she smiled at them, ‘knowing he’s under watchful and sympathetic eyes.’
And so with mutual buttering up and with singing and dancing the augmented holiday band arrived at the spot just south of Elvenhold that they’d selected for their picnic. A portion of the food was laid out on white-sheeted trestles, the drink was broached, and the competitions and games that comprised an important part of the day’s program were begun. These were chiefly trials of strength and skill, not of endurance, and one trial only, so that a reasonable or even somewhat unreasonable amount of eating and drinking didn’t tend to interfere with performance too much.
Between the contests were somewhat less impromptu dancings than had been footed earlier: island stamps and flings, old-fashioned Lankhmar sways, and kicking and bouncing dances copied from the Mingols.
Knife-throwing came early—‘so none will be mad drunk as yet, a sensible precaution,’ Groniger approved.
The target was a yard section of mainland tree trunk almost two yards thick, lugged up the previous day. The distance was fifteen long paces, which meant two revolutions of the knife, the way most contestants threw. The Mouser waited until last and then threw underhand as a sort of handicap, or at least seeming handicap, against himself, and his knife embedded deeply in or near the centre, clearly a better shot than any of the earlier successful ones, whose points of impact were marked with red chalk.