by Fritz Leiber
Then she found his right hand and drew it into her cloak and, through a placket, under her long coat, and pressed it against her crisply-ringleted lower belly.
‘Guess,’ she whispered, licking his ear.
‘It’s part of a girl. I do believe it’s a—’ he began most gayly, though his thoughts were already plunging wildly in a direly different direction.
‘No, idiot, it’s something that belongs to you,’ the wet whisper coached.
The dire direction became an iced chute leading toward certainty. Nevertheless he said bravely, ‘Well, I’d hoped you hadn’t been trying out others, though that’s your right. I must say I am vastly honored—’
‘Silly beast! I meant it’s something that belongs to us.’
The dire direction was now a black icy tunnel, becoming a pit. Automatically and with an appropriately great heart-thump, Fafhrd said, ‘Not?’
‘Yes! I’m certain, you monster. I’ve missed twice.’
Better than ever in his life before, Fafhrd’s lips performed their office of locking in words. When they opened at last, they and the tongue behind them were utterly under control of the great green eyes. There came forth in a joyous rush: ‘O gods! How wonderful! I am a father! How clever of you, Mara!’
‘Very clever indeed,’ the girl admitted, ‘to have fashioned anything so delicate after your rude handling. But now I must pay you off for that ungracious remark about “trying out others.”’ Hitching up her skirt behind, she guided both his hands under her cloak to a knot of thongs at the base of her spine. (Snow Women wore fur hoods, fur boots, a high fur stocking on each leg gartered to a waist thong, and one or more fur coats and cloaks—it was a practical garb, not unlike the men’s except for the longer coats.)
As he fingered the knot, from which three thongs led tightly off, Fafhrd said, ‘Truly, Mara dearest, I do not favor these chastity girdles. They are not a civilized device. Besides, they must interfere with the circulation of your blood.’
‘You and your fad for civilization! I’ll love and belabor you out of it. Go on, untie the knot, making sure you and no other tied it.’
Fafhrd complied and had to agree that it was his knot and no other man’s. The task took some time and was a delightful one to Mara, judging from her soft squeals and moans, her gentle nips and bites. Fafhrd himself began to get interested. When the task was done, Fafhrd got the reward of all courteous liars: Mara loved him dearly because he had told her all the right lies and she showed it in her beguiling behavior, and his interest in her and his excitement became vast.
After certain handlings and other tokens of affection, they fell to the snow side by side, both mattressed and covered entirely by their white fur cloaks and hoods.
A passerby would have thought that a snow-mound had come alive convulsively and was perhaps about to give birth to a snowman, elf, or demon.
After a while the snow-mound grew utterly quiescent and the hypothetical passerby would have had to lean very close to catch the voices coming from inside it.
MARA: Guess what I’m thinking.
FAFHRD: That you’re the Queen of Bliss. Aaah!
MARA: Aaaah back at you, and ooooh! And that you’re the King of Beasts. No, silly, I’ll tell you. I was thinking of how glad I am that you’ve had your southward adventurings before marriage. I’m sure you’ve raped or even made indecent love to dozens of southern women, which perhaps accounts for your wrongheadedness about civilization. But I don’t mind a bit. I’ll love you out of it.
FAFHRD: Mara, you have a brilliant mind, but just the same you greatly exaggerate that one pirate cruise I made under Hringorl, and especially the opportunities it afforded for amorous adventures. In the first place, all the inhabitants, and especially all the young women of any shore town we sacked, ran away to the hills before we’d even landed. And if there were any women raped, I being youngest would have been at the bottom of the list of rapists and so hardly tempted. Truth to tell, the only interesting folk I met on that dreary voyage were two old men held for ransom, from whom I learned a smattering of Quarmallian and High Lankhmarese, and a scrawny youth apprenticed to a hedge-wizard. He was deft with the dagger, that one, and had a legend-breaking mind, like mine and my father’s.
MARA: Do not grieve. Life will become more exciting for you after we’re married.
FAFHRD: That’s where you’re wrong, dearest Mara. Hold, let me explain! I know my mother. Once we’re married, Mor will expect you to do all the cooking and tent-work. She’ll treat you as seven-eighths slave and—perhaps—one-eighth my concubine.
