Jhirun skirted widely away from that place, working out of the current, among other isles. Marks of the Old Ones as well as the Barrow-kings were frequent here, scattered stones upstanding in the water and on the crests of hills. Here was her favorite place when she worked alone, here on the margin of Anla’s Crown, far, far beyond the limit that any marshlander would dare to come save on Midyear’s Day; and out of the convenient limits that her kinsmen cared to work. She enjoyed the silence, the solitude, apart from the brawling chaos of Barrows-hold. Here was nothing but herself and the whisper of reeds, the splash of water, and the lazy song of insects in the morning sun.
The hills glided past, closing in again, and she tended now toward the righthand bank of the winding channel, to the hill called Jiran, after which she was named. It had a Standing Stone at its crest, like others just downstream at water’s edge, and Jiran, like the other hills that clustered here, was green with grass fed by the sweet water of the Aj. She stepped out as the skiff came to ground, her bare feet quick and sure on the damp landing. She seized the mooring rope and hauled the skiff well up on the bank so that no capricious play of current could take it. Then she set to work.
The insect-song stopped for a time when she began to swing her sickle, then began again as the place accepted her presence. Whenever she had done sufficient for a sheaf, she gathered the grasses and bound them with a twist of their own stalks, leaving neat rows behind her. She worked higher and higher on the hill in a wheel-pattern of many spokes, converging at the Standing Stone.
From time to time she stopped and straightened her back and stretched in pain from the work, although she was young and well-accustomed to it. At such times she scanned the whole horizon, with an eye more to the haze gathering in the east than to the earth. From the hilltop, as she neared the end of her work, she could see all the way to Anla’s Crown and make out the ring of stones atop it, all hazy with the distance and the moisture in the air, but she did not like to look toward the south, where the world stopped. When she looked north, narrowing her eyes in the hope—as sometimes happened on the clearest of days—of imagining a mountain in the distant land of Shiuan, all she could see was gray-blue, and a dark smudge of trees against the horizon along the Aj, and that was the marsh.
She came here often. She had worked alone for four years—since her sister Cil had wed—and she cherished the freedom. For now she had her beauty, still was straight and slim and lithe of muscle; she knew that years and a life such as Cil’s would change that. She tempted the gods, venturing to the edge of Anla’s hill; she flaunted her choice of solitude even under the eye of heaven. She had been the youngest—Cil was second-born, and Socha had been eldest—three sisters. Cil was now Ger’s wife and always heavy with child, and began to have that leaden-eyed look that her aunts had. Their mother Ewon had died of birth-fever after Jhirun, and their father had drowned himself, so the men said—and therefore the aunts had reared them, added duty, to bow these grim women down with further self-pity. The three sisters had been close, conspirators against their cousins and against the female tyranny of their aunts. Socha had been the leader, conniving at pranks and ventures constantly. But Cil had changed with marriage, and grew old at twenty-two; only Socha remained, in Jhirun’s memory, unchanged and beautiful. Socha had been swept away that Hnoth when the great sea wall broke; and Jhirun’s last memory of her was of Socha setting out that last morning, standing in that frail, shallow skiff, and the sunlight streaming about her. Jhirun had dreamed ill dreams the night before—Hnoth always gave her nightmares—and she had told her dreams to Socha and wept, in the dark. But Socha had laughed them away, as she laughed at all troubles, and set out the next morning, thus close to Hnoth.
Still happier Socha than Cil, Jhirun thought, when she reckoned Cil’s life, and how few her own months of freedom might be. There was no husband left for her in Barrows-hold but her cousins, and the one that wanted her was Fwar, brother of Cil’s man Ger and of the same stamp. Fwar was becoming anxious; and so Jhirun was the more insistent on working apart from her cousins, all of them, and never where Fwar might find her alone. Sometimes in bitter fancy she thought of running off into the deep marsh, imagining Fwar’s outrage at being robbed of his bride, Ela’s fey daughter, the only unwed woman in Barrows-hold. But she had seen the marshlanders’ women, that came behind their men to Junai, women as grim and miserable as her aunts, as Cil; and there were Chadrih folk among them, that she feared. Most pleasant imagining of all, and most hopeless, she thought of the great north isle, of Shiuan, where the gold went, where halfling lords and their favored servants lived in wealth and splendor while the world drowned.
