I passed the hall where the death feasts were held. The road beyond the hall was edged with skulls, human and animal, warnings to the unwary that they approached the Kingdom of Dead Souls.
To my left now was the sea, and to my right a brackish, dark marsh where no birds sang. Beyond the marsh was a great shingle bank that curved away from the coast to become the causeway that joined the Isle to the mainland. To approach the Isle by the shingle bank meant a detour of many miles, so most traffic used the skull-edged road that led to a decaying timber quay where a ferry crossed over to the beach. A sprawl of wattle guards’ houses stood close to the quay. More guards patrolled the shingle bank.
The guards on the quay were old men or else wounded veterans who lived with their families in the huts. The men watched me approach, then barred my path with rusty spears.
“My name is Lord Derfel,” I said, ‘and I demand passage.”
The guard commander, a shabby man in an ancient iron breastplate and a mildewed leather helmet, bowed to me. “I am not empowered to stop you passing, Lord Derfel,” he said, ‘but I cannot let you return.” His men, astonished that anyone would voluntarily travel to the Isle, gaped at me.
“Then I shall pass,” I said, and the spearmen moved aside as the guard commander shouted at them to man the small ferryboat. “Do many ask to pass this way?” I asked the commander.
“A few,” he said. “Some are tired of living; some think they can rule an isle of mad people. Few have ever lived long enough to beg me to let them out again.”
“Did you let them out?” I asked.
“No,” he said curtly. He watched as oars were brought from one of the huts, then he frowned at me. “Are you sure, Lord?” he asked.
“I’m sure.”
He was curious, but dared not ask my business. Instead he helped me down the slippery steps of the quay and handed me into the pitch-blackened boat. “The rowers will let you through the first gate,” he told me, then pointed further along the causeway that lay at the far side of the narrow channel. “After that you’ll come to a second wall, then a third at the causeway’s end. There are no gates in those walls, just steps across. You’ll likely meet no dead souls between the walls, but after that? The Gods only know. Do you truly want to go?”
“Have you never been curious?” I asked him.
“We’re permitted to carry food and dead souls as far as the third wall and I’ve no wish to go farther,” he said grimly. “I’ll reach the bridge of swords to the Otherworld in my own time, Lord.” He jerked his chin towards the causeway. “Cruachan’s Cave lies beyond the Isle, Lord, and only fools and desperate men seek death before their time.”
“I have reasons,” I said, ‘and I shall see you again in this world of the living.”
“Not if you cross the water, Lord.”
I stared at the isle’s green and white slope that loomed above the causeway’s walls. “I was in a death-pit once,” I told the guard commander, ‘and I crawled from there as I shall crawl from here.” I fished in my pouch and found a coin to give him. “We shall discuss my leaving when the time comes.”
“You’re a dead man, Lord,” he warned me one last time, ‘the very moment you cross that channel.”
“Death doesn’t know how to take me,” I said with foolish bravado, then ordered the oarsmen to row me across the swirling channel. It took only a few strokes, then the boat grounded on a bank of shelving mud and we climbed to the archway in the first wall where the two oarsmen lifted the bar, pulled the gates aside and stood back to let me pass. A black threshold marked the divide between this world and the next. Once over that slab of blackened timber I was counted as a dead man. For a second my fears made me hesitate, then I stepped across.