by Fritz Leiber
Listening to this recital, Gale seemed to get a bit uneasy, certainly wide-eyed. Fingers put an arm around her shoulders, saying, ‘So you see, little one, it is better to have one’s hero a friend and uncle only, is it not?’
Afreyt couldn’t resist saying, ‘Aren’t you overdoing the wise old aunt a bit?’ Then, recalling Fingers’s circumstances, she dropped her smile, adding, ‘But I was forgetting…you know what.’
Fingers nodded gravely and fetched a sigh that she thought suitable for A Cabingirl Against Her Will. Then she gave a squeal. Gale had yanked her hair.
‘I don’t know about Uncle Fafhrd,’ the Rimish girl told her, making a face, ‘but I certainly want you as a friend and not an aunty!’
‘And now it’s time we stopped talking heroes and she-devils and got back to worrying about two real men,’ Afreyt picked that moment to announce. ‘Come on, I’ll rinse you.’
And taking up the water container, she poured a gush each on the blond and reddish heads, then emptied it over her own head.
23
Returning back to that same eventful day’s darksome beginning, we find Fafhrd trudging frantically east by leviathan light from the lamp he carried and with a feather-footedness and hectic lightheadedness that puzzled and alarmed him, across the frosty Great Meadow toward fog-blanketed Salthaven and the horizon beyond, paling with the imminent dawn. His anxiety for the Mouser in desperate plight, his selfish urge to shuck off that bondage, and his wishful hope for a miracle solution to this problem…these three feelings balled up unendurably within him, so that he lifted the brown brandy jug in his right hand to his teeth and fixed them around the protruding cork, biting into it, and drew the jug from off it, spat the cork aside, and downed two swallows that were like lightning brands straight down his throat.
Then yielding to an unanticipated yet imperative impulse, born perhaps of the two blazing swigs, he scanned the sky ahead above the fog.
And, lo, the miracle! For a wide stream of brightness, travelling up the pale sky from the impending sun, called his attention to a small fleet of on-cruising clouds. And as he inspected those five pearl-gray white-edged shapes with a sharp clear vision that was like youth returned, he discerned that the midmost was shaped like a large slender pinnace with towering stern-castle driven by a single translucent sail that bellied smoothly toward him, by all signs a demigalleon of the cloud queendom of Arilia, fable no longer.
And as if there had resounded in his ear a single chime, infinitely stirring and sweet, of the silver bell with which they’d sound the watches upon such a vessel, the knowledge came to him—a message and more—that his old comrade-mistress Frix was aboard her, captaining her crew. And the confident determination was born on him to join her there. And his concern for the Mouser and what Afreyt and his men expected of him dropped away, and he no longer worried about the girls Fingers and Gale following him, and his footsteps grew carefree and light as those of his youth on a Cold Corner hunting morn. He took a measured sup of brandy and skipped ahead.
The women whom Fafhrd loved seriously (and he rarely loved otherwise) seemed to him when he thought about it to split into the two classes of comrade-mistresses and beloved girls. The former were fearless, wise, mysterious, and sometimes cruel; the latter were timorous, adoring, cute, and mostly faithful—sometimes to the point of making too much of it. Both were—apparently had to be, alas—young and beautiful, or at least appear so. The comrade-mistresses were best at that last, on the whole.
Oddly, the beloved girls were more apt to have been actual comrades, sharing day-to-day haps, mishaps, and boredoms, than the others. What made the others seem more like comrades, then? When he asked himself that, which he did seldom, he was apt to decide it was because they were more realistic and logical, thought more like men, or at least like himself. Which was a desirable thing, except when they carried their realism and logic to the point where it became unpleasantly painful to him. Which accounted for their cruel streak, to be sure.
And then the comrade-mistresses more often than not had a supernatural or at least preternatural aura about them. They partook of the demonic and divine.
Fafhrd’s first beloved girl had been his childhood sweetheart Mara, whom he’d got pregnant, only to run away with his first comrade-mistress, the wandering actress and failed thief Vlana, one of the unsupernatural ones, her only glamours those of stage and crime.
