Beneath . ..

He never wanted to take his nap in the afternoon but would delay and evade Nurse's coaxing until he was cranky-tired. Then she would haul him up onto her big soft lap and, thumb tucked safely in his mouth, he'd drift away listening to the Brigante hill songs from her own childhood.

Beneath the greening ... something, something. He remembered the rhythm more clearly than the words. Greening hollow sods, that's it.

The treadmill churned, too tired to cease.

Dorelei had the words wrong. He hurried back through the maze of exhausted sleep. As he drew near enough to call, he remembered the words in a burst, all at once.

"Dorelei! I've found the words."

His wife's head lolled forward between her arms pinioned on the cross. "Thee's lost the words, Padrec."

He opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut against the brightness of whitewashed, sunlit walls. While his head throbbed softly, his cheek felt damp. Someone had wept on his pillow.

Though he was strong enough to carry Padrec home, Malgon was much sicker. The tallfolk uisge tainted his mind with strange pictures. Padrec could sleep it out of him, but Meganius called the court physician whom Marchudd had placed at his disposal. The slight Parisi

doctor came eventually, fashionable in his Byzantine robe, and inspected the sweaty, trembling lump of misery on the couch.

"Your grace, who . . . what is this creature?"

"Faerie/'

The doctor subjected Malgon to professional scrutiny: an acute inflammation of the stomach, possibly a nonfatal dose of poison.

"A week of uisge, master physician."

"Urn. Very like and not the best, Fd say. But that's the least of it."

The physician's examination was thorough and pitying. An accumulation of maladies. Bad food and not enough of that. Exposure. Skin looks unhealthy. Exhaustion mostly. Never seen one of these creatures before, you must realize. They must subsist differently. Well, give him fresh milk with the cream unskimmed. Eggs, boiled only, no condiments or spices. Let him rise when he will. That will be some days yet, by the look of him. Both of them, come to that.

The physician surrendered to his curiosity. "Where have these two been?"

"Doing God's work," Meganius said. "Some wine before you go?"

Malgon crawled shakily from his sickbed, hoping to find a thing lost. This world was not his, nor were Guen-loie or the child anywhere in it. He was homeless as Cruaddan.

Truly lost now. I cannot feel Guenloie on my one hand or Drust —

No.

In his sickness, Malgon dreamed not in words like Padrec, but images and sounds. In the meadow beyond the hill of his dreaming, he heard Finch sing and sensed an unmeasured passage of time. He couldn't find Guenloie anywhere. He went off on some foolish errand and told her to wait, but she couldn't any more than Mother

would forestall autumn. Somewhere he'd lost her completely, lost the way home altogether. Perhaps he really was old as he felt, slipped through the squared-off sieve of tallfolk time with its sundials and hour-marked candles, lost forever to Guenloie.

Malgon squatted alone over the soft patch of courtyard earth, smoothing it out. There was a thing in him that clamored not so much to be said as expelled from his soul. He felt inadequate to the task with the skills he knew, but he btgan anyway in the language familiar to him.

He drew the line of men, a stiff procession of them with bows in their hands, the rampart, and a line of defenders. High over it all, Malgon etched a radiant sun with a face and fire for a beard. Lugh. Father-God. The truth as Malgon saw it. But somehow not true.

"No."

He knew the tread that stopped behind him, the voice that found his picture false as he did.

"Be nae the way oft, Mai."

"Have lost it."

"And I."

Padrec squatted beside him. They both contemplated the image and its inadequacy. Malgon's gift was for more enduring images than spears and men. This was how tallfolk would picture it, trying to take time as seen by the mere eye and freeze it like river into ice. Yet under the ice, water flowed and fish swam, motion and reality did not cease. So with men. In his head, the center of the soul, a frozen man could be running in terror, soaring with rapture, racing with the impetus to create, a cataract of energy behind a single gesture or stillness itself.

Although the notion was alien past recognition, this was what seethed in Malgon, stumbling over itself to be born. Not the men but the truth of them.

Tentatively, under the god-sun, he began to sketch the Chi-Rho. The knife hesitated, then obliterated the lie with vigorous scraping. False, all of it. No lines of men,

no Father-God. For sure, no Jesu sign. Nothing of gods at all about that place.

"Nae," Malgon said. "This."

