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took his turn at serving the evening meal, though as a guest he needn’t have, and I saw him hoist the great fish-cauldron on his shoulder and bear it from the kitchen as though it weighed nothing. I watched him mend a set of beads for one of the sisters one evening at table, prizing and closing the bronze links with powerful clever fingers. And his speech was graceful and witty, making us laugh so, it was as if Christ Himself were there telling jokes.
    This happy time lasted until Beltane Eve. On that afternoon, Lewis and I were sitting out of doors, and white thorn blossoms were dropping on the calfskin from the bush above me, so I kept having to brush them away as I took down Lewis’s account of the Daughter of the King Under the Waves. Suddenly he stopped. A second later the birds, who had been singing delightfully, stopped, too. “Liath is coming,” Lewis announced, raising one eyebrow, “and something’s wrong—”
    When she came into view I saw he was right, for her face was dark with unhappiness. She wasted no time, but came straight to Lewis, and in blunt
Gaelic addressed him: “Pagan man, have you any knowledge of the ways of the sidhe?”
    His mouth hung open a second in surprise. “I have,” he said.
    “Good, for we have need of it. Brother Crimthann has been stolen away from us by the sidhe of Dun Govaun, and must be rescued.”
    If Finn and all his host had suddenly leaped alive from my page, I could not have been more bewildered. Fairy folk? Fairy folk kidnapping one of us? But the sidhe were mere heathen fables, they didn’t exist! And I saw that Lewis was no less amazed, though courteously he asked her to explain.
    It seemed that Brother Crimthann, who was one of the younger members of our community, had been troubled lately with bad dreams. In his dreams, the sidhe came into the cell where he slept, as easily as if they walked through smoke, and bore him away with them to their palace under Dun Govaun. There he suffered torments of fleshly temptation, but by morning woke in his cell again with no sign of the ordeal of his dreams: not even the guilty emission of a young man so tempted. He had sworn that the sidhe were not beautiful, either, but pale and small and silent.
    At this I saw Lewis start forward, like a hound catching a scent. “Now that is a strange thing, truly,” he told the Abbess.
    “Strange, but not so strange as this: Brother Crimthann did not come to prayers this morning, nor later, nor was he to be found in his cell. But Brother Aidan’s hut adjoins his, and Brother Aidan swears that in the third hour of the night the moon shone into his cell, bright enough to flood between the stone chinks; and as you are a pagan and learned in these things I need not tell you that there was no moon last night.” The Abbess looked at him grimly. “Now, this is a pagan matter. The Blessed Patrick gave us prayers against the sidhe , but I never read anywhere that fairy women carried him away from his holy bed. Can you go to them, then, and win our brother back with that fine pagan talk of yours? Bring him alive out of Dun Govaun, and Christ will bless you for it, druid though you are.”
    “I will,” said Lewis, “and gladly, good Mother. Only tell me where to find Dun Govaun, and I’ll go there straight.”
    “Brother Eogan knows,” she told him, and gave me a Look of Order. “Eogan, show him the way.”
“This is really marvelous,” Lewis said as we pushed our way through the heather. “Tell me, Eogan, have you ever noticed this sort of thing going on before? Strange lights in the sky, unusual marking in the fields, cattle inexplicably slaughtered in grotesque ways? Any nocturnal goings-on in your cell?”
    “Certainly not,” I replied stiffly. “I sleep soundly at night, at least since I stopped having to shave my tonsure. I daresay Brother Crimthann will, too, when he’s past thirty and not quite so easily tempted by the flesh.”
    “Cheer up! Baldness looks good on some