by Fritz Leiber
In a short time the square was empty, save for the two victors, the line of trumpeters in the street mouth, the line of guards outside the gateway now facing away from the square as if nothing at all had happened—and a hundred and more pairs of eyes as tiny and red-glinting black as wild cherries, which peered intently from between the grills of street drains and from various small holes in the walls and even from the rooftops. But who counts or even notices rats?—especially in a city as old and vermin-infested as Lankhmar.
The big man and the small man gazed about fiercely a bit longer. Then, regaining their breaths, they laughed uproariously, sheathed their weapons, and faced the trumpeters with a guarded yet relaxed curiosity.
The trumpeters wheeled to either side. A line of pikemen behind them executed the same movement, and there strode forward a venerable, clean-shaven, stern-visaged man in a black toga narrowly bordered with silver.
He raised his hand in a dignified salute. He said gravely, ‘I am chamberlain of Glipkerio Kistomerces, Overlord of Lankhmar, and here is my wand of authority.’ He produced a small silver wand tipped with a five-pointed bronze emblem in the form of a starfish.
The two men nodded slightly, as though to say, ‘We accept your statement for what it’s worth.’
The chamberlain faced the big man. He drew a scroll from his toga, unrolled it, scanned it briefly, then looked up. ‘Are you Fafhrd the northern barbarian and brawler?’
The big man considered that for a bit, then said, ‘And if I am—?’
The chamberlain turned toward the small man. He once more consulted his parchment. ‘And are you—your pardon, but it’s written here—that mongrel and long-suspected burglar, cut-purse, swindler and assassin, the Gray Mouser?’
The small man fluffed his gray cape and said, ‘If it’s any business of yours—well, he and I might be connected in some way.’
As if those vaguest answers settled everything, the chamberlain rolled up his parchment with a snap and tucked it inside his toga. ‘Then my master wishes to see you. There is a service which you can render him, to your own considerable profit.’
The Gray Mouser inquired, ‘If the all-powerful Glipkerio Kistomerces has need of us, why did he allow us to be assaulted and for all he might know slain by that company of hooligans who but now fled this place.’
The chamberlain answered, ‘If you were the sort of men who would allow yourselves to be murdered by such a mob, then you would not be the right men to handle the assignment, or fulfill the commission, which my master has in mind. But time presses. Follow me.’
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser looked at each other and after a moment they simultaneously shrugged, then nodded. Swaggering just a little, they fell in beside the chamberlain, the pikemen and trumpeters fell in behind them, and the cortège moved off the way it had come, leaving the square quite empty.
Except, of course, for the rats.
2
With the motherly-generous west wind filling their brown triangular sails, the slim war galley and the five broad-beamed grain ships, two nights out of Lankhmar, coursed north in line ahead across the Inner Sea of the ancient world of Nehwon.
It was late afternoon of one of those mild blue days when sea and sky are the same hue, providing irrefutable evidence for the hypothesis currently favored by Lankhmar philosophers: that Nehwon is a giant bubble rising through the waters of eternity with continents, islands, and the great jewels that at night are the stars all orderly afloat on the bubble’s inner surface.
On the afterdeck of the last grain ship, which was also the largest, the Gray Mouser spat a plum skin to leeward and boasted luxuriously, ‘Fat times in Lankhmar! Not one day returned to the City of the Black Toga after months away adventuring and we get this cushy job from the Overlord himself—and with an advance on pay too.’
‘I have an old distrust of cushy jobs,’ Fafhrd replied, yawning and pulling his fur-trimmed jerkin open wider so that the mild wind might trickle more fully through the tangled hair-field of his chest. ‘And we were rushed out of Lankhmar so quickly that we had not even time to pay our respects to the ladies. Nevertheless I must confess that we might have done worse. A full purse is the best ballast for any man-ship, especially one bearing letters of marque against ladies.’
Ship’s Master Slinoor looked back with hooded appraising eyes at the small lithe gray-clad man and his tall, more gaudily accoutred barbarian comrade. The master of Squid was a sleek black-robed man of middle years. He stood beside the two stocky black-tunicked bare-legged sailors who held steady the great high-arching tiller that guided Squid.
‘How much do you two rogues really know of your cushy job?’ Slinoor asked softly. ‘Or rather, how much did the arch-noble Glipkerio choose to tell you of the purpose and dark antecedents of this voyaging?’ Two days of fortunate sailing seemed at last to have put the closed-mouthed ship’s master in a mood to exchange confidences, or at least trade queries and lies.
