And what for the horizon? One sharp line where sea met sky, curving about him in a circle to keep the magic

in. He peered ahead, imagining. The sea rolled away, changing color imperceptibly as it receded toward that knife-edge.

No, not a sharp edge now, but blunted somehow. Low, colorless, and vague, but something was there between sea and sky.

He'd been staring for time without end; he shut his eyes against the hard sunlight to rest them for the space of ten breaths, then shaded his brow and looked again.

There—a smudgy line like his own first, unsure thoughts of a picture before he scratched it out. He stared a long time as the smudge thickened, became a reality between sea and sky.

So it was that Malgon was the first of Prydn to see the mole on his back. Lugh's redeemed promise, which later and duller men called Virginia with no sense of the miracle impaled forever on Malgon's forward-thrusting arm—

"TIR-NAN-OGr

What? What did a say high in the ropes? Slow as a dreamer, Dorelei looked up to Malgon, then followed the motion of his rigid arm. Then she was running forward to the prow, calling to the others. Fhain pressed close around Dorelei to watch Tir-Nan-Og rise up out of the west, the dream broken free of sleep into day. Guenloie scampered for the rigging to kiss her sharp-eyed husband and share it with him, while Neniane hugged her sister, crying a little, and Cru held his son high to see, hardly believing it himself.

"Ai, my bairn, now may thee sing of thy mother and father. Be the Land of the Young. Will never grow old now." Nor would I be here without Padrec, he confessed in his heart. He put in me a wolfs rage, cursed me, made me hate him enough to walk. I will tell my wealth of Raven someday.

Dorelei's prayer was as secret and personal as she held onto Cru. Sweet Padrec, dear love. What we have done, have dared between us, I do not yet dare imagine. "Milyod!" She spun about, racing down the deck past

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460 Parke Godwin

the sailors stunned with the fabulous as she, and halted before the master, a small study in triumph. "Make thy ark swim faster!"

Milius would do that. He could believe anything now, even Atlantis, that barnacled old Greek folly. God alone knew what a man could find in such a place. The thing took time just to imagine. They were the first. They could go home rich.

"Riggers up!" he bellowed. "Crowd her, crowd her!"

The smudge on the horizon became a long, low sand-spit with a narrow inlet where the sea had beaten through. Milius put into the shallow channel to keep the spit between his battered ship and the tide. Once through into calm water with sandy bottom, there was a large landmass dead ahead and a thickly wooded island off to starboard.

"There," Dorelei pointed to it. For her, the island would be a wise beginning. There was much here as ordinary as home; still, like Mabh, she preferred water between herself and strangers, real or spirit.

First over the side was Malgon. He splashed only a few yards in the shallows before his feet touched bottom. "Be warm! Jump the ponies, then the sheep."

The ponies were unloaded by a direct if dangerous process in keeping with Salmon fhain. Cru strung them in a fine with a long leader and jumped, swimming to join Malgon. Between the men pulling and the women lashing from behind, the ponies went over the side like their masters, to survive or not.

They neighed in protest, balked and wallowed about, but eventually followed the men up onto the white sand beach. Then the starved, rib-showing sheep, and at last the women and children in the ship's boat, Neniane and Guenloie singing to the wealth, Dorelei with the treasure bag, one eye on a new world and the other on the un-trusted rowers.

Milius watched from the deck, half his mind agog at

miracle, the rest on the treasure bag as the boat scraped bottom and swung about. Women and children scrambled out, Crulegh splashing at Morgana Mary to make her squeal. So they gradually came together on the white strip of beach: two men, three women, the children, scraggly sheep and ponies—all miserable in Milius' grudged admiration, but tough as cured gut.

Suddenly his boatmen jerked their heads toward the edge of the woods and hastily pushed the boat out of the shallows, pulling hard for the ship to make fast and scramble up the ladder. Miracle had turned to terror.

"Jesu, there's more like them in there."

Malgon stood beside Cm, the bow strung and ready, looking at the men who had materialized out of the wood very silently. His mouth twisted with a grimace of disgust to hide the fear. "Would thee nae know it? Tall-folk."

But were they? Under their Pict-paint, the men's skins were coppery as Prydn, and their long hair, worn in fantastic conceits, quite as glossy black. Their scanty dress was not that different, nor were the men much bigger. See? Some even with feathers as Padrec wore.

