by Fritz Leiber
“Begin first at her feet,” he said. “That glimmering skirt falling from her snowy hips, which are almost as high as the Obelisk—that’s the White Waterfall, where no man may live.
“Now to her head again. From her flat tilted snowcap hang two great swelling braids of snow, streaming almost perpetually with avalanches, as if she combed ’em day and night—the Tresses, those are called. Between them’s a wide ladder of dark rock, marked at three points by ledges. The topmost of the three ledge-banks is the Face—d’you note the darker ledges marking eyes and lips? The midmost of the three is called the Roosts; the lowermost—level with Obelisk’s wide summit—the Lairs.”
“What lairs and roosts there?” the Mouser wanted to know.
“None may say, for none have climbed the Ladder,” Fafhrd replied. “Now as to our route up her—it’s most simple. We scale Obelisk Polaris—a trustworthy mountain if there ever was one—then cross by a dippling snow-saddle (there’s the danger-stretch of our ascent!) to Stardock and climb the Ladder to her top.”
“How do we climb the Ladder in the long blank stretches between the ledges?” the Mouser asked with childlike innocence, almost. “That is, if the Lairers and Roosters will honor our passports and permit us to try.”
Fafhrd shrugged. “There’ll be a way, rock being rock.”
“Why’s there no snow on the Ladder?”
“Too steep.”
“And supposing we climb it to the top,” the Mouser finally asked, “how do we lift our black-and-blue skeletonized bodies over the brim of Stardock’s snowy hat, which seems to outcurve and downcurve most stylishly?”
“There’s a triangular hole in it somewhere called the Needle’s Eye,” Fafhrd answered negligently. “Or so I’ve heard. But never you fret, Mouser, we’ll find it.”
“Of course we will,” the Mouser agreed with an airy certainty that almost sounded sincere, “we who hop-skip across shaking snow bridges and dance the fantastic up vertical walls without ever touching hand to granite. Remind me to bring a longish knife to carve our initials on the sky when we celebrate the end of our little upward sortie.”
His gaze wandered slightly northward. In another voice he continued, “The dark north wall of Stardock now—that looks steep enough, to be sure, but free of snow to the very top. Why isn’t that our route—rock, as you say with such unanswerable profundity, being rock.”
Fafhrd laughed unmockingly. “Mouser,” he said, “do you mark against the darkening sky that long white streamer waving south from Stardock’s top? Yes, and below it a lesser streamer—can you distinguish that? That second one comes through the Needle’s Eye! Well, those streamers from Stardock’s hat are called the Grand and Petty Pennons. They’re powdered snow blasted off Stardock by the northeast gale, which blows at least seven days out of eight, never predictably. That gale would pluck the stoutest climber off the north wall as easily as you or I might puff dandelion down from its darkening stem. Stardock’s self shields the Ladder from the gale.”
“Does the gale never shift around to strike the Ladder?” the Mouser inquired lightly.
“Only occasionally,” Fafhrd reassured him.
“Oh, that’s great,” the Mouser responded with quite overpowering sincerity and would have returned to the fire, except just then the darkness began swiftly to climb the Mountains of the Giants, as the sun took his final dive far to the west, and the gray-clad man stayed to watch the grand spectacle.
It was like a black blanket being pulled up. First the glittering skirt of the White Waterfall was hidden, then the Lairs on the Ladder and then the Roosts. Now all the other peaks were gone, even the Tusk’s and White Fang’s gleaming cruel tips, even the greenish-white roof of Obelisk Polaris. Now only Stardock’s snow hat was left and below it the Face between the silvery Tresses. For a moment the ledges called the Eyes gleamed, or seemed to. Then all was night.
Yet there was a pale afterglow about. It was profoundly silent and the air utterly unmoving. Around them, the Cold Waste seemed to stretch north, west, and south to infinity.
And in that space of silence something went whisper-gliding through the still air, with the faint rushy sound of a great sail in a moderate breeze. Fafhrd and the Mouser both stared all around wildly. Nothing. Beyond the little fire, Hrissa the ice-cat sprang up hissing. Still nothing. Then the sound, whatever had made it, died away.
Very softly, Fafhrd began, “There is a legend….” A long pause. Then with a sudden headshake, in a more natural voice: “The memory slips away, Mouser. All my mind-fingers couldn’t clutch it. Let’s patrol once around the camp and so to bed.”
From first sleep the Mouser woke so softly that even Hrissa, back pressed against him from his knees to his chest on the side toward the fire, did not rouse.
