And while Kelson and Dhugal continued to make their slow, disheartened way through chamber after chamber—though at least the burials began to look more recent, when they had gone through nearly a dozen—Morgan and Duncan were equally disheartened, if not as hungry. They had left the two MacArdry retainers behind at the campsite by the waterfall, to continue keeping the watch there, and proceeded with only Ciard and Jass as they dowsed the course of the underground river. As the four of them sat by their campfire, sharing a rabbit that Jass had caught and roasted, Morgan wondered yet again whether they were wasting their time, prolonging the agony of finally having to admit that Kelson and Dhugal were dead.
“D’ye really think there’s any hope?” Ciard murmured, setting his bewhiskered chin on one upraised knee as he tossed the leavings of his portion of rabbit into the fire.
Morgan looked up sharply, almost wondering whether the old gillie had picked up his thought. One day, he really must try to find out more about the second sight that Ciard blamed for many of his otherwise unexplainable perceptions.
“Why, are you ready to give up, Ciard?” he replied softly, as Duncan looked up at him in surprise.
Ciard shook his head and sighed, clasping his arms around his knees for the comfort that Morgan’s words—or any other’s—could not give.
“Nah, I’m wit’ ye until th’ end, sair. It’s just that I dinnae know that we’re goin’ t’ like th’ end, when we find it. The thought o’ layin’ th’ puir lad in th’ ground, at his tender years—sure an’ ye cannae think they’re still alive, after this long.”
“I can’t give up until there’s absolutely no hope!” Morgan said.
The fire flared up briefly as he tossed the dregs of his cup into it, and he lurched to his feet to stagger away to the edge of the circle of firelight. After a few seconds, Duncan came to join him.
“Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right; and I won’t be all right until we know,” Morgan snapped, though he instantly regretted his sharp tone. “I’m sorry, Duncan,” he went on. “I guess it’s finally beginning to get to me—knowing that we’ve done everything we can and it hasn’t helped, that we’re going to have to admit, eventually, that they are dead.”
“Well, we haven’t reached that point yet!” Duncan said fiercely. “And we aren’t going to reach that point, so long as we have faith that we’re going to find them.”
“Faith.” Morgan quirked a bitter smile in Duncan’s direction. “That’s easy enough for you to say. My faith’s a little shaky right now, though, Duncan. How could God do this to us? How could He let this happen?”
“Maybe He’s testing us.”
“Well, if He is, then I’m failing.”
“No you aren’t,” Duncan said, “because I’m not going to let you. Come on, let’s put out another Call to Kelson and Dhugal. If they’re alive, they could really need us.”
Back at the campfire, directed by the two Deryni, Ciard and Jass settled into their passive link with ease, for the four of them had performed this ritual morning and night, every day since leaving the waterfall campsite. When it was done, with no more success than any of the times before, the two humans were allowed to slip gently and naturally into normal sleep. Morgan and Duncan, still lightly in rapport, lay awake for nearly an hour afterwards, refreshing themselves with memories of the two they sought.
The two, meanwhile, continued to work their way through tomb after tomb. Each burial was more recent than the one before, but each had yet another closed door barring their way out. They tried not to disturb anything more than was necessary, for they truly meant no disrespect to the dead they must disturb in their attempt to survive.
They did arm themselves at the first opportunity, however, lest their eventual emergence should produce hostility before explanations could be given—for their very presence in the tombs likely would be viewed as sacrilege and a desecration of sacred ground. They also continued to forage for edibles in each new tomb—for Kelson’s strength, in particular, was being drained without renewal by the constant demands Dhugal must make on him for help in opening the doors. The sour wine gave them some sustenance, but it also kept them both gently buzzed until Dhugal discovered how to use his powers to counteract the effect, at least in himself. For Kelson, it seemed a greater kindness to let him constantly stay a little drunk, to dull the fuzzy edge of headache that had been his constant companion since regaining consciousness. Dhugal would have given a great deal to find grain that was not insect-infested or moldy, or a crust of bread not reduced to the consistency of the mortar they had chipped from the first wall.
