by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser's smile hardly faltered. He was struck rather with how gayly Rill's torch flickered and flared as Hilsa's doleful words poured over him. When Rimic treasures were mentioned he touched his pouch where the queller reposed on its snipped-off length of cord. He had no doubt that it was one of them, yet somehow he was not troubled.
“Is that all?” he asked when Hilsa had done. “I thought at least you'd tell me the trolls had come, against whom the god has warned us. Lead on, my dears, to the council hall! Ourph and Mikkidu, attend us! Take courage, Mother Grum—” (he called down to the skiff) “—doubt not your mistress’ safety.” And linking arms with Hilsa and Rill he set out briskly, telling himself that in reverses of fortune such as this, the all-important thing was to behave with vast self-confidence, flame like Rill's torch with it! That was the secret. What matter that he hadn't the faintest idea of what tale he would tell the council? Only maintain the appearance of self-confidence and at the moment when needed, inspiration would come!
What with the late arrival of the fishing fleet the narrow streets were quite crowded as they footed it along. Perhaps it was market night as well, and maybe the council meeting had something to do with it. At any rate there were a lot of “foreigners” out and Rime Islers too, and for a wonder the latter looked stranger and more drolly grotesque than the former. Here came trudging those four fishers again with their monstrous burdens! A fat boy gaped at them. The Mouser patted his head in passing. Oh, what a show was life!
Hilsa and Rill, infected by the Mouser's lightheartedness, put on their smiles again. He must be a grand sight, he thought, strolling along with two fine whores as if he owned the town.
The blue front of the council hall appeared, its door framed by some gone galleon's massive stern and flanked by two glum louts with quarterstaves. The Mouser felt Hilsa and Rill hesitate, but crying in a loud voice, “All honor to the council!” he swept them inside with him, Ourph and Mikkidu ducking in after.
The room inside was larger and somewhat more lofty than the one at the Salt Herring, but was gray-timbered like it, built of wrecks. And it had no fireplace, but was inadequately warmed by two smoking braziers and lit by torches that burned blue and sad (perhaps there were bronze nails in them), not merrily golden-yellow like Rill's. The main article of furniture was a long heavy table, at one end of which Clif and Afreyt sat, looking their haughtiest. Drawn away from them toward the other end were seated ten large sober Isle-men of middle years, Groniger in their midst, with such doleful, gloomily indignant, outraged looks on their faces that the Mouser burst out laughing. Other Islers crowded the walls, some women among them. All turned on the newcomers’ faces of mingled puzzlement and disapproval.
Groniger reared up and thundered at him, “You dare to laugh at the gathered authority of Rime Isle? You, who come bursting in accompanied by women of the streets and your own trespassing crewmen?”
The Mouser managed to control his laughter and listen with the most open, honest expression imaginable, injured innocence incarnate.
Groniger went on, shaking his finger at the other, “Well, there he stands, councilors. a chief receiver of the misappropriated gold, perchance even of the gold cube of honest dealing. The man who came to us out of the south with tales of magic storms and day turned night and vanished hostile vessels and a purported Mingol invasion — he who has, as you perceive, Mingols amongst his crew — the man who paid for his dockage in Rime Isle gold!”
Cif stood up at that, her eyes blazing, and said, “Let him speak, at least, and answer this outrageous charge, since you won't take my word.”
A councilman rose beside Groniger. “Why should we listen to a stranger's lies?”
Groniger said, “I thank you, Dwone.”
Afreyt got to her feet. “No, let him speak. Will you hear nothing but your own voices?”
Another councilman got up.
Groniger said, “Yes. Zwaakin?”
That one said, “No harm to hear what he has to say. He may convict himself out of his own mouth.” Cif glared at Zwaaken and said loudly, “Tell them, Mouser!”
At that moment the Mouser, glancing at Rill's torch (which seemed to wink at him) felt a godlike power invading and possessing him to the tips of his fingers and toes — nay, to the end of his every hair. Without warning — in fact, without knowing he was going to do it at all he ran forward across the room and sprang atop the table where its sides were clear toward Cif's end.
