The Undying Wizard

Prologue

The enormous reptile lay in a cavern passage, eerily lit by some means surely preternatural; sorcerous, perhaps. Walls and ceiling glowed. The strange illumination was dim, pearly, hardly akin to that of torch or lamp, much less the sun-which could not pierce the cavern’s ceil of earth and rock beneath the man-made pile of masonry that capped the thick natural layer. The pale light emanated from the very walls of the world-old tunnel itself.

In this weird luminous emanation from a source not visible the great reptile lay, a green monster twisted as a vine on rocky soil.

Several times the length of a man the creature was, and nigh as thick. It lay motionless in a great lake of red-brown cruor. The blood had thickened and crusted over in coagulation, so that it shone as if glowing, reflecting the wall-light. The serpent was still. Its eyes, the colour of new flax and large as a man’s eyes, were filmed over.

Yet it gave off no stench, nor was it bloated. There was no sign of putrefaction. Nevertheless, the monster was dead. Its great twisted tree-trunk of a body bore the many wounds that had ended its life. It had been stabbed and hacked, sliced and chopped. No juices remained in that prodigious corpse; the number of wounds and its own volcanically violent death throes had seen to that.

It was fearsome, even in death. No ordinary man had brought red death upon this haunter of subterrene passageways.

In a somber cavern beneath the earth beneath a towering castle of extraordinary antiquity, the reptile that appeared to be the father of all snakes lay dead.

And… it moved.

Only the hint of a shudder was that movement-but no, it was a shimmer, giving but the weird illusion of motion. A Something stirred within the corpse. Some… thing was struggling to gain freedom from its prison of death.

In the whelming silence of a tomb, the air stirred about the great snout. Slowly, above the moribund shell of the reptile, a haze formed. It spread, lengthened, billowed only slightly, and rose. Tenuous, wavering creepers of mist shuddered on the stale air of the cavern. Luminous walls were clearly visible through the gossamer floating haze. It was blue-grey, that ever-shifting amorphous cloudlet; the colour of human death.

Yet about it there was nothing human.

For just a moment among the fleeting motes of time, the necrotic haze seemed to coalesce, as if attempting to form a shape: rounded at the top, pierced below by two holes, narrow and latticed below-a death’s head.

But that was gone in an instant, nor were there living eyes present to have seen.

The mist floated up, free of the serpentine corpse that had spawned it. It moved, and surely there was purpose in the flowing movement of that faint cloud of haze along the subterranean corridor.

The passage bent and twisted again and again, as though formed by a restless reptile-or by long-dead men who had sought to confuse and slow possible pursuit. For though the mist-thing moved away from it, the tunnel gave off a concealed passage in the centuries-old castle above.

The mist-thing drifted along above a dusty, ever-descending floor of packed earth. Around convoluted turnings and twistings writhed the wraithy haze, and it touched nothing but air, this form of life from death that trailed in eerie silence through the soundless channel beneath the earth.

Then it paused, writhing in air. It hovered above… another corpse.

The body was that of a man. Old he had been, aged enough to have died of natural causes. But there was visible evidence to the contrary. He who had been tall and unusually thin wore a cowled robe, dark as night. Cloth covered his reed-thin body from head to instep. He lay belly down, and in the center of the robe’s back a darker stain spread. Dried trails of it led over the fabric to the corridor’s floor of packed, dust-piled earth. The splotch and its coagulated runnels were a reddish brown, like old rust. The robed man had been stabbed from behind and had got his death thereby.

Grey and white, forming silver, were his beard and the hair that straggled limp as corn tassels from his head over his cheek. Grey too were his eyes, nearly white in the paleness. Though open, they saw nothing. Bony hands with fingers like claws had not even torn at the tunnel floor; he had been dead even as he fell. Open too was his mouth in a rictus that had been a gasp or cry.

The hovering mist lowered. Wraithy tendrils of transparent blue-grey touched the corpse, as though the amorphous haze-thing was putting forth exploratory pseudopods.

One of them entered the open mouth of the dead man.

Swiftly then, like smoke somehow filtering into a bottle, the haze entered the corpse.

Then all was quiet and still, and none was there to measure the passage of time. Minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks or months… they were as nothing to the dead-and to the mist-thing.

The seagreen serpent lay dead, and it began to rot. Well away along the twisting corridor beneath the earth, the robed man lay dead. And the mist had vanished, as silently and hazily as it had appeared, from one corpse and into another.

The body of the robed man did not swell, or rot.

Then, in that silence and motionlessness of death, there was movement.

It was fingers that twitched; the fingers of the right hand of the dead man.

They curled, clawing inward and leaving trails in the dust of the ancient cavern. Hardly more than bone, these fingers straightened again. And curled once more.

A ripple flowed through night-dark fabric as the dead man’s left leg moved, only a twitch like the rigour after death-but he had been dead far too long for that.

Both arms bent. Both bone-lean hands moved back toward the body. They planted themselves, palms down, at the shoulders. The head moved. Lank silver hair stirred. The hands pressed down. Buskin-shod feet scraped.

The corpse pushed itself up from the dusty floor.

On its feet, the dead man who was not dead wavered, tottered on long-still legs. A hand swung out to slap the earthen wall, as a brace for a body that had long lain prone. A long moaning sound issued from the thin slash of a mouth. All through the tall form, a great shudder ran. Then, as though just remembering, the mouth closed.

The head turned on its thin neck with another stirring of shoulder-length hair like lifeless silver thread. One hand, the right, rose before the face. It turned there, like a specimen the dead eyes studied, while the robe’s dolmen sleeve slid down. Revealed was a wrist that was only skin drawn over bone like hide tedded for its tanning.

The skin was not tan, but nearly white, like new linen.

The hand slapped the chest, moved over the face. It traced out the high forehead, the deep crag-surmounted sockets of the pale, pale eyes, that thin nose with its porcelain-like nostrils, the gaunt cheeks, the mouth that was little more than a horizontal gash between mustache and ashy beard.

The resurrected corpse, alone beneath the earth… spoke.

“Thin, O Great Serpent, this body-merely skin over bone like the fine parchment of Vanara stretched over stone to dry!” The voice that issued from the corpse was soft, almost a whisper. “A lean body, far from young. A priest, a seer, a mage-a Druid, it is called. From a land called Norge, where the ice remains long and snow falls and lies ever atop the craggy peaks, and wind howls cold to cut like a chariot-wheel’s scythe.”

Up leaped robe-swathed arms, to raise clenched fists on high.

“ALIVE! Alive and in the form of a man once more, with hands, aye and feet to walk the earth again! Cutha Atheldane. That was the name of the life-force that quickened this body before mine animated it anew.”

The Undead man laughed aloud and turned quite around in its jubilation.

“ALIVE! One is grateful for having been snatched from eternal exile in that other dimension that would have been like mortal death, from the life-sucking sword. Yet… to have lain here, waiting, handless and voiceless in the body of a son of the Great Serpent… for eighteen thousand years! Ah!”

Again he turned about, he who had been Cutha Atheldane, Druid of Norway and was now… someone else, some Thing else. His movements were quick and more sure now, animated by one of the strongest life-forces that had ever existed, one that had lived and trod the earth before Atlantis rose from the deeps, let alone sank.

“Cutha Atheldane am I, then!” And he laughed. Exultant, was the new Cutha Atheldane. He moved, he cried out his joy.

But he did not breathe.

“One hundred eighty centuries! Ah, Chaos that existed before all and will reign again, a hundred and eighty times a hundred years! But, a moment in eternity, aye-but what an eternity to have been held here by both stone and spell… and in a body with neither voice nor hands! And liberated…”

Cutha Atheldane, who was not Cutha Atheldane, broke off in a short laugh that would have raised the hackles of a dog and sent birds aflying.

“Ah I knew him, I recognized him at once, ere even he came floundering like a barbarian puppet down into my prison… to release me by slaying the serpent’s body that incarcerated me! I know ye for who ye were, not who ye are now! In any incarnation would I know thee, ancient enemy, barbarian king on a throne of fiery gems-a throne you usurped after slaying the noble lord who sat it!”

The voice trailed off like whispering leaves when the wind dies. When it commenced anew it was much lower, quiet now, and full of menace and deadly purpose.

“None there are to believe how long I have lived, or how long I have waited, while uncounted millions of little mortal men have strutted the earth, and bred like the pigs they are, and slew and slew, and so much of the Old Knowledge was lost that what remains-in the hands of these ‘Druids’-is but the ghost of the shadow of the shadow of what I know! But I have LIVED, I have remained on this earth in this dimension, whilst others died and returned scores of times. And now… at last I will have my vengeance, after a hundred and eighty centuries.”

The risen dead man looked about, ruminating. “First I must be invited to leave this isle, for still I am bound here by the old spell. But… I shall come to thee, you who men know now as Cormac mac Art of Connacht in Eirrin! I… will… have… my… VENGEANCE!”

And as the tall and cadaverous figure in the night-dark robe hurled aloft both arms amid a flapping of full tapering sleeves, the eyes and lips of his visage seemed to waver and vanish, to be replaced for an instant by a ghastly, grinning, chalk-white skull!

The most powerful and dedicatedly evil sorcerer in the world’s history was loose again on the face of the earth.

Chapter One:

Eight-and-twenty Picts

Sped by strong hands at its ten banks of oars, the hide-covered ship-or long boat-clove the water as though with good wind behind. Yet its blue sail was furled, for no air stirred the sea that basked so lazily in the sun betwixt Britain and Eirrin. Only where the ship passed was the blue-green water disturbed; it foamed cloud-white along the little ship and for a short distance in its wake.

The men at the oars had set aside their helmets, some of which sprouted horns, while one was decorated with feathers and still another trailed a horsehair plume after the Roman fashion. Long was the hair of these men, plaited or caught back by a thong, and there was but one among the crew of that lone vessel whose locks were more dark than the colour of new copper. Some of the oarsmen were daubed on face and arms with blue paint or dye. Others wore no such paint, though the face of one huge-armed fellow was etched with a scar so fierce it might have been mistaken for a red dye, only slightly faded.

Three men were aboard who rowed not.

One stood well forward; another manned the tiller. Wargirt they both were, and brawny.

He at the prow wore no helm, but he had chosen to crown his dark yellow hair with a cap made of catskins. From that barred cap sprouted a little plume of seven eagle feathers. Bronze were the bracers on his arms, one blade-etched from some past time when it had saved his shield-hand. His tunic was blue; over it he wore an excellent leathern jerkin that covered him from collarbones to his thighs just below his genitals. The cordwain belt slung at his hips supported a dagger on either side. He wore no sword. This man’s weapon, with a broad thong forming a loop where it had been stoutly wet-tied in a groove ringing the haft, was an ax. Its head was invisible, covered with an oiled cowhide bag against the salt spray.

The ax-man’s feet and ankles were laced into what were unmistakably caligulae, the short boots of the Roman legionaries who had for so long ruled his land… and protected it from those many who now came from oversea to carve it up among themselves; Saxons and Angles, Jutes and Frisians, Irish and Danes; aye, and from the north over the old wall, Picts and the Scoti of Alba that the Romans had called Caledonia.

The blond ax-man at the prow looked asea.

The man at the stern wore a sword, long at his left hip and down his leg. Though he stood the deck of a hide-covered longboat and with his light auburn hair plaited behind each ear to fall down his back, the sword had surely belonged to a darker man more at home astride a horse; it was a spatha, a Roman cavalryman’s sword. No adornment relieved his helmet, which was composed of four bands of dull grey metal laid onto a soft leathern caul. He too wore a jerkin of boiled leather, over a tunic of grey wool. The score or more steel rings fixed to the front of that plain lorica were as much reinforcing protection as decoration. This man’s full drooping mustachioes contained more bronze-red than his braids.

Oars creaked and thumped. Men grunted; water gurgled and swished, and the twenty-oared boat seemed to scud on the very surface of the sea as it swept forward, with unusual smoothness. Its heading was southerly.

The man at the bow was gazing southwestward, ahead and to starboard. Gazing that way as well were the auburn-haired man at the tiller and the third of those who did not row.

The blond ax-man at the prow moved his left arm out from his side, almost stiffly. It was fisted but for the forefinger, which pointed. With a nod, though no eyes were turned his way, the man at the stern changed the pressure of his tanned hands on the tiller. The ship, which was little more than fifty feet in length, did not veer, but angled to port; eastward, on its southerly bearing.

The blond at the bow glanced back. His nose had once been broken and was askew, nor did he quite close his mouth, ever.

“Irish,” he grunted, just loud enough to be heard by three-and-twenty men.

An oarsman to port asked, “Reavers?”

“I think not. Cynwas?”

“I think not,” the steersman said, just as quietly. “They’d be fighting else, Bedwyr, not suffering that… harassment.”

“Leaguered about by wolves,” Bedwyr the blond ax-man said, and there was amusement in his voice. “They’ll not see this sun set, though it’s soon crimson they’ll see!”

“Wolves?” This from another oar-plier, a man with a break in his beard from an old slash of sword or knife; surely no ax could have sliced him so without wrecking his jaw.

Bedwyr said, “Aye.”

“Picts,” Cynwas said from the stern.

“This far south? What be Picts doing this far south of their damned heather?”

“Or this far east,” Bedwyr said. “Mayhap they be Picts from far side Hibernia.”

Silent had been the third man who was not rowing, and him nigh-naked. Now he spoke.

“Eirrin, ye corn-headed ass. Eirrin! Ye talk like a Roman… miss ye your masters so much, ye Briton molester of ewes?”

The blond at the prow turned to stare at the speaker. He was a great burly giant of a man with a red mane and full bushy beard.

“Ye talk foolishly free for a man bound to a ship’s mast, Dane! Be ye so anxious to be oped up for the sun to bake your drunkard’s gizzard?”

The bound man grinned. He wore only a dirty tunic that had been red before its dyes succumbed to wear and sun and salt water and sweat. Now, but for the soil, it was lighter in colour than his full beard.

“It were better than having to list to your stupidity, Briton.”

Bedwyr of Britain cheated his captive, who was bound so that he must remain standing and stare straight ahead, like a strange bow ornament moved back amidships. The blond Briton only grinned, and turned away.

