Chains of Gold

by Nancy Springer

  “Come here!” I demanded again. “We have to go in where this passage is.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said rudely. “I am not moving unless it is to go on.”

  I turned to glare at him. “But there is food or something in there!” I shouted. I felt sure there was, for Lonn was nudging at me.

  “What food could be in that hole?” he retorted. “I am not yet so desperate that I wish to feed on old corpses.”

  That did not even make me shudder. I, who had balked at entering the cenotaph some few months before.

  “The air will be too foul to breathe,” Arlen added.

  “How can you know for sure?” I stormed. “Come here, or I will go in myself.”

  “Go ahead.” He stayed where he was.

  Brute, I fumed inwardly. With my pregnant belly, I had come to expect help and protection, forgetting that protection takes away freedom. And in truth, the swelling was yet modest. Thin as I had become, I was able to slip behind the stone and twist and stoop into the entry.

  “Don’t shout for me if you get stuck.” said Arlen sourly.

  So he was not going to help me or try to stop me. The callous lout. Thoroughly on my mettle, I started to crawl in, then stopped within a heartbeat, motionless with fear. Two serpents lay coiled there just within the entry, coiled in symmetry one facing the other, spiral coiled, like the carving on the rock outside. On their backs shone the chain markings of the serpents most sacred to the goddess. They were clay-colored, and their eyes were of golden hue. They raised their heads and looked at me, stared with a sort of cold wisdom as I met their stare mutely. Then they turned their heads and, again in symmetry, they slid away from me, rustling back into the rock somewhere.

  I do not know why I did not turn back at once, except that Arlen’s churlishness goaded me, urging me onward against all reason. And there was Lonn prodding me as well. And, against all wary instinct, I think I sensed truth: that those serpents, the guardians, had given way before me and would not harm me. So I crawled onward, into darkness, that dense under-earth darkness that will not admit to seeing at all. Fearing at any moment to put a hand down on a snake or a bone or something worse but not, somehow, expecting it. Short of breath. The air was, indeed and truly, very bad. Onward, down, dark. It was not a long passage, not as long as the cenotaph’s entryway, but more strait, therefore more fearsome. I wriggled my way through, feeling squeezed and sick, all anger against Arlen lost, hoping only to see him again.…

  My hand came down on cloth.

  No breath to spend on outcry. Numbly I sent my fingers forward, seeking further. Bones, dry bones—I could bear that—and something of rotted wood, a chest. And a spill of cold that slipped and slithered and rustled under my fingers like a nest of serpents, but it was hard. Metal. No time to think more of it, my lungs were dying—

  I took a handful of it at random, turned, and started back the way I had come.

  Very nearly I did not make it. A heavy smothered feeling took hold of me, as if I were drowning in earth, and even the daylight at the end of the passage looked dark to me, and I blinked at it twice before I could comprehend Arlen’s frightened face looking down at me, his hand reaching toward me. I moved my own left hand the few needed inches to meet it, and he hauled me out like a great fish. I lay gasping.

  “I never—I never thought you really would,” he was stammering. “I didn’t understand—Rae, I could have lost you. I am such a brute, I couldn’t be bothered—”

  “Balderdash,” I interrupted, still fighting for breath. “I am an idiot. What is this stuff?”

  I lifted my clenched hand, and we both stared; trailing down from it there shone bright chains of gold.

  I folded my legs to make a basket of my skirt, and over it I slowly opened my hand. The things shimmered down like sunlight.

  There was a clasp of white gold jeweled with sapphires to keep the wearer from evil influence. There was a brooch of red gold, round, like a little shield or a sun, studded in a flame pattern with beads of gold; and there was a smaller brooch, a triskelion. There were three small loose gems, of what sort we were not sure, for there are many jewels of reddish purple hue, and there were two beads all in bright colors of enamel laid between threads of gold. And there were the chains, some thicker than others, bold chains, red gold and white and pure aureate gold, chains fit for a king or the most esteemed warrior among kings, he whose lord gifts him with golden chains, the gifts of loyalty.

  “Treasure,” Arlen breathed. We both sat as if stunned. Then he looked at me sheepishly.

  “Well,” he said in a tone that struggled for sobriety, “I am convinced, Rae. I will go down and see if there is more.” He got up.

