by Fritz Leiber
Essedinex answered, ‘Believe me, you won’t ever again desire another woman, once you’ve known and—I wish you luck—mastered Vlana. Oh, of course, I suppose—’
Fafhrd reeled back from the tent a half dozen paces and there planted his feet firm and wide, feeling strangely dizzy, or was it drunk? He had early guessed they were almost certainly talking of Vlana, but hearing her name spoken made a much greater difference than he’d expected.
The two revelations, coming so close, filled him with a mixed feeling he’d never known before; an overmastering rage and also a desire to laugh hugely. He wanted a sword long enough to slash open the sky and tumble the dwellers in paradise from their beds. He wanted to find and fire off all the Show’s sky-rockets into the tent of Essedinex. He wanted to topple Godshall with its pines and drag it across all the actors’ tents. He wanted—
He turned around and swiftly made for the stable tent. The one groom was snoring on the straw beside an empty jug and near the light sleigh of Essedinex. Fafhrd noted with a fiendish grin that the horse he knew best happened to be one of Hringorl’s. He found a horse collar and a long coil of light, strong rope. Then, making reassuring mumbles behind half-closed lips, he led out the chosen horse—a white mare—from the rest. The groom only snored louder.
He again noted the light sleigh. A risk-devil seized him and he unlaced the stiff, pitchy tarpaulin covering the storage space behind the two seats. Beneath it among other things was the Show’s supply of rockets. He selected three of the biggest—with their stout ash tails they were long as ski sticks—and then took time to replace the tarpaulin. He still felt the mad desire for destruction, but now it was under a measure of control.
Outside he put the collar on the mare and firmly knotted to it one end of the rope. The other end he fashioned into a roomy noose. Then, coiling the rest of the rope and gripping the rockets under his left elbow, he nimbly mounted the mare and walked it near the tent of Essedinex. The two dim silhouettes still confronted each other across the table.
He whirled the noose above his head and cast. It settled around the apex of the tent with hardly a sound, for he was quick to draw in the slack before it rattled against the tent’s wall.
The noose tightened around the top of the tent’s central mast. Containing his excitement, he walked the mare toward the forest across the moon-bright snow, paying out the rope. When there were only four coils of it left, he urged the mare into a lope. He crouched over the collar, holding it firm, his heels clamped to the mare’s sides. The rope tightened. The mare strained. There was a satisfying, muffled crack behind him. He shouted a triumphant laugh. The mare plunged on against the rope’s irregular restraint. Looking back, he saw the tent dragging after them. He saw fire and heard yells of surprise and anger. Again he shouted his laughter.
At the edge of the forest he drew his knife and slashed the rope. Vaulting down, he buzzed approvingly in the mare’s ear and gave her a slap on the flank that set her cantering toward the stable. He considered firing off the rockets toward the fallen tent, but decided it would be anticlimactic. With them still clamped under his elbow, he walked into the edge of the woods. So hidden, he started home. He walked lightly to minimize footprints, found a branch of fringe pine and dragged it behind him and, when he could, he walked on rock.
His mountainous humor was gone and his rage too, replaced by black depression. He no longer hated Vellix or even Vlana, but civilization seemed a tawdry thing, unworthy of his interest. He was glad he had spilled Hringorl and Essedinex, but they were woodlice. He himself was a lonely ghost, doomed to roam the Cold Waste.
He thought of walking north through the woods until he found a new life or froze, of fetching and strapping on his skis and attempting to leap the tabooed gap that had been the death of Skif, of getting sword and challenging Hringorl’s henchmen all at once, and of a hundred other doom-treadings.
The tents of the Snow Clan looked like pale mushrooms in the light of the crazily glaring moon. Some were cones topping a squat cylinder; others, bloated hemispheres, turnip shapes. Like mushrooms, they did not quite touch the ground at the edges. Their floors of packed branches, carpeted with hides and supported by heavier boughs, stood on and overhung chunky posts, so that a tent’s heat would not turn the frozen ground below it to a mush.
The huge, silvery trunk of a dead snow oak, ending in what looked like a giant’s split fingernails, where an old lightning bolt had shattered it midway up, marked the site of Mor’s and Fafhrd’s tent—and also of his father’s grave, which the tent overlay. Each year it was pitched just so.
