With a hand on the shoulder of ‘that seated, hunched man, Bas looked about. His chin rose and he put back his shoulders. The robe flapping like massy foliage in the wind, he strode to the far corner of the Castle of Atlantis. The druid looked into the gloom alongside it; he spoke into the gloom.
“Woman! One knows of tears shed, of fears that rise unbidden, of imagined gulf betwixt princess and exile! One knows of love, and who holds love for whom in a stout heart and firm, stubborn mind. Woman! Know that ye love not alone, know that ye are needed and that what ye do, weeping and nurturing fears and self-pity in the dark is an unworthy luxury-and an unaffordable one. Be ye woman indeed, Samaire of Leinster, or mere mewling whimpering girl? For there’s another who too would weep, were he able, and the better be for it.
“Woman-he needs us, this man, for that is coming which shall shake the roots of his soul and aye of the world itself, the foundation stones upon which is builded the ridge of the world-shall shake and echo among the dimensions that are, and it’s he will be at fulcrum, hated and menaced and tormented. Power ye have, Samaire of Leinster. For ye can add to that torture-and he to yours-or ye can be great.”
Bas peered into the shadows betwixt natural walls of granite and basalt and castle walls reared eighteen thousand years agone.
Bas said, “Decide!”
And Bas passed into the Castle of Atlantis.
The sun shed warmth and light on that castle, and on its valley and the man who sat as if struck by the hand of Death or powered over by the grim claws of age. He stared at the ground… and after a time there before his eyes were two small feet in unusual dark boots. Another voice came to his ears, and not, this time, from his mind or from Bas.
“It’s like children we are, my love,” that voice said, softly. A hand came onto his bowed head. “You hurt me, and so I sought to hurt you. Too there was confusion upon me. It’s companion I must be, hulking hero, boon companion. For I be no squirming flirting fluttering woman likely to swoon, but Samaire of Leinster, companion to Cormac mac Art. It’s destroyed I’d be an ye treated me as no more than comrade, but… when ye seek to protect me, it must be as companion, not something soft and vulnerable that belongs to you and that you want not marred.”
The woman in the tall soft boots and loose coat of mail heaved up a great sigh. “Thrust me from yourself no more, my love, my dairlin boy, for it’s no favour to me to force safety upon me whiles you face that which may slay you out of my sight. We must face together what is to be, as once we did here, as we did those Pictish raiders on Munster’s coast and again on our ship just yester day but three, as we did in the wood of Brosna, as we did in treacherous Cashel. Lovers, aye… but companions, Cormac, by night and day!”
He looked up. “Princess born, you must not say ‘my love’ to me.”
“Och! Fah, I say it by night, as do yourself… Companions by day and night, aye, and my love by night and day! Now come up, my love, and let us go inside this ancient keep you have made your own.”
My own, Cormac thought rising. The Castle of Kull of Atlantis… my own… my castle. My…
“My woman!” he said hoarsely, seizing her arms above the elbows.
Samaire strove for control, and she looked at him and spoke as coolly as she was able. “Of course. My man.”
They looked at each other a long while in the sunlight. Then, each with an arm about the other, they went for Bas, in the Castle of Atlantis.
Chapter Eight:
Footprints
“It was in this room that the man held her, Bas, that druid out of place among Vikings. Cutha Atheldane. Some plan he had for Samaire’s marriage to one of the Norse. As I think on it now, I remember me that we’ve talked not of that, Samaire and I; I’d forgot. I came upon them, and saw him staring into my eyes with a gaze sharp as a raven’s. Ere I knew what was afoot, it was Wulfhere I was looking upon!”
“Seemed to be looking upon,” Bas corrected, nodding without apparent surprise.
“Just so,” Cormac said. “I like to have died then, until Samaire made a great shout. Then it was like waking from a dream-fraught sleep. Not Wulfhere I saw then but the man Cutha Atheldane in his nightdark robe-almost upon me with a dagger naked in his hand. In avoiding his attack with my mind still befogged, I fell-here, across that chair. I only just saw him as he oped a door, here in this wall, and with Samaire fled within.”
