Wall of Shiuan

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.