The Bear King, page 7
part #3 of Dark Age Series
‘You’ll get in there if I have to ram you in myself,’ Bellicus snarled. He looked up and Mato followed his gaze. The Attacotti were moving on to the cliff path.
‘No time to stand here talking,’ Niall said. ‘Who goes first?’
‘You’re mad,’ Solinus insisted. ‘It might go in for a man’s length and then we’re done.’
‘It’s all we have,’ Apullius repeated.
Solinus glared at him, and then closed his eyes in weary acceptance. ‘You’re bastards and I hate you all.’
‘I’ll go first,’ Mato said.
‘You’re only saying that because you’re afraid Bellicus and the pirate will block the way with their big shoulders,’ Solinus grumbled.
Mato pushed his way past him. He felt the freezing spring water splashing on his back, and then he was dragging himself into the reek of earth and the deep dark.
CHAPTER TEN
The Underworld
ECHOES RANG AROUND HIM, LOW MOANS AND CHOKED GRUMbles as the other Grim Wolves clawed their way into the narrow channel behind him. Mato thought he could almost smell the dread. For men who lived their lives under open skies, this was the greatest fear.
His nose flooded with the stink of earth and wet rock. Endless gloom lay ahead. He couldn’t tell if the tunnel would close up, trapping him there, or if he would suddenly find himself plunging into a dizzying drop.
What if there was no way out?
What if they became jammed there, unable to move forward or back, as Solinus had feared, choking on thin air and dying slowly amid their screams? What if the storm came back and the channel flooded and their lungs filled with water and they drowned? What if they kept descending deeper and deeper into the earth, down to the underworld where Arawn ruled over the dead with his pack of red-and-white wish-hounds?
Mato swallowed, calming himself by force of will. The others were relying on him. ‘All is well,’ he called back, pushing the tremor out of his voice. ‘There is a way here.’
The moans ebbed. That was good. Flat on his belly, Mato dragged himself along. The tunnel roof scraped the top of his head. Barely a hand’s width lay on either side. Solinus had been right – Bellicus and Niall would struggle to force themselves through. The channel dipped down. He swallowed again. Don’t think about having to back up. Slow and steady would do it.
A strangled cry echoed from behind him. ‘What’s wrong?’ he called, and heard his words fly from lips to lips along the chain of desperate men. The cry bounced back, mounting in intensity.
‘The Attacotti are coming,’ Comitinus cried at his heels. ‘They’re crawling into the tunnel. Faster! Faster!’
Mato imagined the terror whoever was at the rear must now be feeling, waiting for hands to clasp his ankles, dragging him back towards his doom. Throwing caution to the wind, he pulled himself down the incline as fast as he could go. If he pitched into a dizzying drop, so be it. His life meant nothing.
His knees and elbows burned. His fingertips felt slick. Blood. Still he hauled himself on, one hand after the other in rapid succession. The ceiling of the channel pressed down, scraping his back. It was growing narrower. As was his throat. He heard his breath wheeze. His lungs cried out for air.
His forehead bumped into rock, and for a moment he thought with a wash of terror that the channel had reached its end. But then he felt a hollow. Reaching under, his fingers groped around until he realized the tunnel dipped beneath a tooth of stone protruding from the ceiling. His back would not bend enough to get under it.
‘Stay calm, brothers,’ he called back, swallowing hard. ‘I must go slowly here.’
There was only one way to proceed. Squeezing his shoulders tight, he forced himself to turn on to his back. Blood rushed to his head as he lowered it into the hollow and pushed himself down. Driving his feet into the rock, he wriggled under the fang. He pressed, and he pressed, bent almost double, and somehow he felt himself slide up until the ground beneath him flattened out once more.
His eyes stung with tears of relief and he rolled on to his belly again. Once he’d called back instructions to the others, he closed his ears to their anguished cries and dragged himself on.
What else could he do? There was no going back now.
His thoughts floated in the dark. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were shut or open, but faces of those long gone floated in front of him. Were they warning him? Welcoming him to the Otherworld?