She thought of Fwar while she attacked the grass with the sickle, putting the strength of hate into her arm, and wished that she had the same courage against him; but she did not, knowing that there was nothing else. She was doomed to discontent. She was different, as all Ewon’s fair children had been, as Ewon herself had been. The aunts said that there was some manner of taint in Ewon’s blood: it came out most strongly in her, making her fey and wild. Ewon had dreamed dreams; so did she. Her grandfather Keln, priest of Barrows-hold, had given her sicha wood and seeds of azael to add to the amulets she wore about her neck, besides the stone Barrow-king’s cross, which were said to be effective against witchery; but it did not stop the dreams. Halfling-taint, her aunt Jinel insisted, against which no amulets had power, being as they only availed for human-kind. It was told how Ewon’s mother had met a halfling lord or worse upon the Road one Midyear’s Eve, when the Road was still open and the world was wider. But Ela’s line was of priests; and grandfather Keln had consoled Jhirun once by whispering that her father as a youth had dreamed wild dreams, assuring her that the curse faded with age.
She wished that this would be so. Some dreams she dreamed waking; that of Shiuan was one, in which she sat in a grand hall, among halflings, claimed by her halfling kindred, and in which Fwar had perished miserably. Those were wish-dreams, remote and far different from the sweat-drenched dreams she suffered of doomed Chadrih and of Socha, drowned faces beneath the waters—Hnoth-dreams that came when the moons moved close and sky and sea and earth heaved in convulsions. The tides seemed to move in her blood as they did in the elements, making her sullen and prone to wild tempers as Hnoth drew near. During the nights of Hnoth’s height, she feared even to sleep by night, with all the moons aloft, and she put azael sprigs under her pillow, lying sleepless so long as she could.
Her cousins, like all the house, feared her speaking of such things, saying that they were ill-wishes as much as they were bad dreams. Only Fwar, who respected nothing, least of all things to which his own vision did not extend, and liked to make mock of what others feared, desired her for a wife. Others had proposed more immediate and less permanent things, but generally she was left alone. She was unlucky.
And this was another matter that held her to Barrows-hold, the dread that the marshlanders, who had taken in the Chadrih folk, might refuse her and leave her outlawed from every refuge, to die in the marsh. One day she might become resolved enough to risk it, but that day was not on her yet She was free and solitary, and it was, save when she had had both Socha and Cil, the best time of her life, when she could roam the isles at will. She was not, whatever the rumors of her gossiping aunts, born of a halfling lord, nor of the little men of Aren, born neither to dine off gold nor to trade in it—but Barrows-born, to dig for it. The sea might have all Hiuaj in her lifetime, drowning the Barrow-hills and all within them; but that was distant and unthreatening on so warm a day.
Perhaps, she thought, with an inward laugh, she was only slightly and sometimes mad, just as mad as living on world’s-edge ought to make one. Perhaps when she dreamed her terrible dreams, she was sane; and on such days as this when she felt at peace, then she was truly mad, like the others. The conceit pleased her.
Her hands kept to their work, swinging the sickle and binding the grasses neatly. She was aware of nothing about her but the song of the insects. At early afternoon she carried all her load down to the bank and rested, there on the slope near the water; and she ate her meal, watching the eddies of the water swirling past the opposing hill. It was a place she knew well.
And the while she gazed she realized that a new and curious shadow lay on that other bank, that indeed there was a gaping wound in that hill, opened just beneath that outcrop of rock. Suddenly she swallowed down a great mouthful of her meal and left everything lying—jars, sickle, sheaves of grass—and gathered up the rope and boat-pole.
Cist. A burial chamber, torn open by last night’s rain. She found her hands sweating with excitement as she pushed the boat out and poled it across the narrow channel.
The other hill was perfectly conical, showing scars about its top as most such suspicious hills did thereabouts, wounds made by earlier Barrow-folk probing to see whether burial had been made there. Those searchers had found nothing, else they would have plundered it and left it gaping open to the sky.
But the waters, searching near the base, had done what men had failed to do and found what men never had: treasure, gold, the purchase of luxuries here at world’s end.
The skiff scraped bottom among the reeds and Jhirun waded ashore up to the knees in water until she could step up on the clay bank. She heaved the skiff onto solid ground, there near the shelf that overshadowed the breach. She trembled with excitement seeing how that apparent rock outcrop was squared on the edge, proving it no work of nature; the rain had exposed it for the first time to light, for she had been here hardly a hand of days ago and had not seen it. She flung herself down by the opening and peered in.
There was a cold chill of depth about that darkness—no cist at all, but one of the great tombs, the rich ones. Jhirun swallowed hard against the tightness in her throat, wiped her hands on her skirt and worked her shoulders in, turning so that she could fit the narrow opening. For a moment she despaired, reckoning such a find too much for her alone, sure that she must go back and fetch her cousins; and those thieving cousins would leave her only the refuse—if it were still intact when she brought them back. She remembered the haze across the east, and the likelihood of rain.