They didn't feel safe until Mother's mooneye shone over this barren Atecotti land. Atecotti, of course, knew all that happened to her but made no judgments. In their soft, throaty tongue, very close to hers, they guided Do-relei to this ancient broch and even found a few oddments to spare by way of provisions. Few and shy, like Prydn, but they understood reality as Dorelei knew it. Perhaps like her own folk, they would fade from Pict-land with no trace but the sinuous animals pocked into stone.

If she was a fool, who played her false? Not Padrec: as faithful and as sold as the rest of them. And he came back to her, not with prayers or Jesu-reasons, but because he needed her. Dorelei knew how much without words. The need was in his hands when he made love to her, not even caring when Crulegh woke to watch, fascinated, which happened often. Padrec's body against hers was like sea sponge in its need to absorb her everywhere, and nothing enough at such times. She felt the fear as well as the need in him, as if she must make up, if only in loving, the other things lost or no longer believed in.

Well, they were all a long way from Dronnarron. She loved him, not by any of the comfortable, sustaining things once clung to, but because he was there and both of them terribly alone. It was lonely to be godless. The

Parke Godwin

joining proved them real, like the stark tower itself against endless sea and moor.

Frightening at first to be gone from any god at all, but in time it removed walls from Dorelei's thinking. Slowly, hesitantly, she began to place one fact on another toward her own tower of existence. She wasn't sure Prydn could live away from Mother, but she could think beyond Bruidda's small scope and for once beyond the pale of gods.

With the prophecy of the black fawn and the vision at Camlann, then clearly, as Wolf once told her, Prydn were not to be long in the land. Grant this, then perhaps the older prophecy was as true. Perhaps Rainbow-song was a map and Lugh Sun could point them to Tir-Nan-Og as well as treasure.

"Will be no rath allowed Salmon in spring. What fhain gets, must take, this side of Tir-Nan-Og."

She confessed it to Padrec as they rode together trying to ferret a hint of spring from the sea wind knifing over the bare, low hills. Propped before his mother, Crulegh rode swaddled in blanket, red-cheeked in the cold air.

There was a nuance of the turning of Mother toward Lugh in the weather, not so much warmth as less gloom in the cast of sky, less edge to the air as it filled the lungs. Coming spring meant more than rade. This time it meant decision. Dorelei had no more leisure to brood over folly or wrongs. What to do, where to go now?

Like their tower, any human sign stood out sharply against the windswept world around them. Dorelei hooted with sudden delight, pointing.

"See, Padrec! Atecotti."

Far to the west, the four small figures trekked along the side of a low rise, distant but quite aware of them. Dorelei waved and received their salute in return.

"A never come close," Padrec remarked, "and yet do feel them neighbors."

"Good folk." Dorelei thought of the fish net left outside the tower, worn but needing only a little mending in Malgon's clever hands. She nudged her pony on.

"Did come in the first days and bring the bronze for Prydn to work. Have always been friends."

Her own folk were once spread over Mabh's island, but Atecotti came to this northern place, and here they remained. Perhaps the remoteness appealed to them.

"A's barrows be still marked in the land as ours," Dorelei concluded. "There: be Atecotti barrow, one of them."

The small hillock rose ahead of them, worn with age and situated so as to seem a natural part of the rolling barrens. Padrec knew Prydn barrows by now, even harder to separate from the landscape than this, and long where this was circular. He would not have noticed this one by himself.

Dorelei explained the mound to him as they walked the horses in a slow circuit around it. In the days of Prydn and Atecotti greatness, such were the customs of burial. Great slabs of stone were cut from the hills or sea cliffs and dragged into position to form the core structure, which was then covered with smaller stones and earth and left undisturbed until Mother made the barrow part of herself again. The great ones from the first days slept in Mother's breast, which still breathed around them. Nae, look where even now the first green showed—

Dorelei jerked the pony to a short halt, wheeling about to Padrec, radiant with discovery. "Barrow."

"What?"

"Barrow!"

As Padrec looked on, mystified, Dorelei lifted Crulegh and jumped to the ground, dancing away along the edge of the burial mound.

- 'Barrowbarrowbarrow!''

She capered, bouncing and jiggling Crulegh into a paroxysm of squealing delight as he tried to imitate her.

"Barbarbar!"

"Barrow!'' Dorelei whirled and leaped in a savage triumph that totally eluded Padrec.

"So? A barrow. What other thunderbolt hast thee to shatter the world with this day?"

"Dost nae see?" Dorelei wheeled her arm toward the round cairn. "Greening hollow sods. Barrow, Padrec. Did think Rainbow could be map, but nae sure until now."

