by Fritz Leiber
All the same his first reaction was pure angry jealousy when Frix paused beside Fafhrd and leaned over his shoulder and looked in his forward-tipped face.
Just then there came a great squeak of outrage and alarm from Skwee and the white rat sprang up onto the bed, still holding carving knife and fork with the mutton slice dangling from it.
From under eyelids that persisted in drooping lower and lower, the Mouser watched Skwee gesticulate with his tiny implements, as he chittered dramatically to Hisvet in most man-like cadences, and finally lift the petal of mutton to her lips with an accusing squeak.
Then, coming faintly through the chittering, the Mouser heard a host of stealthy footsteps crossing the middeck, converging on the cabin. He tried to call Hisvet’s attention to it, but found his lips and tongue numb and unobedient to his will.
Frix suddenly grasped the hair of Fafhrd’s forehead and jerked his head up and back. The Northerner’s jaw hung slackly, his eyes fell open, showing only whites.
There was a gentle rapping at the door, exactly the same as the cook’s boys had made delivering the earlier courses.
A look passed between Hisvet and Frix. The latter dropped Fafhrd’s head, darted to the door, slammed the bar across it and locked the bar with the chain (the grille already being shut) just as something (a man’s shoulder, it sounded) thudded heavily against the thick panels.
That thudding continued and a few heartbeats later became much more sharply ponderous, as if a spare mast-section were being swung like a battering ram against the door, which yielded visibly at each blow.
The Mouser realized at last, much against his will, that something was happening that he ought to do something about. He made a great effort to shake off his lethargy and spring up.
He found he could not even twitch a finger. In fact it was all he could do to keep his eyes from closing altogether and watch through lash-blurred slits as Hisvet, Frix and the rats spun into a whirlwind of silent activity.
Frix jammed her serving table against the jolting door and began to pile other furniture against it.
Hisvet dragged out from behind the sea-bed various dark long boxes and began to unlock them. As fast as she threw them open the white rats helped themselves to the small blued-iron weapons they contained: swords, spears, even most wicked-looking blued-iron crossbows with belted canisters of darts. They took more weapons than they could effectively use themselves. Skwee hurriedly put on a black-plumed helmet that fitted down over his furry cheeks. The number of rats busy around the boxes was ten—that much the Mouser noted clearly.
A split appeared in the middle of the open door. Nevertheless Frix sprang away from there to the starboard trap-door leading to the hold and heaved it up. Hisvet threw herself on the floor toward it and thrust her head down into the dark square hole.
There was something terribly animal-like about the movements of the two women. It may have been only the cramped quarters and the low ceiling, but it seemed to the Mouser that they moved by preference on all fours.
All the while Fafhrd’s chest-sunk head kept lifting very slowly and then falling with a jerk as he went on snoring.
Hisvet sprang up and waved on the ten white rats. Led by Skwee, they trooped down through the hatch, their blued-iron weapons flashing and once or twice clashing, and were gone in a twinkling. Frix grabbed dark garments out of a curtained niche. Hisvet caught her by the wrist and thrust the maid ahead of her down the trap and then descended herself. Before pulling the hatch down above her, she took a last look around the cabin. As her red eyes gazed briefly at the Mouser, it seemed to him that her forehead and cheeks were grown over with silky white hair, but that may well have been a combination of eyelash-blur and her own disordered hair streaming and streaking down across her face.
The cabin door split and a man’s length of thick mast boomed through, overturning the bolstering table and scattering the furniture set on and against it. After the mast-end came piling in three apprehensive sailors followed by Slinoor, holding a cutlass low, and Slinoor’s starsman (navigation officer) with a crossbow at the cock.
Slinoor pressed ahead a little and surveyed the scene swiftly yet intently, then said, ‘Our poppy-dust curry has taken Glipkerio’s two lust-besotted rogues, but Hisvet’s hid with her nymphy slave-girl. The rats are out of their cages. Search, sailors! Starsman, cover us!’
Gingerly at first, but soon in a rush, the sailors searched the cabin, tumbling the empty boxes and jerking the quilts and mattress off the sea-bed and swinging it up to see beneath, heaving chests away from walls and flinging open the unlocked ones, sweeping Hisvet’s wardrobe in great silken armfuls out of the curtained niches in which it had been hanging.
