"Oh? When? Afore morning, before lambs drop or be child-wealth? Must fhain just sit and wait? Mother will not pass, Padrec. Did live with the ice and will live for tens of seasons yet."

"The ungodly are so sure of that."

"Be thee man, Padrec?"

"Oh, not that again."

"Nae, be thee man?" Dorelei came to him and put her hands up on his shoulders. The moonlight washed the expression out of her face; she was all light and dark, whiteness framed in the shadow of her hair, shadow where the light broke on the high bridge of her nose. "Well thee speaks of children, being one."

"Now, tha's enough, young woman!"

"Child." She searched the truth of him out of her own shadows. "Have heard of men who will do anything to run from women. Be thee so? Then will leave thee to tallfolk."

"Fine!" he howled. "Fine. Leave, then. You think I want to spend my life with a damned pack of . . ."

He was vaguely conscious of leaning against a stone for support, his own voice coming from a long distance, common sense from even farther. My God, what's happening to me? An I really this drunk, this indulgent? Careful . ..

careful. Enough sm for one night.

With drunken, exaggerated scruple. Padrec levered himself erect, breathing deeply to clear his head. "P'raps I've had a little too much. Forgive me."

Dorelei's tension loosened in her throaty, sighing laugh.

"Oh, thee's wicked, Padrec. Of alt men or women, thee's first in the world to drink too deep." Her laughter turned

112 merry and soft as she moved closer, pressing her small body against him. "A drink, a love, these be sometimes joy. And how dost spend thy joy but barking at Mother tike foolish Rof."

Tumbling toward sleep, flooded with pity for lost Eden, for all men and mostly himself, Padrec slid down the stone, weeping for all of it.

Dorelei's hair brushed his cheek tike the cool of the night itself. He felt her hand stroking his body and yearned toward that bairn with the last clear impulse left him. With great effort he lifted a hand to fumble over her cheek.

"Wish you could understand me."

She moved so that his face was against her bare breasts, the dark nipples chilled erect by the night air, rocking him gently, murmuring to him. He tried to catch what Dorelei whispered; it was terribly important, the meaning and answer to all questions in the universe- With a sob he buried his face in the breast of God, Mary, Mother, Mag- dalene that was all beginning and end.

Dorelei held him.

Next morning, for all his pounding head and queasy stomach, Padrec added an eleventh to his Ten Com- mandments- Finch did not sing in vain. Although Padrec began to lose track of days and then weeks, it was less than two months from the song to snow. Not a heavy fall, turning to icy rain on the cutting wind. Wrapped in Cru's huge cloak, Padrec paced his horse along the edge of the Hocks with Rof, keeping them together. He welcomed the soli- tude of herd watch, day or night. There was a serious problem to wrestle with.

To want Dorelei was one thing. To see her walk bare in the sun, unconscious of her tithe beauty, was one thing and a simple thing. A priest was only a man and had to deal with the promptings of his own flesh tike any other man. He could manage that easily as a moment's apprecia- tion of sensuous Guenloie. To love Dorelei, to yearn after her, to want to join with her, make her pan of him, was quite another thing. To turn aside with lead in his heart when the woman of her reached to Cru, to bury his head in blankets at night not to hear the sound of their loving, 113.

to go again and again through the exhausting evolution ' from longing to exaltation to pain, hale, weariness, and the hope that it would all die, only to see her smile and wave at him and be lost again-all this was another thing and a torture against which Padrec was defenseless.

He was emotionally younger than his years. Like a sick child, he could not imagine a time when he'd not been ill: was sick, would always be sick. Love took him by the scruff of the neck as Rof a marauding fox, shook, and tossed him high. He rose, moved through the shortening autumn days and lay down at night in dull misery, and all the prayers and meditations in Canon couldn't help. In matters like this they never did, but Padrec tried and spent long hours with Drust.