“Row. An they see us, they all be far too busy-and about to be busier still-to trouble us. Nor need we have worry of them.”

The oarsmen rowed. The ship of Britons-and captive Dane-swept on to the south and east, well east of the Eirrinish craft “leaguered about by wolves.”

Aboard that beleaguered ship from the land of Eirrin, caught by the same calm and now by the swift boats of its harriers, a man watched the vessel from Britain. A tall, rangily built man he was, deep-chested and manifestly strong, his eyes deeply planted and slitted, grey as steel or ice. The distance was too great for faces to be seen; had there been aught of the crew of the other craft he knew, he’d not have recognized him. The hair of the ax-man at the prow seemed sunwhite from this vantage.

“They go on.”

The words came from the warrior beside the tall and rangy man; this one was both short and slight, and wearing a bronze-studded leathern cap that covered brow and cheeks, ears and nape.

“Aye. Ours be no business of theirs. It’s a broad sea, and it bears up many peoples. Those be neither Gaul nor Pict, and if it’s Celts they are-not likely-it’s not from Eirrin but Britain they sail.”

“Britain!” called up one of the men at the oars. “The Britons be no seafarers!”

“Some fare asea.”

The small beardless warrior spoke nervously: “Could… might their destination be the same as ours?”

“No no, dairlin’ girl,” the tall man said. He too was beardless, his narrow-slitted eyes giving him a peculiarly sinister aspect. Though he was of Eirrin, his squarecut hair was black as the shaggy mops of the men in their hideboats round about them. He wore neither beard nor jewellery.

He went on, “How could they be knowing of it? Samaire-heim be not known in their land-nor any other, save wherever it is Wulfhere may be. Nay, they be reavers as I was, though Crom and Manannan only know what they do so far south-HA!”

His shout was elicited by the arcing up of an arrow from one of the little hideboats that sought to encircle his vessel of fourteen oars; the flint tipped shaft fell short.

“HA!” the tall man barked out again. “Try on, Picts-once one of ye comes close enough to bounce one of your puny sticks off this ship, I’ll huff and puff until I blow over your snailshell!”

A cry of rage was the reply from the archer; the dark, squat men of Pictdom were not known for sense of humour.

In the Irish craft, a man called. “A fine threat, Cormac. But… what do we do? There be fourteen of these ‘snail-shells’ as ye’re after styling them, and us between them like a man running the Behlfires!”

The dark man named Cormac looked about.

Two Pictish boats trailed the little ship he commanded. Six paced it on either side. They might have been an escort, save that the Picts were friend to none in the world but themselves. Cormac knew that an ancestor of his had been friend and fighting companion to the last great Pictish king, Bran Mak Morn, years ago. That meant nothing now, either to the squat swarthy men or to the current bearer of the name Cormac mac Art of Connacht in Eirrin.

Small were the Pictish boats, of well-scraped hide rubbed with butter so that they were as if faced with glass that sparkled in the sun flashing on the placid waters. In each were two Picts, armed with spear and knife-and oar. A few had bows and arrows. The two-man craft were light and swift-gliding. Full a hand’s breadth had the sun moved in the sky since the little flotilla had intersected the ship’s course. Nor did the barrel-chested rowers seem in the least winded, nor minded to abandon their odd, paralleling chase.

“Ah for a wind,” Cormac said with anger and longing, “a wind, that we might leave behind these apish scum from Time’s dawn who seek our very hearts!”

He glowered ferociously about at the ringing skinboats, de curucis or curraghs: caracks. All remained just outside the distance to which any sensible man would seek to speed a spear. And few used the bow, which was a hunting tool, rather than a weapon of war.

Cormac snapped, “A-port!”

The steersman responded at once. Swiftly his craft began to move away from the caracks on their right. Nearly as swiftly, the Pictish boats to port swung away, nimble little craft rowed by experts.

In his anger and desperation Cormac himself snatched up arrow and bow of yew and sent a shaft at that skinboat which seemed nearest. The Picts howled in derision; Cormac mac Art was an indifferent archer at best.

“What do we do?”

Cormac looked at the short, leather-capped warrior at his side. “Row,” he said, in a snarl. “Go on. And hope for wind!” He glanced half the length of the ship at the druid.

The man in the robe of forest green either did not notice, or affected not to feel the accusing gaze. But he made answer, staring straight before him as though talking to himself.

“Behl and Crom,” he said, “cede power asea to Manannan mac Lyr and the Morrigu of the waves. And Manannan, as all seafarers know, is deaf from the roar of the surf.”

Cormac blinked. “In all my years asea,” he muttered, “I never heard that.”

The warrior beside him smiled, but wisely kept silent.

“CORMAC!”

The Gael spun at the alarmed shout of his name. Seeing the pointing finger, he wheeled. The Pictish boats to starboard, all six, were closing on his ship. Cormac’s reaction was not understood by those possessed of more patience and less experience and warlike joy than this Gael among Celts: Cormac grinned.

“Lugh!” he snapped. “Ferdiad!”

With grunts Lugh and Ferdiad shipped their oars, Ferdiad the first to starboard, Lugh the last. So had Cormac placed them, after giving both careful instructions and some small rehearsal. These two were better archers than their comrades along that side, and they knew their duties. Each man snatched up bow and clapped on helmet; each wore a jerkin of well-boiled leather, and long bracers on both arms.

Lugh and Ferdiad moved quickly into position at the starboard hull’s bulwark, looked, ducked, nocked, pulled string, rose, released, ducked again. The shafts may perhaps have taught some small respect; otherwise they were ineffective.

Cormac’s grin faltered not. He’d trained these two hunters well. No sooner were they again hunkered below the top of the bulwark than four arrows whished over their heads. The Pictish shafts passed completely over the ship. One persuaded a portside oarsman to helmet himself.

“HARD A-PORT!” Cormac bawled.

At the same time, he pounced like a panther to Ferdiad’s oar. A mighty pull he gave that foremost oar, so that the men behind him felt the sudden ease in their own pulling. Their lean captain’s strength was astonishing. The steersman had responded, and Cormac’s impulsive move added to the ship’s sharp swerve. Ferdiad sprawled; Lugh again straightened and launched an arrow. Like all others thus far, it found no fleshy home.

The ship’s stern was more effective. It crushed a carack in its swing. With a cry, one nearly naked Pict went flying to splash, thrown twice the length of his own body. The other man of that boat was surely more fortunate than brilliant; with a warrior’s reflexes he was able to grasp the tiller even as his boat, spear, oar and bow were lost to him.

Like most of his kind he was a short, dark man with long arms slung from prodigiously broad, meaty shoulders. He clung fast to the tiller. The ship lurched. The steersman cursed. Cormac’s voice rose too, cursing magnificently in two, then three languages.

“The fatherless dog clings to the tiller!” the steersman cried.

“Shake him off!” Cormac wrestled with his oar. “Up oars and sweep: One… Two… Ferdiad! No!”

“It’s shaking him off I’ll be,” the hunter had muttered, and he rose to hurry sternward and put an arrow into the clinging enemy.

Even as Cormac shouted his warning, Ferdiad’s right cheek sprouted a gout of blood and a flint arrowhead. The shaft had entered his other cheek to smash through his mouth and pass completely through his. face. Ferdiad was choking on his own blood even as he fell-onto the third starboard oar. Both that oarsman’s curse and his look of horror were purely reflexive. Again Cormac too cursed; already chaos threatened, rising and shaking its shoulders like a grim spectre over his ship.

Shouts arose both within the Irish vessel and on both sides now, and the ship wheeled insanely. Its oars whipped back and forth less than a meter above water level.

To a god looking down from the dual vantage points of height and immortal lack of concern, the scene might have been amusing.

The Irish ship was like a mighty horse, beset by a swarm of rabid cats. Already it had kicked one-and been scratched. Those to port had started to close just after their comrades on the far side, and then suddenly their prey had swung about, like a mindlessly bucking stallion. It bore down upon them to divide their number yet again or crush one of them under its hard hooves. Next it was bucking like an unbroken colt under its first rider, swinging this way and that, oars lashing out like flying deadly hooves, while one tenacious attacker clung to the hoof that was its tiller.

And now the ship lost momentum. Pictish yells rose triumphant on both sides. They howled like wolves now, not cats.

“Stupid,” Cormac muttered, to none save himself. “Had I known these men to be seasoned competents, and Samaire not aboard, I’d have ordered all oars shipped and allowed this attack, long ago!”

Now battle had been forced upon him, nor was he unhappy.

Jerking in his oar, he bellowed the order for the other rowers to do the same. Then the mail-coated Gael was on his feet and snatching up spear and buckler. The sword at his side was a fine weapon-once the enemy had pressed in too close for good spear-work.

“The mad-dogs want to board!” he bawled. “The worse for them… EIR-R-R-R-RINN-N-N-NNNN!”

It was merely the first rallying shout that sprang into his mind; long a weapon man and a sea-roving reaver as well, Cormac well knew the value to men of a battle cry-any battle cry. It was one more aid to the heating of the blood.

Naturally the shout was instantly taken up by those about him, as would have been any but the most ridiculous. The fire-eyed screamers included the short warrior in the studded leathern cap and strange high boots who’d stood beside him… Samaire that warrior’s name. Samaire of Leinster of Eirrin.

Weighted ropes flew. Some ended in grappling hooks. Others were knotted about stones, one of which sent a son of Eirrin to his knees, clutching his arm. Then Cormac was beside him, his eyes terrible. Without releasing either spear or buckler, the Gael boosted the jagged stone up with his bronze-bossed shield, lifted, and hurled it back over the side.

And ten more came over the bulwarks of the hull, on either side.

The Picts kept up their awful wolf-howling as they attacked, for this was their battle cry both to spur and excite themselves and to shake the enemy. Frail skin-boats rocked as squat men stood in them, tugging at their grapple-ropes. Men from time’s dawn they were, avatars. out of place in this age-and knowing it.

Deagad mac Damain, who’d kissed his plump Dairine farewell and vowed they’d demand her hand of her father on his return, a hero, thrust with his good spear at a burly dark man who stood below, in his boat. The nearly naked Pict deflected the spearpoint with a twisting movement of his shield that turned the jab into a scraping carom accompanied by a grating ear-assaulting noise. At the same time, he miraculously kept his footing in the rocking carack. Without pause the black-haired man drove the tip of his own spear, a jagged wedge of flint the length of his hand, straight up into young Deagad’s eye. It ran deep, destroying eye and pricking brain. Deagad lurched backward with a moan rather than a cry. The Pict, whipping back his spear, cocked his arm and launched the death-tipped stave at another man who leaned over his ship’s bulwark fifteen feet away, engaged in a thrust-and-parry spear-duel with another attacker.

Deagad’s killer looked astonished when a dark, scarred son of Eirrin appeared and, swifter than any man should have moved, bashed the spear away, only inches from its intended victim.

“Take MY spear, Pict!” Cormac yelled.

His hurled spear burst into the chest of Deagad’s slayer with such force that it tore out of his back to the length of a tall man’s foot. Pict and boat went over; only the shining skinboat remained on the surface of the water. Its surface darkened suddenly as with red dye.

Cormac’s crew were not seasoned seamen, nor had any save one so much as seen a Pict before. While they howled like the dread wolves of the forests they loved, the little apelike men the Romans had called Pictii-the very old ones, or aborigines-fought like bulls. They charged, heedless of defense against them. Mothers of Eirrin frightened their children with tales of the awful Picts, with long greasy black hair and woad-daubed faces. It was said too, and often, that a Pict was harder to reduce to that final twitchless death than a cat.

With a battle-mad, blood-loving ferocity and overwhelming momentum, several had gained the ship. It was not that those who should have kept them away were terrified; they were worse: disconcerted, and caught up in memories of old and horrid tales.

Nevertheless Cormac brought death of wound or water on three, and one pouncing man of Pictdom drove his head straight onto the point of Samaire’s spear, which was wrenched from her hands as he dropped into the water. Her arm whipped across her belly under her loose mailcoat and dragged out her sword; Picts were aboard and sons of Eirrin were down.

Hand in hand with the grim god of war, red chaos, the oldest god of all, seized the rocking ship.

Steel flashed in the sunlight like behlfire.

Men-and a woman-shouted and screamed and iron clangour rose loudly. Spears jabbed, knives and swords and two axes flashed and swept. Men reeled on hard-braced feet. Blood spattered and flowed.

A slashing sword taken from the corpse of a slain Irish struck blue sparks from the helm of another son of Eirrin. Beside him another sword struck through hide-armour and flesh and muscle and into bone, and whipped back trailing a flying wake of blood that spattered and smeared ship and woundless men.

Dark eyes blazed with animal blood-lust while whistling blades clanged on shields, skittered skirling over mail byrnies, found vulnerable flesh. Even though the short-hafted ax that struck his shield nigh broke that arm against his own body, Ros mac Dairb of far Dun Dalgan remembered their captain’s counsel to thrust, not slash. He thrust, and was rather surprised at feel of resistance at his point, then a lessening as it went on, as though into a good haunch of meat. Surprising too was the sudden flare of the dark eyes of the stock man before him, and his guttural gasp. Ros of Dun Dalgan remembered to yank back his blade, and saw the bubble of blood over the Pict’s lips even as he stuck him again, though it were unnecessary.

A Pictish head with a gaping mouth flew from one side of the ship to the other in a shower of blood. The man who had swung that decapitating blow so dear to the heart of a weapon-man set his lips and teeth in a grim, ugly grin. For beside him was the former exile from Eirrin’s shores, the former reaver of several coasts, the reigning Champion of Eirrin, Cormac mac Art an Cliuin-and Cormac said “Beautifully done, Connla!” and Connla glowed, and struck with sword and parried with buckler, and he died not that day but emerged scatheless as though god-protected.

There were few duels in that howling, clangourous melee. A man parrying the stroke of a second while slashing or stabbing at a third was often wounded or, given his death by a fourth, and sometimes by accident. Bright red dotted the air and gleamed on helm and mailcoat, jerkin and blade and skin. And on the deck, where footing grew precarious with flowing scarlet and moveless corpses.

“Och, I love to fight!” Brian of Killevy enthused, and hewed away an arm.

