Swords in the Mist

by Fritz Leiber

  There was a spray of stingingly aromatic fluid of most familiar odor. The cask was filled with brandy—to the absolute top, so that it had not gurgled.

  A little later they were able to read the burnt inscription. It was most succinct: “Dear Pulg—Drown your sorrows in this—Basharat.”

  It was only too easy to realize how yesterday afternoon the Number Two Extortioner had had a perfect opportunity to effect the substitution—the Street of the Gods deserted, Bwadres almost druggedly asleep from the unaccustomedly large fish dinner, Fafhrd gone from his post to guzzle with the Mouser.

  “That explains why Basharat was not on hand last night,” the Mouser said thoughtfully.

  Fafhrd was for throwing the cask overboard, not from any disappointment at losing loot, but because of a revulsion at its contents, but the Mouser set aside the cask for Ourph to close and store away—he knew that such revulsions pass. Fafhrd, however, extorted the promise that the fiery fluid only be used in direst emergency—as for burning enemy ships.

  The red dome of the sun pushed above the eastern waves. By its ruddy light Fafhrd and the Mouser really looked at each other for the first time in months. The wide sea was around them, Ourph had taken the lines and tiller, and at last nothing pressed. There was an odd shyness in both their gazes—each had the sudden thought that he had taken his friend away from the life-path he had chosen in Lankhmar, perhaps the life-path best suited to his treading.

  “Your eyebrows will grow back—I suppose,” the Mouser said at last, quite inanely.

  “They will indeed,” Fafhrd rumbled. “I’ll have a fine shock of hair by the time you’ve worked off that belly.”

  “Thank you, Egg-Top,” the Mouser replied. Then he gave a small laugh. “I have no regrets for Lankhmar,” he said, lying mightily, though not entirely. “I can see now that if I’d stayed I’d have gone the way of Pulg and all such Great Men—fat, power-racked, lieutenant-plagued, smothered with false-hearted dancing girls, and finally falling into the arms of religion. At least I’m saved that last chronic ailment, which is worse than the dropsy.” He looked at Fafhrd narrowly. “But how of you, old friend? Will you miss Bwadres and your cobbled bed and your nightly tale-weaving?”

  Fafhrd frowned as the sloop plunged on northward and the salt spray dashed him.

  “Not I,” he said at last. “There are always other tales to be woven. I served a god well, I dressed him in new clothes, and then I did a third thing. Who’d go back to being an acolyte after being so much more? You see, old friend, I really was Issek.”

  The Mouser arched his eyebrows. “You were?”

  Fafhrd nodded twice, most gravely.

  III

  Their Mistress, The Sea

  The next few days were not kind to the Mouser and Fafhrd. To begin with, both got seasick from their many months ashore. Between gargantuan groaning retches, Fafhrd monotonously berated the Mouser for having tricked him out of asceticism and stolen from him his religious vocation. While in the intervals of his vomiting, the Gray Mouser cursed Fafhrd back, but chiefly excoriated himself for having been such a fool as to give up the soft life in Lankhmar for sake of a friend.

  During this period—brief in reality, an eternity to the sufferers—Ourph the Mingol managed sails and tiller. His impassive, wrinkle-netted face forever threatened to break into a grin, yet never did, though from time to time his jet eyes twinkled.

  Fafhrd, first to recover, took back command from Ourph and immediately started ordering an endless series of seamanlike exercises: reefings, furlings, raisings, and changing of sails; shiftings of ballast; inspection of crawl-spaces for rats and roaches; luffings, tackings, jibings, and the like.

  The Mouser swore feebly yet bitterly as these exercises sent both Ourph and Fafhrd clumping all over the deck, often across his prone body, and changed the steady pitch and roll of the Black Treasurer, to which he’d been getting accustomed, into unpredictable jitterbuggings which awakened nausea anew.

  Whenever Fafhrd left off this slave-driving, he would sit cross-legged, deaf to the Mouser’s sultry swearing, and silently meditate, his gaze directed at first always toward Lankhmar, but later more and more toward the north.

  When the Mouser at last recovered, he forswore all food save watery gruel in small measures, and scorning Fafhrd’s nautical exercises, began grimly to put himself through a variety of gymnastical ones until he collapsed sweating and panting—yet only waiting until he had his breath back to begin again.