Guenloie's second husband was a joy with the glim- merings of a poet in his soul. "My David," Padrec called him when they stood herd watch together. Above all Padrec's teaching, Drust loved the Psalms, the songs to God of a small people ringed with enemies; the pleas and thanks for help were realities with which Drust could identify. Their music modified to his own world and tongue, they emerged less stately but more direct. The lustier of them Drust loved to hurl ablaze down the wind toward the Taixati village, as if by their sheer force he could batter down their walls like Joshua.

"How long dost forget me, Oh Lord! Nae, how long?

How long wilt hide Thy face from fhain?"

"LJh . . . those are not the words, Drust."

"Be right words. See; How long must hide sorrow in my heart? How long will hide Thy face, how long shall -tatlfolk be ..."

"Exalted."

"Aye, be exalted over me? But why sing of sorrow, Padrec? Be none in me."

"Well, what the Psalm is saying-"

"Nae, hear. Have no sorrow. Flocks healthy and wolves few, Guenloie a good wife. What sorrow?"

"Am I not trying to tell thee, an will be patient?"

"Dost sorrow in thy heart. Padrec?" Drust twisted around to Padrec. They sat very close together, sharing the large cloak. "Do nae smile anymore."

"Nae, do not sorrow," Padrec evaded. "My heart rejoices."

114 Like a leaden weight.

"Could wish better pasture," Drust allowed, "but that's nae much. Will trade with Taixali."

// / stay, I go on feeding wy heart lo the crows. Was any man ever so miserable?

A good many of them at one time or another, Meganius might have told him. Those with some experience in love learned to abridge the drama of suffering, but Padrec was a neophyte and would not delete a pang or a sigh. The colors and the music of creation he muffled under the pall of his anguish.

They won't let me go, and yel I must. If I don't, I simply go on dying with no death in sight. If I go, I've failed, but I'm a weak and sorry priest, no matter.

His impregnable cosmos was crumbling like a sand castle in the rain.

Someone should go to the Taixali with a request to trade for grain and vetch. Dorelei had already asked him to do it. It would gel him away for a day at least.

Doretei's thoughts were as full of him, but her worries were more practical. As they suspected, the graze was not enough even for their hardy sheep. They must trade for additional feed. The best time for trading was high or late summer, when crops were good and the lallfolk mood more generous. With summer festivals, children being born or running about, and young people's thoughts turn- ing to coupling, Prydn magic was welcome and sometimes handsomely rewarded. The stockade gates would be opened, the Blackbar was hidden away, all doors stood wide in a good year. They could use the looms. If there was a scarcity of wool, they might trade some of theirs to tallfolk, and always there was mending work for small Prydn hands-clothing for the women, bronze working for Malgon, who could make and decorate a shield or sword hi for a chief who might fight with a blade of Blackbar but still preferred the artistry of bronze for dis- play. Sometimes at Bel-tein or Samhain, tallfolk and Prydn celebrated at one fire, jumped together over the flames, and drove their flocks between the two sacred fires for good fortune. In good years it could be so.

But now it was late in a bad year for Taixali. They 115.

would want no part of Prydn, who had nothing to trade in any case but wool not ready for shearing. Fhain needed much: feed for the flocks, woven wool, oil, vegetables- everything, while they had not even sunshine or goodwill to help them through tallfolk gates.

"Must be a way."

Dorelei told herself that with the sureness of her kind, who did not live long without wile. She rode or walked alone over the high ridges, worrying at her prob- lem like a hound at a bone. She thought sometimes of Padrec, and oul of the blend of thoughts came her First answer.

Padrec spoke well. If he was impossible in some ways, there was still music to his tongue. He would go ahead of them to tell the village they came in peace to trade.

The second and knottier question: trade what?

"Padrec, would speak with thee."

She chose her time when all fhain were out of the crannog but the two of them, Padrec summoned from feeding and currying the horses. Dorelei sat formally on the gern-stone, Padrec across the fire.

"Do always look sad now, Padrec."