by Fritz Leiber
The sailors broke and made for the rafts, rats landing on their backs and nipping at their heels. The officers fled too. Slinoor was carried along, crying for a last stand. Skwee out with his sword on the Mouser’s shoulder and bravely waved on his suicidal soldiery, chittering high, then leaped down to follow in their rear. Four white rats armed with crossbows knelt on the crane fittings and began to crank, load and fire with great efficiency.
Splashings began, first two and three, then what sounded like a half dozen together, mixed with screams. The Mouser twisted his head around and from the corner of his eye saw the last two of Squid’s sailors leap over the side. Straining a little further around yet, he saw Slinoor clutch to his chest two rats that worried him, and follow the sailors. The four white-furred arbalesters leaped down from the crane fittings and raced toward a new firing position on the prow. Hoarse human cries came up from the water and faded off. Silence fell on Squid like the fog, broken only by the inevitable chitterings—and those few now.
When the Mouser turned his head aft again, Hisvet was standing before him. She was dressed in close-fitting black leather from neck to elbows and knees, looking most like a slim boy, and she wore a black leather helmet fitting down over her temples and cheeks like Skwee’s silver one, her white hair streaming down in a tail behind making her plume. A slim dagger was scabbarded on her left hip.
‘Dear, dear Dirksman,’ she said softly, smiling with her little mouth, ‘you at least do not desert me,’ and she reached out and almost brushed his cheek with her fingers. Then, ‘Bound!’ she said, seeming to see the rope for the first time and drawing back her hand ‘We must remedy that, Dirksman.’
‘I would be most grateful, White Princess,’ the Mouser said humbly. Nevertheless, he did not let go his sharpened coin, which although somewhat dulled had now sliced almost halfway through a third loop.
‘We must remedy that,’ Hisvet repeated a little absently, her gaze straying beyond the Mouser. ‘But my fingers are too soft and unskilled to deal with such mighty knots as I see. Frix will release you. Now I must hear Skwee’s report on the afterdeck. Skwee-skwee-skwee!’
As she turned and walked aft the Mouser saw that her hair all went through a silver-ringed hole in the back top of her black helmet. Skwee came running past the Mouser and when he had almost caught up with Hisvet he took position to her right and three rat-paces behind her, strutting with forepaw on sword-hilt and head held high, like a captain-general behind his empress.
As the Mouser resumed his weary sawing of the third loop, he looked at Fafhrd bound to the rail and saw that the black kitten was crouched fur-on-end on Fafhrd’s neck and slowly raking his cheek with the spread claws of a fore-paw while the Northerner still snored garglingly. Then the kitten dipped its head and bit Fafhrd’s ear. Fafhrd groaned piteously, but then came another of the gargling snores. The kitten resumed its cheek-raking. Two rats, one white, one black, walked by and the kitten wailed at them softly yet direly. The rats stopped and stared, then scurried straight toward the afterdeck, presumably to report the unwholesome condition to Skwee or Hisvet.
The Mouser decided to burst loose without more ado, but just then the four white arbalesters came back dragging a brass cage of frightened cheeping wrens the Mouser remembered seeing hanging by a sailor’s bunk in the forecastle. They stopped by the crane fittings again and started a wren-shoot. They’d release one of the tiny terrified mutterers, then as it whisked off bring it down with a well-aimed dart—at distances up to five and six yards, never missing. Once or twice one of them would glance at the Mouser narrowly and touch the dart’s point.
Frix stepped down the ladder from the afterdeck. She was now dressed like her mistress, except she had no helmet, only the tight silver hairnet, though the silver rings were gone from her wrists.
‘Lady Frix!’ the Mouser called in a light voice, almost gaily. It was hard to say how one should speak on a ship manned by rats, but a high voice seemed indicated.
She came toward him smiling, but, ‘Frix will do better,’ she said. ‘Lady is such a corset title.’
‘Frix then,’ the Mouser called. ‘on your way would you scare that black witch cat from our poppy-sodden friend? He’ll rake out my comrade’s eye.’
Frix looked sideways to see what the Mouser meant, but still kept stepping toward him.
‘I never interfere with another person’s pleasures or pains, since it’s hard to be certain which are which,’ she informed him, coming close. ‘I only carry out my mistress’ directives. Now she bids me tell you be patient and of good cheer. Your trials will soon be over. And this withal she sends you as a remembrancer.’ Lifting her mouth, she kissed the Mouser softly on each upper eyelid.