His sister was there, smiling, and he felt his heart leap. Once again he was cradling her bloody body, tears burning his cheeks in that moment when his life changed for ever. She seemed to be saying something to him, but then she was gone and there was only the dark again.
Mato jolted to his senses and realized he could no longer feel the rock against his back, and when he rocked from side to side he couldn’t feel the walls of the channel. He called back to the others and he felt his heart sing at their jubilation.
The tunnel was now big enough for him to crawl on his hands and knees. Fire raged through his joints, but still it felt good. On he went, faster now. A beacon of hope glowed. Yet barely had he crawled on a spear’s length when his hands plunged into icy water. He could not feel the bottom.
‘What is it?’ Comitinus whispered. The echoes rustled all around.
‘The tunnel ahead is flooded.’ The other Grim Wolf began to whimper. ‘It may only be for a short way,’ Mato urged him.
‘But how can you know? You could dive down and your breath be gone before you reach the end of it. And if you reach the far side, how will we know?’
Mato heard the panic crack in his friend’s voice and he reached back a comforting hand to grasp Comitinus’ arm. ‘I’ll come back to tell you.’
‘And if you don’t return? What then for us?’
‘You don’t have to worry about that.’ Solinus’ voice rang through the dark. ‘Because I’ll have choked you to death to end your fucking whining.’
‘All we can do is put our faith in the gods, brother. We are in their hands now. And if they decide this is the time we pass through the gate into the Land of Endless Summer, so be it.’
Mato couldn’t tell if his words soothed the other man or not. It didn’t matter. Steeling himself, he sucked in a huge breath of air and dived down before his fears prevented him.
The water thrust daggers of ice into his head. Fumbling along the walls of the tunnel, he pulled himself onward. He felt his back grind against the roof, but on he went, kicking out, knowing the channel was too narrow to swim.
And on.
And on.
He felt his lungs begin to burn. His mouth wanted to open in a desperate need for breath, but that would be the end of him. You are a dead man, a voice in his head whispered.
Darkness and cold.
And then he realized there was no stone above him and he thrust up, bursting out into the air with such a gasp it burned his throat raw.
He pulled himself out on to the tunnel floor and lay there, shuddering and gulping air as if he could never get enough of it. His wits seeped back and he looked up. His skin prickled: a current of warmer air was washing over him.
Mato grinned the grin of a man who’d been saved the moment before the executioner’s axe came down.
How he made the hellish journey back to the others he didn’t know, but soon they were all slumped in the warm tunnel, calming themselves.
‘I’d rather face a thousand barbarian swords than suffer that again.’ Bellicus’ words floated in the dark. Mato imagined him with his head hanging, his sodden hair dripping between his legs.
‘How close were the Attacotti behind?’ Comitinus asked.
‘Close.’ One word, but Apullius, who had brought up the rear, sounded haunted, Mato thought. ‘They fell back when we crawled under that tooth of rock.’
‘Feel that warm air, brothers. Let it soothe you. If that can get in, we may follow it to find a way out.’
‘And then what?’ Niall asked. ‘You’ve lost the element of surprise. If we do get out of here in one piece, we shouldn’t tempt the Fates any more. Sail away. Flee. Never return.’
‘And disappoint Catia, and Weylyn?’ Bellicus’ voice was low. ‘I wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye.’
‘You’re mad, all of you,’ Niall said, his voice crackling with anger. ‘I vowed to bring you here, but—’
‘Let’s get out of here first,’ Mato interjected to suck out the poison. ‘Then we can turn to tearing each other’s throats out.’ Before anyone could respond, he crawled away.
The tunnel dipped and rose, but Mato felt sure that overall it was moving up. Towards the light, he prayed. And sure enough after a while the dark seeped into grey, the walls and floor and ceiling taking shape.
When the roof soared high enough over his head, Mato pushed himself upright and stepped into a cave illuminated by a shaft of light. The opening, at the end of a short walk over jumbled rocks, was edged with grass and dangling ivy, and beyond it was the blue sky he’d thought he would never see again.
A few minutes later, in the centre of the cave, Bellicus reached his arms out wide and threw his head back. Niall laughed, and Apullius and Comitinus clapped each other on the shoulder. Solinus, though, was prowling into the depths of the cavern.