He looked around compellingly at all (a sea of cold and hostile faces, mostly), gave them a searching stare, and then — well, as the godlike force possessed every part of him utterly, his mind was perforce driven completely out of himself, the scene swiftly darkened, he heard himself beginning to say something in a mighty voice, but then he (his mind) fell irretrievably into an inner darkness deeper and blacker than any sleep or swound.
Then (for th~ Mouser) no time at all passed… or an eternity.
His return to awareness (or rebirth, rather, it seemed that massive a transition) began with whirling yellow lights and grinning. open-mouthed, exalted faces mottling the inner darkness, and the sense of a great noise on the edge of the audible and of a resonant voice speaking words of power, and then without other warning the whole bright and deafening scene materialized with a rush and a roar and he was standing insolently tall on the massive council table with what felt like a wild (or even demented) smile on his lips, while his left fist rested jauntily on his hip and his right was whirling around his head the golden queller (or cube of square dealing, he reminded himself) on its cord. And all around him every last Rimelander — councilmen, guards, common fishers, women (and Cif, Afrayt, Rill, Hilsa, Mikkidu, needless to say) — was staring at him with rapturous adoration (as if he were a god or legendary hero at least) and standing on their feet (some jumping up and down) and cheering him to the echo! Fists pounded the table, quarterstaves thudded the stony floor resoundingly. While torchmen whirled their sad flambeaux until they flamed as yellow-bright as Rill's.
Now in the name of all the gods at once, the Mouser asked himself, continuing however to grin, Whatever did I tell or promise them to put them all in such a state? In the fiend's name, what?
Groniger swiftly mounted the other end of the table, boosted by those beside him, waved for silence, and as soon as he'd got a little of that commodity assured the Mouser in a great feelingful voice, advancing to make himself heard, “We'll do it — oh, we'll do it! I myself will lead out the Rimic contingent, half our armed citizenry, across the Deathlands to Fafhrd's aid against the Widdershins, while nwone and Zwaaken will man the armed fishing fleet with the other half and follow you in Flotsam against the Sunwise Mingols. Victory!”
And with that the hall resounded with cries of “Death to the Mingols!” “Victory!” and other cheers the Mouser couldn't quite make out. As the noise passed its peak, Groniger shouted, “Wine!
Let's pledge our allegiance!” while Zwaaken cried to the Mouser, “Summon your crewmen to celebrate with us — they've the freedom of Rime Isle now and forever!” (Mikkidu was soon dispatched.)
The Mouser looked helplessly at Cif — though still maintaining his grin (by now he must look quite glassy-eyed, he thought) — but she only stretched her hand toward him, crying, flush-cheeked, “I'll sail with you!” while Afreyt beside her proclaimed, “I'll go ahead across the Deathlands to join Fafhrd, bringing god Odin with me!”
Groniger heard that and called to her, “I and my men will give you whatever help with that you need, honored council-lady,” which told the Mouser that besides all else he'd got the atheistical fishermen believing in gods — Odin and Loki, at any rate. What had he told them?
He let Cif and Afreyt draw him down, but before he would begin to question them, Cif had thrown her arms around him, hugged him tight, and was kissing him full on the lips. This was wonderful, something he'd been dreaming of for three months and more (even though he'd pictured it happening in somewhat more private circumstances) and when sh
e at last drew back, starry-eyed, it was another sort of question he was of a mind to ask her, but at that moment tall Afreyt grabbed him and soon was kissing him as soundly.
This was undeniably pleasant, but it took away from Cif's kiss, made it less personal, more a sign of congratulations and expression of overflowing enthusiasm than a mark of special affection. His Cif-dream faded down. And when Afreyt was done with him, he was at once surrounded by a press of wellwishers, some of whom wanted to embrace him also.
From the corner of his eye he noted Hilsa and Rill bussing all and sundry — really, all these kisses had no meaning at all, including Cif's of course, he'd been a fool to think differently — and at one point he could have sworn he saw Groniger dancing a jig. Only old Ourph, for some reason, did not join in the merriment. Once he caught the old Mingol looking at him sadly.
