Without any warning or change in his own brooding expression, he flicked inside the protruding twist of fabric and closed the lid of the chest upon her.
Let the confident minx worry a bit, he thought, as to whether I intend to suffocate her or perchance cast the chest overboard, she being in it. Such incidents were common enough, he told himself, at least in myth and story.
Tiny wavelets gently slapped Seahawk’s side, the moonlit sail hummed as softly, and the crew snored on.
The Mouser wakened the two brawniest Mingols by twisting a big toe of each and silently indicated that they should take up the chest without disturbing their comrades and bear it back to his cabin. He did not want to risk waking the crew with sound of words. Also, using gestures spared his strained throat.
If the Mingols were privy to the secret of the girl, their blank expressions did not show it, although he watched them narrowly. Nor did old Ourph betray any surprise. As they came nigh him, the ancient Mingol’s gaze slipped over them and roved serenely ahead and his gnarled hands rested lightly on the tiller, as though the shifting about of the chest were a matter of no consequence whatever.
The Mouser directed the younger Mingols in their setting of the chest between the lashed cases that narrowed the cabin and beneath the brass lamp that swung on a short chain from the low ceiling. Laying finger to compressed lips, he signed them to keep strict silence about the chest’s midnight remove. Then he dismissed them with a curt wave. He rummaged about, found a small brass cup, filled it from a tiny keg of Fafhrd’s bitter brandy, drank off half, and opened the chest.
The smuggled girl gazed up at him with a composure he told himself was creditable. She had courage, yes. He noted that she took three deep breaths, though, as if the chest had indeed been a bit stuffy. The silver glow of her pale skin and hair pleased him. He motioned her to sit up, and when she did so, set the cup against her lips, tilting it as she drank the other half. He unsheathed his dirk, inserted it carefully between her knees, and drawing it upward, cut the ribbon confining them. He turned, moved away aft, and settled himself on a low stool that stood before Fafhrd’s wide bunk. Then with crooked forefinger he summoned her to him.
When she stood close before him, chin high, slender shoulders thrown back by virtue of the ribbons binding her arms, he eyed her significantly and formed the words, “What is your name?”
“Ississi,” she responded in a lisping whisper that was like the ghosts of wavelets kissing the hull. She smiled.
.2.
On deck, Ourph had directed one of the younger Mingols to take the tiller, the other to heat him gahvey. He sheltered from the wind behind the false deck of the timber cargo, looking toward the cabin and shaking his head wonderingly. The rest of the crew snored in the forecastle’s shadow. While on Rime Isle in her low-ceilinged yellow bedroom Cif woke with the thought that the Gray Mouser was in peril. As she tried to recollect her nightmare, moonlight creeping along the wall reminded her of the mer-ghost which had murdered Zwaaken and lured off Fafhrd from sister Afreyt for a space, and she wondered how Mouser would react to such a dangerous challenge.
.3.
Bright and early the next morning the Mouser threw on a short gray robe, belted it, and rapped sharply on the cabin’s ceiling. Speaking in a somewhat hoarse whisper, he told the impassive Mingol thus summoned that he desired the instant presence of Master Mikkidu. He had cast a disguising drape across the transported chest that stood between the crowding casks that narrowed farther the none-too-wide cabin, and now sat behind it on the stool, as though it were a captain’s flat desk. Behind him on the crosswise bunk that occupied the cabin’s end Ississi reposed and either slept or shut-eyed waked, he knew not which, blanket-covered except for her streaming silver hair and unconfined save for the thick black ribbon tying one ankle securely to the bunk’s foot beneath the blanket.
(I’m no egregious fool, he told himself, to think that one night’s love brings loyalty.)
He nursed his throat with a cuplet of bitter brandy, gargled and slowly swallowed.
(And yet she’d make a good maid for Cif, I do believe, when I have done with disciplining her. Or perchance I’ll pass her on to poor maimed and isle-locked Fafhrd.)
He impatiently finger-drummed the shrouded chest, wondering what could be keeping Mikkidu. A guilty conscience? Very likely!
Save for a glimmer of pale dawn filtering through the curtained hatchway and the two narrow side ports glazed with mica, which the lashed casks further obscured, the oil-replenished swaying lamp still provided the only light.
