by Fritz Leiber
‘Here is a tastier plum,’ the Mouser called from beside the bag. Hisvet smiled at him and lightly tossed him back-handed the plum she’d sampled. He dropped that overboard and tossed her the second plum. She caught it deftly, lightly squeezed it, touched it to her lips, shook her head sadly though still smiling, and tossed back the plum. The Mouser, smiling gently too, caught it, dropped it overboard and tossed her a third. They played that way for some time. A shark following in the wake of the Squid got a stomach-ache.
The black kitten came single-footing back along the starboard rail with a sharp eye to larboard. Fafhrd seized it instantly as any good general does opportunity in the heat of battle.
‘Have you seen the ship’s catling, Little Mistress?’ he called, crossing to Hisvet, the kitten almost hidden in his big hands. ‘Or perhaps we should call the Squid the catling’s ship, for she adopted it, skipping by herself aboard just as we sailed. Here, Little Mistress. It feels sun-toasted now, warmer than any plum,’ and he reached the kitten out sitting on the palm of his right hand.
But Fafhrd had been forgetting the kitten’s point of view. Its fur stood on end as it saw itself being carried toward the rats and now, as Hisvet stretched out her hand toward it, showing her upper teeth in a tiny smile and saying, ‘Poor little waif,’ the kitten hissed fiercely and raked out stiff-armed with spread claws.
Hisvet drew back her hand with a gasp. Before Fafhrd could drop the kitten or bat it aside, it sprang to the top of his head and from there onto the highest point of the tiller.
The Mouser darted to Hisvet, crying meanwhile at Fafhrd, ‘Dolt! Lout! You knew the beast was half wild!’ Then, to Hisvet, ‘Demoiselle! Are you hurt?’
Fafhrd struck angrily at the kitten and one of the helmsmen came back to bat at it too, perhaps because he thought it improper for kittens to walk on the tiller. The kitten made a long leap to the starboard rail, slipped over it, and dangled by two claws above the curving water.
Hisvet was holding her hand away from the Mouser and he was saying, ‘Better let me examine it, Demoiselle. Even the slightest scratch from a filthy ship’s cat can be dangerous,’ and she was saying, almost playfully, ‘No, Dirksman, I tell you it’s nothing.’
Fafhrd strode to the starboard rail, fully intending to flick the kitten overboard, but somehow when he came to do it he found he had instead cupped the kitten’s rear in his hand and lifted it back on the rail. The kitten instantly sank its teeth deeply in the root of his thumb and fled up the aftermast. Fafhrd with difficulty suppressed a great yowl. Slinoor laughed.
‘Nevertheless, I will examine it,’ the Mouser said masterfully and took Hisvet’s hand by force. She let him hold it for a moment, then snatched it back and drawing herself up said frostily, ‘Dirksman, you forget yourself. Not even her own physician touches a Demoiselle of Lankhmar, he touches only the body of her maid, on which the Demoiselle points out her pains and symptoms. Leave me, Dirksman.’
The Mouser stood huffily back against the taffrail. Fafhrd sucked the root of his thumb. Hisvet went and stood beside the Mouser. Without looking at him, she said softly, ‘You should have asked me to call my maid. She’s quite pretty.’
Only a fingernail clipping of red sun was left on the horizon. Slinoor addressed the crow’s nest: ‘What of the black sail, boy?’
‘She holds her distance, master,’ the cry came back. ‘She courses on abreast of us.’
The sun went under with a faint green flash. Hisvet bent her head sideways and kissed the Mouser on the neck, just under the ear. Her tongue tickled.
‘Now I lose her, master,’ the crow’s nest called. ‘There’s mist to the northwest. And to the northeast…a small black cloud…like a black ship specked with light…that moves through the air. And now that fades too. All gone, master.’
Hisvet straightened her head. Slinoor came toward them muttering, ‘The crow’s nest sees too much.’ Hisvet shivered and said, ‘The White Shadows will take a chill. They’re delicate, Dirksman.’ The Mouser breathed, ‘You are Ecstasy’s White Shadow, Demoiselle,’ then strolled toward the silver cages, saying loudly for Slinoor’s benefit, ‘Might we not be privileged to have a show of them, Demoiselle, tomorrow here on the afterdeck? ’Twould be wondrous instructive to watch you control them.’ He caressed the air over the cages and said, lying mightily, ‘My, they’re fine handsome fellows.’ Actually he was peering apprehensively for any of the little spears and swords Slinoor had mentioned. The twelve rats looked up at him incuriously. One even seemed to yawn.