Cormac had found the mechanism he had marked; after a few minutes of striving, he sprang open the panel in the wall. Beyond was the corridor that became the tunnel he remembered too well. Bas peered within. The druid’s nose wrinkled as it was assailed by the musty, mephitic odour of ages agone.
“It was with that chair I propped open the door,” Cormac told him, “that it might not seal us within. I pursued. But he had a torch, taken from that sconce there, while I was in darkness. The tunnel twists. Here.”
With the strike-a-light of iron and flint that no sensible man went without, Cormac mac Art raised a flame on a slow-burning torch. He looked at Bas and Samaire; the three of them entered into the wall.
“Ah, see how the corridor runs straight and seems to end at a wall-I ran up against that, and with force! After that, once I’d found the turn, I was forced to less speed.”
The three came to the apparently blank wall, but the flickering torchlight in Cormac’s hand showed them how the tunnel continued, merely bending sharply leftward. A short distance past that, they turned again to the right.
“I soon learned that these constant turn-asides run ever in twos, so that this tunnel proceeds ever in the same direction.”
“The musty odour of this place has not improved since last we trod here,” Samaire said.
“Age, mere age,” Bas said as though to himself. “And the tunnel must be open at the far end, since there’s air to breathe and to burn.”
The torch burned; Cormac nodded.
“Ah-we go down,” Bas said.
“And we turn. An ancient escape-route, methought, made so full of turns to slow and baffle pursuit-as it did me! And man-made all, as ye see by the smoothness of the walls. Else I’d have thought this tunnel was carved out here by a man both blind and blind-drunk-and led the while by a lazy serpent.” Remembering, he added, “Perhaps I was partly aright…”
Their feet scuffed through dust that lifted up and hovered about. Their nostrils were constantly assaulted by fetor. Once Cormac had blown through his nostrils like a tracking hound, Samaire and Bas did the same. The dust was instep deep, for in centuries no feet had trod here but Samaire’s, and Cormac’s, and Cutha Atheldane’s. The men’s buskins and Samaire’s boots hissed susurrantly through dust older than they could conceive in their minds. Each essayed to breathe shallowly, to inspire less vitiated, fetid air.
’Ah! Here, Druid, I stopped. For it was here I beheld a woman of passing beauty of face and form. Like a queen she was, with plaited hair like corn and soft folds of silk robing her. I remember, sandals… of white bronze they were, and so too was she: white as though she’d known no sun. She spoke; she strove to tempt me. She warned that for me to pursue was to find death before the next dawn. I demanded her name. Only one who wished me well, she said, and I bade her swear on my sword.”
Bas nodded.
“Was she fairer than I,” Samaire asked, “this temptress you say was of such passing beauty?”
“Aye, for of what avail a sorcerous temptress, an she were not more beautiful than normal folk… companion? But she called me handsome, and would not swear on my sword. Then knew I she was not what she appeared, for none can call me handsome in honesty! And whether she was a shade of the sidhe or a demon of those cold Northlands whence came Cutha Atheldane, or indeed he himself in a new disguise, I knew she was no woman of woman born!”
“She would not swear on your sword,” Bas said, nodding again. “For though the walking dead can, no demon can abide iron!”
“Aye. And I lunged, and spitted her on my blade.”
“Whereupo
n she vanished?”
Cormac looked at Bas, and his lips made as if to smile; it was good, these reminders that the man was wise, and not one to come apart like old cloth, as that Briton Osbrit had done.
“Whereupon,” Cormac confirmed, “she vanished.” Then he turned about. “And I walked on, in the dark, though were we without this torch, ye’d see that the walls themselves emit some strange light of their own. Around this bending…”
They turned to pace leftward, then were forced by the smooth walls to turn right again.
“Around that bending, even here,” Cormac said, halting again, “I stopped once more. My short hairs stood right up! There facing me were three men, war girt and with their swords naked. One a Norse, and one a Pict, and the third a Norse as well, though he served in Dalriada of Alba when last I’d seen him… and slain him.”
