Night & Demons (28 page)

“Keep away!” Wulfhere shouted over his left shoulder to the little strangers.

The Dane was poised with his axe lifted in both hands. The blade’s hooked lower edge could drag a horseman from his mount or pull an opponent’s shield clear for a quick upward thrust to finish a battle. As a threat against these brown strangers, the weapon looked as out of place as it would have been in a sheepfold.

The little folk spilled around Cormac and Wulfhere. Their voices were as constant and meaningless as the buzz of bees. The tallest of the folk barely rose to the height of Cormac’s armpit. They fingered the reivers’ clothing and accoutrements, pressing close in wonder but never making eye contact.

Wulfhere shouted a great curse. He raised his foot and thrust out, not so much kicking as pushing off the most insistent of the folk who tugged at his dagger sheath. The little man—or perhaps a woman—skidded across the floor, squealing in terror. The whole crowd darted back with the suddenness of a flock of pigeons changing course.

A door at the back of the building opened. Cormac had missed the hinged panel in the coffering which ornamented all the walls. Through the doorway stepped a man in a purple robe with gold lace at the throat and hem. He was black-haired and of normal height, though nowhere near the size of the armored warriors.

The newcomer raised his hand and called to the stunted folk in a liquid version of what was obviously the language that they chirped among themselves. The crowd bobbed to the floor in abasement, then dispersed through the front door and pillared side aisles. A dozen or so remained beneath the dome, waiting for further direction.

“Peace be on you, strangers,” the man called in rough-hewn but intelligible Gaelic. “I am Creon, the—king, I suppose you would say, of this accursed isle. And this—”

Creon didn’t look around, but through the doorway behind him stepped another figure: a woman, younger and dressed in white with gold trim. Her features, like her pale complexion and black hair, were similar to those of the man; but whereas Creon was merely handsome, the woman was startlingly beautiful.

“—is my daughter Antheia,” Creon finished, smiling slightly to notice the reivers staring with interest and appraisal toward the woman.

“What
is
this place?” Cormac called, echoing Wulfhere’s demand of moments before.

“This place . . .” said Antheia. Her voice had a bell-like clarity, and the Gaelic rolled from her tongue without Creon’s stilted choppiness. “. . . is all that remains of fabled Atlantis.”

“You speak Gaelic,” Wulfhere said accusingly. He lowered his axe only to high port, slanted across his chest; one hand on the end of the helve, the other gripping just beneath the broad blade. Cormac knew that his friend could lop Creon and his daughter into halves with a single stroke; and he knew also that Wulfhere was extremely dangerous when, as now, he was confused.

“Yes,” Antheia said in German so distorted that it was a moment before the words fell into Cormac’s mental template. “And we learned the speech of Saxon castaways also. Though not—” she added with a smile when she saw the reivers’ puzzled expressions “—very well, I gather.”

A bustle at the temple’s distant entrance spun Wulfhere. He lifted his axe for a blow that could crush through an elephant’s armor. Some of the stunted folk were back now, bringing wicker trays covered with fruits, nuts and berries.

The Dane lowered his axe in embarrassment, then thrust the helve back under his belt. Cormac smiled faintly and sheathed his sword. He’d want to dry the scabbard, wipe and oil the blade . . . but in good time, not just now.

“You are Atlanteans, then?” he asked.

Creon smiled without humor.
“They
are Atlanteans,” he said, gesturing toward the brown servants bringing in the trays of viands. “My daughter and I are the last descendants of the Athenians who conquered the island in the moments before its collapse into the sea.”

Creon crossed his arms and swept his grim gaze around the temple and the folk within it. “We Greeks decayed in numbers,” he said.
“They
decayed in stature and intelligence—in the arts and in everything that raises humanity from the beasts. The end must be very soon for the Atlanteans and us, their masters, alike.”

“Where
are
we?” Wulfhere demanded in a snarl of frustration. He strode toward the pillared side-aisle, moving with a speed and grace that belied the notion that a man the Dane’s size must be clumsy.

A brown-skinned woman offered Wulfhere ripe pears. He danced around her. There was no contact, but the Atlantean dropped her tray in terror and hid her face in her hands.