Slinoor said curtly, ‘I would advise against it, Demoiselle. The sailors have a mad fear and hatred of all rats. ’Twere best not to arouse it.’
‘But these are aristos,’ the Mouser objected, while Hisvet only repeated, ‘They’ll take a chill.’
Fafhrd, hearing this, took his hand out of his mouth and came hurrying to Hisvet, saying, ‘Little Mistress, may I carry them below? I’ll be gentle as a Kleshite nurse.’ He lifted between thumb and third finger a cage with two rats in it. Hisvet rewarded him with a smile, saying, ‘I wish you would, gallant Swordsman. The common sailors handle them too roughly. But two cages are all you may safely carry. You’ll need proper help.’ She gazed at the Mouser and Slinoor.
So Slinoor and the Mouser, the latter much to his distaste and apprehension, must each gingerly take up a silver cage, and Fafhrd two, and follow Hisvet to her cabin below the afterdeck. The Mouser could not forbear whispering privily to Fafhrd, ‘Oaf! To make rat-grooms of us! May you get rat-bites to match your cat-bite!’ At the cabin door Hisvet’s dark maid Frix received the cages, Hisvet thanked her three gallants most briefly and distantly and Frix closed the door against them. There was the muffled thud of a bar dropping across it and the jangle of a chain locking down the bar.
Darkness grew on the waters. A yellow lantern was lit and hoisted to the crow’s nest. The black war galley Shark, its brown sail temporarily furled, came rowing back to fuss at Clam, next ahead of Squid in line, for being slow in getting up its masthead light, then dropped back by Squid while Lukeen and Slinoor exchanged shouts about a black sail and mist and ship-shaped small black clouds and the Dragon Rocks. Finally the galley went bustling ahead again with its Lankhmarines in browned-iron chain mail to take up its sailing station at the head of the column. The first stars twinkled, proof that the sun had not deserted through the waters of eternity to some other world bubble, but was swimming as he should back to the east under the ocean of the sky, errant rays from him lighting the floating star-jewels in his passage.
After moonrise that night Fafhrd and the Mouser each found private occasion to go rapping at Hisvet’s door, but neither profited greatly thereby. At Fafhrd’s knock Hisvet herself opened the small grille set in the larger door, said swiftly, ‘Fie, for shame, Swordsman! Can’t you see I’m undressing?’ and closed it instantly. While when the Mouser asked softly for a moment with ‘Ecstasy’s White Shadow,’ the merry face of the dark maid Frix appeared at the grille, saying, ‘My mistress bid me kiss my hand good night to you.’ Which she did and closed the grille.
Fafhrd, who had been spying, greeted the crestfallen Mouser with a sardonic, ‘Ecstasy’s White Shadow!’
‘Little Mistress!’ the Mouser retorted scathingly.
‘Black Plum of Sarheenmar!’
‘Kleshite Nurse!’
Neither hero slept restfully that night and two-thirds through it the Squid’s gong began to sound at intervals, with the other ships’ gongs replying or calling faintly. When at dawn’s first blink the two came on deck, Squid was creeping through fog that hid the sail top. The two helmsmen were peering about jumpily, as if they expected to see ghosts. The sails were barely filled. Slinoor, his eyes dark-circled by fatigue and big with anxiety, explained tersely that the fog had not only slowed but disordered the grain fleet.
‘That’s Tunny next ahead of us. I can tell by her gong note. And beyond Tunny, Carp. Where’s Clam? What’s Shark about? And still not certainly past the Dragon Rocks! Not
that I want to see ’em!’
‘Do not some captains call them the Rat Rocks?’ Fafhrd interposed. ‘From a rat-colony started there from a wreck?’
‘Aye,’ Slinoor allowed and then grinning sourly at the Mouser, observed, ‘Not the best day for a rat-show on the afterdeck, is it? Which is some good from this fog. I can’t abide the lolling white brutes. Though but a dozen in number they remind me too much of the Thirteen. Have you ever heard tell of the legend of the Thirteen?’
‘I have,’ Fafhrd said somberly. ‘A wise woman of the Cold Waste once told me that for each animal kind—wolves, bats, whales, it holds for all and each—there are always thirteen individuals having almost manlike (or demonlike!) wisdom and skill. Can you but find and master this inner circle, the Wise Woman said, then through them you can control all animals of that kind.’
