“Ho! A divide splits the rock here, and winds inland.”
Then he walked on past it, rounding a granitic spur that ran down to the very water. Around it Cormac peered, and shook his head, for there was only more rock, and the sea, which ran out and out to turn dark and melt against the farther sky.
Water to the end of the world, the son of Eirrin mused without cheer, and he turned back to meet the others.
They straggled up the sand, huge Wulfhere still buckling on a swordbelt like an ox-harness. Knud limped a bit on a turned ankle, and Hakon Snorri’s son had wiped face and left arm clear of patches of skin on the sand in his violent sliding along it. Hrothgar swung his right arm, wincing, whilst he constantly worked the fingers of his left.
Twelve men had died, and nine had been blessed of their gods. All could walk, nor was there break or sprain among them. Cormac’s lower back nagged; he gave it no more heed than had it been a hangnail.
In horned helmets and steely-rustling mail over leg-hugging trews that bulged over the winding of their footgear, the little band entered the narrow declivity Cormac had found. Natural walls loomed high on either side, no further apart here than the length of two men, as though in some time long gone a giant had carved out this entry to the interior with two swift wedging strokes of an ax the size of the father of all oak trees.
They walked.
And they walked the more, while barren cliffs brooded over them and chilled them in grim shadow. The declivity widened, then narrowed. It widened again, and still again drew snug, while it turned a half-score times like a road that followed a cow’s meandering path. Nor did the nine men see aught of man or animal, not even the wild fowls they had heard.
Then they rounded another turn in that winding corridor roofed with sky and walled with somber basalt, and they came to a halt, and every man stared.
“Odin’s eye!”
“By Odin and the beard of Odin!”
“It-it be a jest of Loki, surely!”
“It’s to Valhalla we’ve come for all that, and still no cup-bearer in sight!”
Thus did those stout weapon-men make exclamation, while they stared.
Before them the slash in the rock widened into a canyon. The canyon became a valley, dotted with fallen rock ranging in size from pebbles to great deep-set chunks large as houses. The expanse of the valley itself was such that they could discern no details in the great dark wall of glowering basalt at its far end. But it was not that natural wall that gave them pause and filled them with awe.
Here were man-made walls.
Between the lofty natural fortress and the stranded sea-rovers, incredibly, stood no less than a castle, a towered and columned palace of spectacular porportion.
Chapter Two: The Castle of Atlantis
Great were their deeds, their passions,
and their sports;
With clay and stone
They piled on strath and shore
those mystic forts,
Not yet o’erthrown…
– D’Arcy McGee, The Celts
“Not in all my years of wandering have I seen the like of this,” Wulfhere said, and not without awe. “Cormac?”
The Gael shook his head. “I have seen the palace of Connacht’s king, and served a king in Leinster and another in Dalriada, and it’s the halls of their keeps these feet have trod. But that man-raised mountain would hold all Leinster’s palace… aye, and a tenth of the kingdom of King Gol of Dalriada in Alba as well!”
There was nervousness in the voice of Knud. “Who… raised this mighty keep-and why here?”
“No man alive,” Cormac mac Art said, very quietly.
Slitted of eye, the Gael was studying the lofty and massive pile of carved stone blocks with its weathered carvings and bronze trim. Broad was its entry and finely arched, the product of science and skill. Arched windows were impudently wide, in scorn of possible attackers.
“Nor was this set here,” Cormac mac Art said into their awed silence, “by those Romans who thought they were the chosen of the earth. Those carved decorations… it’s from the Celts we Gaels sprang, and from the men of long-vanished Cimmeria the Celts sprang, and from the rulers of the world time out of mind that the Cimmerians came-the world-spanning Atlanteans. Aye. Atlantis…”
The Danes looked at him curiously.
He was staring, as though seeing the throngs of golden men in their other-land garb, the stalwart folk of that long-ago land now gone forever.
“The great serpent,” he murmured, and the hair of more than one man bristled on his nape.
