by two glum louts with quarterstaves. The Mouser felt Hilsa and Rill hesitate, but crying in a loud voice, “All honor to the council!” he swept them inside with him, Ourph and Mikkidu ducking in after.
The room inside was larger and somewhat more lofty than the one at the Salt Herring, but was gray-timbered like it, built of wrecks. And it had no fireplace, but was inadequately warmed by two smoking braziers and lit by torches that burned blue and sad (perhaps there were bronze nails in them), not merrily golden-yellow like Rill's. The main article of furniture was a long heavy table, at one end of which Clif and Afreyt sat, looking their haughtiest. Drawn away from them toward the other end were seated ten large sober Isle-men of middle years, Groniger in their midst, with such doleful, gloomily indignant, outraged looks on their faces that the Mouser burst out laughing. Other Islers crowded the walls, some women among them. All turned on the newcomers’ faces of mingled puzzlement and disapproval.
Groniger reared up and thundered at him, “You dare to laugh at the gathered authority of Rime Isle? You, who come bursting in accompanied by women of the streets and your own trespassing crewmen?”
The Mouser managed to control his laughter and listen with the most open, honest expression imaginable, injured innocence incarnate.
Groniger went on, shaking his finger at the other, “Well, there he stands, councilors. a chief receiver of the misappropriated gold, perchance even of the gold cube of honest dealing. The man who came to us out of the south with tales of magic storms and day turned night and vanished hostile vessels and a purported Mingol invasion — he who has, as you perceive, Mingols amongst his crew — the man who paid for his dockage in Rime Isle gold!”
Cif stood up at that, her eyes blazing, and said, “Let him speak, at least, and answer this outrageous charge, since you won't take my word.”
A councilman rose beside Groniger. “Why should we listen to a stranger's lies?”
Groniger said, “I thank you, Dwone.”
Afreyt got to her feet. “No, let him speak. Will you hear nothing but your own voices?”
Another councilman got up.
Groniger said, “Yes. Zwaakin?”
That one said, “No harm to hear what he has to say. He may convict himself out of his own mouth.” Cif glared at Zwaaken and said loudly, “Tell them, Mouser!”
At that moment the Mouser, glancing at Rill's torch (which seemed to wink at him) felt a godlike power invading and possessing him to the tips of his fingers and toes — nay, to the end of his every hair. Without warning — in fact, without knowing he was going to do it at all he ran forward across the room and sprang atop the table where its sides were clear toward Cif's end.
He looked around compellingly at all (a sea of cold and hostile faces, mostly), gave them a searching stare, and then — well, as the godlike force possessed every part of him utterly, his mind was perforce driven completely out of himself, the scene swiftly darkened, he heard himself beginning to say something in a mighty voice, but then he (his mind) fell irretrievably into an inner darkness deeper and blacker than any sleep or swound.
Then (for th~ Mouser) no time at all passed… or an eternity.
His return to awareness (or rebirth, rather, it seemed that massive a transition) began with whirling yellow lights and grinning. open-mouthed, exalted faces mottling the inner darkness, and the sense of a great noise on the edge of the audible and of a resonant voice speaking words of power, and then without other warning the whole bright and deafening scene materialized with a rush and a roar and he was standing insolently tall on the massive council table with what felt like a wild (or even demented) smile on his lips, while his left fist rested jauntily on his hip and his right was whirling around his head the golden queller (or cube of square dealing, he reminded himself) on its cord. And all around him every last Rimelander — councilmen, guards, common fishers, women (and Cif, Afrayt, Rill, Hilsa, Mikkidu, needless to say) — was staring at him with rapturous adoration (as if he were a god or legendary hero at least) and standing on their feet (some jumping up and down) and cheering him to the echo! Fists pounded the table, quarterstaves thudded the stony floor resoundingly. While torchmen whirled their sad flambeaux until they flamed as yellow-bright as Rill's.
Now in the name of all the gods at once, the Mouser asked himself, continuing however to grin, Whatever did I tell or promise them to put them all in such a state? In the fiend's name, what?