Cormac slid by instinct to Wulfhere’s left side as he left the nave, ready to cover the Dane if an axe-stroke drew the bigger man off-balance. They had survived, the two of them, because they fought as a team rather than as two individuals. A hundred times each had blocked the side-thrust spear from his friend’s armpit or the sword swung at the back of the other’s helmet.

At the moment, no armed foe threatened Cormac and Wulfhere in this place, this Atlantis; but the Gael had known evil enough in his wanderings to feel its presence here.

They stepped out onto the edge of the slab which leveled the temple’s foundations. A paved court had once surrounded the building, but grass and even mighty trees now shouldered aside the blocks of hexagonal marble.

A rectangular building clad in tin or tarnished silver faced the temple. The expanse of courtyard between the buildings had been kept clear of vegetation. The silver structure was two stories high and of considerable size, though it was by no means comparable to the domed temple. Atlantean servants with trays scuttled from there to the temple. They halted nervously when they noticed Cormac and Wulfhere watching them.

Antheia came out beside the reivers. Cormac couldn’t read the hint of a smile she gave him. He noticed for the first time that Antheia’s robe was clasped at the left shoulder by a brilliant ruby. That stone and the similar jewel which her father wore were the only objects in this
place
which seemed unaffected by the sickly light.

The thought drew Cormac’s gaze upward. He squinted, holding the back of his left hand across his eyes so that the fingers formed slitted protection.

He’d expected the sun, however distorted or cruelly filtered its beams might be. Instead, a ball of purple-green light hung only a moderate distance—miles or at most tens of miles—above the temple’s dome. The ball had a measurable diameter rather than being a dazzling point like the true sun.

Swirls of sickly color paraded across the sphere’s displayed surface. Its glow provided the sole illumination of the world below.

Cormac lowered his eyes, shivering despite himself. Until he saw
that,
he hadn’t truly believed that something had snatched him from his former reality. Wherever Atlantis was, it was not in a place or time that Cormac’s world knew.

“How did we get here, girl?” Wulfhere asked in a soft voice. Only someone who knew the Dane as well as Cormac did would have realized that Wulfhere was on the edge of berserk fury.

“Sometimes the bubble in which we all are trapped draws things from outside itself,” Antheia replied. She spoke calmly, but a tic in the corner of her eye suggested she read Wulfhere’s mood better than the Gael had feared she would. “Driftwood, seabirds . . . Men, not often, but often enough in the millennia since the bulk of the island sank.”

“In my day and that of my daughter,” said Creon, who joined them from between two of the close-set columns, “there have been Christian monks from Ireland and pirates who call themselves Saxons and Jutes. And yourselves, good sirs.”

He nodded with sad finality.

An animal hooted in pain or triumph from the near distance. The sound was the first sign that anything existed beyond the ruins fringing the overgrown courtyard.

“How do we get out of here, then?” Cormac demanded. His voice didn’t rise after the second syllable, but that was only because he consciously suppressed the spike of terror. “How do we return to the world we came from?”

Though that world was a storm-tossed sea ready to swallow the reivers within minutes or less . . .

“No one has left Atlantis in ten millennia,” Creon said. “None of my ancestors succeeded, none of the later castaways. We are all trapped.”

“Though there are worse worlds to be trapped in,” his daughter added with a speculative look at Cormac. “Especially now.”

The Gael was in no mood for a woman, even a woman as lovely as Antheia. He eyed the pillar behind him.

The temple’s outer columns were massive constructions in their own right, though they were nowhere near the size of the eight pairs which directly supported the dome. The shafts were about four feet in diameter, wider than a man could encircle with his arms.

The columns had been assembled from stone barrels as thick as they were wide. The cylinders were rolled onto the site with relative ease, then fluted and polished when transport was complete.

When the columns were first erected, the joints between the barrels may have been so close as to be invisible from all but the most careful examination. However, even if the atmosphere of Atlantis were always as still as this silent, muggy present, it decayed the stone to a degree.

