Leiber, Fritz - Saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser 01 - Swords and Deviltry

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Swords and Deviltry [Book 1 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

by Fritz Leiber

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THE GREEN MILLENIUM

GATHER, DARKNESS!

SWORDS AND DEVILTY

SWORDS AGAINST DEATH

SWORDS IN THE MIST

SWORDS AGAINST WIZARDY

THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR

SWORDS AND ICE MAGIC

THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS

THE WANDERER

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*I: Induction*

Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the

ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and

sorceries. Nehwon's known realms crowd about the Inner Sea: northward the

green-forested fierce Land of the Eight Cities, eastward the steppe-dwelling

Mingol horsemen and the desert where caravans creep from the rich Eastern

Lands and the River Tilth. But southward, linked to the desert only by the

Sinking Land and further warded by the Great Dike and the Mountains of Hunger,

are the rich grain fields and walled cities of Lankhmar, eldest and chiefest

of Nehwon's lands. Dominating the Land of Lankhmar and crouching at the silty

mouth of the River Hlal in a secure corner between the grain fields, the Great

Salt Marsh, and the Inner Sea is the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed

metropolis of Lankhmar, thick with thieves and shaven priests, lean-framed

magicians and fat-bellied merchants -- Lankhmar the Imperishable, the City

of the Black Toga.

In Lankhmar on one murky night, if we can believe the runic books of

Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious

heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd's origins

were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking

ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a

barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep

Mountains. The Mouser's antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced

from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouseskin hood shadowing flat swart

face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the

suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched

spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit

indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were

two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had

found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime -- or a

hundred lifetimes -- of adventuring.

No one at that moment could have guessed that the Gray Mouser was once

named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by

training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his

mother's tent although he was eighteen.

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*II: The Snow Women *

At Cold Corner in midwinter, the women of the Snow Clan were waging a

cold war against the men. They trudged about like ghosts in their whitest

furs, almost invisible against the new-fallen snow, always together in female

groups, silent or at most hissing like angry shades. They avoided Godshall

with its trees for pillars and walls of laced leather and towering pine-needle

roof.

They gathered in the big, oval Tent of the Women, which stood guard in

front of the smaller home tents, for sessions of chanting and ominous moaning

and various silent practices designed to create powerful enchantments that

would tether their husbands' ankles to Cold Corner, tie up their loins, and

give them sniveling, nose-dripping colds, with the threat of the Great Cough

and Winter Fever held in reserve. Any man so unwise as to walk alone by day

was apt to be set upon and snowballed and, if caught, thrashed -- be he even

skald or mighty hunter.

And a snowballing by Snow Clan women was nothing to laugh at. They

threw overarm, it is true, but their muscles for that had been greatly

strengthened by much splitting of firewood, lopping of high branches, and

pounding of hides, including the iron-hard one of the snowy behemoth. And they

sometimes froze their snowballs.

The sinewy, winter-hardened men took all of this with immense dignity,

striding about like kings in their conspicuous black, russet, and rainbow-dyed

ceremonial furs, drinking hugely but with discretion, and trading as shrewdly

as Ilthmarts their bits of amber and ambergris, their snow-diamonds visible

only by night, their glossy animal pelts, and their ice-herbs, in exchange for

woven fabrics, hot spices, blued and browned iron, honey, waxen candles,

firepowders that flared with a colored roar, and other products of the

civilized south. Nevertheless, they made a point of keeping generally in

groups, and there was many a nose a-drip among them.

It was not the trading the women objected to. Their men were good at

that and they -- the women -- were the chief beneficiaries. They greatly

preferred it to their husbands' occasional piratings, which took those lusty

men far down the eastern coasts of the Outer Sea, out of reach of immediate

matriarchal supervision and even, the women sometimes feared, of their potent

female magic. Cold Corner was the farthest south ever got by the entire Snow

Clan, whose members spent most of their lives on the Cold Waste and among the

foothills of the untopped Mountains of the Giants and the even more northerly

Bones of the Old Ones, and so this midwinter camp was their one yearly chance

to trade peaceably with venturesome Mingols, Sarheenmarts, Lankhmarts, and

even an occasional Eastern desert-man, heavily beturbaned, bundled up to the

eyes, and elephantinely gloved and booted.

