by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser pondered by the fire for some time. Then with a glance at Hrissa, who had closed her eyes and laid back her moustache again, and at Fafhrd, who was snoring softly, he returned to his cloak and to sleep.
He had not told Fafhrd a word about his earlier vision of the living mask. His surface reason was that Fafhrd would laugh at such calf-brained nonsense of smoke-faces; his deeper reason the one which keeps any man from mentioning a pretty new girl even to his dearest friend.
So perhaps it was the same reason which next morning kept Fafhrd from telling his dearest friend what happened to him late that same night. Fafhrd dreamed he was feeling out the exact shape of a girl’s face in absolute darkness while her slender hands caressed his body. She had a rounded forehead, very long-lashed eyes, in-dipping nose bridge, apple cheeks, an impudent snub nose—it felt impudent!—and long lips whose grin his big gentle fingers could trace clearly.
He woke to the moon glaring down at him aslant from the south. It silvered the Obelisk’s interminable wall, turning rock-knobs to black shadow bars. He also woke to acute disappointment that a dream had been only a dream. Then he would have sworn that he felt fingertips briefly brush his face and that he heard a faint silvery chuckle which receded swiftly. He sat up like a mummy in his laced cloak and stared around. The fire had sunk to a few red ember-eyes, but the moonlight was bright, and by it he could see nothing at all.
Hrissa growled at him reproachfully for a silly sleep-breaker. He damned himself for mistaking the afterimage of a dream for reality. He damned the whole girl-less, girl-vision-breeding Cold Waste. A bit of the night’s growing chill spilled down his neck. He told himself he should be fast asleep like the wise Mouser over there, gathering strength for tomorrow’s great effort. He lay back, and after some time he slumbered.
Next morning the Mouser and Fafhrd woke at the first gray of dawn, the moon still bright as a snowball in the west, and quickly breakfasted and readied themselves and stood facing Obelisk Polaris in the stinging cold, all girls forgotten, their manhood directed solely at the mountain.
Fafhrd stood in high-laced boots with newly-sharpened thick hobnails. He wore a wolfskin tunic, fur turned in but open now from neck to belly. His lower arms and legs were bare. Short-wristed rawhide gloves covered his hands. A rather small pack, wrapped in his cloak, rode high on his back. Clipped to it was a large coil of black hempen rope. On his stout unstudded belt, his sheathed ax on his right side balanced on the other a knife, a small waterskin, and a bag of iron spikes headed by rings.
The Mouser wore his ramskin hood, pulled close around his face now by its drawstring, and on his body a tunic of gray silk, triple layered. His gloves were longer than Fafhrd’s and fur-lined. So were his slender boots, which were footed with crinkly behemoth hide. On his belt, his dagger Cat’s Claw and his waterskin balanced his sword Scalpel, its scabbard thonged loosely to his thigh. While to this cloak-wrapped pack was secured a curiously thick, short, black bamboo rod headed with a spike at one end and at the other a spike and large hook, somewhat like that of a shepherd’s crook.
Both men were deeply tanned and leanly muscular, in best trim for climbing, hardened by the Trollsteps and the Cold Waste, their chests a shade larger than ordinary from weeks of subsisting on the latter’s thin air.
No need to search about for the best-looking ascent—Fafhrd had done that yesterday as they’d approached the Obelisk.
The ponies were cropping again, and one had found the salt and was licking it with his thick tongue. The Mouser looked around for Hrissa to cuff her cheek in farewell, but the ice-cat was sniffing out a spoor beyond the campsite, her ears a-prick.
‘She makes a cat-parting,’ Fafhrd said. ‘Good.’
A faint shade of rose touched the heavens and the glacier by White Fang. Scanning toward the latter, the Mouser drew in his breath and squinted hard, while Fafhrd gazed narrowly from under the roof of his palm.
‘Brownish figures,’ the Mouser said at last. ‘Kranarch and Gnarfi always dressed in brown leather, I recall. But I make them more than two.’
‘I make them four,’ Fafhrd said. ‘Two strangely shaggy—clad in brown fur suits, I guess. And all four mounting from the glacier up the rock wall.’
‘Where the gale will—’ the Mouser began, then looked up. So did Fafhrd.
The Grand Pennon was gone.
