"I prayed for guidance. I asked where and how and when I was to be used if my calling is real. It's not enough to teach or preach, not enough to wear an anointed sword. One must use it, strike with it. And yet..."

Meganius allowed the priest his own time and tether. 4 'Yes?"

On his dining couch Patricius made a vague gesture, cleaning his fingers in a bowl of rose water. "I asked myself: is it only my arrogance, this mission to Ireland? I feel like—like a mosaic, each tile a truth adding to a whole if I could arrange them right. Your grace has put doubts in my mind, and now ..."

"Not into the mind of the priest, only the man," Meganius cautioned gently. ' 'Do you know clearly why you took orders, Father Patricius? Did you feel drawn back to Ireland then?"

Patricius took up his wine and swallowed a little, contemplating the goblet. Not the priest but the man answered the question. "There was my vision. I called it that. It was early in the morning after a night of poor sleep. I can't honestly say I wasn't dreaming."

So he was not without the ability to question his own motives, Meganius thought "There's so much dissent in the Church now, one forgets what it all rests on. Put aside the war for now. I am interested now only in the heart of Magon Sochet, a Brigante like myself. What

does he want to do for God? What does he want from God? I don't think you'd be honestly content pattering after luminaries like Jerome. You're not much of a Roman and hardly a Greek for subtlety."

"Lord no!" Patricius laughed heartily at the idea, and his expression lost its tight self-containment. "I'm a plain man. I like plain people."

"And open skies. And animals."

"Yes. Just that I can't think of myself as anything but a priest, not since I was seventeen."

"I see."

"Do you? Much of it's for myself, I admit that. The Church tells me the why of all things. I want to know why. Sometimes I think it's myself I'm trying to save," Patricius finished unhappily.

As I did at your brutal age; Meganius smiled inwardly.

"I want to find the Grace I preach, else I'm no more than a scribe babbling his master's word. I want to find where it is, dig for it, hold it in my hand, define it. Hold it up and say, 'Here! Here is ultimate truth!' '

Meganius sighed over his wine. The men who would be drunk on God: a heady wine, and Patricius already an addict. The inconsistency troubled the bishop. If Patricius were truly another Jerome—narrow, abrasive, forever unresolved himself between the Scylla of flesh and Charybdis of faith—nothing would help now or later. But there was a disconcerting humanity to this young man under the carapace of Germanus' laid-on rigidity, a healthy clay Meganius felt wary of molding hastily in the wrong shape. For all that, purpose was seeding in his mind.

"There is a mission to which I will sponsor you. Not Ireland, not yet, but north across the Wall among the Picts. There have been priests there; the Venicones have some knowledge of Christ. If you can establish a mission among them, then we might speak of Ireland."

The young man's headlong passion for godhead concerned Meganius enough to address a large portion of

his private prayer to the problem that night.

"Did I do wisely in sending him north? Was it guidance, or am I simply an old man impatient or fearful of younger strength? Stagnant water jealous of the fresh spring? My God, my God, this Patricius needs Your special care. He would go over a cliff for You. Have I shoved him to the edge? He will never be the zealot he wants to be."

The Pictish mission was not Patricius' dream but a league toward it. He had the character and perseverance to accept it with a glimmer of humility if not full enthusiasm. When he set out for Corstopitum during the Kalends of July, Meganius' personal relief was not unalloyed with scruple. He'd purged his own headache by giving it to the Picts.

After six years among the Irish, the Venicones were not a cultural shock to Patricius, although he found them startling enough. Some of them were tattooed over much of their body from the neck down and lived naked to display it, their faces dyed or tattooed to the point of nightmare. The warriors stiffened their hair into bleached quills with birdlime. They lived in colorful sloth, each household of brothers with as many communal wives as they could maintain and fearing very little that went in daylight. With sundown, however, their hearts quailed. They barred the doors with iron and lived under siege of the evil dark until the sun rose again.