Men died, or were sore wounded, or were wounded and got their deaths from another’s hand, almost negligently, or took wounds that slew them later rather than at once. A hacked calf guaranteed a Pict a limp the rest of his days-had not the boss of Cormac mac Art’s shield smashed his face and, in crushing his nose, driven splinters of its bone into his brain.

Some who fell or reeled had eyes of blue or grey; others’ were black as the bracelets of polished coal they wore on their thick dark arms.

It was a princess of Eirrin’s Leinster who took a swordcut on the helm that made her head ring and formless grey dance before her eyes, and who drove a booted foot into the crotch of him who had landed that blow turned by her bronze-bossed helmet, then spitted the enemy’s mouth and nose and most of his chin on her sword. The Pict died without even knowing it was a woman had sped his soul. Samaire took a cut on the hand too, and was pinked in the right forearm, but managed to crush that attacker’s face with her buckler’s boss even as his sword dropped.

Sons of Eirrin fought the better for her presence among them, for she was like unto Agron goddess of slaughter that day, or Scathach, the war goddess whose tutoring had made invincible the hero Cuchulain of Muirthemne.

It was she who ferociously out-shouted the Picts, and was hoarse three days after, while limping from the thwack of a shield-edge against her leathershod shin.

And then the ship was clear of living Picts.

So too was the sea all about, save for one. He had plunged overside and, gaining a carack, began paddling madly away. A hard-flung spear missed him but brast through the bottom of his boat, so that he was forced to leave it there, a strange sail-less mast, lest by withdrawing the point he was reduced to floating while he baled.

Yet there could be no immediate rest for the victors, each of whom was ghoulishly blood-spattered, for it had fountained on that weltering ship this day and those without scathe were bloody as their wounded comrades.

There was the gory, twice-unpleasant business of pitching overside Pictish corpses-and pieces, including three limbs, a grimacing head, and a ghastly long coil of pink sausage from a sundered belly.

Even then none could sink down gasping to rest; there were the wounded to see to, and the dying to comfort, and the dead to be buried in the only available grave, that great endless tomb of the sea. Too, the tyrant who commanded them insisted that every inch of blade and mail be wiped of blood and gore, then greased against salt spray.

“Ye fought well,” he told them, “and these weapons served us well. It may be we’ll be having need of them another day-and rust, lads, is the weapon-man’s worst enemy!” He grinned. “Aye, and were some of ye hardly weapon-men this morning-so ye be all now!”

The final words assured willing compliance with the unwelcome command.

Then the sun died, as bloody-red on the horizon as the many battles it had witnessed, and eleven men and a woman sank down to the sleep of exhaustion, while the ship wallowed.

Chapter Two:

Warrior and Priest

The wind was hardly worthy of the name. A gentle breeze, it was just enough to fill the sails. Laeg mac Senain was well chosen, and Cormac was grateful to have the man aboard. Laeg the navigator made the most of even this pallid stir of air, with hardly a limp nor complaint whatever of the cut he’d taken in his right thigh. It was as much Laeg’s skill that made the vessel skim over the water, oarless, as the breeze that others might have thought too little.

The Cormacanacht-so were the men happy to call themselves, men of the Champion of Eirrin who’d bested even Bress Long-hand of Leinster at the great Feis of Tara-took their ease. They lounged, or exercised, or talked idly and looked about, though there was only water to see. Not so glassily flat as on the battle-day afore, Manannan mac Lyr’s bluegreen demesne was nevertheless quiet. The breeze turned only little ripples that gleamed in the sun like twinkling gems.

At the prow, Cormac son of Art of Connacht leaned on the bulwark, gazing ahead.

Beside him was the short, slight warrior. The strange high boots still sheathed her legs above midthigh. Overlarge for those slim firm thighs, the rare boots she loved were held up by thongs she’d fastened to the belt of her tunic, under her coat of good mail. The yellow tunic covered her legs to the knees. Of linked steel in the Irish fashion, her mailcoat fell almost as far, and covered her upper body to the throat.

Discarded this day was her bronze-studded cap of leather. Her hair, which was of a light golden red that might be called orange, blew this way and that, caught by the wind of their passage and by the wind that pushed them so gently.

They’d launched the light Irish longboat with its single sail from the baile or town called Atha Cliath, which some called Darkpool, or Dubh-linn. The vessel skimmed along east by south. Well behind them now was the Pictish attack, and the bodies of good sons of Eirrin that nurtured the ever-hungry sea. They were mourned, though none aboard Quester was of the New Faith, whose adherents believed in an eerie bodily afterlife not of this earth, but cluttered all together in a sky-place called coelis or heaven. There they lived eternally, with their god Iosa Chriost. They did naught, so far as Cormac mac Art had been able to ascertain; he held no discourse with the dark-robed priests that had followed Padraigh to Eirrin.

A venerated Druid rode this ship of men of the old beliefs. None had failed to note that he lifted no weapon against the Picts, nor was he menaced by them… which would hardly have been the case, had he been a priest of the new god from the East-and Rome. The Druid’s robe remained green. All aboard were of his belief, for Cormac mac Art had no Christians about him. These men knew that their slain comrades would return to tread this earth, though with different visages and names.

“Cormac,” the orange-haired warrior said, “is’t true what that man of Baile Atha Cliath said, that once he sailed with you?”

“Aye. Tiobraide lost his arm with me, Samaire, in a battle with the men of Norge up north of Britain.”

“He called you Wolf.”

“So did they all. It was Cormac an-cliuin I was then; Captain Wolf.”

“How came you by that name?”

“Men are fanciful, Samaire.”

“And ye be evasive, dairlin’ boy. Come-how came you by that fierce name?”

Cormac continued to look ahead, on the sea. “I earned it.”

Samaire daughter of Ulad Ceannselaigh heard, and heard more than his spare words. She queried no further into that matter.

“He said too that it was your wont ever to counsel that one should kill only when necessary.”

Staring ahead, the one-time wolf of the sea said nothing.

“Cormac?”

“Aye.”

“Be it true?”

“Aye. Often I said it,” he said, with a catch in his voice that was not quite a sigh.

“And… but… was it meaning that, ye were?”

He nodded, without turning his face toward hers. He was aware of her bright green eyes-and of nine other men.

“Aye. I meant it. Ye’ll be asking further, and I’ll make answer first. It’s true, Samaire: I believe that one should kill only when necessary. Unfortunately it is more often necessary than not.”

The daughter of Leinster’s murdered king was silent for a space, whilst Cormac stared ahead and the sea furrowed past Quester’s prow to ripple all along her length.

“I know not whether to laugh or sigh,” she said at last.

“Nor do I, Samaire. It’s a world of killing we habit, and it’s good at it I am.” His tone and mien were matter-of-fact, and without pride.

“I want to hug you.”

A crease deepened at the edge of his mouth, in the slightest of smiles. “I hear you, dairlin girl. And it’s the hug I’d like to be feeling… but I salute you for the saying of it, rather than the doing.”

“Had I known there’d be so much discomfort for all, I might not have come.”

“’Twas you insisted, Samaire,” he said, noting that she’d said “might” not. A princess asea, among weapon men!

“I remember, dairlin boy.”

“None dare call me boy, save you, woman.”

“Think you I’d suffer being called ‘dairlin girl’ by any other than yourself, man?”

Cormac chuckled. “Likely not. And discomfort is the word. It’s why I insisted that ye dress as ye have, and keep on that mailcoat ungirt. No man asea should have a woman’s form flaunted to his eyes.”

Samaire heaved a sigh and tucked back her nether lip. “It’s not that I meant by discomfort, though I understand it, too.”

“Oh. Well… methinks it hardly inconveniences these men to look away now and again, whiles you do that which is necessary. It’s knowing they all are, too, that on yester day you were a warrior among warriors.”

“It inconveniences them to worry about whether I be looking away!” Samaire assured him, and they chuckled together. “I try, Cormac. And… I miss your touch, your arm around me, and mine about you.”

“Not aboard this ship.”

“I know,” she said, with a hint of exasperation; she need not, Samaire of Leinster was saying, be told that again.

“I have a question of my own,” he told her, turning his face at last toward hers.

The lift of her brows was invitation enough to the asking of it.

“Our… benefactor,” Cormac said. “He who provided money for this boat and crew, your cousin Aine’s husb-”

Samaire was laughing, though not in amusement. “Benefactor! Dealing with Cumal Uais was worse than bargaining in the marketplace of Tara! The tenth portion of what we bring back we must give him, for financing our quest-and that after bargaining him down from the third he demanded! And him the husband of my own cousin… and his coffers full already with the price of five hundreds of cattle won by his wagers on you in the championship games! Benefactor!”

Cormac was smiling. “Well, he did a bit of losing that day, too… sith he also placed wagers on Bress.”

Samaire looked at him in shock, her green eyes huge and indignant. “No!”

“Aye. He did risk more on my prowess, though-fortunately for him. Besides, it were a better return: the odds were against me.”

She shook her head. “Oh gods defend us, why is it thus? Cumal was born wealthy, Cormac! And all his life he’s spent adding to that wealth.”’

“And counting it,” Cormac said. “And eating,” he added, for Cumal’s girth was nigh as fulsome as his tally sheets. “At any rate… it’s his name I wanted to question, Samaire. How could parents nobly born and with wealth, and them residents of royal Tara as well, name a son Cumal Uais… ‘Slavegirl the Noble’?”

For a moment Samaire stared at him. Then she was laughing.

His cool stare stopped her. “Oh, Cormac! It’s not his name… he’s but called that. His name is Tuathal, though he likes not being called after a High-king of four centuries agone, a king whom Cumal considers to have been no good man. He welcomes being called Cumal, ye see, though in truth it began as but a bit of waggery, poking fun at him for his love of gains!”

Cormac understood now. And to think he’d not asked before out of… manners. Until a few months agone it was long and long he was out of Eirrin, an exile for the old “crime” of which he was now absolved by Council, High-king, and druids alike, after his testing. He’d forgot. “Cumal” meant slavegirl, aye. It also meant a unit of exchange, as the Romans used their coins stamped with the faces of rulers with bird-of-prey beaks. A cumal was a unit of exchange worth the value of three cattle; it was by cows, boru, that those of Eirrin had long measured value and wealth.

Not often was Cormac mac Art embarrassed.

Samaire was still a-chuckle. “Hush,” she was bade, and she gave him a look that invited him to force her, even as she ceased.

Cormac was rescued; sensing movement, he turned to see that Bas the Druid had come to join them.

“It’s a god’s blessing ye have on ye, Druid,” the Gael said, “for of all aboard I see no drop of blood on ye.” Then, lest the man think he was being denigrated for having had no part in the battle with the Picts, Cormac added more. “It’s glad I am to have ye aboard, beloved of the gods.”

Bas nodded acknowledgment. “There be two of us, Champion of Eirrin, for as ye proved when ye underwent the Trials of the Fian and had sorcery done upon ye as well, all saw that Behl and Crom do love their staunch defender, Cormac mac Art.”

“I hope it’s right we both are, Druid, and that we live to count many grey hairs. Being a staunch defender, as ye put it, be easier now, and all a true man can do, with the priests of the Dead God upon our land like a plague.”

Art’s son of Connacht was ever wont to call the god of Rome and the bishops “the Dead God,” since all knew he’d been executed on a Roman cross by some forgotten procurator enforcing the sedition laws.

Bas sighed. “Say not ‘No true man,’ mac Art, with so many in high places converted from the ways of Eirrin to the new faith.”

“Perverted,” Samaire corrected.

“There’ll come a time for the dealing with that problem, Lord Bas, and none will find my blade averse to being wetted through black robes!”

“They are holy men, Cormac mac Art-or think themselves so. But I came to ask ye of our destination. How much farther?”

Cormac looked upon the priest of Behl and the ancient god of the Gaels of older Eirrin, Crom Cruach. He did not smile as he said, “I cannot tell you, Druid.”

Bas lifted his brows. “Cannot? Still, this far on our way-and you will not tell me?”

Cormac gave his head a jerk. “No no, Lord Bas of Tara. Cannot, I said, and it’s cannot I meant; Druid or no, be assured that had I meant ‘will not’ I’d have spoke it so. It’s enough years I’ve spent asea that I have an animal’s sense of direction. Though there were changes in the seascape… land rose even as we sailed, and-”

“Land rose?”

Samaire shuddered in memory. “Aye. In fire and thunder! Rock and ash mingled with flame vomited up to slash the clouds and rain down upon us. The winds from that eruption of angry gods drove us far to the south and west, and we missed by mere fingerlengths smashing into a new isle even as it rose from the sea bottom!”

“So that,” Cormac said, “we returned by a somewhat different route, from far off our course. What I know is how we came to the isle that Wulfhere named Samaire-heim. Even so we cannot approach it as we did afore…”

The Gael trailed off. The face of the druid showed thorough confusion; Samaire was smiling.

“Wulfhere Skullsplitter,” she told the druid, “is a Dane. A huge great towering oak of a man with hair and a beard-oh, a great full beard, Bas-like uncarded wool dyed red. He and Cormac are… were…”

“Companions asea,” Cormac swiftly interjected. Most knew he’d been a reaver, a pirate, and he saw no reason to remind Bas, whose sister was the wife of Eirrin’s High-king. “When first we see land ahead, we must swing well to the west. For full ahead lies a combination of horror and death, a whirlpool called the Ire of Manannan, and then the Wind Among the Isles. We discovered them not ere they discovered us, to our dismay. Many jagged little rock-isles cluster there, and the wind that howls among them is insane. First we were whirled and spun and dunked and hurled helpless as a child’s boat when he tires and tosses stones at it. Three-and-twenty of us there were aboard Wolfsail; when we awoke on the beach of a tiny, rocky isle on no maps, we were but nine. The sea ate the rest, and our ship.

“We found a castle on that island, Druid, a prodigious towering pile of superbly-stacked stones more thousands of years old than I’d care to say-or than ye’d believe.”

Bas was staring, with more than interest now in his expression, in his entire attitude. His fingers toyed idly with the sprig of dried mistletoe he wore about his neck.

“Think ye so, descendant of Gaels?”

The two descendants of Gaels stared at each other, warrior and priest.

“What… found you there, Cormac mac Art?”