The Mouser again made a mighty effort to speak or move, with no more success than to widen his blurred eye-slits a little. A sailor louted into him and he helplessly collapsed sideways against an arm of his chair without quite falling out of it. Fafhrd got a shove behind and slumped face-down on the table in a dish of stewed plums, his great arms outsweeping unconsciously, upsetting cups and scattering plates.
The starsman kept crossbow trained on each new space uncovered. Slinoor watched with eagle eye, flipping aside silken fripperies with his cutlass point and using it to overset the rats’ table, peering the while narrowly.
‘There’s where the vermin feasted like men,’ he observed disgustedly. ‘The curry was set before them. Would they had gorged themselves senseless on it.’
‘Likely they were the ones to note the drug even through the masking spices of the curry, and warn the women,’ the starsman put in. ‘Rats are prodigiously wise to poisons.’
As it became apparent neither girls nor rats were in the cabin, Slinoor cried with angry anxiety, ‘They can’t have escaped to the deck—there’s the sky-trap locked below besides our guard above. The mate’s party bars the after hold. Perchance the stern-lights—’
But just then the Mouser heard one of the horn windows behind him being opened and Squid’s arms-master call from there, ‘Naught came this way. Where are they, captain?’
‘Ask someone wittier than I,’ Slinoor tossed him sourly. ‘Certain, they’re not here.’
‘Would that these two could speak,’ the starsman wished, indicating the Mouser and Fafhrd.
‘No,’ Slinoor said dourly. ‘They’d just lie. Cover the larboard trap to the hold. I’ll have it up and speak to the mate.’
Just then footsteps came hurrying across the middeck and Squid’s mate with blood-streaked face entered by the broken door, half dragging and half supporting a sailor who seemed to be holding a thin stick to his own bloody cheek.
‘Why have you left the hold?’ Slinoor demanded of the first. ‘You should be with your party below.’
‘Rats ambushed us on our way to the after hold,’ the mate gasped. ‘There were dozens of blacks led by a white, some armed like men. The sword of a beam-hanger almost cut my eye across. Two foamy-mouthed springers dashed out our lamp. ’Twere pure folly to have gone on in the dark. There’s scarce a man of my party not bitten, slashed or jabbed. I left them guarding the foreway to the hold. They say their wounds are poisoned and talk of nailing down the hatch.’
‘Oh monstrous cowardice!’ Slinoor cried. ‘You’ve spoiled my trap that would have scotched them at the start. Now all’s to do and difficult. Oh scarelings! Daunted by rats!’
‘I tell you they were armed!’ the mate protested and then, swinging the sailor forward, ‘Here’s my proof with a spearlet in his cheek.’
‘Don’t drag her out, captain, sir,’ the sailor begged as Slinoor moved to examine his face. ‘’Tis poisoned too, I wot.’
‘Hold still, boy,’ Slinoor commanded. ‘And take your hands away—I’ve got it firm. The point’s near the skin. I’ll drive it out forward so the barbs don’t catch. Pinion his arms, mate. Don’t move your face, boy, or you’ll be hurt worse. If it’s poisoned, it must come out the faster. There!’
The sailor squeaked. Fresh blood rilled
down his cheek.
‘’Tis a nasty needle indeed,’ Slinoor commended, inspecting the bloody point. ‘Doesn’t look poisoned. Mate, gently cut off the shaft aft of the wound, draw out the rest forward.’
‘Here’s further proof, most wicked,’ said the starsman, who’d been picking about in the litter. He handed Slinoor a tiny crossbow.
Slinoor held it up before him. In the pale candlelight it gleamed bluely, while the skipper’s dark-circled eyes were like agates.
‘Here’s evil’s soul,’ he cried. ‘Perchance ’twas well you were ambushed in the hold. ’Twill teach each mariner to hate and fear all rats again, like a good grain-sailor should. And now by a swift certain killing of all rats on Squid wipe out today’s traitorous foolery, when you clapped for rats and let rats lead your cheers, seduced by a scarlet girl and bribed by that most misnamed Mouser.’
The Mouser, still paralyzed and perforce watching Slinoor aslant as Slinoor pointed at him, had to admit it was a well-turned reference to himself.
