by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser shook his finger before her face in dark challenge and dire warning. Then he slashed lengths of ribbed black silk ribbon from a roll, twisting and tugging it to test its strength, continuing to eye her all the while, and he bound her legs together as they were, slender ankle to calf, just below the knee, and slender calf to ankle. Then he held out his hand for hers imperiously. She rapidly finished plaiting her hair, whipped the braid round her head and tucked it in, so that it became a sort of silvery coronet. Then with a sigh and a turning away of her somewhat narrow face, she held out her wrists to him close together, the palms of her hands upward.
He seized them contemptuously and drew them behind her and bound them there, as he had on the previous night, and her elbows too, drawing her shoulders backward. And then he tipped her over forward so that her face was buried in the coppery silk intended for Cif (how long ago?) and led a double ribbon from her bound wrists down her spine to her crosswise-bound lower legs, and drew it tight as he could, so that her back was perforce arched and her face lifted free of the silk.
But despite his mounting excitement, the thought nagged him that there had been something in her warbled ditty which he had not liked. Ah yes, the mention of Simorgya. What place had that sunken kingdom in a whore’s never-never lands? And all her earlier babble of moist and watery influences in the imagined land where she queened, or rather princessed it—There, she was at it again!
‘Come, Brother Mordroog, to royally escort us,’ she warbled over the orangy silk, seemingly unmindful of her acute discomforts. ‘Come with our guardians, Deep Rusher your horse—your behemoth, rather, and you in his castle. Come also with Slasher and vasty All-Gripper, to shatter our prison and ferry us home. And send all your spirits coursing before you, so our minds are engulfed—’
The shadows steadied unnaturally as the lamp’s swing shortened quiveringly, then stopped.
On the deck immediately above their heads there was consternation. The wind had unaccountably faded and the sea grown oily calm. The tiller in Skor’s grip was lifeless, the sheet that Mikkidu fingered slack. The sky did not appear to be overcast, yet there was a shadowed, spectral quality to the sunlight, as though an unpredicted eclipse or other ominous event impended. Then without warning the dark sea mounded up boiling scarce a spear’s cast off steerside—and subsided again without any diminishment in the feeling of foreboding. The spreading wave jogged Sea Hawk. The two lieutenants and Ourph stared about wonderingly and then at each other. None of them marked the trail of bubbles leading from the place of the mounding toward the becalmed sailing galley.
10
In the treasury Cif had the sudden feeling that the Mouser stood in need of more protection. The doll looked lonely there at pentagram’s centre. Perhaps he was too far from the ikons. She gathered the ikons together and after a moment’s hesitation thrust the doll, doubled up, into the barred globe. Then she poked the ruler and the crooked arrow in along with him, transfixing the globe (more gold close to him!), almost as an afterthought clapped the tiny cup like a helmet on the protruding doll’s head, and set all down on the linked rings. Then she seated herself again, staring doubtfully at what she had done.
11
In the cabin the Gray Mouser rolled the bound Ississi over on her back and regarded the silvery girl opened up for his enjoyment. The blood pounded in his head and he felt an increasing pressure there, as if his brain had grown too large for his skull. The motionless cabin grew spectral, there was a sense of thronging presences, and then it was as if part of him only remained there while another part whirled away into a realm where he was a giant coursing through rushing darkness uncertain of his humanity, while the pressure inside his skull grew and grew.
But the part of him in the cabin still was capable of sensation, though hardly of action, and this one watched helpless and aghast, through air that seemed to thicken and become more like water, the silvery, smiling, trussed-up Ississi writhe and writhe yet again while her skin grew more silvery still—scaly silvery—and her elfin face narrowed and her green eyes swam apart, while from her head and back and shoulders, and along the backs of her legs and her hands and arms, razor-sharp spines erected themselves in crests and, as she writhed once more again mightily, cut through all the black ribbons at once so they floated in shreds about her. Then through the curtained hatchway there swam a face like her own new one, and she came up from the coppery silk in a great forward undulation and reached the palms of her back-crested hands out toward the Mouser’s cheeks lovingly on arms that seemed to grow longer and longer, saying in a strange deep voice that seemed to bubble from her, ‘In moments this prison will be broken, Deep Rusher will smash it, and we will be free.’