MARCADOR 1

Nor was it the guzzling which the women opposed. Their husbands were

great quaffers of mead and ale at all times and even of the native white snow-

potato brandy, a headier drink than most of the wines and boozes the traders

hopefully dispensed.

No, what the Snow Women hated so venomously and which each year caused

them to wage cold war with hardly any material or magical holds barred, was

the theatrical show which inevitably came shivering north with the traders,

its daring troupers with faces chapped and legs chilblained, but hearts a-beat

for soft northern gold and easy if rampageous audiences -- a show so

blasphemous and obscene that the men preempted Godshall for its performance

(God being unshockable) and refused to let the women and youths view it; a

show whose actors were, according to the women, solely dirty old men and even

dirtier scrawny southern girls, as loose in their morals as in the lacing of

their skimpy garments, when they went clothed at all. It did not occur to the

Snow Women that a scrawny wench, her dirty nakedness all blue goosebumps in

the chill of drafty Godshall, would hardly be an object of erotic appeal,

besides her risking permanent all-over frostbite.

So the Snow Women each midwinter hissed and magicked and sneaked and

sniped with their crusty snowballs at huge men retreating with pomp, and

frequently caught an old or crippled or foolish, young, drunken husband and

beat him soundly.

This outwardly comic combat had sinister undertones. Particularly when

working all together, the Snow Women were reputed to wield mighty magics,

particularly through the element of cold and its consequences: slipperiness,

the sudden freezing of flesh, the gluing of skin to metal, the frangibility of

objects, the menacing mass of snow-laden trees and branches, and the vastly

greater mass of avalanches. And there was no man wholly unafraid of the

hypnotic power in their ice-blue eyes.

Each Snow Woman, usually with the aid of the rest, worked to maintain

absolute control of her man, though leaving him seemingly free, and it was

whispered that recalcitrant husbands had been injured and even slain,

generally by some frigid instrumentality. While at the same time witchy

cliques and individual sorceresses played against each other a power game in

which the brawniest and boldest of men, even chiefs and priests, were but

counters.

During the fortnight of trading and the two days of the Show, hags and

great strapping girls guarded the Tent of the Women at all quarters, while

from within came strong perfumes, stenches, flashes and intermittent glows by

night, clashings and tinklings, cracklings and quenchings, and incantational

chantings and whisperings that never quite stopped.

This morning one could imagine that the Snow Women's sorcery was

working everywhere, for the weather was windless and overcast, and there were

wisps of fog in the moist freezing air, so that crystals of ice were rapidly

forming on every bush and branch, every twig and tip of any sort, including

the ends of the men's moustaches and the eartips of the tamed lynxes. The

crystals were as blue and flashing as the Snow Women's eyes and even mimicked

in their forms, to an imaginative mind, the Snow Women's hooded, tall, and

white-robed figures, for many of the crystals grew upright, like diamond

flames.

And this morning the Snow Women had caught, or rather got a near

certain chance of trapping, an almost unimaginably choice victim. For one of

the Show girls, whether by ignorance or foolhardy daring, and perhaps tempted

by the relatively mild, gem-begetting air, had strolled on the crusty snow

away from the safety of the actors' tents, past Godshall on the precipice

side, and from thence between two sky-thrusting copses of snow-laden

evergreens, out onto the snow-carpeted natural rock bridge that had been the

start of the Old Road south to Gnampf Nar until some five man-lengths of its

central section had fallen three score years ago.

