Then, when a dazzlingly white fingernail clipping of the orb’s self, serrated by the teeth of the central-most roof, showed, there was a general sigh of recognition and fulfillment which was echoed inanimately by an intensification of the chimes’ real or imagined low vibrations, and the groups broke up and intermingled and joined hands in one long line, the girls leading with May at their head, the rest linked at random, and the whole company began a slow rhythmic circling of the Temple, twice all the way around, then interweaving the carven stone moon pillars—that of the Snow, the Wolf, the Seed, the Witch, the Ghost, the Murderer, the Thunder, the Satyr, the Harvest, the Second Witch, the Frost, and the Lovers—by sixes, by fours, by threes, by two, and individually.
The girls wove their way one after the other, linked hand to hand, gracefully as in a dream. Old Ourph footed it agilely, stamping out the time, while Mother Grum moved briskly for all her fat and with a surprisingly sure rhythm. Rill brought up the rear, swinging a leviathan-oil lamp, unlit, from her maimed hand.
As the moonlight slowly strengthened, Fingers marveled somewhat fearfully at the strange Rimish runes and savage scenes carved in the thick moon pillars. Gale squeezed her hand reassuringly and told her in whispered snatches how they represented the adventures of the legendary witch queen Skeldir when she descended into the Underworld to get the help that enabled her to turn back the three dire Simorgyan invasions in the Isle’s olden days.
When the seven slow mystic circlings had been completed and the glaringly white orb of Skama (the Goddess’s holiest name) fully arisen, so that sky-black hugged her all around, May led the weaving line out across the great meadow to the west, moving forward confidently in the full moonshine. For a short way the shadows of the twelve pillars and the jaw-hung chime accompanied them, then they launched out one by one across the trackless moonlit expanse, the frozen and snow-dusted grass crackling under their feet. May followed a serpentine course, veering now left, now right, that copied their last pillar-weaving, but went straight west, their shadows preceding them.
And then Afreyt called out in vibrant tones the sacred name, “Skama!” and they all began to chant, in time to their dancing advance, the first song to the Goddess:
“Twelve faces has our Lady of the Dark
As she walks nightly ‘cross her starry park:
Snow, Wolf, and Seed Moon, Witches, Ghosts, and Knife,
The Murderer’s badge; six more of dark and light:
Thunder, Lust, Harvest, Witches second life;
Then end the year with Frost and Lovers bright;
Queen of the Night and Mistress of the Dark
In your black veils and clinging silver sark.”
Their voices fell silent for five beats, Afreyt again called, “Skama!” and they began Her second song, their steps becoming longer and more gliding to suit the changed rhythm:
“These be your signets, dread Mistress of Mystery:
Rain bow and bubble, the flame and the star,
Night bee and glow wasp, volcano, cool history,
Things that are hintings of wonders afar;
Comet and hailstone and strange turns of history,
Queen of the Darkness and Lamp of the Night,
Lover of Terror, cruel and sisterly—
Crone, Girl, and Mother, arise in your white!”
A four-beat pause, once more “Skama!” from Afreyt, and now their dance became a rapid and stamping one, as though they advanced to the pounding of a drum:
“Snow Moon, Wolf Moon, Seed Moon, Witch Moon;
Ghost Moon, Knife Moon, Blast Moon, Lust Moon;
Sickle, Witch Two, Frost Moon, Fuck Moon.
Skama beckons, Skeldir goes down
By the lightless narrow stoneway,
Buried Rimish fashion feet first,
Bravely facing poison monsters,
Treading serpents with her bare feet;
Through dry earth and solid rock;
Sinks like ghost into the granite;
Skeldir’s courage fails, she falters—
When she spies the moon below her,
In the heart of darkness, light!”
This time Afreyt let twenty beats go by before giving her invocation, and the hand-linked linear company began a repetition of the three songs while they continued their curving and countercurving westward advance. A little toward the north Elvenhold loomed, a pale stout needle of rock and scrub heather to whose square top the strongest bow could not loft arrow. Two moons ago, on fateful Midsummer Day, all of them save Fingers and Ourph had picnicked there. While toward the south began a series of low rolling hills, at first mere swells in the sea of moonlit grass. And toward these hills May now began to lead their way, an overall southward veering of the dancing line.
