Out here on the edge of the world lay Barrows-land, wide and empty, with only the conical hills above the flood and the wide waters beyond, and the flight of the white birds above. Jhirun knew each major isle, each stone’s-throw expanse of undrowned earth, knew them by the names of kings and heroes forgotten outside the lore of Barrows-folk, who claimed the kings for ancestors and could still sing the old words of the chants in an accent no marshlander could comprehend. Some few of these hills were hollow at their crest, caps of stone, earth-covered, that had long ago yielded up their treasure to the plundering of Jhirun’s ancestors. Other mounds still defied efforts to discover the cists buried there, and so protected their dead against the living. And some seemed to be true hills, that had no hollow heart of man-made chambers, with king-treasures and weapons. Such as did give up treasure sustained the life of Barrows-hold, providing gold that Barrows-folk remade into rings and sold anew to marshlanders, who in turn bought grain of Shiuan and sold it at Junai. Barrows-folk had no fear of the angry ghosts, their own ancestors, and hammered off the ancient symbols and melted down the gold, purifying it
And besides the grain the gold bought, they kept goats and hunted, and thus secured a small source of food independent of that trade. Daily Jhirun and her cousins cut grass and loaded it on skiffs or on the back of the black marsh pony that they used in the inner hills. By such means they stored up against the days of Hnoth, and fed their livestock, and had surplus of cheeses and domestic meat that the marshlanders valued as much as the gold.
The little skiff reached a stretch of faster-moving water, that place where the current of the Aj reached into the bordering islets, and Jhirun maneuvered into the shallows, holding that margin with care. Afar off she could see the edge of the world, where the Aj met the devouring sea, and horizon and sky merged in gray haze. Hereabouts, a great rolling expanse above the flood, was the hill of Anla’s Crown.
She did not mean to go near that place, with its ring of Standing Stones. None ever approached that hill save at Midyear’s Day, when the priests came—her grandfather for Barrows-hold, and aged Haz for the folk of Aren. Once even Shiua priests had come to it, down the long road from Ohtij-in: it was that important, one of the two true Wells. But none had come since the sea wall broke. The rites were now only the concern of Hiua, but they were by no means neglected. And even on that day the priests remained fearful and ventured no closer than a stone’s cast, Haz of Aren and her grandfather approaching separately because of their differences. In the old days, Barrow-kings had given men to the Wells there, but that custom had lapsed when the Barrow-kings fell. The sacrifices had not enlivened the Wells nor healed the Moon. The Standing Stones stood stark and empty against the sky, some crazily tilted; and that vast hill that none dared approach save on the appointed day remained a place of power and tainted beauty, no refuge for men or halflings. Each priest spoke a prayer and retreated. It was not a place to be alone; it was such that the senses prickled with unease even when one was coming with many kinsfolk, and the two priests and the chanting—a stillness that underlay the singing and made every noise of man seem a mere echo. Here was the thing the Barrow-kings had sought to master, the center of all the eeriness of the Barrows, and if anything would remain after the waters had risen and covered all Hiuaj, it would be this hill and those strange stones.
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.