This was not the first time the scarred, sinister-faced Gael had seemed to slip away from them in this wise, as though he saw what they saw not, as though he spoke of a dream composed of pictures painted on the walls of his mind, and none other’s. His glacial eyes were invisible within their deep, slitted sockets as he stared at the visions of high civilization and artifice before them, and spoke on, quietly, in a droning voice.
“Kull,” he murmured. “Kull… An this great keep was not devised by the men of Atlantis and their slaves that were taken from the men and women of all the world, I am… not the son of Art na Morna, of Connacht, and him not the son of Conla Dair, son of Conal Crimthanni of the Briton wife of that Niall who was High-king over all Eirrin and gnawed at the heels of the Romans even so far as the land of the Gauls…”
“Cormac.”
“…and him the descendant of those worldspanning giants of old who sailed their high-prowed craft over all the seas of the world and came even here to…”
“Cormac,” Wulfhere repeated.
The murmuring Gael twitched, then jerked as though aroused from sleep. His hand dropped automatically to sword-pommel. He looked at the big Dane, and Cormac blinked.
“Why stand we here, when someone time out of mind has put this nice little house here for the cooling of our heels?”
The nervous men about him over-reacted by laughing uproariously.
They started forward, with Cormac suggesting, in a mutter that hardly disturbed the compression of his lips, that they stay not bunched. In that he was right, for when they were within fifty paces of the towering pair of columns flanking the door of that ancient keep, the arrows came.
Bow-loosed shafts came singing like angry wasps, but it was from the roundshields and surrounding stone they rattled, all save one. Wulfhere stared down at the slender stave that stood from his chest.
Then he laughed, and yanked it free of his mail, nor did blood come with it.
“Odin’s good eye,” he grunted, “the man who sped this feathered toy has the strength of a child of the Briton weaklings!”
More arrows whirred, but the little band was well scattered and ready now. They took what cover the terrain afforded, for after the long-dead men had erected the castle, boulders and stones and flattish shards of rock had come slithering and bounding down the cliffs to dot the plain.
Guthrum and Ivarr Ivarr’s son had their bows, and what few arrows they had saved from the greedy sea. They unlimbered bows, nocked feathered shafts, and glanced at Wulfhere. Each man squatted behind a tumbled boulder partially embedded in the earth, and held his bow sidewise. With a confident grin, Wulfhere muttered that he would rise to draw arrows-and reveal thus the positions of their speeders. Ivarr had picked up an enemy arrow; Wulfhere tossed his to Guthrum.
“Wulfhere.”
The voice was Cormac’s. Wulfhere turned questioning eyes on the Gael, who squatted behind a pile of shaly rock that had once been clay.
“Knud,” Cormac said, and when that man and, the giant leader were looking at him: “When the arrows come, Guthrum and Ivarr will both give them back a few. And Knud-you and I are the fleetest of foot. Shall we pretend demons are on our heels and run straight to the door of that keep, you to the leftward pillar?”
Knud grinned. “Aye,” he said, and inspected his buskins’ straps.
All were ready, and after a moment Wulfhere rose confidently to his feet
, his legs protected by the massy boulder behind which he’d ducked. He waved his great ax so that the sun caught its silvery head and splashed dazzle-fire from it.
“HO-O-OH!” the Skull-splitter bellowed, and back rolled his voice from the canyon’s walls. “We’ve seen how your CHILDREN loose arrows-be there MEN among ye too?”
Aye, and an arrow sounded ting and rattled off his horned helmet ere he’d bellowed the last few words. More came, and he struck one so hard with his shield that the little deathstick snapped in twain.
All saw now that there was more than one floor within that lofty castle of old, and that it was from two high windows the keening shafts came. Ivarr and Guthrum joined Wulfhere in standing, and strings thunked as they sent arrows into those same windows.
Like runners in one of the races at the Great Fair of Eirrin, Cormac mac Art and Knud the Swift went racing castle-ward. Knud ran straight, trusting to his well-known speed afoot; Cormac wove a bit, for he was none so fleet of foot as the leggy Dane to his left.