‘Have you not had enough of the dark, brother?’ Mato asked with a laugh.
Solinus glanced back and there was no humour in his face. ‘Look here.’
Mounds of rocks lay side by side in rows. Some of them were decorated with flowers that had become arid husks, and trinkets, and goblets. Two more had bronze swords lying on them.
‘Graves,’ Solinus muttered.
‘And well cared for,’ Apullius added.
During the early days of their arrival in the west, Mato had heard Lucanus talk about the day he had spent as a prisoner of the Attacotti. The experience had left his friend baffled. These were monsters that consumed human flesh, yet they loved and sang and prayed to their gods. What was their true nature? Lucanus had never been sure.
‘Can they be all bad if they grieve for their dead?’ Apullius asked.
‘Ask them that when they’re chewing on your foot,’ Solinus snapped. He spun back to the light. ‘Let’s be away. I’m sick of thinking about those bastards.’ He clambered over the rocks and disappeared into the light.
Close behind him, Mato felt his eyes ache from the glare. Stumbling into the fresh air, he smiled and breathed deep.
‘Bollocks.’
Mato blinked, letting his eyes focus. Solinus was standing in front of him, staring.
A band of Attacotti warriors waited in a crescent in front of the cave entrance. They stared back, coal eyes unblinking, swords already in their hands.
‘The bastards knew where the tunnel opened out,’ Solinus said, his voice flat.
They’d only delayed the inevitable.
The sky and the grass and the trees blurred by. Mato spun this way and that, rough hands grasping his arms as he was propelled in the churning centre of the Attacotti. His brothers were caught up in that mad confusion too, still alive for now. Their curses and oaths rang in his ears.
Those white faces whirled all around him, holding him in the grip of their black, staring eyes. He could see no compassion in their depths, no emotion at all. Their features told no tales, nor hinted at any feelings. Not anger, not contempt, not jubilation. Nothing. As flat and unstirred as a millpond. Somehow that was worse. His nostrils flared at their meaty musk and the reek of the loam that caked them. It smelled like graves.
Someone fought to break free; Bellicus, he thought. Sword hilts cracked down on his skull and then rained down on all of them. His wits flew, and the rest of the journey seemed like a rush through the approach to hell: those faces looming in and out of relief, that oppressive stink, the constant motion, and what sounded like the keening cry of lost souls.
After a while, he realized it was the sound of the Attacotti singing. Inhuman, rising and falling, mere noise that somehow still managed to pluck a wave of dank fear from the depths of him.
Once the pace slowed, rough hands hurled him to the muddy track. When he looked up, he saw they were on the edge of a settlement. Wooden huts tumbled away from him along the floor of the valley and up both sides. A pall of smoke from the hearth-fires hung over the roofs. More Attacotti were flooding out of the doorways. Old men, women with babes, children. Unlike the silent warriors, they erupted in a wild clamour. Baying for blood, Mato thought. Another blow from a hilt cracked against his temple and his wits flew away.
When he came round a moment later, he tasted soil in his mouth. His thoughts fluttered, his vision fractured. Faces flashed by. Those unearthly cries swallowed him. He felt himself lifted up, dragged along, as if he were caught in a storm at sea. Except that the wind was dragging him along a street now lined with the Eaters of the Dead.
That was how it would end: ripped apart and consumed while still alive.
But then he crashed to the ground once again. Silence fell, eerie after the tumult. He sensed the Attacotti had come to a halt in a half-circle at his back.
When he pushed himself up from the trampled mud, he stared into the dark maw of a hall. He marvelled at its size, grander than the surrounding shacks, timbers soaring up to support a roof covered with turf, and walls of wattle and daub. They’d thought these barbarians little more than wild beasts. But to construct this hall took skill, and care.
His fellow Grim Wolves sprawled beside him, rubbing their knocks and bruises. Mato looked at their faces. Features were drawn, stares hanging in the middle distance as they watched the horrors parading across their minds. He wanted to tell them that this would all pass, but he knew it would do no good.
