by Fritz Leiber
By the time Cif arrived (not long) he had decided on his approach to her.
‘Dear Cif,’ he said without preamble, coming to her. ‘I have a confession to make to you,’ and then he told her quite humbly but clearly and succinctly the truth about his ‘wonderful words’—that he simply hadn’t heard one of them. When he was done he added, ‘So you can see not even my vanity is involved—whatever it was, it was Loki’s speech, not mine…so do you now tell me truth about it, sparing me nothing.’
She looked at him with a wondering smile and said, ‘Well, I was puzzled as to what you could have said to Mikkidu to make him so head-in-the-clouds happy—and am not sure I understand that even now. But, yes, my experience was, I now confess, identical with his—and not even the taking of an unknown drink to excuse it. My mind went blank, time passed me by, and I heard not a word you said, except those last directions about Afreyt’s expedition and the whirlpool. But everyone was cheering and so I pretended to have heard, not wanting to injure your feelings or feel myself a fool. Oh, I was a sheep! Once I was minded to confess my lapse to Afreyt, and now I wish I had, for she had a strange look on her then—But I didn’t. You think, as I do now, that she also—?’
The Mouser nodded decisively. ‘I think that not one soul of them heard a word to remember of the main body of my—or, rather, Loki’s talk, but later they all pretended to have done so, just like so many sheep indeed—and I the black goat leading them on. So only Loki knows what Loki said and we sail out upon an unknown course against the Mingols, taking all on trust.’
‘What to do now?’ she asked wonderingly.
Looking into her eyes with a tentative smile and a slight shrug that was at once acquiescent and comical, he said, ‘Why, we go on, for it is your course and I am committed to it.’
Flotsam gave a long lurch then, with a wave striking along her side, and it nudged Cif against him, and their arms went around each other, and their lips met thrillingly—but not for long, for he must hurry on deck, and she too, to discover (or rather confirm) what had befallen.
Flotsam progressed out of Salthaven harbor and the salt cliffs lee to the Outer Sea where the east wind smote them more urgently and the swells and the sunlight struck their canvas and deck. The Mouser took the tiller from sad-faced Ourph and that old one and Gib and Mikkidu set sail for the first eastward tack. And one by one Sea Hawk and the weirdly accoutered fishing boats repeated their maneuver, following Flotsam out.
That selfsame east wind which blew west across the southern half of Rime Isle, and against which Flotsam labored, farther out at sea was hurrying on the horse-ships of the Sunwise Mingols. The grim galleys, each with its bellying square sail, made a great drove of ships, and now and again a stallion screamed in its bow-cage as they plunged ahead through the waves, which cascaded spray through the black, crazily-angled bars. All eyes strained west—ahead, and it would have been hard to say which eyes glared the more madly, those of the fur-clad, grinningly white-toothed men, or those of long-faced, grimacingly white-toothed beasts.
On the poop of the flagship this frenzy looked in a more philosophical direction, where Gonov discoursed with his witch-doctor and attendant sages propounding such questions as, ‘Is it sufficient to burn a city to the ground, or must it also be trampled to rubble?’ and contemplating such answers as, ‘Most meritorious is to pound it to sand, aye, to fine loam, without burning at all.’
While the strong westwind that blew east across the northern half of the island (with a belt of squalls and fierce eddies between the two winds) was hurrying on from west across trackless ocean the like fleet of the Widdershins Mingols, where Edumir had proposed this query to his philosophers: ‘Is death by suicide in the first charge, hurling oneself upon the foeman’s virgin spear, to be preferred to death by self-administered poison in the last charge?’
He hearkened to their closely-reasoned answers and to the counter-question: ‘Since death is so much to be desired, surpassing the delights of love and mushroom wine, how did our all-noble and revered ancestors ever survive to procreate us?’ and at last observed, his white-rimmed eyes gazing east yearningly, ‘That is all theory. On Rime Isle we will once more put these recondite matters to the test of practice.’
While high above all winds Khahkht in his icy sphere ceaselessly studied the map lining it, whereon he moved counters for ships and men, horses and women—aye, even gods—bending his bristly face close, so that no unlawful piece might escape his fierce scrutiny.