‘You said that sometimes—’ the Mouser started.
‘Forget the gale and those two and their rough-edged reinforcements,’ Fafhrd said curtly. He faced around again at Obelisk Polaris. So did the Mouser.
Squinting up the greenish-white slope, head bent sharply back, the Mouser said, ‘This morning he seems somewhat steeper than even that north wall and rather extensive upward.’
‘Pah!’ Fafhrd retorted. ‘As a child I would climb him before breakfast. Often.’ He raised his clenched right rawhide glove as if it held a baton, and cried, ‘We go!’
With that he strode forward and without a break began to walk up the knobby face—or so it seemed, for although he used handholds he kept his body far out from the rock, as a good climber should.
The Mouser followed in Fafhrd’s steps and holds, stretching his legs farther and keeping somewhat closer to the cliff.
Midmorning and they were still climbing without a break. The Mouser ached or stung in every part. His pack was like a fat man on his back, Scalpel a sizable boy clinging to his belt. And his ears had popped five times.
Just above, Fafhrd’s boots clashed rock-knobs and into rock-holes with an unhesitating mechanistic rhythm the Mouser had begun to hate. Yet he kept his eyes resolutely fixed on them. Once he had looked down between his own legs and decided not to do that again.
It is not good to see the blue of distance, or even the gray-blue of middle distance, below one.
So he was taken by surprise when a small white bearded face, bloodily encumbered, came bobbing up alongside and past him.
Hrissa halted on a ledgelet by Fafhrd and took great whistling breaths, her tufted belly-skin pressing up against her spine with each exhalation. She breathed only through her pinkish nostrils because her jaws were full of two snow hares, packed side by side, with dead heads and hindquarters a-dangle.
Fafhrd took them from her and dropped them in his pouch and laced it shut.
Then he said, just a shade grandiloquently, ‘She has proved her endurance and skill, and she has paid her way. She is one of us.’
It had not occurred to the Mouser to doubt any of that. It seemed to him simply that there were three comrades now climbing Obelisk Polaris. Besides, he was most grateful to Hrissa for the halt she had brought. Partly to prolong it, he carefully pressed a handful of water from his bag and stretched it to her to lap: Then he and Fafhrd drank a little too.
All the long summer day they climbed the west wall of the cruel but reliable Obelisk. Fafhrd seemed tireless. The Mouser got his second wind, lost it, and never quite got his third. His whole body was one great leaden ache, beginning deep in his bones and filtering outward, like refined poison, through his flesh. His vision became a bobbing welter of real and remembered rock-knobs, while the necessity of never missing one single grip or foot-placement seemed the ruling of an insane schoolmaster god. He silently cursed the whole maniacal Stardock project, cackling in his brain at the idea that the luring stanzas on the parchment could mean anything but pipe dreams. Yet he would not cry quits or seek again to prolong the brief breathers they took.
He marveled dully at Hrissa’s leaping and hunching up beside them. But by midafternoon he noted she was limping, and once he saw a light blood-print of two pads where she’d set a paw.
They made camp at last almost two hours before sunset, because they’d found a rather wide ledge—and because a very light snowfall had begun, the tiny flakes sifting silently down like meal.
They made a fire of resin-pellets in the tiny claw-footed brazier Fafhrd packed, and they heated over it water for herb tea in their single narrow high pot. The wate
r was a long time getting even lukewarm. With Cat’s Claw the Mouser stirred two dollops of honey into it.
The ledge was as long as three men stretched out and as deep as one. On the sheer face of Obelisk Polaris that much space seemed an acre, at least.
Hrissa stretched slackly behind the tiny fire. Fafhrd and the Mouser huddled to either side of it, their cloaks drawn around them, too tired to look around, talk, or even think.
The snowfall grew a little thicker, enough to hide the Cold Waste far below.
After his second swallow of sweetened tea, Fafhrd asserted they’d come at least two-thirds of the way up the Obelisk.
The Mouser couldn’t understand how Fafhrd could pretend to know that, any more than a man could tell by looking at the shoreless waters of the Outer Sea how far he’d sailed across it. To the Mouser they were simply in the exact center of a dizzily tip-tilted plain of pale granite, green-tinged and now snow-sprinkled. He was still too weary to outline this concept to Fafhrd, but he managed to make himself say, ‘As a child you would climb up and down the Obelisk before breakfast?’