‘First off,’ Slinoor said, ‘drag those two rogues on deck. Truss them to mast or rail. I’ll not have them waking to botch my victory.’
‘Shall I up with a trap and loose a dart in the after hold?’ the starsman asked eagerly.
‘You should know better,’ was all Slinoor answered.
‘Shall I gong for the galley and run up a red lamp?’ the mate suggested.
Slinoor was silent two heartbeats, then said, ‘No. This is Squid’s fight to wipe out today’s shame. Besides, Lukeen’s a hothead botcher. Forget I said that, gentlemen, but it is so.’
‘Yet we’d be safer with the galley standing by,’ the mate ventured to continue. ‘Even now the rats may be gnawing holes in us.’
‘That’s unlikely with the Rat-Queen below,’ Slinoor retorted. ‘Speed’s what will save us and not standby ships. Now hearken close. Guard well all ways to the hold. Keep traps and hatches shut. Rouse off the watch. Arm every man. Gather on middeck all we can spare from sailing. Move!’
The Mouser wished Slinoor hadn’t said ‘Move!’ quite so vehemently, for the two sailors instantly grabbed his ankles and dragged him most enthusiastically out of the littered cabin and across the middeck, his head bumping a bit. True, he couldn’t feel the bumps, only hear them.
To the west the sky was a quarter globe of stars, to the east a mass of fog below and thinner mist above, with the gibbous moon shining through the latter like a pale misshapen silver ghost-lamp. The wind had slackened. Squid sailed smoothly.
One sailor held the Mouser against the mainmast, facing aft, while the other looped rope around him. As the sailors bound him with his arms flat to his sides, the Mouser felt a tickle in his throat and life returning to his tongue, but he decided not to try to speak just yet. Slinoor in his present mood might order him gagged.
The Mouser’s next divertissement was watching Fafhrd dragged out by four sailors and bound lengthwise, facing inboard with head aft and higher than feet, to the larboard rail. It was quite a comic performance, but the Northerner snored through it.
Sailors began to gather then on middeck, some palely silent but most quipping in low voices. Pikes and cutlasses gave them courage. Some carried nets and long sharp-tined forks. Even the cook came with a great cleaver, which he hefted playfully at the Mouser.
‘Struck dumb with admiration of my sleepy curry, eh?’
Meanwhile the Mouser found he could move his fingers. No one had bothered to disarm him, but Cat’s Claw was unfortunately fixed far too high on his left side for either hand to touch, let alone get out of its scabbard. He felt the hem of his tunic until he touched, through the cloth, a rather small flat round object thinner along one edge than the other. Gripping it by the thick edge through the cloth, he began to scrape with the thin edge at the fabric confining it.
The sailors crowded aft as Slinoor emerged from the cabin with his officers and began to issue low-voiced orders. The Mouser caught, ‘Slay Hisvet or her maid on sight. They’re not women but were-rats or worse,’ and then the last of Slinoor’s orders: ‘Poise your parties below the hatch or trap by which you enter. When you hear the bosun’s whistle, move!’
The effect of this ‘Move!’ was rather spoiled by a tiny twing and the arms-master clapping his hand to his eye and screaming. There was a flurry of movement among the sailors. Cutlasses struck at a pale form that scurried along the deck. For an instant a rat with a crossbow in his fore-paws was silhouetted on the starboard rail against the moon-pale mist. Then the starsman’s crossbow twanged and the dart winging with exceptional accuracy or luck knocked the rat off the rail into the sea.
‘That was a whitey, lads!’ Slinoor cried. ‘A good omen!’ Thereafter there was some confusion, but it was quickly settled, especially when it was discovered that the arms-master had not been stuck in the eye but only near it, and the beweaponed parties moved off, one into the cabin, two forward past the mainmast, leaving on deck a skeleton crew of four.
The fabric the Mouser had been scraping parted and he most carefully eased out of the shredded hem an iron tik (the Lankhmar coin of least value) with half its edge honed to razor sharpness and began to slice with it in tiny strokes at the nearest loop of the line binding him. He looked hopefully toward Fafhrd, but the latter’s head still hung at a senseless angle.
