must say, Mara—”
“Hah! Now you'll tell me I shouldn't be here, being a woman. Male prerogatives, intersexual sacrilege, and so forth. Well, neither should you be here.”
Fafhrd gravely considered part of that. “No, I think all the women should be here. What they would learn would be much to their interest and advantage.”
“To caper like a cat in heat? To slouch about like a silly slave? Yes, I saw those acts too — while you were drooling dumb and deaf! You men will laugh at anything, especially when your stupid, gasping, red-faced lust's been aroused by a shameless bitch making a show of her scrawny nakedness!”
Mara's heated hissings were getting dangerously loud and might well have attracted the attention of Hor and others, but once again good fortune intervened, in that there was a ripple of drumming as Vlana streaked off the stage, and then there began a wild, somewhat thin, but galloping music, the one-armed Mingol being joined by the little Ilthmarix playing a nose flute.
“I did not laugh, my dear,” Fafhrd breathed somewhat loftily, “nor did I drool or flush or speed my breath, as I am sure you noted. No, Mara, my sole purpose in being here is to learn more about civilization.”
She glared at him, grinned, then of a sudden smiled tenderly. “You know, I honestly think you believe that, you incredible infant,” she breathed back wonderingly. “Granting that the decadence called civilization could possibly be of interest to anyone, and a capering whore able to carry its message, or rather absence of message.”
“I neither think nor believe, I know it,” Fafhrd replied, ignoring Mara's other remarks. “A whole world calls and have we eyes only for Cold Corner? Watch with me, Mara, and gain wisdom. The actress dances the cultures of all lands and ages. Now she is a woman of the Eight Cities.”
Perhaps Mara was in some small part persuaded. Or perhaps it was that Vlana's new costume covered her thoroughly — sleeved, green bodice; full, blue skirt; red stockings; and yellow shoes — and that the culture dancer was panting a trifle and showing the cords in her neck from the stamping and whirling dance she was doing. At any rate, the Snow Girl shrugged and smiled indulgently and whispered, “Well, I must admit it all has a certain disgusting interest.”
“I knew you'd understand, dearest. You have twice the mind of any woman of our tribe, aye, or of any man,” Fafhrd cooed, caressing her tenderly but somewhat absently as he peered at the stage.
In succession, always making lightning costume changes, Vlana became a houri of the Eastern Lands, a custom-hobbled Quarmallian queen, a languorous concubine of the King of Kings, and a haughty Lankhmar lady wearing a black toga. This last was theatrical license: only the men of Lankhmar wear the toga, but the garment was Lankhmar's chiefest symbol across the world of Nehwon.
Meanwhile Mara did her best to share the eccentric whim of her husband-to-be. At first she was genuinely intrigued and made mental notes on details of Vlana's dress styles and tricks of behavior which she might herself adopt to advantage. But then she was gradually overwhelmed by a realization of the older woman's superiority in training, knowledge and experience. Vlana's dancing and miming clearly couldn't be learned except with much coaching and drill. And how, and especially where, could a Snow Girl ever wear such clothes? Feelings of inferiority gave way to jealousy and that to hatred.
Civilization was nasty, Vlana ought to be whipped out of Cold Corner, and Fafhrd needed a woman to run his life and keep his mad imagination in check. Not his mother, of course — that awful and incestuous eater of her own son — but a glamorous and shrewd young wife. Herself.
She began to watch Fafhrd intently. He didn't look like an infatuated male, he looked cold as ice, but he was certainly utterly intent on the scene below. She reminded herself that a few men were adept at hiding their true feelings.
Vlana shed her toga and stood in a wide-meshed tunic of fine silver wires. At each crossing of the wires a tiny silver bell stood out. She shimmied and the bells tinkled, like a tree of tiny birds all chirruping together a hymn to her body. Now her slenderness seemed that of adolescence, while from between the strands of her sleekly cascading hair, her large eyes gleamed with mysterious hints and invitations.
Fafhrd's controlled breathing quickened. So his dream in the Mingols’ tent had been true! His attention, which had half been off to the lands and ages Vlana had danced, centered wholly on her and became desire.