Slinoor looked narrowly at Fafhrd and said, ‘She was not an altogether stupid woman.’
The Mouser wondered if for men also there was an inner circle of Thirteen.
The black kitten came ghosting along the deck out of the fog forward. It made toward Fafhrd with an eager mew, then hesitated, studying him dubiously.
‘Take for example, cats,’ Fafhrd said with a grin. ‘Somewhere in Nehwon today, mayhap scattered but more likely banded together, are thirteen cats of superfeline sagacity, somehow sensing and controlling the destiny of all catkind.’
‘What’s this one sensing now?’ Slinoor demanded softly.
The black kitten was staring to larboard, sniffing. Suddenly its scrawny body stiffened, the hair rising along its back and its skimpy tail a-bush.
‘Hoongk!’
Slinoor turned to Fafhrd with a curse, only to see the Northerner staring about shut-mouthed and startled. Clearly he had not bellowed.
3
Out of the fog to larboard came a green serpent’s head big as a horse’s, with white dagger teeth fencing red mouth horrendously agape. With dreadful swiftness it lunged low past Fafhrd on its endless yellow neck, its lower jaw loudly scraping the deck, and the white daggers clashed on the black kitten.
Or rather, on where the kitten had just been. For the latter seemed not so much to leap as to lift itself, by its tail perhaps, onto the starboard rail and thence vanished into the fog at the top of the aftermast in at most three more bounds.
The helmsmen raced each other forward. Slinoor and the Mouser threw themselves against the starboard taffrail, the unmanned tiller swinging slowly above them affording some sense of protection against the monster, which now lifted its nightmare head and swayed it this way and that, each time avoiding Fafhrd by inches. Apparently it was searching for the black kitten or more like it.
Fafhrd stood frozen, at first by sheer shock, then by the thought that whatever part of him moved first would get snapped off.
Nevertheless he was about to jump for it—besides all else the monster’s mere stench was horrible—when a second green dragon’s head, four times as big as the first with teeth like scimitars, came looming out of the fog. Sitting commandingly atop this second head was a man dressed in orange and purple, like a herald of the Eastern Lands, with red boots, cape and helmet, the last with a blue window in it, seemingly of opaque glass.
There is a point of grotesquerie beyond which horror cannot go, but slips into delirium. Fafhrd had reached that point. He began to feel as if he were in an opium dream. Everything was unquestionably real, yet it had lost its power to horrify him acutely.
He noticed as the merest of quaint details that the two greenish yellow necks forked from a common trunk.
Besides, the gaudily garbed man or demon riding the larger head seemed very sure of himself, which might or might not be a good thing. Just now he was belaboring the smaller head, seemingly in rebuke, with a blunt-pointed, blunt-hooked pike he carried, and roaring out, either under or through his blue-red helmet, a gibberish that might be rendered as:
‘Gottverdammter Ungeheuer!’1
The smaller head cringed away, whimpering like seventeen puppies. The man-demon whipped out a small book of pages and after consulting it twice (apparently he could see out through his blue window) called down in broken outlandishly accented Lankhmarese, ‘What world is this, friend?’
Fafhrd had never before in his life heard that question asked, even by an awakening brandy guzzler. Nevertheless in his opium-dream mood he answered easily enough, ‘The world of Nehwon, oh sorcerer!’
‘Got sei dank!’2 the man-demon gibbered.
Fafhrd asked, ‘What world do you hail from?’
The question seemed to confound the man-demon. Hurriedly consulting his book, he replied, ‘Do you know about other worlds? Don’t you believe the stars are only huge jewels?’
Fafhrd responded, ‘Any fool can see that the lights in the sky are jewels, but we are not simpletons, we know of other worlds. The Lankhmarts think they’re bubbles in infinite waters. I believe we live in the jewel-ceilinged skull of a dead god. But doubtless there are other such skulls, the universe of universes being a great frosty battlefield.’
The tiller, swinging as Squid wallowed with sail a-flap, bumped the lesser head, which twisted around and snapped at it, then shook splinters from its teeth.
‘Tell the sorcerer to keep it off!’ Slinoor shouted, cringing.