Emerging from behind Stardock, her light glittering on the southern Tress, hung the swelling moon, truly a proper fruit of the Moon Tree. Strange, the Mouser thought, how small the moon was and how big Stardock, silhouetted against the moon-pale sky.
Then, just below the flat top of Stardock’s hat, he saw a bright, pale blue twinkling. He recalled that Ashsha, pale blue and brightest of Nehwon’s stars, was near the moon tonight, and he wondered if he were seeing her by rare chance through the Needle’s Eye, proving the latter’s existence. He wondered too what great sapphire or blue diamond—perhaps the Heart of Light?—had been the gods’ pilot model for Ashsha, smiling drowsily the while at himself for entertaining such a silly, lovely myth. And then, embracing the myth entirely, he asked himself whether the gods had left any of their full-scale stars, unlaunched, on Stardock. Then Ashsha, if it were she, winked out.
The Mouser felt cozy in his cloak lined with sheep’s-wool and now thong-laced into a bag by the horn hooks around its hem. He stared long and dreamily at Stardock until the moon broke loose from her and a blue jewel twinkled on top of her hat and broke loose too—now Ashsha surely. He wondered unfearfully about the windy rushing he and Fafhrd had heard in the still air—perhaps only a long tongue of a storm licking down briefly. If the storm lasted, they would climb up into it.
Hrissa stretched in her sleep. Fafhrd grumbled low in a dream, wrapped in his own great thong-laced cloak stuffed with eiderdown.
The Mouser dropped his gaze to the ghostly flames of the dying fire, seeking sleep himself. The flames made girl-bodies, then girl-faces. Next a ghostly pale green girl-face—perhaps an afterimage, he thought at first—appeared beyond the fire, staring at him through close-slitted eyes across the flame tops. It grew more distinct as he gazed at it, but there was no trace of hair or body about it—it hung against the dark like a mask.
Yet it was weirdly beautiful: narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, wine-dark short lips slightly pouted, straight nose that went up without a dip into the broad, somewhat low forehead—and then the mystery of those fully lidded eyes seeming to peer at him through wine-dark lashes. And all, save lashes and lips, of palest green, like jade.
The Mouser did not speak or stir a muscle, simply because the face was very beautiful to him—just as any man might hope for the moment never to end when his naked mistress unconsciously or by secret design assumes a particularly charming attitude.
Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though knowing them almost certainly to be such.
Suddenly the eyes parted wide, showing only the darkness behind, as if the face were a mask indeed. The Mouser did start then, but still not enough to wake Hrissa.
Then the eyes closed, the lips puckered with taunting invitation; then the face began swiftly to dissolve as if it were being literally wiped away. First the right side went, then the left, then the center, last of all the dark lips and the eyes. For a moment the Mouser fancied he caught a winy odor; then all was gone.
He contemplated waking Fafhrd and almost laughed at the thought of his comrade’s surly reactions. He wondered if the face had been a sign from the gods, or a sending from some black magician castled on Stardock, or Stardock’s very s
oul perhaps—though then where had she left her glittering tresses and hat and her Ashsha eye?—or only a random creation of his own most clever brain, stimulated by sexual privation and tonight by beauteous if devilishly dangerous mountains. Rather quickly he decided on the last explanation and he slumbered.
Two evenings later, at the same hour, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stood scarcely a knife cast from the west wall of Obelisk Polaris, building a cairn from pale greenish rock-shards fallen over the millennia. Among this scanty scree were some bones, many broken, of sheep or goats.
As before, the air was still though very cold, the Waste empty, the set sun bright on the mountain faces.
From this closest vantage point the Obelisk was foreshortened into a pyramid that seemed to taper up forever, vertically. Encouragingly, his rock felt diamond-hard while the lowest reaches of the wall at any rate were thick with bumpy handholds and footholds, like pebbled leather.
To the south, Gran Hanack and the Hint were hidden.
To the north White Fang towered monstrously, yellowish white in the sunlight, as if ready to rip a hole in the graying sky. Bane of Fafhrd’s father, the Mouser recalled.
Of Stardock, there could be seen the dark beginning of the wind-blasted north wall and the north end of the deadly White Waterfall. All else of Stardock the Obelisk hid.
Save for one touch: almost straight overhead, seeming now to come from Obelisk Polaris, the ghostly Grand Pennon streamed southwest.
From behind Fafhrd and the Mouser as they worked came the tantalizing odor of two snow hares roasting by the fire, while before it Hrissa tore flesh slowly and savoringly from the carcass of a third she’d coursed down. The ice-cat was about the size and shape of a cheetah, though with long tufty white hair. The Mouser had bought her from a far-ranging Mingol trapper just north of the Trollsteps.