‘We had rather late breakfasts then,’ Fafhrd explained gruffly.
‘Doubtless on the afternoon of the fifth day,’ the Mouser concluded.
After the tea was drunk, they heated more water and left the hacked and disjointed bits of one of the snow hares in the fluid until they turned gray, then slowly chewed them and drank the dull soup. At about the same time Hrissa became a little interested in the flayed carcass of the other hare set before her nose—by the brazier to keep it from freezing. Enough interested to begin to haggle it with her fangs and slowly chew and swallow.
The Mouser very gently examined the pads of the ice-cat’s paws. They were worn silk-thin, there were two or three cuts in them, and the white fur between them was stained deep pink. Using a feather touch, the Mouser rubbed salve into them, shaking his head the while. Then he nodded once and took from his pouch a large needle, a spool of thin thong, and a small rolled hide of thin, tough leather. From the last he cut with Cat’s Claw a shape rather like a very fat pear and stitched from it a boot for Hrissa.
When he tried it on the ice-cat’s hind paw, she let it be for a little, then began to bite at it rather gently, looking up queerly at the Mouser. He thought, then very carefully bored holes in it for the ice-cat’s non-retracting claws, then drew the boot up the leg snugly until the claws protruded fully and tied it there with the drawstring he’d run through slits at the top.
Hrissa no longer bothered the boot. The Mouser made others, and Fafhrd joined in and cut and stitched one too.
When Hrissa was fully shod in her four clawed paw-mittens, she smelled each, then stood up and paced back and forth the length of the ledge a few times, and finally settled herself by the still-warm brazier and the Mouser, chin on his ankle.
The tiny grains of snow were still falling ruler-straight, frosting the ledge and Fafhrd’s coppery hair. He and the Mouser began to pull up their hoods and lace their cloaks about them for the night. The sun still shone through the snowfall, but its light was filtered white and brought not an atom of warmth.
Obelisk Polaris was not a noisy mountain, as many are—a-drip with glacial water, rattling with rock slides, and even with rock strata a-creak from uneven loss or gain of heat. The silence was profound.
The Mouser felt an impulse to tell Fafhrd about the living girl-mask or illusion he’d seen by night, while simultaneously Fafhrd considered recounting to the Mouser his own erotic dream.
At that moment there came again, without prelude, the rushing in the silent air and they saw, clearly outlined by the falling snow, a great flat undulating shape.
It came swooping past them, rather slowly, about two spear-lengths out from the ledge.
There was nothing at all to be seen except the flat, flakeless space the thing made in the airborne snow and the eddies it raised; it in no way obscured the snow beyond. Yet they felt the gust of its passage.
The shape of this invisible thing was most like that of a giant skate or stingray four yards long and three wide; there was even the suggestion of a vertical fin and a long, lashing tail.
‘Great invisible fish!’ the Mouser hissed, thrusting his hand down in his half-laced cloak and managing to draw Scalpel in a single sweep. ‘Your mind was most right, Fafhrd, when you thought it wrong!’
As the snow-sketched apparition glided out of sight around the buttress ending the ledge to the south, there came from it a mocking rippling laughter in two voices, one alto, one soprano.
‘A sightless fish that laughs like girls—most monstrous!’ Fafhrd commented shakenly, hefting his ax, which he’d got out swiftly too, though it was still attached to his belt by a long thong.
They crouched there then for a while, scrambled out of their cloaks, and with weapons ready, awaited the invisible monster’s return, Hrissa standing between them with fur bristling. But after a while they began to shake from the cold and so they perforce got back into their cloaks and laced them, though still gripping their weapons and prepared to throw off the upper lacings in a flash. Then they briefly discussed the weirdness just witnessed, insofar as they could, each now confessing his earlier visions or dreams of girls.
Finally the Mouser said, ‘The girls might have been riding the invisible thing, lying along its back—and invisible too! Yet, what was the thing?’
This touched a small spot in Fafhrd’s memory. Rather unwillingly he said, ‘I remember waking once as a child in the night and hearing my father say to my mother, “…like great thick quivering sails, but the ones you can’t see are the worst.” They stopped speaking then, I think because they heard me stir.’