She spun about in the thrill of realization. "Barrow! Where else? Prydn gold be barrowed with the dead. Will yet find this treasure and Tir-Nan-Og. Yah!"

She forked Crulegh over the saddle, jumped up behind, and cantered away toward the broch while Padrec stared at the mound and the absurd possibility of it all. He shouted with glee at the sight of Dorelei, happy for once, prancing the bewildered pony in circles for sheer good spirits while her victory floated back on the sea wind.

"Barrow! Barrow! Barrow!"

If they raded, it must be soon. Food for themselves and the stock would not last forever, and here at the end of winter even the benevolent Atecotti had little to sell or trade other than fish. There must be graze or vetch; that meant movement, and this gloomy tower, warm and well built though it was, would never be home to Prydn.

These were urgent matters, but nothing beside Dorelei's discovery, which was turned this way and that by fhain, like picking the last meat from a bone. Neniane ladled out barley porridge while Dorelei, excited on her gern-stone, held forth with such thoughts as not even Reindeer gern would dare, may her shriveled spirit be forgotten of the ages, never to be young again.

Dorelei's shadow danced on the fire-lit walls of the chamber. Now did they have all the pieces of it, look you: beneath the hollow sods of a barrow, a secret, sacred place, at a certain time in the spring, Rainbow will point to the Prydn hoard.

"And how dost know this be truth and nae only song?" Neniane objected.

Before Dorelei could lay out her reasons, Guenloie

spilled the porridge she was spooning to Bruidda, and it splattered over the child's chin, making her howl. Reasons were forgotten in the ensuing clamor that bounced off the walls as Crulegh set up his own wail, joined by Morgana Mary. Clearly a problem for the women. Mal-gon just poured more tea, and Padrec growled. "Can't those bloody children be quiet one moment in a long day?"

So it was a while, with quieting the wealth, and coaxing them to bed, before the women got back to the fire and Dorelei's point.

"Nae, then," Malgon challenged, "an a day in spring, what day?"

'Think on't," Dorelei teased him with a cool smile. "What great, unchanging day would be the choice of Malgon first husband?"

His lower lip jutted in concentration: nothing.

"Bel-tein," said Neniane, and Dorelei rewarded her with a kiss.

"Truly. Bel-tein."

"But only an be Rainbow," Malgon argued.

"But should be Rainbow then," Padrec said. "Be most common then. Will rain at Bel-tein often as't will not. Oftener."

"Should open our eyes and see this Pictland have lived all our lives in," Dorelei judged. "Spring and autumn can give three and four kinds of weather to any day's sky."

Still, Malgon was not convinced. "But why only Bel-tein, Gern-y-fhain?"

"Why not? Can think of better day to mark from?"

She was sure of her reasoning, but each thought was hard-won. She wasn't used to thinking in what Padrec called "logic," or even in words most of the time. He called her thoughts an "assumption," and she paraded it over and over through her mind: on Bel-tein in a certain place, the rainbow would point to a barrow that held the Prydn hoard. But Rainbow fled before the watcher, faded even as one tried to see it all. . . .

The answer came when they were all on the beach with the mended net, casting and hauling in fresh fish. Padrec and Dorelei worked apart, scraping fresh salt off the rocks. Dorelei looked up at her people working on the same rock where the Atecotti cast her net.

"Do remember, Padrec."

"Eh?"

"Atecotti woman. She said .. . about Rainbow."

"Said what?"

"Where a goes."

"And?"

Dorelei bit her lip, picturing the woman on the rock. "A did ask me where Rainbow went." She lifted her arm over the water. "Down to sea, I said. And a made answer: 'Or from sea down to us.' "

Just then a wave higher than the rest broke itself against the rocks and they had to dash up the beach to avoid being drenched. But Dorelei's insight was clear in her mind, although she had no words for it.

"Must be one place thee must stand. Nae, more. What is't do try to say, husband? See."

Not at all sure what she tried to express, Dorelei took up a driftwood stick and smoothed a patch of sand, scratching indecisive figures with the point of the stick: the curve of Rainbow, a figure with breasts for herself, lines connecting them. "Help me, Padrec."

He didn't quite know how at first. She groped for something, not even sure of its shape, only that it was there.

"Do stand here," she poked at the woman-figure. "Rainbow there. An Rainbow point. . ." Dorelei ransacked her small tallfolk vocabulary for the word. "De-pend-ing on where do stand, then—ai, Padrec, who is't do try to say?"