threw back furtive gleams as it caught the light. Malgon made to move through the entrance, but Dorelei stayed him.

"Thy gern will lead."

Dorelei moved between the stones and held her torch high. Padrec and Malgon, then the others clustered about her. They were in a chamber the size of a small crannog. Just before them the floor was raised. Strewn in profusion over it weie the objects that dully caught the light.

Rainbow-gift was real, and they had found it.

After a stunned moment, Dorelei whispered, "Be of Rome, Padrec?"

Of Rome and everywhere else, from what he could distinguish of the plethora. Roman work, Grecian, native British. Delicate Egyptian miniatures in fine gold, chain silver spilling like tears from Cretan jars painted with staring eyes that were troubling in their alien strength. Open chests spilling the tarnished silver, greenish bronze and dull gold coins about them over the packed earthen floor. Green and white jade and ivory cut into figures of impossible intricacy. Emeralds and rubies, uncut or set in elaborate filigreed pendants. Trading sticks of gold, easily two gradii in length. Obsidian statuary of an outlandish but energetic art that glowed queerly in the light. And more.

"Was a great borrowing," Malgon breathed. The rest of the thought he kept to himself. Bredei and Artcois should have shared this triumph, finest of borrowers that they were, and Cruaddan, to whom all horses cried their yearning for freedom.

They stared at Rainbow-gift, trying to stretch imagination around the reality while the wind sang softly through the passage behind them.

Padrec set one foot on the raised floor. "I've got to see—"

Dorelei held him back. "Stay. Be more. There."

The three torches were thrust forward as far as possible, throwing feeble light to the far rock wall. There was a more definite shape in the murk. Bruidda began

to whine again. Bones in a pile were no more worry than those her mother cracked for soup; joined together was a different and terrifying thing.

"Ai, hush," Guenloie soothed her. "Nae fear. Be only a gern who did love wealth like thee."

They spoke no more as they moved forward to the skeleton. The wind keened yet higher in the passageway, and Dorelei heard the voice in it.

Gern-y-fhain . . .

There was an aura about the bones that compelled respectful silence. One did not approach her so much as come into her presence. Whoever she had been among Reindeer fhain, she was venerated as the later ones were not, for all their honors. The tiny figure sat upright on a backed chair of heavy ashwood, white and brittle with age, the thick timbers not sawn but rough-hewn and covered with the remains of a large single hide foreign to fhain, something like a hairy cow. Arranged about the chair and forming an arch over it were the huge antlers of a bog elk. A few lingered in the wild interior of Ireland, but their racks were nowhere near this size, Padrec knew. The head that bore them must have reared seven feet or more above ground.

In touching contrast to her cerements, the child-feet dangled from the chair, not even touching the floor. The fragile skeleton only added to the mystery for Padrec. He glanced at Dorelei rapt in her own thoughts, listening to the wind. Here we are, he thought, just as we stand, the wealthiest family in Britain since the Caesars. And these bones have more of a tale to tell than any jewel I see.

From a sampling of the coins, he knew his theory was correct: much of it was from the last undebased minting decades before his birth, when hard money was still common. The rest, the art and jewelry, from any time after his own ancestors went from thinking of themselves as Romans in Britain to Britons with Roman names.

The gern's bones were not so easily read, but he

yearned to decipher them. She had been interred in nothing more than a kilt of some sort, from the few shreds not gone to dust around her loins. The gut waist-thong lay loose around the pelvic bones, dangling a fragment of hide sheath. On the covered seat where it dropped eons ago lay a small flint knife. The haft was painted in ocher with Rainbow sign.

Unlike the other gerns, she wore no metal at all. The thong about her throat, shriveled and dry, was strung with seashells, painted flints, polished bits of jet, and the elongated tusks of some predator Padrec couldn't begin to conceive. Nothing about this gern was of a past he could fit to a known world. She must have died long before the iron came or the need for a word like Black-bar, long before the Atecotti came with their bronze and stone molds. What mark she left on the land was cut with no more than courage and flint. She might have been the first to walk on Cnoch-nan-ainneal, skirted marshes that were now dry land, hunting the beast whose teeth hung about her neck, animals only vaguely remembered in stones that were themselves sinking into the past.

The temptation to name her was irresistible. Padrec's modern mind laughed at the presumption.

Then Dorelei moved, turned to him. "Dost hear?"