“Booty! A treasure-trove. The castle had been found afore us, and was the lair of a band of Norse reavers. We awaited them. When they came, they had as captive the Princess Samaire and her brother Prince Ceann. Their murdering, throne-thieving brother had arranged for these his younger siblings to fall into the hands of those men of Norge.”

“Ah-it was thus you and Samaire met and linked destinies.”

“We knew each other long before, twelve years and more agone, when she was but a girl and I a boy, a weapon-man in the employ of her father.”

Bas nodded. He had heard the tale. First, because of the plotting of a fearful High-king, Cormac’s father had been slain. The boy, well trained and big for his age, had fled his native Connacht, to serve in Leinster under an assumed name. Later discovered there, he’d been forced to flee that kingdom too… and then Eirrin. For twelve long years he’d been an exile. There was a story that he had crossed the King of DalRiada, too, up in Alba. A man to rouse the fickleness of men and gods, was Cormac of Connacht.

He was speaking on: “None of the Vikings survived. Of us, only Wulfhere and I did-and Samaire and Ceann. And the Norsemen’s ship. It was no easy mater, but the four of us reached Eirrin aboard that ship.”

“When last we saw it,” Samaire said, with a reminiscent sadness in voice and face, “Wulfhere plied it alone, on a northerly bearing, ‘twixt Eirrin and Britain.”

Bas was shaking his head. “What lifetimes of adventure and horror ye’ve crowded into your short term in this body, son of Crom Cruach! Oh… and sith I note how ye call my lord and lady the prince and princess of Leinster by their given names, Cormac, call me Bas.”

“It’s Lord Bas ye be, or should. Ye gave up much to don druidic robes, man!”

“I gained much, Cormac.”

Again they gazed upon each other in silence for a time, and not without admiration and respect. Then Bas spoke.

“And so this voyage is to take ye back to this isle your Danish friend named Samaire-heim, and carry off the rest of the Norsemen’s sword-gains.”

“It is, Lor-Bas. That be the reason we few sail on a ship large enough to bear twice our number. Were the Lord Cumal Uais not so… cautious, we’d have two ships and more armed escort. The pr-Samaire and Ceann, ye see, need the wealth.”

“It’s no comment I’d be making on what seems implicit in that, Cormac, my lady-”

“Samaire,” she corrected, the orange-haired warrior. “No comment is necessary, Bas. My brother Ceann and I are what we are. When our father died, Leinster’s throne passed to his eldest. Within the year he was dead-slain, we know, by our brother Feredach’s scheming. Next it was us Feredach the Dark did treachery upon. Mayhap it’s grateful we should be that he did not have us slain. He is our older brother, and so Ceann and I have no claim on the throne.”

“While Feredach lives,” Cormac added.

Bas nodded, taking no note of Cormac’s sinister addition to Samaire’s words. “All this I know, sweet lady; I was present during the drama of accusation at the Council of Kings on Tara Hill but a month agone. Nor still will I comment, nor on Cormac’s dark remark. But… Cormac. Why am I along on this quest?”

“Why-ye asked to come!” Samaire blurted.

Cormac almost smiled. “Nay, so I told you, and it’s apology I make, dairl-Samaire. It was I asked my lord Bas the Druid to accompany us. There is sorcery on that isle, or was, and any who believe druids know naught but such as oak and mistletoe and the rites of Behltain and Samain be a fool before the gods.”

Bas neither smiled, nor affirmed nor denied; that was affirmation enow.

“The castle, Cormac,” he said, after a time of silence. “It is older than old?”

“Men of Atlantis builded it, Bas.”

“Ye know this.”

“I know it.”

Bas looked at neither of them, but straight ahead, and he spoke as if to himself.

“A castle of Atlantis… There is a story, a story passed down through thousands and thousands of generations of druids. It speaks of Kull, King of Valusia and an Atlantean born, and another man, a mage. Through some means Kull was able to best this wizard, who is variously said to have been a servant of the serpent god far more ancient than Atlantis… and to be immortal… and to be already dead but not dead, alive yet not alive, a man stronger than the grave, whose true face was that of death itself: a fleshless skull. There is a story… It is to these climes Kull is said to have sailed, where again he met that dread sorcerer. With the latter now was a legion of allies: serpents. Perhaps the serpent-god himself, who ruled the earth before we men came up from the seas… or, as some say it, down from the trees! Thus man met serpent again in a last great battle, and King Kull prevailed…”

“Gods of my ancestors,” Samaire murmured, “against such a foe-how?”

The closing of Cormac’s fingers on her arm deeply indented the flesh, and made her flinch. Hush, that sudden squeeze and grip bade her, without a spoken word.

“Kull had his own mage by then,” the druid spoke on, “and besides Kull was of the mightiest of men ever to walk the ridge of the world. By sword and sorcery he and his prevailed, and raised a great castle over the ensorceled mage of evil. Some say those men ranged on, even to Eirrin where there were then no men, and that terrible war upon the Great Serpent’s last servant is the reason our green fens and blue hills are marred even today by no slithering serpent.”

Bas came to a halt in his murmurous narrative-which was more like unto a remembrance, or a day-dreaming recall of the tiniest part of the lore that belonged to the druids. As though lost still within himself, he looked not at Cormac or Samaire. The grey eyes of the High-king’s brother-in-law stared ahead as though seeing only things that lay behind his eyes, not before.

Dully Cormac said, “It is more than story, O Druid. It is Kull’s isle, and his castle. I… know. And beneath it… I like to have ended my days in this form. To a serpent, Lord Druid… a serpent several times the length of my body. And once I’d slain him… he bled scarlet, like a man.”

“O Behl,” the druid murmured, “I am your servant. Lord of Sun and Oak, accept poor thanks and promise of restoration. That I should be the one who sees the castle of my father’s father’s fathers half a million times removed!”

The trio at Quester’s prow fell silent.

Samaire, herself no mewling girl nor yet a small souled person, but a woman of will and determination even among the free women of Eirrin, looked from one of those men to the other. Gaels both, dark of hair and pale of eye. The weapon-man and the druid; the eternal twain: warrior and priest. Samaire could not help but feel that she stood in the presence of giants, and of the eerie. These were men sure who stood above other men, whose lines ran back into the mists of time out of mind, and were likely to continue into the far mistier future, even as far.

These two had been here again and again, and would tread this earth again and again still.

And she knew too, with an absolute though never explicable certitude, that she had known at least one of them before.

She was a princess born, and had been wed as a King’s daughter must be, to a prince now dead in his youth. But their relationship had been a tiny and tenuous thing in the immensity of time, even in the limited sweep of this lifetime. He could not have been the man Cormac mac Art was, that prince of Osraige whose loveless wife she had been; nay, not even in his dreams.

And now she was certain too that there was no way she and Cormac could have failed to meet-again-or could part, not ever. She had known him before this life, she now realized, and she would know him again, and again in the unwoven tapestry of the sprawling time-to-come.

Then she looked out before their gliding ship, and what she saw interrupted her reverie and drove it from her mind.

“Cormac-land! Islands!”

And he looked, and gave the orders to swing Quester sharply to starboard, and hold that westward course until they dared turn south again, safely around the Ire of Manannan and the Wind Among the Isles.

Chapter Three:

Death-tide

The man had been roped to the great rounded spire of sea-rooted rock for hours.

From the sea that tall chunk of granite rose, at the very edge of a rocky isle, before which it stood like a sentinel: With the sun shining down, men had walked to it from shore in no more than a foot of water. At high tide, only its upper two feet were visible.

The monument of water-smoothed white stone rose twice the height of a man.

The man bound to it was tall, taller than tall. Nevertheless, both he and those who had bound him here knew that he was not tall enough. The salt sea was coming for him. The water had lapped about his ankles when his captors had left him, well tied. Now it quivered just below his nipples, and crept ever upward. High tide was but a little over an hour away. Sooner than that, he knew, was death.

First there would be the desperate tipping back of his bearded head, the desperate straining to remain above the salt water that lapped at his lips… into his mouth… until it at last rose to his moustache… and above his nostrils. And then he would see the one-eyed All-father, Odin… if the Valkyries could find him, at the time of tide’s ebb.

Behind the mighty rock and the giant with the fiery beard bound to it, another man sat. Well back up the beach was he, with a goatskin bag to hand. It gurgled with the thin, sour wine of Briton grapes. He had situated himself so that he could see the rockbound man, to whom from time to time he called taunting words.

The seated sentry’s shield lay beside him, upturned, and at his other hand was his spear. Between his outstretched legs, though he expected no trouble, lay his ax, a thin broad blade with a hook at its top edge. Down his back fell a thick straw-coloured braid from just behind his right ear; the left braid lay on his shoulder. Both were wound about with two plaited strips of leather, brown and red and tightly bound.

“I’m having another fine sip of wine, now, son of a Danish dog and a piggish slut; can ye hear its gurgle as it goes down to quench my thirst? Or… can ye hear only the gurgle of… water?” He laughed. “Well, drunken dog of Dane-mark, it’s soon your own thirst will be quenched… with salt water!”

Chuckling, the man drank.

Awaiting death, the Dane made no answer. He was a big man, and many heads had fallen to his ax, and making answer to such a one as his Briton ghoul-guard was beneath him. He’d plead with Odin and Thor, Woden and Thunor, until the end of time itself, to be allowed to come back and meet this taunting midden rat as men should meet, and to end his days… slowly.

“Ahhhhhhh,” the man from Britain sighed, with much exaggeration. First licking his lips, he wiped them with the back of his hand and set the goatskin bag aside.

“Tide,” he called out, “come! Bledyn of Gwent grows weary of watching this ugly Danish body swallowed by the sea!”

“Then rise, Bledyn, pig of Gwent, and let me aid you in the shortening of your vigil.”

For a moment Bledyn froze at that cold voice that came from behind, where no man should be. Then he hurled himself to roll sidewise, snatching at both spear and buckler even as, backing like a crab, he drove himself to his feet by main will.

Brooding dark and menacing before him, a tall man stood, lean and chainmailed. Deepset eyes were only just visible in a scarred, grim face set like death itself. Though this challenger was helmeted, Bledyn saw that he was dark of hair. On his left arm the man wore a small buckler, a targe, with a ferocious boar emblazoned on its face. The shield was seemingly negligently held, nor did the man from the night have a spear. He held a goodly sword whose double-edged blade was nigh straight, and slimmer than Bledyn’s own glaive.

“Who… be you?” Bledyn demanded, speaking with care to keep the quiver from out his voice. “Kull of Atlantis. You Britons profane my castle and raise a stench therein, by your piggish presence.” The accent was none Bledyn knew, and thus was

barbarous. And… Atlantis?

“What… do you want here of me, outlander?”

“It’s yourself’s the outlander, man; ye be not now on your own piteous isle, which you first gave to the Romans and now suffer to be taken by all who come from oversea with a few spears! As to what I want… the man on yon rock. It’s a better man than you he is, and I like not your taunting of him. He dies not this night.”

Bledyn’s fingers tightened sweatily about his spear. From out the haunted dark of this unknown bit of rocky land came this strange dark man, calling himself by no name known to Bledyn of Gwent, and calling that fantastic inland keep his. Holding lips and teeth tight, the Briton spoke.

“Be ye man or shade, the Dane dies. So be the decision of us all, and so be the decree of Bedwyr son of Ingcel, and so it’s to be. Begone, man of night, an ye value your hide.”

“I do not.”

That flat stark statement sent Bledyn’s short hairs astriving against the pressure of his helm. Best to move swiftly and end this menace, this insanity, ere the other made the first move. Spear against sword, the Briton of Gwent was sure, were no contest-particularly when he struck first.

Bledyn of Gwent drove his spear with its long leafshaped blade at the man’s belly. At the last moment he twitched it upward, to skewer the face of this “Kull of Atlantis” whilst he strove to protect his vitals.

The other man’s shield was a blur. There was a clang accompanied by Bledyn’s grunt as his spearpoint struck that small buckler which, twisted slightly in a hand both expert and signally swift, sent his weapon aside. Then in another blurring motion that was silvery in the moonlight, the stranger’s sword swept. Again Bledyn grunted; the blow of the blade not only sheared away two feet of his spear, but slammed its haft into his side with its terrible force.

Rather than follow up the advantage that so shocked his opponent, the stranger was still, staring, hardly so much as crouched in combative stance.

“Quarterstaff against sword be no good match, Bledyn of Gwent. Best pick up that ax, or yield your self. Yield and live.”

Still feeling as though he were a wanderer in some weird dream, Bledyn stared at his decapitated spear a few seconds more. Then he dropped it even as he bent and snatched up his good ax all in one swift motion. Nor had it ended; in a continuation of the same movement, he lunged. The ax-head rushed straight upward. One step backward the dark man took, and then with a frightful clang ax rang off the very boss of the stranger’s shield. It was sped so swiftly aside that Bledyn thought his arm would come off.

“The same tactic twice? Pitiful, Bledyn. Best ye yield, man; I kill only when I must, and there are few enough Britons on the ridge of the world to face off the invaders of your land.”

Bledyn yielded not. Grim, back-prickling fear lent strength to his body and skill to his attack. His great swinging slice was aimed at the other man’s sword-arm.

Somehow that seemingly magic shield was there again, the stranger turning partway aside-and then completely around, to crash his buckler against Bledyn’s with such force that he groaned and felt his shield-arm strike his mouth with a splitting of lip. Desperately he tried to chop. Upward whipping shield-edge struck his arm, his fingers flew open, and his ax went sailing.

At the same time the other man used his sword against the Briton for the first time. He drove it with jolting power into Bledyn’s belly, through leathern jerkin and blue-dyed tunic. A strong arm gave the imbedded blade a half-twist before whipping it free.

The tall slender man stepped back while the Briton, in his eyes a startled look, stretched his length on the sand.

“Ye were warned, Briton,” the man from the night said with a sigh. He half-bent to thrust his sword into the sand. “Unfortunately, killing is usually necessary, though one does try…”

With care, he returned his sand-cleaned blade to the sheath he had slung across his back. Bledyn made no reply, nor did he see aught, for all that his eyes were wide. His feet kicked the sand in spastic jerks.

First looking all about, straining his eyes against the moon-shot dark,. Bledyn’s slayer nodded; the Gwentish Briton had been alone. The tall man walked down the strand to water’s edge, behind the rock to which was bound the red-bearded captive. There he left his targe, and waded out through the tidewaters.

