... 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 com- monly 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 cer- tainly met them and knew their name which falleth on the ear as CRUATHAN and is writ in English as CROATAN....

Author's Afterword:

What's in a Name

The name Prydn for Dorelei's people is my own derivation from /'retanic or Prettanic,

M. from /'manic 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 corner- stone compilation of a monograph. The Problem of the Puts, 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 relation- ship to nature, unwilling to quicken their step as history moves ever faster. Some of them could change, others f could not- If they seemed backward, remember that "prog- i ress" is always measured in terms of the winners.

t 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.

419.

420 Parke Godwn

We have labeled [hem proto-Celts or Iberians, small, dark.

people whose physical type still exisis 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 tet- ters 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 lan- guage 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 hilts with them, would become the demons of the stronger people, haunting the night about their walls.

Forget the names, forget the time. For a moment imagine two pictures without dates.

The Indian warrior sits his pony on a hilltop. watch- ing the white man's wagon train/railroad bite deep into his older truth with a blade of iron. He wonders how the spirits can allow this. He has done the ghost dance to bring back the buffalo and the Green Time That Was, but the buffalo will not return.

Dorelei sits her pony on a hilllop, looking at a tallfotk village with its timber walls and planted fields. Their queer, straight lines are an alien geometry to her. She prays in the ring of stones and wonders why these tallfblk thrive where her own decline.

Where is the essential difference? Both were a people, both wanted to survive on their own terms but failed to keep up with the quickening dance of the world. Both had a concept of existence and man's place in nature before Christianity placed the human soul apart from it. Both were called devils by the people who pushed them out of 421.

the good lands. The Indians were overrun in a time of cameras and the written word. The Faerie/proto-Celts/ Iberians were engulfed in a time of illiteracy and supersti- tion. For this reason atone, Indians are a recorded fact while Faerie retreat into distorted legend.

Take them both without tears. Remember them watch- ing from a very real hill, and that both had a truth quite different from our own, but one that worked tor them for thousands of years before their time ran out. The same has happened to more than one people who considered themselves chosen of their gods, and perhaps it wilt again.

Acknowledgments.

is a

work of fiction and fantasy, but for the framework of

fact to reconstruct the Britain of the years 429-432, I found the following works of the most help to me:

In the Steps of St. Patrick by Brian De Breffny 1982, Thames and Hudson Ltd., New York-

The Battle for Gaul, Julius Caesar, tr. by Anne and Peter Wiseman, David R. Godine, Boston, 1980.

The Problem of the Picts, ed. by F. T. Wainwrignt, Green- wood Press, Westpon, Connecticut, repr. 1970.

The Bible As History, Werner Keller. Newly revised English translation 1980, Hodder &: Stoughton Ltd, G.B. Printed in the U.S. by William Morrow, New York. 1984.

The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert L. Witken, Yale University Press, 1984.

A History of Christianity, Paul Johnson, Atheneum Press, New York, 1970.

423.

424 Parke Godwin The Age of Arthur, John Morris, Scribners, New York, 1973.

There were also the standard works; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records burial of treasure by Roman Britons under the entry for the year 418. with the caveat that datings for that period may not be absolutely accurate.

There was as well The Gospel of St. Luke and Psalms, re-read with total delight in their pure poetry; and, for as much fun as enlightenment, The Encyclopedia of Faeries by Kath- erine Briggs, Pantheon Books, New York, 1976.

Finally, to Professor Aubrey Burl, John Rowley and Roger Martlew of the 1979 Earthwatch eKpedition to Machrie Moor, Arran, Scodand, who taught me, through diree weeks in the field, more of the common-sense nuts and bolts of Scottish prehistory than I could ever have learned from the best reference books. My heartfelt thanks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

IpVith The Last Rainbow, Parke Godwin concludes his llptych on Roman Britain begun with Firelord and Beloved x&. While not a minimalist, Godwin was an early student IF Parker and Lardner and firmly believes in shutting up .^hen it's been said once-an unpopular approach to genre :iWiting, but typical of the boy teachers called "untalented, unmotivated, unwashed . . . disturbed."

Through the tireless scholarship of Marvin Kaye, God- win's early works are now in some readable chronology;

hence The Lady of Finnegan's Hearth and Darker Places, hitherto numbered K.I and K.2 respectively, must now be considered ca. K-14 and K.15. Godwin wrote his first short story at the age of eight, the year he also set fire to the family piano in a fine spirit of adventure. That he coolly denied guilt in the face of evidence also displayed what Hemingway called "grace under pressure." Some- where among the earliest Kaye-numbers must be placed Godwin's immature appearances in Stag and Mole (1952-54) and the contributions to short-lived but now legendary periodicals like Popular Embalming and The American Pederast.

Thanks to Kaye's unpublished memoir The Giant Rat of Chelsea, much light can now be shed on the lost or "Missis- sippi" period of Godwin's life, particularly his rumored contribution to the privately printed Donner Pass Cookbook (referring, of course, to the attributed recipe for filet d'enfant Chretien in which internal evidence is rather convincing, particularly in the use of basil, ginger, and pressed garlic mice). Despite these unresolved issues, Godwin is best known to gourmets for his ringing denunciation of catsup.

His award-winning novella, The Fire When ft Comes has recently been optioned for a major motion picture. In 1984 Godwin turned to writing contemporary comedy.

feeling that a script as bad as this world could only be dignified by playing it for laughs.