«Come on.»
He dragged Belphebe toward the dimly seen black opening and then through it. As he entered the darkness he felt a tingling all over, as of a mild electric shock.
Then, abruptly, sunlight replaced moonlight. He and Belphebe were standing on the downward slope of another hill, like the one they had just entered. He had time to take in the fact that the landscape was similar to the one they had quitted, before something crashed down on the back of his head and knocked him unconscious.
VIII
Briun Mac Smetra, King of the Sidhe of Connacht, leaned forward in his carven chair and looked at the prisoners. Harold Shea looked back at him as calmly as he could, although his hands were bound behind his back and his head was splitting. Briun was a tall, slender person with pale blond hair and blue eyes that seemed too big for his face. The rest of them were a delicate-looking people, clad with Hellenic simplicity in wrap-around tunics. Their furnishings seemed a point more primitive than those in theIreland from which they had come — the building they were in had a central hearth with a smoke-hole instead of the fireplaces and chimneys he had seen there.
«It will do you no good at all to be going on like this,» said the King. «So now it is nothing at all you must lose but your heads, for the black-hearted Connachta that you are.»
«But we’re not Connachta!» Said Shea. «As I told you.»
A husky man with black hair said, «They look like Gaels, they speak like Gaels, and they are dressed like Gaels.»
«And who should know better than Nera the champion, who was a Gael himself before he became one of us?» said the King.
«Now look here, King.» said Shea. «We can prove we’re not Gaels by teaching you things no Gael ever knew.»