After more hurried page-flipping the man-demon called down, ‘Don’t worry, the monster seems to eat only rats. I captured it by a small rocky island where many rats live. It mistook your small black ship’s cat for a rat.’
Still in his mood of opium-lucidity, Fafhrd called up, ‘Oh sorcerer, do you plan to conjure the monster to your own skull-world, or world-bubble?’
This question seemed doubly to confound and excite the man-demon. He appeared to think Fafhrd must be a mind reader. With much frantic book-consulting, he explained that he came from a world called simply Tomorrow and that he was visiting many worlds to collect monsters for some sort of museum or zoo, which he called in his gibberish Hagenbecks Zeitgarten3. On this particular expedition he had been seeking a monster that would be a reasonable facsimile of a wholly mythical six-headed sea-monster that devoured men off the decks of ships and was called Scylla by an ancient fantasy writer named Homer.
‘There never was a Lankhmar poet named Homer,’ muttered Slinoor.
‘Doubtless he was a minor scribe of Quarmall or the Eastern Lands,’ the Mouser told Slinoor reassuringly. Then, grown less fearful of the two heads and somewhat jealous of Fafhrd holding the center of the stage, the Mouser leapt atop the taffrail and cried, ‘Oh, sorcerer, with what spells will you conjure your Little Scylla back to, or perhaps I should say ahead to your Tomorrow bubble? I myself know somewhat of witchcraft. Desist, vermin!’ This last remark was directed with a gesture of lordly contempt toward the lesser head, which came questing curiously toward the Mouser. Slinoor gripped the Mouser’s ankle.
The man-demon reacted to the Mouser’s question by slapping himself on the side of his red helmet, as though he’d forgotten something most important. He hurriedly began to explain that he traveled between worlds in a ship (or space-time engine, whatever that might mean) that tended to float just above the water—‘a black ship with little lights and masts’—and that the ship had floated away from him in another fog a day ago while he’d been absorbed in taming the newly captured sea-monster. Since then the man-demon, mounted on his now-docile monster, had been fruitlessly searching for his lost vehicle.
The description awakened a memory in Slinoor, who managed to nerve himself to explain audibly that last sunset Squid’s crow’s nest had sighted just such a ship floating or flying to the northeast.
The man-demon was voluble in his thanks and after questioning Slinoor closely announced (rather to everyone’s relief) that he was now ready to turn his search eastward with new hope.
‘Probably I will never have the opportunity to repay your courtesies,’ he said in parting. ‘But as you drift through the waters of eternity at least carry with you my name: Karl Treu
herz of Hagenbeck’s.’
Hisvet, who had been listening from the middeck, chose that moment to climb the short ladder that led up to the afterdeck. She was wearing an ermine smock and hood against the chilly fog.
As her silvery hair and pale lovely features rose above the level of the afterdeck the smaller dragon’s head, which had been withdrawing decorously, darted at her with the speed of a serpent striking. Hisvet dropped. Woodwork rended loudly.
Backing out into the fog atop the larger and rather benign-eyed head, Karl Treuherz gibbered as never before and belabored the lesser head mercilessly as it withdrew.
Then the two-headed monster with its orange-and-purple mahout could be dimly seen moving around Squid’s stern eastward into thicker fog, the man-demon gibbering gentlier what might have been an excuse and farewell: ‘Es tut mir sehr leid! Aber dankeschoen, dankeschoen!’4
With a last gentle ‘Hoongk!’ the man-demon dragon-dragon assemblage faded into the fog.
Fafhrd and the Mouser raced a tie to Hisvet’s side, vaulting down over the splintered rail, only to have her scornfully reject their solicitude as she lifted herself from the oaken middeck, delicately rubbing her hip and limping for a step or two.
‘Come not near me, Spoonmen,’ she said bitterly. ‘Shame it is when a Demoiselle must save herself from toothy perdition only by falling helter-skelter on that part of her which I would almost shame to show you on Frix. You are no gentle knights, else dragons’ heads had littered the after-deck. Fie, fie!’
Meanwhile patches of clear sky and water began to show to the west and the wind to freshen from the same quarter. Slinoor dashed forward, bawling for his bosun to chase the monster-scared sailors up from the forecastle before Squid did herself an injury.
Although there was yet little real danger of that, the Mouser stood by the tiller, Fafhrd looked to the mainsheet. Then Slinoor, hurrying back aft followed by a few pale sailors, sprang to the taffrail with a cry.
