She looked at him with a wondering smile and said, “Well, I was puzzled as to what you could have said to Mikkidu to make him so head-in-the-clouds happy—and am not sure I understand that even now. But, yes, my experience was, I now confess, identical with his—and not even the taking of an unknown drink to excuse it. My mind went blank, time passed me by, and I heard not a word you said, except those last directions about Afreyt’s expedition and the whirlpool. But everyone was cheering and so I pretended to have heard, not wanting to injure your feelings or feel myself a fool. Oh, I was a sheep! Once I was minded to confess my lapse to Afreyt, and now I wish I had, for she had a strange look on her then—But I didn’t. You think, as I do now, that she also …?”
The Mouser nodded decisively.”I think that not one soul of them heard a word to remember of the main body of my—or, rather, Loki’s—talk, but later they all pretended to have done so, just like so many sheep indeed—and I the black goat leading them on. So only Loki knows what Loki said and we sail out upon an unknown course against the Mingols, taking all on trust.”
“What to do now?” she asked wonderingly.
Looking into her eyes with a tentative smile and a slight shrug that was at once acquiescent and comical, he said, “Why, we go on, for it is your course and I am committed to it.”
Flotsam gave a long lurch then, with a wave striking along her side, and it nudged Cif against him, and their arms went around each other, and their lips met thrillingly—but not for long, for he must hurry on deck, and she too, to discover (or rather confirm) what had befallen.
Flotsam progressed out of Salthaven harbor and the salt cliffs lee to the Outer Sea where the east wind smote them more urgently and the swells and the sunlight struck their canvas and deck. The Mouser took the tiller from sad-faced Ourph and that old one and Gib and Mikkidu set sail for the first eastward tack. And one by one Sea Hawk and the weirdly accoutered fishing boats repeated their maneuver, following Flotsam out.
* * * *
That selfsame east wind which blew west across the southern half of Rime Isle, and against which Flotsam labored, farther out at sea was hurrying on the horse-ships of the Sunwise Mingols. The grim galleys, each with its bellying square sail, made a great drove of ships, and now and again a stallion screamed in its bow-cage as they plunged ahead through the waves, which cascaded spray through the black, crazily-angled bars. All eyes strained west—ahead, and it would have been hard to say which eyes glared the more madly, those of the fur-clad, grinningly white-toothed men, or those of long-faced, grimacingly white-toothed beasts.
On the poop of the flagship this frenzy looked in a more philosophical direction, where Gonov discoursed with his witch-doctor and attendant sages propounding such questions as, “Is it sufficient to burn a city to the ground, or must it also be trampled to rubble?” and contemplating such answers as, “Most meritorious is to pound it to sand, aye, to fine loam, without burning at all.”
While the strong westwind that blew east across the northern half of the island (with a belt of squalls and fierce eddies between the two winds) was hurrying on from west across trackless ocean the like fleet of the Widdershins Mingols, where Edumir had proposed this query to his philosophers: “Is death by suicide in the first charge, hurling oneself upon the foeman’s virgin spear, to be preferred to death by self-administered poison in the last charge?”
He hearkened to their closely-reasoned answers and to the counter-question: “Since death is so much to be desired, surpassing the delights of love and mushroom wine, how did our all-noble and revered ancestors ever survive to procreate us?” and at last observed, his white-rimmed eyes gazing east yearningly, “That is all theory. On Rime Isle we will once more put these recondite matters to the test of practice.”
While high above all winds Khahkht in his icy sphere ceaselessly studied the map lining it, whereon he moved counters for ships and men, horses and women—aye, even gods—bending his bristly face close, so that no unlawful piece might escape his fierce scrutiny.
* * * *
By early morning sunlight and against the nipping wind, Afreyt hurried on alone through heather dotted by stunted cedars past the last silent hiil farm, with its sagging gray-green turf roofs, before Cold Harbor. She was footsore and weary (even Odin’s noose around her neck seemed a heavy weight) for they’d marched all night with only two short rest-stops and midway they’d been buffeted by changing winds reaching tornadic strenfith as they’d passed through the transition belt between the southeastern, Salthaven half of Rime Isle, which the east wind presently ruled, and the northwestern, Cold Harbor half, where the equally strong west wind now held sway.
Yet she forced herself to scan carefully ahead for friend or foe, for she had constituted herself vanguard for Groniger and his grotesquely burdened trampers. A while ago in the twilight before dawn she’d gone from litter-side up to the head of the column and pointed out to Groniger the need of having a guard ahead now that they were nearing their journey’s end and should be wary of ambushes. He had seemed unconcerned and heedless, unable to grasp the danger, almost as if he (and all the other Rime men, for that matter) were intent only on marching on and on, glaze-eyed, growling Gale’s doom-chant, like so many monstrous automatons, until they met the Mingols, or Fafhrd’s force. Failing those, she believed, they would stride into the chilly western ocean with never a halt or waver, as did the lemming hordes in their climacteric. But neither had Groniger voiced any objection to her spying on ahead-nor even concern for her safety. Where was the man’s one-time clear-headedness and prudence? Afreyt was not unversed in island woodcraft and she now spotted Skor peering toward Cold Harbor from the grove of dwarf cedars whence Fathrd had launched yestermorning’s brief arrow-fusillade. She called Skor’s name, and he whipped around nocking an arrow to his bow, then came up swiftly when he saw her familiar blues.
“Lady Afreyt, what do you here? You look weary,” he greeted her succinctly. He looked weary himself and hollow-eyed, his cheeks and forehead smudged with soot above his straggly russet beard. perhaps against the glare of glacial ice.
She quickly told him about the Rimeland reinforcements approaching behind her.
His weariness seemed to lift from him as she spoke. “That’s brave news,” he said when she had done. “We joined our lines (I’m now making the rounds of them) with those of the Cold Harbor defenders before sunset yesterday and have the Mingol fore-raiders penned on the beach—and all by bluff! The mere sight of the forces you describe, strategically deployed, will cause ‘em to take ship and sail away, I think—and we not lift a finger.”
“Your pardon, lieutenant,” she rejoined. her own weariness lifting at his optimism, “but I have heard you and your fellows named berserkers—and have always thought it was the way of such to charge the enemy at the first chance, charge wolf-howling and bounding, mother-naked?”
“To tell the truth, that was once my own understanding of it,” he replied. thoughtfully rubbing his broken nose with the back of his hand, “but the captain’s changed my mind for me. He’s a great one for sleights and deceits, the captain is! Makes the foe imagine things. sets their own minds to work against ‘em, never fights when there’s an easier way—and some of his wisdom has rubbed off on us.”
“Why are you wearing Fafhrd’s sword?” she asked, seeing it suddenly.
“Oh, he went off yestermorning to Hellglow after the girl, leaving me in command, and he’s not yet returned,” Skor answered readily, though a crease of concern appeared between his brows, and he went on briefly to tell Afreyt about Mara’s strange abduction.
“I wonder at him leaving you all so long to shift without him, merely for that,” Afreyt commented, frowning.
“Truth to tell, I wondered at it myself, yestermorning,” Skor admitted. “But as events came on us, I asked myself what the captain would do in each case, and did that, and it’s worked out—so far.” He hooked a middle-finger over ar fore-one.
There came a faint tramping and the wispers of a horase chant and turning they saw the front of the Rime column coming downhill.
“Well, they look fearsome enough,”Skor said, after a moment. “Strange, too,” he added, as the litter and gallows hove into view. The girls in their red cloaks were walking beside the former.
“Yes, they are that,” Afreyt said.