  It was an odd sight to see the Mouser walking about on his hands while Ourph raced forward to change the set of the jib and Fafhrd threw his weight on the tiller and bellowed, “Hard a-lee!”

  Yet at odd moments now and then, chiefly at sunset, when they each sipped a measure of water tinted with sweet wine—the brandy being still under interdict—they began to reminisce and yarn together, only a little at first, then for longer and longer periods.

  They spoke of piratings, both inflicted and suffered. They recalled notable storms and calms, sighting of mysterious ships which vanished in fog or distance, never more to be seen. They talked of sea monsters, mermaids, and oceanic devils. They relived the adventure of their crossing of the Outer Sea to the fabled Western Continent, which of all Lankhmarts only Fafhrd, the Mouser, and Ourph know to be more than legend.

  Gradually the Mouser’s belly melted and a bristly lawn of hair grew on Fafhrd’s pate, cheeks, and chin, and around his mouth. Life became happenings rather than afflictions. They lived as well as saw sunsets and dawns. The stars became friendly. Above all, they began to match their rhythms to those of the sea, as if she were someone they lived and voyaged with, rather than sailed upon.

  But their water and stores began to run low, the wine ran out, and they lacked even suitable clothing—Fafhrd in particular.

  Their first piratical foray ended in near disaster. The small and lubberly-sailing merchant ship they approached most subtly at dawn suddenly bristled with brown-helmeted pikemen and slingers. It was a Lankhmar bait-ship, designed to trap pirates.

  They escaped only because the trap was sprung too soon and the Black Treasurer was able to outsail the bait-ship, transformed into a speedy goer by proper handling. At that, Ourph was struck senseless by a slung stone, and Fafhrd had two ribs cracked by another.

  Their next sea-raid was only a most qualified success. The cutter they conquered turned out to be manned by five elderly Mingol women, witches by profession, they said, and bound on a fortune-telling and trading voyage to the southern settlements around Quarmall.

  The Mouser and Fafhrd exacted from them a modest supply of water, food, and wine, and Fafhrd took several silk and fur tunics, some silver-plated jewelry, a longsword and ax which he fancied, and leather to make him boots. However, they left the surly women by no means destitute and forcibly prevented Ourph from raping even one of them, let alone all five as he had boastfully threatened.

  They departed then, somewhat ashamed, to the tune of the witchwomen’s chanting curses—most venomous ones, calling down on Fafhrd and the Mouser all the worst evils of air and earth, fire and water. Their failure to curse Ourph also, made the Mouser wonder whether the witch-women were not angriest because Ourph had been prevented in his most lascivious designs.

  Now that the Black Treasurer was somewhat better provisioned, Fafhrd began to talk airily about voyaging once again across the Outer Sea, or toward the Frozen Sea north of No-Ombrulsk, there to hunt the polar tiger and white-furred giant worm.

  That was the last straw to Ourph, who was a most even-tempered, sweet old man—for a Mingol. Overworked, skull-bashed, thwarted of a truly unusual amorous opportunity for one of his age, and now threatened with idiot-far-voyagings, he demanded to be set ashore.

  The Mouser and Fafhrd complied. All this while the Black Treasurer had been southwesting along Lankhmar’s northwestern coast. So it was near the small village of Earth’s End that they put landside the old Mingol, who was still cursing them grumblingly, despite the gifts
with which they had loaded him.

  After consultation, the two heroes decided to set course straight north, which would land them in the forested Land of the Eight Cities at the city of Ool Hrusp, whose Mad Duke had once been their patron.

  The voyage was uneventful. No ships were sighted. Fafhrd cut, sewed, and nailed himself boots, which he footed with spikes, perhaps from some dream of mountaineering. The Mouser continued his calisthenics and read The Book of Aarth, The Book of Lesser Gods, the Management of Miracles, and a scroll titled Sea Monsters from the sloop’s small but select library.

  Nights they would lazily talk for hours, feeling nearest then to the stars, the sea, and each other. They argued as to whether the stars had existed forever or been launched by the gods from Nehwon’s highest mountain—or whether, as current metaphysics asserted, the stars were vast firelit gems set in islands at the opposite end of the great bubble (in the waters of eternity) that was Nehwon. They disputed as to who was the world’s worst warlock: Fafhrd’s Ningauble, the Mouser’s Sheelba, or—barely conceivably—some other sorcerer.