There were lights in a few of the tents and in the great Tent of the Women lying beyond in the direction of Godshall, but Fafhrd could see no one abroad. With a dispirited grunt he headed for his home door then, remembering the rockets, he veered toward the dead oak. It was smooth surfaced, the bark long gone. The few remaining branches were likewise bare and broken off short, the lowest of them appearing well out of reach.
A few paces away he paused for another look around. Assured of secrecy, he raced toward the oak and making a vertical leap more like a leopard’s than a man’s, he caught hold of the lowest branch with his free hand and whipped himself up onto it before his upward impetus was altogether spent.
Standing lightly on the dead branch with a finger touching the trunk, he made a final scan for peepers and late walkers, then with pressure of fingers and tease of fingernails, opened in the seemingly seamless gray wood a doorway tall as himself but scarcely half as wide. Feeling past skis and ski sticks, he found a long thin shape wrapped thrice around with lightly oiled sealskin. Undoing it, he uncovered a powerful-looking bow and a quiver of long arrows. He added the rockets to it, replaced the wrappings, then shut the queer door of his tree-safe and dropped to the snow below, which he brushed smooth.
Entering his home tent, he felt again like a ghost and made as little noise as one. The odors of home comforted him uncomfortably and against his will; smells of meat, cooking, old smoke, hides, sweat, the chamber pot, Mor’s faint, sour-sweet stench. He crossed the springy floor and, fully clad, he stretched himself in his sleeping furs. He felt tired as death. The silence was profound. He couldn’t hear Mor’s breathing. He thought of his last sight of his father, blue and shut-eyed, his broken limbs straightened, his best sword naked at his side with his slate-colored fingers fitted around the hilt. He thought of Nalgron now in the earth under the tent, worm-gnawed to a skeleton, the sword black rust, the eyes open now—sockets staring upward through solid dirt. He remembered his last sight of his father alive: a tall wolfskin cloak striding away with Mor’s warnings and threats spattering against it. Then the skeleton came back into his mind. It was a night for ghosts.
‘Fafhrd?’ Mor called softly from across the tent.
Fafhrd stiffened and held his breath. When he could no longer, he began to let it out and draw it in, open-mouthed, in noiseless draughts.
‘Fafhrd?’ The voice was a little louder, though still like a ghost cry. ‘I heard you come in. You’re not asleep.’
No use keeping silent. ‘You haven’t slept either, Mother?’
‘The old sleep little.’
That wasn’t true, he thought. Mor wasn’t old, even by the Cold Waste’s merciless measure. At the same time, it was the truth. Mor was as old as the tribe, the Waste itself, as old as death.
Mor said composedly—Fafhrd knew she had to be lying on her back, staring straight upward—‘I am willing that you should take Mara to wife. Not pleased, but willing. There is need for a strong back here, so long as you daydream, shooting your thoughts like arrows loosed high and at random, and prank about and gad after actresses and such gilded dirt. Besides, you have got Mara with child and her family does not altogether lack status.’
‘Mara spoke to you tonight?’ Fafhrd asked. He tried to keep his voice dispassionate, but the words came out strangledly.
‘As any Snow Girl should. Except she ought to have told me earlier. And you earlier
still. But you have inherited threefold your father’s secretiveness along with his urge to neglect his family and indulge himself in useless adventurings. Except that in you the sickness takes a more repulsive form. Cold mountaintops were his mistresses, while you are drawn to civilization, that putrid festering of the hot south, where there is no natural stern cold to punish the foolish and luxurious and to see that the decencies are kept. But you will discover that there is a witchy cold that can follow you anywhere in Nehwon. Ice once went down and covered all the hot lands, in punishment for an earlier cycle of lecherous evil. And wherever ice once went, witchery can send it again. You will come to believe that, and shed your sickness, or else you will learn as your father learned.’
