"Good." She knew they'd both be far too tired. "Do need it."

He chuckled softly, stroking her nipples. "Will love thee like stag at Samhain."

"Oh ... large words, small deeds."

"Dost say so?"

"Will be too tired."

"Thee wait. Just wait."

"Cru?"

"Aye, wife."

"Padrec's Father-God that put Jesu into maiden. Dost believe it?"

If true, it was potent magic; yet, by Cru's thinking, there seemed no place for Mother in this paternal scheme of things. Padrec's god was no more comprehensible than Padrec himself. "Nae, Dorelei."

"But if a be true; if this Father-God has such magic— would I be fool to bring it into fhain?'' When Cru hesitated, Dorelei twisted around in his arms and let him see her quandary. "Did see Reindeer fhain? Did see the miserable graze? Be child-wealth in crannog? Where be the magic fhain needs?"

"Dorelei, Dorelei.

"Hear! Dost think will nae call Father-God's magic in need?"

"Father with no mother? How can such be?"

Dorelei's shoulders twitched in bleak ignorance. "Who can say? But have much on my mind now, Cru. Much on my heart."

Dorelei's thin face was tight with insoluble quandary. Cru knew the truth of it. The new pasture was nothing

to sing about. Winter would be lean. They must try to trade among tallfolk strangers who'd killed their kind that very year. They needed the strongest possible magic. Yet he feared the full extent of Dorelei's thinking. It was dangerous for a new fhain to turn its back on tried ways before taking root. Mother and Lugh might indeed forget them. Cru framed his wife's solemn face in his hands.

"Dost think to turn from Parents?"

"If... a turn from us, Cru, would first husband leave?"

"What?"

"Nae, nae, did ask. Would thee leave?"

"Oh, Dorelei." Cru took a deep breath and sighed it out. "Sometimes thee be Gern-y-fhain—"

"Just sometimes?"

"And other times be plain woman and thick." He shut her mouth with a long, tender kiss. "Cru will leave a's wife when pasture moves with sheep."

She needed to hear that. Of all strengths, Cru would not fail her. She remembered hungry winter nights in Gawse's crannog and questioned the providence of Mother and Lugh, especially when tallfolk thrived and fhain weakened. No. Before she watched her people die on a hillside, before they faded into mist like Reindeer fhain with scarce heart for a greeting, Dorelei would bargain with gods and demons alike to survive.

Signs had meaning or they did not. In Mother's world no bird lofted, no mole or worm burrowed without purpose in the wheel of life. Padrec was given to them for a reason, of this much she was sure, must be sure. She would hear more of this Father-God.

For the first night in a new home, Dorelei herself built the fire from the ends of the old one. The crannog was large, cunningly built of dry stone wedged together in the manner Prydn learned from the old broch builders in the north; large but dark, the only light from the fire flickering over Dorelei's preoccupied expression, Neni-ane and Guenloie cutting dried meat on a washed flat

go Parke Godwin

stone, Artcois and Padrec carefully preparing the rath skins for spring use. From now until spring broke they would live underground cheek by woolly jowl with their sheep, but the rath skins needed waterproofing every year, curded sheep's milk rubbed in by hand. Padrec gagged at the soured mess on his hands.

4 'Stinks, doesn't it?"

Artcois' mouth twisted in a wry grin. "Thee knows spring rain, Padrec. Can smell sweet or be dry."

They went on rubbing.

Neniane and Guenloie prepared a light meal out of dried meat and mutton broth with a few late greens collected about the hill. When the meal was done and the heat from the fire a steady glow in the crannog stones, Dorelei assumed the formal position on her gern-stone.

1 'Will speak of Mabh. And then Padrec will speak of Father-God."

Dorelei departed from tradition and knew it. The Mabh story was told at Brigid in the dead of winter, when Lugh Sun was far away and all men needed hope, but they needed hope now. Mother did not kindle this fire, or Gawse. She was Gern-y-fhain here and a little reckless in her determination. Salmon would not limp away into fog like Reindeer, looking for a new place that might not be there.

"Was in the first days when the ice was on the land."

Listening to the story, Padrec was confused. He knew the Hebrew writings and had a clear idea of the unfolding of human endeavor from the Creation. Nowhere in Canon was there reference to a sheet of ice covering the flat dish of the earth. Yet this story of Mabh and of ice was central to Faerie belief as the Flood to his. Time, in his sense, meant nothing to them, nor large numbers. Their unit of measurement was in tens as the fingers of a hand and still bewildering to an outsider. 'Tens of seasons" could mean two, two dozen, two hundred, even two thousand years, so foreshortened and stylized was their unwritten but queerly consistent concept of

history. There was the ice. Its melting had shaped their world anew.