Bas stepped past Cormac, turned so that he could look into his face. “This ye’ve told me not-that ye’d fought the walking dead before this day."
“There was a difference, Bas. Mayhap the spell was of less power, or mayhap it was more. One called Sigrel and I fought briefly, just here, and I broke his wrist and skewered his belly. And he laughed. Then did I remember the woman I’d just stabbed in the same manner, and I shouted to them to get hence, that I had business beyond, with their master-and I charged them. Whereupon, like smoke in a goodly wind, they vanished.”
Bas thought upon that. “A spell of less power, I’d venture to say. If a spell at all-thus Cutha Atheldane had the power of the eyes, Cormac. The illusion-power over men’s minds, as did he who sent darkness on ye in Eirrin that day of your testing. Only your eyes beheld that darkness that was not. Nor were there dead men here, nor was the woman a demon. All sprang from the mind of Cutha Atheldane as did the darkness that later came from that foul Leinsterish druid-and from your own mind, Cormac mac Art."
“So it can be done, the seizing of a man’s mind and making him to see what is not there, without sorcery?”
Bas nodded. “It can, though whether it is of sorcery or no-who can say?”
“You have this power, this knowledge?” Samaire asked.
“It is available to me.”
“I’ll be asking ye about that again, Druid,” Cormac mac Art assured him. “And methinks yours is the explanation, for those men in the great hall today were there, and so are their bones still. But the woman and the men who braced me here, all three slain before by me… those were not here, sure, for they left no prints at all in the dust, no sign.”
Automatically Samaire looked down though Bas did not.
“Cormac! Bas!”
They whirled about; they followed her down-directed gaze. The trio stared at the footprints in the dust, only a little of which had dribbled down into the depressions. Cormac stepped forward, moving the torch. The prints of shod feet continued. They faded away into the darkness ahead of them whence that walker had come-for these prints led to the castle, not from it. In the darkness before, and with the torch held well up, none had noticed.
“Yours,” Bas said, “from that other time.”
“There be but one set,” Samaire said.
Cormac squatted. “Nor are they yours… nor mine! Here, look here. These are ours, nearly gone now in the three months since we were here.”
The three looked at the impressions in the dust and, in the light of the flickering torch, at each other. None needed to speak. The evidence was there. Someone, a man wearing buskins or sandals, had paced this subterrene corridor since Cormac and Samaire had, nor had it been one of the slain Britons. For there was but one set of prints, and they came from… wherever this tunnel led. To the sea, Cormac had previously assumed; he’d not gone on to be sure, for he’d been in haste to return to the great hall and the battle he had known was taking place there. It was in that fierce and bloody fight had been slain the Danes and Norse who had returned to slay again.
“Cutha Atheldane we left dead,” Samaire whispered.
“Aye, and the serpent,” Cormac said. “There was no other. But… from the sea, one must think, someone else has walked this ancient corridor-to the castle, but never from it.”
Bas straightened up. “A mystery we can think on later,” he said. “He be not before us, and he be not in the castle either.”
“Nevertheless,” Samaire said, and she unsheathed her sword.
The three went on, in silence.
The odour of the decay of death came to their nostrils before they reached the physical evidence. With wrinkled noses, they came to where lay the remains of the mighty serpent that had attacked Cormac.
He told Bas of how he had nearly died from his error then; since he had been twice set upon by those that were not truly there, he had assumed the serpent-three times his length and more thick than his arm-to have been the same.
“It was real enough,” he said. “And it took a lot of killing.”
Despite the odour of putrefaction, Bas was pacing along the curving length of the dead reptile. Turning away, he sucked in a deep breath and released it, then sucked in another, which he held. The druid squatted beside the dead monster.
“What is it, lord Druid?”
“It is a dead serpent of impossible size, Cormac. A sea monster, one must suppose, for all know such frightful monsters inhabit the keep of Manannan mac Lyr. A serpent… dead, from the smell and the extent of its decay, less than a month.”
Nor, could all Cormac’s and Samaire’s gasping and denials belie the evidence.