‘They want us to go inside,’ Apullius breathed.
Comitinus bowed his head. ‘Is this their feasting hall?’
Niall was craning his neck up, scanning the towering structure. ‘This is the hall of a king, mark my words.’
Mato followed the pirate’s stare and had to agree, given the way the Attacotti hung back, too, and bowed their heads as if in deference.
Bellicus stood up, closed his eyes and raised his face to the sun. For a moment, he drank in what might be his last taste of that warmth, and then he said, ‘If they want us to meet their king, so be it. But I won’t grovel.’ The leader of the Grim Wolves strode to the entrance and waited for the others to join him.
As they gathered before the door, Mato glanced back at the Attacotti. They were watching in silence. None of the warriors were venturing forward. He frowned. ‘They are sending us in to meet their king. Five of us. Yet they don’t fear we’ll attack him?’
‘There’re probably guards aplenty waiting inside,’ Solinus grumbled.
But a light glowed in Comitinus’ eyes. ‘This king … could it be …?’
Mato barely dared consider it. ‘That would explain why there was no need for guards.’
‘What are you two fools talking about?’ Solinus said. But then Mato watched realization fall on him too, and his eyes suddenly brightened.
‘We’ll know soon enough.’ Mato even heard hope in Bellicus’ low rumble. The leader of the Grim Wolves stepped into the dark. The others followed.
Two torches guttered inside the door, the only light in the place. Mato blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom after the glare of the sun. The ruddy glow wavered towards the centre of the vast space. It seemed empty, as far as he could tell, and as silent as a temple.
Was that a low moan? A whisper? He cocked his head, but only quiet followed. Bellicus stepped into the half-light.
As they moved across the packed mud of the floor, Mato’s nostrils wrinkled. He smelled the pitch of the torches, and something like rotting vegetation. Behind that, though, he caught a hint of sweat. ‘We’re not alone,’ he said, squinting into the gloom. Now he could make out a wooden throne at the far end of the hall. As he watched, he thought he could see a figure hunched in it.
‘Fetch a torch,’ Bellicus ordered.
Apullius raced back to the door and pulled one of the torches off the wall. The dark swooped away as he stalked back to the tight cluster of Grim Wolves. The red light picked out the throne, ornately carved with dragons along the back and the arm rests. The seated figure huddled inside a cloak, and as the glow of the torch played out Mato gasped. This was no cloak for a barbarian king. Gold thread glowed in an intricate spiral design along the edge, a fine piece of workmanship. But there was more to it than that.
‘That is Lucanus’ cloak,’ Apullius gasped. ‘The one Myrrdin gave to him, the one the wood-priests wore for their rituals.’
Mato swallowed. Still he couldn’t bring himself to believe that his old friend survived.
The figure shifted underneath the cloak, as if the occupant of the throne had been sleeping and the new arrivals had disturbed him.
‘If one man could beat the odds and end up ruling this bunch of misbegotten bastards, it would be Lucanus,’ Solinus said.
‘Lucanus!’ Comitinus called out, unable to restrain himself any longer. They all ran forward.
The king jumped from his throne and whirled towards them, the cloak billowing out. ‘Wyyvvvgggaaahh!’ he cried.
Mato didn’t know what he was seeing. His mind had prepared him for Lucanus, but this …
The king leapt forward and then scurried away, spinning and crying out as he whirled around the hall. The Grim Wolves pressed back in horror. ‘Abbbthhhhbbbb!’ cried the king.
Beneath the flowing cloak, he was short and twisted, a hunchback. The face too was distorted, one eye large and wide and higher than the other, swollen lips dripping drool from a mouth that seemed to hold only one misshapen tooth.
‘An idiot,’ Solinus said, gaping. ‘A mad idiot. This is their king?’
The malformed barbarian scurried behind the throne and peered out at them, whimpering. Mato felt his blood run cold. ‘He wears Lucanus’ cloak.’ The meaning behind those words drove them all to silence.
‘All of it for nothing,’ Bellicus growled after a moment. Mato felt a pang in his heart at the desolation he heard in those words. Surely they had been in hell from the moment they’d set foot on this island.
