by Fritz Leiber
A flurry of applause started, but then it was announced that Cif had still to throw; she’d entered at the last possible minute. There was no surprise at a woman entering; that sort of equality was accepted on the Isle.
‘You didn’t tell me beforehand you were going to,’ the Mouser said to her.
She shook her head at him, concentrating on her aim. ‘No, leave his dagger in,’ she called to the judges. ‘It won’t distract me.’
She threw overhand and her knife impacted itself so close to his that there was a klir of metal against metal along with the woody thud. Groniger measured the distances carefully with his beechwood ruler and proclaimed Cif the winner.
‘And the measures on this ruler are copied from those on the golden Rule of Prudence in the Island treasury,’ he added impressively, but later qualified this by saying, ‘Actually, my ruler’s more accurate than that ikon; doesn’t expand with heat and contract with cold as metals do. But some people don’t like to keep hearing me say that.’
‘Do you think her besting the Captain is good for discipline and all?’ Mikkidu asked Pshawri in an undertone, his new trust in Cif wavering.
‘Yes, I do!’ that one whispered back. ‘Do the Captain good to be shook up a little, what with all this old-man scurrying and worrying and prying and pointing out he’s going in for.’ There, he thought, I’ve spoken it out to someone at last, and I’m glad I did!
Cif smiled at the Mouser. ‘No, I didn’t tell you ahead of time,’ she said sweetly, ‘but I’ve been practicing—privately. Would it have made a difference?’
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘though I might have had second thoughts about throwing underhand. Are you planning to enter the slinging contest too?’
‘No, never a thought of it,’ she answered. ‘Whatever made you think I might?’
Later the Mouser won that one, both for distance and accuracy, making the latter cast so powerful that it not only holed the centre of the bull’s-eye into the padded target box but went through the heavier back of the latter as well. Cif begged for the battered slug as a souvenir, and he presented it to her with elaborate flourishes.
‘’Twould have pierced the cuirass of Mingsward!’ Mikkidu fervently averred.
The archery contests were beginning, and Fafhrd was fitting the iron tang in the middle of his bow into the hardwood heading of the leather stall that covered half his left forearm, when he noted Afreyt approaching. She’d doffed her jacket, for the sun was beating down hotly, and was wearing a short-sleeved violet blouse, blue trousers wide-belted with a gold buckle, and purple-dyed short holiday boots. A violet handkerchief confined a little her pale gold hair. A worn green quiver with one arrow in it hung from her shoulder, and she was carrying a big longbow.
Fafhrd’s eyes narrowed a bit at those, recalling Cif and the knife throwing. But, ‘You look like a pirate queen,’ he greeted her, and then only inquired, ‘You’re entering one of the contests?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I’ll watch along through the first.’
‘That bow,’ he said casually, ‘looks to me to have a very heavy pull, and tall as you are, to be a touch long for you.’
‘Right on both counts,’ she agreed, nodding. ‘It belonged to my father. You’d be truly startled, I think, to see how I managed to draw it as a stripling girl. My father would doubtless have spanked me soundly if he’d ever caught me at it, or rather lived long enough to do that.’
Fafhrd lifted his eyebrows inquiringly, but the pirate queen vouchsafed no more. He won the distance shot handily but lost the target shot (through which Afreyt also watched) by a finger’s breadth to Skor’s other sub-lieutenant, Mannimark.
Then came the high shot, which was something special to Midsummer Day on Rime Isle and generally involved the loss of the contestant’s arrow, for the target was a grassy, nearly vertical stretch on the upper half of the south face of Elvenhold. The north face of the slanting rock tower actually overhung the ground a little and was utterly barren, but the south face, though very steep, sloped enough to hold soil to support herbage, rather miraculously. The contest honoured the sun, which reached this day his highest point in the heavens, while the contesting arrows, identified by coloured rags of thinnest silk attached to their necks, emulated him in their efforts.
Then Afreyt stepped forward, kicked off her purple boots and rolled up her blue trousers above her knees. She plucked her arrow, which bore a violet silk, from her quiver and threw that aside. ‘Now I’ll reveal to you the secret of my girlish technique,’ she said to Fafhrd.
