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 goaclass="underline" 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 halclass="underline" 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.
At their tug on the rope, Cormac loosed it and let it slide over the edge, into the deep shadow where they waited. Then he followed.
The Gael went slowly, testing each little ledge or rocky projection before giving it his weight. His feet were sea-sure, and he had done more than his share of scaling. Down he went, with but one slip that fingers like cables turned into no more than a delay. A few feet above the upturned faces of the other two men, he dropped and alit like a cat on bent legs. His hands slapped the earth a second after his feet.
“Crom’s eyes,” Lugh said in a gasp, “an I dropped that’ distance I’d be wearing my stones around my knees!”
“An ever-active man learns to keep them bound up tight to his body,” Cormac assured him. “And learns how to fold up when he drops so. Now, Lugh. It’s your bow and skill we depend upon, all. Pluck you forth a good straight shaft with a wicked heavy head, and let us tie this little cord to it.”
Three times Lugh assayed to arc an arrow up and up and over one of the bronze poles standing out like sun’s rays from the castle. On the third try, three delighted men watched the cord-trailing shaft sail up and over its target. It dropped; the cord caught, lying across the pole: the arrow dangled well above their heads.
First Cormac gave the hunter’s shoulder a squeeze of congratulations and thanks. Then he began working the cord up, shaking it, lifting, coaxing…
Jerking and swaying like an erratic pendulum, the arrow descended. Cormac flashed one of his tight almost-smiles as he caught hold of it. He began pulling. Up went the slender cord, followed by the stout ship’s rope knotted to its tail. And over the projection, and down. And then the thick rope was in Cormac’s hand. There was just enough cordage; only one end touched the ground now, and with little to spare.
“Another man’s length and we’d have failed for my lack of planning!” he snapped, while his companions silently wondered at his excellence of forethought. “Now, we haven’t enough rope to tie off. But if you will wind yourself with it, Lugh, and brace your feet against the castle wall, I can climb up-without, hopefully, breaking either of our backs.”
Lugh gazed at him, amazed at the ingeniousness, and he smiled at the joke his leader made, between comrades.
“My back will hold, mac Art!”
The cleverer Bas bobbed his head in one nod, and stepped forward.
“Mac Art would not ask a druid to hold the rope’s end, as he would any other man. I will. Come, Lugh. An we stand side by side, facing the castle, we can draw the rope across our backs and brace it well. It’s a brave man we’re to support and keep safe… and him no boy whose weight might be measured against feathers!”
The two men braced themselves.
By all the gods, Cormac thought, that I should see the day! I entrust my very life to an army composed of a farm-born hunter of hare and boar, and a robed druid whose strength I know not… but would hardly make wager on!