From a bag of netted cord that hung by the taffrail, the Mouser speared a night-purple plum with the dirk he called Cat’s Claw. Then he answered lightly, ‘This fleet bears a gift of grain from Overlord Glipkerio to Movarl of the Eight Cities in gratitude for Movarl’s sweeping the Mingol pirates from the Inner Sea and mayhap diverting the steppe-dwelling Mingols from assaulting Lankhmar across the Sinking Land. Movarl needs grain for his hunter-farmers turned cityman-soldiers and especially to supply his army relieving his border city of Klelg Nar, which the Mingols besiege. Fafhrd and I are, you might say, a small but mighty rear-guard for the grain and for certain more delicate items of Glipkerio’s gift.’
‘You mean those?’ Slinoor bent a thumb toward the larboard rail.
Those were twelve large white rats distributed among four silver-barred cages. With their silky coats, pale-rimmed blue eyes and especially their short, arched upper lips and two huge upper incisors, they looked like a clique of haughty, bored, inbred aristocrats, and it was in a bored aristocratic fashion that they were staring at a scrawny black kitten which was perched with dug-in claws on the starboard rail, as if to get as far away from the rats as possible, and staring back at them most worriedly.
Fafhrd reached out and ran a finger down the black kitten’s back. The kitten arched its spine, losing itself for a moment in sensuous delight, but then edged away and resumed its worried rat-peering—an activity shared by the two black-tunicked helmsmen, who seemed both resentful and fearful of the silver-caged afterdeck passengers.
The Mouser sucked plum juice from his fingers and flicked out his tongue-tip to neatly capture a drop that threatened to run down his chin. Then, ‘No, I mean not chiefly those high-bred gift-rats,’ he replied to Slinoor and kneeling lightly and unexpectedly and touching two fingers significantly to the scrubbed oak deck, he said, ‘I mean chiefly she who is below, who ousts you from your master’s cabin, and who now insists that the gift-rats require sunlit and fresh air—which strikes me as a strange way of cosseting burrow- and shadow-dwelling vermin.’
Slinoor’s cropped eyebrows rose. He came close and whispered, ‘You think the Demoiselle Hisvet may not be merely the conductress of the rat-gift, but also herself part of Glipkerio’s gift to Movarl? Why, she’s the daughter of the greatest grain-merchant in Lankhmar, who’s grown rich selling tawny corn to Glipkerio.’
The Mouser smiled cryptically but said nothing.
Slinoor frowned, then whispered ever lower, ‘True, I’ve heard the story that Hisvet has already been her father Hisvin’s gift to Glipkerio to buy his patronage.’
Fafhrd, who’d been trying to stroke the kitten again with no more success than to chase it up the aftermast, turned around at that. ‘Why, Hisvet’s but a child,’ he said almost reprovingly. ‘A most prim and proper miss. I know not of Glipkerio, he seems decadent’—the word was not an insult in Lankhmar—‘but surely Movarl, a Northerner albeit a forest man, likes only strong-beamed, ripe, complete women.’
‘Your own tastes, no doubt?’ the Mouser remarked, gazin
g at Fafhrd with half-closed eyes. ‘No traffic with child-like women?’
Fafhrd blinked as if the Mouser had dug fingers in his side. Then he shrugged and said loudly, ‘What’s so special about these rats? Do they do tricks?’
‘Aye,’ Slinoor said distastefully. ‘They play at being men. They’ve been trained by Hisvet to dance to music, to drink from cups, hold tiny spears and swords, even fence. I’ve not seen it—nor would care to.’
The picture struck the Mouser’s fancy. He envisioned himself small as a rat, dueling with rats who wore lace at their throats and wrists, slipping through the mazy tunnels of their underground cities, becoming a great connoisseur of cheese and smoked meats, perchance wooing a slim rat-queen and being surprised by her rat-king husband and having to dagger-fight him in the dark. Then he noted one of the white rats looking at him intently through the silver bars with a cold inhuman blue eye and suddenly his idea didn’t seem amusing at all. He shivered in the sunlight.
Slinoor was saying, ‘It is not good for animals to try to be men.’ Squid’s skipper gazed somberly at the silent white aristos.
‘Have you ever heard tell of the legend of—’ he began, hesitated, then broke off, shaking his head as if deciding he had been about to say too much.
