by Fritz Leiber
And still Fingers could not move one.
In the interval the sky had brightened markedly, sunrise was close at hand, and as the cloud-ship sailed away west at a surprisingly fast rate, it and its crew, momentarily less substantial, were suddenly on the verge of fading out, while the music gave way to a ripple of affectionate laughter.
Fingers felt all constraints lift from her muscles. She darted forward, and the next moment, it seemed, was looking down into the very shallow depression wherein the dancing nuns had laid their mortal burden.
There on a bed of new-sprung milky mushrooms stretched out serenely the tall, handsome, faintly smiling form of the man she knew as Captain Fafhrd and toward whom she felt such a puzzling mixture of feelings. He was doubly naked because recently close-shaven everywhere, save for eyebrows and lashes, and those trimmed short, and quite unclad except for ribbons of the six spectral colours and white tied in big bows around his limp genital member.
‘Keepsakes of his six lady loves who were his pallbearers, or dancers, and from their mistress or chieftainess,’ the girl pronounced wisely.
And noting the organ’s extreme flaccidity and the depth of satisfaction in his smile, she added with professional approval, ‘And loved most thoroughly.’
At first she felt a strong pang of grief, thinking him dead, but a closer look showed his chest to be gently rising and falling, and also brought her within range of his warm exhalation.
She prodded him gently in the chest over his breastbone, saying, ‘Wake up, Captain Fafhrd.’
The warmth of his skin surprised her, though not enough to make her think of fever.
The smoothness of his skin truly startled her. It was shaved more closely than she’d thought possible, with sharpest eastern steel. Bending down just as the new-risen sun sent out a wave of brightness, she could see only the faintest copper-pink flecks as of fresh-scoured metal. Yesterday she’d noticed gray and white hairs among the red. He’d merited Gale’s ‘Uncle’ fully. But now—the effect was of rejuvenation, the skin looked babyish, fair as hers was. He continued to smile in his sleep.
Fingers gripped him firmly by the shoulders and shook him.
‘Wake up, Captain Fafhrd,’ she cried. ‘Arise and shine!’ Then, in an impish mood, irked by this smile, which now began to seem merely foolish and stupid, ‘Cabingirl Fingers reporting for duty.’
She knew that was wrong as soon as she heard herself utter it, when in response to her shaking he reared up into a sitting position, though without opening his eyes or changing expression. Suddenly these things became frightening.
To give herself time to think about the situation and consider what to do next, Fingers returned to fetch his robe from where she’d left it spread out on the wet grass back at the moondial. She doubted he’d want to be seen naked, and certainly not wearing his ladies’ colours. Yet the sun was up and at any moment Gale, Afreyt, or some visitor might appear.
‘For although your ladies playing nuns had every right to mark you as their lover—seeing you’d been most free (I think) with all of them, that does not mean I have to go along with their naughty joke, though I do think it funny,’ the girl said as she came hurrying with his robe, speaking aloud because she thought he really did still sleep and wanted in any case to check upon this fact.
In the interval she had jumped to the rather romantic conclusion that Fafhrd was in the situation of the Handsome Tranced One, a male equivalent of Sleeping Beauty in Lankhmar legend—a youth with a sleep spell on him that can be lifted only by his true love’s kiss.
Which at once suggested to Fingers that she convey the sleeping (and strangely transformed, even frightening) hero to the Lady Afreyt for the reviving kiss.
After all, they had been introduced to her as lovers (and proper gentlefolk) except for Fafhrd’s straying with the naughty nuns, which was the sort of straying to be expected of men, according to her mother’s teaching. Moreover he’d been under all the strain of directing the search for his comrade Captain who’d slipped underground.
Surely to bring Fafhrd and Afreyt back together would be a most proper return for all the courtesies they’d shown her, beginning with her rescue from Weasel.
Back at the mushroom bed Fafhrd had made no further progress toward awakening. So she draped the sun-warmed robe around him, gently urging him by words and assisting movements to don it.
