And then the rising ululation from Guenloie that could not be mistaken for any part of religious fervor: "Drust, oh, Drust, aye, aye —"

Padrec broke off. "What. . . what's that? Are you listening to me, Guenloie? Drust?"

He staggered, rubbing his eyes, then seized a faggot from the fire and thrust it aloft, stumbling into the further recess of the crannog, pouring light over the writhing, coital lump of them.

"Jesus!"

They paid little attention to him, Neniane thoroughly involved with Artcois, generous Guenloie unable to exclude either husband from this night's outpouring of her love. Padrec barely quelled an urge to kick them.

"Guenloie! Drust! All of you: what have I—oh, abomination!"

"Stop, Padrec!"

He whirled, reeling, at the whiplash sound of her voice as if she had authorized this desecration to humiliate him. Dorelei hovered like a warning at the edge of his light. "Damn you, woman."

"Be nae more fool than Mother made thee, Padrec."

"Fool?" he seethed. "Fool is it? What have I been talking about? And what to? Animals... animals!" Padrec hurled the stick into the firepit and lunged for the ladder, Cru's delighted laughter floating after like a sting; up, out into the fresh-aired dark to glare blearily at the moon.

"Mooneye ..."

The uisge and crannog warmth had crept up and struck him down from behind. He was drunk enough not to think what he did at all ridiculous but the reasoned acts of a rational mind. Padrec staggered off across the ridge saddle toward the ring of stones, falling now and then, to reach the circle and clutch precariously at one of the huge liths to steady himself, snarling his challenge to the moon.

"Mother is it? Fat, greasy sow-idea of a god!" Padrec swayed and stumbled about the center of the ring, screaming his contempt at the stones, as if to shatter them with his tongue alone. ' 'Aye, and Lugh Sun. Come up'n I'll spit on you. Is this all you can do for your own? Teach them to rut like animals anywhere, any time they've a mind? Well, I am Patricius. Father Patricius. Here I am! Here I stand! Now come and strike me down if you can. Past and gone, the both of you. Frauds!" He hurled his arms aloft. ' 7 am the sword of God, you hear me?"

"All the world hears thee, Padrec fool."

He turned at her voice, trying to steady the circle of treacherous stones that reeled sickeningly in front of him. With an effort, Padrec focused his sight on Dorelei. She stood only a few feet away, hands on slender hips, outlined by moonlight from behind. Her face was shadowed, but the attitude of her head and body told Padrec in the small reason left him that she was here for a purpose. Good. Time to pay her out, too.

"Indeed," he said with sneering dignity. "Indeed, so they do, so they should. 'Now Padrec will speak of Father-God!' Speak what, savage? Speak of God while they rut like animals?"

He was drunk, but her words cut through the fire in his head like shards of diamond. "Teach belief, Padrec? Wise or foolish, words be only words. Did hear the words on the Moses-stones, and so many be what thee shall not. Did think on that? All not, all no." Dorelei whipped her arm toward the crannog. "Loving be teaching. Loving be faith. Fool!"

"Faith in what?"

"In .. . tomorrow. Thee stands here, near to falling down and dare curse Mother and Lugh? Be nae Lugh and Father-God the same?''

"No, Dorelei. No, ignorant lump, they are not the same. Your sun is only trivial fire that God conceived, that He could snuff out with a flicker of His will."

"Yet thee rage at Lugh as if a could answer."

Blinking at her, Padrec felt distinctly that he was losing his advantage in argument; in fact he had difficulty following it. ''Figure of speech. Mere... figure'f speech."

"Padrec fool, thee knows nothing worth breath to tell."

"Oh, no?"

"Nae. And do not start away, but hear me!" With an arm stronger than he would have guessed, Dorelei spun him about to face her. In his unreliable sight, she went on spinning with the stones.

"This dirt thee spits in a clean crannog—"

"What!"

"Aye, of marriage: better none at all, but will allow't from pity if a must. Better to marry than to burn. No word of loving, none of joy. Thee's ill, Padrec. Must be child-wealth as must be lambs and crops, but thee says to marry is only bare best of a poor bargain. One wife if thee must, but, oh, much better to put love aside for the naught it is and spend thy time howling to Father-God. A will grow tired of thee as Mother tired of Mabh. Give fhain something a can use."

Dorelei tore away from him. Padrec tried to keep her in his failing sight, feeling the tension in her small form, something more than anger.

"Thee troubles me, Padrec. I tell thee, could be wrong in bringing thee to fhain. Could be very wrong."

"Then le'me go."

"Nae."

"Why not?"