By early morning sunlight and against the nipping wind, Afreyt hurried on alone through heather dotted by stunted cedars past the last Silent Hill farm, with its sagging gray-green turf roofs, before Cold Harbor. She was footsore and weary (even Odin’s noose around her neck seemed a heavy weight) for they’d marched all night with only two short rest-stops and midway they’d been buffeted by changing winds reaching tornadic strength as they’d passed through the transition belt between the southeastern, Salthaven half of Rime Isle, which the east wind presently ruled, and the northwestern, Cold Harbor half, where the equally strong west wind now held sway. Yet she forced herself to scan carefully ahead for friend or foe, for she had constituted herself vanguard for Groniger and his grotesquely burdened trampers. A while ago in the twilight before dawn she’d gone from litter-side up to the head of the column and pointed out to Groniger the need of having a guard ahead now that they were nearing their journey’s end and should be wary of ambushes. He had seemed unconcerned and heedless, unable to grasp the danger, almost as if he (and all the other Rime men, for that matter) were intent only on marching on and on, glaze-eyed, growling Gale’s doom-chant, like so many monstrous automatons, until they met the Mingols, or Fafhrd’s force. Failing those, she believed, they would stride into the chilly western ocean with never a halt or waver, as did the lemming hordes in their climacteric. But neither had Groniger voiced any objection to her spying on ahead—nor even concern for her safety. Where was the man’s one-time clear-headedness and prudence?
Afreyt was not unversed in island woodcraft and she now spotted Skor peering toward Cold Harbor from the grove of dwarf cedars whence Fafhrd had launched yestermorning’s brief arrow-fusillade. She called Skor’s name, and he whipped around nocking an arrow to his bow, then came up swiftly when he saw her familiar blues.
‘Lady Afreyt, what do you here? You look weary,’ he greeted her succinctly. He looked weary himself and hollow-eyed, his cheeks and forehead smudged with soot above his straggly russet beard. perhaps against the glare of glacial ice.
She quickly told him about the Rimeland reinforcements approaching behind her.
His weariness seemed to lift from him as she spoke. ‘That’s brave news,’ he said when she had done. ‘We joined our lines (I’m now making the rounds of them) with those of the Cold Harbor defenders before sunset yesterday and have the Mingol fore-raiders penned on the beach—and all by bluff! The mere sight of the forces you describe, strategically deployed, will cause ’em to take ship and sail away, I think—and we not lift a finger.’
‘Your pardon, lieutenant,’ she rejoined. her own weariness lifting at his optimism, ‘but I have heard you and your fellows named berserkers—and have always thought it was the way of such to charge the enemy at the first chance, charge wolf-howling and bounding, mother-naked?’
‘To tell the truth, that was once my own understanding of it,’ he replied. thoughtfully rubbing his broken nose with the back of his hand, ‘but the captain’s changed my mind for me. He’s a great one for sleights and deceits, the captain is! Makes the foe imagine things. sets their own minds to work against ’em, never fights when there’s an easier way—and some of his wisdom has rubbed off on us.’
‘Why are you wearing Fafhrd’s sword?’ she asked, seeing it suddenly.
‘Oh, he went off yestermorning to Hellglow after the girl, leaving me in command, and he’s not yet returned,’ Skor answered readily, though a crease of concern appeared between his brows, and he went on briefly to
tell Afreyt about Mara’s strange abduction.
‘I wonder at him leaving you all so long to shift without him, merely for that,’ Afreyt commented, frowning.
‘Truth to tell, I wondered at it myself, yestermorning,’ Skor admitted. ‘But as events came on us, I asked myself what the captain would do in each case, and did that, and it’s worked out—so far.’ He hooked a middle-finger over a fore-one.
There came a faint tramping and the whispers of a hoarse chant and turning they saw the front of the Rime column coming downhill.
‘Well, they look fearsome enough,’ Skor said, after a moment. ‘Strange, too,’ he added, as the litter and gallows hove into view. The girls in their red cloaks were walking beside the former.
‘Yes, they are that,’ Afreyt said.
‘How are they armed?’ he asked her. ‘I mean, besides the pikes and spears and quarterstaves and such?’
She told him those were their only weapons, as far as she knew.
‘They’d not stand up to Mingols, then, not if they had to cover any distance to attack,’ he judged. ‘Still, if we showed; ’em under the right conditions, and put a few bowmen amongst ’em…’
‘The problem, I think, will be to keep them from charging,’ Afreyt told him. ‘Or, at any rate, to get them to stop marching.’