A short step from the up-curving, perilous brink she had paused and

looked for a long while south through the wisps of mist that, in the distance,

grew thin as pluckings of long-haired wool. Below her in the canyon's overhung

slot, the snow-capped pines flooring Trollstep Canyon looked tiny as the white

tents of an army of Ice Gnomes. Her gaze slowly traced Trollstep Canyon from

its far eastern beginnings to where, narrowing, it passed directly beneath her

and then, slowly widening, curved south, until the buttress opposite her with

its matching, jutting section of the one-time rock bridge, cut off the view

south. Then her gaze went back to trace the New Road from where it began its

descent beyond the actors' tents and clung to the far wall of the canyon

until, after many a switchback and many a swing into great gully and out again

-- unlike the far swifter, straighter descent of the Old Road -- it plunged

into the midst of the flooring pines and went with them south.

From her constant yearning look, one might have thought the actress a

silly homesick soubrette, already regretting this freezing northern tour and

pining for some hot, flea-bitten actors' alley beyond the Land of the Eight

Cities and the Inner Sea -- except for the quiet confidence of her movements,

the proud set of her shoulders, and the perilous spot she had chosen for her

peering. For this spot was not only physically dangerous, but also as near the

Tent of the Snow Women as it was to Godshall, and in addition the spot was

taboo because a chief and his children had plunged to their deaths when the

central rock-span had cracked away three score years ago, and because the

wooden replacement had fallen under the weight of a brandy-merchant's cart

some two score years later. Brandy of the fieriest, a loss fearsome enough to

justify the sternest of taboos, including one against ever rebuilding the

bridge.

And as if even those tragedies were not sufficient to glut the jealous

gods and make taboo absolute, only two years past the most skillful skier the

Snow Clan had produced in decades, one Skif, drunk with snow brandy and an icy

pride, had sought to jump the gap from the Cold Corner side. Towed to a fast

start and thrusting furiously with his sticks, he had taken off like a gliding

hawk, yet missed the opposite snowy verge by an arm's length; the prows of his

skis had crashed into rock, and he himself smashed in the rocky depths of the

canyon.

The bemused actress wore a long coat of auburn fox fur belted with a

light, gold-washed brass chain. Icy crystals had formed in her high-piled,

fine, dark brown hair.

From the narrowness of her coat, her figure promised to be scrawny or

at least thinly muscular enough to satisfy the Snow Women's notion of female

players, but she was almost six feet tall -- which was not at all as actresses

should be and definitely an added affront to the tall Snow Women now

approaching her from behind in a silent white rank.

An over-hasty white fur boot sang against the glazed snow.

The actress spun around and without hesitation raced back the way she

had come. Her first three steps broke the snow-crust, losing her time, but

then she learned the trick of running in a glide, feet grazing the crust.

She hitched her russet coat high. She was wearing black fur boots and

bright scarlet stockings.

The Snow Women glided swiftly after her, pitching their hard-packed

snowballs.

One struck her hard on the shoulder. She made the mistake of looking

back.

By ill chance two snowballs took her in jaw and forehead, just beneath

painted lip and on an arched black eyebrow.

She reeled then, turning fully back, and a snowball thrown almost with

the force of a slinger's stone struck her in the midriff, doubling her up and

driving the breath from her lungs in an open-mouthed whoosh.

She collapsed. The white women rushed forward, blue eyes a-glare.

A big, thinnish, black-moustached man in a drab quilted jacket and a

low black turban stopped watching from beside a becrystalled, rough-barked

living pillar of Godshall, and ran toward the fallen woman. His footsteps

broke the crust, but his strong legs drove him powerfully on.

Then he slowed in amaze as he was passed almost as if he were at a

standstill by a tall, white, slender figure glide-running so swiftly that it

seemed for a moment it went on skis. Then for another instant, the turbaned

man thought it was another Snow Woman, but then he noted that it wore a short

fur jerkin rather than a long fur robe -- and so was presumably a Snow Man or

Snow Youth, though the black-turbaned man had never seen a Snow Clan male

dressed in white.

