by Fritz Leiber
Yes, Quatch and Wiggin rushed forward, but almost immediately came to a halt—in the very strange posture of men who are trying to lift themselves into the air by heaving at their own belts.
The shortswords would not come out of their scabbards. Mingol glue is indeed a powerful adhesive, and the Mouser had been most determined that, however little else he accomplished, Pulg’s henchmen should be put in a position where they could harm no one.
However, he had been able to do nothing in the way of pulling Grilli’s fangs, as the tiny man was most sharp-witted himself, and Pulg had kept him closely at his side. Now almost foaming at the mouth in vulpine rage and disgust, Grilli broke loose from his god-besotted master, whisked out his razor, and sprang at Fafhrd, who at last had clearly realized what was encumbering him and was having a fine time breaking the last pesky fragments of the bed over his knee or by the leverage of foot against cobble—to the accompaniment of the continuing wild cheers of the mob.
But the Mouser sprang rather more swiftly. Grilli saw him coming, shifted his attack to the gray-clad man, feinted twice and loosed one slash that narrowly missed. Thereafter he lost blood too quickly to be interested in attempting any further fencing. Cat’s Claw is narrow, but it cuts throats as well as any other dagger (though it does not have a sharply curved or barbed tip, as some literal-minded scholars have claimed).
The bout with Grilli left the Mouser standing very close to Fafhrd. The little man realized he still held in his left hand the golden representation of the Jug fashioned by Fafhrd, and that object now touched off in the Mouser’s mind a series of inspirations leading to actions that followed one another very much like the successive figures of a dance.
He slapped Fafhrd back-handed on the cheek to attract the giant’s attention. Then he sprang to Pulg, sweeping his left hand in a dramatic arc as if conveying something from the naked god to the extortioner, and lightly placed the golden bauble in the supplicating fingers of the latter. (One of those times had come when all ordinary scales of value fail—even for the Mouser—and gold is—however briefly—of no worth.) Recognizing the holy object, Pulg almost expired in ecstasy.
But the Mouser had already skipped on across the Street. Reaching Issek’s coffer-altar, beside which Bwadres was stretched unconscious but smiling, he twitched off the garlic bag and sprang upon the small cask and danced upon it, hooting to further attract Fafhrd’s attention and then pointing at his own feet.
Fafhrd saw the cask, all right, as the Mouser had intended he should, and the giant did not see it as anything to do with Issek’s collections (the thought of all such matters was still wiped from his mind) but simply as a likely source of the liquor he craved. With a glad cry he hastened toward it across the Street, his worshipers scuttling out of his way or moaning in beatific ecstasy when he trod on them with his naked feet. He caught up the cask and lifted it to his lips.
To the crowd it seemed that Issek was drinking his own coffer—an unusual yet undeniably picturesque way for a god to absorb his worshipers’ cask offerings.
With a roar of baffled disgust Fafhrd raised the cask to smash it on the cobbles, whether from pure frustration or with some idea of getting at the liquor he thought it held is hard to say, but just then the Mouser caught his attention again. The small man had snatched two tankards of ale from an abandoned tray and was pouring the heady liquid back and forth between them until the high-piled foam trailed down the sides.
Tucking the cask under his left arm—for many drunkards have a curious prudent habit of absentmindedly hanging onto things, especially if they may contain liquor—Fafhrd set out again after the Mouser, who ducked into the darkness of the nearest portico and then danced out again and led Fafhrd in a great circle all the way around the roiling congregation.
Literally viewed it was hardly an edifying spectacle—a large god stumbling after a small gray demon and grasping at a tankard of beer that just kept eluding him—but the Lankhmarians were already viewing it under the guise of two dozen different allegories and symbolisms, several of which were later written up in learned scrolls.
The second time through the portico Issek and the small gray demon did not come out again. A large chorus of mixed voices kept up expectant and fearful cries for some time, but the two supernatural beings did not reappear.
Lankhmar is full of mazy alleyways, and this stretch of the Street of the Gods is particularly rich in them, some of them leading by dark and circuitous routes to localities as distant as the docks.