Brave or foolhardy, one of the defenders exposed himself to speed an arrow at the Dane and, in a swift movement of hand to waist and back to bow, another at the runner. Cormac felt the arrow strike his belt or the armour there. He grunted and continued running. The castle rushed closer to him, while Wulfhere continued his madman’s bellowing-and from ahead and above came a scream of horror and pain.
Cormac grinned wolfishly. An arrow from Guthrum or Ivarr had paid the defender for his temerity, then, and in steely coin!
Cormac mac Art reached the castle. Despite his efforts to slow his headlong pace, he slammed a shoulder into the pillar. It was strangely white despite its age, and iron hard. No more than a grunt escaped the Gael, who met Knud’s eyes across a distance of several feet. Knud was there first, naturally enough, and himself not winded. Now the two found that the doorway’s width was full the length of a man. Too, it was open. The door itself, massive and ironbound, hung by one huge hinge-strap. It had been chopped well by several axes.
The defenders within did not belong here, Cormac reasoned, but had found this prodigious keep the same as he and his companions, and had hacked and smashed their way inside.
“They’ve left the door open in welcome,” Knud said, showing the other man his drawn steel.
“Shields low and sword ready and in, you to the left.”
They entered thus, in crouching movements that emanated from their toes, both men poised to wheel, run, duck, or drop.
A blank wall of well-cut stone met them. To either side a stone stairway ran up to a landing, turned, and vanished behind a wall. A nice way to greet invaders, Cormac thought; were I on those steps and others entering, I’d hold the place for a day and a night and cover the steps with bodies and gore!
The two men exchanged a look. With a nod they went each to a separate stairwell. Cormac went up cautiously, close-pressed to the inner wall, step after step with sword out and ready. Knud, who was left-handed as well as fleet as a deer, ascended the other stairway in the same manner.
At the landing, Cormac gathered himself and took a deep breath. He bounded all the way across the platform, into the far corner. By the time he alighted there, his eyes were turned upward and his shield covered his crouching body from collarbones to crotch. He’d had experience with bow-men, and good ones, and knew they seldom drove shaft at the more difficult target of head or throat, but at the midsection or below; a man with an arrow through his leg was more likely than not completely out of any fight.
But he was staring up an empty stairwell, and Knud had not been so clever.
Cormac heard him scream, but could not see the other landing. He soon saw the Dane nevertheless, for he came bumping and rolling back down the stairs. An arrow stood from his guts. He struck the floor face down, and a tent appeared in the back of his mailcoat as the weight of his own limp body against the floor drove the arrow all the way through him.
Without a sound, Cormac mac Art bounded up the second set of narrow stone steps. Passing a corridor to his right, he charged straight ahead. On the floor, in a shaft of sunlight from the broad window, a man lay still, with an arrow through his throat. Ivarr or Guthrum had shot well, at a man who had shown them only head and shoulders!
Another archer, crouched by that same window, was already whipping around and loosing a feathered shaft at the charging invader.
Cormac spun his left arm, trusting to the shield to find the rushing arrow. He was rewarded by the sound of ironshod wood ringing off ironbound buckler. Then his right arm came whipping around in a grey blur. He had a vision of enormous blue eyes beneath a small cap. of a helmet, and then eyes and the face in which they were set leaped high and were gone, as his blade sent the head flying from its shoulders-and out the window.
There was no time for so much as a grim smile at the, sound of an exultant cry from his comrades outside.
“COMMMMMMME!” the son of Art of Eirrin shouted, and then he was slamming his shoulder against a wall. From it dangled dusty tatters of an eons-old tapestry that had once lent beauty to these somber basaltic halls. From the corner of his eye Cormac had seen the appearance of another man, at the top of the steps at the far end of the broad corridor.
He wore a winged helmet, and he held a bow with arrow nocked. The string snapped home and the arrow came too fast for Cormac to see it, at this close range. His shield was angle-held, and the arrow was deflected with a ring and a rap of its tail that was followed instantly by the sound of its glancing off the wall to his left.
Already another arrow was being fitted to string.