Quite rapidly she sat down facing the dizzy slope, set the bow to her bare feet, laying the arrow between her big toes and holding it and the string with both hands, rolled back onto her shoulders, straightened her legs smoothly, and loosed her shot.
It was seen to strike the slope near Fafhrd’s yellow, skid a few yards higher, and then lie there, a violet taunt.
Afreyt, bending her legs again, removed the bow from her feet, and rolling sharply forward, stood up in the same motion.
‘You practiced that,’ Fafhrd said, hardly accusingly, as he finished screwing the hook back in the stall on his left arm.
She nodded. ‘Yes, but only for half a lifetime.’
‘The lady Afreyt’s arrow didn’t stick in,’ Skullick pointed out. ‘Is that fair? A breath of wind might dislodge it.’
‘Yes, but there is no wind and it somehow got highest,’ Groniger pointed out to him. ‘Actually, it’s accounted lucky in the high shot if your arrow doesn’t embed itself. Those that don’t sometimes are blown down. Those that do stay up there are never recovered.’
‘Doesn’t someone go up and collect the arrows?’ Skullick asked.
‘Scale Elvenhold? Have you wings?’
Skullick eyed the rock tower and shook his head sheepishly. Fafhrd overheard Groniger’s remarks and gave the harbormaster an odd look but made no other comment at the time.
Afreyt invited both of them over to the red dogcarts and produced a jug of Ilthmar brandy, and they toasted her and Fafhrd’s victories—the Mouser’s too, and Cif’s, who happened along.
‘This’ll put feathers in your wings!’ Fafhrd told Groniger, who eyed him thoughtfully.
The children were playing with the white bearhounds. Gale had won the girls’ archery contest and May the short race.
Some of the younger children were becoming fretful, however, and shadows were lengthening. The games and contests were all over now, and partly as a consequence of that the drinking was heavying up as the last scraps of food were being eaten. Among the whole picnic group there seemed to be a feeling of weariness, but also (for those no longer very young but not yet old) new jollity, as though one party were ending and another beginning. Cif’s and Afreyt’s eyes were especially bright. Everyone seemed ready to go home, though whether to their own places or the Sea Wrack was a matter of age and temperament. There was a chill breath in the air.
Gazing east and down a little toward Salthaven and the harbour beyond, the Mouser opined that he could already see low mist gathering around the bare masts there, and Groniger confirmed that. But what was the small lone dark figure trudging up-meadow toward them in the face of the last low sunlight?
‘Ourph, I’ll be bound,’ said Fafhrd. ‘What’s led him to make the hike after all?’
But it was hard to be sure the big Northerner was right; the figure was still far off. Yet the signal for leaving had been given, things were gathered, the carts repacked, and all set out, most staying near the carts, from which drinks continued to be forthcoming. And perhaps these were responsible for a resumption of the morning’s impromptu singing and dancing, though now it was not Fafhrd and the Mouser but others who took the lead in this. The Twain, after a whole day of behaving like old times, were slipping back under the curses they knew not of, the one’s eyes forever on the ground, with the effect of old age unsure of its footing, the other’s on the sky, indicative of old age’s absentmindedness.
/> Fafhrd turned out to be right about the up-meadow trudger, but it was few words they got from Ourph as to why he’d made the hike he’d earlier begged off from.
The old Mingol said only to them, and to Groniger, who happed to be by, ‘The Good News is in.’ Then, eyeing the Twain more particularly, ‘Tonight stay away from the Sea Wrack.’
But he would answer nothing more to their puzzled queries save ‘I know what I know and I’ve told it,’ and two cups of brandy did not loosen his Mingol tongue one whit.
The encounter put them behind the main party, but they did not try to catch up. The sun had set some time back, and now their feet and legs were lapped by the ground mist that already covered Salthaven and into which the picnic party was vanishing, its singing and strumming already sounding tiny and far off.
‘You see,’ Groniger said to Fafhrd, eyeing the twilit but yet starless sky while the mist lapped higher around them, ‘you won’t be able to show me your bearded star tonight in any case.’