"Be Prydn." Dorelei swept up Crulegh, hesitated, then set him down to manage for himself. She raised her arm high in greeting to the wary strangers.

"Dorelei," she called, pointing to herself. "Gern-y-fhain."

There were no women in the tense group of warriors watching them, nor did the men respond to Dorelei. Among their kind, women did not speak first. They waited, still as the newcomers. Only when the small man spoke did one of them move.

"Cruaddan." Cm tapped his chest. "Cruaddan."

The most elaborately feathered and painted among the dark strangers stalked toward them, stiff-legged as Rof circling another strange hound. Dorelei started forward to meet him, but the painted man walked by her with barely a glance.

"Dorelei," Cm advised gently, "this day let first husband do't." He felt Mother's soft breast under his feet and Lugh overhead, praying to both as he moved to meet the man, trying not to limp too noticeably. They stopped a pace apart, the garish leader peering at Cru with pride and suspicion. He touched his decorated chest. "Ma-soit."

"Cru-a-ddan."

To Dorelei, the Ma-so-it man looked terribly stern, very like Vaco trying to brazen it out when he wasn't that sure of himself. So even in Tir-Nan-Og, some things didn't change. Neither would she.

"Would best learn to smile at us," she advised the stranger, giving him her brightest. "Be nae going back."

True enough. Milius never saw them again. For that matter, neither Milius nor his ship were ever seen again in any known port of call. The mystery and the wealth behind the white sand beach were left undisturbed for a thousand years, to be discovered again by men who wrote of it in English before they disappeared themselves in another mystery never solved to anyone's satisfaction. A very strange island.

From a letter to the Virginia Company, London, on the vanishment of the Roanoke Colony, September 1592—

... We met many savages with skins of a hue like to copper and of a goodly stature. However, on the north of the island and on the main land, there are others like unto children but for their broad and powerful shoulders. These were not so quick to trade or, in truth, even to parlay with us. They were not as friendly as the Roanokes, that being a pity, for they are bedight in such goldwork as Raleigh and Smith did write of, the which they regard as sacred and will not trade. They live in peace with the villages about them who, nonetheless, can

report little of them. They are here, there, and silently gone, most commonly with our own valuables, particularly iron. They are accomplished thieves.

Thus far I digress only to return the surer to my argument, that the vanished company most certainly met them and knew their name which falleth on the ear as CRUATHAN and is writ in English as CROAT AN. . . .

AUTHORS AFTERWORD: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

The name Prydn for Dorelei's people is my own derivation from Pre tanic or Prettanic, the earliest designation for the British Isles. Personal names—Dorelei, Neniane, Guenloie, Cruaddan, etc.—are taken directly or in slightly altered form from the cornerstone compilation of monographs, The Problem of the Picts y edited by F.T. Wainwright. I used the term Faerie for easy identification, although it is a much later term. Surely these people had their own name, pride, and concept of creation.

Before men put a seed in the ground and stayed to harvest it, they were nomadic hunters, then herders. The moving herd became a way of life. Nomads even today live by their own sense of time and in their own relationship to nature, unwilling to quicken their step as history moves ever faster. Some of them could change, others could not. If they seemed backward, remember that ' 'progress" is always measured in terms of the winners.

Thousands of years before the first word of Celtic was heard in Britain, the Mesolithic hunters were inching north after the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age. Some went east across the land bridge from Siberia to North America, others north and west across Europe, finally to Britain. We have labeled them proto-Celts or

Iberians, small, dark people whose physical type still exists in the northern and western fringes of the British Isles. In the extreme north, there was at least one historical people, the Atecotti, who spoke a language with no Celtic root at all. There are fragments carved on stone in readable Greco-Roman letters that do not translate into any known Indo-European tongue.

Since Picti meant only "the painted ones" north of Hadrian's Wall, the term is about as accurate as calling an oriental a "gook." Undoubtedly some of the Pictish language and ancestry was Gaelic/Brythonic. Some must have been considerably older, from a time far before ca. 1500 BC when the name "Celt" began to have specific meaning. I've imagined the Prydn as one of these dawn-folk like the Atecotti, still nomad herders in a land putting names and fences to itself and about to become Scotland, people already an anachronism in Patricius' day. Their ancient language, like Basque or Lapp, would contain much the rest of the world had forgotten. Their gods, pushed into the remote hills with them, would become the demons of the stronger people, haunting the night about their walls.