Like all young clerics with some pretense to intellect, Padrec had estimated the world's age from the lives of the prophets in the Old Testament. There was much argument back and forth, but the nearest he could make it was four or five thousand years from Creation to the present. Academic: what need to know how old when the vital question was how long remaining? In this year of God's Grace and dwindling patience, 429, the Second Coming of Christ was an imminent reality. Let some doubt it, the world could end almost before Padrec completed his Irish mission. Virtue, not history, was a matter of urgent priority. Still, as Dorelei spun out the tale, Padrec sensed she spoke of a time impossibly older than his Creation. It troubled him; she didn't speak as of a hallowed legend but of facts accomplished yesterday.

In the first days, in the time of the ice (Dorelei told them), the winters were longer and summers short and wet. Fhains were more hunters than shepherds, sheep and horses still wild enough to want to go their own way. Times were very hard, and all through the quarrel between Lugh Sun and Mother Earth.

The fhain of Mabh lived far south of the ice flow. Mabh was most beautiful of all Prydn women. Her skin was of a hue like copper and smoke, and her hair like washed coal in the firelight, so black it was, and it is said that she wore the skins of animals that melted away with the ice, so who can speak of her clothes?

Times were lean and food scarce, and Prydn said even then: we would hate to be forgotten like tallfolk since even as remembered children life is not that good. Even then the tallfolk hunters harried Mabh's people—until in a certain spring when the melting ice roared down the swollen brooks and rivers, Mabh took a handful of moonstones, scattered them in the circle, and spoke her mind to Mother.

'Where is Tir-Nan-Og?" she demanded. "Where is

the mole on our back we cannot see, the place Lugh Sun promised us? We need it now."

So one can see that fhain problems were much the same then as now—if Guenloie and her husbands would pay attention, there being a time for love and another to heed one's gern, but not both at once.

Mother was not feeling too generous herself, half covered with ice. Her eye shone coldly on Mabh. *'First husband has left me," she mourned, her voice thin and dry as the crackle of ice breaking up in the streams. "What does Mabh want of me, who have nothing left to give?"

Mabh said, "Now that the snows are melting, we would find Tir-Nan-Og."

Mother laughed at her child, the sound of chill wind through the circle of stones. "That was your father's promise, and thee knows men are inconstant. Has he not left me?"

Mother went on sulking over her misfortune; she wanted to know she was loved before giving anything, a fact that infuriates men but is not all that unreasonable when you know the heart of woman. Mabh knew not what to do except to prove her faith. She laid the first kill of the spring hunt on the altar stone in her circle, a fine red deer. Mother only turned away, clouded over her mooneye, and would not be pleased.

Then Mabh brought to the altar the prize kill of the next hunt, a giant bull of the wild cattle, yet Mother remained obstinate. When Mabh sent her the meat of their next kill, a huge beast who was said to eat with its long curling snout, Mother yet refused it. As a gern Mabh was used to some respect herself and would take only so much refusal. She grew angry and stormed about the circle, never mind the moonstones, and raged at Mother:

"Hear me! Three times have laid gifts on your stone, and this last has cost two of my good hunters to show our love to you. If we cannot waste time crying for ourselves, neither should you. Dost think our life is easy?

There are ten tallfolk to every one of us, and all hate us as we do them. Now, dost help first children or dost not?"

"Not," said Mother, who could be short herself, and she closed her mooneye against her daughter. Angry and hopeless Mabh brooded in the circle so that she was not fox-wary as usual. While she wrestled with her own thoughts, great harm stole upon her: an evil spirit of the tallfolk, summoned by devious magic in the shape of a young man to kill the Prydn gern. But being conjured as a male, the spirit had other male purposes aforehand, and he leaped upon Gern-y-fhain Mabh. She threw him off and drew her flint knife, swallowing her natural fear as the evil spirit grew bigger and bigger to kill her.

"Lugh and Mother protect me!" she cried—and hurled herself upon the looming evil. It was a battle from which all humans and animals cowered in fright, covering their ears against the sound of it. Lugh's sky darkened from the dust of their whirling feet. The thunder was the roar of the evil spirit, shaking the earth so that the high rocks tumbled down. The lightning that split the sky was the clash of their knives and Mabh's challenge.