“Nice of ye not to carve up his shield, old Wolf!”
“It was on you my mind was, o’course. I fear his armour won’t be fitting you, though.”
Wulfhere chuckled. “Well, it seems to be leaky in the area of the stomach, anyhow. Mayhap this.” But no, the helmet would not encompass his head. He tossed it aside. “Where be your ship?”
“You know. Down below the spur of rock that cuts down to sea’s edge and ends this pretty beach.” “Umm. How, many men have we, Cormac?”
“I have ten, not counting Samaire-and I do. The Picts robbed me of a few.”
“Samaire!” But Wulfhere said no more. If he refrained from asking aught of mac Art-such as what he was doing traveling asea from Eirrin with the princess he’d taken so much trouble to convey there-perhaps Cormac would ask no more questions either.
“There be two-and-twenty with Bedwyr-oh.” Wulfhere looked down at his former death-watcher, and his big strong teeth flashed in a grin. “One-and-twenty, and Bedwyr. Good odds, surely: one for each of your men and seven for me. Ye can handle five, Crom’s own son?”
“Four is what your accounting left for me, ye rapacious barbarian.”
Wulfhere shrugged. “Four, then. Whatever. Saw you their ship?”
“Hours ago.” Cormac pointed; Wulfhere nodded.
The beached longship of the Britons, so painstakingly hide-covered, lay ten tens of paces up the strand. Cormac had come along the beach from the opposite direction. It was the ship he’d had as goal in his reconnoitering; his discovery of Wulfhere and Bledyn had been accidental.
Wulfhere nodded. “Bedwyr left two men aboard.” The Dane scratched under his beard.
“Two. Apparently they be earless!”
Wulfhere made a foul noise. “You know how it is with men fit for naught but crewing, when their chief’s not at hand to bid them scratch their itches. They were drunk hours ago.” Having recalled that sore subject to his mind and his friend’s, Wulfhere looked away. “That leaves a score for us to brace. Tonight, or by ambush on the morrow, when they return from the castle.”
“Mmm. Ye recall how we hid the Norsemen’s ship, when last we bode here?”
Wulfhere’s teeth flashed. “Aye! Your men are with your ship?”
“Aye.”
The Dane hefted his new ax. “Do you fetch them then, old friend, whilst I stroll up the beach and discuss possession of yon ship with its present occupants.”
“Ye’ve no armour man, and no helmet, and ye be wet and muscle-tight from long strain, and…”
Cormac’s voice trailed off. Wulfhere had turned to look at him.
The Gael read what was in those blue eyes, and he understood. Wulfhere had lost much face, and nearly his life. Helpless as a hare in a Dumnonion snare, he’d had to be rescued from death, and that rescuer had not so much as left him Bledyn for the venting of his spleen and the betterment of his sore-wounded pride. Wulfhere wanted atonement, and needed it. Those two Britons on the beached ship would be only a beginning, but his bracing them alone, Cormac knew, would help. Too, he knew that this giant Dane with his prodigious reach and mighty thews was a match for any five men… and probably eight of Britain.
Besides, Wulfhere had said the two men were drunk.
With a nod, Cormac turned without a word. He set off back along the moon-sparkled strand, to bring his crew for the floating and concealing of the Briton ship.
Chapter Four:
The Castle of Atlantis
The ship of the Britons, its two guardians afloat facedown, was concealed near the Irish vessel. The latter, just in case, was hidden even more thoroughly.
This island south of Britain was a bare and inhospitable one, despite the incredible structure inland. There was only one slender strip of sandy, sparkling beach that split a coast otherwise stony and high and forbidding, and… of rock. Brooding granite rose like a bulwark just back of the beach, and the darker stone too of basalt, igneous rock that was like petrified sponge.
Their visit here before had established it: Samaireheim was one great wall of stone like a giant’s castle. Even its coast consisted mainly of precipitous stony faces, totally without promise. It seemed minded to wear an attractive face, like an aged and tired tavern-doxy: the dark, high coastline gleamed jewel-like here and there with veins of lipartite and studs of twinkling quartz.
They were a lie, as the sandy beach was a lie. There was no life on this island of stone, no hint of green.
