She knew the tales. The fables and the songs in the old language were the life and livelihood of the Barrows, their golden substance the source of the bread she ate, the fabric of her happier dreams. She knew the names of kings who had been her ancestors, the proud Mija, knew their manners, though she could not read the runes; she knew their very faces from the vase paintings, and loved the beauty of the golden art they had prized. She was sorry when these precious things must be hammered and melted down; she had wept much over seeing it when she was a child, not understanding how such beautiful objects were reckoned unholy and unlucky by marshlanders, and that without that purifying, the gold was useless in trade. The fables were necessary for the house to teach the children, but there was no value for beauty in the existence of the Barrows, only for gold and the value that others set on having it
She moved, and in doing so, nudged an object beside the doorway. It fell and shattered, a pottery sound, loud in that vast emptiness. The nape of her neck prickled, and she was overwhelmingly aware of the silence after the echo, and of the impudence of Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, who had come to steal from a king.
She thrust herself out from the security of the wall and into the main area, where the light streamed down to the bier of the king and gleamed on dusty metal.
She saw the body of the king, his clothes in spidery tatters over his age-dark bones. His skeletal hands were folded on his breast, on mail of rusted rings, and over his face was a mask of gold such as she had heard was the custom of the earliest age. She brushed at the dust that covered it, and saw a fine face, a strong face. The eyes were portrayed shut, the high cheekbones and delicate moulding of the lips more khalin than man. The long-dead artist had graven even the fine lines of the hair of brows and lashes, had made the lips and nostrils so delicate it was as if they might suddenly draw breath. It was a young man’s face, the stern beauty of him to haunt her thereafter, she knew, when she slept beside Fwar. Cruel, cruel, that she had come to rob him, to strip away the mask and reveal the grisly ruin of bun.
At that thought she drew back her hand, and shivered, touching the amulets at her throat; and retreated from him, turning to the other hapless dead that lay along the wall. She plundered them, rummaging fearlessly among their bones for golden trinkets, callously mingling their bones to be sure the ghosts were equally muddled and incapable of vengeance on Midyear’s Eve.
Something skittered among them and frightened her so that she almost dropped her treasure, but it was only a rat, such as sheltered in the isles and fed on
wreckage and drowned animals, and sometimes housed in opened tombs.
Cousin, she saluted him in wry humor, her heart still fluttering from panic. His nose twitched in reciprocal anxiety, and when she moved, he fled. She made haste, filling her skirts with as much as she could carry, then returning to the access and laboriously bringing bit after bit down that narrow tunnel and out into daylight She crawled out after, and loaded the pieces in the skiff, looking all about the while to be sure that she was atone: wealth made her suspect watchers, even where such were impossible. She covered over everything with grass in the skiffs bottom and hurried again to the entrance, pausing to cast a nervous glance at the sky.
Clouds filled the east. She knew well how swiftly they could come with the wind behind them, and she hurried now doubly, feeling the threat of storm, of flood that would cover the entrance of the tomb.
She wriggled through into the dark again, and felt her way along until her eyes reaccustomed themselves to the dark. She sought this time the bones of the horses, wrenching bits of gold from leather that went to powder in her hands. Their bones she did not disturb, for they were only animals, and she was sorry for them, thinking of the Barrows-hold’s pony. If they would haunt anyone, it would be harmless, and she wished them joy of their undersea plains.