The Mouser asked, ‘Did your father ever speak of seeing girls in the high mountains—flesh, apparition, or witch, which is a mixture of the two; visible or invisible?’
‘He wouldn’t have mentioned ’em if he had,’ Fafhrd replied. ‘My mother was a very jealous woman and a devil with a chopper.’
The whiteness they’d been scanning turned swiftly to darkest gray. The sun had set. They could no longer see the falling snow. They pulled up their hoods and laced their cloaks tight and huddled together at the back of the ledge with Hrissa close between them.
Trouble came early the next day. They roused with first light, feeling battered and nightmare-ridden, and uncramped themselves with difficulty while the morning ration of strong herb tea and powdered meat and snow were stewed in the same pot to a barely uncold aromatic gruel. Hrissa gnawed her rewarmed hare’s bones and accepted a little bear’s fat and water from the Mouser.
The snow had stopped during the night, but the Obelisk was powdered with it on every step and hold, while under the snow was ice—the first-fallen snow melted by yesterday afternoon’s meager warmth on the rock and quickly refrozen.
So Fafhrd and the Mouser roped together, and the Mouser swiftly fashioned a harness for Hrissa by cutting two holes in the long side of an oblong of leather. Hrissa protested somewhat when her forelegs were thrust through the holes and the ends of the oblong double-stitched together snugly over her shoulders. But when an end of Fafhrd’s black hempen rope was tied around her harness where the stitching was, she simply lay down flat on the ledge, on the warm spot where the brazier had stood, as if to say, ‘This debasing tether I will not accept, though humans may.’
But when Fafhrd slowly started up the wall and the Mouser followed and the rope tightened on Hrissa, and when she had looked up and seen them still roped like herself, she followed sulkily after. A little later she slipped off a bulge—her boots, snug as they were, must have been clumsy to her after naked pads—and swung scrabbling back and forth several long moments before she was supporting her own weight again. Fortunately the Mouser had a firm stance at the time.
After that, Hrissa came on more cheerily, sometimes even climbing to the side ahead of the Mouser and smiling back at him—rather sardonically, the Mouser fancied.
The climbing was a shade steeper tha
n yesterday with an even greater insistence that each hand- and foothold be perfect. Gloved fingers must grip stone, not ice; spikes must clash through the brittle stuff to rock. Fafhrd roped his ax to his right wrist and used its hammer to tap away treacherous thin platelets and curves of the glassy frozen water.
And the climbing was more wearing because it was harder to avoid tenseness. Even looking sideways at the steepness of the wall tightened the Mouser’s groin with fear. He wondered what if the wind should blow?—and fought the impulse to cling flat to the cliff. Yet at the same time sweat began to trickle down his face and chest, so that he had to throw back his hood and loosen his tunic to his belly to keep his clothes from sogging.
But there was worse to come. It had looked as though the slope above were gentling, but now, drawing nearer, they perceived a bulge jutting out a full two yards some seven yards above them. The under-slope was pocked here and there—fine handholds, except that they opened down. The bulge extended as far as they could see to either side, at most points looking worse.
They found themselves the best and highest holds they could, close together, and stared up at their problem. Even Hrissa, a-cling by the Mouser, seemed subdued.
Fafhrd said softly, ‘I mind me now they used to say there was an out-jutting around the Obelisk’s top. His Crown, I think my father called it. I wonder…’
‘Don’t you know?’ the Mouser demanded, a shade harshly. Standing rigid on his holds, his arms and legs were aching worse than ever.
‘O Mouser,’ Fafhrd confessed, ‘in my youth I never climbed Obelisk Polaris farther than halfway to last night’s camp. I only boasted to raise our spirits.’
There being nothing to say to that, the Mouser shut his lips, though somewhat thinly. Fafhrd began to whistle a tuneless tune and carefully fished a small grapnel with five dagger sharp flukes from his pouch and tied it securely to the long end of their black rope still coiled on his back. Then stretching his right arm as far out as he might from the cliff, he whirled the grapnel in a smallish circle, faster and faster, and finally hurled it upward. They heard it clash against rock somewhere above the bulge, but it did not catch on any crack or hump and instantly came sliding and then dropping down, missing the Mouser by hardly a handbreadth, it seemed to him.