‘A sail!’ The call winged down thinly from the crow’s nest. ‘A black sail to windward!’
‘What manner of ship?’ Slinoor shouted up.
‘I know not, master. I see only sail top.’
‘Keep her under view, boy,’ Slinoor commanded.
‘Under view it is, master.’
Slinoor paced to the starboard rail and back.
‘Movarl’s sails are green,’ Fafhrd said thoughtfully.
Slinoor nodded. ‘Ilthmar’s are white. The pirates’ were red, mostly. Lankhmar’s sails once were black, but now that color’s only for funeral barges and they never venture out of sight of land. At least I’ve never known…’
The Mouser broke in with, ‘You spoke of dark antecedents of this voyaging. Why dark?’
Slinoor drew them back against the taffrail, away from the stocky helmsmen. Fafhrd ducked a little, passing under the arching tiller. They looked all three into the twisting wake, their heads bent together.
Slinoor said, ‘You’ve been out of Lankhmar. Did you know this is not the first gift-fleet of grain to Movarl?’
The Mouser nodded. ‘We’d been told there was another. Somehow lost. In a storm, I think. Glipkerio glossed over it.’
‘There were two,’ Slinoor said tersely. ‘Both lost. Without a living trace. There was no storm.’
‘What then?’ Fafhrd asked, looking around as the rats chittered a little. ‘Pirates?’
‘Movarl had already whipped the pirates east. Each of the two fleets was galley-guarded like ours. And each sailed off into fair weather with a good west wind.’ Slinoor smiled thinly. ‘Doubtless Glipkerio did not tell you of these matters for fear you might beg off. We sailors and the Lankhmarines obey for duty and the honor of the City, but of late Glipkerio’s had trouble hiring the sort of special agents he likes to use for second bowstrings. He has brains of a sort, our overlord has, though he employs them mostly to dream of visiting other world bubbles in a great diving-bell or sealed metallic diving-ship, while he sits with trained girls watching trained rats and buys off Lankhmar’s enemies with gold and repays Lankhmar’s ever-more-greedy friends with grain, not soldiers.’ Slinoor grunted. ‘Movarl grows most impatient, you know. He threatens, if the grain comes not, to recall his pirate-patrol, league with the land-Mingols and set them at Lankhmar.’
‘Northerners, even though not snow-dwelling, league with Mingols?’ Fafhrd objected. ‘Impossible!’
Slinoor looked at him. ‘I’ll say just this, ice-eating Northerner. If I did not believe such a league both possible and likely—and Lankhmar thereby in dire danger—I would never have sailed with this fleet, honor and duty or no. Same’s true of Lukeen, who commands the galley. Nor do I think Glipkerio would otherwise be sending to Movarl at Kvarch Nar his noblest performing rats and dainty Hisvet.’
Fafhrd growled a little. ‘You say both fleets were lost without a trace?’ he asked incredulously.
Slinoor shook his head. ‘The first was. Of the second, some wreckage was sighted by an Ilthmar trader Lankhmar-bound. The deck of only one grain ship. It had been ripped off its hull, splinteringly—how or by what, the Ilthmart dared not guess. Tied to a fractured stretch of railing was the ship’s master, only hours dead. His face had been nibbled, his body gnawed.’
‘Fish?’ the Mouser asked.
‘Seabirds?’ Fafhrd inquired.
‘Dragons?’ a third voice suggested, high, breathless, and as merry as a schoolgirl’s. The three men turned around, Slinoor with guilty swiftness.
The Demoiselle Hisvet stood as tall as the Mouser, but judging by her face, wrists, and ankles was considerably slenderer. Her face was delicate and taper-chinned with small mouth and pouty upper lip that lifted just enough to show a double dash of pearly tooth. Her complexion was creamy pale except for two spots of color high on her cheeks. Her straight fine hair, which grew low on her forehead, was pure white touched with silver and all drawn back through a silver ring behind her neck, whence it hung unbraided like a unicorn’s tail. Her eyes had china whites but darkly pink irises around the large black pupils. Her body was enveloped and hidden by a loose robe of violet silk except when the wind briefly molded a flat curve of her girlish anatomy. There was a violet hood, half thrown back. The sleeves were puffed but snug at the wrists. She was bare-foot, her skin showing as creamy there as on her face, except for a tinge of pink about the toes.