Coming around the huge rock rising up from the sea, he looked into the face of the outsized man bound there. The latter’s eyes widened.

“Cormac! Thunor singe my beard-it’s CORMAC!”

Cormac shook his head. “For shame, Wulfhere, leading total strangers to our island. Ah, Samaire’ll not be liking this, after it was you your self named this isle for her! And man, man, the vanity in ye… bathing your ugly self at this hour!”

Wulfhere Hausakliufr’s fiery beard twitched as the giant’s mouth writhed. He was able to curb hot rejoinder: “It’s shame upon me on both counts in truth, Wolf. But meseems to’ve got entangled… might ye be prevailed upon to lend a poor shame-filled son of Woden a sharp blade?”

Cormac showed his old comrade his dagger, a Saxon’s sax-knife the length of his forearm. “Why o’course, old friend. Where would he like it best: across the throat, or the belly, or straight into the heart?”

After a moment, Wulfhere made reply, “The heart were best; I’d prefer death to come all at once.”

“Aye.”

Unsmiling, Cormac, put up his left hand to the Dane’s massive chest, which even in naught but sodden tunic looked as if he wore one of those moulded cuirasses that gleamed on the high officers of the Romans.

“And whiles I be finding the exact spot-so as to be sure to miss it first time, old friend-suppose ye occupy your gross self with the telling me of how it is ye came here in company with Britons. When I last saw ye it was crew ye were going in quest of-and naturally methought they’d be Danes, sith ye could not afford the best-Eirrin’s sons. But… Britons! And to our island!”

“Cormac!” Hurt broidered Wulfhere’s tone.

Cormac lifted his brows. “This grows more difficult. Your nipples are already under water.” He glanced about, then up at the moon. “Well, ye probably have time for the telling of your tale, ere the tide silences ye.”

“Cormac! Ye… ye demand explanation of ME, battle brother?”

“Humour me.”

“Use your reason, man! Those Britons tethered me here to die as the tide came in. Now no great brain be needed to know we are not allies, they and I! Nor to know that the man ye’ve just come through had an ax, which is my weapon. Now if it’s Britonish blood ye’d be seeing and our booty ye’d prevent their taking, it’s much worse ye could do than to have with you a man in search of the same goal-vengeance sped!”

“A good argument,” Cormac said in the same flat, emotionless tone that was all Wulfhere had heard this night. “And unsullied by statements of old friendship and the like. But Wulfhere… how came ye here in their company?”

Wulfhere sighed. When Cormac the Wolf had a point to make or to hear, he was tenacious as the jaws of his namesake. Nevertheless, Wulfhere tried still again. “How know ye I did?”

“This water grows chill, Wulfhere. Saw you a ship of Eirrin a day or two agone, and it ringed about by Picts?”

“Aye-was you, then!”

“We were too far to recognize, but I know now who was the big fellow standing so close against the mast of the ship I saw.”

“Then ye know I was their prisoner,” Wulfhere said in his chesty rumbling voice, “and roped to that mast. That, Cormac who sore injures me with his doubts, is how I came here ‘in their company.’”

Cormac nodded. He said nothing.

Wulfhere waited, hopefully. Still the Gael spoke not, and the Dane realized that Cormac, too, was waiting. At last the huge man heaved a sigh and gave it up. Looking straight ahead into the darkness so as not to meet the other’s eyes, he told his tale in a swift-running string of words that were quietly spoken indeed.

“I left ye, with Ceann and Samaire, on Eirrin’s shore, nor will I ask aught of what befell ye after. As for me, Odin smiled. I had crew before I reached Dane-mark. Next we found an easy, ah, prey, and soon we were as happy as men can be, with a good ship and no wounds and the wherewithal to buy the best ale. That we did-unwisely, though, for one of my company told me this townlet of Britain, at the Demetian point, was open and there we’d be welcome. Too, he spake of a fine inn, and a great thirst was upon us. There we put in, and went to the ratty inn of that mud-heim, and whilst I wet my throat I let it be known I was alook for more seamen. None came forward, though there were friendly spirits there-”

“Meaning you bought the ale.”

“-and, to my eternal shame, a tavern-wench, an exotic Romish looking girl with shield-broad hips-and may she be accursed with lice, piles, and phlegmy throat all her days! I… she…”

“Ye got drunk with her and your lip flapped like a loose sail in the wind.”

The massive chest rose and fell in another great dolorous sigh that rippled the waters. “Aye, old comrade. When I awoke, my men were gone and I was captive. The wench had two brothers and she brought them fast enow, once I was asleep.”

“Blood of the gods,” Cormac said, his wondering tone not all feigned. “You, drunk unto sleep! Why ye must’ve drunk the land dry as far inland as Powys and Gwent!”

“The place was… well stocked,” Wulfhere admitted. “Naturally it was only denials I made, despite some small pain… I be missing a fingernail now. But these fellows had a ship, and plenty there were about who sought any sort of hope other than being pushed into the sea by the Saxons-ye know how goes it with the Britonish.”

“Ye denied what ye drunkenly blabbed to the wench, but they elected to come and look for themselves.”

“Ah, that brain-how I’ve missed ye and your wise counsel, Cormac!”

Cormac said nothing. Wulfhere, waiting, realized then that so was his fellow-pirate of old. He went on, dully.

“Aye, they decided to sail down here anyhow. With me bound to the mast, stiff and baking by day and shivering by night.”

Such things Wulfhere Skull-splitter was not wont to admit, Cormac knew; how anxious the giant was becoming, with the water approaching his collarbones!

“Were there no such isle they said, or no such castle upon it, they avowed it was back they’d take me, and mayhap even aid me in seeking out my crew and the ship they stole from me. An it were here, I’d die though, for having lied that it wasn’t. They, claim to set great store by the truth, these lying Britons!”

“It’s considerable regard for it I’ve always been having myself,” Cormac said musingly.

He ruminated. He believed most of the woeful story, and decided to press no further into the matter of a few points he believed not, and some few details he was sure had been left unmentioned. He knew Wulfhere. He understood.

Cormac was sure that the Dane’s shame was unfeigned. Mayhap he had foolishly made alliance with the wrong men, who’d turned on him when he spoke too much of their destination and what it held-though he’d split many skulls indeed, Wulfhere might too have been surnamed “the Impetuous.” Or mayhap he had indeed fallen deep into his cups and blabbed to some Roman-descended Briton temptress who knew how to love a man and bring his secrets from out him-particularly when they were bragging matters. And mayhap there was another explanation altogether.

It did not matter. Cormac knew he’d been told the greater part of the truth, and that assured him Wulfhere remained the same, and his friend. The Dane had ever been too much given to the moment’s call and too little to thinking a bit. It was a fortunate good pairing they’d made, after they’d met in that foul prison years ago; the Dane had always bent ear to his Gaelic comrade’s counsel, and nearly always abided by it.

With a few swift movements of his knife, Cormac cut Wulfhere loose. He waded back onto the beach while the giant stood flexing his great arms and sucking up vasty breaths.

Following, Wulfhere picked up the Briton ax. He hefted it, plucked up the buckler, with its large protruding boss-which Bledyn had failed to use as he should have done. Wulfhere rushed the ax through the air, swung the shield in a blow that would have sent a foeman flying.

“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!”

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 into 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.

He was unable to understand the total lack of sound, unless all the Britons were somewhere outside. In that event, they and his comrades-and Samaire, far more than comrade-might well be at the grim business of death-dealing even now. But he forced himself not to hurry, and paced forward in a semicrouch. He let his soles glide over the dust, so as to make no sound of footfalls.

He moved only as swiftly as he thought he dared, with no more noise than a pacing cat.

Cormac passed the room wherein Wulfhere and Ceann had spent a night, while he had preferred to sleep out under the watchful moon. He passed the room in which Samaire was to have spent that same night. Almost he smiled; she had instead joined him outside, though he had stated clearly that he was exile, and would not return to Eirrin. In the morning, he had announced that he would…

He reached the end of the corridor, and was wary anew.

There was no man in view. There was no sound.

With caution, he moved past the stairway that led down to the narrow cul-de-sac of an entry hail. Here had knelt Norse archers; here was the window from whence they’d sped their whistling shafts at himself and Wulfhere and their approaching band of Danes. Now Cormac obtained the same view those Norgeborn bowmen had. He peered without, and caution eased.

There was only the empty plain and, far off, the entry into the twisting passage through the rock that connected this valley with the beach.

A new feeling of nervousness akin to fear drifted over the Gael like a dark mist. The castle… deserted? And without… no matter how he turned his head to peer this way and that, and strained his ears, there was no sound of shout or clash of arms to seaward.

Cormac mac Art walked the length of that defense-hall, hardly pausing to peer out at each of the other three windows. At the head of the second flight of steps, he glanced back. He saw nothing, no one. He crept down the stairs to the landing, peered around.

Below was nothing, no one.

Re-ascending, he passed around the hall’s back wall and onto the railed gallery that overlooked the vast main hall of the eerily silent castle.

Below, sprawled amid great dark splashes, were the bodies of strong men.

Cormac’s and Wulfhere’s Danes had died down there, three months agone, along with fifteen Norsemen. Cormac had been pursuing Samaire and Cutha Atheldane, a druid among Vikings, and had no part in the terrible battle. Only Wulfhere and Samaire’s brother Ceann survived.

Despite some objection from the more civilized prince and princess of Leinster, Wulfhere and Cormac had deemed this great structure a fine tomb indeed. They had left the dead here, friend and foe alike, corpses all. It was these considerably decayed bodies Cormac expected to find this day.

He did not. Not even the bones of those two-and-twenty men remained.

Instead, the scent of new-spilled blood was on the air. It lay barely dry below in splashes and pools, amid the hideously staring, sprawled corpses of eighteen… Britons!

Chapter Five:

The Living Dead

Cormac was outside in the bright sunlight, summoning Bas the Druid and Lugh, the Meathish hunter whom the Gael had surnamed the Manhunter.

Then came the clamor, and the three men whirled. A clot of weapon-men burst into the far end of the Valley of the Castle. A huge red-bearded, ax-wielding Dane… a small warrior in leathern boots with a bronze-studded leathern helmet… three chainmailed men with bows and feather-bristling quivers… others: all of Eirrin. And with them, a stumbling, mumbling Briton.

The man appeared mad and his gibbering was audible to Cormac long before his main party reached him. Great glazed eyes stared awfully from out a pallid Briton face twisted and set in horror.

“That man looks as if he has gazed upon the face of Death itself,” Bas said.

“Mayhap he has,” Cormac said very quietly. “He is the last of his entire crew.”

The three waited; the fourteen came on. All were united before the gaping dark maw of the castle, where its big iron-bound door sagged forlornly from one rotting hinge.

“You’ve been within?” Wulfhere demanded, ere any other could direct coherent words.

“Aye”

“What… did you find?” Samaire asked.

Cormac jerked a gesture at the sagging Briton. “This one’s companions. All of them save the three Wulfhere and I accounted for. All are dead; all of them. Hacked and stabbed and cut to pieces.”

“Gods of my ancestors,” Samaire said, little above a whisper. “This sniveler spoke true, then.”

Wulfhere’s big hand clamped the back of the Briton’s neck. “Tell this man, Briton. Tell him-and the druid.”

The Briton made as if to hurl himself to his knees before Bas; Wulfhere held him back and on his feet, by main strength. “Speak!”

The man did not speak; he babbled, high-voiced, “Druid, Holy Druid, call upon-uhk!”

“I said speak, not beg,” Wulfhere rumbled, squeezing until the Briton’s eyes bulged and his lean fox-face gained a bit of colour.

“I… I… we were… within,” he said, and he shuddered when he cast a fearful glance in the direction of the castle’s doorway. “Drinking, talking of what we’d do with our booty on our return to Silurnum. All was merriment-this demon-haunted keep is overflowing with the loot of a dozen raids!”

“We know that, man,” Cormac said impatiently. He drew deep breath. His gaze flickered up to Wulfhere; back to the Briton. “Your name, man. What be your name? He’d never seen a man so in need of calming.

“Os… Osbrit son of Drostan, of Wroxeter.”

“And I be Cormac, Art’s son of Connacht, Osbrit of Wroxeter. Be mindful of yourself as a surrounded captive, Osbrit Drostan’s son, and attend me: no harm will come to ye. My word on it, before the druid. Now tell me how died those men in there, Osbrit. Who else be on this isle-and how is it you alone made escape?” Cormac raised his eyes. “Wulfhere-let go his neck. He’s a man. He can stand.”

“We… we were… they just appeared, among us, about us! Men of the north countries oversea, all of them. Most were Norse, though too there were Danes-”

“Danes and Norse together? Allies?”

“I swear it! Behl witness-I swear it! Danes and Norse, aye. They just… they were just there. Out of the very air they came, all with axes and swords naked in their hands: No word they spoke-not ever, not one among them uttered aught that I heard. Their faces were grim-set, awful… their business was slaughter! Naught else but to bring red death upon us. Four of our number were down bloody ere we even knew, realized! My cousin Anir… Bedwyr’s brother Cei… oh, ye GODS!” The man paused to shudder and draw a deep uneven breath.

“Then we were snatching up spear and ax and sword and bucklers,” he went on, “wallowing on the floor, stumbling to our feet and defending ourselves as best we could. But… what boots defense, when a man cannot injure his foe!”

“What?”

“Truth! They would not bleed, they could not be hurt. Struck, they bled not. Arms, slashed through, remained attached to body.” A terrible shudder took Osbrit’s body. “They would not die, not even when I passed my spear through the belly of one till the point brast through his backbone.”

“What?”

Osbrit babbled. Tears shimmered in his eyes and spittle flecked his lips to drool upon his chin. “I SWEAR it! I myself faced a Dane, a man with a scar on his cheek like a fork for the snaring of hares, and an ax-haft dyed red and what I took for the emblem of the new faith on his black shield. He-”

Cormac stared with stricken, fixed eyes. “Wait, man. This Dane… his belt buckle… his buckler…”

“The bands of bronze on his black shield I at first thought was the cross of the Christians, and aye, his belt buckle… the face of a wing-eared man it was, moulded of br-”

“Crom and the Dagda!” Cormac gasped. “Wulfhere… it’s Guthrun he describes!”