At those words the other part of the Mouser realized that the darkness through which he was now coursing upward was the deep sea, that he was engulfed in the whale-body and great-foreheaded brain of Deep Rusher, her monster, that it was the tiny hull of Sea Hawk far above him that his massive forehead was aimed at, and that he could no more evade that collision than his other self in the cabin could avoid the arms of Ississi.
12
In the treasury Cif could not bear the woeful expression with which the blank linen face of the doll appeared to gaze out at her from under the jammed-down golden helmet, nor the sudden thought that the sea demoness had recently fondled all that gold hemming in the doll. She grabbed it up with its prison, withdrew it from the barred globe and snatched off its helmet, and while the ikons chinked down on the table she clutched the stuffed cloth to her bosom and bent her lips to it and cherished and kissed it, breathing it words of endearment.
13
In the cabin the Mouser was able to dodge aside from those questing silvery spined hands, which went past him, while in the dark realm his giant self was able to veer aside from Sea Hawk’s hull at the last moment and burst out of the darkness, so that his two selves were one again and both back in the cabin—which now lurched as though Sea Hawk were capsizing.
On deck all gaped, flinching, as a black shape thicker than Sea Hawk burst resoundingly from the dark water beside them, so close the ship’s hull shook and they might have reached out and touched the monster. The shape erected itself like a windowless tower built all of streaming black boot leather, down which sheets of water cascaded. It shot up higher and higher, dragging their gazes skyward, then it narrowed and with a sweep of its great flukes left the water altogether, and for a long moment they watched the dark dripping underbelly of black leviathan pass over Sea Hawk, vast as a storm cloud, lacking lightning perhaps but not thunder, as he breached entire from the ocean. But then they were all snatching for handholds as Sea Hawk lurched down violently sideways, as though trying to shake them from her back. At least there was no shortage of lashings to grab onto as she slid with the collapsing waters into the great chasm left by Leviathan. There came the numbing shock of that same beast smiting the sea beyond them as he returned to his element. Then salt ocean closed over them as they sank down, down, and down.
Afterward the Mouser could never determine how much of what next happened in the cabin transpired underwater and how much in a great bubble of air constrained by that other element so that it became more akin to it. (No question, he was wholly underwater toward the end.) There was a somewhat slow or, rather, measured dreamlike quality to all subsequent movements there—his, the transformed Ississi’s, and the creature he took to be her brother—as if they were made against great pressures. It had elements both of a savage struggle—a fierce, life-and-death fight—and of a ceremonial dance with beasts. Certainly his position during it was always in the centre, beside or a little above the open chest of fabrics, and certainly the transformed Ississi and her brother circled him like sharks and darted in alternately to attack, their narrow jaws gaping to show razorlike teeth and closing like great scissors snipping. And always there was that sense of steadily increasing pressure, though not now within his skull particularly, but over his entire body and centering, if an
ywhere, upon his lungs.
It began, of course, with his evading of Ississi’s initial loving and murderous lunge at him, and his moving past her to the chest she had just quitted. Then, as she turned back to assault him a second time (all jaws now, arms merged into her silver-scaled sides and her crested legs merged, but eyes still great and green), and as he, in turn, turned to oppose her, he was inspired to grab up with both hands from the chest the topmost fabric and, letting it unfold sequentially and spread as he did so, whirl it between him and her in a great lustrous, baffling coppery sheet, or pale rosy-orange cloud. And she was indeed distracted from her main purpose by this timely interposition, although her silvery jaws came through it more than once, shredding and shearing and altogether making sorry work of Cif’s intended cloak or dress of state or treasurer’s robes, or whatever.