The strange, swift figure glide-ran, with chin tucked down and eyes

bent away from the Snow Women, as if fearing to meet their wrathful blue gaze.

Then, as he swiftly knelt by the felled actress, long reddish-blond hair

spilled from his hood. From that and the figure's slenderness, the black-

turbaned man knew an instant of fear that the intercomer was a very tall Snow

Girl, eager to strike the first blow at close quarters.

But then he saw a jut of downy male chin in the reddish-blond hair and

also a pair of massive silver bracelets of the sort one gained only by

pirating. Next the youth picked up the actress and glide-ran away from the

Snow Women, who now could see only their victim's scarlet-stockinged legs. A

volley of snowballs struck the rescuer's back. He staggered a little, then

sped determinedly on, still ducking his head.

The biggest of the Snow Women, one with the bearing of a queen and a

haggard face still handsome, though the hair falling to either side of it was

white, stopped running and shouted in a deep voice, "Come back, my son! You

hear me, Fafhrd, come back now!"

The youth nodded his ducked head slightly, though he did not pause in

his flight. Without turning his head, he called in a rather high voice, "I

will come back, revered Mor my mother ... later on."

The other women took up the cry of "Come back now!" Some of them added

such epithets as "Dissolute youth!" "Curse of your good mother Mor!" and

"Chaser after whores!"

Mor silenced them with a curt, sidewise sweep of her hands, palms down.

"We will wait here," she announced with authority.

The black-turbaned man paused a bit, then strolled after the vanished

pair, keeping a wary eye on the Snow Women. They were supposed not to attack

traders, but with barbarian females, as with males, one could never

tell.Fafhrd reached the actors' tents, which were pitched in a circle around a

trampled stretch of snow at the altar end of Godshall. Farthest from the

precipice was the tall, conical tent of the Master of the Show. Midway

stretched the common actors' tent, somewhat fish-shaped, one-third for the

girls, two-thirds for the men. Nearest Trollstep Canyon was a medium-size,

hemicylindrical tent supported on half hoops. Across its middle, an evergreen

sycamore thrust a great heavy branch balanced by two lesser branches on the

opposite side, all spangled with crystals. In this tent's semicircular front

was a laced entry-flap, which Fafhrd found difficult to open, since the long

form in his arms was still limp.

A swag-bellied little old man came strutting toward him with something

of the bounce of youth. This one wore ragged finery touched up with gilt. Even

his long gray moustache and goatee glittered with specks of gold above and

below his dirty-toothed mouth. His heavily pouched eyes were rheumy and red

all around, but dark and darting at center. Above them was a purple turban

supporting in turn a gilt crown set with battered gems of rock crystal, poorly

aping diamonds.

Behind him came a skinny, one-armed Mingol, a fat Easterner with a vast

black beard that stank of burning, and two scrawny girls who, despite their

yawning and the heavy blankets huddled around them, looked watchful and

evasive as alley cats.

"What's this now?" the leader demanded, his alert eyes taking in every

detail of Fafhrd and his burden. "Vlana slain? Raped and slain, eh? Know,

murderous youth, that you'll pay high for your fun. You may not know who I am,

but you'll learn. I'll have reparations from your chiefs, I will! Vast

reparations! I have influence, I have. You'll lose those pirate's bracelets of

yours and that silver chain peeping from under your collar. Your family'll be

beggared, and all your relatives, too. As for what _they'll_ do to _you_ -- "

"You are Essedinex, Master of the Show," Fafhrd broke in dogmatically,

his high tenor voice cutting like a trumpet through the other's hoarse,

ranting baritone. "I am Fafhrd, son of Mor and of Nalgron the Legend-Breaker.

Vlana the culture dancer is not raped or dead, but stunned with snowballs.

This is her tent. Open it."

"We'll take care of her, barbarian," Essedinex asserted, though more

quietly, appearing both surprised and somewhat intimidated by the youth's

almost pedantic precision as to who was who, and what was what. "Hand her

over. Then depart."

