save him hurt, that what he said of civilization had an honest core. Of course that might be because Vellix felt so sure of Vlana that he could afford to be kind to a rival. Nevertheless…
Nevertheless, Fafhrd now once again felt more uncomfortable than anything else.
He drained his mug. “Your advice is worth thought, sir — Vellix, I mean. I'll ponder it.”
Refusing another drink with a headshake and smile, he stood up and straightened his clothes.
“I had hoped for a longer chat,” Vellix said, not rising.
“I've business to attend,” Fafhrd answered. “My hearty thanks.”
Vellix smiled thoughtfully as he departed.
The concourse of trodden snow winding amongst the traders’ tents was racketty with noise and crowdedly a-bustle. While Fafhrd slept, the men of the Ice Tribe and fully half of the Frost Companions had come in and now many of these were gathered around two sunfires — so called for their bigness, heat, and the height of their leaping flames — quaffing steaming mead and laughing and scuffling together. To either side were oases of buying and bargaining, encroached on by the merrymakers or given careful berth according to the rank of those involved in the business doings. Old comrades spotted one another and shouted and sometimes drove through the press to embrace. Food and drink were spilled, challenges made and accepted, or more often laughed down. Skalds sang and roared.
The tumult irked Fafhrd, who wanted quiet in which to disentangle Vellix from Nalgron in his feelings, and banish his vague doubts of Vlana, and unsmirch civilization. He walked as a troubled dreamer, frowning yet unmindful of elbowings and other shoves.
Then all at once he was tinglingly alert, for he glimpsed angling toward him through the crowd Hor and Harrax, and he read the purpose in their eyes. Letting an eddy in the crush spin him around, he noted Hrey, one other of Hringorl's creatures, close behind him.
The purpose of the three was clear. Under guise of comradely scuffling, they would give him a vicious beating or worse.
In his moody concern with Vellix, he had forgotten his more certain enemy and rival, the brutally direct yet cunning Hringorl.
Then the three were upon him. In a frozen instant he noted that Hor bore a small bludgeon and that Harrax’ fists were overly large, as if they gripped stone or metal to heavy their blows.
He lunged backward, as if he meant to dodge between that couple and Hrey; then as suddenly reversed course and with a shocking bellow raced toward the sunfire ahead. Heads turned at his yell and a startled few dodged from his way. But the Ice Tribesmen and Frost Companions had time to take in what was happening: a tall youth pursued by three huskies. This promised sport. They sprang to either side of the sunfire to block his passage past it. Fafhrd veered first to left, then to right. Jeering, they bunched more closely.
Holding his breath and throwing up an arm to guard his eyes, Fafhrd leaped straight through the flames. They lifted his fur cloak from his back and blew it high. He felt the stab of heat on hand and neck.
He came out with his furs a-smolder, blue flames running up his hair. There was more crowd ahead except for a swept, carpeted, and canopied space between two tents, where chiefs and priests sat intently around a low table where a merchant weighed gold dust in a pair of scales.
He heard bump and yell behind, someone cried, “Run, coward,” another, “A fight, a fight'; he saw Mara's face ahead, red and excited.
Then the future chief paramount of Northland — for so he happened at that instant to think of himself — half sprang, half dived a-flame across the canopied table, unavoidably tumbling the merchant and two chiefs, banging aside the scales, and knocking the gold dust to the winds before he landed with a steaming zizzle in the great, soft snowbank beyond.
He swiftly rolled over twice to make sure all his fires were quenched, then scrambled to his feet and ran like a deer into the woods, followed by gusts of curses and gales of laughter.
Fifty big trees later he stopped abruptly in the snowy gloom and held his breath while he listened. Through the soft pounding of his blood, there came not the faintest sound of pursuit. Ruefully he combed with his fingers his stinking, diminished hair and sketchily brushed his now patchy, equally fire-stinking furs.
Then he waited for his breath to quiet and his awareness to expand. It was during this pause that he made a disconcerting discovery. For the first time in his life the forest, which had always been his retreat, his continent- spanning tent, his great private needle-roofed room, seemed hostile to him, as if the very trees and the cold- fleshed, warm-boweled mother-earth in which they were rooted knew of his apostasy, his spurning, jilting and intended divorce of his native land.
It was not the unusual silence, nor the sinister and suspicious quality of the faint sounds he at last began to hear: scratch on bark of small claw, pitter of tiny paw-steps, hoot of a distant owl anticipating night. Those were effects, or at most concomitants. It was something unnamable, intangible, yet profound, like the frown of a god. Or goddess.
He was greatly depressed. At the same time he had never known his heart feel as hard.
When at last he set out again, it was as silently as might be, and not with his unusual relaxed and wide-open awareness, but rather the naked-nerved sensitivity and bent-bow readiness of a scout in enemy territory.
And it was well for him that he did so, since otherwise he might not have dodged the nearly soundless fall of an icicle, sharp, heavy, and long as a siege-catapult's missile, nor the down-clubbing of a huge snow-weighted dead branch that broke with a single thunderous crack, nor the venomous dart of a snow-adder's head from its unaccustomed white coil in the open, nor the sidewise slash of the narrow, cruel claws of a snow-leopard that seemed almost to materialize a-spring in the frigid air and that vanished as strangely when Fafhrd slipped aside from its first attack and faced it with dirk drawn. Nor might he have spotted in time the up-whipping, slip-knotted snare, set against all custom in this home-area of the forest and big enough to strangle not a hare but a bear.
He wondered where Mor was and what she might be muttering or chanting. Had his mistake been simply to dream of Nalgron? Despite yesterday's curse — and others before it — and last night's naked threats, he had never truly and wholly imagined his mother seeking to kill him. But now the hair on his neck was lifted in apprehension and horror, the watchful glare in his eyes was febrile and wild, while a little blood dripped unheeded from the cut in his cheek where the great icicle down-dropping had grazed it.
So intent had he become on spying dangers that it was with a little surprise that he found himself standing in the glade where he and Mara had embraced only yesterday, his feet on the short trail leading to the home tents. He relaxed a little then, sheathing his dirk and pressing a handful of snow to his bleeding cheek — but he relaxed only a little, with the result that he was aware of one coming to meet him before he consciously heard footsteps.
So silently and completely did he then melt into the snowy background that Mara was three paces away before she saw him.
“They hurt you,” she exclaimed.
“No,” he answered curtly, still intent on dangers in the forest.
“But the red snow on your cheek. There was a fight?”
“Only a nick got in the woods. I outran ‘em.”
Her look of concern faded. “First time I saw you run from a quarrel.”
“I had no mind to take on three or more,” he said flatly.
“Why do you look behind? They're trailing you?”
“No.”
Her expression hardened. “The elders are outraged. The younger men call you scareling. My brothers among them. I didn't know what to say.”
“Your brothers!” Fafhrd exclaimed. “Let the stinking Snow Clan call me what they will. I care not.”
Mara planted her fists on her hips. “You've grown very free with your insults of late. I'll not have my family berated, do you hear? Nor myself insulted, now that I think of it.” She was breathing hard. “Last night you went back to that shriveled old whore of a dancer. You were in her tent for hours.”
“I was not!” Fafhrd denied, thinking
“You lie! The story's all around the camp. Any other girl would have set her brothers on you ere this.”
Fafhrd came back to his schemy self almost with a jerk. On this eve of all eves he must not risk needless trouble — the chance of being crippled, it might even be, or dead.