Dorelei hesitated. "Parents would not. .. lie to a gern," she answered with halting obstinacy. "Where, Padrec? Where the sense in thy teaching?"

He was tired, befuddled, and wanted passionately to lie down in his tracks and sleep. Speaking was a thick-tongued effort. His mouth kept going dry. "D'you not know this world will soon pass away?"

"Oh? When? Afore morning, afore lambs drop or be child-wealth? Must fhain just sit and wait? Mother will

not pass, Padrec. Did live with the ice and will live for tens of seasons yet."

"The ungodly are so sure of that."

"Be thee man, Padrec?"

"Oh, not that again."

"Nae, be thee man?" Dorelei came to him and put her hands up on his shoulders. The moonlight washed the expression out of her face; she was all light and dark, whiteness framed in the shadow of her hair, shadow where the light broke on the high bridge of her nose. "Well thee speaks of children, being one."

"Now, tha's enough, young woman!"

"Child." She searched the truth of him out of her own shadows. "Have heard of men who will do anything to run from women. Be thee so? Then will leave thee to tallfolk."

"Fine!" he howled. "Fine. Leave, then. You think I want to spend my life with a damned pack of. .."

He was vaguely conscious of leaning against a stone for support, his own voice coming from a long distance, common sense from even farther. My God, what's happening to me? Am I really this drunk this indulgent? Careful . . . careful. Enough sin for one night.

With drunken, exaggerated scruple, Padrec levered himself erect, breathing deeply to clear his head. "P'raps I've had a little too much. Forgive me."

Dorelei's tension loosened in her throaty, sighing laugh. "Oh, thee's wicked, Padrec. Of all men or women, thee's first in the world to drink too deep." Her laughter turned merry and soft as she moved closer, pressing her small body against him. "A drink, a love, these be sometimes joy. And how dost spend thy joy but barking at Mother like foolish Rof."

Tumbling toward sleep, flooded with pity for lost Eden, for all men and mostly himself, Padrec slid down the stone, weeping for all of it.

Dorelei's hair brushed his cheek like the cool of the night itself. He felt her hand stroking his body and yearned toward that balm with the last clear impulse left

him. With great effort he lifted a hand to fumble over her cheek.

"Wish you could understand me."

She moved so that his face was against her bare breasts, the dark nipples chilled erect by the night air, rocking him gently, murmuring to him. He tried to catch what Dorelei whispered; it was terribly important, the meaning and answer to all questions in the universe. With a sob he buried his face in the breast of God, Mary, Mother, Magdalene that was all beginning and end.

Dorelei held him.

Next morning, for all his pounding head and queasy stomach, Padrec added an eleventh to his Ten Commandments.

Finch did not sing in vain. Although Padrec began to lose track of days and then weeks, it was less than two months from the song to snow. Not a heavy fall, turning to icy rain on the cutting wind. Wrapped in Cru's huge cloak, Padrec paced his horse along the edge of the flocks with Rof, keeping them together. He welcomed the solitude of herd watch, day or night. There was a serious problem to wrestle with.

To want Dorelei was one thing. To see her walk bare in the sun, unconscious of her lithe beauty, was one thing and a simple thing. A priest was only a man and had to deal with the promptings of his own flesh like any other man. He could manage that easily as a moment's appreciation of sensuous Guenloie. To love Dorelei, to yearn after her, to want to join with her, make her part of him, was quite another thing. To turn aside with lead in his heart when the woman of her reached to Cru, to bury his head in blankets at night not to hear the sound of their loving, to go again and again through the exhausting evolution from longing to exaltation to pain, hate, Weariness, and the hope that it would all die, only to see her smile and wave at him and be lost again—all this was another thing and a torture against which Padrec was defenseless.

He was emotionally younger than his years. Like a sick child, he could not imagine a time when he'd not been ill: was sick, would always be sick. Love took him by the scruff of the neck as Rof a marauding fox, shook, and tossed him high. He rose, moved through the shortening autumn days and lay down at night in dull misery, and all the prayers and meditations in Canon couldn't help. In matters like this they never did, but Padrec tried and spent long hours with Drust.

Guenloie's second husband was a joy with the glimmerings of a poet in his soul. "My David," Padrec called him when they stood herd watch together. Above all Padrec's teaching, Drust loved the Psalms, the songs to God of a small people ringed with enemies; the pleas and thanks for help were realities with which Drust could identify. Their music modified to his own world and tongue, they emerged less stately but more direct. The lustier of them Drust loved to hurl ablaze down the wind toward the Taixali village, as if by their sheer force he could batter down their walls like Joshua.