“He lies! Guthrun Jarl’s son fell beside me these three months agone, in that same great hall of this keep! You yourself saw his body, with his head attached by only a string of tendon. This fellow lies-he saw Guthrun’s remains within-”

Cormac interrupted. “There are no remains within, Wulfhere. All are gone. There are only the new-dead: eighteen Britons.”

“Aye, Behl show mercy,” Osbrit said with a sobbing catch in his voice. “All eighteen cut down by men who would neither wound nor bleed nor die! I slashed a face, I tell you, and that Norseman did not even bleed! At that I backed away in horror, for I knew there was evil upon us, dark magic. All around me good men screamed as they were hacked to death by… by man-things they could neither slay nor even wound! He came on, him whose face I slashed. He said nothing, he neither grinned nor frowned, but only just stared, stared into my soul, like… like a dead man! His ax caught in my shield. I fell back, stumbled-and then to catch my balance I was sitting in that huge curulechair in there.”

“The huge… what?” Samaire asked.

“The Roman influence,” Cormac said. “He speaks of the throne. So you gave ground because ye must, in horror I’ve no doubt, and ye lost your balance and fell back into the lord’s chair.”

“Aye!” Osbrit nodded madly. “And-and… he drew back. He turned from me! I saw Dyfnwal thrust into him… I saw the point of Dyfnwal’s sword emerge at that man’s back!”

With a great shudder Osbrit sagged. Samaire gripped his arm and the man beside her held the Briton up merely by his presence; Osbrit leaned weakly against lean young Ros mac Dairb, nor did either seem to take note.

At last, dully, Osbrit regained life, and talked on.

“They… they killed them all. All my companions. All… all of them. No Norsemen fell or bled, no Dane, none of them, and they must have numbered a score. Then in the midst of the red carnage they’d wrought, they… they turned. All of them, as though one had given a signal, though none spoke. They turned to face me. They stared. None spoke. They looked upon me like hungry wolves just beyond the firelight, staring in, waiting, hoping… Gods! O mother… in awful silence they just stared at me thus, and none spoke ever, or so much as frowned. Like masks their faces were, with burning pale fires for eyes. I… sat. Behl’s Name, Fire of Life, I could do naught else! I admit it-nay, I swear it: I was frozen with fear! There must have been a score-”

“Sixteen Norse,” Cormac mac Art said in a quiet, dull voice, and he knew horror at his own thoughts, hearing his own matter-of-fact tone and chilled by it, “and… six Danes, I should say.”

Wulfhere stared at him with wide eyes. “Cormac!”

Cormac met those blue eyes. “Aye.” His gaze returned to what had been a man and was now a frightmad, gibbering creature for pity. “Osbrit… and then…”

“I remained where I was. And then… Fire of Life! I swear it by the sun and the moon-they vanished! Like smoke, like mist in the morning sun.”

Cormac laid a hand on the man’s shoulder; he did not drop it there, but laid hand on the other in commiseration, in a strange, understanding tenderness. “I believe you, Osbrit. Think. Describe others…”

Osbrit described two Norsemen, to be interrupted by Wulfhere; with an oath, the Dane swore he’d cloven the head of one of those Vikings from crown to chin, three months agone.

Cormac nodded. He accepted what he must, and turned to Bas.

“It is a castle of dark sorcery, my lord Bas. The Britons were attacked by men already slain… when last we were here! And when we left, those same slain slayers lay on the floor within. Now there is no sign of them. Only the Briton dead. And the throne… somehow it be safe from their attack.”

Bas was silent in thought. None broke that reverie.

“Such things,” Bas said, “are said to be possible… to have been possible. We druids have no such power, nor do we covet it. It is black sorcery, the sorcery of death, the Old Magick. To raise the dead against the living… to cheat the dead of their rest and return for any purpose… Behl protect and Crom defend! It is too horrible. It is against all that is decent on the ridge of the world. Kull’s or no, this is a place of evil!”

“It’s not Kull’s evil, I’m thinking. Will ye go in with me?”

“Cormac! No!”

Cormac ignored Samaire and her hand on his arm. He continued to look questioningly on the. greenrobed servant of Celtic and Gaelic gods, Bas of Tir Conaill who had been a noble of Eirrin.

Bas nodded. He looked about, seeming taller with purpose. He fingered his mistletoe pendant. “Who among ye bears oak? Be there the All-healer among us, an t’uil: Mistletoe?”

“The haft of my ax be oak,” a man said, and so called another, hefting his shiny-bladed ax. Hopefully Ros mac Dairb bared a lunula from under his mailcoat; another drew forth, almost embarrassedly, a dried old sprig of mistletoe from his sword scabbard. His wife, he claimed, had insisted on his carrying it…

Bas took the mistletoe, and an oak-hafted ax Cormac thought too light for war. Its owner had a Briton sword now, given him by Wulfhere in a moment of camaraderie the night previous.

Of course the druid wore a lunula, a moon-disk on a cord woven of gold wire about his neck. Larger it was than those of the three men present who also wore them, and surely more potent. Bas looked at Cormac, who wore the usual Celtic torc, and no other jewellery; the leather band about his right wrist was a brace for his sword-arm, not decoration.

“Yourself?”

Cormac gestured helplessly, in some embarrassment. He had little to do with gods, and never had, nor did he encumber himself with their trappings. Bas only put his hands on the other Gael, mistletoe to flesh, and murmured to himself-and to his gods. All heard the names, Behl of the shining sun and great Crom who was older than Eirrin, and the Dagda-the Good God-his son mac Og, and others as well.

Bas’s voice rose and his words became discernible: “…who protected Cuchulain and the first mac Art, Cormac Mor, and the great Finn… protect this Cormac mac Art too, for no more loyal servant of your reveredness exists on all the ridge of the sprawling world.”

Cormac looked around at the others. “Remain without. Bas and I go within, armed by our faith and his knowledge.”

“I go with you, Cormac mac Art,” Brian na Killevy said, a not-unhandsome young man whose face, Cormac felt, was so smooth because fair young Brian could raise no fur on it. The youth’s hair was the colour of flax.

Another young man pressed forward. “It’s not here I’ll be remaining whilst my captain go into danger.” Ros mac Dairb said, just as firmly.

Samaire said only, “No. I choose not to remain without.” Her lower lip pushed forth, nor did it tremble; Cormac knew the sign.

Wulfhere’s rumble summed up: “Lead on Druid. We go where you go; I go where Cormac goes. Damn you, son of an Eirish pig-farmer, I owe you this life!”

“No,” Cormac said. “No. Wulfhere, ye must stay here with these men, who will not object to being termed… indifferent sailors.” He looked at Brian and Ros, like eager-eyed pups when the master makes hunting preparations. “It’s death inside, and sorcerous death at that. I would not bring the red blood on your bodies for it, south or north, east or west.”

“Would be grief to me all my days, Cormac mac Art, if I went not with you after I’ve declared!” Brian of Killevy in Airgialla showed in his face that he’d not remain outside. “And ye know,” he grinned, “I love to fight!”

“And I, son of Art,” Dairb’s son Ros said, a fair young man and lean, with a golden bush of hair like a halo. “And unless the sky fall on me, or the earth gave way beneath these feet, I will not move from your side.”

“Ye be insane both,” Cormac said. “And ye honour your mothers and your people. Very well. It’s this we know: if we be set upon within, it’s no living hands will bring steel upon us, but dead men. No. You two are ordered to go up onto the gallery which I shall show you, and there remain. On your oath.”

Neither looking very happy, the two young men agreed. Cormac looked at Wulfhere. “An we shriek and scream and there be the clangour of arms, come not within. Wulfhere old cleaver of skulls, d’ye hear?”

If Ros and Brian were young dogs eager for the hunt, Wulfhere was an old hunting hound, envious, morose; saddened that he was to be left behind. Stiffly, sadly he said, “Aye.” His right forefinger scratched within his beard.

“If such be the case, if ye hear us attacked and we come not forth… take these men from this place, Wulfhere. And slay a fine calf to the end that this dread Samaire-heim joins her mother Atlantis beneath the eternal sea. You’re agreed?”

Unenthusiastically as before: “Aye.”

Cormac nodded. “Bas… Brian… Ros…”

The three stood ready. Bas muttered, but naught that he said was understood by any present.

“Wulfhere?”

“The All-father’s one eye be upon you, bloodbrother.”

Cormac nodded shortly. “Wulfhere… seize Samaire, and hold her fast!”

Though he’d paid her no mind while he issued his instructions, Samaire was unprepared for this treachery. For a moment she was still in shock. Then she started forward, her grass-green eyes widening.

The man who towered behind her, topping her height by more than the length of her two hands combined, enfolded her in arms that were like tree limbs. Instantly she was kicking and squirming.

“NO! Cormac! No no-Wulfhere, you ugly goatsmelling bull-let me GO!”

Wulfhere held fast. Without a word, Cormac and his trio turned to the castle. They passed between the pillars, and were lost to sight.

Behind them Samaire still combined pleading and demanding in no small voice as Cormac pointed to the stairs and issued swift instructions to Brian and Ros. They all ascended. The younger men went round and out onto the gallery; Cormac and Bas descended into the prodigious expanse of the castle’s high-domed main hall.

Great pillars rose from the tiled floor, propping the gallery and the semi-floor that ran all about the walls, ten feet and more above the floor. The walls were engraved and indited with scenes not discernible until one went close, so that all appeared to be mere decor. The bodies of eighteen Britons still strewed the floor, in pools and splashes of the blood that was solely theirs, amid weapons and pieces of their corpses. Full forty good paces away, back of the sprawling hall’s center, rested the carven throne. Despite the lofty pillars, the closely-etched walls, the decorated ceiling; despite even the dead, that regal throne dominated the hall and the castle; it surveyed all and seemed to own all.

Bas stopped suddenly as if he’d run into some barrier Cormac could not see. The druid looked all about, then lifted oak and mistletoe at the ends of green-robed arms.

“Hail O warming Sun in your bright rising, our shield of gold and our eternal heat-fire; give us good fortune! Hail O Behl lord of earth and sky; You we call now upon to perform a work only you can! A work of the Light to hurl down foul work that comes from the Dark!”

Bas began walking forward, among the corpses toward the throne.

“Soothe pains until they are painless… let the dead sink in rightful unpained slumber with woundy hurts smarting no more… let them rest and begin the Ring of Return, not as shades bearing evil but as Rightful Men in your Name!”

Cormac stood still, feeling a horripilation on him, as the man in the forest-green robe advanced into the immense room, walking amid corpses without looking down to guide his steps, without stilling his voice. But his steps were guided; his feet touched neither blood nor sheared away member nor corpse nor fallen weapon, and Cormac knew that the god was upon the druid.

“Agron, slaughter’s noble mistress: attend us not!

“Shadowy Scathach who did tutor Cuchulain of Muirthemne, grant us invincibility as ye did him!

“Cu Roi mac Dairi, twice-noble master of sorcerers, note ye here Cormac mac Art-lend him your sword!

“Go along now those unneeded, come along now those we need, and perform for the sons of men the work of laying the dead, the word of the Light against the Dark! Hear us, warming Sun in your bright rising! Let not this mortal blood be spilled-we BEG! Let not evil strike down these fair mortal forms-WE PLEAD! Behl, Crom, Cu Roi, Great Dagda… behold your servant Cormac, behold your servant Bas, behold-an t’uil!”

Bas lifted high the all-healing mistletoe to the unseeing walls and the high-domed ceiling and, Cormac fervently hoped, to observant gods. All-healer was the wax-green plant that grew not from the ground but magickally on the sacred oaks in Eirrin, and in Gaul, and in Britain, and put forth its pure white berries: an t’uil!

“By mistletoe and oak, by Sun and moon, by fire and water we call for help, we pledge the good, the Light; we abjure the Dark of sorcerous evil; we proclaim that we be not ready to face Donn, Lord of the Dead, that so well we like this land we are not ready to view splendid I-breasil…”

Cormac’s voice rose, and it seemed of its own accord, for he had no thought of speaking whilst holy words were intoned. The words merely… emerged.

“And I pledge body and brain,” mac Art said, “spear and sword, voice and arms, to drive out from our fair green Eirrin those raven-robed, raven-tongued usurpers and proclaimers of the New Faith!”

Cormac frowned, shocked and astonished he’d spoken so.

Bas had stopped still at that sudden interruption of his speaking to his gods. But then, there amid the gory dead of Britain, he nodded, and bent, and took up a sword and a dagger. These he held high, one across the other so that they formed the execution symbol of the Romans and the priests of Rome.

“Behold the Cross, symbol of slow and agonized Death!” he cried, and dashed down the two blades with a great clang.

The druid was at pains to tread upon the broken cross as he resumed his slow trek to the throne. Now he muttered, and Cormac, understanding no word, knew that Bas spoke in the Old Tongue that only druids knew.

“In the name of the Sun and the moon,” Cormac said, rather haltingly, wondering how to pray, wondering if indeed the gods of his fathers would listen to such a red-handed dealer of death as he. “This I say truly and swear by the gods the great clans of Eirrin swear by: All foemen I face. And this I ask: if foes must come, let them be of living flesh, that I may fight as a man fights.”

At the far end of the sprawling room, ringed about by pillars with squared decor of bronze and gilt, the stately chair rested. From it, Cormac remembered, had one of his own men swept a fine bale of rich cloth, to cover one of their dead. Now green-robed Bas reached that kingly seat, and turned, and sat. Cormac stared, taken aback.

Kings Cormac had seen, and kings he had served, and on him by kings had treachery been done. But only one had he seen who looked so kingly, so made for such a chair, as this Bas mac Miall of the Northern ui-Neill of Tir Conaill; grandson of a king, brother of a king, brother in law to Eirrin’s Highking-and by choice Druid of the Old Faith.

Then, as the seated Bas spoke on, droning now, Cormac took note of that rich and outsized chair.

It was of wood, bound with bronze, decorated in silver and onyx and gold itself, and all the decor in squared figures, for those of Atlantis and Valusia of old never broidered with reminders of their dread enemy: the sons of the Great Serpent, who owned the earth before man.

