"I usually—that is, a priest does not ride a horse but a mule," Padrec attempted.

They frowned at him. Mule? What be mule?

"Like a horse, but—"

They couldn't grasp it. Horse be horse.

"You don't know everything," Padrec burst out, exasperated at them and his crutchbound helplessness. "It's half horse and half ass."

Consternation. A new problem. Which half was ass?

"The mare, damn it. God forgive my careless tongue."

No real help there. Draft animals and hybrids were unknown to fhain. They'd never seen a mule—nor, come to think of it, a stallion with a taste for loving anything but his own kind. Either Padrec made a joke on his friends whose every effort now bent to his aid, or else he came from a land where animals had customs inscrutable as his own.

He got a horse night-borrowed from a distant village. No one seriously thought anyone would come to make trouble. Padrec learned after a time that anything borrowed by Faerie was never sought by the original owners. It simply disappeared into Faene-land.

"And much happier with fhain," Artcois reasoned. "See how dost toss a's fine head."

"But you stole it." And Padrec launched into a cautionary lecture on the sin of theft: "Thou shalt not steal!"

"And shall nae shout, Padrec. Will fright thy horse. Do nae steal," Bredei concluded on a note of injury. Padrec abandoned it. They had no direct word for theft, as they had only the vaguest notion of property. All came from Mother and Lugh, who would deny nothing to first children.

There was little discord in their lives and that quickly settled. Most of it came from Guenloie. Padrec's direct experience with women as sexual beings was limited,

but he knew the sort men regarded as light or easy. Guenloie told him of her Taixali mother and seemed eager to hear of the women of the south and to identify with them. Padrec was sensitive enough to be touched by her open naivete but insufficiently versed in the gender to know her first-blown, half-child sexuality as ingenuous as the rest of her. Guenloie reminded him of one of his father's overbred roses, too flush and ripe. Fhain women were not promiscuous; no woman invited the husband of another, but Padrec was a gift from Raven and unclaimed. Guenloie found ample excuse to putter about close by. That she did so in full view of her husbands was a measure not of cruelty but innocence. Once she leaned across Padrec to fetch a cup and let her bare breast brush his cheek. He recoiled in confusion, indignant.

"Woman, stop that. Cover yourself. Do you not know what I am?

Guenloie flashed her radiant smile. "Holy man."

In a corner of the rath, Drust drew his bronze knife and began to hone it on a piece of sandstone. Beside him, Malgon's eyes narrowed with long experience on Guenloie, whose smile now had a teasing quality.

"Dost nae like women?"

"I am a priest. How can I say it? Be promised not to take women. Go away."

The notion of celibacy was as alien to Guenloie as was flying to a dog. She was openly astonished. "Dost not lie with women?"

"No."

"Then how dost get child-wealth?" Guenloie's laughter tinkled in the rath as she leaned forward to stroke his cheek. Suddenly she was jerked roughly away and Padrec felt Drust's knife at his throat. "Drust, no!"— his heart stopped for an instant, then Drust in his turn was thrust aside and Malgon loomed over the knot of them, restraining his brother husband's arm.

"Fool, Drust, fool! A knows nothing. Go thee down in crannog. Guenloie!" Malgon jerked his head toward

the taut Drust. Not submissively, but in complete understanding and acceptance, Guenloie took Drust's hand and drew him with caresses through the crannog opening in a corner of the rath. Malgon turned on Padrec.

"Come, walk."

"I don't feel like walking."

"Walk."

Malgon pulled Padrec to his feet and steadied him as he set the crutches. He'd made them himself and was proud of their craftsmanship. When Padrec eased himself out of the rath, Malgon led him a little way from it. His gray eyes were almost black with the anger behind them.

"A's love for Guenloie be too full. Like a sickness. Guenloie's be worse. Must be loved by all. Fools." Malgon squatted, scratching with angry knife strokes in the dirt. It was his habitual preoccupation; he sketched constantly with anything at hand. In a few strokes, idly or perhaps to visualize the intensity of his feelings, he drew the head of a wolf with mouth lolled open, laughing or snarling "Will never be happy, Padrec. Never have enough. Guenloie be a good wife, but fool. Leave be."

Exasperating to Padrec that they could not understand even that much of him or his intentions. "I can take no woman. Leave me alone."