Fafhrd nodded vaguely but made no other answer save to pass the brandy jug as they footed it along: four men walking deeper and deeper, as it were, into a white silence.
18
Cif and Afreyt, very much caught up in the gaiety of the evening party, and bright-eyed drunk besides, were among the first to enter the Sea Wrack and encounter arresting silence of another sort, and almost instantly come under the strange, hushing spell of the scene there.
Fafhrd and the Mouser sat at their pet table in the low-walled booth playing backgammon, and the whole tavern frightenedly watched them while pretending not to. Fear was in the air.
That was the first impression. Then, almost at once, Cif and Afreyt saw that Fafhrd couldn’t be Fafhrd, he was much too thin; nor the Mouser the Mouser, much too plump (though every bit as agile and supple-looking, paradoxically).
Nor were the faces and clothing and accouterments of the two strangers anything really like the Twain’s. It was more their expressions and mannerisms, postures and general manner, self-confident manner, those and the fact of being at that table. The sublime impression the two of them made that they were who they were and that they were in their rightful place.
And the fear that radiated from them with the small sounds of their gaming: the muted rattle of shaken bone dice in one or the other’s palm-closed leather cup, the muted clatter as the dice were spilled into one or other of the two low-walled felt-lined compartments of the backgammon box, the sharp little clicks of the bone counters as they were shifted by ones and twos from point to point. The fear that riveted the attention of everyone else in the place no matter how much they pretended to be understanding the conversations they made, or tasting the drinks they swallowed, or busying themselves with little tavern chores. The fear that seized upon and recruited each picnic newcomer. Oh yes, this night something deadly was coiling here at the Sea Wrack, make no mistake about it.
So paralyzing was the fear that it cost Cif and Afreyt a great effort to sidle slowly from the doorway to the bar, their eyes never leaving that one little table that was for now the world’s hub, until they were as close as they could get to the Sea Wrack’s owner, who with downcast and averted eye was polishing the same mug over and over.
‘Keeper, what gives?’ Cif whispered to him softly but most distinctly. ‘Nay, sull not up. Speak, I charge you!’
Eagerly that one, as though grateful Cif’s whiplash command had given him opportunity to discharge some of the weight of dread crushing him, whispered them back his tale in short, almost breathless bursts, though without raising an eye or ceasing to circle his rag.
‘I was alone here when they came in, minutes after the Good News docked. They spoke no word, but as though the fat one were the lean one’s hunting ferret, they scented out our two captains’ table, sat themselves down at it as though they owned it, then spoke at last to call for drink.
‘I took it them, and as they got out their box and dice cups and set up their game, they plied me with harmless-seeming and friendly questions mostly about the Twain, as if they knew them well. Such as: How fared they in Rime Isle? Enjoyed they good health? Seemed they happy? How often came they in? Their tastes in drink and food and the fair sex? What other interests had they? What did they like to talk of? As though the two of them were courtiers of some great foreign empire come hither our captains to please and to solicit about some affair of state.
‘And yet, you know, so dire somehow were the tones in which those innocent questions were asked that I doubt I could have refused them if they’d asked me for the Twain’s heart’s blood or my own.
‘This too: The more questions they asked about the Twain and the more I answered them as best I might, the more they came to look like…to resemble our…you know what I’m trying to say?’
‘Yes, yes!’ Afreyt hissed. ‘Go on.’
‘In short, I felt I was their slave. So too, I think, have felt all those who came into the Sea Wrack after them, save for old Mingol Ourph, who shortly stayed, somehow then parted.
‘At last they sucked me dry, bent to their game, asked for more drink. I sent the girl with that. Since then it’s been as you see now.’
There was a stir at the doorway through which mist was curling. Four men stood there, for a moment bemused. Then Fafhrd and the Mouser strode toward their table, while old Ourph settled down on his hams, his gaze unwavering, and Groniger almost totteringly sidled toward the bar, like a man surprised at midday by a sleepwalking fit and thoroughly astounded at it.