The Mouser said, ‘That’s the kiss with which the unseen priestess of Djil seals the eyes of those departing this world.’
‘Is it?’ Frix asked softly.
‘Aye, ’tis,’ the Mouser said with a little shudder, continuing briskly, ‘So now undo me these knots, Frix, which is something your mistress has directed. And then perchance give me a livelier smack—after I’ve looked to Fafhrd.’
‘I only carry out the directives of my mistress’ own mouth,’ Frix said, shaking her head a little sadly. ‘She said nothing to me about untying knots. But doubtless she will direct me to loose you shortly.’
‘Doubtless,’ the Mouser agreed, a little glumly, forbearing to saw with his coin at the third loop while Frix watched him. If he could but sever at once three loops, he told himself, he might be able to shake off the remaining ones in a not impossibly large number of heartbeats.
As if on cue, Hisvet stepped lightly down from the afterdeck and hastened to them.
‘Dear mistress, do you bid me undo the Dirksman his knots?’ Frix asked at once, almost as if she wanted to be told to.
‘I will attend to matters here,’ Hisvet replied hurriedly. ‘Go you to the afterdeck, Frix, and hearken and watch for my father. He delays overlong this night.’ She also ordered the white crossbow-rats, who’d winged their last wren, to retire to the afterdeck.
6
After Frix and the rats had gone, Hisvet gazed at the Mouser for the space of a score of heartbeats, frowning just a little, studying him deeply with her red-irised eyes.
Finally she said with a sigh, ‘I wish I could be certain.’
‘Certain of what, White Princessship?’ the Mouser asked.
‘Certain that you love me truly,’ she answered softly yet downrightly, as if he surely knew. ‘Many men—aye and women too and demons and beasts—have told me they loved me truly, but truly I think none of them loved me for myself (save Frix, whose happiness is in being a shadow) but only because I was young or beautiful or a Demoiselle of Lankhmar or dreadfully clever or had a rich father or was dowered with power, being blood-related to the rats, which is a certain sign of power in more worlds than Nehwon. Do you truly love me for myself, Gray Mouser?’
‘I love you most truly indeed, Shadow Princess,’ the Mouser said with hardly an instant’s hesitation. ‘Truly I love you for yourself alone, Hisvet. I love you more dearly than aught else in Nehwon—aye, and in all other worlds too and heaven and hell besides.’
Just then Fafhrd, cruelly clawed or bit by the kitten, let off a most piteous groan indeed with a dreadful high note in it, and the Mouser said impulsively, ‘Dear Princess, first chase me that were-cat from my large friend, for I fear it will be his blinding and death’s bane, and then we shall discourse of our great loves to the end of eternity.’
‘That is what I mean,’ Hisvet said softly and reproachfully. ‘If you loved me truly for myself, Gray Mouser, you would not care a feather if your closest friend or your wife or mother or child were tortured and done to death before your eyes, so long as my eyes were upon you and I touched you with my fingertips. With my kisses on your lips and my slim hands playing about you, my whole person accepting and welcoming you, you could watch your large friend there scratched to blindness and death by a cat—or mayhap eat
en alive by rats—and be utterly content. I have touched few things in this world, Gray Mouser. I have touched no man, or male demon or larger male beast, save by the proxy of Frix. Remember that, Gray Mouser.’
‘To be sure, Dear Light of my Life!’ the Mouser replied most spiritedly, certain now of the sort of self-adoring madness with which he had to deal, since he had a touch of the same mania and so was well-acquainted with it. ‘Let the barbarian bleed to death by pinpricks! Let the cat have his eyes! Let the rats banquet on him to his bones! What skills it while we trade sweet words and caresses, discoursing to each other with our entire bodies and our whole souls!’
Meanwhile, however, he had started to saw again most fiercely with his now-dulled coin, unmindful of Hisvet’s eyes upon him. It joyed him to feel Cat’s Claw lying against his ribs.
‘That’s spoken like my own true Mouser,’ Hisvet said with most melting tenderness, brushing her fingers so close to his cheek that he could feel the tiny chill zephyr of their passage. Then, turning, she called, ‘Holla, Frix! Send to me Skwee and the White Company. Each may bring with him two black comrades of his own choice. I have somewhat of a reward for them, somewhat of a special treat. Skwee! Skwee-skwee-skwee!’
