Fritz Leiber: Swords and Deviltry

“Your mother!”

Stooping at the entry, Fafhrd finally did stop to look back. “I owe my mother many duties,” he said. “I owe you none, as yet.”

“Vlana, he must leave. It's the one ,” Essedinex stage-whispered hoarsely. Meanwhile he was shoving at Fafhrd, but for all the youth's slenderness, he might as well have been trying to push a tree off of its roots.

“Are you afraid of him who comes?” Vlana was buttoning up her dress now.

Fafhrd looked at her thoughtfully. Then, without replying in any way whatever to her question, he ducked through the entry and stood up, waiting the approach through the persistent mist of a man in whose face anger was gathering.

This man was as tall as Fafhrd, half again as thick and wide, and about twice as old. He was dressed in brown sealskin and amethyst-studded silver except for the two massive gold bracelets on his wrists and the gold chain about his neck, marks of a pirate chief.

Fafhrd felt a touch of fear, not at the approaching man, but at the crystals which were now thicker on the tents than he recalled them being when he had carried Vlana in. The element over which Mor and her sister witches had most power was cold— whether in a man's soup or loins, or in his sword or climbing rope, making them shatter. He often wondered whether it was Mor's magic that had made his own heart so cold. Now the cold would close in on the dancer. He should warn her, except she was civilized and would laugh at him.

The big man came up.

“Honorable Hringorl,” Fafhrd greeted softly.

For reply, the big man aimed a backhanded uppercut at Fafhrd with his near arm.

Fafhrd leaned sharply away, slithering under the blow, and then simply walked off the way he had first come.

Hringorl, breathing heavily, glared after him for a couple of heartbeats, then plunged into the hemicylindrical tent.

Hringorl was certainly the most powerful man in the Snow Clan, Fafhrd reflected, though not one of its chiefs because of his bullying ways and defiances of custom. The Snow Women hated, but found it hard to get a hold of him, since his mother was dead and he had never taken a wife, satisfying himself with concubines he brought back from his piratings.

From wherever he'd been inconspicuously standing, the black-turbaned and black-moustached man came up quietly to Fafhrd. “That was well done, my friend. And when you brought in the dancer.”

Fafhrd said impassively, “You are Vellix the Venturer.”

The other nodded. “Bringing brandy from Kleg Nar to this mart. Will you sample the best with me?”

Fafhrd said, “I am sorry, but I have an engagement with my mother.”

“Another time then,” Vellix said easily.

“Fafhrd!”

It was Hringorl who called. His voice was no longer angry. Fafhrd turned. The big man stood by the tent, then came striding up when Fafhrd did not move. Meanwhile, Vellix faded back and away in a fashion as easy as his speech.

“I'm sorry, Fafhrd,” Hringorl said gruffly. “I did not know you had saved the dancer's life. You have done me a great service. Here.” He unclasped from his wrist one of the heavy gold bracelets and held it out.

Fafhrd kept his hands at his sides. “No service whatever,” he said. “I was only saving my mother from committing a wrong action.”

“You've sailed under me,” Hringorl suddenly roared, his face reddening though he still grinned somewhat, or tried to. “So you'll take my gifts as well as my orders.” He caught hold of Fafhrd's hand, pressed the weighty torus into it, closed Fafhrd's lax fingers on it, and stepped back.

Instantly Fafhrd knelt, saying swiftly, “I am sorry, but I may not take what I have not rightly won. And now I must keep an engagement with my mother.” Then he swiftly rose, turned, and walked away. Behind him, on an unbroken crust of snow, the golden bracelet gleamed.

He heard Hringorl's snarl and choked-back curse, but did not look around to see whether or not Hringorl picked up his spurned gratuity, though he did find it a bit difficult not to weave in his stride or duck his head a trifle, in case Hringorl decided to throw the massive wristlet at his skull.

Shortly he came to the place where his mother was sitting amongst seven Snow Women, making eight in all. They stood up. He stopped a yard short. Ducking his head and looking to the side, he said, “Here I am, Mor.”

“You took a long while,” she said. “You took too long.” Six heads around her nodded solemnly. Only Fafhrd noted, in the blurred edge of his vision, that the seventh and slenderest Snow Woman was moving silently backward.

“But here I am,” Fafhrd said.

“You disobeyed my command,” Mor pronounced coldly. Her haggard and once beautiful face would have looked very unhappy, had it not been so proud and masterful.

“But now I am obeying it,” Fafhrd countered. He noted that the seventh Snow Woman was now silently running, her great white cloak a-stream, between the home tents toward the high, white forest that was Cold Corner's boundary everywhere that Trollstep Canyon wasn't.

“Very well,” Mor said. “And now you will obey me by following me to the dream tent for ritual purification.”

“I am not defiled,” Fafhrd announced. “Moreover, I purify myself after my own fashion, one also agreeable to the gods.”

There were clucks of shocked disapproval from all Mor's coven. Fafhrd had spoken boldly, but his head was still bent, so that he did not see their faces, and their entrapping eyes, but only their long-robed white forms, like a clump of great birches.

Mor said, “Look me in the eyes.”

Fafhrd said, “I fulfill all the customary duties of a grown son, from food-winning to sword-guarding. But as far as I can ascertain, looking my mother in the eyes is not one of those duties.”

“Your father always obeyed me,” Mor said ominously.

“Whenever he saw a tall mountain, he climbed her, obeying no one but himself,” Fafhrd contradicted.

“Yes, and died doing so!” Mor cried, her masterfulness controlling grief and anger without hiding them.

Fafhrd said hardly, “Whence came the great cold that shattered his rope and pick on White Fang?”

Amidst the gasps of her coven, Mor pronounced in her deepest voice, “A mother's curse, Fafhrd, on your disobedience and evil thinking!”

Fafhrd said with strange eagerness, “I dutifully accept your curse, Mother.”

Mor said, “My curse is not on you, but on your evil imaginings.”

“Nevertheless, I will forever treasure it,” Fafhrd cut in. “And now, obeying myself, I must take leave of you, until the wrath-devil has let you go.”

And with that, head still bent down and away, he walked rapidly toward a point in the forest east of the home tents, but west of the great tongue of forest that stretched south almost to Godshall. The angry hissings of Mor's coven followed him, but his mother did not cry out his name, nor any word at all. Fafhrd would almost rather that she had.

Youth heals swiftly, on the skin-side. By the time Fafhrd plunged into his beloved wood without jarring a single becrystalled twig, his senses were alert, his neck-joint supple, and the outward surface of his inner being as cleared for new experience as the unbroken snow ahead. He took the easiest path, avoiding bediamonded thorn bushes to left and huge pine-screened juttings of pale granite to right.

He saw bird tracks, squirrel tracks, day-old bear tracks; snow birds snapped their black beaks at red snowberries; a furred snow-snake hissed at him, and he would not have been startled by the emergence of a dragon with ice-crusted spines.

So he was in no wise amazed when a great high-branched pine opened its snow-plastered bark and showed him its dryad — a merry, blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl's face, a dryad no more than seventeen years old. In fact, he had been expecting such an apparition ever since he had noted the seventh Snow Woman in flight.