"I will lay her down," Fafhrd persisted. "Open the tent!"

Essedinex shrugged and motioned to the Mingol, who with a sardonic grin

used his one hand and elbow to unlace and draw aside the entry-flap. An odor

of sandalwood and closetberry came out. Stooping, Fafhrd entered. Midway down

the length of the tent he noted a pallet of furs and a low table with a silver

mirror propped against some jars and squat bottles. At the far end was a rack

of costumes.

Stepping around a brazier from which a thread of pale smoke wreathed,

Fafhrd carefully knelt and most gently deposited his burden on the pallet.

Next he felt Vlana's pulse at jaw-hinge and wrist, rolled back a dark lid and

peered into each eye, delicately explored with his fingertips the sizable

bumps that were forming on jaw and forehead. Then he tweaked the lobe of her

left ear and, when she did not react, shook his head and, drawing open her

russet robe, began to unbutton the red dress under it.

Essedinex, who with the others had been watching the proceedings in a

puzzled fashion, cried out, "Well, of all -- Cease, lascivious youth!"

"Silence," Fafhrd commanded and continued unbuttoning.

The two blanketed girls giggled, then clapped hands to mouths, darting

amused gazes at Essedinex and the rest.

Drawing aside his long hair from his right ear, Fafhrd laid that side

of his face on Vlana's chest between her breasts, small as half pomegranates,

their nipples rosy bronze in hue. He maintained a solemn expression. The girls

smothered giggles again. Essedinex strangledly cleared his throat, preparing

for large speech.

Fafhrd sat up and said, "Her spirit will shortly return. Her bruises

should be dressed with snow-bandages, renewed when they begin to melt. Now I

require a cup of your best brandy."

"My best brandy -- !" Essedinex cried outragedly. "This goes too far.

First you must have a help-yourself peep show, then strong drink! Presumptuous

youth, depart at once!"

"I am merely seeking -- " Fafhrd began in clear and at last slightly

dangerous tones.

His patient interrupted the dispute by opening her eyes, shaking her

head, wincing, then determindedly sitting up -- whereupon she grew pale and

her gaze wavered. Fafhrd helped her lie down again and put pillows under her

feet. Then he looked at her face. Her eyes were still open and she was looking

back at him curiously.

He saw a face small and sunken-cheeked, no longer girlish-young, but

with a compact catlike beauty despite its lumps. Her eyes, being large, brown-

irised and long-lashed, should have been melting, but were not. There was the

look of the loner in them, and purpose, and a thoughtful weighing of what she

saw.

She saw a handsome, fair-complexioned youth of about eighteen winters,

wide-headed and long-jawed, as if he had not done growing. Fine red-gold hair

cascaded down his cheeks. His eyes were green, cryptic, and as staring as a

cat's. His lips were wide, but slightly compressed, as if they were a door

that locked words in and opened only on the cryptic eyes' command.

One of the girls had poured a half cup of brandy from a bottle on the

low table. Fafhrd took it and lifted Vlana's head for her to drink it in sips.

The other girl came with powder snow folded in woolen cloths. Kneeling on the

far side of the pallet, she bound them against the bruises.

After inquiring Fafhrd's name and confirming that he had rescued her

from the Snow Women, Vlana asked, "Why do you speak in such a high voice?"

"I study with a singing skald," he answered. "They use that voice and

are the true skalds, not the roaring ones who use deep tones."

"What reward do you expect for rescuing me?" she asked boldly.

"None," Fafhrd replied.

From the two girls came further giggles, quickly cut off at Vlana's

glance.

Fafhrd added, "It was my personal obligation to rescue you, since the

leader of the Snow Women was my mother. I must respect my mother's wishes, but

I must also prevent her from performing wrong actions."

"Oh. Why do you act like a priest or healer?" Vlana continued. "Is that

one of your mother's wishes?" She had not bothered to cover her breasts, but

Fafhrd was not looking at them now, only at the actress's lips and eyes.