‘Arise, Captain Fafhrd,’ she suggested, ‘and I will help you into your robe and then to some shadowed and comfortable spot where you may have your full sleep out.’
When with some repetitions of this routine and patter she’d got him up (safely asleep on his feet, as it were) with his robe belted about him so his colourful honours were completely concealed—and a long look around showed they were still unobserved—she breathed a sigh of relief and set about to lead him back to Cif’s house using the same methods.
But they’d got no farther than the moondial when it occurred to Fingers to ask herself, Where’s everyone?
It was a question easier to ask than answer.
You’d think after the second great weather change, every last soul would be out to see, soaking in the heat and talking about the wonder.
Yet wherever you looked there wasn’t a person to be seen or heard. It was eerie.
All yesterday the digging for Captain Mouser had kept up a steady traffic between the diggings, the barracks, and Cif’s place. Today no trace of that since Cif’s departure by moonlight hours ago.
It was as if Fafhrd’s sleep spell were on everyone in Salthaven save herself. Maybe it was.
And the somnambulistic spell on Fafhrd was a lot stronger than she’d judged at first. Here, he and she were halfway back to Cif’s and it showed no signs of falling off.
She began to doubt the power of Afreyt’s kiss to dispel it. Perhaps it would be better if he had his full sleep out, as she’d been suggesting to him in her patter.
And what if Afreyt didn’t go for her idea of the Handsome Tranced One and the revivifying kiss? Or tried it and it didn’t? And then they both tried to wake Fafhrd and couldn’t? And Lady Afreyt blamed her for that?
Suddenly she lost all faith in the ideas that had seemed so brilliant to her moments before. Getting Fafhrd back to full sleep again (as she had been promising him over and over in her patter) as soon as they’d reached a suitable place for that seemed the thing to do. She recalled an infallible sleep spell her mother had taught her. The sooner she recited it to Fafhrd, the better. Fully asleep again, he’d no longer be her responsibility.
Perhaps it would work on her too—and perhaps that was just what she needed to straighten her out—a good sleep.
The idea of falling asleep with Captain Fafhrd seemed vastly attractive.
They’d just got back to Cif’s without encountering anyone. She was relieved to find the door ajar. She thought she’d closed it.
Stopping her soft talk to Fafhrd, but keeping up a pressure on his arm, she worked the thick door open and guided him inside. The house was silent, she was pleased to find, and Captain Fafhrd, being barefoot, made no more noise than she.
Then, as they were halfway across the kitchen, nearer the cellar stairs than those to the second floor (or the sauna door), she heard footsteps overhead in Cif’s bedroom. Afreyt’s, she thought.
She decided at once on flight and chose the cellar because it was nearest and also the place where she had first met Fafhrd. She stuck with her choice because the Northerner responded instantly to her silent guidance, as if it would have been his choice too.
And then they were down in the cellar and the die was cast—simply a matter of whether the firm, decisive footsteps of Afreyt followed him down into the cellar or did not. Fingers had led him out of the space at the foot of the stairs visible from the kitchen and sat him down on the bench facing the large square of unpaved loamy earth, illuminated, she now saw, by one of the long-lasting cool leviathan-oil lamps. But she dared not turn that off now, no matter how unsuitable for slee
ping, for if Afreyt saw the light dim in the cellar, she’d surely come down to investigate.
The footsteps finished the upper stairs, came five paces across the kitchen, and then stopped dead. Had she noticed the light on in the cellar and would she come down to turn it off?
But moments gave way to seconds and seconds to minutes, or at least lengthened unendurably, and still there’d been no sound. It was as if Afreyt had died up there or just evaporated. Until Fingers, to stop herself growing tired or numb and getting a crick in her neck or shoulder and making a violent involuntary move, edged forward step by silent step and seated herself on the bench beside the northern Captain, facing away from the unpaved square of earth.
