Andrew Offutt: The Sword of the Gael

Another man moved, with first a grunt and then a curse. “Water! Hmp-it’s food this snarling belly wants!”

Cormac was removing his sleeveless tunic of linked chain. “Food! That , Half-a-man, we’ll have, for there are tasty gulls-”

“Arrgh,” Halfdan Half-a-man growled, and he made a face.

“-and wild geese or ducks,” the man of Eirrin went on. “And it’s their blood we’ll be drinking, Wulfhere, and proclaiming it the fairest quencher of thirst on the ridge of the world!”

On his feet, Wulfhere poked a finger into his scarlet beard to scratch. He nodded, a giant with breast muscles that bulged like a brace of shields beneath his corselet of scalemail. He grunted when he stooped for his horned helmet. With that on his head he was even more formidable and giant-like.

“Ummm,” he agreed in a rumbling grumble. “We shall not die of thirst or starvation, then. And meanwhile-what do we do here?”

“Care for our armour,” Cormac advised. With his removed, he folded his legs and lowered himself to the sand. He commenced a meticulous wiping of each of the many links of good small chain, to rid it of salt and rust-bringing water.

Thirst and rumbling bellies were ignored as one, then three, and at last eight others followed his example. A man could stand his hunger and his dry throat. Arms and armour, though-on those his life depended. Despite the fact that this island was surely abandoned by the gods, and unpeopled by the sons of man so that it might be home now in both life and death, the nine survivors of Wolfsail sat, and squinted, and rubbed and picked and polished.

As he had begun first and had no scales to lift, it was Cormac who first finished and rose. As though he might at any instant meet an army of attackers, he doggedly fastened armour and arms about his lean, rangy form. Wulfhere glanced up.

“Whither?”

“You’ve more armour to see to,” Cormac said, with that small sardonic smile of his. “I think I’ll take a walk.”

“Aye, with care. Halfdan will follow you, Cormac mac Art-he has less steel to see to.”

Halfdan-called-halfman said nothing. He was built low to the ground, too, but like an ox. Thus the name jestingly given him meant naught to the short man, who could lift and hurl the likes of Cormac and who had sent many taller men to their fathers, and them longer of arm.

Cormac mac Art set off walking, along the shore to the eastward. He angled his steps inland to the rocky wall that stood between him and-whatever dark secrets this grim land housed, back of its lifeless shore.

Halfdan-and Knud the Swift as well-were just on their feet and clad in well-inspected armour when their Gaelic comrade called.

“Ho! A divide splits the rock here, and winds inland.”

Then he walked on past it, rounding a granitic spur that ran down to the very water. Around it Cormac peered, and shook his head, for there was only more rock, and the sea, which ran out and out to turn dark and melt against the farther sky.

Water to the end of the world , the son of Eirrin mused without cheer, and he turned back to meet the others.

They straggled up the sand, huge Wulfhere still buckling on a swordbelt like an ox-harness. Knud limped a bit on a turned ankle, and Hakon Snorri’s son had wiped face and left arm clear of patches of skin on the sand in his violent sliding along it. Hrothgar swung his right arm, wincing, whilst he constantly worked the fingers of his left.

Twelve men had died, and nine had been blessed of their gods. All could walk, nor was there break or sprain among them. Cormac’s lower back nagged; he gave it no more heed than had it been a hangnail.

In horned helmets and steely-rustling mail over leg-hugging trews that bulged over the winding of their footgear, the little band entered the narrow declivity Cormac had found. Natural walls loomed high on either side, no further apart here than the length of two men, as though in some time long gone a giant had carved out this entry to the interior with two swift wedging strokes of an ax the size of the father of all oak trees.

They walked.

And they walked the more, while barren cliffs brooded over them and chilled them in grim shadow. The declivity widened, then narrowed. It widened again, and still again drew snug, while it turned a half-score times like a road that followed a cow’s meandering path. Nor did the nine men see aught of man or animal, not even the wild fowls they had heard.

Then they rounded another turn in that winding corridor roofed with sky and walled with somber basalt, and they came to a halt, and every man stared.

“Odin’s eye!”

“By Odin and the beard of Odin!”

“It-it be a jest of Loki, surely!”

“It’s to Valhalla we’ve come for all that, and still no cup-bearer in sight!”

Thus did those stout weapon-men make exclamation, while they stared.

Before them the slash in the rock widened into a canyon. The canyon became a valley, dotted with fallen rock ranging in size from pebbles to great deep-set chunks large as houses. The expanse of the valley itself was such that they could discern no details in the great dark wall of glowering basalt at its far end. But it was not that natural wall that gave them pause and filled them with awe.

Here were man-made walls.

Between the lofty natural fortress and the stranded sea-rovers, incredibly, stood no less than a castle, a towered and columned palace of spectacular porportion.

Chapter Two:The Castle of Atlantis

Great were their deeds, their passions,

and their sports;

With clay and stone

They piled on strath and shore

those mystic forts,

Not yet o’erthrown…

– D’Arcy McGee, The Celts

“Not in all my years of wandering have I seen the like of this,” Wulfhere said, and not without awe. “Cormac?”

The Gael shook his head. “I have seen the palace of Connacht’s king, and served a king in Leinster and another in Dalriada, and it’s the halls of their keeps these feet have trod. But that man-raised mountain would hold all Leinster’s palace… aye, and a tenth of the kingdom of King Gol of Dalriada in Alba as well!”

There was nervousness in the voice of Knud. “Who… raised this mighty keep-and why here?”

“No man alive,” Cormac mac Art said, very quietly.

Slitted of eye, the Gael was studying the lofty and massive pile of carved stone blocks with its weathered carvings and bronze trim. Broad was its entry and finely arched, the product of science and skill. Arched windows were impudently wide, in scorn of possible attackers.

“Nor was this set here,” Cormac mac Art said into their awed silence, “by those Romans who thought they were the chosen of the earth. Those carved decorations… it’s from the Celts we Gaels sprang, and from the men of long-vanished Cimmeria the Celts sprang, and from the rulers of the world time out of mind that the Cimmerians came-the world-spanning Atlanteans. Aye. Atlantis…”

The Danes looked at him curiously.

He was staring, as though seeing the throngs of golden men in their other-land garb, the stalwart folk of that long-ago land now gone forever.

“The great serpent,” he murmured, and the hair of more than one man bristled on his nape.

This was not the first time the scarred, sinister-faced Gael had seemed to slip away from them in this wise, as though he saw what they saw not, as though he spoke of a dream composed of pictures painted on the walls of his mind, and none other’s. His glacial eyes were invisible within their deep, slitted sockets as he stared at the visions of high civilization and artifice before them, and spoke on, quietly, in a droning voice.