But the Issekians—old-timers and new converts alike—largely did not even consider such mundane avenues in analyzing their god’s disappearance. Gods have their own doorways into and out of space and time, and it is their nature to vanish suddenly and inexplicably. Brief reappearances are all we can hope for from a god whose chief life-drama on earth has already been played, and indeed it might prove uncomfortable if he hung around very long, protracting a Second Coming—too great a strain on everybody’s nerves for one thing.
The large crowd of those who had been granted the vision of Issek was slow in dispersing, as might well have been expected—they had much to tell each other, much about which to speculate and, inevitably, to argue.
The blasphemous attack of Quatch and Wiggin on the god was belatedly recalled and avenged, though some already viewed the incident as part of a general allegory. The two bullies were lucky to escape with their lives after an extensive mauling.
Grilli’s corpse was unceremoniously picked up and tossed in next morning’s Death Cart. End of his story.
Bwadres came out of his faint with Pulg bending solicitously over him—and it was largely these two persons who shaped the subsequent history of Issekianity.
To make a long or, rather, complex story simple and short, Pulg became what can best be described as Issek’s grand vizier and worked tirelessly for Issek’s greater glory—always wearing on his chest the god-created golden emblem of the Jug as the sign of his office. He did not upon his conversion to the gentle god give up his old profession, as some moralists might expect, but carried it on with even greater zeal than before, extorting mercilessly from the priests of all gods other than Issek and grinding them down. At the height of its success, Issekianity boasted five large temples in Lankhmar, numerous minor shrines in the same city, and a swelling priesthood under the nominal leadership of Bwadres, who was lapsing once more into general senility.
Issekianity flourished for exactly three years under Pulg’s viziership. But when it became known (due to some incautious babblings of Bwadres) that Pulg was not only conducting under the guise of extortion a holy war on all other gods in Lankhmar, with the ultimate aim of driving them from the city and if possible from the world, but that he even entertained murky designs of overthrowing the gods of Lankhmar or at least forcing them to recognize Issek’s overlordship…when all this became apparent, the doom of Issekianity was sealed. On the third anniversary of Issek’s Second Coming, the night descended ominous and thickly foggy, the sort of night when all wise Lankhmarians hug their indoor fires. About midnight awful screams and piteous howlings were heard throughout the city, along with the rending of thick doors and the breaking of heavy masonry—preceded and followed, some tremulously maintained, by the clicking tread of bones on the march. One youth who peered out through an attic window lived long enough before he expired in gibbering madness to report that he had seen striding through the streets a multitude of black-togaed figures, sooty of hand, foot and feature and skeletally lean.
Next morning the five temples of Issek were empty and defiled and his minor shrines all thrown down, while his numerous clergy, including his ancient high priest and overweeningly ambitious grand vizier, had vanished to the last member and were gone beyond human ken.
Turning back to a dawn exactly three years earlier we find the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd clambering from a cranky, leaky skiff into the cockpit of a black sloop moored beyond the Great Mole that juts out from Lankhmar and the east bank of the River H
lal into the Inner Sea. Before coming aboard, Fafhrd first handed up Issek’s cask to the impassive and sallow-faced Ourph and then with considerable satisfaction pushed the skiff wholly under water.
The cross-city run the Mouser had led him on, followed by a brisk spell of galley-slave work at the oars of the skiff (for which he indeed looked the part in his lean near-nakedness) had quite cleared Fafhrd’s head of the fumes of wine, though it now ached villainously. The Mouser still looked a bit sick from his share in the running—he was truly in woefully bad trim from his months of lazy gluttony.
Nevertheless the twain joined with Ourph in the work of upping anchor and making sail. Soon a salty, coldly refreshing wind on their starboard beam was driving them directly away from the land and Lankhmar. Then while Ourph fussed over Fafhrd and bundled a thick cloak about him, the Mouser turned quickly in the morning dusk to Issek’s cask, determined to get at the loot before Fafhrd had opportunity to develop any silly religious or Northernly-noble qualms and perhaps toss the cask overboard.