"Healing is part of the singing skald's art," he answered. "As for my

mother, I do my duty toward her, nor less, nor more."

"Vlana, it is not politic that you talk thus with this youth,"

Essedinex interposed, now in a nervous voice. "He must -- "

"Shut up!" Vlana snapped. Then, back to Fafhrd, "Why do you wear

white?"

"It is proper garb for all Snow Folk. I do not follow the new custom of

dark and dyed furs for males. My father always wore white."

"He is dead?"

"Yes. While climbing a tabooed mountain called White Fang."

"And your mother wishes you to wear white, as if you were your father

returned?"

Fafhrd neither answered nor frowned at that shrewd question. Instead he

asked, "How many languages can you speak -- besides this pidgin-Lankhmarese?"

She smiled at last. "What a question! Why, I speak -- though not too

well -- Mingol, Kvarchish, High and Low Lankhmarese, Quarmallian, Old

Ghoulish, Desert-talk, and three Eastern tongues."

Fafhrd nodded. "That's good."

"Forever why?"

"Because it means you are very civilized," he answered.

"What's so great about that?" she demanded with a sour laugh.

"You should know, you're a culture dancer. In any case, I am interested

in civilization."

"One comes," Essedinex hissed from the entry. "Vlana, the youth must --

"He must not!"

"As it happens, I must indeed leave now," Fafhrd said, rising. "Keep up

the snow-bandages," he instructed Vlana. "Rest until sundown. Then more

brandy, with hot soup."

"Why must you leave?" Vlana demanded, rising on an elbow.

"I made a promise to my mother," Fafhrd said without looking back.

"Your mother!"

Stooping at the entry, Fafhrd finally did stop to look back. "I owe my

mother many duties," he said. "I owe you none, as yet."

"Vlana, he _must_ leave. It's the _one_," Essedinex stage-whispered

hoarsely. Meanwhile he was shoving at Fafhrd, but for all the youth's

slenderness, he might as well have been trying to push a tree off of its

roots.

"Are you afraid of him who comes?" Vlana was buttoning up her dress

now.

Fafhrd looked at her thoughtfully. Then, without replying in any way

whatever to her question, he ducked through the entry and stood up, waiting

the approach through the persistent mist of a man in whose face anger was

gathering.

This man was as tall as Fafhrd, half again as thick and wide, and about

twice as old. He was dressed in brown sealskin and amethyst-studded silver

except for the two massive gold bracelets on his wrists and the gold chain

about his neck, marks of a pirate chief.

Fafhrd felt a touch of fear, not at the approaching man, but at the

crystals which were now thicker on the tents than he recalled them being when

he had carried Vlana in. The element over which Mor and her sister witches had

most power was cold -- whether in a man's soup or loins, or in his sword or

climbing rope, making them shatter. He often wondered whether it was Mor's

magic that had made his own heart so cold. Now the cold would close in on the

dancer. He should warn her, except she was civilized and would laugh at him.

The big man came up.

"Honorable Hringorl," Fafhrd greeted softly.

For reply, the big man aimed a backhanded uppercut at Fafhrd with his

near arm.

Fafhrd leaned sharply away, slithering under the blow, and then simply

walked off the way he had first come.

Hringorl, breathing heavily, glared after him for a couple of

heartbeats, then plunged into the hemicylindrical tent.

Hringorl was certainly the most powerful man in the Snow Clan, Fafhrd

reflected, though not one of its chiefs because of his bullying ways and

defiances of custom. The Snow Women hated, but found it hard to get a hold of

him, since his mother was dead and he had never taken a wife, satisfying

himself with concubines he brought back from his piratings.

From wherever he'd been inconspicuously standing, the black-turbaned

and black-moustached man came up quietly to Fafhrd. "That was well done, my

friend. And when you brought in the dancer."

Fafhrd said impassively, "You are Vellix the Venturer."

