The Mouser, furious, could barely restrain himself from striking out. Defend me, Mikkidu, he inwardly implored. Oh the monstrousness of it—to invoke Fafhrd. Had Fafhrd really—”Do you really think so?” he heard Mikkidu say, only a little doubtfully. “You really think he’s got a girl in there? Well, if that’s the case I must admit he is a very devil!”
The cry of pure rage that traitorous utterance drew from the sprung-up Mouser made the two lieutenants throw back their heads and stare, and brought the nappers fully awake and almost to their feet.
He opened his mouth to utter rebuke that would skin them alive—and then paused, wondering just what form that rebuke could take. After all, there was a naked girl in his cabin with her legs tied wide—in fact, spread-eagled. His glance lit on the lashings of the chest of fabrics still lying loose on the deck.
“Clear up that strewage!” he roared, pointing it out. “Use it to tie down doubly those grain sacks there.” He pointed again. “And while you’re at it—” (he took a deep breath) “double lash the entire cargo! I am not satisfied that it won’t shift if hurricane strikes.” He directed that last remark chiefly at the two lieutenants, who peered puzzledly at the blue sky as they moved to organize the work.
“Yes, double lash it all down tight as eelskin,” he averred, beginning to pace back and forth as he warmed to his task. “Pass the timber’s extra ropings around belaying pins set inside the oarholes and then draw them tight across the deck. See that those wool sacks of grain and fruit are lashed really tight—imagine you’re corseting a fat woman, put your foot in her back and really pull those laces. For I’m not convinced those bags would stay in place if we had green water aboard and dragging at them. And when all that is done, bring a gang aft to further firm the casks and barrels in my cabin, marry them indissolubly to Seahawk’s deck and sides. Remember, all of you,” he finished as he danced off aft, “if you tie things up carefully enough—your purse, your produce, or your enemies, and eke your lights of love—nothing can ever surprise you, or escape from you, or harm you!”
.8.
Cif untied the massive silver key from the neck of her soft leather tunic, where it had hung warm inside, unlocked the heavy oaken door of the treasury, opened it cautiously and suspiciously, inspected the room from the threshold—she’d been uneasy about the place ever since the sea-ghost’s depredations. Then she went in and relocked the door behind her. A small window with thumb-thick bars of bronze illumined not too well the wooden room. On a shelf reposed two ingots of pale silver, three short stacks of silver coins, and a single golden stack, still shorter. The walls of the room crowded in on a low circular table, in the gray surface of which a pentacle had been darkly burnt. She named over to herself the five golden objects standing at the points: the Arrow of Truth, kinked from Fafhrd’s tugging of it from the demoness; the Rule of Prudence, a short rod circled by ridges; the Cup of Measured Hospitality, hardly larger than a thimble; the Circles of Unity, so linked that if any one were taken away, the other two fell apart; and the strange skeletal globe that Fafhrd had recovered with the rest and suggested might be the Cube of Square Dealing smoothly deformed (something she rather doubted). She took the Mouser doll from her pouch and laid it in their midst, at pentalpha’s center. She sighed with relief, sat down on one of the three stools there were, and gazed pensively at the doll’s blank face.
.9.
As the Mouser approved the last cask’s double lashings and then dismissed as curtly his still-baffled lieutenants and their weary work gang—fairly drove ‘em from his cabin!—he felt a surge of power inside, as if he’d just stepped or been otherwise carried over an invisible boundary into a realm where each last object was plainly labeled “Mine Alone!”
Ah, that had been sport of the best, he told himself—closely supervising the gang’s toil while standing all the while in their midst atop the draped chest he’d had them hunting all day long, and while the girl Ississi lay naked and securely spread-eagled beneath the blanket spread across his bunk—and they all somehow conscious of her delectable presence yet never quite daring to refer to it. Power sport indeed!
In a transport of self-satisfaction he whipped the drape from the chest, threw back its top, and admired the expanse of coppery silk so revealed and the bolts of black ribbon. Now there was a bed fit for a princess’s nuptials, he told himself as he filled and downed a brass cup of brandy, a couch somewhat small, but sufficient and soft all the way down to the bottom.
His mind and his feet both dancing with all manner of imaginings and impulses, he moved to the bunk and whirled off its coverings and—
The bunk’s coarse gray single sheeting was covered by a veritable black snow-sprinkle of ribbon scraps and shreds. Of Ississi there was no sign.
After a long moment’s searching of it with his astounded eyes, he fairly dove across the bunk and fumbled frantically all the way around the thin mattress’s edges and under them, searching for the razor-keen knife or scissors that had done this or (who knew?) some sharp-toothed, ribbon-shredding small animal secretly attendant on the girl whore and obedient to her command.
A trilling sigh of blissful contentment made him switch convulsively around. In the midst of the new-opened chest, got there by sleights he could scarce dream of, Ississi sat cross-legged facing him. Her arms were lifted while her nimble hands were swiftly braiding her long straight silvery hair, an action which showed off her slender waist and dainty small breasts to best advantage, while her green eyes flashed and her lips smiled at him, “Am I not exceedingly clever? Surpassingly clever and wholly delightful?”
The Mouser frowned at her terribly, then sent the same expression roving to either side, as if spying for a route by which she could have got unseen from bunk to chest past the double-lashed and closely abutting casks—and mayhap for her confederates, animal, human, or demonic. Next he got off the bunk and, approaching her, edged his way around the chest and back, eyeing her up and down as though searching for concealed weapons, even so little as a sharpened fingernail, and turning his own body so that his frown was always fixed on her and he never lost sight of her for an instant, until he faced her once more.
His nostrils flared with his deep breathing, while the lamp’s yellow beams and shadows swayed measuredly across his dark angry presence and her moon-pale skin.
She continued to braid her hair and to smile and to warble and trill, and after a short while her trillings and warblings became a sort of rough song of recitation, one shot with seeming improvisations, as though she were translating it into Low Lankhmarese from another language:
“Oh, the golden gifts of my land are six, And round you now they’re straitly fixed. The Golden Shaft of Death and Desire, The Rod of Command whose smart’s like fire, The Cup of Close Confinement and Minding, The Circles of Fate whose ways are winding. The Cubical Prison of god and of elf, The Many-Barred Globe of Simorgya and Self. Deep, oh deep is my far country, Where gold will carry us, me and thee.”
The Mouser shook his finger before her face in dark challenge and dire warning. Then he slashed lengths of ribbed black silk ribbon from a roll, twisting and tugging it to test its strength, continuing to eye her all the while, and he bound her legs together as they were, slender ankle to calf, just below the knee, and slender calf to ankle. Then he held out his hand for hers imperiously. She rapidly finished plaiting her hair, whipped the braid round her head and tucked it in, so that it became a sort of silvery coronet. Then with a sigh and a turning away of her somewhat narrow face, she held out her wrists to him close together, the palms of her hands upward.
He seized them contemptuously and drew them behind her and bound them there, as he had on the previous night, and her elbows too, drawing her shoulders backward. And then he tipped her over forward so that her face was buried in the coppery silk intended for Cif (how long ago?) and led a double ribbon from her bound wrists down her spine to her crosswise-bound lower legs, and drew it tight as he could, so that her back was perforce arched and her face lifted free of the silk.