.4.
There was a flurry of running footsteps coming closer, and then Mikkidu simultaneously rapped at the hatchway and thrust tousle-pated head and distracted eyes between the curtains. The Mouser beckoned him in, saying in a soft brandy-smoothed voice, “Ah, Master Mikkidu, I’m glad your duties, which no doubt must be pressing, at last permit you to visit me, because I do believe I ordered that you come at once.”
“Oh, Captain, sir,” the latter replied rapidly, “there’s a chest missing from the stowage forward. I saw that it was gone as soon as Trenchi wakened me and gave me your command. I only paused to rouse my mates and question them before I hurried here.”
(Ah-ha, the Mouser thought, he knows about Ississi, I’m sure of it, he’s much too agitated, he had a hand in smuggling her aboard. But he doesn’t know what’s happened to her now—suspects everything and everyone, no doubt—and seeks to clear himself with me of all suspicion by reporting to me the missing chest, the wretch!)
“A chest? Which chest?” the Mouser meanwhile asked blandly. “What did it contain? Spices? Spicy things?”
“Fabrics for Lady Cif, I do believe,” Mikkidu answered.
“Just fabrics for the Lady Cif and nothing else?” the Mouser inquired, eyeing him keenly. “Weren’t there some other things? Something of yours, perhaps?”
“No, sir, nothing of mine,” Mikkidu denied quickly.
“Are you sure of that?” the Mouser pressed. “Sometimes one will tuck something of one’s own inside another’s chest—for safekeeping, as it were, or perchance to smuggle it across a border.”
“Nothing of mine at all,” Mikkidu maintained. “Perhaps there were some fabrics also for the other lady … and, well, just fabrics, sir and—oh, yes—some rolls of ribbon.”
“Nothing but fabrics and ribbon?” the Mouser went on, prodding him. “No fabrics made into garments, eh?—such as a short silvery tunic of some lacy stuff, for instance?”
Mikkidu shook his head, his eyebrows rising.
“Well, well,” the Mouser said smoothly, “what’s happened to this chest, do you suppose? It must be still on the ship—unless someone has dropped it overboard. Or was it perhaps stolen back in ‘Brulsk?”
“I’m sure it was safe aboard when we sailed,” Mikkidu asserted. Then he frowned. “I think it was, that is.” His brow cleared. “Its lashings lay beside it, loose on the deck!”
“Well, I’m glad you found something of it,” the Mouser said. “Where on the ship do you suppose it can be? Think, man, where can it be?” For emphasis, he pounded the muffled chest he sat at.
Mikkidu shook his head helplessly. His gaze wandered about, past the Mouser.
(Oh-ho, the latter thought, does he begin to get a glimmering at last of what has happened to his smuggled girl? Whose plaything she is now? This might become rather amusing.)
He recalled his lieutenant’s attention by asking, “What were your men able to tell you about the runaway chest?”
“Nothing, sir. They were as puzzled as I am. I’m sure they know nothing. I think.”
“Hmm. What did the Mingols have to say about it?”
“They’re on watch, sir. Besides, they answer only to Ourph—or yourself, of course, sir.”
(You can trust a Mingol, the Mouser thought, at least where it’s a matter of keeping silent.)
“What about Skor, then?” he asked. “Did Captain Fafhrd’s man know anything about the chest’s vanishment?”
Mikkidu’s expression became a shade sulky. “Lieutenant Skor is not under my command,” he said. “Besides that, he sleeps very soundly.”
There was a thuddingly loud double knock at the hatchway.
“Come in,” the Mouser called testily, “and next time don’t try to pound the ship to pieces.”
Fafhrd’s chief lieutenant thrust bent head with receding reddish hair through the curtains and followed after. He had to bend both back and knees to keep from bumping his naked pate on the beams. (So Fafhrd too would have had to go about stooping when occupying his own cabin, the Mouser thought. Ah, the discomforts of size.)
Skor eyed the Mouser coolly and took note of Mikkidu’s presence. He had trimmed his russet beard, which gave it a patchy appearance. Save for his broken nose, he rather resembled a Fafhrd five years younger.