Lugh went looking for Oatey after the not so honorable Martel Jones had left.  The party was over, but there were still folk cleaning and straightening.  Polite directions and sly smiles followed him as he wandered from server to cook to reveler to chambermaid and at last through passages, dark and narrow, to a low doorway, curtained, and beyond it, a dark chamber.

“Oatey?” He called softly, not wishing to disturb folk behind other curtains in the nearby rooms.  He glanced about for another helpful source of direction, but finding none he pulled aside the curtain and called into the room, “Oatey? Might I speak to you?” There was no answer from the small chamber and no light to reveal it.

A fine fix, he had little enough confidence that he could find his way back out and none that he could find the girl, thought Lugh.  He hovered in the doorway wondering if he should feel around in the dark for a place to sit or a light or just go.  This is my chance to be rid of her and her giant killing.  Martel Jones does have a point about Oatey Moss and Peace being mutually exclusive.

“Its considered rude to hover in doorways, Lugh,” said Oatey Moss. 

He might have jumped, but Oatey didn’t seem to notice.  She slipped past him and reached up inside the doorway for a candle and a chemical match which she struck against stone and brought to the taper.  “Welcome to my home, such as it is.  I went looking for you and heard from a few that the blond youth was asking for me.”  She slipped inside, drawing aside the curtain so he could pass into the cramped space beyond.

The place was small, there was room for a bed and not much else.  The tight quarters were made tighter by stacks and stacks of books that covered nearly everything but the bed and a narrow path that led to it.  “It’s cluttered,” said Oatey, suddenly embarrassed, “here, sit on the bed.”  She slipped by him on the path and found a book stack to perch on.

Lugh sat on the bed and looked at the girl, she was flustered, here in her home, when before leaders, warriors, and giants she was supremely confident.  Lugh wondered how both of those women could be Oatey or indeed which was the real one.  “I didn’t know where you were.  I really don’t know anyone here either, except you.”

She looked up at him in dismay, “Oh my, I didn’t think about that.” 

Before Lugh could recover from the shock of her clear innocent embarrassment Oatey Moss, giant killer, burst into tears. 

She was always doing that, surprising him.

Smoke was pleasantly surprised by the fare.  The monk’s table was bountiful it seemed the brotherhood was much more generous with its guests than it was with its brethren.  Gospels ate too, but Smoke noted his restraint despite having learned that he had been fasting while they were on the rock.  These men thought nothing of self-sacrifice, indeed that seemed to be the point of it all.

There were some 100  or so brothers, guest brothers, and novices here at the monastery.  The weather was most likely milder, but they lived in the same beehive huts, two or three together, and spent their lives in prayer and industrious work that supplied their physical needs with enough left for guests and to procure other needful things, at least in their minds, not luxuries, or niceties, but books and scrolls and writing implements, inks, and dyes.

Smoke listened as Gospels explained how his order had its foundations over the great mountains to the East even though he himself had never seen those mountains or even met a person who had.  These monks knew things far beyond their experience.  A man, even a learned one, likely knew far less, because these monks had access to written records, books, documents they had a memory to be envied.

Smoke had wondered about the Gaels who supposedly lived on the other side of the great Eastern mountain range.  He had lived in the south, had traded with Nubia, travelled through the lands of the Great Khan, dealt with factors of the blood thirsty Corn Kings, hired guides from the tribes, and from these he had heard whispers of the Gael, of the Celts on their islands, even of stranger, more exotic places, but only whispers.  Smoke wanted to know about these places.