Nemia turned round and said, “Look what the cat dragged in.” Hardship had drastically straightened her lush curves. Her comrade Ogo-Eyes still looked somewhat like a child, but a very old and ill-used one. “Wow,” she said wearily, “you two look miserable, as if you’d just escaped death and sorry you had. Do yourselves a favor—fall down the stairs, breaking your necks.”
When Fafhrd and the Mouser didn’t move, or change their woebegone expressions, she laughed shortly, dropped into a broken-seated chair, poked out a leg at the Mouser, and said, “Well, if you’re not leaving, make yourself useful. Remove my sandals, wash my feet,” while Nemia sat down before a rickety dressing table and, while surveying herself in the broken mirror, held out a broken-toothed instrument in Fafhrd’s direction, saying, “Comb my hair, barbarian. Watch out for snarls and knots.”
Fafhrd and the Mouser (the latter preparing and fetching warm water) began solemn-faced to do those very things most carefully.
After quite a long time (and several other menial services rendered or servile penances done) the two women could no longer keep from smiling. Misery, after it’s comforted, loves company.
“That’s enough for now,” Ogo-Eyes told the Mouser. “Come, make yourself comfortable.” Nemia spoke likewise to Fafhrd, adding, “Later you men can make the dinner and go out for wine.”
After a while the Mouser said, “By Mog, this is more like it.” Fafhrd agreed, “By Issek, yes. Kos damn all spooked adventures.”
The three gods, hearing their names taken in vain as they rested in paradise from their toils, were content.
VI: Trapped In the Sea of Stars
Fafhrd the educated barbarian and his constant comrade the Gray (Grey?) Mouser, city-born but wizard-tutored in the wilds, had in their leopard-boat Black Racer sailed farther south in the Outer Sea along the Quarmallian or west coast of Lankhmar continent than they had ever ventured before, or any other honest mariner they knew.
They were lured on by a pair of shimmer-sprights, as they are called, a breed of will-o’-the-wisps which men deem infallible guides to lodgements of precious metals, if only one have a master hunter’s patience and craft to track them down, by reason of which they are also called treasure-flies, silver-moths, and gold-bugs. This pair had a coppery pink seeming by day and a silvery black gleam by night, promising by those hues a trove of elektrum and still dearer, because massier, white gold. They most resembled restlessly flowing, small bedsheets of gossamer. They fluttered ceaselessly about the single mast, darting ahead, drifting behind. Sometimes they were almost invisible, faintest heat-blurs in the pelting fire of the near-vertical sun, ghostliest shimmers in the dark of night and easily mistaken for reflections of the White Huntress’ light on sea and sail, the moon now being near full. Sometimes they moved as sprightly as their name, sometimes they drooped and lagged, but ever moved on. At such times they seemed sad (or melancholy, Fafhrd said, one of his favorite moods). On other occasions they became (if ears could be trusted) vocal with joy, filling the air about the leopard-boat with faint sweet jargonings, whispers ‘twixt wind and speech, and long ecstatic purrs.
By the Gray Mouser’s and Fafhrd’s calculations, Black Racer had now left behind Lankhmar continent to loadside, and the hypothetical Western continent far, far to steerside, and struck out due south into the Great Equatorial Ocean (sometimes called—but why?—the Sea of Stars) that girdles Nehwon and is deemed wholly dire and quite uncrossable by Lankhmarts and Easterners alike, who in their sailings hug the southern coasts of the northern continents, so that one would have thought the doughtiest sailors would have ere this turned back.