Into the wall of rock ran a slim declivity, like an unceiled tunnel that was braced on either side by nature’s high-looming walls. So narrow was the passageway in places that two men could not walk abreast, while elsewhere it widened to accommodate five. In addition it wound about, as though some whimsical god had raised walls on either side of a path laid out by a meandering cow, time out of mind.
Well back within the grim shadow of the barren cliff-walls, that natural corridor widened to become a canyon, which debouched into a valley carelessly strewn with pebbles and boulders ranging up to the size of houses in Eirrin.
Save for the winding natural “hallway,” the canyon was bounded about by rocky cliffs, more often sheer and unscalable than not. Yet at its far end, against that rearward cliff that dropped sheer to the sea, rose other walls: man-made walls. The castle of Atlantis. There last night had slept the Britons; from there today they must come.
Cormac and his nine men, with Wulfhere and Samaire and Bas the Druid, awaited them. Their vigil had been taken up before dawn. When the men of Britain came along the narrow, twisting defile, doubtless bearing booty, half their number would be down ere they could draw steel. Ambush was the only sensible course when twelve men sought to best a score; the druid, of course, would not take up arms.
But the sun was high, and the Britons had not come.
Long and too frequently had Cormac stayed his companions. Now he, too, was beyond curbing his natural impatience. The sun’s light should have brought the foe happily along the natural hallway walled with sombre basalt and roofed with naught but cloud-strewn sky. Surely they were anxious to see Wulfhere’s corpse… and to load, their ship with what Cormac and Wulfhere had found here months before, at summer’s beginning: the sword-won spoils Norse reavers had stored in a castle whose origin and existence they doubtless never questioned.
But the Britons came not.
At last Cormac took Lugh and Bas, and scaled a talus formed by the slippage of rock over thousands of years. Up they climbed, onto the nigh-flat mesa that was the island’s main surface. Over one shoulder Cormac bore many loops of stout rope.
The others had to stay and maintain the ambuscade, lest the Britons come forth. There’d be noise aplenty then, Cormac had pointed out, and he and Lugh would be terribly effective against the men of Britain from above! Wulfhere was troublesome. Him Cormac persuaded to remain with the others only by reminding, quietly, that the Dane was the most experienced fighting man among them, and worth any five others as well.
Any seven others, Wulfhere corrected, and stayed, scratching under his beard.
With Bas and the archer, Cormac moved inland, well above the level of the beach, the valley of the castle, and his own men.
“Like walking the roof of the world it is!” Lugh commented.
Above them the golden eye of Behl moved steadily and unconcernedly toward its zenith. It was by that watchful god Lugh swore when they caught sight of their goal: soaring, straight stone walls raised by the hands of men skilled beyond any now alive.
“Behl’s eye!”
Cormac half-smiled at the man’s astonishment and awe, though he felt it, too. Towered and columned, builded of stone laid upon stone by master builders, the thrice-ancient keep was of spectacular proportion. The whole was no less than awe-inspiring, topped off by flashing rays of bronze standing out from the towers near their tops, like sun-rays.
“Ah,” Bas the Druid whispered. “No Roman hands raised this magnificence. See the carving-see the Behl-rays on the towers!”<
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Cormac nodded. “It’s from the Celtish ancestors of Lugh that we Gaels sprang, Druid,” he said in a fervidly quiet voice, “and from those fierce men of forgotten Cimmeria came the Celts, and in the oldest land of all, the Sunken Land, that the Cimmerians had their birth.”
“World-spanning Atlantis,” Bas breathed.
Lugh ignored the Gaels; he was content to stare in silence.
“It came upon me when first I set eyes to it, Bas, that which affrights other men around me. My… remembering. I saw it, and I knew.” Then Cormac laid a hand on Lugh’s shoulder, which he found aquiver. “See you the two pillars and the deep shadow between, Lugh mac Cellach, like a black gaping mouth?”
