Andrew Offutt - The Undying Wizard

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.