But only the wine remained generally palatable. Dhugal’s one cautious attempt to chew on a handful of grain resulted in horrible stomach and bowel cramping, and then a frightening bout with hallucinations that rendered him unable to continue for what could have been as much as a day. During the worst throes of the reaction, it even disrupted his powers to the point that he could not maintain handfire, so that a desperate Kelson was driven to breaking up some of the wooden coffers for torches—for he must have light to tend Dhugal.
The episode taught them a valuable lesson, not only about the dangers of contaminated food, but about the amount of energy Dhugal had been using to maintain the handfire on a constant basis, other than while they slept. Consequently, they continued to use torches in preference to handfire, though they tried not to destroy anything other than the boxes. Indeed, the first time one of them had needed to relieve himself, they had pondered for some time to choose the least offensive place—for they truly did not wish to profane sacred ground. And Dhugal still grimaced every time he had to empty out another coffer and break it up for more torches. Some of the boxes were beautifully made.
Thus, it was by torchlight that they swung back the door to enter the most recent tomb of their discovery—and it was very recent, indeed. Evergreen boughs scattered on the floor around the bier were barely gone brown; and the tomb’s occupant obviously had not been dead more than a week or two.
Nor had he been much older than themselves at the time of his death—certainly no more than twenty-five or thirty. He lay, not in a log coffin like all but the most recent of his predecessors, but directly on a pall draping the bier of piled stones, all but his face muffled in a cloak and under-robe of fine, dark grey wool, rather than in armor. The familiar, wide-meshed net of scarlet shrouded him from head to toe, but this one seemed to be woven of rough-spun wool rather than silk; and the drilled stones at the junctures were only stone, not shiral. Even Kelson, his normal perceptions blurred by wine and with his powers still reduced to only a fraction of their former levels, could tell that no power was stored in the net.
Of more immediate interest, however, were the funerary tributes left on a small table near the head of the bier; flat rounds of bread, very stale but not yet even gone moldy, with sealed flasks that proved to contain ale which, far from being merely adequate, tasted almost like ambrosia to the two famished youths. Their arrangement reminded Kelson of the bread and wine presented at the Offertory during Mass, and he pointed this out after he and Dhugal had wolfed down their first few, hurried bites—for with the discovery of palatable food, the first to pass their lips in many, many days, the urgency to see what lay beyond the ubiquitous next door had temporarily disappeared.
“Well, whatever the reason they left it,” Dhugal said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve after taking a long pull at one of the flasks, “I’m glad they did. They may just have saved our lives in the bargain.”
“I’ll say,” Kelson mumbled around a mouthful of bread, as Dhugal leaned closer over the still, waxen face of the corpse. “What do you think killed this chap? He’s awfully young. And more important, how long do you think he’s been here?”
Dhugal shook his head. “I dunno. A week? Two, at the outside. Look at those evergreen boughs,” he added, poking at some of the debris beside the bier with his toe. “They’re hardly brown at all, so they
can’t have been here long.”
“No, I suppose not.”
When they had eaten and drunk their fill, replenishing their flask with ale and wrapping up the last two bread roundels in a corner of Dhugal’s cloak hitched under his belt, they approached the door. Kelson was still a little unsteady on his feet, but he was feeling stronger than he had since regaining consciousness and he held the torch as Dhugal laid his hands on the door opposite where the bar must be, his free hand resting lightly on the back of Dhugal’s neck to facilitate the link through which the other must draw.
He tolerated the drain far better than he had in the past, too, and was still standing when the door gave under Dhugal’s hands and swung gently outwards. This time, the room beyond was empty, though the door in the opposite wall was just as tightly closed as any of the others. Kelson crouched down against it as Dhugal again laid his hands on the door, for though another drain of energy so quickly, without time for even partial recovery, would be hard on both of them, they knew this might spell an end to it all. Beyond this last door could lie freedom.