MARA: Ha! You really will have to learn to rule your mother, Fafhrd. Yet do not fret, dearest, even about that. It’s clear you know nothing of the weapons a strong and untiring young wife has against an old mother-in-law. I’ll put her in her place, even if I have to poison her—oh, not to kill, only to weaken sufficiently. Before three moons have waxed, she’ll be trembling at my gaze and you’ll feel yourself much more a man. I know that you being an only child and your wild father perishing young, she got an unnatural influence over you, but—
FAFHRD: I feel myself very much the man at this instant, you immoral and poisoning witchlet, you ice-tigress; and I intend to prove it on you without delay. Defend yourself! Ha, would you—!
Once more the snow-mound convulsed, like a giant ice-bear dying of fits. The bear died to a music of sistrums and triangles, as there clashed together and shattered the flashing ice crystals which had grown in unnatural numbers and size on Mara’s and Fafhrd’s cloaks during their dialogue.
The short day raced toward night, as if even the gods who govern the sun and stars were impatient to see the Show.
Hringorl conferred with his three chief henchmen, Hor, Harrax, and Hrey. There was scowling and nodding, and Fafhrd’s name was mentioned.
The youngest husband of the Snow Clan, a vain and thoughtless cockerel, was ambushed and snowballed unconscious by a patrol of young Snow Wives who had seen him in brazen converse with a Mingol stage girl. Thereafter, a sure casualty for the two-day run of the Show, he was tenderly but slowly nursed back toward life by his wife, who had been the most enthusiastic of the snowballers.
Mara, happy as a snow dove, dropped in on this household and helped. But as she watched the husband so helpless and the wife so tender, her smiles and dreamy grace vanished. She grew tense and, for an athletic girl, fidgety. Thrice she opened her lips to speak, then pursed them, and finally left without saying a word.
In the Women’s Tent, Mor and her coven put a spell on Fafhrd to bring him home and another to chill his loins, then went on to discuss weightier measures against the whole universe of sons, husbands, and actresses.
The second enchantment had no effect on Fafhrd, probably because he was taking a snow-bath at the time—it being a well-known fact that magic has little effect on those who are already inflicting upon themselves the same results which the spell is trying to cause. After parting with Mara, he had stripped, plunged into a snowbank, then rubbed every surface, crack and cranny of his body with the numbing powdery stuff. Thereafter he used thickly needled pine branches to dust himself off and beat his blood back into motion. Dressed, he felt the pull of the first enchantment, but opposed it and secretly made his way into the tent of two old Mingol traders, Zax and Effendrit, who had been his father’s friends, and he snoozed amidst a pile of pelts until evening. Neither of his mother’s spells was able to follow him into what was, by trading custom, a tiny area of Mingol territory, though the Mingols’ tent did begin to sag with an unnaturally large number of ice crystals, which the Mingol oldsters, wizened and nimble as monkeys, beat off janglingly with poles. The sound penetrated pleasantly into Fafhrd’s dream without arousing him, which would have irked his mother had she known—she believed that both pleasure and rest were bad for men. His dream became one of Vlana dancing sinuously in a dress made of a net of fine silver wires, from the intersections of which hung myriads of tiny silver bells, a vision which would have irked Mor b
eyond endurance; fortunate indeed that she was not at that moment using her power of reading minds at a distance.
Vlana herself slumbered, while one of the Mingol girls, paid a half smerduk in advance by the injured actress, renewed the snow-bandages as necessary and, when they looked dry, wet Vlana’s lips with sweet wine, of which a few drops trickled between. Vlana’s mind was a-storm with anticipations and plots, but whenever she waked, she stilled it with an Eastern circle-charm that went something like, ‘Creep, sleep; rouse, drowse; browse, soughs; slumber, umber; raw, claw; burnt, earn’d; cumber, number; left, death; cunt, won’t; count, fount; mount, down’t; leap, deep; creep, sleep,’ and so on back around the incestuous loop. She knew that a woman can get wrinkles in her mind as well as her skin. She also knew that only a spinster looks after a spinster. And finally she knew that a trouper, like a soldier, does well to sleep whenever possible.