And so the celebration began that lasted half the night and involved much drinking and eating and impromptu cheering and dancing and parading round and about and in and out. And the longer it went on, the more grotesque the cavorting and footstamping marches got, and all of it to the rhythm of the vindictive little rhyme that still went on resounding deep in the Mouser's mind, the tune to which everything was beginning to dance: “Storm clouds thicken round Rime Isle. Nature brews her blackest bile. Monsters quicken, nightmares foal, niss and nicor, drow and troll.” Those lines in particular seemed to the Mouser to describe what was happening just now — a birth of monsters. (But where were the trolls?) And so on (the rhyme) until its doomful and monstrously compelling end: “Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below, never draw an easy breath, suffer an unending death, everlasting pain and strife, everlasting death in life. Mingol madness ever burn! Never peace again return!”
And through it all the Mouser maintained his perhaps glassy-eyed smile and jaunty, insolent air of supreme self-confidence, he answered one repeated question with, “No, I'm no orator — never had any training — though I've always liked to talk,” but inwardly he seethed with curiosity. As soon as he got a chance. he asked Cif, “Whatever did I say to bring them around, to change their minds so utterly?”
“Why, you should know,” she told him.
“But tell me in your own words,” he said.
She deliberated. “You appealed entirely to their feelings, to their emotions,” she said at last, simply. “It was wonderful.”
“Yes, but what exactly did I say? What were my words?”
“Oh, I can't tell you,” she protested. “It was so all of a piece that no one thing stood out — I've quite forgotten the details. Content you, it was perfect.”
Later on he ventured to inquire of Groniger, “At what point did my arguments begin to persuade you?”
“How can you ask that?” the grizzled Rimelander rejoined, a frown of honest puzzlement furrowing his brow. “It was all so supremely logical, clearly and coldly reasoned. Like two and two makes four. How can one point to one part of arithmetic as being more compelling than another?”
“True, true,” the Mouser echoed reluctantly, and ventured to add, “I suppose it was the same sort of rigorous logic that persuaded you to accept the gods Odin and Loki?”
“Precisely,” Groniger confirmed.
The Mouser nodded, though he shrugged in spirit. Oh, he knew what had happened all right, he even checked it out a little later with Rill.
“Where did you light your torch?” he asked.
“At the god's fire, of course,” she answered. “At the god's fire in the Flame Den.” And then she kissed him. (She wasn't too bad at that either, even though there was nothing to the whole kissing business.) Yes, he knew that the god Loki had come out of the flames and possessed him for a while (as Fafhrd had perhaps once been possessed by the god Issek back in Lankhmar) and spoken through his lips the sort of arguments that are so convincing when voiced by a god or delivered in time of war or comparable crisis — and so empty when proclaimed by a mere mortal on any ordinary occasion.
And really there was no time for speculation about the mystery of what he'd said, now that there was so much to be done, so many life-and-death decisions to be made, so many eventful trains of action to be guided to their conclusions — once these folk had got through celebrating and taken a little rest.
Still, it would be nice to know just a little of what he'd actually said, he thought wistfully. Some of it might even have been clever. Why in heaven's name, for instance, and to illustrate what, had he taken the queller out of his pouch and whirled it around his head?
He had to admit it was rather pleasant being possessed by a god (or would be if one could remember any of it) but it did leave one feeling empty, that is, except for the ever-present Mingols-to-their-deaths jingle — that he'd never get shut of, it seemed.
* * *
Next morning Fafhrd's band got their first sight of Cold Harbor, the sea, and the entire Mingol advance force all at once. The sun and west wind had dissipated the coastal fog and blew it from the glacier, on the edge of which they were now all making their way. It was a much smaller and vastly more primitive settlement than Salthaven. To the north rose the dark crater-summit of Mount Hellglow, so lofty and near that its eastern foothills still cast their shadows on the ice. A wisp of smoke rose from it, trailing off east. At the snowline a shadow on the dark rock seemed to mark the mouth of a cavern leading into the mountain's heart. Its lower slopes were thickly crusted with snow, leading back to the glacier which, narrow at this point, stretched ahead of them north to the glittering gray sea, surprisingly near. From the glacier's not-very-lofty foot, rolling grassy turf with occasional clumps of small northern cedars deformed by the wind stretched off to the southwest and its own now-distant snowy heights, wisps of white fog blowing eastways and vanishing across the rolling sunlit land between.