“Aye “
“That be the doorway… the only doorway. No door binds it now; it hangs by one hinge-strap and the entry gapes full the length of a man. Just within is a blank wall… to enter the keep itself, one must turn to the upper level. It is a defensive hall: see ye its windows, like slitted dark eyes? Archers’ windows! Behind the rear wall of that defense-hall is a gallery, and below that… a vasty room into which fifty, a hundred longships might be piled.”
“Gods of my ancestors, a half-score men could defend it against an army!”
“Exactly. Hunter or no, Lugh, it’s a fighting man’s instincts ye have. Our few then, would never win past our own number, were they inside, much less a score of men!”
“Even Britons, aye. Then… but we’ve seen them not, and heard naught of them… must we wait forever, then, for them to come forth to us?”
“Why no, Lugh,” Cormac told the archer with the hair like corn and the knotty, bandy legs. “You are our hope, man.”
While Lugh stared at him, Cormac peeled from his shoulder the coils of rope. It was of two sizes, one less thick than the little finger of a thin man.
“See how those projections stand out from the castle’s towers like slim straight horns or the sun-king’s rayed crown?”
“And so they are,” Bas said quietly. His thin face remained turned toward the awesome castle. “They knew Behl, those men of that land so long ago swallowed up by sea and time.”
“By whatever name, aye,” Cormac agreed. “Now first, see you how this ‘roof of the world’ as ye put it runs so closely alongside the castle. There go we first, where man-built walls cast gloom between them and these natural ones. Then… we climb down. And then, Lugh, it’s you who will gain us safe entry!”
Neither Lugh nor Bas fathomed that plan, but both saw now the reason for the rope, or so they thought: on it they would climb down, beside the castle in the gloom, rather than risk being seen in a frontal approach-and be dropped by arrows with them powerless as fish flopping on land.
Along the mesa they went, and beside the castle, until its pillar-flanked entry was invisible to them-and thus they to it. Cormac gazed with longing across at the stone wall, from which they were separated by a chasm more than three man-lengths across.
“Had we brought a grappling iron…” Bas murmured, gazing fixedly at slitted windows so near-and too far.
“We’d have made noise,” Cormac finished for him, “steel on stone. No. First I secure this rope, thus and thus. Then I bid ye both farewell, and hold on here whilst you climb down and await me.”
The druid looked at him a moment, thinking perhaps to challenge that which resembled an order. Then, with a glance back at the castle, he sighed. Its walls tugged like the eyes of an enchantress. Without a word, he followed Lugh down on the dangling rope-bordering on the ludicrous, with the skirts of his robe hitched up to bare that which a druid seemed not to have: legs. His leggings, his companions saw, were the same deep, foresty green of his robe.
At their tug on the rope, Cormac loosed it and let it slide over the edge, into the deep shadow where they waited. Then he followed.
The Gael went slowly, testing each little ledge or rocky projection before giving it his weight. His feet were sea-sure, and he had done more than his share of scaling. Down he went, with but one slip that fingers like cables turned into no more than a delay. A few feet above the upturned faces of the other two men, he dropped and alit like a cat on bent legs. His hands slapped the earth a second after his feet.
“Crom’s eyes,” Lugh said in a gasp, “an I dropped that’ distance I’d be wearing my stones around my knees!”
“An ever-active man learns to keep them bound up tight to his body,” Cormac assured him. “And learns how to fold up when he drops so. Now, Lugh. It’s your bow and skill we depend upon, all. Pluck you forth a good straight shaft with a wicked heavy head, and let us tie this little cord to it.”
Three times Lugh assayed to arc an arrow up and up and over one of the bronze poles standing out like sun’s rays from the castle. On the third try, three delighted men watched the cord-trailing shaft sail up and over its target. It dropped; the cord caught, lying across the pole: the arrow dangled well above their heads.
First Cormac gave the hunter’s shoulder a squeeze of congratulations and thanks. Then he began working the cord up, shaking it, lifting, coaxing…
Jerking and swaying like an erratic pendulum, the arrow descended. Cormac flashed one of his tight almost-smiles as he caught hold of it. He began pulling. Up went the slender cord, followed by the stout ship’s rope knotted to its tail. And over the projection, and down. And then the thick rope was in Cormac’s hand. There was just enough cordage; only one end touched the ground now, and with little to spare.