  “There is. But Arl, wait.…” I needed the help of my hands to sit up without his support. “The snakes.…”

  “What?” He stared at me.

  “The guardian serpents. They let me in, but how are we to know they will do the same for you?”

  He stared. Then he came to me swiftly, knelt beside me and took me into a tight embrace, his faced pressed against my neck.

  “Rae,” he whispered, “you are the treasure, the true treasure.”

  ELEVEN

  We got it all out within the next few hours, the gold, or as much of it as we could find by groping about in the utter blackness of that tomb. Arlen was forced back on his first attempt, not by the serpents but by the foul air. But as he learned the way he traversed the passage more swiftly, and on a third trial he was able to bring out a heavy load, dragging it in a sack made of his shirt. Then I went down again and found a little more, feeling for the chill hardness of metal and jewel on the chill hardness of stone. Then he made one last raid and came up with less than I, and by unspoken consent we considered the matter done, the unknown king sufficiently plundered, and we sat and stared at our booty spread out around us. No crown—perhaps the king had been no king but a great warrior, proud in his many chains, for they were great chains, heavy and intricately linked. Also there were amulets of gold and silver, moon crescents of silver and sun disks of gold, and there were tiny animals made of gold—a seated dog, a reclining deer, a perched and hooded falcon—and there was a small golden boat with sail and oars, and a miniature of the sun chariot, all of gold, with leaping horses and great wheeling sun riding behind them. There were surpent rings and serpentine torcs biting their tails, jewels for eyes, and there were loose jewels beyond numbering.… We sat amidst it all, and suddenly Arlen lay back dizzily and laughed up at the sky, laughter with a hard edge, yell after yell of laughter.

  “Rae, we are a pair of poor sillies,” he whooped. “What is the use of all this to us? We cannot eat it.”

  We were, indeed, starving where we sat. I felt a sudden chill of fear, of doubt that we would be able to get up, to journey onward, and I saw Arlen looking back the way we had come, where there lay only miles of mountain and woodland and wilderness, where all the gold in the world would not buy so much as a bowl of gruel. He was still laughing as he looked, and the tone of his laughter frightened me all the more.

  “Stop it!” I shouted at him, and I struggled to my feet and tugged at him to make him get up also. His laughter stopped and his face grew grim.

  “Let the stuff lie,” he said

  “No. Lonn wants us to have it.” We would have been churlish indeed to refuse such a glorious gift.

  “Why? So that we may lie upon it? So that it may adorn us in an unmarked grave?”

  I was too weary to be angry with him. Nor could I too sharply disagree with his thought that we might die. But something had grown stubborn in me, and I began to gather up treasure by the fistful and put it in Bucca’s saddlebags. And after a moment Arlen did likewise.

  “Lonn be cursed,” he said, scraping up jewels as if they were pebbles. Then, our footsteps painfully slow, we started onward again, up the mountainside terraces toward the place where we thought we had discerned a pass to whatever lay on the other side. More wilderness, most likely.
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  We reached it just at sunset. Great peaks towered on either side of us, but between them lay a patch of soil, level and gentle. It grew larger as we plodded ahead, soft grass underfoot and copses of slender trees scattered about us, and the trees were full of the whistlings of birds as the dusk drew on. So benumbed were we by hunger, and exhausted, that it took us some moments to realize that where there were birds, in the spring of the year, there were likely to be eggs. But when it struck us we gave each other one glance and left Bucca where he stood. He dropped his head to the grass and ate, and we ate also, sucking the eggs raw from the shells; there were plenty within easy reach on all sides. Frantic and greedy, we wandered farther and farther in search of them the more of them we found.

  “Look!” I called to Arlen. “Lights.”

  Mouths egg-smeared and agape, we stared. We had come to the far side of the Mountains of the Mysteries. Their flanks went down in grassland and moorland as much as in rock, and clinging perhaps halfway down was a village with the lamplight yellow in its windows, glowing in the quiet dusk. Velvet purple dusk. I thought I had never seen anything so lovely, yellow lamplight and the yellow of gorse in bloom catching the last glimmers of the day. And there were other lights, more distant and so seemingly smaller, other villages farther down the mountainside, and farther yet, a dim and bulky something that might have been a castle.

