break? Very well! And now, darlingest lieutenant, banish all discipline. Forget every atom of respect you owe your captain and—”
But now it was Fafhrd's turn to delay. Vlana's talk had allowed time for his own worries to rouse and he held her away from him although she had knit her hands behind his neck and was straining to draw their two bodies together.
He said, “I will obey you in every particular. Only one warning more, which it's vital you heed. Think as little as you can today about our plans, even while performing actions vital to them. Keep them hid behind the scenery of your other thoughts. As I shall mine, you may be sure. For Mor my mother is a great reader of minds.”
“Your mother! Truly she has overawed you inordinately, darling, in a fashion which makes me itch to set you wholly free — oh, do not hold me off! Why, you speak of her as if she were the Queen of Witches.”
“And so she is, make no mistake,” Fafhrd assured her dourly. “She is the great white spider, while the whole Cold Waste, both above and below, is her web, on which we flies must go tippy-toe, o'erstepping sticky stretches. You
“Yes, yes, yes! And now—”
He brought her slowly down toward him, as a man might put a wineskin to his mouth, tantalizing himself. Their skins met. Their lips poised.
Fafhrd became aware of a profound silence above, around, below, as if the very earth were holding her breath. It frightened him.
They kissed, drinking deeply of each other, and his fear was drowned.
They parted for breath. Fafhrd reached out and pinched the lamp's wick so that the flame fled and the tent was dark except for the cold silver of dawn seeping in by cranny and crack. His fingers stung. He wondered why he'd done it — they'd loved by lamplight before. Again fear came.
He clasped Vlana tightly in the hug that banishes all fears.
And then of a sudden — he could not possibly have told why — he was rolling over and over with her toward the back of the tent. His hands gripping her shoulders, his legs clamping hers together, he was hurling her sideways over him and then himself over her in swiftest alteration.
There was a
They rolled into the racked garments spilling down. There was a second monster crack followed by a crashing and a crunching like some super-giant beast snapping up a behemoth and crunching it between its jaws. Earth quivered for a space.
Then all was silent after that great noise and ground-shaking, except for the astonishment and fear buzzing in their ears. They clutched each other like terrified children.
Fafhrd recovered himself first. “Dress!” he told Vlana and squirmed under the back of the tent and stood up naked in the biting cold under the pinkening sky.
The great bough of the snow sycamore, its crystals dashed off in a vast heap, lay athwart the middle of the tent, pressing it and the pallet beneath into the frozen earth.
The rest of the sycamore, robbed of its great balancing bough, had fallen entire in the opposite direction and lay mounded around with shaken-off crystals. Its black, hairy, broken-off roots were nakedly exposed.
All the crystals shone with a pale flesh-pink from the sun.
Nothing moved anywhere, not even a wisp of breakfast smoke. Sorcery had struck a great hammerstroke and none had noted it except the intended victims.
Fafhrd, beginning to shake, slithered under again. Vlana had obeyed his word and was dressing with an actress's swiftness. Fafhrd hurried into his own garments, piled so providentially at this end of the tent. He wondered if he had been under a god's directions in doing that and in snuffing out the lamp, which else by now would have had the crushed tent flaming.
His clothes felt colder than the icy air, but he knew that would change.
He crawled with Vlana outside once more. As they stood up, he faced her toward the fallen bough with the great crystal heap around it and said, “Now laugh at the witchy powers of my mother and her coven and all the Snow Women.”
Vlana said doubtfully, “I see only a bough that was overweighted with ice.”
Fafhrd said, “Compare the mass of crystals and snow that was shaken off that bough with those elsewhere. Remember: hide your thoughts!”
Vlana was silent.
A black figure was racing toward them from the traders’ tents. It grew in size as it grotesquely bounded.
Vellix the Venturer was gasping as he stamped to a stop and seized Vlana's arms. Controlling his breathing, he said, “I dreamed a dream of you struck down and pashed. Then a thunderclap waked me.”
Vlana answered, “You dreamed the beginning of the truth, but in a matter like this, almost is as good as not at all.”
Vellix at last saw Fafhrd. Lines of jealous anger engraved his face and his hand went to the dagger at his belt.
“Hold!” Vlana commanded sharply. “I had indeed been mashed to a mummy, except that this youth's senses, which ought to have been utterly engrossed in something else, caught the first cues of the bough's fall, and he whipped me out of death's way in the very nick. Fafhrd's his name.”
Vellix changed his hand's movement into part of a low bow, sweeping his other arm out wide.
“I am much indebted to you, young man,” he said warmly, and then after a pause, “for saving the life of a notable
By now other figures were in view, some hurrying toward them from the nearby actors’ tents, others at the doors of the far-off Snow Tribe's tents and not moving at all.
Pressing her cheek to Fafhrd's, as if in formal gratitude, Vlana whispered rapidly, “Remember my plan for tonight and for all our future rapture. Do not depart a jot from it. Efface yourself.”
Fafhrd managed, “Beware ice and snow. Act without thought.”
To Vellix, Vlana said more distantly, though with courtesy and kindness, “Thank you, sir, for your concern for me, both in your dreams and your wakings.”
From out a fur robe, whose collar topped his ears, Essedinex greeted with gruff humor, “It's been a hard night on tents.” Vlana shrugged.
The women of the troupe gathered around her with anxious questions and she talked with them privately as they walked to the actors’ tent and went in through the girls’ door-flap.
Vellix frowned after her and pulled at his black moustache.
The male actors stared and shook their heads at the beating the hemicylindrical tent had taken.
Vellix said to Fafhrd with warm friendliness, “I offered you brandy before and now I'd guess you need it. Also, since yestermorning I've had a great desire to talk with you.”
“Your pardon, but once I sit I will not be able to stay awake for a word, were they wise as owls', nor for even a brandy swig,” Fafhrd answered politely, hiding a great yawn, which was only half feigned. “But I thank you.”
“It appears I am fated always to ask at the wrong time,” Vellix commented with a shrug. “Perhaps at noon? Or midafternoon?” he added swiftly.
“The latter, if it please you,” Fafhrd replied and rapidly walked off, taking great strides toward the trading tents. Vellix did not seek to keep up with him.
Fafhrd felt more satisfied than he ever had in his life. The thought that tonight he would forever escape this stupid snow world and its man-chaining women almost made him nostalgic about Cold Corner. Thought-guard! he told himself. Feelings of eerie menace or else his hunger for sleep turned his surroundings spectral, like a childhood scene revisited.
He drained a white porcelain tankard of wine given him by his Mingol friends Zax and Effendrit, let them conduct him to a glossy pallet hidden by piles of other furs, and fell at once into a deep sleep.
After eons of absolute, pillowy darkness, lights came softly on. Fafhrd sat beside Nalgron his father at a stout banquet table crowded with all savory foods smoking hot and all fortified wines in jugs of earthenware, stone, silver, crystal and gold. There were other feasters lining the table, but Fafhrd could make nothing of them except