This time his composure was put to an even sorer test for, without warning, Mara's hand clutched his crotch.
But he had little time in which to demonstrate his composure. She let go and crying, “Filthy beast! You are lusting!” struck him in the side, below the ribs.
He tried to catch her wrists, while staying on his branches. She kept trying to hit him. The pine boughs creaked and shed snow and needles.
In landing a clout on Fafhrd's ear, Mara's upper body overbalanced, though her feet kept hooked to branchlets.
Growling, “God freeze you, you bitch!” Fafhrd gripped his stoutest bough with one hand and lunged down with the other to catch Mara's arm just beneath the shoulder.
Those looking up from below — and by now there were some, despite the strong counter-attraction of the stage — saw two struggling, white-clad torsos and fair-haired heads dipping out of the branchy roof, as if about to descend in swan dives. Then, still struggling, the figures withdrew upward.
An older Snow Man cried out, “Sacrilege!” A younger, “Peepers! Let's thrash ‘em!” He might have been obeyed, for a quarter of the Snow Men were on their feet by now, if it hadn't been that Essedinex was keeping a close eye on things through a peephole in one of the screens and that he was wise in the ways of handling unruly audiences. He shot a finger at the Mingol behind him, then sharply raised that hand, palm upward.
The music surged. Cymbals clashed. The two Mingol girls and the Ilthmarix bounded on stage stark naked and began to caper around Vlana. The fat Easterner clumped past them and set fire to his great black beard. Blue flames crawled up and flickered before his face and around his ears. He didn't put the fire out — with a wet towel he carried — until Essedinex hoarsely stage-whispered from his peephole, “That's enough. We've got ‘em again.” The length of the black beard had been halved. Actors make great sacrifices, which the yokels and even their co- mates rarely appreciate.
Fafhrd, dropping the last dozen feet, lighted in the high drift outside Godshall at the same instant Mara finished her downward climb. They faced each other calf-deep in crusted snow, across which the rising, slightly gibbous moon threw streaks of white glimmer and made shadow between them.
Fafhrd asked, “Mara, where did you hear that lie about me challenging Hringorl for the actress?”
“Faithless lecher!” she cried, punched him in the eye, and ran off toward the Tent of the Women, sobbing and crying, “I will tell my brothers! You'll see!”
Fafhrd jumped up and down, smothering a howl of pain, sprinted after her three steps, stopped, clapped snow to his pain-stabbed eye and, as soon as it was only throbbing, began to think.
He looked around with the other eye, saw no one, made his way to a clump of snow-laden evergreens on the edge of the precipice, concealed himself among them, and continued to think.
His ears told him that the Show was still going at a hot pace inside Godshall. There were laughs and cheers, sometimes drowning the wild drumming and fluting. His eyes — the hit one was working again — told him there was no one near him. They swiveled to the actors’ tents at that end of Godshall which lay nearest the new road south, and at the stables beyond them, and at the traders’ tents beyond the stables. Then they came back to the nearest tent: Vlana's hemicylindrical one. Crystals clothed it, twinkling in the moonlight, and a giant crystal flatworm seemed to be crawling across its middle just below the evergreen sycamore bough.
He slitheringly walked toward it across the bediamonded snow crust. The knot joining the lacings of its doorway was hidden in shadow and felt complex and foreign. He went to the back of the tent, loosened two pegs, went on belly through the crack like a snake, found himself amongst the hems of the skirts of Vlana's racked garments, loosely replaced the pegs, stood up, shook himself, took four steps and lay down on the pallet. A little heat radiated from a banked brazier. After a while he reached to the table and poured himself a cup of brandy.
At last he heard voices. They grew louder. As the lacings of the door were being unknotted and loosened, he felt for his knife and also prepared to draw a large fur rug over him.
Saying with laughter but also decision, “No, no, no,” Vlana swiftly stepped in backward over the slack lashings, held the door closed with one hand while she gave the lashings a tightening pull with the other, and glanced over her shoulder.
Her look of stark surprise was gone almost before Fafhrd marked it, to be replaced by a quick welcoming grin