Kelson breathed a deep sigh of relief when it was done, breathing in again, deeply, of fresh, cool air tinged with the scent of pine and wood-smoke, as the door swung slowly outward and he drew himself shakily to his feet by an edge of Dhugal’s cloak. More corridor lay beyond, with live torches stuck into the walls on either side—certain sign that they had regained civilization—and the air was no longer the still, moist atmosphere of the tomb cavern, though they could not yet see the outside.
“Thank God!” Kelson whispered, as he and Dhugal hobbled toward the source of the breeze, gulping in deep lungfuls gratefully. “Dhugal, we did it! We’re free!”
But before they could get their bearings or go more than a dozen paces, they burst from the mouth of the cave into a clearing peopled by a score of shocked, startled men lounging around a bonfire. Both groups simply froze and looked at one another for an interminable instant, one of the men by the fire surreptitiously crossing himself. The motion freed at least the voice of another man, who started backing off, murmuring, “An spiorad! The dead walk!”
“They aren’t spirits!” another snapped. “They’re brigands. They’ve tried to rob the tuam coisrigte! Take them!”
“Robbers! Sacrilege!” the others took up the cry, as suddenly all of them were drawing weapons and swarming toward the two.
Kelson never had time to do more than wonder why they were under attack, too stunned even to draw the odd short sword at his belt—if, indeed, he had had the physical strength. Dhugal had the presence of mind to draw his weapon, at the same time shouting for their attackers to hold off, that this was the king—but no one seemed to be listening.
Kelson struggled weakly as they were overrun, trying to tell them that he was no robber but their king—for surely the river could not have swept them all the way out of Gwynedd—but he was overshouted by frenzied orders to secure and bind them, not to listen to the words of blasphemers and perpetrators of sacrilege.
As they bore him to the ground, some of them babbling in a dialect Kelson did not understand, he caught a brief glimpse of a flailing Dhugal disappearing under a heap of at least six men, one of them with a choke-hold on him from behind, and Dhugal’s freckled face going red.
But then, as Kelson continued fighting for his own life, already disarmed and his pounding head threatening to do him in, even if his captors did not, he saw the flash of a dagger in a burly fist, coming toward his head.
He tried to avoid it, to at least fend it off, but he could not move fast enough or far enough. Pain exploded through his head, in the same area he had hit his head before, and everything immediately went black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fear not the sentence of death, remember them that have been before thee, and that come after.
—Ecclesiasticus 41:3
Dhugal, too, was roughly handled, but he never lost consciousness during his capture—though he came close, when one of the men bore him backwards in a choke-hold, with others pinning his arms. In hopes of curtailing any further violence to his person—for it was clear he could not hope to escape, at least for now—he made his body go limp and feigned unconsciousness. The hands searching him were no less thorough after that, stripping off his cloak and belt after they had spread-eagled him on the ground, but at least the arm across his throat was released, and he was struck no more.
Even so, it was one of the most difficult shams Dhugal had ever had to maintain—for he had seen the king go down, and the deadly glitter of a dirk above him. He had not been able to see what part of the weapon touched Kelson, or where, but the king had ceased struggling immediately.
Heartsick, Dhugal prayed that they had not killed him and concentrated all his energy on trying not to react to the tears scalding behind his closed eyelids. Though he longed to explode in one last burst of defiance, he knew it would not help Kelson—if anything could—and would only get him roughed up more and possibly killed. Alive, Dhugal might eventually be able to talk his way out—though the men’s shouts of sacrilege and thievery did not bode at all well for their willingness to listen.
