In a scurrilous bargain made worse because it was with Norsemen, Feredach saw that there was no possible claim on Leinster’s throne save his own. The men of Norge kidnaped and carried off Ceann and Samaire as one day they rode near the sea.
Then had chance or the gods taken a hand-if Chance were not indeed a god. To this haunted isle whirlpool and storm brought Cormac and Wulfhere; here too the Norsemen brought Ceann and Samaire. Soon Feredach’s Viking hirelings were well paid in scarlet coin. Once he was freed of bonds and had snatched up sharp steel, the minstrel-prince Ceann took good toll among his own captors; all were slain.
Across the sea Cormac escorted Ceann and Samaire, and across a third of Eirrin; through Picts and a lustful Munsterish soldier and an honour-less Munsterish king-and his honourable son. Through highwaymen in the Wood of Brosna and into Meath Cormac escorted them, and to Tara Hill and the palace of the High-king. Nor was the relationship of Cormac and Samaire less than one of friendship and companionry-nor still was it limited so, for they were man and woman. Each had been, long ago, the other’s first lover.
Now a protected ward of the Ard-righ, Ceann remained in Eirrin but durst not go into his own Leinster. He was saying and doing the things that princes without crowns say and do when they’d have the throne of their fathers, but will not resort to murder. Such activities had much need of financing. And so Cormac had come back here, to a lonely, uncharted isle of rock and its castle peopled by ghosts and the crimsoned corpses of slain men. For here was the price of many cattle, and Ceann and Samaire needed such in their endeavours.
With Cormac had come Samaire, for she’d not stay behind. And they’d met the grimmest and most horrible of powerful enemies, who sought dark vengeance on Cormac mac Art, though for nothing done by Cormac mac Art. And if the subterrene corridor were his haunt and den-Cormac walked now its dusty floor, alone.
In that smooth-walled hallway of earth and stone, the thoughtful Cormac of Connacht came again upon the remains of the awesome serpent he’d slain. Called back by sight and smell from his thoughts to the present, he paused, staring.
Then he went on, for this was not his goal.
He came to that place where had lain Cutha Atheldane, and he paused. Thulsa Doom, Doom…
Cormac gave his head a jerk to clear it of the drum-thrum and went on. On both the previous occasions of his being here-the second but a few hours past-there had been reason not to go on, but swiftly to return. Now there was no such reason. He would see what lay ahead, toward what Cutha Atheldane had fled. He walked on, through untrod dust, dust that had lain here without stirring for… what man could know how long? Dust rose in little clouds at each step, so that he was able to see his feet only when one lifted in a step.
Thulsa Doom, Doom…
The torchlight flickered off smooth, close-set walls and floor smooth and soft with its layer of dust. The tunnel ran straight now, without the constant leftthen-right baffles.
Though he was not able to see ahead more than a few body-lengths, Cormac knew by the sensation in legs and broad back that he had begun to ascend. He was surprised. He had assumed the tunnel ran on down, to the sea. Instead, it leveled at about the place where Cutha Atheldane had died… and risen again… and then it began to elevate once more, though at a most gentle incline.
Cormac walked on, ascending.
Was the tunnel turning, bending? He could not be sure; he was unable to see far enough ahead to make such a determination. It seemed so; he felt that he was both ascending and rounding a long gentle bend.
He walked on. Dust puffed up about his legs. The name walked with him, grimly stalking the hallways of his mind. Thulsa Doom, Doom…
Now he saw clearly a curve up ahead, for it was somehow illumined. The tremulous light from the glim he carried rayed out not so far, but by some other light he could see that curving wall, could see the tunnel disappear to the left. A feeling of the eerie eddied about him with the dust. It strove to settle between his shoulder blades and chill his back, a nervousness and foreboding that had no name and could not be explained.
Cormac shrugged and twitched his shoulders as if to free them of something palpable.
He had reached across his lean, mailcoated belly to set hand to his sword pommel, shaped for enwrapping fingers. His fingers enwrapped it. He felt well-shaped, heat-hardened wood and the cool touch of insets of bronze and silver, tooled and chiseled. He drew the long sword slowly; there was only the faintest of sounds as steel blade slid from leather-covered, bronze encircled scabbard. Dust hissing and eddying about his feet and lower legs, he paced watchfully forward.
Cormac began rounding the long curve in the tunnel, and two facts made themselves known to his senses. The light came not from the walls, but from ahead. It grew brighter. And the air was better, far less stagnant, imbued with less of that unpleasant mephitic odour.
Tunnel’s end at last, he thought, and stopped.
First he checked his strike-a-light. Then, snuffing the torch in thick dust, he placed it against the wall of the corridor. He gripped his shield; while he had carried the torch, he had but “worn” the targe, with his arm through its straps. Above, over his shoulders, was the coil of rope.
Sword and shield at ready, he advanced along the curving hall, of earth and stone. The light grew and the air became sweeter still. He felt the stir of a faint breeze.
Then he saw daylight. A patch of fleece-decorated cerulean sky formed the very top of a slender oval opening; below the sky reared shadowed rock of grey and black. Unmenaced but silent and ready, he went forward. The patch of sky grew. He saw that the aperture through which he must pass was little more than the width of his shoulders. Clean air wafted in, bearing with it the familiar saline tang of the sea.
Cormac mac Art emerged from the subterrene escape-route from the Castle of Atlantis, and he drew in great lungsful of clear clean air, which he released in long suspirations. He looked about.
Above him: the sky of autumn, in late afternoon. To his left, a stony wall, slightly convex, so that a man standing above might well look down into the shadowy slice in the rock without seeing the niche that was the tunnel’s mouth. Directly ahead: the same dark stone. Behind him: the niche; a doorway opening into the tunnel. And to his right: another niche, also slender and framed all in sky. The tunnel emerged through a cleft into another, then, a sort of roofless vestibule.
After a few moments, Cormac left it. The coiled rope on his shoulder brushed the stone on his left.
First he saw the sea, far below. At nearly the same time, he both saw and felt the existence of another natural phenomenon, a sinister one. Cormac stopped, very suddenly indeed. Simultaneously he did his best to lean backward.
He was on the brink of death.
Once, a long granitic slope had perhaps swept down to the dark sea. Surely only if that were true would the tunnel have been brought to its terminus here. But inconceivable time had passed, and wrought its changes. Now an escape tunnel ending at this place was no less than insanity. Over the thousands of years, wind and sea had done their work. The slope had been chewed up and swallowed, the ocean moving in as a predator on its quarry.
Yet Cormac knew how great rearing formations of solid granite could break; he remembered the “earth”-quake he himself had experienced so recently at sea, not far from here. Perhaps there had been no slow relentless chewing away at all. Perhaps the slope’s death had not been the result of weathering, but had taken place all in a day-or within seconds.
Whatever the cause, the Gael was now on the brink of a cliff.
He stood on a short narrow shelf atop a sheer beetling precipice that could have been laid with a plumb-line. The basaltic butte dropped from his feet straight to a jumble of jagged rocks against which the restless sea lapped. It was a nigh-straight wall, as though he stood atop an unusually high watch tower of one of those Roman forts in Britain, or a Cromlech raised to the glory of Crom by an army of devoted giants.