Then, as the Mouser completed his whirling turn, he found himself confronting the in-rushing silver-crested Mordroog, and to hold him off snatched up and whirlingly interposed the next rich silken fabric in the chest, which happened to be a violet one, his reluctant gift for Afreyt, so now it became a great pale purple cloud-wall soon slashed to lavender streaks and streamers, through which Mordroog’s silver and jaw-snapping visage showed like a monstrous moon.
This maneuver brought the Mouser back in turn to face Ississi, who was closing in again through coppery shreds, and this attack was in turn thwarted by the extensive billowing-out of a sheet of bold scarlet silk, which he had meant to present to the capable whore-turned-fisherwoman Hilsa, but now was as effectively reduced to scraps and tatters as any incarnadined sunset is by conquering night.
And so it went, each charming or at least clever fabric gift in turn sacrificed—brassy yellow satin for Hilsa’s comrade Rill, a rich brown worked with gold for Fafhrd, lovely sea-green and salmon-pink sheets (also for Cif), a sky-blue one (still another for Afreyt—to appease Fafhrd), a royal purple one for Pshawri (in honour of his first lieutenancy), and even one for Groniger (soberest black)—but each sheet successively defeating a dire attack by silvery sea demon or demoness, until the cabin had been filled with a most expensive sort of confetti and the bottom of the chest had been reached.
But by then, mercifully, the demonic attacks had begun to lessen in speed and fury, grow weaker and weaker, until they were but surly and almost aimless switchings-about (even floppings-about, like those of fish dying), while (most mercifully—almost miraculously) the dreadful suffocating pressure, instead of increasing or even holding steady, had started to fall off, to lessen, and now was continuing to do so, more and more swiftly.
What had happened was that when Sea Hawk had slid into the hole left by leviathan, the lead in her keel (which made her seaworthy) had tended to drag her down still farther, abetted by the mass of her great cargo, especially the bronze ingots and copper sheetings in it. But on the other hand, the greater part of her cargo by far consisted of items that were lighter than water—the long stack of dry, well-seasoned timber, the tight barrels of flour, and the woollen sacks of grain, all of these additionally having considerable amounts of air trapped in them (the timber by virtue of the tarred canvas sheathing it, the grain because of the greasy raw wool of the sacks, so they acted as so many floats). So long as these items were above the water they tended to press the ship more deeply into it, but once they were underwater, their effect was to drag Sea Hawk upward, toward the surface.
Now under ordinary conditions of stowage—safe, adequate stowage, even—all these items might well have broken loose and floated up to the surface individually, the timber stack emerging like a great disintegrating raft, the sacks bobbing up like so many balloons, while Sea Hawk continued on down to watery grave carrying along with it those trapped below decks and any desperately clinging seamen too shocked and terror-frozen to loosen their panic-grips.
But the imaginative planning and finicky overseeing the Mouser had given the stowage of the cargo at ’Brulsk, so that Fafhrd or Cif or (Mog forbid!) Skor should never have cause to criticize him, and also in line with his determination, now he had taken up merchanting, to be the cleverest and most foresighted merchant of them all, taken in conjunction with the mildly sadistic fury with which he had driven the men at their stowage work, insured that the wedgings and lashings-down of this cargo were something exceptional. And then when, earlier today and seemingly on an insane whim, he had insisted that all those more-than-adequate lashings be doubled, and then driven the men to that work with even greater fury, he had unknowingly guaranteed Sea Hawk’s survival.
To be sure, the lashings were strained, they creaked and boomed underwater (they were lifting a whole sailing galley), but not a single one of them parted, not a single air-swollen sack escaped before Sea Hawk reached the surface.
14
And so it was that the Mouser was able to swim through the hatchway and see untamed blue sky again and blessedly fill his lungs with their proper element and weakly congratulate Mikkidu and a Mingol paddling and gasping beside him on their most fortunate escape. True, Sea Hawk was water-filled and awash, but she floated upright, her tall mast and bedraggled sail were intact, the sea was calm and windless still, and (as was soon determined) her entire crew had survived, so the Mouser knew there was no insurmountable obstacle in the way of their clearing her of water first by bailing, then by pumping (the oarholes could be plugged, if need be), and continuing their voyage. And if in the course of that clearing, a few fish, even a couple of big ones, should flop overside after a desultory snap or two (best be wary of all fish!) and then dive deep into their proper element and return to their own rightful kingdom—why, that was all in the Nehwonian nature of things.