What would have happened then, both instantly and ultimately, is impossible to say, for at that moment Frix hailed, ‘Ahoy!’ into the fog and called happily down, ‘A black sail, oh Blessed Demoiselle, it is your father!’
Out of the pearly fog to starboard came the shark’s-fin triangle of the upper portion of a black sail, running alongside Squid aft of the dragging brown mainsail. Two boathooks, a small ship’s length apart, came up and clamped down on the starboard middeck rail while the black sail flapped. Frix came running lightly forward and secured to the rail midway between the boathooks the top of a rope ladder next heaved up from the black cutter (for surely this must be that dire craft, the Mouser thought).
Then up the ladder and over the rail came nimbly an old man of Lankhmar dressed all in black leather and on his left shoulder a white rat clinging with right forepaw to a cheek-flap of his black leather cap. He was followed swiftly by two lean bald Mingols with faces yellow-brown as old lemons, each shoulder-bearing a large black rat that steadied itself by a yellow ear.
At that moment, most coincidentally, Fafhrd groaned again, more loudly, and opened his eyes and cried out in the faraway moan of an opium-dreamer. ‘Millions of black monkeys! Take him off, I say! ’Tis a black fiend of hell torments me! Take him off!’
At that the black kitten raised up, stretched out its small evil face, and bit Fafhrd on the nose. Disregarding this interruption, Hisvet threw up her hand at the newcomers and cried clearly, ‘Greetings, oh Co-commander my Father! Greetings, peerless rat-captain Grig! Clam is conquered by you, now Squid by me, and this very night, after small business of my own attended to, shall see the perdition of all this final fleet. Then it’s Movarl estranged, the Mingols across the Sinking Land, Glipkerio hurled down, and the rats ruling Lankhmar under my overlordship and yours!’
The Mouser, sawing ceaselessly at the third loop, glanced to note Skwee’s muzzle at that moment. The small white captain had come down from the afterdeck at Hisvet’s summoning along with eight white comrades, two bandaged, and now he shot Hisvet a silent look that seemed to say there might be doubts about the last item of her boast, once the rats ruled Lankhmar.
Hisvet’s father Hisvin had a long-nosed, much-wrinkled face patched by a week of white, old-man’s beard, and he seemed permanently stooped far over, yet he moved most briskly for all that, taking very rapid little shuffling steps.
Now he answered his daughter’s bragging speech with a petulant sideways flirt of his black glove close to his chest and a little impatient ‘Tsk-tsk!’ of disapproval, then went circling the deck at his odd scuttling gait while the Mingols waited by the ladder-top. Hisvin circled by Fafhrd and his black tormentor (‘Tsk-tsk!’) and by the Mouser (another ‘Tsk!’) and stopping in front of Hisvet said rapid and fumingly, still crouched over, jogging a bit from foot to foot, ‘Here’s confusion indeed tonight! You catsing and romancing with bound men! I know, I know! The moon coming through too much! (I’ll have my astrologer’s liver!) Shark oaring like a mad cuttlefish through the foggy white! A black balloon with little lights scudding above the waves! And but now ere we found you, a vast sea monster swimming about in circles with a gibbering demon on his head—it came sniffing at us as if we were dinner, but we evaded it!
‘Daughter, you and your maid and your little people must into the cutter at once with us, pausing only to slay these two and leave a suicide squad of gnawers to sink Squid!’
‘Yeth, think Thquid!’ the Mouser could have sworn he heard the rat on Hisvin’s shoulder lisp shrilly in Lankhmarese.
‘Sink Squid?’ Hisvet questioned. ‘The plan was to slip her to Ilthmar with a Mingol skeleton crew and there sell her cargo.’
‘Plans change!’ Hisvin snapped. ‘Daughter, if we’re not off this ship in forty breaths, Shark will ram us by pure excess of blundering energy or the monster with the clown-clad mad mahout will eat us up as we drift here helpless. Give orders to Skwee! Then out with your knife and cut me those two fools’ throats! Quick, quick!’
