"Then I grant you the hill." Vaco sealed the bargain with an expansive gesture. "So long as Faerie keep their place, agreed?"

"Agreed. The Venicone are old and mighty in the land. Get the boy home before his arm festers.'

And that was, happily, the last they ever saw of Vaco.

His presence acknowledged and the Faerie respectful, he allowed them what he would not have labored to take in any case. He and his brother helped the shaken youth away down the hill through the trees.

And Malgon was very pleased Padrec happened by at auch an opportune time.

348 "Luck. Was on the ridge and saw them set out for the wood." Padrec sheathed his sword. "Will be no buck this morning, brother."

Mafgon agreed reluctantly, not with such noisy tallfolk in the wood. Stag would be far away now and running yet.

Malgon might as well wait the evening or try for smaller game. They squatted in the thicket, grinning at each other as the sun rose higher through the trees.

"Must keen tonight, Mal. Did tell them bean sidhe would sing on the Hill of the Fires."

"Be none dead."

"Be nae poison to thy arrows, either. Will nae tell an thee won't."

Malgon sifted the idea. Very tallfolk it was to make profit of a belief, but shrewd in this case. "Will sing Venicones to sleep."

"Tonight and often." Padrec sniffed at the air. "Will be showers. Must watch from circle."

That night the wind whispering about Vaco*s stock- ade was haunted with the dark song of the bean sidhe. No man, for his life, would go near Cnoch-nan-ainneal when the shadows lengthened eastward, and few during the day. Fhain breathed easier.

Sighted from the center of the stones, the sun slid each day closer to the Bel-tein stone. Rain showers were brief and frequent but not always followed by a rainbow, so another variable factor had to be worked into an al- ready fragile hypothesis. The length of time between ces- sation of the rain to the clearing sky and sunlight. To compensate, Padrec estimated the time at optimum: a rain shower with no fading of sunlight, which happened quite often. He marked the morning and evening position of rainbows, no matter how faint or brief- For each observa- tion, he set up a sapling rod notched at the top which, from his center, he sighted on that point where the rain- bow would touch earth.

Forty days to Bel-tein, thirty-five. Thirty. The center of Dorelei's worship place now looked rather complicated.

Padrec's rods became a cage in which he gradually mewed himself up. Each sighting called for an investigation. One of them, whoever could be spared, would saddle Padrec's 349.

horse, the fastest they had, and ride out sometimes for miles to the sighted point. One rider alone could more easily elude Venicone detection. The truce was unbroken, but they would ruffle no leathers meanwhile.

Report was always the same. "Nae barrow," Guenloie said, slipping down from the saddle.

"Did look sharp?"

"Until my eyes pained, Gern-y-fhain. None."

Prydn barrows were not that numerous or easily de- tected. From the first days, the bones of the dead were Stored in temporary houses, split, dismembered, and stacked neatly until the death of a person of note, usually a gern.

When the gern died, the barrow would be put up and communai ceremony done for all the waiting dead, who would then be interred with the great one.

So it was in the first days, Dorelei told Padrec. Many of the oldest barrows were forgotten, all kept secret. Was never good to let tallfolk keep count of their deaths with Prydn so few in the land.

Twenty-five days to Bel-tein. Twenty. Fifteen.

"And . . . midpoint." Padrec drove a notched rod between the two stones and swung back to Dorelei with long strides, flourishing his writing shingle peppered with calculations.

"Fifteen days past, fifteen yet to come- Mind the rod, don't jar it. See."

She dutifully admired the incomprehensible bird tracks, curves, crosses, and odd scribblings. "Most braw. What dost say?"

Padrec was rather pleased with himself. "More than it did. Have marked where Rainbow went down for fifteen days. Nine times: six of the evening, three of the morning.

Beginning to get some sense oi distribution. Proportion."

Dorelei was impressed. Mathe-matic was sorcery to be reckoned with, but . . . proportion?

"Well, percentage."

No light there, either.

"Be simple." Padrec swept his ami over the southern horizon. "Because of where Lugh Sun is now, Rainbow shines south of our hill. Southeast in the evening, south- west in morn. Be nae so close thee can put the point of a pin to it but can make areas to search. So."

350 He carved two short arcs in the dirt with his knife.

two more under them, joined by straight lines into two warped rectangles. "Twixt now and Bel-tein, Rainbow will nae wander that much." Padrec bent over his latest planted rod, squinted through the notch to the southwest. Not an hour before by his sundia! stake, there was a shower so brief the sun didn't even bother to cloud over. The colors bent to earth only for a few minutes, but Padrec was there, like Cruaddan on the track of deer, to mark it ...

yes. So.

He straightened up and pulled Dorelei close, planting light kisses on her mouth and narrow cheeks. "Will Gern-y- fhain ride with me?"

"Where?"

He pointed again to the southwest, delineating two points. "Atwixt there and there."

Dorelei's gaze narrowed like an archer's, fixing one point, then the other, and the ground between, a rumple of sparsely wooded low hills, rarely used for graze or anything else.

"Come."

The approximate area of search was about a mile square, the winter grass turning lush with mild spring rain. Violets peeped from the humus at the foot of young trees, and oak saplings were coming into leaf. Padrec and Dorelei rode as much for the beauty of the afternoon as for any quest, but her awareness of the place was as much instinct as sight. Coming out of the trees onto a little knoll, she pointed to the stone slab lying flat, slowly disappear- ing under moss.

She'd seen it often, year by year watched the faint etchings wear and be covered. Ancient animals, ancient memories of them. The bog elk; a few were left in Ire- land, Padrec said, but long vanished from Britain-

"Be most old," Dordlei murmured over the stone.

"Should nae be forgot."

She scraped at the encroaching moss near the foot of the slab, casually at first, then with more purpose as it became clear that the moss obscured more than she'd thought. Under her knife, old fhain signs appeared-Hawk, Marten, even Salmon, peeked into the granite with a bronze awl by some dim ancestor. The knife scraped over the 351.

surface, the only sound in the silent world around them, even the wind's whisper fallen to nothing.

"Padrec, look."

So worn it was barely readable, already ages old be- fore Mother grew over it. "Reindeer fhain. Long before Bruidda, that's sure."

"What be older than hundreds, husband?"

"Thousands."

Meaningless to Dorelei, but other things were near as yesterday. "Be tale-speaking that Mabh put first rath on the Hill of the Fires and raised the stones."

She gazed thoughtfully at the sign. The young grace of her, the antiquity of her unhistoried people in this land . ..

Padrec felt a sudden, vast pity like a requiem. Egypt, for all its unimaginable ages, was real as Jupiter in enduring stone: temples, tombs, pyramids whose unreadable inscrip- tions could yet say. Here we were. Here we lived, a people.