The other nodded. "Bringing brandy from Kleg Nar to this mart. Will you

sample the best with me?"

Fafhrd said, "I am sorry, but I have an engagement with my mother."

"Another time then," Vellix said easily.

"Fafhrd!"

It was Hringorl who called. His voice was no longer angry. Fafhrd

turned. The big man stood by the tent, then came striding up when Fafhrd did

not move. Meanwhile, Vellix faded back and away in a fashion as easy as his

speech.

"I'm sorry, Fafhrd," Hringorl said gruffly. "I did not know you had

saved the dancer's life. You have done me a great service. Here." He unclasped

from his wrist one of the heavy gold bracelets and held it out.

Fafhrd kept his hands at his sides. "No service whatever," he said. "I

was only saving my mother from committing a wrong action."

"You've sailed under me," Hringorl suddenly roared, his face reddening

though he still grinned somewhat, or tried to. "So you'll take my gifts as

well as my orders." He caught hold of Fafhrd's hand, pressed the weighty torus

into it, closed Fafhrd's lax fingers on it, and stepped back.

Instantly Fafhrd knelt, saying swiftly, "I am sorry, but I may not take

what I have not rightly won. And now I must keep an engagement with my

mother." Then he swiftly rose, turned, and walked away. Behind him, on an

unbroken crust of snow, the golden bracelet gleamed.

He heard Hringorl's snarl and choked-back curse, but did not look

around to see whether or not Hringorl picked up his spurned gratuity, though

he did find it a bit difficult not to weave in his stride or duck his head a

trifle, in case Hringorl decided to throw the massive wristlet at his skull.

Shortly he came to the place where his mother was sitting amongst seven

Snow Women, making eight in all. They stood up. He stopped a yard short.

Ducking his head and looking to the side, he said, "Here I am, Mor."

"You took a long while," she said. "You took too long." Six heads

around her nodded solemnly. Only Fafhrd noted, in the blurred edge of his

vision, that the seventh and slenderest Snow Woman was moving silently

backward.

"But here I am," Fafhrd said.

"You disobeyed my command," Mor pronounced coldly. Her haggard and once

beautiful face would have looked very unhappy, had it not been so proud and

masterful.

"But now I am obeying it," Fafhrd countered. He noted that the seventh

Snow Woman was now silently running, her great white cloak a-stream, between

the home tents toward the high, white forest that was Cold Corner's boundary

everywhere that Trollstep Canyon wasn't.

"Very well," Mor said. "And now you will obey me by following me to the

dream tent for ritual purification."

"I am not defiled," Fafhrd announced. "Moreover, I purify myself after

my own fashion, one also agreeable to the gods."

There were clucks of shocked disapproval from all Mor's coven. Fafhrd

had spoken boldly, but his head was still bent, so that he did not see their

faces, and their entrapping eyes, but only their long-robed white forms, like

a clump of great birches.

Mor said, "Look me in the eyes."

Fafhrd said, "I fulfill all the customary duties of a grown son, from

food-winning to sword-guarding. But as far as I can ascertain, looking my

mother in the eyes is not one of those duties."

"Your father always obeyed me," Mor said ominously.

"Whenever he saw a tall mountain, he climbed her, obeying no one but

himself," Fafhrd contradicted.

"Yes, and died doing so!" Mor cried, her masterfulness controlling

grief and anger without hiding them.

Fafhrd said hardly, "Whence came the great cold that shattered his rope

and pick on White Fang?"

Amidst the gasps of her coven, Mor pronounced in her deepest voice, "A

mother's curse, Fafhrd, on your disobedience and evil thinking!"

Fafhrd said with strange eagerness, "I dutifully accept your curse,

Mother."

Mor said, "My curse is not on you, but on your evil imaginings."

"Nevertheless, I will forever treasure it," Fafhrd cut in. "And now,

obeying myself, I must take leave of you, until the wrath-devil has let you

go."