‘But, Daddy,’ Hisvet objected, ‘I had something quite different in mind for them. Not death, at least not altogether. Something far more artistic, even loving—’
‘I give you thirty breaths each to torture ere you slay them!’ Hisvin conceded. ‘Thirty breaths and not one more, mind you! I know your somethings!’
‘Dad, don’t be crude! Among new friends! Why must you always give people a wrong impression of me? I won’t endure it longer!’
‘Chat-chat-chat! You pother and pose more than your rat-mother.’
‘But I tell you I won’t endure it. This time we’re going to do things my way for a change!’
‘Hist-hist!’ her father commanded, stooping still lower and cupping hand to left ear, while his white rat Grig imitated his gesture on the other side.
Faintly through the fog came a gibbering. ‘Gottverdammter Nebel! Freunde, wo sind Sie?’5
‘’Tis the gibberer!’ Hisvin cried under his breath. ‘The monster will be upon us! Quick, daughter, out with your knife and slay, or I’ll have my Mingols dispatch them!’
Hisvet lifted her hand against that villainous possibility. Her proudly plumed head literally bent to the inevitable.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Skwee, give me your crossbow. Load with silver.’
The white rat-captain folded his forelegs across his chest and chittered at her with a note of demand.
‘No, you can’t have him,’ she said sharply. ‘You can’t have either of them. They’re mine now.’
Another curt chitter from Skwee.
‘Very well, your people may have the small black one. Now quick with your crossbow; or I’ll curse you! Remember, only a smooth silver dart.’
Hisvin had scuttled to his Mingols and now he went around in a little circle, almost spitting. Frix, smiling, glided to him and touched his arm but he shook away from her with an angry flirt.
Skwee was fumbling into his canister rat-frantically. His eight comrades were fanning out across the deck toward Fafhrd, snarling defiance.
Fafhrd himself was looking about, bloody-faced but at last lucid-eyed, drinking in the desperate situation, poppy-languor banished by nose-bite.
Just then there came another gibber through the fog, ‘Gottverdammter Nirgendswelt!’6
Fafhrd’s bloodshot eyes widened and brightened with a great inspiration. Bracing himself against his bonds, he inflated his mighty chest.
‘Hoongk!’ he bellowed. ‘Hoongk!’
Out of the fog came eager answer, growing each time louder: ‘Hoongk! Hoongk! Hoongk!’
Seven of the eight white rats that had crossed the deck now returned carrying stretched between them the still-snarling black kitten, spread-eagled on its back, one to each paw and ear while the seventh tried to master b
ut was shaken from side to side by the whipping tail. The eighth came hobbling behind on three legs, shoulder paralyzed by a deep-stabbing cat-bite.
From cabin and forecastle and all corners of the deck, the black rats scurried in to watch gloatingly their traditional enemy mastered and delivered to torment, until the middeck was thick with their bloaty dark forms.
Hisvin cracked a command at his Mingols. Each drew a wavy-edged knife. One headed for Fafhrd, the other for the Mouser. Black rats hid their feet.
Skwee dumped his tiny darts on the deck. His paw closed on a palely gleaming one and he slapped it in his crossbow, which he hurriedly handed up toward his mistress. She lifted it in her right hand toward Fafhrd, but just then the Mingol moving toward the Mouser crossed in front of her, his kreese point-first before him. She shifted crossbow to left hand, whipped out her dagger and darted ahead of the Mingol.
Meanwhile the Mouser had snapped the three cut loops with one surge. The others still confined him loosely at ankles and throat, but he reached across his body, drew Cat’s Claw and slashed out at the Mingol as Hisvet shouldered the yellow man aside.
The dirk sliced her pale cheek from jaw to nose.
The other Mingol, advancing his kreese toward Fafhrd’s throat, abruptly dropped to the deck and began to roll back across it, the black rats squeaking and snapping at him in surprise.
‘Hoongk!’
A great green dragon’s head had loomed from the moon-mist over the larboard rail just at the spot where Fafhrd was tied. Strings of slaver trailed on the Northerner from the dagger-toothed jaws.
Like a ponderous jack-in-the-box, the red-mawed head dipped and drove forward, lower jaw rasping the oaken deck and sweeping up from it a swath of black rats three rats wide. The jaws crunched together on their great squealing mouthful inches from the rolling Mingol’s head. Then the green head swayed aloft and a horrid swelling traveled down the greenish-yellow neck.
