"Thee will look up to Gern-y-fhain. And mark."

"Did try to rob us. Did hear thee think to kill us," Dorelei accused. "Dost think a gern who raded with the gods will shrink from thee? Listen, then, and live to make braw tale-speaking for thy wealth. Mark, all of thee tallfolk: there is a land beyond. Have seen it. Be faithful, then, and keep the look of death from thee."

The knife at his throat improved Milius' hearing and did wonders for his common sense. Die now or later? He chose later and resigned himself to it in his meeting with the demoralized crew the next day.

"They'll kill us, and that easily. We can't frighten them." Milius explained as much as he understood of them. "They think they're dead already in a way. Don't laugh, I'm serious. Dead and bound for God knows where, something about being young forever. Mad, but

there it is. I've done what I can, told the bitch the sickness is natural and to eat if they have to stuff it down."

His men ruminated in a growing terror on where they were bound. Absurd to think of an optimist in such a doomed company, but Sejus, rubbing his bandaged arm, conceived one small hope. "Could it be there is something out there?"

Milius gave him a weary smirk. "What do you think?"

The stubby little Manx sailmaker had a more practical question. "How long is it that they'll keep us alive?"

"As long as we hold due west."

"And how long would that be?"

"You ask me?" Milius shrugged, exasperated. "The damned woman says there is no edge. Well, we haven't seen it yet, and we're not dead yet."

Sejus still wouldn't leave the impossible alone. "But if there were something out there—we'd be the first to change all the maps, wouldn't we?"

If the crew was terrified of them now and didn't bother to hide it, fhain was paralyzed with fear and dared not show a jot of it; afraid not only of murder but of this heavy, changing, changeless monster sea that threw them high, over, and down, shuddering the planks, swallowing the prow only to spit up again. An endless world of sea, as Dorelei once dreamed in a safe crannog, with thunder for a voice.

They never slept all at once now. One was always awake close to the children, weapon in hand. They lost count of days since Bel-tein. Sometime after four tens of days, the drinking water turned so bad that the sailors rigged a spinnaker sail to catch the rain. It tasted flat to fhain, but they needed it to wash down the abominable dry ship's bread, the only solid food not turned moldy. When Malgon presented Milius with four large chunks of fresh, bloody meat, the master's stomach turned over at first, thinking them parts of his crew.

"Army horses," Malgon explained with considerable

regret. They were not as tough or sure-footed as Prydn ponies. In the rolling of the ship during a high sea, they'd both broken a leg. The men could slice it thin and cook it. Not the best eating but not the worst, and the sailors were welcome.

"Milyod did nae think to come so far," Cru reasoned to Dorelei as they clung to the rail far forward on the pitching deck. The seas were running higher than ever, though the cold was days gone out of the wind. The horsemeat and the miserable bread kept their bellies too full to be sick, and sweet Milius had to eat it, too.

In the worst storms, sometimes Dorelei's faith deserted her. Not near the edge of the world they were, but at it, plunging through the last fringe of hissing spray, the long fall into limbo only heartbeats away, and only Cru's strong arms to keep her from screaming. Night was worst, and stormy nights beyond any word for horror. No light but dim stars here and there, the whole sky tilting this way and that over them, plunging down to black where it met the sea. They huddled below and prayed for Lugh to rise again. Starless nights when the world was nothing but dark, a pool of black and themselves drowning in it, no light but the small blue points of pale brightness shimmering below the boiling water: pallid light in the eyes of the drowned who failed too short of Tir-Nan-Og.

Then, new terrors. Dorelei and Cru stared, frozen. Not dream-flight now, but real. The monsters had found them. The ship had blundered into their wallowing, spouting midst—great black and white arcs of smooth-curving power. Huge, longer than the frail eggshell craft they clung to.

"Cm!"

Dorelei cried out in fright and wonder. Not a half-bowshot from the ship, one of the great creatures shot straight up from unimaginable depths—up, up, the impossible length of it aimed at Lugh himself, jewel-bright water streaming from its slick hide, writhing to steal one more foot of height from the air before it crashed back

into the sea, rolled under, rolled on. Another leap, then two together. The moments passed; Cm and Dorelei remembered to breathe again. As the creatures veered away, Dorelei saw the majesty in the great rade. They had come to a place of magic. Where in the world of men were such creatures as these?

Is there an end, an edge? Did Mabh lie to me!