Fact: near unto death in squeezing coils and with his shield ruined and his sword-arm pinned to his side, the son of Art had drawn his dagger, lefthanded, and stabbed his reptilian attacker many times in the space of a few seconds. Fact: he had slain the serpent, and gone on in pursuit of Samaire and the anomaly of a druid of the Norse. Fact: when they two had come back this way not long after, the great creature had lain dead as now, though without any decay at all. There had been a lake of blood, and Cormac had retrieved his sax-knife from the monster’s mouth.
Fact, then: this enormous snake had been slain three months agone.
Evidence: that it had begun to decay but a few more than a score of days before now; it had lain here two full months before began that ugly and stenchy process that begins in all creatures immediately after death, whether there be flies to lay their maggot-spawning eggs in the swelling corpse or no.
There was no explanation. No… natural explanation.
They went on, and soon Cormac was saying, “Ah. It was just beyond this bend that I came upon them at last-Cutha Atheldane and Samaire.”
“I like not the way ye do put his name first,” Samaire said with a smile.
Bas did not smile. “And here ye killed him.”
“No no-here Samaire killed him! It was she who was the captive maid, ye see, and I the pursuing warrior. I suppose he heard my approach, and turned from her to stand ready to face me-doubtless to use his eyes and brain, and my eyes and brain, to confound me with more illusions. But the poor son of a donkey had turned his back on a warrior, not a helpless girl he’d kidnaped! He dropped to his knees and then stretched his length just as I caught sight of him… it was his own dagger he wore in him, to the hilt.”
About to follow the turn of the passage, Cormac glanced back to show one of his almost-smiles. He directed at Samaire a look that saw past the prettiness of face and well-wrought womanly form. Then he went on and stopped with an oath.
The others crowded in to look upon what his astonished eyes beheld: nothing.
Of course they were certain, Samaire and Cormac told Bas with some heat; here had lain Cutha Atheldane. Aye, and he was dead. Here, this was his blood, Cormac said, holding up the dark-threaded dust.
But Cutha Atheldane lay there no longer.
The three stood close. None of them even approached comfort in the mind.
“The footprints…”
“Aye…”
“A dead man… walked out of here…”
“An
d… raised… others to await our return!”
“Bas!” Cormac’s eyes were grimly bright. “That dead Norseman ye made to speak-can you remember that ye asked him twice for his name? First he commenced to reply ‘Cuth,’ and then said ‘no,’ for it was the wrong name. It was after ye asked him again that he pronounced that other name.”
Bas nodded. “It’s right ye must have it, Cormac. It’s Cutha Atheldane Samaire slew, and Cutha Atheldane is dead. His body walks the earth, though, a husk now, guided by the brain of another. An undying brain, and how it came to be here, or where it lay all these centuries, who can say? But that brain is amove again, within a human body, and it seeks an ancient revenge, Cormac, on you.”
“O ye gods,” Samaire murmured, “why talk ye so? Surely such things cannot be-a man from the past, who can resurrect the body of a man slain in the present-his future, and-”
“A man,” Cormac said, with an arm across her back and a hand on her waist, “with naught for a face but bones-a death’s head!”
Bas spoke, and in that place of eeriness and deathconquering sorcery his voice was passing quiet.
“The man ye slew here, Princess Samaire, is dead, make no mistake. Like those we defeated today, and yet unlike them, he is… un-dead. For though he lay here in death, now he walks and plots again-Cutha Atheldane, driven by the vengeful mind of an ancient wizard… Thulsa Doom!”
Chapter Nine:
Memories
The men of Cormac mac Art went through the halls and rooms of the castle, collecting the booty stored there by Norse rievers or reavers: raiders from the sea. They gathered it in a glittering pile along the defense-hall across the fore of the castle. From there it would be carried down and through the winding pass to the shore, and thence onto the ships.
Aye, ships, for now they possessed two, though their number totaled but fourteen: Cormac, and Bas the Druid, and Samaire and Wulfhere Skullsplitter of the Danes, and their Briton captive Osbrit, and nine men of Eirrin.
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