Fafhrd and the Mouser leaned over and looked down at the table and open backgammon box over which the two strangers were bent, surveying their positions. After a bit Fafhrd said rather loudly, ‘A good rilk against two silver smerduke on the lean one! His stones are poised to fleet swiftly home.’
‘You’re on!’ the Mouser cried back. ‘You’ve underestimated the fat one’s back game.’
Turning his chill blue eyes and flat-nosed skull-like face straight up at Fafhrd with an almost impossible twist of his neck, the skinny one said, ‘Did the stars tell you to wager at such odds on my success?’
Fafhrd’s whole manner changed. ‘You’re interested in the stars?’ he asked with an incredulous hopefulness.
‘Mightily so,’ the other answered him, nodding emphatically.
‘Then you must come with me,’ Fafhrd informed him, almost lifting him from his stool with one fell swoop of his good hand and arm that at once assisted and guided, while his hook indicated the mist-filled doorway. ‘Leave off this footling game. Abandon it. We’ve much to talk of, you and I.’ By now he had a brotherly arm—the hooked one, this time—around the thin one’s shoulders and was leading him back along the path he’d entered by. ‘Oh, there are wonders and treasures undreamed amongst the stars, are there not?’
‘Treasures?’ the other asked coolly, pricking an ear but holding back a little.
‘Aye, indeed! There’s one in particular under the silvery asterism of the Black Panther that I lust to show you,’ Fafhrd replied with great enthusiasm, at which the other went more willingly.
All watched astonishedly, but the only one who managed to speak out was Groniger, who asked, ‘Where are you going, Fafhrd?’ in rather outraged tones.
The big man paused for a moment, winked at Groniger, and smiling said, ‘Flying.’
Then with a ‘Come, comrade astronomer’ and another great arm-sweep, he wafted the skinny one with him into the bulging white mist, where both men shortly vanished.
Back at the table the plump stranger said in loud but winning tones, ‘Gentle sir! Would you care to take over my friend’s game, continue it with me?’ Then in tones less formal, ‘And have you noticed that these mug dints on your table together with the platter burn make up the figure of a giant sloth?’
‘Oh, so you’ve already seen that, have you?’ the Mouser answered the second question, returning his gaze from the door. Then, to the second, ‘Why, yes, I will, sir, and double the bet!—it being my die cast. Alth
ough your friend did not stay long enough even to arrange a chouette.’
‘Your friend was most insistent,’ the other replied. ‘Sir, I take your bet.’
Whereupon the Mouser sat down and proceeded to shake a masterly sequence of double fours and double threes so that the skinny man’s stones, now his own, fleeted more swiftly to victory than ever Fafhrd had predicted. The Mouser grinned fiendishly, and as they set up the stones for another game, he pointed out to his more thinly smiling adversary in the tabletop’s dints and stains the figure of a leopard stalking the giant sloth.
All eyes were now back on the table again save those of Afreyt. And of Fafhrd’s lieutenant Skor. Those four orbs were still fixed on the mist-bulging doorway through which Fafhrd had vanished with his strangely unlike doublegoer. Since babyhood Afreyt had heard of those doleful nightwalkers whose appearance, like the banshee’s, generally betokened death or near-mortal injury to the one whose shape they mocked.
Now while she agonized over what to do, invoking the witch queen Skeldir and lesser of her own and (in her extremity) others’ private deities, there was a strange growling in her ears—perhaps her rushing blood. Fafhrd’s last word to Groniger kindled in her memory the recollection of an exchange of words between those two earlier today, which in turn gave her a bright inkling of Fafhrd’s present destination in the viewless fog. This in turn inspired her to break the grip upon her of fear’s and indecision’s paralysis. Her first two or three steps were short and effortful ones, but by the time she went through the doorway, she was taking swift giant strides.
Her example broke the dread-duty deadlock in Skor, and the lean, red-haired, balding giant followed her in a rush.
But few in the Sea Wrack except Ourph and perhaps Groniger noted either departure, for all gazes were fixed again on the one small table where now Captain Mouser in person contested with his dread were-brother, battling the Islanders’ and his men’s fears for them as it were. And whether by smashing attack, tortuous back game, or swift running one like the first, the Mouser kept winning again and again and again.
