In the interval she had jumped to the rather romantic conclusion that Fafhrd was in the situation of the Handsome Tranced One, a male equivalent of Sleeping Beauty in Lankhmar legend—a youth with a sleep spell on him that can be lifted only by his true love’s kiss.
Which at once suggested to Fingers that she convey the sleeping (and strangely transformed, even frightening) hero to the Lady Afreyt for the reviving kiss.
After all, they had been introduced to her as lovers (and proper gentlefolk) except for Fafhrd’s straying with the naughty nuns, which was the sort of straying to be expected of men, according to her mother’s teaching. Moreover he’d been under all the strain of directing the search for his comrade Captain who’d slipped underground.
Surely to bring Fafhrd and Afreyt back together would be a most proper return for all the courtesies they’d shown her, beginning with her rescue from Weasel.
Back at the mushroom bed Fafhrd had made no further progress toward awakening. So she draped the sun-warmed robe around him, gently urging him by words and assisting movements to don it.
“Arise, Captain Fafhrd,” she suggested, “and I will help you into your robe and then to some shadowed and comfortable spot where you may have your full sleep out.”
When with some repetitions of this routine and patter she’d got him up (safely asleep on his feet, as it were) with his robe belted about him so his colorful honors were completely concealed—and a long look around showed they were still unobserved—she breathed a sigh of relief and set about to lead him back to Cif’s house using the same methods.
But they’d got no farther than the moondial when it occurred to Fingers to ask herself, Where’s everyone?
It was a question easier to ask than answer.
You’d think after the second great weather change, every last soul would be out to see, soaking in the heat and talking about the wonder.
Yet wherever you looked there wasn’t a person to be seen or heard. It was eerie.
All yesterday the digging for Captain Mouser had kept up a steady traffic between the diggings, the barracks, and Cif’s place. Today no trace of that since Cif’s departure by moonlight hours ago.
It was as if Fafhrd’s sleep spell were on everyone in Salthaven save herself. Maybe it was.
And the somnambulistic spell on Fafhrd was a lot stronger than she’d judged at first. Here, he and she were halfway back to Cif’s and it showed no signs of falling off.
She began to doubt the power of Afreyt’s kiss to dispel it. Perhaps it would be better if he had his full sleep out, as she’d been suggesting to him in her patter.
And what if Afreyt didn’t go for her idea of the Handsome Tranced One and the revivifying kiss? Or tried it and it didn’t? And then they both tried to wake Fafhrd and couldn’t? And Lady Afreyt blamed her for that?
Suddenly she lost all faith in the ideas that had seemed so brilliant to her moments before. Getting Fafhrd back to full sleep again (as she had been promising him over and over in her patter) as soon as they’d reached a suitable place for that seemed the thing to do. She recalled an infallible sleep spell her mother had taught her. The sooner she recited it to Fafhrd, the better. Fully asleep again, he’d no longer be her responsibility.
Perhaps it would work on her too—and perhaps that was just what she needed to straighten her out—a good sleep.
The idea of falling asleep with Captain Fafhrd seemed vastly attractive.
They’d just got back to Cif’s without encountering anyone. She was relieved to find the door ajar. She thought she’d closed it.
Stopping her soft talk to Fafhrd, but keeping up a pressure on his arm, she worked the thick door open and guided him inside. The house was silent, she was pleased to find, and Captain Fafhrd, being barefoot, made no more noise than she.
Then, as they were halfway across the kitchen, nearer the cellar stairs than those to the second floor (or the sauna door), she heard footsteps overhead in Cif’s bedroom. Afreyt’s, she thought.
She decided at once on flight and chose the cellar because it was nearest and also the place where she had first met Fafhrd. She stuck with her choice because the Northerner responded instantly to her silent guidance, as if it would have been his choice too.
And then they were down in the cellar and the die was cast—simply a matter of whether the firm, decisive footsteps of Afreyt followed him down into the cellar or did not. Fingers had led him out of the space at the foot of the stairs visible from the kitchen and sat him down on the bench facing the large square of unpaved loamy earth, illuminated, she now saw, by one of the long-lasting cool leviathan-oil lamps. But she dared not turn that off now, no matter how unsuitable for sleeping, for if Afreyt saw the light dim in the cellar, she’d surely come down to investigate.
The footsteps finished the upper stairs, came five paces across the kitchen, and then stopped dead. Had she noticed the light on in the cellar and would she come down to turn it off?
But moments gave way to seconds and seconds to minutes, or at least lengthened unendurably, and still there’d been no sound. It was as if Afreyt had died up there or just evaporated. Until Fingers, to stop herself growing tired or numb and getting a crick in her neck or shoulder and making a violent involuntary move, edged forward step by silent step and seated herself on the bench beside the northern Captain, facing away from the unpaved square of earth.
She felt herself growing more and more tired, forgot about Afreyt hearing, and hastened to recite the sleep spell softly so that she and Captain Fafhrd would receive the full benefit of it.
Meanwhile something very interesting and quite unsuspected by Fingers had actually been happening to Afreyt.
She had wakened alone just before dawn and heard the thaw, opened the window overlooking the headland and moondial just in time to observe the wondrous sailing of the Arilian moon pinnace with Fafhrd’s mistress and her naughty train, and heard the last notes of the quick march give way to the ripple of derisive laughter.
Thereafter, Afreyt had watched from the distance the tricksy and ambitious cabin-girl Fingers seemingly rouse, then robe her magically rejuvenated father (for the woman had noted many other resemblances between parent and offspring besides hair color), and then work their way at leisure back to Cif’s place, getting their two stories straight, thought Afreyt, but above all murmuring of their great incestuous love (for after all, what else did they really have to talk about?), and while Fafhrd’s lady was thus reacting to their manifold treacheries, she furiously laced on her shoes and belted her robe and hurried downstairs to confront the miscreants.
When she found them gone, Afreyt made the deduction Fingers had anticipated about the cellar light. She thought for a moment, then to surprise them, knelt and silently undid the shoes she had so furiously laced, stepped out of them and tiptoed downstairs without a sound.
But when she stepped out suddenly into full view she found them both faced away from her on the bench, gazing at the unpaved square of earth, Fafhrd resting his head against Fingers’s chest, “lying in her lap,” as it’s expressed, just as the girl started to recite in a small bell-like voice what she thought was her mother’s sleep spell but was in truth, as she had inadvertently revealed to Gale and Afreyt the second morning of the cold by reciting its last five individually harmless lines, the direst of Quarmallian death spells taught her under hypnosis by the infinitely vengeful and devious Lord Quarmal of Quarmall.
“Call for the robin red breast and the wren
Since o’er shady groves they hover
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And safe from any savage hurt or harm…”
As Afreyt heard Fingers recite the first of those eight lines, she saw emerge vertically upward from the soft earth of the left forefront of the unpaved square a small serpent’s head or tentacle tip, followed almost at once close to either side by a second and third at the same even rate, then a short fourth in line at the same short distance to the left, and lastly a thick fifth erecting alone two inches in front of the rest, and then she saw that the four serpents’ heads or tentacles were joined at their bases to a palm, and taken with the thick separate member, constituted the fingers and thumb of a buried hand digging itself upward and bursting from the ground, while down off it the revealing earth sifted and tumbled.