Nonetheless, Dhugal managed to maintain the charade of unconsciousness while they continued to search him. Thinking him oblivious made his captors garrulous, too, though they spoke a quick, oddly inflected dialect of which he could understand hardly one word in ten. A word that he did catch was, “Rightire,” as they discovered his golden spurs—surely a close cognate to the border word for knight. They removed the spurs, as he had known they must—for spurs could be used as a weapon, aside from the value of this particular pair—and then, apparently as an afterthought, they started on the boots themselves.
Removing the boots, with no care for his injured ankle, nearly made Dhugal swoon in earnest, but he knew it was reasonable from their viewpoint to reduce the likelihood of his escape. Barefoot and unarmed in what must be rugged mountain country, they would know he could not go far. They also stripped off his leather jerkin, leaving him with only shirt and breeches against the cold.
That enabled them to find his Saint Camber medal and the shiral crystal that had been his mother’s, both of which they took. They had already divested him of his MacArdry signet. After that, they rolled him onto his stomach and drew his arms high behind him.
In this, too, they knew what they were doing, for they lashed his wrists with the hands back to back and took an extra turn around his thumbs, so that it would be impossible for him to lower them even to waist-level, much less use them to untie his bonds. The manhandling made his wrist ache, even though he had thought it nearly healed, but he was able to bear that pain. It was his ankle that made him groan, as they bound his legs at ankles and knees and pulled his feet toward the small of his back, passing an end of the rope from his feet, under his wrist bonds, and around his neck, so that if he tried too hard to move he would choke himself. And when, at length, two of them rolled him on his side and hoisted under his back to carry him off, the rope tightened across his throat and he did pass out.
The distant, muffled murmur of voices pricked Dhugal back to awareness. Groggy, still half choking from the rope around his neck, he came to his senses in a small, semidarkened room, lying on his left side and with his face pressed against a mat of woven rushes, fresh and fragrant. A gag bit across his cheeks, not making it any easier to breathe, and his left shoulder was so numb from pressure on the unnatural angle caused by his bonds that he whimpered a little in the back of his throat from the movement it cost to ease the rope—though at least his head cleared after a few seconds.
And his next thought, with his own immediate condition stabilizing, was for Kelson. The room was not totally dark—a little light leaked in from under a door not far away, beyond which the voices continued to converse—but Dhugal could see little else from his present angle. He nearly choked himself again, trying to rear up on his hip for a look around, and had to arch his back and roll on his stomach in the end, so
that he could twist his head to see the rest of his surroundings.
A similarly trussed Kelson was lying on his side not far away, however, eyes closed but breathing shallowly.
Thank God!
Immensely relieved, Dhugal eased his chin back down to rest on the matting and closed his eyes, his feet in the air, giving himself as much slack as possible on the rope around his throat. He must evaluate their new situation.
First of all, and on the positive side, he seemed no worse injured than he had been since this whole misadventure began—though he did not know whether he could say the same for Kelson. The king appeared to be unconscious, and being hit on the head again would not have done his original concussion any good.
Also on the positive side was the fact that the two of them had gorged on the bread and ale they found in the last tomb. That would not make them any more popular with their captors, who already believed them to be tomb robbers and desecrators of sacred ground, but Dhugal could feel new strength coursing in his veins already, as his body greedily took nourishment from what he had eaten. He would have preferred something with more substance than bread—like a haunch of venison, or a brace of partridges, or at least a pigeon pie or something else to stick to the ribs. But after days of nothing but water, fish, and wine—and only wine, recently—the bread had been like manna from heaven. Nor had the ale fuzzied his perceptions, soaked up by all the bread, so he would not have to use precious energy to neutralize the effect of the alcohol.
Another effect of the ale, more annoying than really troublesome—and one for which he had no realistic solution, at least for now—was that his bladder was filling. Nor was there any way to relieve himself in a genteel manner, trussed as he was like a spring lamb ready for slaughter—an apt imagery for Lent, he supposed, if indeed Lent was not already past, for he had no idea how long he and Kelson had wandered underground. His condition was not yet urgent, but it would become more and more of a distraction as the hours wore on.