She'd seen it often, year by year watched the faint etchings wear and be covered. Ancient animals, ancient memories of them. The bog elk: a few were left in Ireland, Padrec said, but long vanished from Britain.

"Be most old," Dorelei murmured over the stone. "Should nae be forgot."

She scraped at the encroaching moss near the foot of the slab, casually at first, then with more purpose as it became clear that the moss obscured more than she'd thought. Under her knife, old fhain signs appeared— Hawk, Marten, even Salmon, pocked into the granite with a bronze awl by some dim ancestor. The knife scraped over the surface, the only sound in the silent world around them, even the wind's whisper fallen to nothing.

"Padrec, look."

So worn it was barely readable, already ages old before Mother grew over it. "Reindeer fhain. Long before Bruidda, that's sure."

"What be older than hundreds, husband?"

"Thousands."

Meaningless to Dorelei, but other things were near as

yesterday. "Be tale-speaking that Mabh put first rath on the Hill of the Fires and raised the stones/'

She gazed thoughtfully at the sign. The young grace of her, the antiquity of her unhistoried people in this land .. . Padrec felt a sudden, vast pity like a requiem. Egypt, for all its unimaginable ages, was real as Jupiter in enduring stone: temples, tombs, pyramids whose unreadable inscriptions could yet say, Here we were. Here we lived, a people.

And here his wife like a last flower in a garden sinking under bog. Where were the fhains of even a few years ago? Where the thousands that flourished after Mabh and greeted the bronze-bringers? Mere hundreds now, scattered over Pictland, trekking from one crannog to the next, even their long-haired sheep an antique curiosity seen nowhere else. Stones in a lonely, shunned circle, shadows slipping over a hilltop. Faint marks in stone obliterated by the very Nature they worshipped, fewer and fewer to read them or care. People who never wrote a word or needed to, and there the difference. But for the writing, even Christ might be forgotten, who was to say?

He saw Dorelei clear with her narrow head bowed over the stone. A tiny woman in half-cured sheepskin and skirt of ragged wool fringes, usually hung with thistle or burrs, that even a tattooed Pict would call outlandish. Yet she had been to him in reality what he once asked of God. Through her he was born again as surely as if she'd forced him from her own womb with Cru-legh. She gave him eyes to see the world he lived in, and even now in her doe-graceful youth, he saw her dead and gone as those who scratched the fading marks on this stone.

"Dorelei."

She couldn't understand why he hugged her so close and hard. .

"Because I love you."

Because you have made me whole, I see the whole and that there will be an end, and I dread it. That must

be what makes the light so lovely, knowing it will go. We see the parting and know we 11 never be ready when it comes, yet we go on and even dare beauty. If not worthy of Grace, at least that keeps us human. Let me write my own gospel, my Book of Dorelei, that men re-member you and this moment you filled. Hell, they'll forget both of us anyway, so stay the moment in my arms and let sunlight be our psalm.

''Husband?" She touched his eyelids. "Dost weep."

"Nothing. Sometimes I. . . nothing. Foolish."

"To touch be never foolish."

"Come, let's ride on. Be late."

Dorelei rode ahead in a gradual circuit between the marked points, much more able than Padrec to note any human incursion on the ancient hills. The sun was only a finger's width on the horizon when they gave it up for the day and turned back toward the rath, riding close together. Dorelei was anything but discouraged.

"Be many days to Bel-tein. Thy magic will yet point us. Ai, smell." She breathed deep with pleasure at the damp air. "Do love spring. A time to quicken." She kicked playfully at Padrec's leg. "Must bear more wealth, husband. Be nae good to have but one child and that a man. A gern must bear a gern."

Neither of them spoke of the future such a gern would be born to, but her grin was mischievous. "Do nae spend all the day on mathe-matic."

Just then a few of their sheep appeared over a rise, Guenloie riding on their flank, leading them to water at the brook south of Cnoch-nan-ainneal. The setting sun bathed the hills in an eerily beautiful light, and Guenloie basked in it, stretching slender arms to the sky, out and down again. When she saw them, the old playfulness in her welled over. Yelping with pure good spirits, Guenloie goaded the pony into a furious gallop straight at Dorelei in a mock pass, plunging by her only inches away and dashing on.

