Andrew Offutt - The Sign of the Moonbow

Wulfhere glanced back, and his helmet clonked dully against a low ceil of solid stone. He saw only the darkness; they had followed the cavern downward, and its mouth had vanished.

“How can people, live down here, in this blackness? Cormac… there cannot be people down here!”

Cormac said nothing. Doubts plucked at his confidence and his hopes, too, but he’d go on until uncertainty became certainty-one way or another. An there be a crowned woman down here , he mused, sure it’s Queen of the Dark she is!

So, and so. Let it be that, then. If such there were, he’d be finding her. Behind him paced Thulsa Doom in silence; last came Wulfhere Hausakluifr. Cormac walked on, leading the others ever deeper into the earth. A silence surrounded them, and it seemed ominous, brooding, a menace. Waiting. Silence and darkness swallowed them. The air grew heavy with the odour of damp loam.

Their footsteps and the clink of chainmail were the only sounds, and close-pressing walls gave off echoes. Even their breathing seemed loud, echoic in this subterrene silence.

Cormac mac Art knew not how long they’d paced forward, ever downward, but his back had begun to complain of having been so long bowed. Many minutes, he knew; many, many minutes. He was sure that Wulfhere suffered even more, by reason of his great height. But the Dane did not complain. Cormac realized, and appreciated. Wulfhere Skullsplitter was no child. He knew when not to jest or jape or make complaints.

Aye-and surely the ceiling’s height is proof enow of the origin of this endless tunnel, added to the sorcerous invisibility of its mouth; this passage was constructed for people far shorter than I, than men of normal height… the Tuatha de Danann.

“Cormac!” Wulfhere’s voice came in a rumblous whisper.

“Aye.”

Cormac’s voice, too, was cautiously low, for there was light ahead. They advanced toward the pallid grey glow. Now the walls ahead became visible, in a dim pearly light that seemed to have no source and yet was like… moonlight. It did not grow brighter as they approached, though they were soon able to see more clearly. The illumination was like that of earliest dawn just when the birds commence to sing, rather than the final blush at day’s end. Toward that light the three walked-and what they became able to see directly ahead was a blank wall of stone.

Just as they reached that dead end of the passage they trekked, they saw that it was not; the tunnel split and went off at angles to left and right. In the broader space formed by the three openings in the earth, they paused, peering down each arm of the Y and looking at each other.

There came help then in the matter of choosing: from. along the leftward passage came sound. It was that of weeping, in the naturally high voice of a woman or an adolescent.

After the exchange of another glance-and one directed at Thulsa Doom-they turned and entered the channel to the left.

Was it an omen of ill favour that the first sound they heard in this subterrene road to the tuatha de Danann was of sobbing; that the first person they met here inside Eirrin was deep in sadness?

The passageway descended, angled-and they saw the weeper.

She was a girl or young woman, huddled on the cavern floor, close to the far wall with her legs drawn up and her head in her hands.

She was entirely naked but for a bracelet, which looked like bronze.

Deciding as he had about Sinshi that this nude little weeper was more girl than woman, Cormac paused, lifted a hand to halt the others. His buckler was on his arm and his sword in his sheath. They gazed on the girl, whose head was down while she wept with quaking shoulders and yet little sound as though she strove not to be heard; nevertheless she had neither seen nor heard their approach. In silence, the three trespassers of under-earth stared.

Never had Cormac mac Art seen anyone so pale.

An infant, mayhap; a toddler never out of the house. As this girl of the Danans had never been out of the earth. No sun had ever touched that skin, nor that of her parents or their parents before them, nor indeed any of her forebears, for some five centuries. They and their arcane art had somehow brought with them the light of their goddess, for this chamber was brighter, as though bathed in moonlight. But not sunlight. Aye, the Danans, for so pale was this one that she had to be of those people of sub-Eirrin, despite her great difference from those of the Isle of Daneira.

Though strange, the pearly colour of her hair, ever so faintly tinged with the palest slate blue, was far from distasteful. Cormac had seen ash-blonds afore, though hardly often, and he had seen too those whose hair went grey and even white ere they had lived long enough to gain the wrinkles of age; he thought such hair beautiful.

This Danan’s hair was that hue all over her body, he saw, and she was superbly constructed-strangely no darker round her nipples than the inner shell of a mussel-and attractive by the standards of any people he knew, assuming they judged not beauty by the amount of flesh. Though true, he had not yet seen her face.

Like those of Daneira, this sobbing Danan was slight, lightly boned and extremely short; five feet, if that tall.

Cormac spoke quietly, with deliberate slowness and care for pronunciation.

“Whatever it is that puts sadness on ye, we’ll not be adding to it.”

Up came her head; wide went eyes more pale than ever Cormac had seen even among the Norse. Her sobs ended. Fine nostrils flared as with a little cry she drew back against a wall of rocky earth shored with both wood and stones. She stared, shrinking.

“We bring you absolutely no harm,” Cormac said, uncomfortable in the role of gentleness; it was little practice he’d had. “D’ye understand my words?”

Silent and huge-eyed, weird-eyed, she nodded. Her head was longish, her face thin and with pronounced bone-structure. Like those of a rabbit though nigh without colour, her eyes swiftly shifted their skittish gaze from one to the other of the three men before her. Cormac knew that they were even stranger to her than she to them; they expected the unusual. On impulse, he squatted. Even at a distance of two lengths of his body, he towered over the girl on the floor against the wall, her legs and arms drawn up defensively.

“My name is Cormac mac Art. He of the red beard is Wulfhere. Wulfhere. This is… Thulsa. It’s from… above, that we’ve come. And in peace… oh.”

He had forgotten. From between tunic and mailcoat he lifted the silver chain, with its pendent sign of the Moonbow.

The girl gasped, stared. Her head came forward a trifle to peer at the sigil. Her gaze shifted to the chest of Thulsa Doom. She blinked and tucked her lower lip betwixt her teeth.

“It is as friend of Danu and Her people I come, with my blood-brother and him who is my captive, bonded to me by the Chains of Danu.” Cormac smiled. “We are not monster Gaels come to eat ye! Indeed, we come bearing some gifts, and begging a boon.”

Still she said naught, but only stared.

“It’s slowly I’m talking because it’s apart our tongues have grown, your people’s and mine, across the hundreds of years. Please do the same. It’s of the Danans ye be?”

Long he waited for her reply; at last she said, in a tiny voice, “Aye. Cor… Cormac mac… your hair! And his hair… and so tall ye be, all three!”

Cormac showed her another smile, working very hard at being gentle and confidence-winning. “And to us ye be lovely small, child of Danu! I… it’s on me to ask…” He paused. “See us as friends of yourself, g-will ye be telling us your name?”

She was staring past him with those positively unsettling eyes with less colour than the underside of a cloud. Abruptly realizing that it was not cold as he’d expected, so deep in the earth, he gave thought to the possibility that the Danans of sub-Eirrin wore no clothing. But her legs were drawn up and to one side, heels at her buttocks, thus concealing her privates in apparent modesty. Her arms remained across breasts that he had already seen were firm and high and pointy of tip, like cones of snow.