The Mouser’s fingers did not find the coin-slit in the top—it was still quite dark—so he upended the pleasantly heavy object, crammed so full it did not even jingle. No coin-slit in that end either, seemingly, though there was what looked like a burned inscription in Lankhmarian hieroglyphs. But it was still too dark for easy reading and Fafhrd was coming up behind him, so the Mouser hurriedly raised the heavy hatchet he had taken from the sloop’s tool rack and bashed in a section of wood.
There was a spray of stingingly aromatic fluid of most familiar odor. The cask was filled with brandy—to the absolute top, so that it had not gurgled.
A little later they were able to read the burnt inscription. It was most succinct: ‘Dear Pulg—Drown your sorrows in this—Basharat.’
It was only too easy to realize how yesterday afternoon the Number Two Extortioner had had a perfect opportunity to effect the substitution—the Street of the Gods deserted, Bwadres almost druggedly asleep from the unaccustomedly large fish dinner, Fafhrd gone from his post to guzzle with the Mouser.
‘That explains why Basharat was not on hand last night,’ the Mouser said thoughtfully.
Fafhrd was for throwing the cask overboard, not from any disappointment at losing loot, but because of a revulsion at its contents, but the Mouser set aside the cask for Ourph to close and store away—he knew that such revulsions pass. Fafhrd, however, extorted the promise that the fiery fluid only be used in direst emergency—as for burning enemy ships.
The red dome of the sun pushed above the eastern waves. By its ruddy light Fafhrd and the Mouser really looked at each other for the first time in months. The wide sea was around them, Ourph had taken the lines and tiller, and at last nothing pressed. There was an odd shyness in both their gazes—each had the sudden thought that he had taken his friend away from the life-path he had chosen in Lankhmar, perhaps the life-path best suited to his treading.
‘Your eyebrows will grow back—I suppose,’ the Mouser said at last, quite inanely.
‘They will indeed,’ Fafhrd rumbled. ‘I’ll have a fine shock of hair by the time you’ve worked off that belly.’
‘Thank you, Egg-Top,’ the Mouser replied. Then he gave a small laugh. ‘I have no regrets for Lankhmar,’ he said, lying mightily, though not entirely. ‘I can see now that if I’d stayed I’d have gone the way of Pulg and all such Great Men—fat, power-racked, lieutenant-plagued, smothered with false-hearted dancing girls, and finally falling into the arms of religion. At least I’m saved that last chronic ailment, which is worse than the dropsy.’ He looked at Fafhrd narrowly. ‘But how of you, old friend? Will you miss Bwadres and your cobbled bed and your nightly tale-weaving?’
Fafhrd frowned as the sloop plunged on northward and the salt spray dashed him.
‘Not I,’ he said at last. ‘There are always other tales to be woven. I served a god well, I dressed him in new clothes, and then I did a third thing. Who’d go back to being an acolyte after being so much more? You see, old friend, I really was Issek.’
The Mouser arched his eyebrows. ‘You were?’
Fafhrd nodded twice, most gravely.
III
Their Mistress, The Sea
The next few days were not kind to the Mouser and Fafhrd. To begin with, both got seasick from their many months ashore. Between gargantuan groaning retches, Fafhrd monotonously berated the Mouser for having tricked him out of asceticism and stolen from him his religious vocation. While in the intervals of his vomiting, the Gray Mouser cursed Fafhrd back, but chiefly excoriated himself for having been such a fool as to give up the soft life in Lankhmar for sake of a friend.
During this period—brief in reality, an eternity to the sufferers—Ourph the Mingol managed sails and tiller. His impassive, wrinkle-netted face forever threatened to break into a grin, yet never did, though from time to time his jet eyes twinkled.
Fafhrd, first to recover, took back command from Ourph and immediately started ordering an endless series of seamanlike exercises: reefings, furlings, raisings, and changing of sails; shiftings of ballast; inspection of crawl-spaces for rats and roaches; luffings, tackings, jibings, and the like.
The Mouser swore feebly yet bitterly as these exercises sent both Ourph and Fafhrd clumping all over the deck, often across his prone body, and changed the steady pitch and roll of the Black Treasurer, to which he’d been getting accustomed, into unpredictable jitterbuggings which awakened nausea anew.