  But chiefly they talked of their mistress, the sea, whose curving motions they loved again, and to whose moods they now felt preternaturally attuned, particularly in darkness. They spoke of her rages and caressings, her coolths and unending dancings, sometimes lightly footing a minuet, some times furiously a-stamp, and her infinitude of secret parts.

  The west wind gradually lessened, then shifted to a fluky east wind. Stores were once more depleted. At last they admitted to each other that they couldn’t fetch Ool Hrusp on this reach, and they contented themselves with sailing to intercept the Claws—the narrow but mountainously rocky end of the Eastern Continent’s great western-thrusting northern peninsula, comprised of the Land of the Eight Cities, the Cold Waste, and numerous grim and great mountain ranges. The east wind died entire one midnight. The Black Treasurer floated in a calm so complete it was as if their aqueous mistress had fallen into a trance. Not a breath stirred. They wondered what the morrow would show, or bring.

  IV

  When the Sea-King’s Away

  Stripped to his loincloth, underbelt, and with amulet pouch a-dangle under his chin, the Gray Mouser stretched lizardlike along the bowed sprit of the sloop Black Treasurer and stared straight down into the hole in the sea. Sunlight unstrained by slightest wisp of cloud beat hotly on his deep-tanned back, but his belly was cold with the magic of the thing.

  All around about, the Inner Sea lay calm as a lake of mercury in the cellar of a wizard’s castle. No ripple came from the unbounded horizon to south, east and north, nor rebounded from the endless vertically-fluted curtain of creamy rock that rose a bowshot to the west and was a good three bowshots high, which the Mouser and Fafhrd had only yesterday climbed and atop which they had made a frightening discovery. The Mouser could have thought of those matters, or of the dismal fact that they were becalmed with little food and less water (and a tabooed cask of brandy) a weary sail west from Ool Hrusp, the last civilized port on this coast—or uncivilized either. He could have wondered about the seductive singing that had seemed to come from the sea last night, as of female voices softly improvising on the themes of waves hissing against sand, gurgling melodiously among rocks, and screaming wind-driven against icy coasts. Or he could perhaps best have pondered on Fafhrd’s madness of yesterday afternoon, when the large Northerner had suddenly started to babble dogmatically about finding for himself and the Mouser “girls under the sea” and had even begun to trim his beard and brush out his brown otterskin tunic and polish his best male costume jewelry so as to be properly attired to receive the submarine girls and arouse their desires. There was an old Simorgyan legend, Fafhrd had insisted, according to which on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the seventh year of the Sevens-Cycle the king of the sea journeyed to the other end of the earth, leaving his opalescently beautiful green wives and faintly silver-scaled slim concubines free to find them lovers if they could…and this, Fafhrd had stridently asserted he knew by the spectral calm and other occult tokens, was the place of the sea-king’s home and the eve of the day!

  In vain had the Mouser pointed out to him that they had not sighted an even faintly feminine-looking fish in days, that there were absolutely no islets or beaches in view suitable for commerce with mermaids or for the sunbathing and primping of loreleis, that there were no black hulks whatever of wrecked pirate ships drifting about that might conceivably have fair captives imprisoned below decks and so technically “under the sea,” that the region beyond the deceptive curtain-wall of creamy rock was the last from which one could expect girls to come, that—to sum it up—the Black Treasurer had not fetched the faintest sort of girl-blink either to starboard or larboard for weeks. Fafhrd had simply replied with crushing conviction that the sea-king’s girls were there down below, that they were now preparing a magic channel or passageway whereby air-breathers might visit them, and that the Mouser had better be ready like himself to hasten when the summons came.

  The Mouser had thought that the heat and dazzle of the unremitting sun—together with the sudden intense yearnings normal to all sailormen long at sea—must have deranged Fafhrd, and he had dug up from the hold and unsuccessfully coaxed the Northerner to wear a wide-brimmed hat and slitted ice-goggles. It had been a great relief to the Mouser when Fafhrd had fallen into a profound sleep with the coming of night, though then the illusion—or reality—of the sweet siren-singing had returned to trouble his own tranquillity.