Vellix the Venturer, idly slipping about, overheard some of Hringorl’s plottings, saw Fafhrd enter his tent of retreat, noted that Essedinex was drinking beyond his wont, and eavesdropped for a while on the Master of the Show.
In the girls’ third of the actors’ fish-shaped tent, Essedinex was arguing with the two Mingol girls, who were twins, and a barely nubile Ilthmarix, about the amount of grease they proposed to smear on their shaven bodies for tonight’s performance.
‘By the black bones, you’ll beggar me,’ he wailingly expostulated. ‘And you’ll look no more lascivious than lumps of lard.’
‘From what I know of Northerners, they like their women well larded, and why not outside as well as in?’ the one Mingol girl demanded.
‘What’s more,’ her twin added sharply, ‘if you expect us to freeze off our toes and tits, to please an audience of smelly old bearskins, you’ve got your head on upside-down.’
‘Don’t worry, Seddy,’ the Ilthmarix said, patting his flushed cheek and its sparse white hairs, ‘I always give my best performance when I’ll all gooey. We’ll have them chasing us up the walls, where we’ll pop from their grabs like so many slippery melon seeds.’
‘Chasing—?’ Essedinex gripped the Ilthmarix by her slim shoulder. ‘You’ll provoke no orgies tonight, do you hear me? Teasing pays. Orgies don’t. The point is to—’
‘We know just how far to tease, daddy-pooh,’ one of the Mingol girls put in.
‘We know how to control them,’ her sister continued.
‘And if we don’t, Vlana always does,’ the Ilthmarix finished.
As the almost imperceptible shadows lengthened and the mist-wreathed air grew dark, the omnipresent crystals seemed to be growing even a little more swiftly. The palaver at the trading tents, which the thick snowy tongue of the forest shut off from the home tents, grew softer-voiced, then ceased. The unending low chant from the Women’s Tent became more noticeable, and also higher pitched. An evening breeze came from the north, making all the crystals tinkle. The chanting grew gruffer and the breeze and the tinkling ceased, as if on command. The mist came wreathing back from east and west, and the crystals were growing again. The women’s chanting faded to a murmur. All of Cold Corner grew tautly and expectantly silent with the approach of night.
Day ran away over the ice-fanged western horizon, as if she were afraid of the dark.
In the narrow space between the actors’ tents and Godshall there was movement, a glimmer, a bright spark that sputtered for nine, ten, eleven heartbeats, then a flash, a flaring, and there rose up—slowly at first, then swifter and swifter—a comet with a brushy tail of orange fire that dribbled sparks. High above the pines, almost on the edge of heaven—twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three—the comet’s tail faded and it burst with a thunderclap into nine white stars.
It was the rocket signaling the first performance of the Show.
Godshall on the inside was a tall, crazy longship of chill blackness, inadequately lit and warmed by an arc of candles in the prow, which all the rest of the year was an altar, but now a stage. Its masts were eleven vast living pines thrusting up from the ship’s bow, stern, and sides. Its sails—in sober fact, its walls—were stitched hides laced tautly to the masts. Instead of sky overhead, there were thickly interthrusting pine branches, white with drifting snow, beginning a good five man’s-heights above the deck.
The stern and waist of this weird ship, which moved only on the winds of imagination, were crowded with Snow Men in their darkly colorful furs and seated on stumps and thick blanket rolls. They were laughing with drink and growling out short talk and jokes at each other, but not very loudly. Religious awe and fear touched them on entering Godshall, or more properly, God’s Ship, despite or more likely because of the profane use to which it was being put tonight.
There came a rhythmic drumming, sinister as the padding of a snow-leopard and at first so soft that no man might say exactly when it began, except that one moment there was talk and movement in the audience and the next none at all, only so many pairs of hands gripping or lightly resting on knees, and so many pairs of eyes scanning the candlelit stage between two screens painted with black and gray whorls.
The drumming grew louder, quickened, complicated itself into weaving arabesques of tapped sound, and returned to the leopard’s padding.
There loped onto the stage, precisely in time with the drum beats, a silver-furred, short-bodied, slender feline with long legs, long ears a-prick, long whiskers, and long, white fangs. It stood about a yard high at the shoulder and rump. The only human feature was a glossy mop of long, straight black hair falling down the back of its neck and thence forward over its right shoulder.