But there was, you see, another reason besides the hope of vast riches—and not chiefly their great courage either, by any means—that Fafhrd and the Mouser kept sailing on in the face of unknown perils and horrid legendary of monsters that crunched ships, and currents swifter than the hurricane, and craterous maelstroms that swallowed vastest vessels in one gulp and even sucked down venturesome islands. It was a reason they spoke of seldom to each other and then only most guardedly, in low tones after long silence in the long silent watches of the night. It was this: that on the edge of darkest sleep, or sluggishly rousing from sail-shadowed nap by day, they briefly saw the shimmer-sprights as beautiful, slim, translucent girls, mirror-image twins, with loving faces and great, glimmering wings. Girls with fine hair like gold or silver clouds and distant eyes that yet brimmed with thought and witchery, girls slim almost beyond belief yet not too slim for the act of love, if only they might wax sufficiently substantial, which was something their smiles and gazes seemed to promise might come to pass. And the two adventurers felt a yearning for these shimmer-girls such as they had never felt for mortal woman, so that they could no more turn back than men wholly ensorcelled or stark lockjawed mad.
That morning as their treasure-sprights led them on, looking like rays of rainbow in the sun, the Mouser and Fafhrd were each lost in his secret thoughts of girls and gold, so that neither noted the subtle changes in the ocean surface ahead, from ripply to half smooth with odd little long lines of foam racing east. Suddenly the gold-bugs darted east and the next instant something seized the leopard-boat’s keel so that she veered strongly east with a bound like that of the lithe beast for which her class of craft was named. The tall mast was almost snapped and the two heroes were nearly thrown to the deck, and by the time they had recovered from their surprise the Black Racer was speeding east, the twin shimmer-sprights winging ahead exultantly, and the two heroes knew that they were in the grip of the Great Eastward Equatorial Current and that it was no fable. Momentarily forgetting their aerial maybe-girls, they moved to steer north out of it, Fafhrd leaning on the tiller while the Mouser saw to the large single sail, but at that moment a northwest wind struck from astern with gale force, almost driving the Black Racer under as it drove her deeper and deeper south into the current. This wind was no mere gust but steadily mounted to storm force, so that it would infallibly have torn their sail away ere they could furl it save that the current below was carrying them east almost as fast as the wind harried them on above.
Then a league to the south they saw three waterspouts traveling east together, gray pillars stretching halfway from earth to sky, at thrice Black Racer’s speed at least, indicating that the current was still swifter there. As the two still-astonished sailormen perforce accepted their plight—helpless in the twin grasp of furiously speeding water and air as if their craft were frozen to the sea—the Gray Mouser cried out, “O Fafhrd, now I can well believe that metaphysical fancy that the whole universe is water and our world but one wind-haunted bubble in it.”
From where white-knuckled he gripped the tiller, Faf replied, “I’ll grant, what with those ‘spouts and all this flying foam, it seems right now there’s water everywhere. Yet still I can’t believe that philosopher’s dream of Nehwon-world a bubble, when any fool can see the sun and moon are massy orbs like Nehwon thousands of leagues distant in the high air, which must be very thin out there, by the by.
“But man, this is no time for sophistries. I’ll tie the tiller, and while this weird calm lasts (born of near equal speeds of current and wind, and as if the air were cut away before and closing in behind) let’s triple-reef the sail and make all snug.”
As they worked, the three waterspouts vanished in the distance ahead, to be replaced by a group of five more coming up fast from astern—somewhat nearer this time, for all the while Black Racer was being driven gradually but relentlessly south. From almost overhead the midday sun beat down fiercely, for the storm wind blowing near hurricane force had brought no clouds or opaque air with it—in itself a prodigy unparalleled in the recollection of the Mouser or even Fafhrd, a widely sailed man. After several futile efforts to steer north out of the mighty current (which resulted only in the following storm wind shifting perversely north a point or two, driving them deeper south) the two men gave over, thereby admitting their complete inability at present to influence their leopard boat’s course.
“At this rate,” Fafhrd opined, “we’ll cross the Great Equatorial Ocean in a matter of month or two. Lucky we’re well provisioned.”
The Mouser replied dolefully, “If Racer holds together a day amidst those ‘spouts and speeds, I’ll be surprised.”
“She’s a stout craft,” Fafhrd said lightly. “Just think, Small Gloomy One, the southern continents, unknown to man! We’ll be the first to visit ‘em!”