by Fritz Leiber
"Tonight the earth is full of the heat of these gods' forges, pressing summer scents from spring flowers and grasses. Let's rest a while," 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 seaperson, 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.
"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 takes 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 . . . "
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 niplets 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."
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 treasurers are, more like," the other amended, "if they distrust each other, as all sane men do."
Coming in opposite directions around a corner behind Salthaven's council hall after a sharp rainshower, 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, 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 tone 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 untraveled 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.
And so time passed on Rime Isle. Witches Moon grew full and waned and gave way to Ghostsmoon, 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 hard-headed 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 favorite 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 shelfed 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 absent-minded 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 compet
itions.
If anyone 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 Wag north of the Land of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. All very baffling and unsatisfactory.
At Illik Ving the Death of the Twain joined a caravan bound for No-Ombrulsk, changing their mounts for shaggy Mingo ponies inured to frost, and spent all of Ghostsmoon on that long traverse. Although early summer, there was sufficient chill in the Trollsteps and the foothills of the Bones of the Old One and in the plateau of the Cold Waste that lies between the 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 onto 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 Kroot trader. Sails with the tide day after morrow."