Groniger swiftly mounted the other end of the table, boosted by those beside him, waved for silence, and as soon as he'd got a little of that commodity assured the Mouser in a great feelingful voice, advancing to make himself heard, “We'll do it — oh, we'll do it! I myself will lead out the Rimic contingent, half our armed citizenry, across the Deathlands to Fafhrd's aid against the Widdershins, while nwone and Zwaaken will man the armed fishing fleet with the other half and follow you in
And with that the hall resounded with cries of “Death to the Mingols!” “Victory!” and other cheers the Mouser couldn't quite make out. As the noise passed its peak, Groniger shouted, “Wine!
Let's pledge our allegiance!” while Zwaaken cried to the Mouser, “Summon your crewmen to celebrate with us — they've the freedom of Rime Isle now and forever!” (Mikkidu was soon dispatched.)
The Mouser looked helplessly at Cif — though still maintaining his grin (by now he must look quite glassy- eyed, he thought) — but she only stretched her hand toward him, crying, flush-cheeked, “I'll sail with you!” while Afreyt beside her proclaimed, “I'll go ahead across the Deathlands to join Fafhrd, bringing god Odin with me!”
Groniger heard that and called to her, “I and my men will give you whatever help with that you need, honored council-lady,” which told the Mouser that besides all else he'd got the atheistical fishermen believing in gods — Odin and Loki, at any rate. What had he told them?
He let Cif and Afreyt draw him down, but before he would begin to question them, Cif had thrown her arms around him, hugged him tight, and was kissing him full on the lips. This was wonderful, something he'd been dreaming of for three months and more (even though he'd pictured it happening in somewhat more private circumstances) and when she at last drew back, starry-eyed, it was another sort of question he was of a mind to ask her, but at that moment tall Afreyt grabbed him and soon was kissing him as soundly.
This was undeniably pleasant, but it took away from Cif's kiss, made it less personal, more a sign of congratulations and expression of overflowing enthusiasm than a mark of special affection. His Cif-dream faded down. And when Afreyt was done with him, he was at once surrounded by a press of wellwishers, some of whom wanted to embrace him also.
From the corner of his eye he noted Hilsa and Rill bussing all and sundry — really, all these kisses had no meaning at all, including Cif's of course, he'd been a fool to think differently — and at one point he could have sworn he saw Groniger dancing a jig. Only old Ourph, for some reason, did not join in the merriment. Once he caught the old Mingol looking at him sadly.
And so the celebration began that lasted half the night and involved much drinking and eating and impromptu cheering and dancing and parading round and about and in and out. And the longer it went on, the more grotesque the cavorting and footstamping marches got, and all of it to the rhythm of the vindictive little rhyme that still went on resounding deep in the Mouser's mind, the tune to which everything was beginning to dance: “Storm clouds thicken round Rime Isle. Nature brews her blackest bile. Monsters quicken, nightmares foal, niss and nicor, drow and troll.” Those lines in particular seemed to the Mouser to describe what was happening just now — a birth of monsters. (But where were the trolls?) And so on (the rhyme) until its doomful and monstrously compelling end: “Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below, never draw an easy breath, suffer an unending death, everlasting pain and strife, everlasting death in life. Mingol madness ever burn! Never peace again return!”
And through it all the Mouser maintained his perhaps glassy-eyed smile and jaunty, insolent air of supreme self-confidence, he answered one repeated question with, “No, I'm no orator — never had any training — though I've always liked to talk,” but inwardly he seethed with curiosity. As soon as he got a chance. he asked Cif, “Whatever did I say to bring them around, to change their minds so utterly?”
“Why, you should know,” she told him.
“But tell me in your own words,” he said.
She deliberated. “You appealed entirely to their feelings, to their emotions,” she said at last, simply. “It was wonderful.”
“Yes, but what exactly did I say? What were my words?”
“Oh, I can't tell you,” she protested. “It was so all of a piece that no one thing stood out — I've quite forgotten the details. Content you, it was perfect.”
Later on he ventured to inquire of Groniger, “At what point did my arguments begin to persuade you?”
