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

"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-

413.

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 Churnel 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 nard line of reality but its spirit, one ray for Lugh, one sweeping curve for all the waves that ever were.

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 roiled 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 be- tween 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.

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Parks Godwin

So it was that Maigon 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 mira- cle impaled forever on Malgon's forward-thrusting arm-

"T1R-NAN-OG!".

What? What did a say high in the ropes? Slow as a dreamer, Doretei looked up to Maigon, then followed the motion of his rigid arm. Then she was running forward to the prow, calling lo 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, curbed me, made me hate him enough lo walk. I wll 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 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 atone 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 sandspit with a narrow inlet where the sea had battered 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 ordi-

415.

nary as home; still, like Mabh, she preferred water be- tween herself and strangers, real or spirit.

First over the side was Maigon. 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 line with a fong leader and Jumped, swimming to join Matgon. 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 untrusied 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 while strip of beach; two men, three women, the children, scraggly sheep and ponies-all miserable in Milius' grudged admi- ration, 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 scram- ble up the ladder. Miracle had turned to terror.

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

Maigon stood beside Cru, 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? Tallfolk."

But were they? Under their Picl-paint, the men's skins were coppery as Prydn, and their long hair, worn in fan- tastic 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 Crutegh, hesitated, then

416 set him down lo 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." Cru tapped his chest. "Cruaddan."

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

"Dorelei," Cru advised gently, "this day let First hus- band 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. "Masoil."

"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 be- hind 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-