With angry strokes, he smoothed his patch of earth again and let the truth spill out. Aye, that was the sun that drew their sweat from them, beating down in hard— straight—lines with a demon energy of its own, like so. And there were the twisting snakes of mist that chilled them when they woke, that wet them through as they toiled up and down the hills, rolling along the picture-ground. The head of a Coritani spear darted out of the mist here and there, as it always could. More strokes: not stiff men, not men at all, but the force lines of their forward movement pointing ahead, the strength of Prydn that uncoiled under a keening and launched at Churnet Head. Now, jagged runes for the sharp branches that speared them in the alley.

4 'Yah, Mai."

Malgon felt Padrec's sharing like a warmth in his hand, guiding it. The knife moved faster. No Chi-Rho over it, no neat symbol but truth as it burned into him: two deep slashes in a cross for a cruel thing that men died on.

The dance of the knife slowed, became deliberate. Truth, yes, but there was part of truth that could not be shown as eye saw it. Malgon scraped the bottom of his soul for the truth that would never be scoured from it.

He drew a mouth, open in pain, distorted to gasp out the bleak question at such betrayal in payment for such faith. The mouth was Drust's and his and Padrec's. All of them. It was beautiful and obscene and it hurt.

The knife paused. Malgon roused himself from a concentration like troubled sleep. Quickly, to one side of the mouth, he etched a sweeping curve: a wing, the spirit of all wings that ever flew.

"Finch."

"Aye, Malgon. Must go home."

"I can't just pray with complacent faith. The words must mean. They don't anymore."

'Then how do I find you here in my chapel?" Me-ganius asked mildly.

"Asking questions," Padrec said.

The lift of an eyebrow. "Of a silence, you will say. Oh, Sochet."

They stood at the altar of the small oratory that formed one chamber of the bishop's villa. Outside, Mal-gon waited by the saddled and provisioned horses. Thinking only to say good-bye, Meganius was surprised to find Padrec here, livid, readier for confrontation than prayer. "You are a priest. With the faith or throwing stones at it, you will be that forever. Why do you pester God so?"

The old bishop deposited himself on a stone bench. He tired earlier in the day now, and these last days with Padrec wore him down even more quickly. "You weary me much as my age does. Obsessive priests."

"Obsessive?"

"Yes, that. You woo God like a suitor and then rage at Him out of the same jealousy. Not God you love, but yourself. I, I, I. Pity the world's less perfect than you can endure, but you are a priest. You must work with fallible sight through fallible souls to prepare for the union of God and man. To that you are consecrated. Stop sulking like a rejected lover and do what you have to do."

"What's that?" Padrec glowered.

"I don't know; what honesty prompts you to. You might start with tonsuring to help you at least look your calling. Don't you tire of the exotic?"

"Only when I can believe in what it stands for."

Meganius rubbed at tired eyes. Since Padrec's return, he'd not slept that well for concern and soul-searching of his own. The man was justified in his righteous disgust, as far as it went.

"So you have lost your faith, Father Patricius. The first time, I take it. A moment ago I compared you to a jealous lover. Say then that you are married to God. Do you not imagine in any marriage that lovers grow bored,

disillusioned with each other, see how common and clay-footed the loved one can be, unwashed, unshaven, unpleasant in the morning? How perfection can decline? Do you think I have not lost my faith a dozen times over, sought an answer in marriage as you have; that I haven't rutted and reveled my way through every dreary vice the uninventive world has to offer, only to find myself wearier of error and indulgence than I was of faith? You haven't lost your belief, it's merely indisposed."

Padrec tried to shape with his hands what words failed. "You—you are—"

"What, Sochet?"

"So damned smug. How do you presume to know what I feel?"

"Because you are not apathetic toward God, but angry at Him."

"Yes." More than angry; Padrec felt the cold suet of his rage begin to heat and stir.

"No one hurls invective at an empty room. Still, let it out."

The younger man's eyes shot to the Chi-Rho. "At that?"

"Why not? Every union has its quarrels. And God, since we are made in His image, is man enough to hear you out."

"Then I would ask..."

"Let it out, Sochet."

"Why?"

"Don't whine. Yell. You're that angry, aren't you? Yell!"

"WhyV 9 The force of it pulled Padrec around to the Chi-Rho panel, pointed like a weapon at his betrayer. "Why? If you are there and you hear me, I want an answer. I—they ..."

His fists beat against his thighs with rising fury. "Never since the Apostles were there children so sure of you, so ready to your hand. They believed. You placid, omniscient butcher, they believed). Do you know what that costs? Any tonsured eunuch can bend his