Fafhrd tried to make the accusation of husband-murder that he had hinted at so easily this morning, but the words stuck, not in his throat, but in his very mind, which felt invaded. Mor had long ago made his heart cold. Now, up in his brain, she was creating among his most private thoughts crystals which distorted everything and prevented him from using against her the weapons of duty coldly performed and joined by a cold reason which let him keep his integrity. He felt as if there were closing in on him forever the whole world of cold, in which the rigidity of ice and the rigidity of morals and the rigidity of thought were all one.
As if sensing her victory and permitting herself to joy in it a little, Mor said in the same dead, reflective tones, ‘Aye, your father now bitterly regrets Gran Hanack, White Fang, the Ice Queen, and all his other mountain paramours. They cannot help him now. They have forgotten him. He stares up endlessly from lidless sockets at the home he despised and now yearns for, so near, yet so impossibly far. His fingerbones scrabble feebly against the frozen earth, he tries futilely to twist under its weight…’
Fafhrd heard a faint scratching, perhaps of icy twigs against tent leather, but his hair rose. Yet he could move no other part of him, he discovered as he tried to lift himself. The blackness all around him was a vast weight. He wondered if Mor had magicked him down under the ground beside his father. Yet it was a greater weight than that of eight feet of frozen earth that pressed on him. It was the weight of the entire Cold Waste and its killingness, of the taboos and contempts and shut-mindedness of the Snow Clan, of the pirate greed and loutish lust of Hringorl, of even Mara’s merry self-absorption and bright, half-blind mind, and atop them all Mor with ice crystals forming on her fingertips as she wove them in a binding spell.
And then he thought of Vlana.
It may not have been the thought of Vlana that did it. A star may have chanced to crawl across the tent’s tiny smoke-hole and shoot its tiny silver arrow into the pupil of one of his eyes. It may have been that his held breath suddenly puffed out and his lungs automatically sucked another breath in, showing him that his muscles could move.
At any rate he shot up and dashed for the doorway. He dared not stop for the lashings, because Mor’s ice-jagged fingers were clutching at him. Instead he ripped the brittle, old leather with one downward sweep of his clawed right hand and then leaped from the door, because Nalgron’s skeletal arms were straining toward him from the narrow black space between the frozen ground and the tent’s elevated floor.
And then he ran as he had never run before. He ran as if all the ghosts of the Cold Waste were at his heels—and in some fashion they were. He passed the last of the Snow Clan’s tents, all dark, and the faintly tinkling Tent of the Women, and sprinted out onto the gentle slope, all silvered by the moon, leading down to the upcurving lip of Trollstep Canyon. He felt the urge to dash off that verge, challenging the air to uphold him and bear him south or else hurl him to instant oblivion—and for a moment there seemed nothing to choose between those two fates.
Then he was running not so much away from the cold and its crippling, supernatural horrors, as toward civilization, which was once again a bright emblem in his brain, an answer to all small-mindedness.
He slowed down a little and some sense came back into his head, so that he peered for living late-walkers as well as for demons and fetches.
He noted Shadah twinkling blue in the western treetops.
He was walking by the time he reached Godshall. He went between it and the canyon’s rim, which no longer tugged him.
He noted that Essedinex’s tent had been set up again and was once more lit. No new snow worm crawled across Vlana’s tent. The snow sycamore bough above it glittered with crystals in the moonlight.
He entered without warning by the back door, silently drawing out the loosened pegs and then thrusting together under the wall and the hems of the racked costumes his head and right fist, the latter gripping his drawn knife.
Vlana lay asleep alone on her back on the pallet, a light red woolen blanket drawn up to her naked armpits. The lamp burned yellow and small, yet brightly enough to show all the interior and no one but her. The unbanked and newly stoked brazier radiated heat.
Fafhrd came all the way in, sheathed his knife, and stood looking down at the actress. Her arms seemed very slender, her hands long-fingered and a shade large. With her big eyes shut, her face seemed rather small at the center of its glory of outspread, dark brown hair. Yet it looked both noble and knowing and its moist, long, generous lips, newly and carefully carmined, roused and tempted him. Her skin had a faint sheen of oil. He could smell its perfume.
