Later the Mouser won that one, both for distance and accuracy, making the latter cast so powerful that it not only holed the center of the bull's-eye into the padded target box but went through the heavier back of the latter as well. Cif begged for the battered slug as a souvenir, and he presented it to her with elaborate flourishes.
“ ‘Twould have pierced the cuirass of Mingsward!” Mikkidu fervently averred.
The archery contests were beginning, and Fafhrd was fitting the iron tang in the middle of his bow into the hardwood heading of the leather stall that covered half his left forearm, when he noted Afreyt approaching. She'd doffed her jacket, for the sun was beating down hotly, and was wearing a short-sleeved violet blouse, blue trousers wide-belted with a gold buckle, and purple-dyed short holiday boots. A violet handkerchief confined a little her pale gold hair. A worn green quiver with one arrow in it hung from her shoulder, and she was carrying a big longbow.
Fafhrd's eyes narrowed a bit at those, recalling Cif and the knife throwing. But, “You look like a pirate queen,” he greeted her, and then only inquired, “You're entering one of the contests?"
“I don't know,” she said with a shrug. “I'll watch along through the first."
“That bow,” he said casually, “looks to me to have a very heavy pull, and tall as you are, to be a touch long for you."
“Right on both counts,” she agreed, nodding. “It belonged to my father. You'd be truly startled, I think, to see how I managed to draw it as a stripling girl. My father would doubtless have spanked me soundly if he'd ever caught me at it, or rather lived long enough to do that."
Fafhrd lifted his eyebrows inquiringly, but the pirate queen vouchsafed no more. He won the distance shot handily but lost the target shot (through which Afreyt also watched) by a finger's breadth to Skor's other sub-lieutenant, Mannimark.
Then came the high shot, which was something special to Midsummer Day on Rime Isle and generally involved the loss of the contestant's arrow, for the target was a grassy, nearly vertical stretch on the upper half of the south face of Elvenhold. The north face of the slanting rock tower actually overhung the ground a little and was utterly barren, but the south face, though very steep, sloped enough to hold soil to support herbage, rather miraculously. The contest honored the sun, which reached this day his highest point in the heavens, while the contesting arrows, identified by colored rags of thinnest silk attached to their necks, emulated him in their efforts.
Then Afreyt stepped forward, kicked off her purple boots and rolled up her blue trousers above her knees. She plucked her arrow, which bore a violet silk, from her quiver and threw that aside. “Now I'll reveal to you the secret of my girlish technique,” she said to Fafhrd.
Quite rapidly she sat down facing the dizzy slope, set the bow to her bare feet, laying the arrow between her big toes and holding it and the string with both hands, rolled back onto her shoulders, straightened her legs smoothly, and loosed her shot.
It was seen to strike the slope near Fafhrd's yellow, skid a few yards higher, and then lie there, a violet taunt.
Afreyt, bending her legs again, removed the bow from her feet, and rolling sharply forward, stood up in the same motion.
“You practiced that,” Fafhrd said, hardly accusingly, as he finished screwing the hook back in the stall on his left arm.
She nodded. “Yes, but only for half a lifetime."
“The lady Afreyt's arrow didn't stick in,” Skullick pointed out. “Is that fair? A breath of wind might dislodge it."
“Yes, but there is no wind and it somehow got highest,” Groniger pointed out to him. “Actually, it's accounted lucky in the high shot if your arrow doesn't embed itself. Those that don't sometimes are blown down. Those that do stay up there are never recovered."
“Doesn't someone go up and collect the arrows?” Skullick asked.
“Scale Elvenhold? Have you wings?"
Skullick eyed the rock tower and shook his head sheepishly. Fafhrd overheard Groniger's remarks and gave the harbormaster an odd look but made no other comment at the time.
Afreyt invited both of them over to the red dogcarts and produced a jug of Ilthmar brandy, and they toasted her and Fafhrd's victories — the Mouser's too, and Cif's, who happened along.
“This'll put feathers in your wings!” Fafhrd told Groniger, who eyed him thoughtfully.
The children were playing with the white bearhounds. Gale had won the girls’ archery contest and May the short race.
Some of the younger children were becoming fretful, however, and shadows were lengthening. The games and contests were all over now, and partly as a consequence of that the drinking was heavying up as the last scraps of food were being eaten. Among the whole picnic group there seemed to be a feeling of weariness, but also (for those no longer very young but not yet old) new jollity, as though one party were ending and another beginning. Cif's and Afreyt's eyes were especially bright. Everyone seemed ready to go home, though whether to their own places or the Sea Wrack was a matter of age and temperament. There was a chill breath in the air.
Gazing east and down a little toward Salthaven and the harbor beyond, the Mouser opined that he could already see low mist gathering around the bare masts there, and Groniger confirmed that. But what was the small lone dark figure trudging up-meadow toward them in the face of the last low sunlight?
“Ourph, I'll be bound,” said Fafhrd. “What's led him to make the hike after all?"
But it was hard to be sure the big Northerner was right; the figure was still far off. Yet the signal for leaving had been given, things were gathered, the carts repacked, and all set out, most staying near the carts, from which drinks continued to be forthcoming. And perhaps these were responsible for a resumption of the morning's impromptu singing and dancing, though now it was not Fafhrd and the Mouser but others who took the lead in this. The Twain, after a whole day of behaving like old times, were slipping back under the curses they knew not of, the one's eyes forever on the ground, with the effect of old age unsure of its footing, the other's on the sky, indicative of old age's absentmindedness.
Fafhrd turned out to be right about the up-meadow trudger, but it was few words they got from Ourph as to why he'd made the hike he'd earlier begged off from.
The old Mingol said only to them, and to Groniger, who happed to be by, “The Good News is in.” Then, eyeing the Twain more particularly, “Tonight stay away from the Sea Wrack."
But he would answer nothing more to their puzzled queries save “I know what I know and I've told it,” and two cups of brandy did not loosen his Mingol tongue one whit.
The encounter put them behind the main party, but they did not try to catch up. The sun had set some time back, and now their feet and legs were lapped by the ground mist that already covered Salthaven and into which the picnic party was vanishing, its singing and strumming already sounding tiny and far off.
“You see,” Groniger said to Fafhrd, eyeing the twilit but yet starless sky while the mist lapped higher around them, “you won't be able to show me your bearded star tonight in any case."
Fafhrd nodded vaguely but made no other answer save to pass the brandy jug as they footed it along: four men walking deeper and deeper, as it were, into a white silence.
18
Cif and Afreyt, very much caught up in the gayety of the evening party, and bright-eyed drunk besides, were among the first to enter the Sea Wrack and encounter arresting silence of another sort, and almost instantly come under the strange, hushing spell of the scene there.
Fafhrd and the Mouser sat at their pet table in the low-walled booth playing backgammon, and the whole tavern frightenedly watched them while pretending not to. Fear was in the air.