Neither of the women took notice of the Mouser, but after a while the one feeding the fire stood up, brought a wine jar and two small tankards to his table, poured into one, and stood regarding him.
He took up the tankard, tasted a small mouthful, swallowed it, set down the tankard, and nodded curtly without looking at her.
She went back to her former occupation. Thereafter the Mouser took an occasional swallow of wine while studying and listening to the flames. What with their combination of crackling and singing, they were really quite vocal in that rather small, silent room—resembling an eager, rapid, youthful voice, by turns merry and malicious. Sometimes the Mouser could have sworn he heard words and phrases.
While in the flames, continually renewed, he began to see faces, or rather one face which changed expression a good deal—a youthfully handsome face with very mobile lips, sometimes open and amiable, sometimes convulsed by hatreds and envies (the flames shone green awhile), sometimes almost impossibly distorted, like a face seen through hot air above a very hot fire. Indeed once or twice he had the fancy that it was the face of an actual person sitting on the opposite side of the fire from him, sometimes half rising to regard him through the flames, sometimes crouching back. He was almost tempted to get up and walk around the fire to check on that, but not quite.
The strangest thing about the face was that it seemed familiar to the Mouser, though he could not place it. He gave up racking his brains over that and settled back, listening more closely to the flame-voice and trying to attune its fancied words to the movements of the flame-face’s lips.
Mother Grum got up again and moved back, bowing. There entered without stooping a lady whose russet cloak was drawn across the lower half of her face, but the Mouser recognized the gold-shot green eyes and he stood up. Cif nodded to Mother Grum and the two harlots, walked to the Mouser’s table, cast her cloak atop his, and sat down in the third chair. He poured for her, refilled his own tankard, and sat down also. They drank. She studied him for some time.
Then, “You’ve seen the face in the fire and heard its voice?” she asked.
His eyes widened and he nodded, watching her intently now.
“But have you guessed why it seems familiar?” He shook his head rapidly, sitting forward, his expression a most curious and expectant frown.
“It resembles you,” she said flatly.
His eyebrows went up and his jaw dropped, just a little. That was true! It did remind him of himself—only when he was younger, quite a bit younger. Or as he saw himself in mirror these days only when in a most self-infatuated and vain mood, so that he saw himself as unmarked by age.
“But do you know why?” she asked him, herself intent now.
He shook his head.
She relaxed. “Neither do I,” she said. “I thought you might know. I marked it when I first saw you in the Eel, but as to why—it is a mystery within mysteries, beyond our present ken.”
“I find Rime Isle a nest of mysteries,” he said meaningfully, “not the least your disavowal of myself and Fafhrd.”
She nodded, sat up straighter, and said, “So now I think it’s high time I told you why Afreyt and I are so sure of a Mingol invasion of Rime Isle while the rest of the council disbelieves it altogether. Don’t you?”
He nodded emphatically, smiling.
“Almost a year ago to the day,” she said, “Afreyt and I were walking alone upon the moor north of town, as has been our habit since childhood. We were lamenting Rime Isle’s lost glories and lost (or man-renounced) gods and wishing for their return, so that the Isle might have surer guidance and foreknowledge of perils. It was a day of changeable winds and weather, the end of spring, not quite yet summer, all the air alive, now bright, now gloomed over, as clouds raced past the sun. We had just topped a gentle rise when we came upon the form of a youth sprawled on his back in the heather with eyes closed and head thrown back, looking as if he were dying or in the last stages of exhaustion—as though he had been cast ashore by the last great wave of some unimaginably great storm on high.
“He wore a simple tunic of homespun, very worn, and the plainest sandals, worn thin, with frayed thongs, and a very old belt dimly pricked out with monsters, yet from first sight I was almost certain that he was a god.
“I knew it in three ways. From his insubstantiality—though he was there to the touch, I could almost see the crushed heather through his pale flesh. From his supernal beauty—it was … the flame-face, though tranquil-featured, almost as if in death. And from the adoration I felt swelling in my heart.
“I also knew it from the way Afreyt acted, kneeling at once like myself beside him across from me—though there was something unnatural in her behavior, betokening an amazing development when we understood it aright, which we did not then. (More of that later.)
“You know how they say a god dies when his believers utterly fail him? Well, it was as if this one’s last worshipper were dying in Nehwon. Or as if—this is closer to it—all his worshippers had died in his own proper world and he whirled out into the wild spaces between the worlds, to sink or swim, survive or perish according to the reception he got in whatever new world whereon chance cast him ashore. I think it within the power of gods to travel between the worlds, don’t you?—both involuntarily and also by their own design. And who knows what unpredictable tempests they might encounter in dark mid-journey?
“But I was not wasting time in speculations on that day of miracles a year ago. No, I was chafing his wrists and chest, pressing my warm cheek against his cold one, prising open his lips with my tongue (his jaw was slack) and with my open lips clamped upon his (and his nostrils clipped between my finger and thumb) sending my fresh, new-drawn breaths deep into his lungs, the meanwhile fervently praying to him in my mind, though I know they say the gods hear only our words, no thoughts. A stranger, happening upon us, might have judged us in the second or third act of lovemaking, I the more feverish seeking to rekindle his ardor.
“Meanwhile Afreyt (again here’s that unnatural thing I mentioned) seemed to be as busy as I across from me—and yet somehow I was doing all the work. The explanation of that came somewhat later.
“My god showed signs of life. His eyelids quivered, I felt his chest stir, while his lips began to return my kisses.
“I uncapped my silver flask and dribbled brandy between his lips, alternating the drops with further kisses and words of comfort and endearment.
“At last he opened his eyes (brown shot with gold, like yours) and with my help raised up his head, meanwhile muttering words in a strange tongue. I answered in what languages I know, but he only frowned, shaking his head. That’s how I knew he was not a Nehwon god—it’s natural, don’t you think, that a god, all-knowing in his own world, would be at a loss at first, plunged into another? He’d have to take it in.
“Finally he smiled and lifted his hand to my bosom, looking at me questioningly. I spoke my name. He nodded and shaped his lips, repeated it. Then he touched his own chest and spoke the name ‘Loki.’”
At that word the Mouser knew feelings and thoughts similar to those of Fafhrd hearing “Odin”—of other lives and worlds, and of Karl Treuherz’s tongue and his little Lankhmarese-German, German-Lankhmarese dictionary that he’d given Fafhrd. At the same moment, though for that moment only, he saw the fire-face so like his own in the flames, seeming to wink at him. He frowned wonderingly.
Cif continued, “Thereafter I fed him crumbs of meat from my script, which he accepted from my fingers, eating sparingly and sipping more brandy, the whiles I taught him words, pointing to this and that. That day Darkfire was smoking thick and showing flames, which interested him mightily when I named it. So I took flint and iron from my script and struck them together, naming ‘fire.’ He was delighted, seeming to gather strength from the sparks and smouldering straws and the very word. He’d stroke the little flames without seeming to take hurt. That frightened me.
“So passed the day—I utterly lost in him, unaware of all else, save what struck his fancy moment by moment. He was a wondrously apt scholar. I named objects both in our Rime tongue and Low Lankhmarese, thinking it’d be useful to him as he got his vision for lands beyond the Isle.