By the songs’ second repetition islands of gorse and furze were appearing in the grassy ocean. May led between them toward a somewhat higher hill.
“Our destination?” Fingers asked Gale, softly singing the question into the song they were on.
“Yes,” Gale replied in murmured snatches while swaying to the song. “In old times had a gallows. Then ‘twas the ghost god Odin’s hill when he counseled Aunt Afreyt. I was one of his handmaids.”
Fingers: What did you have to do?
Gale: For one thing, I was his cabin-girl, you could say.
Fingers: You were? You said he was a ghost. Was he solid enough for such things?
Gale: Enough. He wanted all sorts of touching, both do and be done by.
Fingers: Gods are just like men. Your aunt let you?
Gale: It was very important information she was getting from him. Helped save Rime Isle. Also, I braided nooses for him. He made us wear them around our necks.
Fingers: That sounds scary. Dangerous.
Gale: It was. That’s how Uncle Fafhrd lost his left hand. He was wearing them all around his left wrist in that battle I told you about. When Odin and the gallows vanished up into the sky, the nooses all tightened to nothing and shot up after—and Uncle Fafhrd’s hand with them.
Fingers: Really scary. If you’d kept them round your necks—
Gale: Yes. Later, when Aunt Cif and Mother Grum purified the hill and cut down the bower where May and Mara and I had loved up the old god, they changed its name from Gallows to Goddess Hill, and we’ve been holding the summer full-moon rites on it.
Mara: Whatever are you two whispering about? I can see Aunt Afreyt frowning at you.
They instantly took up the song, which by now was another. “The little demons!” Afreyt whispered to Fafhrd in a not particularly angry voice.
He turned back toward her and nodded, though even less concerned than she, just as he’d sometimes been chanting tonight and sometimes not, as the mood took him.
The chill air was very still and fantastically clear. It occurred to Fafhrd that he had never in his life seen the full moon shine so bright, not even from Stardock. At that instant, as though some hidden cord of weakness deep in his vitals had been shrewdly plucked, he felt a spasm of unmanning faintness flurry through him, a feeling of insubstantiality, as if the world were about to fade away from him, or he from the world. It was all he could do to stand upright and not shake.
As the weird qualm receded somewhat, he looked along the curving line of brightly lit moonlit faces to learn if it were something others had felt. Halfway up the hill the five girls moved on slowly in line, chanting raptly. Fingers, nearest of them but for Gale, looked toward him, but tranquilly, as though she’d simply sensed his gaze upon her. Next closest after the girls, Pshawri, dutifully chanting, or at least moving his lips. Finally, not five feet away, the Mouser, making not even pretense of chanting, seemingly lost in a brown study, but very much at ease, hood thrown back to bare his close-cropped head to the frosty air, while Fafhrd’s covered his ears.
Looking on his other side he saw, in orderly succession and absorbed in the ceremony: Afreyt, Groniger, Skullick, old Ourph the Mingol, Cif, fat Mother Grum the Witch, and Rill the Harlot.
And then Fafhrd looked at Cif again (she must have started) and saw that she was now staring past him, her pale face of a sudden contorted with an expression of incredulous horror.
He whipped around and saw, on his side, one face fewer than there’d been before. While he’d been looking in the other direction, the Mouser had gone away somewhere and his fingers dropped away unfelt from the hook that was the Northerner’s left hand.
And then he noticed that Pshawri, with an expression on his face not unlike that of Cif’s, was staring at the Northerner’s knees as if the Gray Mouser’s young lieutenant were stupefiedly witnessing some horrifying miracle. Fafhrd looked down and saw that the Mouser had indeed dropped away! Straight down feet first into the frozen earth so he was buried upright to his waist and was no taller than a dwarf. Impossible! But there it was.