‘Oh, so it’s that way,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Cousin Afreyt! Cousin Afreyt!’ May and Gale were crying shrilly while they waved at her. But then the girls were pointing overhead and calling, ‘Look! Look!’ and next they were running downhill alongside the column, still waving and calling and pointing at the sky.
Afreyt and Skor looked up and saw, at least a hundred yards above them, the figures of a man and a small girl (Mara by her red cloak) stretched out flat on their faces and clinging to each other and to something invisible that was swiftly swooping toward Cold Harbor. They came around in a great curve, getting lower all the time, and headed straight for Skor and Afreyt. She saw it was Fafhrd and Mara, all right, and she realized that she and Cif must have looked just so when they were being rescued from Khahkht’s blizzard by the invisible mountain princesses. She clutched Skor, saying rapidly and somewhat breathlessly, ‘They’re all right. They’re hanging onto a fish-of-the-air, which is like a thick flying carpet that’s alive, but invisible. It’s guided by an invisible woman.’
‘It would be,’ he retorted obscurely. Then they were buffeted by a great gust of air as Fafhrd and Mara sped past close overhead and still flat out—both of them grinning excitedly, Afreyt was able to note as she cringed down, at least Fafhrd’s lips were drawn back from his teeth. They came to rest midway between her and Groniger at the head of the column, which had slowed to gawk, about a foot above the heather, which was pressed down in a large oval patch, as if Fafhrd and Mara were lying prone on an invisible mattress wide and thick enough for a king’s bed.
Then the air travelers had scrambled to their feet and jumped down after an unsteady step or two. Skor and Afreyt were closing in on them from one side and May and Gale from the other, while the Rimelanders stared openmouthed. Mara was shrieking to the other girls, ‘I was abducted by a very nasty demon, but Fafhrd rescued me! He chopped off its hand!’ And Fafhrd had thrown his arms around Afreyt (she realized she’d invited it) and he was saying, ‘Afreyt, thank Kos you’re here. What’s that you’ve got around your neck?’ Next, without letting Afreyt go, to Skor, ‘How are the men? What’s your position?’ All the while the staring Rimelanders marched on slowly and almost painfully, like sleepers peering at another wonder out of a nightmare which has entrapped them.
And then all others grew suddenly silent and Fafhrd’s arms dropped away from Afreyt as a voice that she had last heard in a cave on Darkfire called out like an articulate silver trumpet, ‘Farewell, girl. Farewell. barbarian. Next time, think of the courtesies due between orders and of your limitations. My debt’s discharged, while yours has but begun.’
And with that a wind blew out from where Fafhrd and Mara had landed (from under the invisible mattress, one must think), bending the heather and blowing the girls’ red coats out straight from them (Afreyt felt it and got a whiff of animal stench neither fish nor fowl nor four-legged) and then it was as if something large and living were taking off into the air and swiftly away, while a silvery laughter receded.
Fafhrd threw up his hand in farewell, then brought it down in a sweeping gesture that seemed to mean, ‘Let’s say goodbye to all that!’ His expression, which had grown bleakly troubled during Hirriwi’s speaking, became grimly determined as he saw the Rime column marching slowly into them. ‘Master Groniger!’ he said sharply, ‘Captain Fafhrd!’ that one replied thickly, as one half-rousing from a dream. ‘Halt your men!’ Fafhrd commanded, and then turned to Skor, who made report, telling his leader in somewhat more detail matter told earlier to Afreyt, while the column slowly ground to a halt, piling up around Groniger in a disorderly array.
Meanwhile Afreyt had knelt beside Mara, assured herself that the girl wasn’t outwardly injured, and was listening bemused as Mara proudly but deprecatingly told the other girls about her abduction and rescue. ‘He made a scarecrow out of my cloak and the skull of the last little girl he’d eaten alive. and he kept touching me just like Odin does, but Fafhrd cut off his hand and Princess Hirriwi got my cloak back this morning. It was neat riding through the sky. I didn’t get dizzy once.’
Gale said, ‘Odin and I made up a marching song. It’s about killing Mingols. Everyone’s chanting it.’ May said, ‘I made nooses with flowers in them. They’re a mark of honor from Odin. We’re all wearing them. I made one for you and a big one for Fafhrd. Say, I’ve got to give Fafhrd his noose. It’s time he was wearing it, with a big battle coming.’
