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 that wrinkled her nose comically. She turned away from him, carefully drew the lacings tight, and spent some time tying a knot on the inside. Then she came over and knelt beside him where he lay, her body erect from her knees. There was no grin now as she looked down at him, only a composed, enigmatic thoughtfulness, which he sought to match. She was wearing the hooded robe of her Mingol costume.
“So you changed your mind about a reward,” she said quietly but matter-of-factly. “How do you know that I too may not have changed mine since?”
Fafhrd shook his head, replying to her first statement. Then, after a pause, he said, “Nevertheless, I have discovered that I desire you.”
Vlana said, “I saw you watching the show from the gallery. You almost stole it, you know — I mean the show — Who was the girl with you? Or was it a youth? I couldn't be quite sure.”
Fafhrd did not answer her inquiries. Instead he said, “I also wish to ask you questions about your supremely skillful dancing and… and acting in loneliness.”
“Miming.” She supplied the word.
“Miming, yes. And I want to talk to you about civilization."
“That's right, this morning you asked me how many languages I knew,” she said, looking straight across him at the wall of the tent. It was clear that she too was a thinker. She took the cup of brandy out of his hand, swallowed half of what was left, and returned it to him.
“Very well,” she said, at last looking down at him, but with unchanged expression. “I will give you your desire, my dear boy. But now is not the time. First, I must rest and gather strength. Go away and return when the star Shadah sets. Wake me if I slumber.”
“That's an hour before dawn,” he said, looking up at her. “It will be a chilly wait for me in the snow."
“Don't do that,” she said quickly. “I don't want you three-quarters frozen. Go where it's warm. To stay awake, think of me. Don't drink too much wine. Now go.”