Glimpses of a few devastated and deserted hill farms late yesterday and early this morning, while they'd been trailing and chivvying the retreating Mingol marauders, had prepared them for what they saw now. Those farmhouses and byres had been of turf or sod solely, with grass and flowers growing on their narrow roofs, smokeholes instead ofchimneys.
Mara, dry-eyed, pointed out the one she'd dwelt in.
Cold Harbor was simply a dozen such dwellings atop a rather steep hill or large mound backed against the glacier and turf-walled — a sort of retreat for the country-dwellers in times of peril. A short distance beyond it, a sandy beach fronted the harbor itself and on it three Mingol galleys had been drawn ashore, identified by the fantastic horse cages that were the above-deck portion of their prows.
Ranged round the mound of Cold Harbor at a fairly respectful distance were some fourscore Mingols, their leaders seemingly in conference with those of the twoscore who'd gone raiding ahead and but now returned. One of these latter was pointing back toward the Deathlands and then up at the glacier, as if describing the force that had pursued them. Beyond them the three Steppe-stallions free from their cages were cropping turf. A peaceful scene, yet even as Fafhrd watched, keeping his band mostly hid (he hoped) by a fold in the ice (he did not trust too far Mingol aversion to ice) a spear came arching out of the tranquil-seeming mound and (it was a prodigious cast) struck down a Mingol. There were angry cries and a dozen Mingols returned arrow fire. Fafhrd judged that the besiegers, now reinforced. would surely try soon a determined assault. Without hesitation he gave orders.
“Skullick, here's action for you. Take your best bowman, oil, and a firepot. Race ahead for your life to where the glacier is nearest their beached ships and drop fire arrows in them, or attempt to. Run!
“Mara, follow them as far as the mound and when you see the ships smoke, but not before, run down and join your friends if the way is clear. Careful! Afreyt will have my head if aught befalls you. Tell them the truth about our numbers. Tell them to hold out and to feint a sortie if they see good chance.
“Mannimark! Keep one man of your squad and maintain watch here. Warn us of Mingol advances.
“Skor an
d the rest, follow me. We'll descend in their rear and briefly counterfeit a pursuing army. Come!”
And he was off at a run with eight berserks lumbering after, arrow-quivers banging against their backs.
He'd already picked the stand of stunted cedars from the cover of which he planned to make his demonstration. As he ran, he sought to run in his mind with Skullick and his mate, and with Mara, trying to make the timing right.
He arrived at the cedars and saw Mannimark signaling that the Mingol assault had begun. “Now howl like wolves,” he told his hard-breathing men, “and really scream, each of you enough for two. Then we'll pour arrows toward ‘em, longest range and fast as you can. Then, when I give command, back on the glacier again! as fast as we came down.”
When all this was done (and without much marking of consequences — there was not time) and he had rejoined Mannimark, followed by his panting band, he saw with delight a thin column of black smoke ascending from the beached galley nearest the glaciers. Mingols began to run in that direction from the slopes of the beleaguered mound, abandoning their assault. Midway he saw the small figure of Mara running down the glacier to Cold Harbor, her red cloak standing out behind her. A woman with a spear had appeared on the earth wall nearest the child, waving her on encouragingly. Then of a sudden Mara appeared to take a fantastically long stride, part of her form was obscured, as if there were a blur in Fafhrd's vision there, and then she seemed to — no, did! — rise in the air, higher and higher, as though clutched by an invisible eagle or other sightless predatory flier. He kept his eyes on the red cloak, which suddenly grew brighter as the invisible flyer mounted from shadow into sunlight with his captive.
