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it will cumber you."
    "Not at all, thanks. Discomfort will be slight, beside the comfort of having it handy."
    "I assure you, where we swim it's wide and deep, and there's nothing dangerous. Out in the estuary are concentrated the only dangerous flora or fauna in our—"
    "Forgive me, Minim. Bluntly, I am obligated by a private vow to myself, never to find myself swordless where a need might arise. I don't intend any insult to your river. Allow an anxious traveller his odd charms and rites."
    "Nimmy lay off our friend!" cried Pandagon. "Manners! Let's hit the water, lads! In!"
    How like a schoolboy he still was, this head priest of all North Hagia! Yet the river was indeed glorious. Its wide flux was all hammered pewter, sunpricked with sapphire and silver, and diving into the broad, smooth surge of its flowing coolth felt like having ten years of age skinned off me in a single slash. We porpoised up new-fleshed into the morning light.
    "We ride downstream just a ways," called Paanja Pandagon, "then we steady-stoke against the current, then when we're breathed and limbered, we swim back upstream."
    Slice it however, I disliked swimming naked in dark water in the spidergod's country. I was a while forgetting the tickle of nasty possibilities against my footsoles.
    But at length, forget I did. Hagia, heaped green and bosomy to either side of the wide, silver waterway—she was fair for all her failings! Never again do I expect to see such lush beauty made the theater of such an ugly Death as was soon to hold sway here.
    This sustained, methodical swimming against the current was an inspired means of turning brute exercise into recreation. We were all working away, well spread, each privately savoring his task, when Minim surprised me by declaiming quite impressively, spacing their rhythm to his labor's, a quatrain of the pennysheet verses I'd just sold to Paanja.
    "Let the A'Rak's . . . web be woven . . . that ghost web he . . . was wont to weave . . . of souls torn from . . . bodies cloven . . . by his fangs that . . . all things cleave!"
    "Did you know it already . . . that ballad, good Minim?"
    "I'm just a quick study. . . . but what could it mean ?. . . . Does it mean any thing? . . . No offense."
    "None taken!. . . . Of course you doubt! . . . I approached you . . . for profit! . . . But I didn't write it! . . . I don't know what it means . . . It sounds very much . . . like a threat though . . ."
    We swam then in silence. Never could I have believed I could find such physical pleasure in the waters of a land so deeply wormholed and blighted with horror beneath its fair surfaces! When we climbed out at last, we were laughing like youths at inane jollities, merely glad at our strength and refreshment and the glory of the sun on the green hills around us. We each found a big, comfy, sunwarmed boulder to lie on. The sun lavished light on us like a largess of gold coin. I felt the happy moment was, distinctly, an omen. If I survived, my enterprise here was meant to bathe me in gold.
    But at length our silence grew tenser with unspoken thoughts of the problems at hand, until at last Paanja said, "Speak it out for us, Nimmy. Let us hear the lines again."
    And Minim recited them without preamble. Just at the first, it seemed he wanted to put a burlesque solemnity in his rendering, to parody the lines, but his voice soon turned grave:
     
Let the A'Rak's web be woven
that ghostweb he was wont to weave
of souls torn from bodies cloven
by his fangs that all things cleave!
     
Let him stab and slay and tear them,
souls alive from bodies slain.
Let him weave those ghosts and wear them—
for one doth come to work him pain.
     
Heap the smoking meat thou'st plundered!
Weave, oh A'Rak! Weave it strong!
for such web can scarce be sundered,
And thou'lt need its shield ere long!
     
When thou'rt clothed in Slaughter's garment.
Wilt thou not be bravely clad?
Staunch the fabric spun from torment,
And bright the dyes by victims bled!
     
But