For a moment Vlana’s supine posture reminded him of both Mor and Nalgron, but this thought was instantly swept away by the brazier’s fierce heat, like that of a small wrought-iron sun, by the rich textures and graceful instruments of civilization all around him, and by Vlana’s beauty and couth grace, which seemed self-aware even in sleep. She was civilization’s sigil.
He moved back toward the rack and began to strip off his clothes and neatly fold and pile them. Vlana did not wake, or at least her eyes did not open.
Getting back under the red blanket again some time later, after crawling out to relieve himself, Fafhrd said, ‘Now tell me about civilization and your part in it.’
Vlana drank half of the wine Fafhrd had fetched her on his way back, then stretched luxuriously, her head resting on her intertwined hands.
‘Well, to begin with, I’m not a princess, though I liked being called one,’ she said lightly. ‘I must inform you that you have not got yourself even a lady, darlingest boy. As for civilization, it stinks.’
‘No,’ Fafhrd agreed, ‘I have got myself the skillfullest and most glamorous actress in all Nehwon. But why has civilization an ill odor for you?’
‘I think I must disillusion you still further, beloved,’ Vlana said, somewhat absently rubbing her side against his. ‘Otherwise you might get silly notions about me and even devise silly plans.’
‘If you’re talking about pretending to be a whore in order to gain erotic knowledge and other wisdoms—’ Fafhrd began.
She glanced at him in considerable surprise and interrupted rather sharply: ‘I’m worse than a whore, by some standards. I’m a thief. Yes, Red Ringlets, a cutpurse and filchpocket, a roller of drunks, a burglar and alleybasher. I was born a farm girl, which I suppose makes me lower still to a hunter, who lives by the death of animals and keeps his hands out of the dirt and reaps no harvest except with the sword. When my parents’ plot of land was confiscated by the law’s trickery to make a tiny corner of one of the new, vast, slave-worked, Lankhmar-owned grain farms, and they in consequence starved to death, I determined to get my own back from the grain merchants. Lankhmar City would feed me, aye, feed me well!—and be paid only with lumps and perhaps a deep scratch or two. So to Lankhmar I went. Falling in there with a clever girl of the same turn of mind and some experience, I did well for two full rounds of moons and a few more. We worked only in black garb, and called ourselves to ourselves the Dark Duo.
‘For a cover, we danced, chiefly in the twilight hours, to fill in the time before the big-name entertainers. A little later we began to mime too, taught by one Hinerio, a famous actor fallen by wine on evil days, the darlinges
t and courtliest old trembler who ever begged for a drink at dawn or contrived to fondle a girl one quarter his age at dusk. And so, as I say, I did quite well…until I fell afoul, as my parents had, of the law. No, not the Overlord’s courts, dear boy, and his prisons and racks and head-and-hand-chopping blocks, though they are a shame crying to the stars. No, I ran afoul of a law older even than Lankhmar’s and a court less merciful. In short, my friend’s and my own cover was finally blown by the Thieves’ Guild, a most ancient organization with locals in every city of the civilized world with a hidebound law against female membership and with a deep detestation of all freelance pilferers. Back on the farm I had heard of the Guild and hoped in my innocence to become worthy to join it, but soon learned their byword, “Sooner give a cobra a kiss, than a secret to a woman.” Incidentally, sweet scholar of civilization’s arts, such women as the Guild must use as lures and attention-shifters and such, they hire by the half hour from the Whores’ Guild.
‘I was lucky. At the moment when I was supposed to be slowly strangling somewhere else, I was stumbling over my friend’s body, having looped swiftly home to get a key I’d forgot. I lit a lamp in our close-shuttered abode and saw the long agony in Vilis’ face and the red silken cord buried deep in her neck. But what filled me with the hottest rage and coldest hate—besides a second measure of knee-melting fear—was that they had strangled old Hinerio too. Vilis and I were at least competitors and so perhaps fair game by civilization’s malodorous standards, but he had never even suspected us of thievery. He had assumed merely that we had other lovers or else—and also—erotic clients.
‘So I scuttled out of Lankhmar as swiftly as a spied crab, eyes behind me for pursuit, and in Ilthmar encountered Essedinex’ troupe, headed north for the off-season. By good fortune they needed a leading mime and my skill was sufficient to satisfy old Seddy.
