“I’m good. My butt’s sore.” Grizzly rubbed his backside for emphasis. “I guess it’s because I’m a man of action. I don’t sit around, so my ass isn’t accustomed to making contact with hard surfaces.” He forced a laugh.
Maddock clenched his fist and imagined it making contact with Grizzly’s face.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully. Don’t… touch… anything.”
Grizzly smiled. “Relax. We’re all right, aren’t we? And I managed to discover… whatever this is. It’s like I said, if there’s a trapdoor, I’ll find it.”
Gritting his teeth, Maddock turned and shone his light all around.
They were in a natural cave. Moisture coated the surface above them, which gleamed under the beams of their lights. A single stalactite, smooth and glistening, hung from the middle of the ceiling. Every few seconds, a single drop of water fell from its tip down onto an oddly shaped stalagmite, which stood at the center of a dark pool. The steady drip, along with Grizzly’s labored breathing, were the only sounds.
A line of Celtic symbols — single, double, and triple spirals — led the way to the statue, which stood in the center of a triskele pattern.
As they moved closer, Maddock realized that it was not a stalagmite at all, but a statue. The steady drip of water over countless years had eroded its features. The top of its head was gone, and rivulets marred its surface. Still, he could tell the figure was female, clad in an ornate robe, and holding what had once been a bowl or a disc of some sort. A serpent lay coiled at her feet.
“That’s Danu,” Grizzly said. “She’s the mother goddess of the Tuatha de Dannan.” He reached out to touch her face, but Maddock seized his wrist.
“I told you not to touch anything.”
The twinkle in Grizzly’s brown eyes faded as he met the cold steel of Maddock’s gaze. “It’s cool.” He drew away, hands held up as if he were being arrested.
Maddock stared for a few seconds longer, just to show he meant business, before continuing his inspection of the cave. Hidden in the darkness stood four large stone blocks, carved of basalt, each at one of the compass points if Maddock did not miss his guess.
“There’s writing on them,” Grizzly said. “Lia Fáil, Lug, Nuada, Dagda.”
“What do they mean?” Maddock asked.
“Stone, spear, sword, and cauldron.”
“Great.” Maddock ran a hand through his hair. “It looks like the four treasures were once here.” He pictured the artifacts, each on its respective pedestal, standing beneath the watchful gaze of the Tuathan goddess.
“How did they even find this place?” Grizzly asked. “Someone without diving gear held his breath and swam into a dark underwater channel until he found this cave?”
“I have a feeling there was once a way down here from the castle, probably close to the trapdoor you so cleverly found. Whoever took the treasure, assuming it was real, and these aren’t symbolic representations, must have sealed it up.”
“But why seal it up once the treasure was gone?”
“To cover their tracks, I suppose,” Maddock said. “If knowledge of this place came to light, people might start believing the treasures are more than a mere legend.”
“I think this proves the treasures are real,” Grizzly said. “If they were figurative, there wouldn’t be a simple stone block with the words on them.”
Maddock nodded. “They’d have carved representations of the treasures, just like they made the image of their goddess.” It felt odd to agree with Grizzly, but at least the man wasn’t a complete idiot.
“The million-dollar question is where did they go?” Grizzly said.
“There’s got to be a clue,” Maddock said.
“How do you figure?”
“I’ve seen it more times than I can count. When something sacred is moved to a new location, there’s always someone who is so afraid of it being lost forever, that they leave a message behind just in case.”
“What about when an enemy takes it?” Grizzly asked. “Like when the Babylonians took the Ark of the Covenant?”
Maddock could have told him a few things about the sacred ark, but he kept his knowledge to himself. “Depends. In a situation like you describe, they’ll often leave a gloating message behind. Usually, something like that isn’t kept a secret. They want the world to know they’ve taken the enemy’s most treasured possessions.”
“Like a Roman triumph, when they’d parade the treasures of the conquered nation to show off the fruits of their victory.”
“Exactly.” Again, Maddock felt a twinge of discomfort at agreeing with Grizzly. “What we need to do now is look for such a message.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed.” Grizzly gave him a wink. “And I promise not to touch anything.”
They gave the cavern a thorough, floor-to-ceiling search, but found nothing. Maddock had hoped that one of the pedestals on which the treasure once stood might hold a clue, but they were free of any markings aside from the names of the treasures.
“Maybe there was a clue, but it got eroded away?” Grizzly asked.
Eroded! Maddock returned to the statue of Danu. If anything had been washed away, this would be the most likely place.
“Do you see something?” Grizzly asked.
“Help me look.” He examined every inch of the statue, from head to toe. And then his gaze drifted to the serpent at her feet, and something caught his eye. What he’d initially taken to be the snake’s faded markings were, in fact, a series of symbols scraped into the stone. “I think this is it!” He took out his camera and began photographing the markings. “Jimmy’s going to kill me when I ask him to decipher this.”
“Isla has a friend — a codebreaker by the name of Meikle. He helped us with the last clue. He’d probably help with this one, too.”
“Works for me. Two heads are better than one.” Maddock barked a rueful laugh. “These people do like their puzzles, don’t they?”
Chapter 19
Walter Meikle sat in a high-backed chair, feet propped up, thumbing absently through an aged volume of Tuatha mythology. The yellowed pages made a pleasant scratching sound as he slowly turned them. He looked at each word but digested only a few. He turned another page and stopped at a detailed, black and white image of the goddess Danu. He knew it was merely his imagination, but it seemed accusation shone in her eyes as she gazed up at him. He snapped the book closed and tossed it on the table beside him, knocking over his empty teacup in the process.
“Damn,” he muttered.
His phone rang, and he stared at the name for a full three seconds before answering. Isla Mulheron. Why couldn’t the girl just leave it alone? But he knew the answer, knew she would not relent.
“Hello?”
“Meikle? It’s Isla Mulheron. Listen, the Dunstaffnage clue was spot-on.”
“Really?” Meikle sat up straight. “What did you find?” He felt his eyes go wide as she described an underwater passageway, a trapdoor, and a treasure room hidden in a cave far beneath the castle.
“And you’re confident the treasures were once kept there?” His reservations about her, his wishes for her to leave him alone, were forgotten.
“As certain as we can be.”
Meikle squeezed the phone, tension knotting his back. “Did you… run into any trouble? The passageway and cave were structurally sound, I mean,” he hastily added, not wanting to rouse her suspicion.
“I didn’t go down with them. SCUBA isn’t my thing. But the guys who went in made it back okay.”