It circled the stage thrice, ducking its head and sniffing as if on a scent and growling deep in its throat.
Then it noticed the audience and with a scream crouched back from them rampant, menacing them with the long, glittering claws which terminated its forelegs.
Two members of the audience were so taken in by the illusion that they had to be restrained by neighbors from pitching a knife or hurling a short-handled axe at what they were certain was a genuine and dangerous beast.
The beast scanned them, writhing its black lips back from its fangs and lesser teeth. As it swiftly swung its muzzle from side to side, inspecting them with its great brown eyes, its short-furred tail lashed back and forth in time.
Then it danced a leopardly dance of life, love, and death, sometimes on hind legs, but mostly on all fours. It scampered and investigated, it menaced and shrank, it attacked and fled, it caterwauled and writhed cat-lasciviously.
Despite the long black hair, it became no easier for the audience to think of it as a human female in a close-fitting suit of fur. For one thing, its forelegs were as long as its hind legs and appeared to have an extra joint in them.
Something white squawked and came fluttering upward from behind one of the screens. With a swift leap and slash of foreleg, the great silvery cat struck.
Everyone in Godshall heard the scream of the snow pigeon and the crack of its neck.
Holding the dead bird to its fangs, the great cat, standing womanly now, gave the audience a long look, then walked without haste behind the nearest screen. There came from the audience a sigh compounded of loathing and longing, of a wonder as to what would happen next, and of a wish to see what was going on now.
Fafhrd, however, did not sigh. For one thing, the slightest movement might have revealed his hiding place. For another, he could clearly see all that was going on behind both whorl-marked screens.
Being barred from the Show by his youth, let alone by Mor’s wishes and witcheries, half an hour before showtime he had mounted one of the trunk-pillars of Godshall on the precipice side when no one was looking. The strong lacings of the hide walls made it the easiest of climbs. Then he had cautiously crawled out onto two of several stout pine branches growing inward close together over the hall, being very careful to disturb neither browning needles nor drifted snow, until he had found a good viewing hole, one opening toward the stage, but mostly hidden from the audie
nce. Thereafter, it had been simply a matter of holding still enough so that no betraying needles or snow dropped down. Anyone looking up through the gloom and chancing to see parts of his white garb would take it for snow, he hoped.
Now he watched the two Mingol girls rapidly pull off from Vlana’s arms the tight fur sleeves together with the fur-covered, claw-tipped, rigid extra lengths in which they ended and which her hands had been gripping. Next they dragged from Vlana’s legs their fur coverings, while she sat on a stool and, after drawing her fangs off her teeth, speedily unhooked her leopard mask and shoulder piece.
A moment later she slouched back on stage—a cave woman in a brief sarong of silvery fur and lazily gnawing at the end of a long, thick bone. She mimed a cave woman’s day: fire-and-baby-tending, brat-slapping, hide-chewing, and laborious sewing. Things got a bit more exciting with the return of her husband, an unseen presence made visible by her miming.
Her audience followed the story easily, grinning when she demanded what meat her husband had brought, showed dissatisfaction with his meager kill, and refused him an embrace. They guffawed when she tried to clobber him with her chewing bone and got knocked sprawling in return, her children cowering around her.
From that position she scuttled off stage behind the other screen, which hid the actors’ doorway (normally the Snow Priest’s) and also concealed the one-armed Mingol, whose flickering five fingers did all the drum music on the instrument clutched between his feet. Vlana whipped off the rest of her fur, changed the slant of her eyes and eyebrows by four deft strokes of makeup, seemingly in one movement shouldered into a long gray gown with hood, and was back on stage in the persona of a Mingol woman of the Steppes.
After another brief session of miming, she squatted gracefully down at a low, jar-stocked table stage front, and began carefully to make up her face and do her hair, the audience serving as her mirror. She dropped back hood and gown, revealing the briefer red silk garment her fur one had hidden. It was most fascinating to watch her apply the variously colored salves and powders and glittering dusts to her lips, cheeks, and eyes, and see her comb up her dark hair into a high structure kept in place by long, gem-headed pins.