She looked them all three one after another quickly in the eye. ‘You were whispering of the fleets that failed,’ she said accusingly. ‘Fie, Master Slinoor. We must all have courage.’
‘Aye,’ Fafhrd agreed, finding that a cue to his liking. ‘Even dragons need not daunt a brave man. I’ve often watched the sea monsters, crested, horned, and some two-headed, playing in the waves of outer ocean as they broke around the rocks sailors call the Claws. They were not to be feared, if a man remembered always to fix them with a commanding eye. They sported lustily together, the man dragons pursuing the woman dragons and going—’ Here Fafhrd took a tremendous breath and then roared out so loudly and wailingly that the two helmsmen jumped—‘Hoongk! Hoongk!’
‘Fie, Swordsman Fafhrd,’ Hisvet said primly, a blush mantling her cheeks and forehead. ‘You are most indelicate. The sex of dragons—’
But Slinoor had whirled on Fafhrd, gripping his wrist and now crying, ‘Quiet, you monster-fool! Know you not we sail tonight by moonlight past the Dragon Rocks? You’ll call them down on us!’
‘There are no dragons in the Inner Sea,’ Fafhrd laughingly assured him.
‘There’s something that tears ships,’ Slinoor asserted stubbornly.
The Mouser took advantage of this brief interchange to move in on Hisvet, rapidly bowing thrice as he approached.
‘We have missed the great pleasure of your company on deck, Demoiselle,’ he said suavely.
‘Alas, sir, the sun mislikes me,’ she answered prettily. ‘Now his rays are mellowed as he prepared to submerge. Then too,’ she added with an equally pretty shudder, ‘these rough sailors—’ She broke off as she saw that Fafhrd and the master of Squid had stopped their argument and returned to her. ‘Oh, I meant not you, dear Master Slinoor,’ she assured him, reaching out and almost touching his black robe.
‘Would the Demoiselle fancy a sun-warmed, wind-cooled black plum of Sarheenmar?’ the Mouser suggested, delicately sketching in the air with Cat’s Claw.
‘I know not,’ Hisvet said, eyeing the dirk’s needle-like point. ‘I must be thinking of getting the White Shadows below before the evening’s chill is upon us.’
‘True,’ Fafhrd agreed with a flattering laugh, realizing she must mean the white rats. ‘But ’twas most wise of you, Little Mistress, to let them spend the day on deck, wh
ere they surely cannot hanker so much to sport with the Black Shadows—I mean, of course, their black free commoner brothers, and slim delightful sisters, to be sure, hiding here and there in the hold.’
‘There are no rats on my ship, sportive or otherwise,’ Slinoor asserted instantly, his voice loud and angry. ‘Think you I run a rat-brothel? Your pardon, Demoiselle,’ he added quickly to Hisvet. ‘I mean, there are no common rats aboard Squid.’
‘Then yours is surely the first grain ship so blessed,’ Fafhrd told him with indulgent reasonableness.
The sun’s vermilion disk touched the sea to the west and flattened like a tangerine. Hisvet leaned back against the taffrail under the arching tiller. Fafhrd was to her right, the Mouser to her left with the plums hanging just beyond him, near the silver cages. Slinoor had moved haughtily forward to speak to the helmsmen, or pretend to.
‘I’ll take that plum now, Dirksman Mouser,’ Hisvet said softly.
As the Mouser turned away in happy obedience and with many a graceful gesture, delicately palpating the net bag to find the most tender fruit, Hisvet stretched her right arm out sideways and without looking once at Fafhrd slowly ran her spread-fingered hand through the hair on his chest, paused when she reached the other side to grasp a fistful and tweak it sharply, then trailed her fingers rightly back across the hair she had ruffled.
Her hand came back to her just as the Mouser turned around. She kissed the palm lingeringly, then reached it across her body to take the black fruit from the point of the Mouser’s dirk. She sucked delicately at the prick Cat’s Claw had made and shivered.
‘Fie, sir,’ she pouted. ‘You told me ’twould be sun-warmed and ’tis not. Already all things grow chilly with evening.’ She looked around her thoughtfully. ‘Why, Swordsman Fafhrd is all gooseflesh,’ she announced, then blushed and tapped her lips reprovingly. ‘Close your jerkin, sir. ’Twill save you from catarrh and perchance from further embarrassment a girl who is unused to any sight of man-flesh save in slaves.’