But the chair… the chair itself… that huge highbacked throne of wood…

Cormac mac Art strode out amid the gore and weapons and ghastly remains littering the floor, treading with care to avoid the awful clutter. He turned, and looked up. From the gallery at the front of the castle, Brian and Ros gazed down upon him.

“Go ye together. Remain together!” Cormac gestured. “Go along that corridor until ye come to a room piled with booty like the treasure trove of an Eastern prince. Gather what your arms can carry, and proceed back, and down, and out the door into the sun. An ye succeed unchallenged, return for more. WAIT! If aught amiss occurs… if it’s foemen ye see… drop the booty, lads, and RUN! Draw ye no sword and stand to fight-FLEE, for heed me: it’s fleeing mac Art will be!”

Without waiting for an answer, he whirled again and strode, a dark and lean man in rustling chain who stepped over a headless body and a cloven shield and then an armless hand as he paced to the stately chair where sat Bas.

“Bas… your pardon, Holy Druid… what say ye this chair be made of?”

’Bas stared, blinking, obviously having been far and now coming back but slowly.

“Cormac mac Art,” he said in a strange voice that came as if from that faraway place, “see ye that so long as ye live ye do never again interrupt a Druid in converse with Those he serves!”

It was Cormac’s turn to blink. His armpits prickled and a chill touched his back. Almost, he who bent knee to no man, not even crowned head, considered kneeling… almost. He made no reply, for he could think of naught to say.

Now Bas, with no visible rancor whatever, looked down at the ancient throne, ran his hands over it. The druidic ring flashed. His head came up, long dark hair flurrying at his shoulder, and there was enlightenment in his clear eyes.

“Oak!”

“Aye, so I thought even from afar. Oak! From the tree holy and beloved to Behl and-”

But the druid’s grey eyes had swerved to look past him, widening. Cormac broke off. He knew what he’d see ere he turned, for he felt it: Silent menace and the chill of the grave had entered the lofty hall of Atlantis. The air hung thick with a loathsome aura of blood-freezing horror and the cruelest sorcery devised by demonic mind.

He turned, and they were there.

There had been no sound; there was none now. They were there.

Men in plain helmets of iron bands and helms with horns like the Old God, Cernunnos the Horned One; men with eyes of blue and grey, and drooping pale moustaches; men carrying axes and swords and the round shields of far Norge. And… others…

Cormac’s body went all overchill and damp, and the sweat was atrickle in armpits and palms. Ah, gods! He knew them, those Danes… Hrothgar of the bent broken nose and brilliant swordwork, and Hrut Forkbeard with his ornately hilted sword and silver-chased leather jerkin and vainly twisted mustachioes… and there Edric, aye and Hnaef…

“Gods! Oh my old comrades… I saw ye all dead on this very floor!”

Chapter Six:

The Throne of Kull

Dull eyes staring fixedly from faces like pasty masks, the men who were at once dead and not-dead began to move forward.

Bas rose to his feet. Deeply green sleeves slid back over surprisingly thick wrists as the druid extended his arms. Toward those stalking shades he held out mistletoe and oak. They stared, every one with naked sword or ax in hand, and no wounds upon them.

“Be at rest! By Sun and Moon, fire and water, oak and the green mistletoe that lives all the year… BEGONE! Mead awaits you in Valhal… your Valkyries cannot find you… bodies unborn await you in the land of the living! Your mighty god Odin of the Single Eye awaits you! Journey to him-Leave us! This is the realm of the living, where there is no place for slain men… and… ye be dead!”

They stared dully, fixedly, those horrid spectres that looked so unlike spectres, but living men. Two-and-twenty, they ceased their slow forward movement. Every eye, Cormac saw, was on the druid’s hands…

Then they began their ghastly silent moving again, edging around sidewise, avoiding Bas… coming at Cormac. In winged helm and shining scale-mail, one Norseman was well ahead of his fellows. Blue eyes, dull as though mindless, stared at Cormac mac Art.

Cormac’s buckler was on his arm and sword in hand. The Gael attacked, for all the prickle of horripilation up his back and on his arms.

His sword swept out and around like a gale, humming through the air, and he watched it slash through the Viking’s bronze-cuffed sword-arm. Watched it slash… through… without resistance… without blood… and with no effect on the arm, which continued rising. It descended in a rush. The Gael’s shield leaped up and he shuddered as the descending sword crashed onto its metal-ringed edge.

“By all the gods! My steel has no effect on him-none! But his blade’s as deadly as ever steel is! A man has no chance against this horror-BAS!”

Cormac could only retreat or die; a swift jab showed him that the Norseman’s shield, too, was fit to defend a living man. An unslayable kill-machine, the Viking swept up his terrible ax.

For the first time in his life, Cormac mac Art turned and ran from a foeman.

From the shocked druid’s hand he tore the oaken hafted ax of Ruadan mac Mogcorf. He was unsure why; it was as if some instinct drove him. His sword he left against the throne-chair as useless, nor did he wield the ax as a man should. Holding it close to the head he’d thought overlight for a fighting man, he drove the end of the haft at the Norseman who had followed-but had stopped three paces from the throne.

The ax was poorly balanced for a thrusting weapon, held thus wrong end before, but with it Cormac thrust. Nor was he averse to using the Saxon tactic of feinting at the body and stabbing at the face.

The tip of the haft jolted home as if against living flesh and bone. Cormac could have wept for happiness at the shock to his arm.

A horrid groan filled that soaring chamber, and seconds later an equally horrid stench, the stomach-turning fetor of putrefaction and decay. And the Norseman seemed to melt, the flesh fading from his bones, hanging in tatters, vanishing into the air. His body quivered all over.

While his back crawled, Cormac watched what oaken stave had wrought, when steely brand was of no avail.

Bronze armlets dropped to ring on the floor, and one rolled noisily. Coat of scalemail caved in, cleaving to a form suddenly fleshless. For a brief moment Cormac stared into the eye-holes of a skull, a whiteboned death’s head bereft of so much as a scrap of flesh.

Then the lifeless skeleton crumpled to the floor with a rattle. It lay there, as should have done the bony structure of a man slain three months before.

“It’s the O-O-O-OAKHH!” Cormac mac Art shouted, partly in triumph and partly in a release of fear and horror, tension close to hysteria. “The OAK, Druid! Behl’s symbol of LIFE-the dead cannot withstand its touch! This be why that man Osbrit alone survived, for he sat that oaken throne! Here is why they sought to avoid you and come ‘round at me, Bas-you held this ax!”

Then Cormac did that which was alien to a weaponman, and against the grain of his very nature.

With all his might, he swung the ax against a broad thick pillar of smooth, time-darkened stone. His hands shifted so that it was the side of the steel head that struck with a great ringing thump and a terrible jar to his arms. A loud crack split the air as the haft broke. With another swift stroke Cormac smashed the head from his ax so that it hurtled through the air until it struck another pillar-and rebounded, and rebounded, and drove bloodlessly through one of those horrid foes to ring and clatter on the floor.

The Dane was unharmed; the ax was an ax no longer; Cormac held a thick oaken stave as long as his arm, to the fingers.

With it he drove at another man of the Norse. A whirring ax-blade rushed past his head, while he slammed the haft of what had been Ruadan’s ax into the shield-arm of the Viking. An awful death-cry rose; again came the stench of a mouldering putrid corpse-and a second skeleton clattered horribly to the floor.

Bas stared with half-glazed eyes as the tall weaponman of Eirrin fell to one knee to avoid a swordthrust, and cracked that attacker’s knee with his strange cudgel. And there were three skeletons amid the corpses on the floor of Kull’s Castle.

They closed in now, and Cormac did what he must to avoid death-dealing thrusts and slashes of un-dead men whose blades his targe could not turn all at once; he hurled himself aside.

Then he ran, racing around the seated druid to come upon a Dane at the edge of the cluster. Cormac knew that lightly bearded man; had fought beside him and trod the decks of ships named Raven and Wolfsail with him. But the Gael was steeled, sure now that he had the means of providing rest for these men brought back from the land of the dead on the murderous mission of some unknown mage. Cormac was the means.

Before the Dane could swing his weapon into line, a truncated ax-haft struck his shield and then his arm. As silently as he’d done three months before, Cormac’s comrade of erst died again, and there were four skeletons.

Bas jerked erect as though waking from some dark dream.

“Cu Roi mac Dairi,” he said in a shaky voice as his hand closed around the hilt of Cormac’s sword, “son of Behl, servant of Crom, be with me! And… King Kull… pardon!”

With that the druid crashed Cormac’s sword down onto one arm of the priceless ancient throne. The blade bit deep; wood older than old splintered and broke. The throne shuddered-as did Bas’s surprisingly powerful arm.

A man in an iron-banded helm of dented grey rushed past the oaken throne to swing his shining glaive at Cormac mac Art-and Bas the Druid smashed a ragged chunk of chair-arm into the Viking’s back. Released by fingers from which the flesh began instantly to dangle in tatters like old draperies, the Norse sword rushed past Cormac to clang and clatter far across the room. A thrice-banded helmet slipped down over the shining white mound of bone that had been a human head. A skeleton once more, the Norseman fell.

Cormac too had struck, and six skeletons lay on the tiles.

A sword crashed off Cormac’s shield and he saw another rushing in from the side. Desperately he struck at it with his oaken club just as he’d have done with his own good sword-which was now so horribly useless. Ax-haft deflected glaive-blade; the point tore a channel up the Gael’s forearm. Later he would feel pain and be discommoded by the rip in the skin and flesh; now he did not so much as notice. Ax-haft thunked into mailed hip, jerked away, leaped sidewise swift as a striking adder. Oak met skin; skin became tatters; tatters vanished to leave only bone.

The two skeletons fell almost together, with a rattle as of many games of knuckle-bones at once.

The ghastly battle continued. It was two against fourteen now, and one of the two unarmoured. Unhelmeted too he was, and cumbered by rustling robes of woolen girt with a rope composed of four intricately plaited strands.

“Bas, Bas! Back to the throne, man, ere ye be slain for naught! Hack the throne… and hurl the pieces!”

Bas skipped away from an overweight man of Norge. He turned-and faced an ax that had already commended its downward rush. Reflexively the holy druid jerked up his splintry chunk of ancient oak, and up leaped his other hand to brace it with a grip on either end.

The ax rushed down to cleave through that time-weakened slab of wood so that it was two, and had only slowed the descent of steel death. Bas went to one knee. His shocked arms quivered. From one nerve-tingling hand, even as the un-dead drew up his ax for the death-stroke, a piece of ragged wood fell. It struck the floor and bounded, just a little, onto the buskined foot of the ax-wielding Dane.

From above his head Bas heard a grunt. Then there was the stench of death’s decay eerily accelerated, and then that was gone, as Guthrun Black-shield died once more. Again he returned to pallid smooth bones that clattered on the tiles.

Ten skeletons lay on the floor in their mail or leather; twelve men who were not men shuffled on. Twelve Un-dead men continued to do what they must: endeavour to slay the living. Helpless voiceless minions of the ghoulish sorcery that had raised them, they clove blindly to their one purpose: murder.

Bas of Tir Conaill gained the throne-chair and turned to look upon the awful sight.

The floor was strewn with corpses and man-shaped collections of bones. Bleeding from right forearm and left shoulder where the capping sleeve of his mailcoat was shredded, Cormac mac Art leaped and dodged, ducked and skidded, lunged and jabbed and swung. He danced, armour a-jingle; he raced away to attack again like a great spitting cat amid harrying dogs. Succor he knew lay only in nimbleness; a dash here, a jab there with his headless ax, and duck and dodge to continue the grim work from a new direction.

One advantage was held by the living man among the Un-dead; when his stave struck other than shield or enemy blade, an enemy fell.

The wood of the god-tree met sorcery-driven steel. Another of the resurrected dead was struck. Another skeleton crashed to the floor. A hand broke, and fingerbones rattled free to roll about. It was then Cormac fell backward across a Briton corpse. Ghoulmen who had been enemies, allied now in death, leaped in concert to carve the fallen man like a ham at feast-time.

Bas groaned in horror. But the other Gael was lean and more than passing quick.

Cormac rolled, contriving to hurl himself several feet along the floor with a wrenching twisting exertion that would have crippled the back of a man whose body was not so agile and muscle-sheathed. Armour screamed on tile. A rushing ax chopped down the corpse of the Briton over which Cormac had fallen, and where he’d sprawled but a second before. Already he was scrambling to his feet, aiding himself with his hands like the animals that were his remotest ancestors. To such was he reduced.

A brief glance showed the Gael five foes converging on him. These were uncanny foes, unnatural foes, impervious to aught but the headless ax in his hand. Again he must needs run, fleet as a hare before hounds, racing around and between pillars tall as oaks-which he wished they were.

In shuddery silence, dead men followed, to join him with them.

Bas saw that Cormac was bent on making his way around and back to him. He saw too how the Dane hurried to cut off his former piratic comrade-and the druid hurled the broken piece of oak in his hand. The dead man moved too fast to be struck where Bas aimed, between the shoulder blades. The splinter-bristling chunk of wood fell short.

Yet again the druid was lucky or Behl-blessed; it struck the back of his knotty calf. In seconds he became mere bone. Again the ghastly cycle: man who had turned into corpse and then into bone and then into man-returned to bone.

With cries of rage and challenge that rang and echoed in the room, Ros and Brian burst into the hall of horror. Having heard the clangour and Cormac’s shouts, they’d hurried onto the gallery to stare down at that which erupted their bodies into gooseflesh. The two youths withstood the moveless watching as long as they could without intervening. Swallowing all fear, they came now loping like young hounds with more enthusiasm than knowledge or sense.

“STOP!” Bas bellowed, and it was no small voice the druid possessed. “Hold-only oak slays them-only oak!”

The two young men looked at him, at Cormac and his assailants-who though eerily silent looked quite natural-and at each other, and back to the druid.

Bas chopped a piece of splintery wood from the ruined airm of the throne of Kull. As though he’d commanded men all his life, as though he wore a crown and mail rather than robe and center-parted black hair that was rope-held about his forehead above his brows, Bas the Druid called out again.

“Come ye hither, both!”