Over the ten thousand years Creon claimed—and surely it could not have been
so
long? But over however many years, cracks that originally wouldn’t pass a knifeblade were etched away into ledges for Cormac’s fingers and toeholds for his boots. He began to climb as he had often climbed the friable rock of a seacliff, preparing to take a coast watcher unaware.

Below him, Cormac heard the Dane say, “These others, then—where are they? I don’t care about your monks, but if there are Saxons, they are no friends to me.”

“The last monk died a year ago,” Antheia responded. “Cearbhall, his name was. He was an old man, and never well since the storm which carried him to us, to here.”

She didn’t speak loudly, but her voice carried over the skritch of Cormac’s boots as he mounted from handhold to foothold. The Gael took no risks: three of his limbs were always anchored when he raised the fourth to its new position.

The surroundings of the temple opened out into a verdant jungle. Greenery was occasionally punctuated by a gleaming metal roof or, more often, by a lonely wall which was all that survived of a building.

“The Saxons were men of action, as you gentlemen are,” Creon said. “Though I hope their example will prevent you from seeking the same doom. The ground on which we stand is an island. It’s surrounded by a belt of water—a moat, you could almost say. Before the collapse, the island was joined to a pair of encircling ring islands and to the mainland beyond by bridges, but those were thrown down by earthquakes when most of the continent sank.”

A fig tree grew out of the side of the column forty feet in the air. Seven thumb-thick stems sprouted from where a bird had picked apart the fruit and left pulp containing a seed.

The roots were anchored deep within the column, wedging thousands of tons of stone apart by hydrostatic pressure. Fig wood wasn’t especially strong, but the green stems would at worst give warning before they started to crack. Cormac let the plant take enough of his weight that he could survey the horizon.

“Only the innermost of the ring islands was preserved with the temple when the continent sank,” Antheia said. “All that remains of Atlantis—all that there is of this world—ends on that island. But Aslief and his Saxons wouldn’t believe that, and they died trying to reach what would have been an impenetrable barrier anyway.”

Cormac could see a broad belt of water half a mile from where the temple rose. A fish jumped in it. There was nothing unusual about its mackerel-like shape or silvery scales; but unless the angle was deceptive, the fish was ten or a dozen feet in length.

The water belt’s unnaturally smooth margins were perfectly circular except where a stand of willows broke the marble coping. The land across the water was similar to that of the central island, though there were fewer visible signs of ruined buildings. Either the earthquake’s destruction had been more extensive toward the boundaries of the preserved portion of the continent, or the structures had been less gigantic to begin with.

The further edge of the ring island blurred into purple-green haze, as though the light of the false sun above had been compressed into a membrane. The transition didn’t look impenetrable, but there was little to be told from miles’ distance in any event.

He and Wulfhere would build a raft—or a true boat, if the Greeks could provide better tools than Cormac’s sword and the Dane’s war axe. With that and oars or a pole, they would cross to the ring island.

A quick tramp through the undergrowth would bring them to the boundary; and one way or another they would find a way through, though it were a wall of solid steel that they faced when they got there . . .

“The Saxons built a raft,” Creon said. “We warned them of monsters in the water, but they would go anyway. Aslief said they feared not men nor devils, so long as they had their swords in their hands.”

“This Aslief,” Wulfhere asked. “Was he a man of my height or lacking little of it? The fellow I’m thinking of has blond hair and a silver-mounted spear with a blade broad as a shovel’s.”

“You’ve described him to the life,” said Antheia. “Aslief Gorm’s Bane, he called himself when first he appeared with his men. Was he a friend of yours, sir?”

“No,” said Wulfhere without inflection. “But Gorm was my sister’s son. I little thought to meet his slayer here.”

“Nor shall you,” Creon objected. “Aslief and his men built a raft, as I said, and the monsters had their way with them.”

Three gigantic fish leaped in unison as close as that of veterans forming the shield wall. Cormac wondered what the creatures lived on. Though the belt of water was half a mile broad and several miles in length . . . if it was as deep as it looked, the volume could support an enormous and varied culture.

“Do you take me for a fool or a townsman?” Wulfhere demanded harshly. “What sort of monster threatens a shipload of Vikings?”