15
A fortnight later, being a week after Sea Hawk’s safe arrival in Salthaven, Fafhrd and Afreyt rented the Sea Wrack and gave Captain Mouser and his crew a party, which Cif and the Mouser had to help pay for from the profits of the latter’s trading voyage. To it were invited numerous Isler friends. It coincided with the year’s first blizzard, for the winter gales had held off and been providentially late coming. No matter, the salty tavern was snug and the food and drink all that could be asked for—with perhaps one exception.
‘There was a faint taste of wool fat in the fruit soup,’ Hilsa observed. ‘Nothing particularly unpleasant, but noticeable.’
‘That’ll have been from the grease in the sacking,’ Mikkidu enlightened her, ‘which kept the salt sea out of ’em, so they buoyed us up powerfully when we sank. Captain Mouser thinks of everything.’
‘Just the same,’ Skor reminded him sotto voce, ‘it turned out he did have a girl in the cabin all the while—and that damned chest of fabrics too! You can’t deny he’s a great liar whenever he chooses.’
‘Ah, but the girl turned out to be a sea demon, and he needed the fabrics to defend himself from her, and that makes all the difference,’ Mikkidu rejoined loyally.
‘I never saw her as aught but a ghostly and silver-crested sea demon,’ old Ourph put in. ‘The first night out from No-Ombrulsk I saw her rise from the cabin through the deck and stand at the taffrail, invoking and communing with sea monsters.’
‘Why didn’t you report that to the Mouser?’ Fafhrd asked, gesturing toward the venerable Mingol with his new bronze hook.
‘One never speaks of a ghost in its presence,’ the latter explained, ‘or while there is chance of its reappearance. It only gives it strength. As always, silence is silver.’
‘Yes, and speech is golden,’ Fafhrd maintained.
Rill boldly asked the Mouser across the table, ‘But just how did you deal with the sea demoness while she was in her guise? I gather you kept her tied up a lot, or tried to?’
‘Yes,’ Cif put in from beside him. ‘You were even planning at one point to train her to be a maid for me, weren’t you?’ She smiled curiously. ‘Just think, I lost that as well as those lovely materials.’
‘I attempted a number of things that were rather beyond my powers,’ the Gray One admitted manfully
, the edges of his ears turning red. ‘Actually, I was lucky to escape with my life.’ He turned toward Cif. ‘Which I couldn’t have done if you hadn’t snatched me from the tainted gold in the nick of time.’
‘Never mind, it was I put you amongst the tainted gold in the first place,’ she told him, laying her hand on his on the table, ‘but now it’s been hopefully purified.’ (She had directed that ceremony of exorcism of the ikons herself, with the assistance of Mother Grum, to free them of all baleful Simorgyan influence got from their handling by the demoness. The old witch was somewhat dubious of the complete efficacy of the ceremony.)
Later Skor described leviathan arching over Sea Hawk. Afreyt nodded appreciatively, saying, ‘I was once in a dory when a whale breached close alongside. It is not a sight to be forgotten.’
‘Nor is it when viewed from the other side of the gunwale,’ the Mouser observed reflectively. Then he winced. ‘Mog, what a head thump that would have been!’
III
The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars
1
Late one nippy afternoon of early Rime Isle spring, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser slumped pleasantly in a small booth in Salthaven’s Sea Wrack Tavern. Although they’d been on the Isle for only a year, and patronizing this tavern for an eight-month, the booth was recognized as theirs when either was in the place. Both men had been mildly fatigued, the former from supervising bottom repairs to Sea Hawk at the new moon’s low tide—and then squeezing in a late round of archery practice, the latter from bossing the carpentering of their new warehouse-and-barracks—and doing some inventorying besides. But their second tankards of bitter ale had about taken care of that, and their thoughts were beginning to float free.
