"Mother. Lugh. Prydn would speak with thee."

Dorelei scattered the pebbles with smooth motions of her arms. The ritual offering done, she spoke the mind of fhain. All of them heard the firmer tone in her words. Gern-y-fhain did not say "please" now, but "listen!" Their need called for it.

"Mother and Lugh: fhain keeps thy festivals and wears thy mark, given in the first days. Do follow the herds as Mabh's people followed the reindeer. Do use no Blackbar, turn to no parents but thee.

"Why, then, in the plain sight of thy eye, do Prydn

grow weaker? Our child-wealth dies, we get only the leavings from tallfolk who have long since turned from thee. A put names to us that are not ours, and fences to keep us out. A tell lies about us and yet grow fat in the land while Prydn starve and die like Neniane's child. Prydn would not turn from thee.

Dorelei felt her people tense behind her as she uttered the words. She'd thought it out all day, her mind clear from fasting. Above all else, they must survive. Bargains had two sides. Earth and sky could not expect worship without a like return. It was not disobedience, merely the desperation she saw growing in Neniane and the rest of them. Without some hope and a strong Gern-y-fhain, they would drift away from her.

4 'Mother and Lugh: can see our wants. Send them to us." Or we will turn away. Dorelei dare not say it, but what did earth or Gawse or any of them expect of her? They needed a miracle.

"Thee has promised us Tir-Nan-Og in the west. Show it to us. Give us a sign. Thy children put their hands out to thee, hungry. We must have Tir-Nan-Og now." Dorelei took a breath and swallowed and made the plunge. "Or will make new magic without thee."

Out and said; she felt her shoulders hunch as if Mother might open and swallow her on the spot. Cru's head turned slightly; she knew his thoughts: she was bargaining and threatening, uttering words on the edge of blasphemy, but fhain was dying before it could begin. What else could she do?

"Go back to the rath," Dorelei bade her folk. "Will watch with Cru tonight and barrow't when the sun rises/'

Still Neniane lingered by the small bundle. Dorelei knelt by her. "Take my promise, sister. Tir-Nan-Og will be found. Will be like hound rooting after fox, will tear Mother's secret places apart to find it. Fhain will prosper and thee bear again."

She embraced Neniane, hoping to squeeze a firmness of faith into both of them. A disturbing thought had been

growing in her mind, something not so much said by Gawse as what her mother had been —absolutely unwavering in her faith and her holding to the correct way, as if the faith were more important than the fact. She still had no assurance she was right, except that Gawse's fhain lived and hers withered. She had to show strength before her people and hoped Mother understood the need for strong words.

"Artcois, Bredei—take second daughter to the rath."

Standing silent by the dead child and the other objects carefully placed beside it, Cru and Dorelei watched the line of ponies wend down the dark hillside. Cru brought his new cloak from the rath to keep them warm on the vigil, which must last until sunrise. The cloak was huge and thick, traded to Cru by a Venicone farmer in return for the mending of harness. It was too large even for most tallfolk and once belonged to a man of the yellow-haired Angles from oversea.

"Was a giant," Cru marveled, shaking out the oceanic folds. The farmer said the Angle was so big he needed two days to stand in the same place. When Cru tried it on, it flowed down and over the ground in waves so that he looked like a corn shock with a man's head on top. He could wear it riding, but its best use was for sleeping, he and Dorelei engulfed in its thick folds. For tonight's vigil it was perfect to warm them both, their small heads cowled together within the wide hood. The great dark cloak made them look like part of the stone they rested against.

"Did speak harshly to Mother," Cru said.

"Cru?" Dorelei's voice was small and tentative inside the hood. "If Tir-Nan-Og be in the west..."

"Was nae told so?"

"Where?"

"Who can say? Beyond world edge."

"Could Prydn go there? Find a curragh to sail beyond world edge like Lugh?"

It was not one of his wife's strange questions, like Where do the clouds go? or What holds the world up?

Dorelei wanted an answer. "Well, now ..." Cm tried to picture such a craft but honestly considered it beyond even Mabh's formidable powers. "Who could build such?"

Dorelei didn't know, but they must go somewhere, find quickly those ends and rewards promised them, or all go into the barrow with Neniane's child. The shape of wolf-truth and world-truth was plain as that.

Cru's arm emerged from the cloak, pointing down the valley. "See."

