The artifact had been fashioned from a piece of smooth brown chert. Flakes had been expertly chipped away from one side to yield a sharp cutting edge, while the other side was blunt and rounded to provide a grip. The knife fit easily, comfortably, into my palm. I knew at once that the last time it knew the touch of a human hand had been thousands of years ago.
It was not the first stone artifact I had examined that had been retrieved by accident from long burial beneath the soil of time. Many believed that such things were created by goblins or trolls, but that was not so. The makers of the stone knives and obsidian arrowheads and copper axes were not goblins. They were people. People who had lived a long time ago, before cities were raised, before horses were tamed, and before the secrets of working gold and iron were stolen from the dwarves. I know, for I have used the things they left behind to see through their ancient eyes.
“We were afraid to keep plowing,” the boy went on, growing bolder now. “Scaldirk claimed it was an ill omen. My father said to come fetch you, that you could say what the bones were, and appease the spirits in them.”
I knew nothing of the craft of appeasing spirits, but I did not tell the boy that. I clutched the stone knife tightly in my hand. “Take me to where this was found.”
The boy nodded and turned to pad swiftly down the narrow footpath. I hurried after him. My cave was situated at the foot of the ridge that bounded the north side of the valley. In the center lay the rushing river near which most of the people dwelled, in stone houses with sod roofs. To the south, the valley narrowed, rising steeply in a defile that plunged deeper into the blue mountains. It was a pass-a way into the mountains- though one that was never tread, as far as I knew.
The defile climbed past countless massive shoulders of rock, making its way toward white-crowned peaks that hovered like sharp clouds in the far distance. Though all must be dizzyingly high, one summit soared above the others: a great horned peak that seemed to rake the sky. “Dragonmount” the valefolk called it, after the horned summit. Or, at least, so I always supposed.
I followed the boy across open heath and patches of scree. At last we crested a low rise, and I saw the knot of valefolk. They stood in the center of a fallow field, clad in grimy garb of brown and gray, gazing at the ground. Gathering my robe up around my ankles, I approached across the muddy ground. White shapes protruded from the dark, freshly turned earth. I knelt in the broken soil, my breath fogging in the moist air. With growing excitement, I examined what the plow had uncovered. Carefully I brushed away bits of dirt, my wonder growing at the ancient objects before me.
It was a grave.
Looking carefully, I found I could see a faint line where the color of the soil changed, marking the edge of the burial pit that had been dug and filled in again so long ago. The skeleton was largely intact, save the legs, which had been disturbed by the plow. By the shape of the hip bones, the lack of brow ridges on the skull, and the smallness of the bony protuberance behind the hole of the ear, I knew this was a woman.
However, the caps on the ends of her arm bones looked only barely fused to the shafts, and her wisdom teeth, though erupted, were barely worn down. It was the skeleton of a young woman then, perhaps twenty when she died, no more. They had curled her body, knees to chin, like a child in the womb, returning her to the embrace of the world that had given her birth. Rusty red stained the soil, remnants of the ocher with which they had colored her skin.
By the grave goods, I knew that she had been a princess of some sort. Beads of jade and carved bone in the soil around her neck bespoke a necklace, though the strand that had bound it together had rotted away centuries ago. Copper rings still encircled her fingers, and an ivory cup lay next to her, along with a comb fashioned from antler. Such riches would have accompanied only an important woman into the afterlife. I imagined she had been a chief’s daughter. Though more careful examination of the artifacts would be required before I could be more certain, my guess was that she had been laid to rest over two thousand years ago by a forgotten people who had dwelled in this valley long before the valefolk.