The Knight and Knave of Swords fagm-7

by Fritz Leiber

  “But why collect ‘em?” she queried. Like an old ragpicker, she thought.

  He shrugged. “I don't know. I think I thought I might find a use for them,” he added doubtfully.

  She said, “They do look like oddments that might be involved in casting a spell."

  He shrugged again, but added, “They're not all what they seem. That, for instance—” he pointed at one of three gray spherelets “—is not a pebble like the other two, but a lead slingshot, perhaps one of my own."

  Struck by his thrusting finger, that rolled off the table and hit the terrazzo floor with a little dull yet dinky thud, as if to prove his observation.

  As he recovered it, he paused with his eyes close to the floor to study first the crushed black marble of the terrazzo flecked with dark red and gold, and second Cif's near foot, which he then drew up onto his lap and studied still more minutely.

  “A strangely symmetric pentapod coral outcrop from sea's bottom,” he observed, and planted a slow kiss upon the base of her big toe, insinuated the tip of his tongue between it and the next.

  “There's an eel nosed around in my reef,” she murmured.

  Laying his cheek upon her ankle, he sighted up her leg. She was wearing a singlet of fine brown linen that tied between her legs. He said, “Your hair has exactly the same tints as are in the flooring."

  She said, “You think I didn't select the marble for crushing with that in mind? Or add in the gold flakes? Here's a present of sorts for you.” And she pushed the small flat black box down her leg toward him from her groin to her knee.

  He sat up to inspect it, though keeping her foot in his lap.

  On the black fabric lining it, there lay like a delicate mist cloud the slender translucent bladder of a fish.

  Cif said, “I am minded to experience your love fully tonight. Yet not as fully, mind you, as to wish that we fashion a daughter together."

  The Mouser said, “I've seen the like of this made of thinnest leather well oiled."

  She said, “Not as effectual, I believe."

  He said, “To be sure, here, it would be something from a fish, this being Rime Isle. Tell me, did harbor master Groniger fashion this, as thrifty with the Isle's sperm as with its coins?” Then he nodded.

  He reached over and drew her other foot up on his lap also. After saluting it similarly, he rested the side of his face on both her ankles and sighted up the narrow trough between her legs. “I am minded,” he said dreamily but with a little growl in his voice, “to embark on another slow and intensely watchful journey, mindful of every step, such as that by which I arrived at this house this eve."

  She nodded, wondering idly if the growl were Gusorio's, but it seemed too faint for that.

  8

  In the bow of a laden grainship sailing north from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea to the land of the Eight Cities, the Death of Fafhrd, who was tall and lank, dire as a steel scarecrow, said to his fellow passenger, “This incarnation likes me and likes me not. ‘Tis a balmy journey now but it'll be long and by all accounts cold as witchcunt at the end, albeit summer. Arth-Pulgh's a mean employer, and unlucky. Hand me a medlar from the sack."

  The Death of the Gray Mouser, lithe as a weasel and forever smiling, replied, “No meaner nor no curster than Hamomel. Working for whom, however, is the pits. I've not yet shaken down to this persona, know not its likings. Reach your own apples."

  9

  A week later, the evening being unseasonably balmy and Witches Moon at first quarter near the top of the sky, a hemispherical silver goblet brimful of stars and scattering them dimmed by moonwine all over the sky as it descended toward the lips of the west, drawn down by the same goddess who had lifted it, Afreyt and Fafhrd after supping alone at her violet-tinted pale house on Salthaven's northern edge were minded to wander across the great meadow in the direction of Elvenhold, a northward slanting slim rock spire two bowshots high, chimneyed and narrowly terraced, that thrust from the rolling fields almost a league away to the west.

  “See how her tilt,” Fafhrd observed of that slender mountainlet, “directs her at the dark boss of the Targe—” (naming the northernmost constellation in the Lankhmar heavens) “—as if she were granite arrow aimed at skytop by the gods of the underworld."

  “Tonight the earth is full of the heat of these gods’ forges, pressing summer scents from spring flowers and grasses. Let's rest awhile,” Afreyt answered, and truly although it was not yet May Eve, the heavy air was more like Midsummer's. She touched his shoulder and sank to the herby sward.

  After a stare around the horizon for any sky wanderer on verge of rise or set, Fafhrd seated himself by her right side. A low lurhorn sounded faintly from the town behind them or the sea beyond that.

  “Night fishers summoning the finny ones,” he hazarded.

  “I dreamed last night,” she said, “that a beast thing came out of the sea and followed me dripping salt drops as I wandered through a dark wood. I could see its silver scales between the dark boles in the gloom. But I was not afeared, and it in turn seemed to respond to this cue, for the longer it followed me the less it became like a beast and the more like a sea-person, and come not to work a hurt on me but to warn me."

  “Of what?” and when she was silent, “Its sex?"

  “Why, female—” she answered at once, but then becoming doubtful, “—I think. Had it sex? I wonder why I did not wait for it to catch up, or perhaps turn sudden and walk toward it? I think I felt, did I so, and although I feared it not, it would turn to a beast again, a deep-voiced beast."

  “I too dreamed strangely last night, and my dream strangely chimed with yours, or was it by day I dreamed? For I have begun to do that,” Fafhrd announced, dropping himself back at full length on the springy sward, the better to observe the seven spiraled stars of the Targe. “I dreamt I was pent in the greatest of castles with a million dark rooms in it, and that I searched for Gusorio (for that old legend between the Mouser and me is sometimes more than a joke) because I'd been solemnly told, perchance in a dream within the dream, that he had a message for me."