In the gloom where the Venicone village would be, a torch was lit, tiny in the distance, but as they watched another and another spark flared up until Cru counted ten of them. The lights milled about for a few moments, then formed two straight lines close together and began to move. The lights passed out the stockade gate and kept moving. Most strange: tallfolk never left their stockade after dark.

"Where do a go?" Dorelei wondered.

In a few moments they knew: not going but coming.

"Here," said Cru.

His name was Magonus Succatus Patricius, and it had been remarked of him, to his secret pleasure, that he was obsessed with God. In later years he would sign himself Patrick to all the Christian world. In later centuries miracles as preposterous as his present youthful self-esteem would be solemnly ascribed to him and devoutly believed. In his twenty-eighth year, like many men who grow slowly to the simplicity of greatness, he was quite unfinished and thoroughly insufferable. Patricius admitted this in moments of candor, but it disturbed him to think that men who professed a devotion like his own, men of the Church, found him abrasive. Later in life, Patricius often chuckled over the obvious answer. Not his holiness but his holy naivete and brash assumption of absolute right. Among wise and worldlier men, a little youth goes a long way.

Patricius' father was a decurion of Clannaventa on the

north-western coast just south of Solway. Since the rank was hereditary, Patricius might have looked forward to a secure and uneventful career preparing the town's tax schedules, maintaining the baths, and arranging public entertainments. The legions left when he was a child; the Britain in which he grew to young manhood was a part of Rome only in hopeful spirit. Most men were sure the legions would return; meanwhile, the engine of administration churned on in Roman form if not efficiency.

In his early youth Patricius could not be called either pagan or Christian. More accurately he thought very little about it. Rome had given him a secure land to grow in, unchanging and tolerant, sheathed in the Pax Ro-mana. His father, Calpurnius, was a Christian, and his grandfather Potitus a priest of the growing new faith. Like most educated citizens of the Empire, they took sophisticated delight in the verses of Martial, were vaguely disturbed by the attacks on the rich by young British monks—not wrongheaded attacks, but tending to shake the established order of things—and in matters of faith inclined to the reasonable humanism of Pelagius rather than Augustine. Pelagius was, after all, British and patrician, postulating a reasonable God who would not create men intrinsically incapable of their own salvation.

Augustine was a hotheaded African, and no matter how impassioned his arguments on the necessity of Grace and the very few destined to receive it, there was about him the vulgar taint of the fanatic. He decried as sloth what civilized men took for granted, eschewed good manners in debate, and launched his attack on Pelagius from the vicinity of the gutter. Augustine's human failings, like those of any rigid reformer, perfectly complemented his purposes. He lumped all his opponents, political and religious, into one composite enemy and called him Evil. The Enemy. He knew no compromise.

More than one catalyst in history has been slighted by his contemporaries as a bad-mannered boor whom one could not comfortably invite to dinner. If Augustine was shortsighted, the Pelagians were equally myopic. They

failed to see that the temper of coming times was Augustine's, or that their own was fading. Rome had proved less than eternal; its power and grandeur shrank and faded even as they watched. Men saw this world ending and yearned for the security of one truly enduring. The old days of tranquil meditation wherein a philosopher might construct an ethical dialogue between the trained human mind and the intents of God were quite gone. The world men knew had turned to quicksand. The Chi-Rho symbol of Christ was no longer to be debated but battened on for sheer survival.

At sixteen none of this bothered Patricius overmuch. When he thought of it at all, he made comfortable obeisance to Christ and just as blithely dropped a pinch of incense on the altar of Mercury, and went whistling out of the chapel to bask in the last rays of the long Roman sunset. But for Patricius, night came suddenly.

The mouth of the River Esk was always tempting to Irish pirates. One day they appeared suddenly at his father's villa, pouring through the gates, the doors, the rooms. His mother and father were mercifully absent. Patricius happened to be alone in the courtyard. Along with a few able-bodied young slaves, he was chained, thrown into a curragh, and rowed for a short, lurching journey to the pirate vessel at Esk mouth and dumped on the hard deck. For Calpurnius' slaves it was only a harsher degree of the servitude they'd known all their lives. For Patricius it was the end of his world. Alienated, his whole being an open wound of hunger, pain, and fear, his newborn faith was not surprising to anyone but himself.