Only an idiot charged an archer at such proximity. Had he been a bit closer, only an idiot of a bow-man would have tried to stop attack with an arrow. As it was, the other man had the better of it, and Cormac adopted an uncoventional defense and attack-born of desperation.
With all his might he hurled his sword at the archer.
At the same time, he lunged wildly leftward, toward that gaping window. Even then he was mindful of keeping his buckler betwixt him and the enemy.
It was unnecessary; the disconcerted yeoman sent his shaft on a wild upward angle, in his attempt to dodge the flung sword. He did not succeed, nor did it do him harm. But in the seconds he took to recover from that ridiculous “attack,” his foe covered yards of stone floor.
Cormac’s shield smashed into the other man’s breast and face and the Gael’s dagger drove into his belly, its impact heightened by the speed of his charge and muscles so powerful that mail parted like paper. The dagger’s hilt clanked against steel scales.
With a deliberate twist of his wrist, Cormac jerked the blade back and swung the shield straight up, away from the clawing hand that sought to grasp it.
Nose smashed and belly gutted, the wide-eyed man in the winged helmet staggered back one step, then two. The third time his foot came down not on floor, but on empty air, and then the topmost step.
The man Cormac recognized as of the Norse went tumbling and clattering and clanging down the stone stairwell.
“What’s this?” a great voice came bellowing up. “Cormac sends us a gift of welcome?” And there was a chunk. That, the Gael knew, was Wulfhere’s ax, and they’d never know which of them had slain Knud’s slayer.
Knotty-legged Wulfhere rounded the corner of the landing, and then Hakon and Ivarr, and from behind himself Cormac heard others of his Danish companions, who had come by the steps he had chosen. For the space of several seconds, all stood in that ancient corridor and stared at each other, in wondering silence.
A great castle the size of a Roman circus and the height of an oak lofty enough for the highest Druidic rites-and but three men to defend?
Aye, for by the time the sun had moved across the sky the length of two joints of Cormac’s finger, the eight men had assured themselves that the castle was empty of life other than their own. But not of other things…
“It be the hiding-hie and treasure-keep of a band of rievers,” Cormac muttered, as they stood
to stare with greed-bright eyes at what they’d found. “And them off a-roving. They came upon this place as we did, and made it theirs, and left three of their number as guards. Against nothing, for we should not be here but for that treacherous wind.”
“And they’ve gone a-raiding again,” Wulfhere murmured.
They gazed at the large room piled and strewn with bales of fine fabric and, cloaks, and arms, and gold and gems that gave off their dull light in the dimness, and they nodded.
“Touch,” Wulfhere said, and stepped past the Gael. His word was a warning and assurance that he meant not to grab for himself.
The bearded Dane scooped up and held aloft a string of shining pearls the colour of milk and the size of large peas. There were full thirty on the strand. He brandished them, shaking his head.
“From far and far came these beauties, by Odin, and it’s a ship and arms they’d buy, and two women for a month as well!”
“Find me the women!” Ivarr called.
“Find me the ship,” Cormac said darkly, and the laughter died.
So too had Knud died, and the three men from Norge, nor could they be sent their way properly into the world of grim shades or high joy. Their laden bodies were removed to the sunlight, each wrapped in rich cloth from the booty. With more of that dear fabric that was surely for the cloaks and robes of kings and their women, the Danes and their Gaelic comrade wiped and mopped up the blood. Wulfhere was unyielding: no disporting of themselves until the dead were away. And so all of them carried those four in their purple and scarlet wrappings back along the valley, and along the narrow defile that opened into it, and far down the beach. And on their return, despite their anxiousness, they obliterated their own tracks.
Then did the eight return to that magickal castle from a time long gone, for they had found other booty there as well: food, and ale. There was even a small quantity of wine. And the fabulous room that might have contained an army of hundreds.
In it, their voices echoing, they ate, and drank. There was many a growled admonition from Wulfhere and Cormac against gluttony in the matter of wine and ale, for those who had first found this unlikely place might return at any time. Nor would their number be so few as eight.
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