Fafhrd listened patiently, for he’d wanted to know what that ugly thing around Afreyt’s neck was. But when Mara had asked him to bend down his head, and he looked up spying the curtained litter, and recognized the uprooted gallows beyond it, he felt a shivery revulsion and said angrily, ‘No, I won’t wear it. I won’t mount his eight-legged horse. Get those things off your necks, all of you!’
But then he saw the hurt, distrustful look in the girls’ eyes as Mara protested, ‘But it’s to make you strong in battle. It’s an honor from Odin.’ And then the look of concern in Afreyt’s eyes as she gestured toward the litter, its curtains fluttering in the wind (he sensed the grim holiness that seemed to emanate from it), and the look of expectation in the eyes of Groniger and the other Rimers, made him change his mind. He said, making his voice eager, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll wear it around my wrist, to strengthen it,’ and he thrust his left hand through the noose and after a moment May tightened it.
‘My left arm,’ he explained, lying somewhat, ‘has always been markedly weaker than my right in battle. This noose will help strengthen it. I’ll take yours too,’ he said to Afreyt with a meaningful look.
She loosened it from around her neck with feelings of relief which partly changed to apprehension as she saw it tightened around Fafhrd’s wrist beside the first noose.
‘And yours, and yours, and yours,’ he said to the three girls. ‘That way I’ll be wearing a noose for each of you. Come on, you wouldn’t want my left arm weak in battle, would you?’
‘There!’ he said when it was done, gripping the five pendant cords in his left hand and whirling them. ‘We’ll whip the Mingols off Rime Isle, we will!’
The girls, who had seemed a little unhappy about losing their nooses, laughed delighted, and the Rimers raised an unexpected cheer.
Then they marched on, Skor scouting ahead after remembering to give Fafhrd back his sword, and Fafhrd trying to put some order into the Rimers and keep them quiet—although the wind helpfully blew the drum-noise of their chant from the beach. The girls and Afreyt dropped back with the litter, though not as far as Fafhrd wished. The company picked up a couple of Fafhrd’s men, who reported the Mingols massing on the beach around their ships. And then they
mounted a slight rise where the lines extended south from the fortress-hump of Cold Harbor, Fafhrd and his men holding back the now overeager Rimers. A mounting cry of woe came from the beach beyond and they all beheld a wonderfully satisfying sight: the three Sea Mingol galleys launching into the wind, forward oars out and working frantically while small figures gave a last heave to the sterns and scrambled aboard.
Then came an arresting cry from Cold Harbor and they began to see out in the watery west a host of sails coming up over the horizon: the Widder-Mingol fleet. And with the sight of it they became aware also of a faint distant rumbling, as of the hoofbeat of innumerable war-horses charging across the steppes. But the Rimelanders recognized it as the voice of Hellfire, threatening eruption where it smoked blackly to the north. While to the south churned high-domed clouds, betokening a change of wind and weather.
The Gray Mouser fully realized that he was in one of the tightest spots he’d ever been in during the course of a danger-dappled career—with this difference. that this time the spot was shared by three hundred friendly folk (even dear, thinking of Cif beside him), along with any number of enemies (the Sun-Sea-Mingol fleet, that was, in close pursuit). He’d raised them (the Mingols) with the greatest of ease and was now luring them so successfully to their destruction that Flotsam was last, not first, of the Rime Island fleet, which was spread out disorderly before him, Sea Hawk nearest, and within arrow range of the pursuing Mingols, who came in endless foaming shrieking whinnying numbers, their galleys sailing faster with the wind than he. Moments ago one of the horseships had driven herself under with excess of sail, and foundered, and not a sister ship had paused to give her aid. Dead ahead some four leagues distant was the Rimic coast with the two crags and inviting bay (and blackly smoking Darkfire beyond) that marked the position of the Great Maelstrom. North, the clouds churned, promising change of weather. The problem, as always, was how to get the Mingols into the Maelstrom, while avoiding it himself (and his friends with him), but he had never appreciated the problem quite so well as now. The hoped-for solution was that the whirlpool would turn on just after the Rimers and Sea Hawk and he had sailed across it, and so catch at least the van of the close-crowding Mingol fleet. And the way they were all bunched now, that required perfect, indeed Godlike timing, but he’d worked his hardest at it and after all the gods were supposed to be on his side, weren’t they?—at least two of them.