This impressed Malgon no more than Guenloie. "A's in crannog with Drust and will love him now. Leave be." And Malgon left Padrec hunched on his crutches, angry and frustrated as cloud shadows chased each other through the sunlight and Guenloie's tremulous cry of delight lifted from the crannog below.

They understood nothing, these people, nothing of value. While there was no papal rule, celibacy was the approved way of a priest. Some married; many bishops did, but the case for celibacy was incontrovertible and encouraged by Rome.

Not that he was entirely virginal. On two occasions in Ireland, female slaves of Miliuc found him attractive. They excited him. He might have pursued lechery fur-

ther at peril of his soul if the energy of his youth had not been diverted by God. One wrestled with and defeated such urges; they were not the worst of his personal devils, not even with Dorelei walking bare in his sight. No, the need to be right, to be vindicated before all men, to be spiritually triumphant, this was his acknowledged weakness. Meganius sensed it in him, as deadly as lust. The priest of Padrec forever forced his head to bow while the frail, intractable sinner piped his feeble pride.

Oh, Meganius, where have you sent me?

What did these Faerie want of him? He couldn't leave. They claimed his spirit as theirs. Sometimes it seemed Dorelei was waiting something from him, but what? He was almost strong enough now to collect his thoughts and contemplate how to bring them the Word. Certainly no more fallow field existed for it than these incestuous children of Cain, and yet where to begin? What handhold, what common starting point that Dorelei or the rest would understand?

His legs were not yet healed. The continued pain fueled the flush of self-righteousness. Perhaps in her ignorant way, Dorelei had a piece of truth. God had sent him to teach her pathetic people, to save them from the spiritual oblivion toward which they drifted. Their ministered needs would hone his powers, as Drust's knife against the stone, toward the day he faced the Irish chiefs. Even Miliuc would see how the holy strength of Patricius dwarfed his own and confounded his shamans. All Ireland would flock to him. His letters, models of modesty, would impress Germanus by their lack of striving to that effect. The word would go from Auxerre to Rome itself: In the west, in Ireland, there is a new province for Christ carved by Bishop Patricius whose footsteps led first through Pictland and those fabulous folk known as Faerie ...

He was tipsy with the notion of fame; yet as he bowed his head to pray with renewed inspiration, Padrec quelled the pride and tried to think only that God and

Christ burned through him in their potency. When he had given thanks, he turned his fierce anger on the distant Venicone village like a sleeping sow in the valley beyond. You thought you could blunt the sword of God? You?

But Meganius may have been right—that once. He wasn't quite ready. He would start here with the first small brick in his edifice to God. Savages they were, but not animals, as most people thought. Even giving Him the wrong name, they had a burning need for God. The dead child, the grain, were only a message to their "parents." Send food for ourselves and our flocks, or this death will take all of us.

Dorelei would come to understand. There was an unexpected sweetness in the prospect. He imagined the bright dawn of comprehension in that exquisite, intelligent face. He saw her standing humbly before him, head bowed (befitting, although she never did) and modestly dressed (for a change) to receive at last the truth from Father Patricius. He dressed her in the robes and role of the Magdalene and was young enough not to wince at the indulgence. He saw Dorelei kneel to him, open to the Power that worked through him, and thought the deep flush of excitement and pleasure was pure holy purpose when it was predictably adulterated with simple love for the woman. Being more practical and much more observant, Dorelei knew it earlier and more surely, but then women usually do.

Yet while he strained to change their lives, those lives began to color his own. He sensed a pattern to their existence beyond mere survival, even a music if he could catch the theme and put it to God's harmony. When Padrec's sight began to enlarge beyond his own purposes to contemplate theirs, it seemed to him that he knew them not at all.

Sometimes with sunset red beyond the rath entrance, they would fall silent as if by a single will, frozen on muscled haunches like Bredei and Artcois waiting for Hawk, their gaze on Gern-y-fhain.

"Did speak to Mother in dream last night," Dorelei announced.

Cru waited a proper space to show his respect. "What dream, Gern-y-fhain?"

"As before. As always. Dream of Rainbow."

If Padrec was perplexed, he was not alone. In the circle of stones, Dorelei pondered the other side of the same quandary without the aid of Padrec's dramatic egotism. She weighed the wisdom of a decision snatched out of the air in a desperate moment. Did she read the sign aright? Was it Lugh perched on the stone at dawn, or just a scavenging bird attracted by carrion?