Yet none beyond the flickering spill of their torches, Smoke wraiths silhouetted against the brightness, and the wall of pited rock in front of them. Malgon thrust his torch to the left, exploring.

360 "Dost turn here."

The wind-whisper slid up a note in its mourning.

Malgon's torch revealed two heavy upright stones sup- porting another lintel, a doorway into darkness that threw back furtive gleams as it caught the light. Malgon made to move through the entrance, but Dorelei stayed him.

"Thy gern will lead."

Dorelei moved between the stones and held her torch high. Padrec and Malgon, then the others clustered about her. They were in a chamber the size of a small crannog.

Just before them the floor was raised. Strewn in profusion over it were the objects that dully caught the light.

Rainbow-gift was real, and they had found it.

After a stunned moment, Dorelei whispered, "Be of Rome, Padrec?"

Of Rome and everywhere else, from what he could distinguish of the plethora. Roman work, Grecian, native British. Delicate Egyptian miniatures in Fine gold, chain silver spilling like tears from Cretan jars painted with staring eyes that were troubling in their alien strength.

Open chests spilling the tarnished silver, greenish bronze and dull gold coins about them over the packed earthen floor. Green and white jade and ivory cut into figures of impossible intricacy. Emeralds and rubies, uncut or set in elaborate filigreed pendants. Trading sticks of gold, easily two gradii in length. Obsidian statuary of an outlandish but energetic art that glowed queerly in the light. And more.

"Was a great borrowing," Malgon breathed. The rest of the thought he kept to himself. Bredei and Artcois should have shared this triumph, finest of borrowers that they were, and Cruaddan, to whom all horses cried their yearning for freedom.

They stared at Rainbow-gift, trying to stretch imagi- nation around the reality while the wind sang softly through the passage behind them.

Padrec set one foot on the raised floor. "I've got to see-"

Dorelei held him back. "Stay. Be more. There."

The three torches were thrust forward as far as possi- ble. throwing feeble light to the far rock wall. There was a more definite shape in the murk. Bruidda began to whine 361.

again. Bones in a pile were no more worry than those her mother cracked for soup; joined together was a different and terrifying thing.

"Ai, hush," Guenloie soothed her. "Nae fear. Be only a gern who did love wealth like thee."

They spoke no more as they moved forward to the skeleton. The wind keened yet higher in the passageway, and Dorelei heard the voice in it.

Gem-y-fhain . ..

There was an aura about the bones that compelled respectful silence. One did not approach her so much as come into her presence. Whoever she had been among Reindeer fhain, she was venerated as the later ones were -not, for all their honors. The tiny figure sat upright on a backed chair of heavy ashwood, white and brittle with age, the thick timbers not sawn but rough-hewn and covered with the remains of a large single hide foreign to fhain, something like a hairy cow. Arranged about the chair and forming an arch over it were the huge antlers of a bog elk.

A few lingered in the wild interior of Ireland, but their racks were nowhere near this size, Padrec knew. The head that bore them must have reared seven feet or more above ground- in touching contrast to her cerements, the child-feet dangled from the chair, not even touching the floor. The fragile skeleton only added to the mystery for Padrec. He glanced at Dorelei rapt in her own thoughts, listening to the wind. Here we are, he thought, ]ust as we stand, the wealthiest family in Britain since the Caesars. And these bones have more of a tale to tell than any jewel I see.

From a sampling of the coins, he knew his theory was correct: much of it was from the last undebased minting decades before his birth, when hard money was still com- mon. The rest, the art and jewelry, from any time after his own ancestors went from thinking of themselves as Romans in Britain to Britons with Roman names.

The gem's bones were not so easily read, but he yearned to decipher them. She had been interred in noth- ing more than a kilt of some sort, from the few shreds not gone to dust around her loins. The gut waist-thong lay loose around the pelvic bones, dangling a fragment of hide sheath. On the covered seat where it dropped eons

362.

Parke Godwn

ago lay a small flint knife. The haft was painted in ocher with Rainbow sign.

Unlike the other gems, she wore no metal at all. The thong about her throat, shriveled and dry, was strung with seashells, painted flints, polished bits of jet, and the elon- gated tusks of some predator Padrec couldn't begin to conceive. Nothing about this gem was of a past he could fit to a known world. She must have died long before the iron came or the need for a word like Blackbar, long before the Alecotti came with their bronze and stone molds.

What mark she left on the land was cut with no more than courage and flint. She might have been the first to walk on Cnoch-nan-ainneal, skirted marshes that were now dry land, hunting the beast whose teeth hung about her neck.

animals only vaguely remembered in stones that were themselves sinking into the past.

The temptation to name her was irresistible. Padrec's modern mind laughed at the presumption.

Then Dorelei moved, turned to him. "Dost hear?"

"What?"

"Dost hear?"

"The wind, no more."

"Nae. Under the wind."

Dorelei looked at the skeletal gem on the throne, her head canted queerly in that listening attitude. Then quickly:

"Out, Padrec. Malgon, all of you, out. See to the wealth."

"What is't, wife?"

She turned on him. It was a command. "Thee dost nae hear? Go!"

"Not and leave thee here."

"Take him, Malgon."

"Nae," Padrec refused.

He might as well argue with the bones. "Have opened a door long shut, husband. Do wonder, then, who comes to greet us5 Go."

She snatched his torch away as Malgon pulled him toward the chamber entrance after the women. Padrec's last glimpse of Dorelei; erect before the bones of the old gem, two torches held high.

The rising wind shrieked through the passageway now as they moved along it behind Malgon. To hurry them on, Padrec scooped up Crulegh and Morgana Mary 563.

plunder each arm. They stumbled along expecting every ^moment to see the entrance and daylight, but the only ^ illumination was the single torch in Malgon's grip. The ''* fight flooded over the stacked bones, winked lewdly from > hollow eye sockets, gave a likeness of movement to the ^gerns, formidable in death as they were in life. Then .^.Malgon cried out in fear, a sound Padrec never heard fi from him in war. They were at the entrance, moving into '