A whistle sounded faintly, followed some ten breaths later by a louder one from another part of the hold, it seemed. Then muffled shouts began to come in flurries, there were two screams, something thumped the deck from below, and a sailor swinging a rat squeaking in a net dashed past the Mouser.
The Mouser’s fingers told him he was almost through the first loop. Leaving it joined by a few threads, he began to slice at the next loop, bending his wrist acutely to do it.
An explosion shook the deck, stinging the Mouser’s feet. He could not conjecture its nature and sawed furiously with his sharpened coin. The skeleton crew cried out and one of the helmsmen fled forward but the other stuck by the tiller. Somehow the gong clanged once, though no one was by it.
Then Squid’s sailors began to pour up out of the hold, half of them without weapons and frantic with fear. They milled about. The Mouser could hear sailors dragging Squid’s boats, which were forward of the mainmast, to the ship’s side. The Mouser gathered that the sailors had fared most evilly below, assaulted by battalions of black rats, confused by false whistles, slashed and jabbed from dark corners, stung by darts, two struck in the eye and blinded. What had completed their rout was that, coming to a hold of unsacked grain, they’d found the air above it choked with grain dust from the recent churnings and scatterings of a horde of rats, and Frix had thrown in fire from beyond, exploding the stuff and knocking them off their feet though not setting fire to the ship.
At the same time as the panic-stricken sailors, there also came on deck another group, noted only by the Mouser—a most quiet and orderly file of black rats that went climbing around him up the mainmast. The Mouser weighed crying an alarm, although he wouldn’t have wagered a tik on his chances of survival with hysterical be-cutlassed sailors rat-slashing all around him.
In any case his decision was made for him in the negative by Skwee, who climbed on his left shoulder just then. Holding on by a lock of the Mouser’s hair, Skwee leaned out in front of him, staring into the Mouser’s left eye with his own two wally blue ones under his black-plumed silver helmet. Skwee touched pale paw to his buck-toothed lips, enjoining silence, then patted the little sword at his side and jerked his rat-thumb across his rat-throat to indicate the penalty for silence broken. Thereafter he retired into the shadows by the Mouser’s ear, presumably to watch the routed sailors and wave on and command his own company—and keep close to the Mouser’s jugular vein. The Mouser kept sawing with his coin.
The starsman came aft followed by three sailors with two white lanterns apiece. Skwee crowded back closer between the Mouser and the mast, but touched the cold flat of his sword to the Mouser’s neck, just under the ear, as a r
eminder. The Mouser remembered Hisvet’s kiss. With a frown at the Mouser the starsman avoided the mainmast and had the sailors hang their lanterns to the aftermast and the crane fittings and the forward range of the afterdeck, fussing about the exact positions. He asserted in a high babble that light was the perfect military defense and counter-weapon, and talked wildly of light-entrenchments and light palisades, and was just about to set the sailors hunting more lamps, when Slinoor limped out of the cabin bloody-foreheaded and looked around.
‘Courage, lads,’ Slinoor shouted hoarsely. ‘On deck we’re still masters. Let down the boats orderly, lads, we’ll need ’em to fetch the marines. Run up the red lamp! You there, gong the alarm!’
Someone responded, ‘The gong’s gone overboard. The ropes that hung it—gnawed!’
At the same time thickening waves of fog came out of the east, shrouding Squid in deadly moonlit silver. A sailor moaned. It was a strange fog that seemed to increase rather than diminish the amount of light cast by the moon and the starsman’s lantern. Colors stood out, yet soon there were only white walls beyond the Squid’s rails.
Slinoor ordered, ‘Get up the spare gong! Cook, let’s have your biggest kettles, lids and pots—anything to beat an alarm!’
There were two splashing thumps as Squid’s boats hit the water.
Someone screamed agonizingly in the cabin.
Then two things happened together. The mainsail parted from the mast, falling to starboard like a cathedral ceiling in a gale, its lines and ties to the mast gnawed loose or sawed by tiny swords. It floated darkly on the water, dragging the boom wide. Squid lurched to starboard.
At the same time a horde of black rats spewed out of the cabin door and came pouring over the taffrail, the latter presumably by way of the stern lights. They rushed at the humans in waves, springing with equal force and resolution whether they landed on pike points or tooth-clinging to noses and throats.
