Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,61
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?”
“How can you ask that?” the grizzled Rimelander rejoined, a frown of honest puzzlement furrowing his brow. “It was all so supremely logical, clearly and coldly reasoned. Like two and two makes four. How can one point to one part of arithmetic as being more compelling than another?”
“True, true,” the Mouser echoed reluctantly, and ventured to add, “I suppose it was the same sort of rigorous logic