And with that, head still bent down and away, he walked rapidly toward

a point in the forest east of the home tents, but west of the great tongue of

forest that stretched south almost to Godshall. The angry hissings of Mor's

coven followed him, but his mother did not cry out his name, nor any word at

all. Fafhrd would almost rather that she had.

Youth heals swiftly, on the skin-side. By the time Fafhrd plunged into

his beloved wood without jarring a single becrystalled twig, his senses were

alert, his neck-joint supple, and the outward surface of his inner being as

cleared for new experience as the unbroken snow ahead. He took the easiest

path, avoiding bediamonded thorn bushes to left and huge pine-screened

juttings of pale granite to right.

He saw bird tracks, squirrel tracks, day-old bear tracks; snow birds

snapped their black beaks at red snowberries; a furred snow-snake hissed at

him, and he would not have been startled by the emergence of a dragon with

ice-crusted spines.

So he was in no wise amazed when a great high-branched pine opened its

snow-plastered bark and showed him its dryad -- a merry, blue-eyed, blonde-

haired girl's face, a dryad no more than seventeen years old. In fact, he had

been expecting such an apparition ever since he had noted the seventh Snow

Woman in flight.

Yet he pretended to be amazed for almost two heartbeats. Then he sprang

forward crying, "Mara, my witch," and with his two arms separated her white-

cloaked self from her camouflaging background, and kept them wrapped around

her while they stood like one white column, hood to hood and lips to lips for

at least twenty heartbeats of the most thuddingly delightful sort.

Then she found his right hand and drew it into her cloak and, through a

placket, under her long coat, and pressed it against her crisply-ringleted

lower belly.

"Guess," she whispered, licking his ear.

"It's part of a girl. I do believe it's a -- " he began most gayly,

though his thoughts were already plunging wildly in a direly different

direction.

"No, idiot, it's something that belongs to you," the wet whisper

coached.

The dire direction became an iced chute leading toward certainty.

Nevertheless he said bravely, "Well, I'd hoped you hadn't been trying out

others, though that's your right. I must say I am vastly honored -- "

"Silly beast! I meant it's something that belongs to us."

The dire direction was now a black icy tunnel, becoming a pit.

Automatically and with an appropriately great heart-thump, Fafhrd said, "Not?"

"Yes! I'm certain, you monster. I've missed twice."

Better than ever in his life before, Fafhrd's lips performed their

office of locking in words. When they opened at last, they and the tongue

behind them were utterly under control of the great green eyes. There came

forth in a joyous rush: "O gods! How wonderful! I am a father! How clever of

you, Mara!"

"Very clever indeed," the girl admitted, "to have fashioned anything so

delicate after your rude handling. But now I must pay you off for that

ungracious remark about 'trying out others.'" Hitching up her skirt behind,

she guided both his hands under her cloak to a knot of thongs at the base of

her spine. (Snow Women wore fur hoods, fur boots, a high fur stocking on each

leg gartered to a waist thong, and one or more fur coats and cloaks -- it was

a practical garb, not unlike the men's except for the longer coats.)

As he fingered the knot, from which three thongs led tightly off,

Fafhrd said, "Truly, Mara dearest, I do not favor these chastity girdles. They

are not a civilized device. Besides, they must interfere with the circulation

of your blood."

"You and your fad for civilization! I'll love and belabor you out of

it. Go on, untie the knot, making sure you and no other tied it."

Fafhrd complied and had to agree that it was his knot and no other

man's. The task took some time and was a delightful one to Mara, judging from

her soft squeals and moans, her gentle nips and bites. Fafhrd himself began to

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======================SwordsandDeviltry[Book1ofthe"FafhrdandGrayMouser"series]byFritzLeiber======================Copyright(c)1995byFritzLeibere-readswww.ereads.comFantasy---------------------------------NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Duplicationordistributi...

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Leiber, Fritz - Saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser 01 - Swords and Deviltry

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