The cook chuckled.
But as to who visited Hieronymus, the greedy tax farmer and connoisseur of Antioch, or in what guise, we cannot be sure. One morning he was found in his treasure room with his limbs stiff and chill, as if from hemlock, and there was a look of terror on his fat face, and the famous cup from which he had often caroused was missing, although there were circular stains on the table before him. He recovered but would never tell what had happened.
The priests who tended the Tree of Life in Babylon were a little more communicative. One evening just after sunset they saw the topmost branches shake in the gloaming and heard the snick of a pruning knife. All around them, without other sound or movement, stretched the desolate city, from which the inhabitants had been herded to nearby Seleucia three-quarters of a century before and to which the priests crept back only in great fear to fulfill their sacred duties. They instantly prepared, some of them to climb the Tree armed with tempered golden sickles, others to shoot down with gold-tipped arrows whatever blasphemer was driven forth, when suddenly a large gray batlike shape swooped from the Tree and vanished behind a jagged wall. Of course, it might conceivably have been a gray-cloaked man swinging on a thin, tough rope, but there were too many things whispered about the creatures that flapped by night through the ruins of Babylon for the priests to dare pursuit.
Finally Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser reappeared in Tyre, and a week later they were ready to depart on the ultimate stage of their quest. Indeed, they were already outside the gates, lingering at the landward end of Alexander’s mole, spine of an ever-growing isthmus. Gazing at it, Fafhrd remembered how once an unintroduced stranger had told him a tale about two fabulous adventurers who had aided mightily in the foredoomed defense of Tyre against Alexander the Great more than a hundred years ago. The larger had heaved heavy stone blocks on the attacking ships, the smaller had dove to file through the chains with which they were anchored. Their names, the stranger had said, were Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd had made no comment.
It was near evening, a good time to pause in adventurings, to recall past escapades, to hazard misty, wild, rosy speculations concerning what lay ahead. “I think any woman would do,” insisted the Mouser bickering. “Ningauble was just trying to be obscure. Let’s take Chloe.”
“If only she’ll come when she’s ready,” said Fafhrd, half smiling.
The sun was dipping ruddy-golden into the rippling sea. The merchants who had pitched shop on the landward side in order to get first crack at the farmers and inland traders on market day were packing up wares and taking down canopies.
“Any woman will eventually come when she’s ready, even Chloe,” retorted the Mouser. “We’d only have to take along a silk tent for her and a few pretty conveniences. No trouble at all.”
“Yes,” said Fafhrd, “We could probably manage it without more than one elephant.”
Most of Tyre was darkly silhouetted against the sunset, although there were gleams from the roofs here and there, and the gilded peak of the Temple of Melkarth sent a little water-borne glitter track angling in toward the greater one of the sun. The fading Phoenician port seemed entranced, dreaming of past glories, only half listening to today’s news of Rome’s implacable eastward advance, and Philip of Macedon’s loss of the first round at the Battle of the Dog’s Heads, and now Antiochus preparing for the second, with Hannibal come to help him from Tyre’s great fallen sister Carthage across the sea.
“I’m sure Chloe will come if we wait until tomorrow,” the Mouser continued. “We’ll have to wait in any case, because Ningauble said the woman wouldn’t come until she was ready.”
A cool little wind came out of the wasteland that was Old Tyre. The merchants hurried; a few of them were already going home along the mole, their slaves looking like hunchbacks and otherwise misshapen monsters because of the packs on their shoulders and heads.
“No,” said Fafhrd, “we’ll start. And if the woman doesn’t come when she’s ready, then she isn’t the woman who will come when she’s ready, or if she is, she’ll have to hump herself to catch up.”
The three horses of the adventurers moved restlessly, and the Mouser’s whinnied. Only the great camel, on which were slung the wine-sacks, various small chests, and snugly wrapped weapons, stood sullenly still. Fafhrd and the Mouser casually watched the one figure on the mole that moved against the homing stream; they were not exactly suspicious, but after the year’s doings they could not overlook the possibility of death-dealing pursuers, taking the form either of accursed swordsmen, black eunuch scimitarmen, gold-weaponed Babylonian priests, or such agents as Hieronymus of Antioch might favor.
“Chloe would have come on time, if only you’d helped me persuade her,” argued the Mouser. “She likes you, and I’m sure she must have been the one Ningauble meant, because she has that amulet which works against the adept.”
The sun was a blinding sliver on the sea’s rim, then went under. All the little glares and glitters on the roofs of Tyre winked out. The Temple of Melkarth loomed black against the fading sky. The last canopy was being taken down, and most of the merchants were more than halfway across the mole. There was still only one figure moving shoreward.
“Weren’t seven nights with Chloe enough for you?” asked Fafhrd. “Besides, it isn’t she you’ll be wanting when we kill the adept and get this spell off us.”
“That’s as it may be,” retorted the Mouser. “But remember we have to catch our adept first. And it’s not only I whom Chloe’s company could benefit.”
A faint shout drew their attention across the darkling water to where a lateen-rigged trader was edging into the Egyptian Harbor. For a moment they thought the landward end of the mole had been emptied. Then the figure moving away from the city came out sharp and black against the sea, a slight figure, not burdened like the slaves.
“Another fool leaves sweet Tyre at the wrong time,” observed the Mouser. “Just think what a woman will mean in those cold mountains we’re going to, Fafhrd, a woman to prepare dainties and stroke your forehead.”
Fafhrd said, “It isn’t your forehead, little man, you’re thinking of.”
The cool wind came again, and the packed sand moaned at its passing. Tyre seemed to crouch like a beast against the threats of darkness. A last merchant searched the ground hurriedly for some lost article.
Fafhrd put his hand on his horse’s shoulder and said, “Come on.”
The Mouser made a last point. “I don’t think Chloe would insist on taking the slave girl to oil her feet, that is, if we handled it properly.”
Then they saw that the other fool leaving sweet Tyre was coming toward them, and that it was a woman, tall and slender, dressed in stuffs that seemed to melt into the waning light, so that Fafhrd found himself wondering whether she truly came from Tyre or from some aerial realm whose inhabitants may venture to earth only at sunset. Then, as she continued to approach at an easy, swinging stride, they saw that her face was fair and that her hair was raven; and the Mouser’s heart gave a great leap, and he felt that this was the perfect consummation of their waiting, that he was witnessing the birth of an Aphrodite, not from the foam but the dusk, for it was indeed his dark-haired Ahura of the wine shops, no longer staring with cold, shy curiosity, but eagerly smiling.
Fafhrd, not altogether untouched by similar feelings, said slowly, “So you are the woman who came when she was ready.”
“Yes,” added the Mouser gaily, “and did you know that in a minute more you’d have been too late.”
4: The Lost City
During the next week, one of steady northward journeying along the fringe of the desert, they learned little more of the motives or history of their mysterious companion than the dubious scraps of information Chloe had provided. When asked why she had come, Ahura replied that Ningauble had sent her, that Ningauble had nothing to do with it and that it was all an accident, that certain dead Elder Gods had dreamed her a vision, that she sought a brother lost in a search for the Lost City of Ahriman; and often her only answer was silence, a silence that seemed sometimes sly and sometimes mystical. However, she stood up well to hardship, proved a tireless rider, and did not complain at sleeping on the ground with only a large cloak snuggled around her. Like some especially sensitive migratory bird, she seemed possessed of an even greater urge than their own to get on with the journey.