Other super- and preternatural females had included the Ghoulish she-soldier Kreeshkra, a transparent-fleshed beautiful walking skeleton, and the wholly invisible (save when she tinted her skin or resorted to like stratagem such as wetting herself before being pelted by a lover with rose petals) Princess Hirriwi of Stardock.
Sample beloved girls were Luzy of Lankhmar, the fair swindler Nemia of the Dusk (not all of this class, too, were law-abiding), and faint-hearted and bouncing Friska, whom he’d rescued from the cruelties of Quarmall—not altogether willingly. On learning his wild plan she’d told him, ‘Take me back to the torture chamber.’
But of all his lady lovers, first in his heart was Hisvet’s onetime slave-maid and guardian, the tall, dark-haired, and altogether delicious Frix, now again Queen Frixifrax of Arilia, although she was almost, but not quite, too tall and slender. (Just as he knew that Hisvet herself, though heartless and mostly cruel, was somehow the Mouser’s inmost favourite.)
Above all else, Frix’s love was ever tactful, and even in scenes of extremest ecstasy and peril she had an utterly fearless and completely dispassionate overview of life, as if she saw it all as a grand melodrama, even to the point of coolly calling out stage directions to the participants of an orgy or melee whilst chaos whirled about them.
Of course this train of reasoning left out Afreyt, surely the best of comrade-mistresses as well as his current one, a better archer than himself, loving and wise, an altogether admirable woman—and able to get along with Mouser too.
But Afreyt, though greatly gifted, was wholly human, while the demonic and divine Frix fairly glimmered with supernatural highlights. As at this very moment, when after another and larger swig of brandy on the fly, a short but steady sighting far ahead miraculously showed her standing at the bow of her cloud-pinnace like a figurehead carved of pale ivory as she cheered and welcomed him on. This wondrous apparition of her touched off a memory flash of an assignation with her in a mountaintop castle where they’d ingeniously spied together on two of her waiting ladies tall and mantis-slender as herself while they were mutually solacing each other, and later joined them in their gentle sport.
That ivory prow-vision, together with attendant memories, made him feel light as air and added yards to his stride, so that his next two skimming skips carried him knee-deep and waist-deep into the fog bank, while the third never ended. He drained the brandy jug of its last skimpy swallow, cast it and the lamp behind him to either side, and then swam forward up the face of the deepening fog bank, employing a powerful breaststroke while flattening his legs like a fish’s tail.
Exultation suffused him as he felt himself mounting the side of a long stationary swell in an ocean of foam, but his strong sweeping strokes soon carried him above the fog. He resolutely forbore to look down, keeping his gaze upon the wondrously prowed white pinnace, concentrating all his attention and energies on flight. He felt his deltoid and pectoral muscles swell and lengthen and his arms flatten into wings. The rhythm of flight took over.
He noted that, though still mounting, he was veering to the left because of the lesser purchase his hook got on the air than the palm-paddle of his good right hand, but instead of trying to correct he kept on undauntedly, confident the motion would bring him around in a great circle in sight of his goal again and closer to it.
And so it did. He continued to mount in great spirals. He noted that along the way five snowy sea gulls had appeared and were soaring up circularly too, evenly spaced around him like the points of a pentacle. It gave him a warm feeling to be so escorted.
He was well into
his fifth spiral and nearing his goal, momentarily waiting for the cloud-ship to swing into his view from the left behind him, the sun’s rays baking through his clothes becoming almost uncomfortable. He was selecting just the right words with which to greet his aerial paramour when he flew into shadow and something hard yet resilient struck the back of his head a shrewd blow, so that black spots and flashing diamond points danced in his eyes and all his senses wavered.
His first reaction to this unexpected assault was to look up behind him.
A dark pearl-gray, wind-weathered, smoothly rounded leviathan-long shape hovered above him just out of reach—as he discovered when he grasped at it with hand and hook, his second reaction. It seemed to be drifting sideways slowly. He’d bumped into the hull of the cloud-ship he’d been seeking and then rebounded from it somewhat.
His third reaction, as the pain in his skull lessened and his vision cleared somewhat, was a mistake. He looked down.