  She turned and leaned over him, her eyes staring deep into his as she listened. Her palely golden hair fell forward in two sweeping smooth cascades over her shoulders. He readjusted his position slightly so that five of the stars of Targe rose in a semicircle from her forehead (his eyes straying now and again toward her shadowed throat and the silver cord lacing together the sides of her violet bodice) and he continued, “In the twelve times twelve times twelfth room there stood at the far door a figure clad all in silver-scale mail (there's our dreams chiming) but its back was toward me and the longer I looked at it, the taller and skinnier it seemed than Gusorio should be. Nevertheless I cried out to it aloud and in the very instant of my calling knew that I'd made an irreparable mistake and that my voice would work a hideous change in it and to my harm. See, our dreams clink again? But then, as it started to turn, I awoke. Dearest princess, did you know that the Targe crowns you?” And his right hand moved toward the silver bow drooping below her throat as she bent down to kiss him.

  But as he enjoyed those pleasures and their continuations and proliferations while the moon sank, which pleasures were greatly enhanced by their starry background, the far ecstasies complementing the near, he marveled how these nights he seemed to be walking at once toward brightest life and darkest death, while through it all Elvenhold loomed in the low distance.

  10

  “No question on it, Captain Mouser's changed,” Pshawri said with certainty, yet also amazedly and apprehensively, to his fellow lieutenant Mikkidu as they tippled together two evenings later in a small booth of the Sea Wrack. “Here's yet another example if't be needed. You know the care he has for our grub, to see that cookie doesn't poison us. Normally he'll taste a spoon of stew, say what it lacks or not, even order it dumped (that happened once, remember?) and go dancing off. Yet this very afternoon I spied him standing before the roiling soup kettle and staring into it for as long as it take
s to stow Flotsam's mainsail and then rig it again, watching it bubble and seethe with greatest interest, the beans and fish flakes bobbing and the turnips and carrots turning over, as though he were reading there auguries and prognostics on the fate of the world!"

  Mikkidu nodded. “Or else he's trotting about bent over like Mother Grum, seeing things even an ant ignores. He had me stooping about after him over a route that could have been the plan of a maze, pointing out in turn a tangle of hair combings, a penny, a pebble, a parchment scrap scribbled with runic, mouse droppings, and a dead cockroach."

  “Did he make you eat it?” asked Pshawri.

  Mikkidu shook his head wonderingly. “No chewings… and no chewings out either. He only said at the end, when my legs had started to cramp, ‘I want you to keep these matters in mind in the future.’”

  “And meantime Captain Fafhrd—” the two semi-rehabilitated thieves looked up. Skor from the next booth had thrust over his balding head, worry-wrinkled, which now loomed above them “—is so busy keeping watch on the stars by night — and by day too, somehow — that it's a wonder he can navigate Salthaven without breaking his neck. Think you some evil wight has put a spell on both?"

  Normally the Mouser's and Fafhrd's men were mutually rivalrous, suspicious, and disparaging of each other. It was a measure of their present concern for their captains that they pooled their knowledge and took frank counsel together.

  Pshawri shrugged as hugely as one so small was able. “Who knows? ‘Tis such footling matters, and yet…"

  “Chill ills abound here,” Mikkidu intoned. “Khahkht the Wizard of Ice, Stardock's ghost fliers, sunken Simorgya…"

  11

  At the same moment Cif and Afreyt, in the former's sauna, chatted together with even greater but more playful freedom. Afreyt confided with mock grandeur, “I'll have you know that Fafhrd compared my nipplets to stars."

  Cif chortled midst the steam and answered coarsely with mock pride, “The Mouser likened my arse hole to one. And to the stem dimple of a pome. And his own intrusive member to a stiletto! Whate'er ails them doesn't show in bed."

  “Or does it?” Afreyt questioned laughingly. “In my case, stars. In yours, fruits and cutlery too."

  12

  As the Deaths of Fafhrd and the Mouser jounced on donkeyback at the tail of a small merchant troop to which they'd attached themselves traveling through the forested land of the Eight Cities from Kvarch Nar to Illik Ving, Witches Moon being full, the former observed, “The trouble with these long incarnations as the death of another is that one begins to forget one's own proper persona and best interests, especially if one be a dedicated actor."

  “Not so, necessarily,” the other responded. “Rather, it gives one a clear head (what head clearer than Death's?) to observe oneself dispassionately and examine without bias the terms of the contract under which one operates."

  “That's true enough,” Fafhrd's Death said, stroking his lean jaw while his donkey stepped along evenly for a change. “Why think you this one talks so much of booty we may find?"

  “Why else but that Arth-Pulgh and Hamomel expect there will be treasure on our intendeds or about them? There's a thought to warm the cold nights coming!"

  “Yes, and raises a nice question in our order's law, whether we're being hired principally as assassins or robbers."

  “No matter that,” Death of the Mouser summed up. “We know at least we must not hit the Twain until they've shown us where their treasure is."

  “Or treasures are, more like,” the other amended, “if they distrust each other, as all sane men do."

  13

  Coming in opposite directions around a corner behind Salthaven's council hall after a sharp rain shower, the Mouser and Fafhrd bumped into each other because the one was bending down to inspect a new puddle while the other studied the clouds retreating from arrows of sunshine. After grappling together briefly with sharp growls that turned to sudden laughter, Fafhrd was shaken enough from his current preoccupations by this small surprise to note the look of puzzled and wondrous brooding that instantly replaced the sharp friendly grin on the Mouser's face — a look that was undersurfaced by a pervasive sadness.

  His heart was touched and he asked, “Where've you been keeping yourself, comrade? I never seem to see you to talk to these past days."

  “ ‘Tis true,” the Mouser replied with a sharp grimace, “we do seem to be operating on different levels, you and I, in our movings around Salthaven this last moon-wax."

  “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, savored 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.

  Seahawk 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 behavior (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 neighbors, 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.