No, she told herself and the others. Beyond this nightmare was a white beach and long curraghs full of laughing fisherfolk, anci beyond that the green went on forever into hills much like home. There would be hills. There must be.

Six tens of days, seven. Then the Morning of the Green.

"Salmon, come!"

All along the white-worn decks, the sailors were as intent on the wonder as fhain but none as jubilant.

"Dronnarron," Dorelei said fervently. "Did tell thee."

In the night the waters had calmed and turned from dark gray to green. And the gulls were back, no one knew from where. They'd not been astern for a month, but here were seabirds much like them. The sailors lured a few in with bread and ate them.

"Did tell thee, Milyod!" Dorelei wheeled a victorious arm at the green water. "Dronnarron. Be close."

He only half understood, studying the rapidly changing sky. "Going to squall. Half-reef fore- and mainsails."

The storm came at sunset, driven by a strange warm wind that forced Milius to strike all sail before they foundered. At the tiller himself, he managed to keep them head on into the wind against the demon current. Never such a wind, like heated whips, not a hint of cold in it, and with an odd smell. The storm blew out by morning. When Dorelei climbed heavily on deck after a sleepless night on vigil, she stopped in the hatchway and gasped. The sky framed in the square of the hatch was ablaze with color. For a moment she stared, then, out of

released tension and hopes strained to breaking, Dorelei began to cry.

"Cm..."

She stepped all the way onto the deck that no longer rolled or heaved under her. The sailors were about, some of them, yet blind or indifferent to the marvel.

"CruCruCru!" And she went sprinting forward to the prow, singing in her joy. "CRU!"

"Ah, God," the wizened Manx sailmaker scowled, "and what's the weird sister on to now?"

Whatever, Dorelei danced with it, and the others, too, when they came on deck, herding the children like small, precious monkeys.

"With all of them up," the sailmaker notioned, "couldn't we be into that bag of theirs?"

Milius only barked a dry, pitying laugh for the retarded. "And do what with it, drown? Starve? Look at them up there. You'd think they never saw a stupid rainbow before."

And such a rainbow, closer, brighter than ever bent over the hills of home. The night's storm scrubbed the world clean and left clear blue above the green water of Dronnarron that lapped ever more gently against the salt-white planks. Gulls still screamed about them or hovered on the flower-scented breeze.

"Oh, could weep at it," Guenloie said. "See, Bruidda? Road of the gods to take us home."

Dorelei exulted, swinging on the rigging lines. "Did Mabh nae show't to me? Rainbow and the smell of flowers? All true."

"Yet Rainbow parts from Lugh," Cru observed.

So it did; not much, but a difference in what Padrec called the an-gle. Dorelei weighed the possibilities. Rainbow led them to Mabh. All they had seen, Mabh had showed her before. "Then will follow. Mily od\"

On the afterdeck, Milius saw the small, imperious figure pointing decisively to the southwest.

"Rainbow! Road of the gods."

Christ and saints, what now? "Yes, see them quite often after rain. Haven't you noticed?"

"Follow't!"

Follow a rainbow? Well, why not? What difference now? The edge couldn't be far past this sick, green, north-running current. Nothing was normal here, even his sea-sense was going, the smell of flowers in his nose when the closest blossom was that far behind in Ireland. Mad. He hadn't even bothered with a lookout this past week.

"Put her over," he called to the helm. "Where the rainbow goes down."

With the care of habit, he watched as they fell off onto the new heading. Then the one called Malgon bobbed his head to the hard little witch of a leader and swung up into the shrouds toward the lookout seat on the main spar.

Lugh was high overhead and still no cloud in the sky. Malgon knuckled his eyes that ached from staring into unrelieved bright green and blue, one arm wrapped about the spar, the horizon tilting to the right, level, left, level again. He was used to it now.

He could stare into the monotonous beauty ahead but not keep all his mind on it. Now and then when he rested his eyes, he thought of Padrec. They shared something apart from the rest of fhain, wove a new design into the fabric of Malgon's life. Two tens of Bel-teins this past spring made for him. Not young anymore, and so much seen. Even before Churnet Head, he and Padrec would never have been quite the same again, or the rest of fhain, for that matter. A war and a rade to the end of the world, old ways broken, new ones forged. Malgon saw it as a picture like that he scratched in Meganius' garden: not the hard line of reality but its spirit, one ray for Lugh, one sweeping curve for all the waves that ever were.