Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,75
“So you can see not even my vanity is involved ―whatever it was, it was Loki's speech, not mine ― so do you now tell me truth about it, sparing me nothing.”
She looked at him with a wondering smile and said, “Well, I was puzzled as to what you could have said to Mikkidu to make him so head-in-the-clouds happy ― and am not sure I understand that even now. But, yes, my experience was, I now confess, identical with his ― and not even the taking of an unknown drink to excuse it. My mind went blank, time passed me by, and I heard not a word you said, except those last directions about Afreyt's expedition and the whirlpool. But everyone was cheering and so I pretended to have heard, not wanting to injure your feelings or feel myself a fool. Oh, I was a sheep! Once I was minded to confess my lapse to Afreyt, and now I wish I had, for she had a strange look on her then ― But I didn't. You think, as I do now, that she also ...?”
The Mouser nodded decisively.“I think that not one soul of them heard a word to remember of the main body of my ― or, rather, Loki's ― talk, but later they all pretended to have done so, just like so many sheep indeed ― and I the black goat leading them on. So only Loki knows what Loki said and we sail out upon an unknown course against the Mingols, taking all on trust.”
“What to do now?” she asked wonderingly.
Looking into her eyes with a tentative smile and a slight shrug that was at once acquiescent and comical, he said, “Why, we go on, for it is your course and I am committed to it.”
Flotsam gave a long lurch then, with a wave striking along her side, and it nudged Cif against him, and their arms went around each other, and their lips met thrillingly ― but not for long, for he must hurry on deck, and she too, to discover (or rather confirm) what had befallen.
Flotsam progressed out of Salthaven harbor and the salt cliffs lee to the Outer Sea where the east wind smote them more urgently and the swells and the sunlight struck their canvas and deck. The Mouser took the tiller from sad-faced Ourph and that old one and Gib and Mikkidu set sail for the first eastward tack. And one by one Sea Hawk and the weirdly accoutered fishing boats repeated their maneuver, following Flotsam out.
* * * *
That selfsame east wind which blew west across the southern half of Rime Isle, and against which Flotsam labored, farther out at sea was hurrying on the horse-ships of the Sunwise Mingols. The grim galleys, each with its bellying square sail, made a great drove of ships, and now and again a stallion screamed in its bow-cage as they plunged ahead through the waves, which cascaded spray through the black, crazily-angled bars. All eyes strained west ― ahead, and it would have been hard to say which eyes glared the more madly, those of the fur-clad, grinningly white-toothed men, or those of long-faced, grimacingly white-toothed beasts.
On the poop of the flagship this frenzy looked in a more philosophical direction, where Gonov discoursed with his witch-doctor and attendant sages propounding such questions as, “Is it sufficient to burn a city to the ground, or must it also be trampled to rubble?” and contemplating such answers as, “Most meritorious is to pound it to sand, aye, to fine loam, without burning at all.”
While the strong westwind that blew east across the northern half of the island (with a belt of squalls and fierce eddies between the two winds) was hurrying on from west across trackless ocean the like fleet of the Widdershins Mingols, where Edumir had proposed this query to his philosophers: “Is death by suicide in the first charge, hurling oneself upon the foeman's virgin spear, to be preferred to death by self-administered poison in the last charge?”
He hearkened to their closely-reasoned answers and to the counter-question: “Since death is so much to be desired, surpassing the delights of love and mushroom wine, how did our all-noble and revered ancestors ever survive to procreate us?” and at last observed, his white-rimmed eyes gazing east yearningly, “That is all theory. On Rime Isle we will once more put these recondite matters to the test of practice.”
While high above all winds Khahkht in his icy