She felt herself growing more and more tired, forgot about Afreyt hearing, and hastened to recite the sleep spell softly so that she and Captain Fafhrd would receive the full benefit of it.
Meanwhile something very interesting and quite unsuspected by Fingers had actually been happening to Afreyt.
She had wakened alone just before dawn and heard the thaw, opened the window overlooking the headland and moondial just in time to observe the wondrous sailing of the Arilian moon pinnace with Fafhrd’s mistress and her naughty train, and heard the last notes of the quick march give way to the ripple of derisive laughter.
Thereafter, Afreyt had watched from the distance the tricksy and ambitious cabingirl Fingers seemingly rouse, then robe her magically rejuvenated father (for the woman had noted many other resemblances between parent and offspring besides hair colour), and then work their way at leisure back to Cif’s place, getting their two stories straight, thought Afreyt, but above all murmuring of their great incestuous love (for after all, what else did they really have to talk about?), and while Fafhrd’s lady was thus reacting to their manifold treacheries, she furiously laced on her shoes and belted her robe and hurried downstairs to confront the miscreants.
When she found them gone, Afreyt made the deduction Fingers had anticipated about the cellar light. She thought for a moment, then to surprise them, knelt and silently undid the shoes she had so furiously laced, stepped out of them and tiptoed downstairs without a sound.
But when she stepped out suddenly into full view she found them both faced away from her on the bench, gazing at the unpaved square of earth, Fafhrd resting his head against Fingers’s chest, ‘lying in her lap,’ as it’s expressed, just as the girl started to recite in a small bell-like voice what she thought was her mother’s sleep spell but was in truth, as she had inadvertently revealed to Gale and Afreyt the second morning of the cold by reciting its last five individually harmless lines, the direst of Quarmallian death spells taught her under hypnosis by the infinitely vengeful and devious Lord Quarmal of Quarmall.
‘Call for the robin red breast and the wren
Since o’er shady groves they hover
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And safe from any savage hurt or harm…’7
As Afreyt heard Fingers recite the first of those eight lines, she saw emerge vertically upward from the soft earth of the left forefront of the unpaved square a small serpent’s head or tentacle tip, followed almost at once close to either side by a second and third at the same even rate, then a short fourth in line at the same short distance to the left, and lastly a thick fifth erecting alone two inches in front of the rest, and then she saw that the four serpents’ heads or tentacles were joined at their bases to a palm, and taken with the thick separate member, constituted the fingers and thumb of a buried hand digging itself upward and bursting from the ground, while down off it the revealing earth sifted and tumbled.
As Afreyt, all a-shiver at this prodigy, listened to the recitation of the innocuous-seeming second and third lines and realized that the situation must be different, with Fafhrd playing a more passive role than she’d suspected, a second and larger emergence started, that of a head behind and to the right of the hand and with its hairy earth-mired crown beginning at the level of the palm.
The forward-facing brow, as it emerged at the same even rate as had the hand, showed more bright yellow in its illumination than white leviathan light would account for, which reminded Afreyt of Cif’s dream of the Mouser wearing a glowing yellow mask and was Afreyt’s first clue to the identity of the underground traveller. By now it was apparent that the escaping hand was attached to and directed by the rising head, and Afreyt, shaking with terror at the unnatural sight, at least need not fear the dartings, scuttlings, and gropings of a hostile, detached, and independently roving hand.
As she heard the child’s clear little voice recite the somewhat sinister fourth line of the Quarmallian death spell, which Afreyt already suspected to be something of the sort (which Fingers did not as yet), the eyes beneath the rising brow came into view and opened wide.
Afreyt at once recognized the gray eyes of the Mouser, saw that they were fixed upon Fafhrd and full of fear for him and that it was the very fear of death. At that moment she would have given a great deal to know whether Fafhrd’s own eyes were open or closed, if the Mouser had made his deduction from the expression in them or from his comrade’s extreme pallor or other physical symptom. She did not think (at least as yet) of getting up and looking for herself—her awe of what was happening, rather than her fear (though that was great) kept her frozen.
