First he tugged at the dangling rope with all his strength. Then he gave it his weight. With no word of apology, he hung from it-and set himself a-swinging. Lugh gasped and Bas grunted openly. The rope held.
“Rest,” Cormac bade them, and prepared for his climb.
His buskins he hung by their laces around his neck. Buckler he fastened to his belt behind, its curve hugging that of his backside. By a thong, he made his sword-scabbard immobile against his thigh.
He looked at the two men who were ready to lean back against the rope, their feet against the base of the wall they faced, while he climbed. He nodded. And he went up.
The two men gasped, and Lugh cursed without heed of the druid beside him. Each held fast, and Cormac’s strength and superb physical condition steaded him well. Hand over hand, not hurriedly so as to avoid jerking Bas and Lugh, he went up, and up.
Lugh’s arrow had had to go far higher than Cormac. He’d snugged the rope in close to the castle itself, and the narrow window he sought was little more than a dozen feet above the ground. The sunray projection held; the rope held; the men below held. Cormac climbed.
When he peered into the gloomy niche, he saw no man within the room. Muscles knotted and strained then, for he could not edge through that air-and-arrow embrasure while wearing his buckler behind. Dangling by one hand, he reached back and untethered it. He eased the targe into the slice in the stone wall, which was thick as the length of his arm.
Cormac glanced down. Then he put out his bare right foot and set it into the niche. In a swift movement then that scraped chainmail on stone, he lunged into the open window.
There he stood a moment, drawing shallow breath, for chest and shoulderblades touched the sides of the embrasure. He was wedged snugly into an opening that was as if designed to accommodate his body-sidewise.
A gliding step rightward, another… and he eased himself silently as a stalking panther down into the room. He stood in one of the several chambers that lined the castle’s pillar-supported second floor-or half-floor, for the vaulted ceiling of the main great hall soared to the roof.
Ancient hangings that surely were once more beauteous than the famed product of Eirrin’s women hung now in tatters and were dust at the base of the walls. Yet two chairs and a low table, brassbound all, somehow remained. Cormac looked upon them, his teeth pressed tightly together; only through some sorcerous means surely could those furnishings have survived the millenia.
The feeling came upon him.
Hair prickled at his nape and cold fingers seemed to trail up his back. He’d been here afore of a certitude… but not in this lifetime. Neither had anyone else: the floor’s thick layer of dust was long undisturbed.
Slowly so as to be more silent than a mouse seeking indoors for sustenance in winter, he picked up his buckler and drew his sword. There was no door; only a doorway, where long ago had hung a curtain or arras. Cormac paced to the portal. His bare feet were silent in the soft dust. No sound stirred the stillness. He peered out. There was no one in the corridor.
Cormac mac Art sat down in the dust and put on his buskins.
Out he went into the dingy hallway, and he turned right toward the castle’s front. All was silent and gloomy; only the single window-niche in each room admitted light, and that but little, so that by the time it found its way out to the hall it was the merest glim. In that upper hallway of the anciently brooding castle, it may as well have been night. On a carpet of dust, in silence, Cormac walked through night at nigh-midday.
He was unable to understand the total lack of sound, unless all the Britons were somewhere outside. In that event, they and his comrades-and Samaire, far more than comrade-might well be at the grim business of death-dealing even now. But he forced himself not to hurry, and paced forward in a semicrouch. He let his soles glide over the dust, so as to make no sound of footfalls.
He moved only as swiftly as he thought he dared, with no more noise than a pacing cat.
Cormac passed the room wherein Wulfhere and Ceann had spent a night, while he had preferred to sleep out under the watchful moon. He passed the room in which Samaire was to have spent that same night. Almost he smiled; she had instead joined him outside, though he had stated clearly that he was exile, and would not return to Eirrin. In the morning, he had announced that he would…
He reached the end of the corridor, and was wary anew.
There was no man in view. There was no sound.
With caution, he moved past the stairway that led down to the narrow cul-de-sac of an entry hail. Here had knelt Norse archers; here was the window from whence they’d sped their whistling shafts at himself and Wulfhere and their approaching band of Danes. Now Cormac obtained the same view those Norgeborn bowmen had. He peered without, and caution eased.
There was only the empty plain and, far off, the entry into the twisting passage through the rock that connected this valley with the beach.
A new feeling of nervousness akin to fear drifted over the Gael like a dark mist. The castle… deserted? And without… no matter how he turned his head to peer this way and that, and strained his ears, there was no sound of shout or clash of arms to seaward.
Cormac mac Art walked the length of that defense-hall, hardly pausing to peer out at each of the other three windows. At the head of the second flight of steps, he glanced back. He saw nothing, no one. He crept down the stairs to the landing, peered around.
Below was nothing, no one.
Re-ascending, he passed around the hall’s back wall and onto the railed gallery that overlooked the vast main hall of the eerily silent castle.
Below, sprawled amid great dark splashes, were the bodies of strong men.
Cormac’s and Wulfhere’s Danes had died down there, three months agone, along with fifteen Norsemen. Cormac had been pursuing Samaire and Cutha Atheldane, a druid among Vikings, and had no part in the terrible battle. Only Wulfhere and Samaire’s brother Ceann survived.
Despite some objection from the more civilized prince and princess of Leinster, Wulfhere and Cormac had deemed this great structure a fine tomb indeed. They had left the dead here, friend and foe alike, corpses all. It was these considerably decayed bodies Cormac expected to find this day.
He did not. Not even the bones of those two-and-twenty men remained.
Instead, the scent of new-spilled blood was on the air. It lay barely dry below in splashes and pools, amid the hideously staring, sprawled corpses of eighteen… Britons!
Chapter Five:
The Living Dead
Cormac was outside in the bright sunlight, summoning Bas the Druid and Lugh, the Meathish hunter whom the Gael had surnamed the Manhunter.
Then came the clamor, and the three men whirled. A clot of weapon-men burst into the far end of the Valley of the Castle. A huge red-bearded, ax-wielding Dane… a small warrior in leathern boots with a bronze-studded leathern helmet… three chainmailed men with bows and feather-bristling quivers… others: all of Eirrin. And with them, a stumbling, mumbling Briton.
The man appeared mad and his gibbering was audible to Cormac long before his main party reached him. Great glazed eyes stared awfully from out a pallid Briton face twisted and set in horror.
“That man looks as if he has gazed upon the face of Death itself,” Bas said.
“Mayhap he has,” Cormac said very quietly. “He is the last of his entire crew.”
The three waited; the fourteen came on. All were united before the gaping dark maw of the castle, where its big iron-bound door sagged forlornly from one rotting hinge.
“You’ve been within?” Wulfhere demanded, ere any other could direct coherent words.
“Aye”