The whole southwest corner of Rime Isle lay below him, uncomfortably small and far down: Salthaven town and harbour with its tiny red roofs and wisp-pennoned toothpick masts thrusting through its thinning coverlet of fog, the rocky coast leading off west, the narrow lofty headland to the east, and north of that the Great Maelstrom spinning furiously, an infinitely menacing foamy pinwheel.
The sight froze Fafhrd’s privates. His reaction was anything but beat his wings (arms, rather), flutter his legs-tail, resuming flying, and so land lightly on the cloud-craft’s deck and sketch a bow to Frix. The blow had halted all those avian rhythms as if they’d never possessed him; it had nauseated him, switched him from glorious drunkenness to near puking hangover in a trice. Instead of master of the air, he felt as if he were flimsily glued to it up here, pasted to this height by some fragile magic, so that the least wrong move, or wrong thought even, might break the flimsy bond and pitch him down, down, down!
His sailor’s instinct was to lighten ship. It was the last resort when your vessel was sinking, and so presumably the wisest course when falling was the danger. With infinite caution and deliberation he began a series of slow contortions calculated to bring his manual extremities of hand and hook into successive contact with his feet, waist, neck, and so forth, so as to rid himself of all abandonable weight whatever without at the same time making some uncalculated movement that would cause him to come unstuck from the sky wherein he was so precariously poised.
This course of action had the added advantage of concentrating all his attention on his body and the space immediately around it, so he was not tempted to look down again and suffer the full pangs of vertigo.
He did note, as he gently cast aside his right and left boot, ax and dirk, their sheaths, finally his pouch and iron-studded belt, that they floated off slowly to about the distance of a man’s length, then dropped away as if jerked down, seeming almost to vanish instantly—suggesting some magical sphere or spell of safety about him.
He didn’t trust it.
So long as he confined himself to discarding such relatively ponderous and rigid items, his convoy of gulls continued to circle him evenly, but when he continued on to divest himself of all his garments (for this seemed certainly no time for half measures) they broke formation and (either attracted by the flimsy and flappable nature of his discards, or else outraged at the shameless impropriety of his action) made fierce darts and dives at and upon each piece of clothing to the accompaniment of raucous barking squawks and bore them off triumphantly in their sharp talons as if reasserting the honour of their squadron.
Fafhrd paid very little attention to these captious avian antics, concentrated as he was upon making not the least incautious or marginally violent movement.
Eventually he had divested himself of his very last implement and garment save for one.
It shows how much he had come to think of his hook together with the cork-and-leather cuff carrying it as his true left hand that he did not jettison them with the rest of the abandonable material.
But it was not until he’d stripped himself stark naked (save for hook) that he bethought himself of a final way to ‘lighten ship.’ He was admiring the bright golden gleam of the powerful stream of urine arching above him and then down over his head out of his vision’s range (it had first hit him in the eye but he corrected); it was not until then that he realized that in the course of his emergency undressing he had passed out of the shadow of the cloud-craft’s hull and was bathed in full hot sunlight (which had, coincidentally, counterbalanced nicely any chill he might otherwise have felt at abandoning his last scrap of clothing in the sharp air of early morning).
But where had the Arilian cloud-vessel got to? He looked about and finally saw its narrow deck its own ship’s length beneath him—a score of yards at least. Meanwhile, he himself was slowly but steadily mounting to portside of its rather ghostly or at least somewhat translucent mast top and upper rigging, whereon were perched the five raptorial gulls, busily shredding with claws and beaks the clothing they’d appropriated from him and, looking more now like cormorants than gulls, staring at him from time to time disgustedly.
And now a wholly different, in fact opposite fear took sudden hold of Fafhrd—that he might continue to rise inexorably until all below became too tiny to be seen and he was lost in space, or until he reached the forever frost-capped height of mountain-tops and perished of cold—especially when chilly night came on (how stupid he’d been to discard all his clothes—he’d been in a dismal panic that was sure!)—or got himself devoured by the airy monsters that inhabited such altitudes such as the invisible giant fliers he’d first encountered on Stardock, or even reach the mysterious stars (if he lasted that long before dying of thirst and hunger) and be dazzled to death by them or suffer whatever other fate the Bright Ones kept in store for impudent venturers such as he must appear to them.