“Another man’s length and we’d have failed for my lack of planning!” he snapped, while his companions silently wondered at his excellence of forethought. “Now, we haven’t enough rope to tie off. But if you will wind yourself with it, Lugh, and brace your feet against the castle wall, I can climb up-without, hopefully, breaking either of our backs.”
Lugh gazed at him, amazed at the ingeniousness, and he smiled at the joke his leader made, between comrades.
“My back will hold, mac Art!”
The cleverer Bas bobbed his head in one nod, and stepped forward.
“Mac Art would not ask a druid to hold the rope’s end, as he would any other man. I will. Come, Lugh. An we stand side by side, facing the castle, we can draw the rope across our backs and brace it well. It’s a brave man we’re to support and keep safe… and him no boy whose weight might be measured against feathers!”
The two men braced themselves.
By all the gods, Cormac thought, that I should see the day! I entrust my very life to an army composed of a farm-born hunter of hare and boar, and a robed druid whose strength I know not… but would hardly make wager on!
First he tugged at the dangling rope with all his strength. Then he gave it his weight. With no word of apology, he hung from it-and set himself a-swinging. Lugh gasped and Bas grunted openly. The rope held.
“Rest,” Cormac bade them, and prepared for his climb.
His buskins he hung by their laces around his neck. Buckler he fastened to his belt behind, its curve hugging that of his backside. By a thong, he made his sword-scabbard immobile against his thigh.
He looked at the two men who were ready to lean back against the rope, their feet against the base of the wall they faced, while he climbed. He nodded. And he went up.
The two men gasped, and Lugh cursed without heed of the druid beside him. Each held fast, and Cormac’s strength and superb physical condition steaded him well. Hand over hand, not hurriedly so as to avoid jerking Bas and Lugh, he went up, and up.
Lugh’s arrow had had to go far higher than Cormac. He’d snugged the rope in close to the castle itself, and the narrow window he sought was little more than a dozen feet above the ground. The sunray projection held; the rope held; the men below held. Cormac climbed.
When he peered into the gloomy niche, he saw no man within the room. Muscles knotted and strained then, for he could not edge through that air-and-arrow embrasure while wearing his buckler behind. Dangling by one hand, he reached back and untethered it. He eased the targe in
to the slice in the stone wall, which was thick as the length of his arm.
Cormac glanced down. Then he put out his bare right foot and set it into the niche. In a swift movement then that scraped chainmail on stone, he lunged into the open window.
There he stood a moment, drawing shallow breath, for chest and shoulderblades touched the sides of the embrasure. He was wedged snugly into an opening that was as if designed to accommodate his body-sidewise.
A gliding step rightward, another… and he eased himself silently as a stalking panther down into the room. He stood in one of the several chambers that lined the castle’s pillar-supported second floor-or half-floor, for the vaulted ceiling of the main great hall soared to the roof.
Ancient hangings that surely were once more beauteous than the famed product of Eirrin’s women hung now in tatters and were dust at the base of the walls. Yet two chairs and a low table, brassbound all, somehow remained. Cormac looked upon them, his teeth pressed tightly together; only through some sorcerous means surely could those furnishings have survived the millenia.
The feeling came upon him.
Hair prickled at his nape and cold fingers seemed to trail up his back. He’d been here afore of a certitude… but not in this lifetime. Neither had anyone else: the floor’s thick layer of dust was long undisturbed.
Slowly so as to be more silent than a mouse seeking indoors for sustenance in winter, he picked up his buckler and drew his sword. There was no door; only a doorway, where long ago had hung a curtain or arras. Cormac paced to the portal. His bare feet were silent in the soft dust. No sound stirred the stillness. He peered out. There was no one in the corridor.
Cormac mac Art sat down in the dust and put on his buskins.
Out he went into the dingy hallway, and he turned right toward the castle’s front. All was silent and gloomy; only the single window-niche in each room admitted light, and that but little, so that by the time it found its way out to the hall it was the merest glim. In that upper hallway of the anciently brooding castle, it may as well have been night. On a carpet of dust, in silence, Cormac walked through night at nigh-midday.
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