Dorelei wheeled about, yipping in chorus with her cousin. She gathered herself and bent low over the po-

ny's mane to dash at Guenloie in return. Then Padrec saw her freeze the intent in midmotion. She reined the pony to a dead stop. She was not looking at Guenloie, but something beyond her, outlined in late sun and shadow amid the undulating rises they'd just left.

"Padrec! There!"

The pony shot forward. The whole action was so abrupt that Padrec just sat his horse watching as Guenloie dashed aftei her cousin, the sheep forgotten. They were barely within earshot when Dorelei's pony dug his hoofs into the last rise, drumming to the top. She leaped down, whirling and capering with Guenloie for pure excitement. Dorelei's voice floated back to Padrec, faint with distance:

"Rainbow!"

The two women spun about and fell in a laughing heap. Then Dorelei sprang up, waving to Padrec, jabbing her arm up and down again and again at the bump of ground she stood on. Pointing, shouting the word over and over, but after the first time, Padrec was galloping to join her.

"Barrow!"

There it was, and yet even Dorelei had been unaware that they'd walked their horses almost directly over it. A gentle, elongated swell parallel to the side of a small hill, more and more a part of it through the ages. The end facing west, when one really looked close, had a low but definable hump.

Watching the women caper in their excitement, Padrec felt a twinge of depression. A barrow, yes. Opening it could prove them as easily wrong as right, and the whole supposition that sustained them through winter an emptied hope.

Something else sobered Dorelei and Guenloie when they thought about it. Each barrow would hold the bones of at least one powerful gern whose magic might still guard the place.

4 'Will offer prayers to Mother, Padrec. And would much help to pray thyself."

She sent Guenloie to finish watering the sheep and led Padrec to the eastern end of the barrow mound. The spirit of the gern and her people had escaped through the hole left in the western end when the barrow was put up, but the holy place was always entered from the east. On a certain day of the year, perhaps the day of burial, the rising sun would shine directly down the central passage. At such solemn times, it was well to have all good magic working with one.

"Will all dig together," Dorelei ruled. "Give me thy sword."

Dorelei prowled back and forth in front of the low mound. Twice she raised the blade and touched the covering sod, then changed her mind. Suddenly she plunged the sword into the earth and cut a sod from it.

"Here. Will dig here."

The next day saw a break in custom, at least for the sheep. No one wanted to tend them today and miss the first sight of Rainbow-gift. Much to their confusion, the sheep were herded to water at first light by Malgon and Padrec, then back to byre and forgotten. All of fhain, including the children, rode to the barrow with tools and torches, then turned the animals loose to graze.

Digging implements were few, being rarely needed. There was an old bronze mattock, an antler pick, a small iron shovel made by Malgon last year at the forge, and another carved from the shoulder bone of an ox that served to shovel and scrape away loosened earth.

Dorelei's prayers were fervent but brief. Padrec muttered something invocative to Saint Alban, not sure of the potency, then drew his sword and cut a rectangle around the sod removed yesterday. The barrow was very old and the long deforested soil over it going to peat. The turf came away in neat strips, Padrec and the women pulling them back as Malgon chopped furiously at the underpart to free clinging roots. Dorelei was will-

ing to inconvenience her ancestors but not offend them. The sods were stacked neatly to be replaced.

Judging from the character of the moor around them, there should have been an unbroken layer of peat under the turf, but the bare rectangle revealed a mixture of loose, darkish soil speckled white with bits of decayed granite. The women were eager to get their hands into it, but Padrec stayed them, scratching his shaggy head over the character of the earth and conferring with Mal-gon in terse monosyllables.

"What be amiss?" Dorelei asked. "Should dig now afore rain turns work hard."

Still, he and Malgon took some time to cut a square out of the side of the mound and squat over it before coming back to the mystified women. Whatever the delay taught them, it was eminently satisfying from Padrec's grin.

"Be nae the first to open this barrow," he told them.

If there was one thing he and Malgon saw more than enough of in the Coritani war, it was digging, ditches, and loose dirt. You could tell when earth had been turned before; it was looser than that around it, often of a different color as one layer sagged down into another. Old post holes were black against brown and clear as a footprint. The turf cut from the side of the mound revealed an underlayer of peat. The eastern end was a jumble of loose soil of varying textures. No peat had formed over it. At some point the tomb obviously had been reopened. They could very well be on the right scent, and Dorelei need not worry to much about profanation. The occupants were used to it.