Cormac was parrying a vicious sword-stroke from a man whose sword-wound he’d once treated, off Rechru isle after an encounter with a boat too full of Frisians. His hurried swing of his makeshift stave at the attacker was well caught on oval shield, even as Cormac blunted the ax-swing of a second foe on his own buckler.

“GET TO BAS!” he bellowed, without looking from his foemen.

Brian and Ros, as confused as they were quiveringly excited, were already doing so in obedience to the sword-wielding druid. Like a man whose wife is dying for lack of wood on the fire, the robed man chopped at the magnificent old throne with Cormac’s sword.

Diving headlong between two attackers and beneath their rushing blades, Cormac was able to strike a leg in passing with his strange weapon.

Nine of the Un-dead remained.

A flying chunk of wood struck one and rebounded to thud into the leg of a second. Brian of Killevy cried out in high glee at the double result of his throw.

Seven Un-dead stalked Cormac mac Art.

He fell before the simultaneous crash of two axes on his shield, which divided in twain nearly to the boss. Yet a moment later there were six of the enemy remaining, and then five, for Ros and the druid each hurled an oaken missile true. Brian’s second throw missed his target.

Slammed into a knee with a jolting force and then struck with a rushing sword, the splinter-tipped stave in Cormac’s hand bit his wrist… and went clattering and rolling noisily across the floor.

Without smiles of triumph on their mask-like faces, four grim, silent spectres from the other side of the grave closed on him. Blades rushed down-

And Cormac hurled himself, not between, but through the legs of one Un-dead enemy!

The cold of death stabbed through mail and tunic like an icy knife, and then he was landing on his hands without so much as a grunt. He skidded, rolled, came up running. The Gael sprinted for the throne and the three allies there. Ere he joined them, Bas had stepped away. His eyes blazed with an unearthly fire and his gesturing hands were like the claws of a rearing bear. Strange words issued from his lips, guttural words from the dim past of the race of man.

Three horrors that had been men-and more lately corpses-stalked toward him with uplifted weapons. From the throne-chair oaken chunks whizzed. Two of the Un-dead became first putrefying corpses once again, then bones-and as they dropped, so fell the last of their number-with his flesh still sheathing his skeleton.

“HOLD!” Cormac called, and his hand leapt out to stay Brian’s arm. “That be the last-and he remains flesh, if not blood! The druid has wrought a spell upon him… upon it.”

The eyes of three weapon-men of Eirrin turned their gazes upon Bas. Still gesturing and still gutturally murmuring, he advanced upon the fallen Viking. The man, if such he could be called, lay still in his horn-sprouting helm and fine scalemail corselet and steel-bossed seagreen belt.

“…hear me?” the druid said aloud. “By all those names and conjuries and by the eternal golden sun and silv’ry moon, lord of day and lord of night, I conjure you… I command you. Answer! Your name, your name!”

The dead man’s chest did not move. The dead man’s voice rasped up from his throat like wood dragged over whetstone, and words emerged as though he had to think hard to form each one, and three men shivered who had never quaked in combat.

“Thor Bast… Shield – hewer-r-r-”

“Ah!” The druid stood now over the living dead man he had bound by ancient words to the floor. Now he forced him to speak on, by dint of powers greater even than the speechlessness of death. “And are ye dead, Thorgast Shield-hewer?”

Rasping and dry: “Ay-ye…”

“Gods,” Brian whispered, and beside him Ros gasped out, “Crom Cruach stead me!”

“Why came ye back, ye who were dead, to war thus on the living?”

“…sent-called, forced-I wa-as… had to-commme ba-a-ack… co-ol-l-ld…”

“Aye, colder than your northern home it is, for ye were not meant to be here thus. Release is at hand, Thorgast Shield-hewer, but first-answer! Why came ye back? What was your mission?”

“Kill-all who ca-ame… herre-kill-Ku-K… Cor-r-mac-mac-Aar-r-r-tt…”

Brian of Killevy saw it, as the dead spoke, but never did flaxen-haired Brian tell what he saw: Cormac mac Art shuddered and paled.

“Why him?” the druid demanded. “Speak, Thorgast Shield-hewer!”

“Let-me-e-ee-go-oh…”

“SPEAK, damned spirit that was a man, answer! Why must ye seek to slay Cormac mac Art?”

“…ha-ad to-ooo-ven-geann-ccce-”

“Vengeance? Ye knew him before?”

N-O-oh-passst-pa-a-ast-li-i-ife…”

“Ah.” The druid crouched close to the dead man, motionless but for the tortured moving of his lips. “And, Thorgast Shield-hewer, dead and not dead, poor cold shade dragged back from the Otherwhere… who called you here?”

“C-C-uth-no-o-ohh,” the corpse moaned, as though confused. “L-et me-go-oh…”

“Speak the name, Thorgast Shield-hewer that was. Who? Speak-and these will be your last words; speak, and return where you belong… dead man!”

Staring, his face pale, Cormac strained to hear.

Thorgast Shield-hewer spoke two words, a strange name if it was a name, and then he was still, and the flesh faded from his white face to leave behind only the eternally grinning death’s head on the skeleton he had been before he was called back by him whose name he pronounced: “Thulsa Doom!”

Chapter Seven:

Pacts

Brian and Ros were heroes. Both slim, and neither ill-favoured, the excited young men reminded Cormac of tail-wagging dogs after their first hunt. The hounds of Cormac, he thought, and wondered if he were not crediting himself with overmuch. His head had been swelled a bit by that name the crew had begun applying to themselves after the successful fighting off of the Pictish attack asea: the Cormacanachta; descendants or followers of Cormac.

So Ros and Brian-I-love-to-fight were heroes, and the two youthful weapon-men strutted and figuratively wagged their tails before the others, while responding to questions with answers longer than necessary. If those who had abided outside did not quite fawn on the two who with Cormac and Bas had “slain” no less than two-and-twenty ghastly un-men, they did certainly show their envy and adulation.

Most of the others, just as naturally, expressed the wish that they’d been allowed to go within, rather than remaining without; but… captain’s orders.

During that great deal of chatter, Cormac caught the eye of a rather sombre Lugh, and he winked. Lugh’s looks improved; Ros and Brian were the heroes of the hour-or moment-but that wink advised the archer that Cormac mac Art still remembered how initial entry had been gained to the Castle of Kull of Atlantis.

Bas ruminated apart, while Cormac, the dead man’s words having discovered to him his extraordinary danger from whom or whatever Thulsa Doom was, brooded on his future. How, he wondered, as Ros na Dun Dalgan and Brian na Killevy received the adulation and envy of their comrades, did a mere weapon-man protect himself, much less do combat against a sorcerer so powerful as to raise the dead and turn them into fighting men?

Wulfhere meanwhile was grim. The Dane was essaying not to show his unhappiness at being left out of the steel-wielding action-and probably suspecting Cormac of having cheated him of his beloved sport: the splitting of shields and helms and skulls. Cormac said nothing to the giant from Dane-mark. He had no doubt that impatient and impetuous Wulfhere would have been slain within. The Dane’s pride and concept of manhood would have prevented his employing the dodging, fleeing, circling, snapping-wolf tactics that Cormac had used-to the saving of his own life.

And Samaire sulked.

Wulfhere had held her fast, nor had she ceased struggling and railing at him until Cormac reappeared; four ashy-faced men emerging from the reeking charnel-house of the thrice-ancient castle. Released then, Samaire had not run to Cormac as all would have thought natural, but had turned from him. Nor would she say aught to the Dane or accept his bumbling friendly overtures.

Now, either forgetting their leader with two younger heroes to raise on high or perhaps respecting Cormac’s withdrawal into himself, all trooped inside to see what little there was to be viewed: corpse-slain corpses and oak-made skeletons. Eighteen of the former there were, mingled among a score and two of the latter. Blood and cruor, weapons and rattly bones, dismembered and beheaded corpses and a chopped-up throne; these were what remained to be seen.

And so they were noted and exclaimed over-along with the excited words of Ros and Brian, but one of whom was so much as a score of years of age.

Others remained outside in the still-warm sunlight of early fall.

With his soiled robe flapping in a little breeze, Bas walked away to be alone with himself and his gods. Cormac sat on a rounded stone, heedless of his wounds. Someone or other had salved and bandaged them; someone or other not Samaire. Again and again he examined and worked at his doffed coat of linked steel chain, though he was hardly aware of what he did. Cormac spoke not now to gods; he was alone with his thoughts.

Samaire, too, had remained outside. Around the castle she had walked, into the shadowy gloom betwixt it and the cliff. Her helmet of lacquered and bronze-studded cowhide she had removed, so that her wealth of orange-and-gold hair stirred about her shoulders and bounced when she walked.

Cormac noted well her departure, while making sure his noticing went unnoticed. He assumed she had gone to relieve herself; it was no privacy she’d had on the ship, and soon they’d be aboard again. Morosely, he ruminated.

Thulsa Doom.

Thulsa Doom, Doom, Doom, Thool-sah… Doooommmm. The name and its ominous sound pulsed within his head like a gloomy drum, thrumming there and somberly booming. Thulsa Doooommmm…

What was a Thulsa Doom?

Who was Thuls-

He knew.

He saw. It was what his former crewmen had called “the remembering” that was upon him once again; the pictures, the words and memories or “memories” within his brain.

A bronzed hand tore away the shielding veil from a tall, spectrally thin man in a dark, well-made robe. A woman screamed; white faces, including those of soldiers in uniforms and with weapons unfamiliar to Cormac mac Art, shrank bank. Revealed behind the veil was the face of the living man in the robe. But it was no living face; it was a bare white skull, in whose eye sockets flamed livid fire!

Cormac heard… a voice thrumming in his mind as if in an echoic cavern, and he knew that this was the voice of the faceless man…

“Aye, Thulsa Doom, fools! The greatest of all wizards and your eternal foe, Kull of Atlantis! You have won this tilt, but beware, there shall be others.”

Cormac saw that death’s head man burst the cords that bound him; saw him swing to stalk, dark robe whirling and flapping about his heels to the tall ornate door. The back of his head, too, was the skull of a man long dead. Cormac saw a sharp blade transpierce the tall figure… and emerge unblooded. Seated on a stone on a lonely island plain incalculable years later, Cormac saw the skull-faced mage turn, saw him laugh, heard him speak, sneering-

“Ages ago I died as men die! Nay, I shall pass to some other sphere when my time comes, not before. I bleed not, for my veins are empty… Stand back, fool, your master goes. But he shall come again to you, and you shall scream and shrivel and die in that coming!”

Cormac saw…

The skull faced wizard step to a door bordered all about with squared, runic decor, and pass through it, and… vanish.

He heard… a man’s voice-what man? Could there be men with names such as Ka-nu, and Tu?

Aye, there had been, time out of mind.

“Next time we must be more wary, “ one said, within the mind of the seemingly stricken mac Art, “for he is a fiend incarnate-an owner of magic black and unholy. He hates you, for he is a satellite of the Great Serpent.”

“Me? Hates me? I broke? I broke his power, I? But I am… I am…”

“He has the gift of illusion and invisibility… you must beware of Thulsa Doom, for he vanished into another dimension, and as long as he is there he is invisible and harmless to us… but he will come again.”

Dimension? What other dimension?

What is a “dimension”?

And Cormac saw…

…a death-duel with swords, all shrouded in a swirling eerie mist not of nature born. One man fought with a green-glowing blade, and his face was a pallid, awful skull… Thulsa Doom once again! The other man Cormac could not see… the other man was himself.

And they fought well and with the clangour of blades of steel within the mist, and the wizard’s flashing green glaive was ensorceled, so I (he? I? He? He is I; I was he; I am he!) contrived to switch swords, warned by some shade or god from without the machina and aye, he was stronger at once, for the enchanted green brand of the wizard drank the source of life and energy itself, and gave it to the wielder that he became ever more strong and virile.

Cormac spoke aloud, dully, sitting and staring down at the earth. His voice was that of an old and weary man.

“And I grew strong and he weak, until he was drained. Then sank he down into naught but dust for the fickle winds to play with. For dust he was or should have been afore, a man long dead, a servant of… a servantish minion of… ka nama kaa lajerama!”

Well away along the plain of the Castle of Atlantis, another robed man with knowledge arcane stood, ruminating. At sound of those words he whirled about. A great look of surprise, of astonishment was writ on his well-boned face… well-boned, but fleshy that face, and not unpleasant to look upon, while his robe was of Nature’s green, not night-dark like that of the mage whose age was measured in millenia. A servant of the gods of men was this man, not of rustling spiteful serpents who must ever hate the race possessed of voices and legs.

“Ka nama kaa lajerama,” Bas repeated. “La ka nam’an vorankh amarejal!” Sweat stood out on the druid’s brow as he stared at the hunched and slackfaced Cormac mac Art. “And he thinks he be but a descendant of that great ancient Kull, King Kull, that once and always King Kull! For it is all the same, Celt and Kelt, the Keltoi of the Greeks and the Celtii/Keltii of the Latins. All the same: Cormac and Kull, Cull and Kormak!”

The druid shook as with palsy. He murmured on, “And that I, I, Miall’s son Bas of Tir Conaill, am alive at this time, and him alive and abroad in goodly body once more. Aye… and menaced!”

Bas the Druid strode to the seated, bowed man. His hand fell gently on Cormac’s shoulder.

Up jerked a dark head, and eyes like ice from within the crevasses of their slits stared wildly up at Bas. “Tu! It’s he! We must-”

Cormac broke off. Bas waited a moment longer, feeling his own hand quiver on that powerful shoulder. He saw Cormac’s eyes come into focus. Then the druid said what he had come to say, what he must say.

“Cormac mac Art! You are in more danger than any man on earth, for a timeless master of evil and illusion has marked you for his own. Vengeance he seeks, not on you whom he knows not in this life, but on him ye once were. Cormac mac Art! I who was there too, as councillor and enemy of the same enemy… I shall not leave your side, for sword and prowess alone will not prevail against the one who seeks grim vengeance from a time so far removed from this that men have not the numbers to count the years!”

Cormac did not move; it was as if the powerful weapon-man did not hear, so lost was he in visions and memories that were not memories, and voices of the past that was never past, never wholly gone, but one more portion of the flowing river of the eternal present.

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.”

“Whereupon 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…”

“And… 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!”