Whenever Fafhrd left off this slave-driving, he would sit cross-legged, deaf to the Mouser’s sultry swearing, and silently meditate, his gaze directed at first always toward Lankhmar, but later more and more toward the north.
When the Mouser at last recovered, he forswore all food save watery gruel in small measures, and scorning Fafhrd’s nautical exercises, began grimly to put himself through a variety of gymnastical ones until he collapsed sweating and panting—yet only waiting until he had his breath back to begin again.
It was an odd sight to see the Mouser walking about on his hands while Ourph raced forward to change the set of the jib and Fafhrd threw his weight on the tiller and bellowed, ‘Hard a-lee!’
Yet at odd moments now and then, chiefly at sunset, when they each sipped a measure of water tinted with sweet wine—the brandy being still under interdict—they began to reminisce and yarn together, only a little at first, then for longer and longer periods.
They spoke of piratings, both inflicted and suffered. They recalled notable storms and calms, sighting of mysterious ships which vanished in fog or distance, never more to be seen. They talked of sea monsters, mermaids, and oceanic devils. They relived the adventure of their crossing of the Outer Sea to the fabled Western Continent, which of all Lankhmarts only Fafhrd, the Mouser, and Ourph know to be more than legend.
Gradually the Mouser’s belly melted and a bristly lawn of hair grew on Fafhrd’s pate, cheeks, and chin, and around his mouth. Life became happenings rather than afflictions. They lived as well as saw sunsets and dawns. The stars became friendly. Above all, they began to match their rhythms to those of the sea, as if she were someone they lived and voyaged with, rather than sailed upon.
But their water and stores began to run low, the wine ran out, and they lacked even suitable clothing—Fafhrd in particular.
Their first piratical foray ended in near disaster. The small and lubberly-sailing merchant ship they approached most subtly at dawn suddenly bristled with brown-helmeted pikemen and slingers. It was a Lankhmar bait-ship, designed to trap pirates.
They escaped only because the trap was sprung too soon and the Black Treasurer was able to out-sail the bait-ship, transformed into a speedy goer by proper handling. At that, Ourph was struck senseless by a slung stone, and Fafhrd had two ribs cracked by another.
Their next sea-raid was only a most qualified success. The cutter they conquered turned out to be manned by five elderly Mingol women, witches by profession, they said, and bound on a fortune-telling and trading voyage to the sou
thern settlements around Quarmall.
The Mouser and Fafhrd exacted from them a modest supply of water, food, and wine, and Fafhrd took several silk and fur tunics, some silver-plated jewelry, a longsword and ax which he fancied, and leather to make him boots. However, they left the surly women by no means destitute and forcibly prevented Ourph from raping even one of them, let alone all five as he had boastfully threatened.
They departed then, somewhat ashamed, to the tune of the witchwomen’s chanting curses—most venomous ones, calling down on Fafhrd and the Mouser all the worst evils of air and earth, fire and water. Their failure to curse Ourph also, made the Mouser wonder whether the witch-women were not angriest because Ourph had been prevented in his most lascivious designs.
Now that the Black Treasurer was somewhat better provisioned, Fafhrd began to talk airily about voyaging once again across the Outer Sea, or toward the Frozen Sea north of No-Ombrulsk, there to hunt the polar tiger and white-furred giant worm.
That was the last straw to Ourph, who was a most even-tempered, sweet old man—for a Mingol. Overworked, skull-bashed, thwarted of a truly unusual amorous opportunity for one of his age, and now threatened with idiot-far-voyagings, he demanded to be set ashore.
The Mouser and Fafhrd complied. All this while the Black Treasurer had been southwesting along Lankhmar’s northwestern coast. So it was near the small village of Earth’s End that they put landside the old Mingol, who was still cursing them grumblingly, despite the gifts with which they had loaded him.
After consultation, the two heroes decided to set course straight north, which would land them in the forested Land of the Eight Cities at the city of Ool Plerns, whose Mad Duke had once been their patron.