Unless, of course, he had the good fortune to encounter the moon first or the secret (invisible?) Queendom of Arilia, if that were anything more than a great fleet of cloud-ships.
This thought reminded him that there was such a ship close at hand, of which he’d had great hopes and expectations before the brandy had died in him.
After a moment’s gloomy apprehension that it had heartlessly sailed off or perhaps vanished entire (its upper works at least had looked so very ghostly), he was relieved to see it still floated below him, though some thirty feet farther down than at last glimpse—there was at least that distance between him and the masthead with its quincunx of cormorantishly-behaving seagulls, who still shredded his garments vindictively, although their shrill squawkings had subsided.
He searched the vessel with his eyes for Frix, but the tall, supernally attractive beauty was nowhere to be seen, not in the bow impersonating a figurehead, or anywhere else—if she ever had been present, he added wryly, to anything but his overeager and overbrandied imagination.
He did spot, however, a sixth figure in the rigging, besides the birds, a trim young woman halfway up it on the other side of the rigging, faced away from him and leaning back against the ratlines with arms outspread as if to expose herself to sun’s rays. She wore an abbreviated white lace chemise, was barefoot, and carried a small curved silver trumpet slung round her neck. She was also too short for Frix and a blonde to boot, instead of raven-tressed.
Fafhrd called down ‘Ahoy!’ not softly, but not unnecessarily loudly either, for although his new fear of rising indefinitely preoccupied his thoughts, he still entertained the conviction that any violent movement or speech would be unwise. Just rising a few yards did not convince him that he could not fall, especially when he surveyed the emptiness below.
The lazing maiden did not look up or give the least other indication that she had heard him.
‘Ahoy!’ Fafhrd repeated, quite a bit more loudly, but again with no discernible reaction from her, unless her yawn now was intended as that.
‘Ahoy!’ Fafhrd bellowed, forgetting his worries about the possible dire effects of loud noises.
&n
bsp; Rather slowly, then, she turned her head and lifted her face toward him. But nothing more.
‘Cloud girl,’ Fafhrd called down in friendly tones but a shade peremptorily, ‘summon your mistress on deck. I’m an old friend.’
She went on staring at him. Nothing more, except perhaps to lift her brows superciliously.
Fafhrd called sharply, ‘I’m Captain Fafhrd, out of Sea Hawk,’ naming his ship riding at anchor in Rime harbour. ‘And as you can plainly see, I’m in distress. Inform your captain of these circumstances. And be assured she knows me well.’
After staring at him a while more, the cloud girl nodded moodily and descended to the deck hand over hand, taking her time, and after another look up at him, strolled toward the sterncastle.
Fafhrd was annoyed. ‘Oh, hurry up, girl,’ he called, ‘and if it’s formalities you want, tell the Queen of Arilia that an old friend respectfully craves instant audience.’
She paused in the door of the stern-castle to look up at him once more and inquire in a shrill pert voice, ‘Was that the respect led you to piss on our ship?’ before she flipped up the tail of her chemise and vanished inside.
Fafhrd made dignified growling noises in his throat, though there were none to hear them but the gulls, and was emboldened to try to swim down to the cloud-ship’s mast top, getting himself positioned with head turned down toward it, body upside down, though it took an intense effort of will to make himself use full power in what persisted in seeming an attempt to come unstuck from the heights and launch a disastrous fall. He kept himself aimed at the rigging so he’d intercept it if the worst occurred.
He was breathing heavily and had fought his way down, he judged, about a quarter of the distance when the saucy cloud girl reemerged, followed (at last!) by Frix, garbed like a dashing captain of Amazon marines in tropical dress uniform of silver-trimmed white lace which strikingly set off her slender form, dark hair, and coppery complexion wonderfully, white deerskin hip boots, a wide-brimmed hat of like material, with ostrich plumes and a silver-studded belt of snow-serpent hide from which depended a long slim sabre with silver fittings.