  Yes, the Mouser might well have thought of any of these matters, Fafhrd’s prophetic utterances in particular, while he lay poised but unsweating in the hot sun along the stout bowsprit of the Black Treasurer, yet the fact is that he had mind only for the jade marvel so close that he could almost reach down a hand and touch the beginning of it.

  It is well to approach all miracles and wonders by gradual stages or degrees, and we can do this by examining another aspect of the glassy seascape of which the Mouser also might well have been thinking—but wasn’t.

  Although untroubled by swell, wavelet or faintest ripple or quiver, the Inner Sea around the sloop was not perfectly flat. Here and there, scatteredly, it was dimpled with small depressions about the size and shape of shallow saucers, as if giant invisible featherweight water-beetles were standing about on it—though the dimples were not arranged in any six-legged or four-legged or even tripod patterns. Moreover, a slim stalk of air seemed to go down from the center of each dimple for an indefinite distance into the water, quite like the tiny whirlpool that sometimes forms when the turquoise plug is pulled in the brimful golden bathtub of the Queen of the East (or the drain unstoppered in a bathtub of any humbler material belonging to any lowlier person)—except that there was no whirling of water in this case, and the air stalks were not twisted and knotted but straight, as though scores of slim-bladed rapiers with guards like shallow saucers but all as invisible as air had been plunged at random into the motionless waters around the Black Treasurer. Or as though a sparse forest of invisible lily pads with straight invisible stems had sprung up around the sloop.

  Imagine such an air-stalked dimple magnified so that the saucer was not a palm’s breadth but a good spearcast across and the rodlike sword-straight stalk not a fingernail’s width but a good four feet, imagine the sloop slid prow-foremost down into that shallow depression but stopping just short of the center and floating motionless there, imagine the bowsprit of the slightly tilted ship projecting over the exact center of the central tube or well of air, imagine a small, stalwart, nut-brown man in a gray loincloth lying along the bowsprit, his feet braced against the foredeck rails, and looking straight down the tube…and you have the Gray Mouser’s situation exactly!

  To be in the Mouser’s situation and peering down the tube was very fascinating indeed, an experience calculated to drive other thoughts out of any man’s mind—or even any woman’s! The water here, a bowshot from the creamy rock-wall, was green, remarkably clear, but too deep to allow a vi
ew of the bottom—soundings taken yesterday had shown it to vary between six score and seven score feet. Through this water the well-size tube went down as perfectly circular and as smooth as if it were walled with glass; and indeed the Mouser would have believed that it was so walled—that the water immediately around it had been somehow frozen or hardened without altering in transparency—except that at the slightest noise, such as the Mouser’s coughing, little quiverings would run up and down it in the form of a series of ring-shaped waves.

  What power prevented the tremendous weight of the sea from collapsing the tube in an instant, the Mouser could not begin to imagine.

  Yet it was endlessly fascinating to peer down it. Sunlight transmitted through the sea water illuminated it to a considerable depth brightly if greenishly, and the circular wall played odd tricks with distance. For instance, at this moment the Mouser, peering down slantwise through the side of the tube, saw a thick fish as long as his arm swimming around it and nosing up to it. The shape of the fish was very familiar yet he could not at once name it. Then thrusting his head out to one side and peering down at the same fish through the clear water alongside the tube, he saw that the fish was three times the length of his body—in fact, a shark. The Mouser shivered and told himself that the curved wall of the tube must act like the reducing lenses used by a few artists in Lankhmar.

  On the whole, though, the Mouser might well have decided in the end that the vertical tunnel in the water was an illusion born of sun-glare and suggestion and have put on the ice-goggles and stuffed his ears with wax against any more siren-singing and then perhaps swigged at the forbidden brandy and gone to sleep, except for certain other circumstances footing the whole affair much more firmly in reality. For instance, there was a knotted rope securely tied to the bowsprit and hanging down the center of the tube, and this rope creaked from time to time with the weight on it, and also there were threads of black smoke coming out of the watery hole (these were what made the Mouser cough), and last but not least there was a torch burning redly far down in the hole—so far down its flame looked no bigger than a candle’s—and just beside the flame, somewhat obscured by its smoke and much tinied by distance, was the upward-peering face of Fafhrd!