Curiosity opened gates to Patricius. Shamans of the Christ were still a novelty to the southern Picts, and he was welcome to preach to them if he didn't mind doing it over dinner or in the fields or while the village elder was pronouncing a sentence of death on someone for any one of a dozen sanguinary reasons. Patricius found it hard at first translating the profundities of Latin into their tongue. It was not that different from his native Cumbric but far less altered since their ancestors brought it from Gaul. The Venicones applauded his message of

salvation. They were less impressed with his notions of virtue, especially at the riotous feast of Lughnassadh, when Patricius preached of Paul the Apostle and the basic tenets of Christian marriage. He stood close to the door of the smoky longhouse and called on the village elder, Vaco, to relinquish four of his five wives, tragically ignorant of what he demanded.

Picts might fear Faerie as reincarnated spirits of the dead, but they shared one age-old custom with them, from king to village head: descent through the female line, brothers sharing wives in common. To Patricius the custom was as legally vague as it was sinful. He knew and cared nothing for the reasons behind it. Each wife brought into a family linked it specifically within a social pyramid. Women were carefully chosen and not lightly discarded. This Briton's teaching was not only radical but dangerous. He exhorted men to celibacy and women to virginity with marriage as a poor alternative, as if a new generation would grow of itself like grass on the heath.

"I do not like this Christ-man," Vaco counseled with his two brothers, glancing at the knot of wives equally puzzled by what they understood of the sermon. "He does not teach but that he demands."

The younger brother snorted. "He thinks he is better than us because he speaks and dresses like a Roman."

"And we know them," Vaco commented sourly. "It is in my mind to send him away."

"He is not of importance. There is not one mark of honor on his body. Kill him," the second brother urged. "Quietly. Say his god took him in sleep."

That sat poorly with the elder, who did not earn his position for impulsiveness. "This god of his, this Jesu Christ, is powerful not only in Britain but across all the world to the city of the Romans themselves."

"Is not Lugh then as strong?" the younger argued. "Is it that we have ever had a better harvest or so many wives with child? We do well keeping the way we know."

" Aye, kill him," the second brother urged again, wiping greasy hands on his brilliantly tattooed chest.

"That is a thought. We might do that." Elder Vaco gave his attention to the mead pot to allow himself a moment's reflection. The priest's teachings were subversive and downright arrogant. Nevertheless, they were close enough to trade with Roman camp towns on the Wall or raid when it suited them, and the idea of profit was to lose as litt!e as possible when you didn't have to. Nothing would be gained by killing the priest or flouting their own gods.

"There is that way which is in the middle," he told his brothers. "We'll cripple him and leave him on the hill. If Faerie or wolves kill him, his god was not strong enough. If he lives and returns, we will know that even Lugh is not stronger. Then... we will see. Meanwhile, we lose no favor with Lugh."

The brothers mulled this and nodded soberly. Their brother chief was a wise man who ever held first the good of his people.

"Crack his bones and take him to the hill of the fires."

It hardly need be said that Picts were a shrewd people, older than Britons in the land and serpentine in bargaining even with the gods. By virtue of this prudence, Pa-tricius was allowed his life and two broken legs—but, for the time, no converts.

He thought he was going to die when they dragged him to the stone and threw him on it, sure of it when the elder approached with the hammer. They were going to dash his brains out. He closed his eyes against the weak mortal fear and tried to whisper as much of a contrition as he could before the blow fell.

He shrieked when the hammer first struck his ankle, fainted at the second. When he could think again, he was jolting on a rough litter through the darkness flanked by torches. His head was lower than his feet; they were

toiling him uphill. The pain in his ankles throbbed steadily.

Now the men stopped in the darkness. Patricius saw the new fear in their faces limned by the torchlight. He was too far gone in pain and shock to be frightened himself. He tried to pray again, but his numbed mind couldn't frame the words. Looming dim beyond the torches, he saw the ring of great stones and caught the sibilant drift of the men's timorous hesitation.

44 Well, come on! We have to put him in the circle."

"Nae, I will not go in there, not tonight"

"Is it coward that you are?"

"That I am not, but Faerie's abroad this night."

"Fool! It is a special need that this is, and a moment's work. Come on."

"The stones moved. I saw them move."

4 'Come on!"

For all his determination to follow orders, the leader did not tarry within the ring of haunted stones. His men huddled close together, glancing fearfully over their shoulders every few moments while two of them hauled Patricius off the litter and dumped him on the ground. He cried out when his ankles hit the earth. Then the light dimmed and the torches receded with the hurrying bearers, jittering with their haste.