Not yet o’erthrown…

– D’Arcy McGee, The Celts

“Not in all my years of wandering have I seen the like of this,” Wulfhere said, and not without awe. “Cormac?”

The Gael shook his head. “I have seen the palace of Connacht’s king, and served a king in Leinster and another in Dalriada, and it’s the halls of their keeps these feet have trod. But that man-raised mountain would hold all Leinster’s palace… aye, and a tenth of the kingdom of King Gol of Dalriada in Alba as well!”

There was nervousness in the voice of Knud. “Who… raised this mighty keep-and why here?”

“No man alive,” Cormac mac Art said, very quietly.

Slitted of eye, the Gael was studying the lofty and massive pile of carved stone blocks with its weathered carvings and bronze trim. Broad was its entry and finely arched, the product of science and skill. Arched windows were impudently wide, in scorn of possible attackers.

“Nor was this set here,” Cormac mac Art said into their awed silence, “by those Romans who thought they were the chosen of the earth. Those carved decorations… it’s from the Celts we Gaels sprang, and from the men of long-vanished Cimmeria the Celts sprang, and from the rulers of the world time out of mind that the Cimmerians came-the world-spanning Atlanteans. Aye. Atlantis…”

The Danes looked at him curiously.

He was staring, as though seeing the throngs of golden men in their other-land garb, the stalwart folk of that long-ago land now gone forever.

“The great serpent,” he murmured, and the hair of more than one man bristled on his nape.

This was not the first time the scarred, sinister-faced Gael had seemed to slip away from them in this wise, as though he saw what they saw not, as though he spoke of a dream composed of pictures painted on the walls of his mind, and none other’s. His glacial eyes were invisible within their deep, slitted sockets as he stared at the visions of high civilization and artifice before them, and spoke on, quietly, in a droning voice.