Beyond the fire the ponies eagerly chomped the last of the grain, strengthening stuff they’d not tasted for a week.
Fafhrd wrapped his sheathed longsword Graywand in oiled silk and laid it in the cairn, then held out a big hand to the Mouser.
“Scalpel?”
“I’m taking my sword with me,” the Mouser stated, then added justifyingly, “it’s but a feather to yours.”
“Tomorrow you’ll find what a feather weighs,” Fafhrd foretold. The big man shrugged and placed by Graywand his helmet, a bear’s hide, a folded tent, shovel and pickax, gold bracelets from his wrists and arms, quills, ink, papyrus, a large copper pot, and some books and scrolls. The Mouser added various empty and near-empty bags, two hunting spears, skis, an unstrung bow with a quiver of arrows, tiny jars of oily paint and squares of parchment, and all the harness of the ponies, many of the items wrapped against damp like Graywand.
Then, their appetites quickening from the roast-fumes, the two comrades swiftly built two top courses, roofing the cairn.
Just as they turned toward supper, facing the raggedly gilt-edged flat western horizon, they heard in the silence the rushy sail-like noise again, fainter this time but twice: once in the air to the north and, almost simultaneously, to the south.
Again they stared around swiftly but searchingly, yet there was nothing anywhere to be seen except—again Fafhrd saw it first—a thread of black smoke very near White Fang, rising from a point on the glacier between that mountain and Stardock.
“Gnarfi and Kranarch, if it be they, have chosen the rocky north wall for their ascent,” the Mouser observed.
“And it will be their bane,” Fafhrd predicted, up-jerking his thumb at the Pennon.
The Mouser nodded with less certainty, then demanded, “Fafhrd, what was that sound? You’ve lived here.”
Fafhrd’s brow crinkled and his eyes almost shut. “Some legend of great birds…” he muttered questioningly, “…or of great fish—no, that couldn’t be right.”
“Memory pot still seething all black?” the Mouser asked. Fafhrd nodded.
Before he left the cairn, the Northerner laid beside it a slab of salt. “That,” he said, “along with the ice-filmed pool and herbage we just passed, should hold the ponies here for a week. If we don’t return, well, at least we showed ’em the way between here and Illik-Ving.”
Hrissa smiled up from her bloody tidbit, as if to say, “No need to worry about me or my rations.”
Again the Mouser woke as soon as sleep had gripped him tight, this time with a surge of pleasure, as one who remembers a rendezvous. And again, this time without any preliminary star-staring or flame-gazing, the living mask faced him across the sinking fire: every same expression-quirk and feature—short lips, nose and forehead one straight line—except that tonight it was ivory pale with greenish lips and lids and lashes.
The Mouser was considerably startled, for last night he had stayed awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face—and even trying to make it come again—until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock…without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise—to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night’s sleep.
And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas on the parchment scrap in his pouch’s deepest pocket:
Who scales the Snow King’s citadel
Shall father his two daughters’ sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
Yesterday that had seemed rather promising—at least the fathering and daughters part—though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.
But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood—with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong from the top hooks of his cloak—Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight—and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.
Although he knew there wasn’t anything beyond the fire but scattered scree and ringingly hard earth, there wasn’t the faintest sound of the pebble striking anywhere. He might have thrown it off Nehwon.
At almost the same instant, the mask smiled tauntingly.
The Mouser was very swiftly out of his cloak and on his feet.
But even more swiftly the mask dissolved away—this time in one swift stroke from forehead to chin.
He quickly stepped, almost lunged, around the fire to the spot where the mask had seemed to hang, and there he stared around searchingly. Nothing—except a fleeting breath of wine or spirits of wine. He stirred the fire and stared around again. Still nothing. Except that Hrissa woke beside Fafhrd and bristled her moustache and gazed solemnly, perhaps scornfully, at the Mouser, who was beginning to feel rather like a fool. He wondered if his mind and his desires were playing a silly game against each other.
Then he trod on something. His pebble, he thought, but when he picked it up, he saw it was a tiny jar. It could have been one of his own pigment jars, but it was too small, hardly bigger than a joint of his thumb, and made not of hollowed stone but some kind of ivory or other tooth.
He knelt by the fire and peered into it, then dipped in his little finger and gingerly rubbed the tip against the rather hard grease inside. It came out ivory-hued. The grease had an oily, not winy odor.
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 n
onsense 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.