As a matter of fact his eyes were closed with the spell’s workings, which operated by degrees, line by line, from sleep to death.
Fingers, reciting the death spell Quarmal had taught her hypnotically after her kidnapping and which she now thought of as a sleep spell of her mother’s (as he’d told her ’twas) saw the same figure emerging from the earth that Afreyt did, but it did not catch her interest. She hoped it would not interfere with her recital of the spell and its working on Fafhrd and herself. Perhaps it was the beginning of a dream they’d share.
The Mouser had last lost consciousness underground spying on old Quarmal’s buried map room and chamber of necromancy while asking himself questions about Rime Isle.
He came to awareness now with head, shoulders, and one arm emerged into a familiar cellar on the latter island and with the answers to his questions in plain view: Fafhrd dying in the arms and against the breasts of his daughter by (the Quarmallian) slave girl Friska, and the child’s unwitting recitation of the death spell.
Who else could be the assassin indicated by the lone red dot on Quarmal’s world map? And so what Mouser must do at once to save his dearest friend from life’s worst ill—even before Mou inhaled the unrationed breaths he longed to, stretched the cramped muscles, or tasted the wine for which his dry throat cried—was to countermand that death spell by snapping his fingers thrice as he’d just now seen Quarmal do to stay the instructional assassination of his son Igwarl by the latter’s sister Issa.
And, if Mou knew anything about the rules of magic and the ways of Quarmal, those snaps must be perfectly executed, delivered without delay, and loud as thundercracks—or else he could go whistle for Faf’s life forevermore.
And so it happened that as Afreyt listened to Fingers recite the idyllic fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth lines of the spell (but getting closer to the nasty ones she’d ‘spelled’ to them in her fatigue the second morning of the cold), the Rime Isle woman was puzzled and nonplussed to see the earth-traveller—just as there rose into view Mouser’s mouth set in a narrow slit for air scavenging—wave his limply held free hand vigorously, as if it were a dusting rag from which he shook the dirt, and then carefully settle the pad at end of his middle finger against the ball of his thumb above ring and little finger bent back against the palm, and against which the poised and powerfully tensed middle finger now flashed down.
It was, quite simply, the loudest fingersnap she’d ever heard. So might a most impatient god s
ummon a reprehensibly straying angel.
And as if that prodigious snap were not enough to prove whatever point was being contested, it was followed with preternatural swiftness by not one, but two repetitions of the same sound, each one a little louder than the previous one, which as any knowledgeable gambler knows, is not a bet to be backed, an achievement to set a wager on.
The Mouser’s fingerbolts had their desired effect on the others in the cellar, including their sender.
They brought Afreyt to her feet. Fingers was silenced, Quarmal’s death spell cancelled. The bell tones ceased to sound, the cabingirl fell backward. Fafhrd collapsed, sank sidewise against her.
This should have made it easier for Afreyt to see the Mouser, but it didn’t. The effort he’d put into his fingerbolts had taken it out of him. As if time had been turned back to that night of full Satyrs Moon on Gallows Hill, his outline grew fainter, the steady leviathan light flickered, his emergence slowed and stopped, without reaching his waist, and he began to slip backward into the earth.
His eyes fixed on Afreyt’s most dolefully. His lips opened and a low moaning came out, such as a ghost utters at cockcrow, infinitely sad.
Afreyt plunged to her knees before the unpaved square. Her grasping digging hands encountered only loose dirt. She clambered to her feet and turned back to the fallen figures.
The man with the child’s skin and the child lay as if dead. But a closer inspection showed them to be but sleeping.
(7) The White Devil by John Webster, Act V, Scene 4. Sometimes called Cornelia’s dirge, this ends in the play:
‘To rear him hillocks, that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig him up again.’