"What?"

"Dost hear!"

"The wind, no more."

"Nae. Under the wind."

Dorelei looked at the skeletal gern on the throne, her head canted queerly in that listening attitude. Then quickly: "Out, Padrec, Malgon, all of you, out. See to the wealth."

"What is't, wife?"

She turned on him. It was a command. "Thee dost nae hear? Go!"

"Not and leave thee here."

"Take him, Malgon."

"Nae," Padrec refused.

He might as well argue with the bones. * 'Have opened a door long shut, husband. Do wonder, then, who comes to greet us? Go."

She snatched his torch away as Malgon pulled him toward the chamber entrance after the women. Padrec's last glimpse of Dorelei: erect before the bones of the old gern, two torches held high.

The rising wind shrieked through the passageway now as they moved along it behind Malgon. To hurry them on, Padrec scooped up Crulegh and Morgana Mary under each arm. They stumbled along expecting every moment to see the entrance and daylight, but the only illumination was the single torch in Malgon's grip. The light flooded over the stacked bones, winked lewdly from hollow eye sockets, gave a likeness of movement to the gerns, formidable in death as they were in life. Then Malgon cried out in fear, a sound Padrec never heard from him in war. They were at the entrance, moving into the open.

One by one they emerged from the barrow into starless, moonless night. The dark flowed over them, a black tide on the crying wind.

What the others might wonder at, Dorelei knew surely as her own face in the bronze mirror. She stood in the gateway between her own world and Tir-Nan-Og, so close she could hear the calling. Who but Mabh worthy to guard it? Who but she speaking to her sister gern on the wind? Dorelei was terrified, but she must answer like a gern. To name Mabh aloud, to invoke her in her very resting place was to bring her surely as naming the iron once summoned its evil. Yet Dorelei was called, and the thing was to be done. She wedged the torches into the earth and knelt before Mabh. With deep reverence she stretched her palms forward to touch the holy bones.

La! Great Mabh. Be Dorelei, first daughter to Gawse. Have taken thy name in honor to lead my folk. Great sister, my magic be small to yours, but do hear thy voice.

The wind howled through the barrow, moaning out

through the spirit hole. The voice drew nearer on the wind that drove it as a sail.

Yah, DoreleL

Great sister, give me your pardon for breaking this barrow. The tallfolk betray us, our own cast us out Were much in need of magic.

/, too, had my war with tallfolk. I never called them brothers as you did. This strange hoard about me is not mine. Those who brought it did not even know me, only that I am Reindeer.

We try new ways as Mabh did. We try to find the mole on our back.

And found the world larger than you knew, as I did, and of a different shape. My war was as much with my own as tallfolk.

And mine, sister.

Those who were afraid to go and called it wisdom. Those afraid to lose what they had, calling it caution and me a moon-dreaming fool. The world does not change. Look on your sister, Dorelei.

The torches burned low, the shadow of the hide-covered chair dancing on the wall. The seated figure was dim but majestic, her black hair deep shadow about the strong face.

Be most fair, great sister.

/ am of Tir-Nan-Og. I am young forever.

We would find it, Mabh. Show us the mole on our back beyond the tallfolk world.

The gray eyes looked through Dorelei to her soul, calmly merciless, as if to pin that quivering essence and hurl it through the spirit-hole on the singing wind.

For the few gems who dare, there is always a place. My foot trod the wet earth at the very edge of the ice before Lugh melted it into river and sea. With this flint knife, my magic cut the sea between the lands. Have you not sung of it?

Many times. My mother to me, and I to my own wealth.

THE LAST RAINBOW

403

What magic have you made?

I put the good of fhain before all else, tried new ways, and found the truth and folly in them. I have bora wealth, and here are the marks on my belly as yours. I have found the Fool of the World who wears my own face in my mirror, laughed at her, tamed her, and forgiven her. This I have done, my sister, and more beside. Lugh gave tallfolk a magic so strong we dared not name it but gave it a ward-name, Blackbar. For tens of seasons, no magic could stand against it.

It seemed the small figure bent forward slightly in curiosity.

What is this Blackbar that Prydn must hide from it?

Dorelei rose from her knees to stand straight before the ancient throne. Be called iron. I spoke its name aloud and defeated it. As Mabh led fhain where none dared go before, I found a new path. I tamed the iron into a good servant of many uses.