  Arlen drew a bit of gold chain from his pocket and looked at it dazedly. It also glinted yellow in the last sunlight of the day.

  “Rae,” he blurted, “do you realize we will be able to trade for what we need?”

  “I dare say.” I faced him, and he has since told me that I looked intolerably smug. “Lonn has not led us so badly after all.”

  “I suppose not,” he said, too full of gladness to resent or dispute it.

  There was food in my stomach; already I could feel some small strength coming of it, and there would be more food on the morrow. I lay down where I was, lay down on the soft grass and went to sleep within the moment, never feeling the chill of the mountain air in the night. When I awoke to a misty springtime morning, Arlen lay beside me, and he had placed the blankets over us.

  There was a spring trickling out of the rock to the northern side of our haven. We drank. There were chainmail and treasure-chest mushrooms, good food both, and we ate them. Arlen ate them impatiently. “Now,” he said, “for more proper viands.” He started to saddle Bucca and looked at me curiously when I did not get up to help.

  “You go,” I told him. “Trade for what we need or what you can get, and come back here with it. I will stay here with Lonn.”

  “Oh.” He glanced at the blur hovering near my left hand, as if seeing it for the first time in weeks. We had both grown so accustomed to Lonn’s hazy presence that we had forgotten it, accepting it as we accepted the presence of the air itself. But others would not accept it so readily.

  “There is no need for you to stay behind,” Arlen said. “The gold will speak more loudly than our voiceless specter.”

  “Perhaps. But there will have to be much showing of gold, and they will envy us for it afterward, and hate us for frightening them, and some of them may plot to steal it from us. And I want no one’s hatred and no one’s envy.” I shook my head vaguely, feeling that I had somehow ventured beyond a single day’s plans. “And I am tired, Arl,” I said.

  “I wonder,” he murmered, looking about him.

  He wanted to stay too, I knew it then. Stay in the small plot caught between the mountain peaks, where wild blackberries grew and the birds sang. The mountain walls made it seem like the strongest of havens, shielding us from all harm, like a very private paradise, our own special place where no one had ever come before—though of course we knew better—and pursuit might be close behind.…

  “But we cannot run forever,” I said, as much to myself as to him.

  “The way is narrow, where we came up,” he said. “I could perhaps block it with stones …”

  “It is spring. We could plant a garden.”

  “Well,” he said offhandedly, as if it were but an idle thought, “I might as well leave these things with you, then.” And he removed the saddlebags full of treasure from Bucca’s back, gave them to me, and took instead a single gold chain, one of the smaller ones, and pried it apart into links. Each link was as good as a gold coin, and he might yet have to pound some of them into halves or quarters. He put several links in his pocket and gave the rest of the chain back to me. He kissed me. Then he rode away down the gentler slopes of the northern mountainside.

  I spent the day drinking at the spring and eating what I could find and sleeping beside our gold.

  When Arlen came back at sunset he brought freshly baked bread. I could smell it as he came up the mountainside. He carried a spade across the saddle in front of him, and in his left arm he cradled a lamb, a fleecy white lamb, quite young. He rode up to me and handed the spade down to me and himself got down without letting go of the lamb, holding it tenderly.

  “Are we to eat that?” I asked, staring in a predatory way. I must have been parlous hungry. Arlen glanced at me in mild shock and amusement, then put the lamb down on the grass; it lay flat and still, as if it had forgotten the use of its legs. His hands freed, he began to draw viands out of the pockets of his tunic and out of the slack above his belt. There were rounds of bread and hunks of cheese and, so help me, meat pies still warm from the oven. I grabbed one greedily.

  “Those are what took me so long,” he explained. “You eat. They have been feeding me all day.”

  “They were willing enough to take you in? No taint?”

  “No taint. They seemed somewhat in awe of me, though. They could not believe I had come over the mountain.” He shrugged, looking bemused. “I was hard put to make them accept payment for their hospitality. They are friendly folk.”

  He was bent over the lamb, handling it gently.

  “This little one is sickly. And I think, from my memory of Briony’s herbs, I might know the one that could help it. If I can find it hereabouts.…”

  He wandered off, searching in the fading light, and I ate my fill, and there was more left for the morrow.

  Arlen healed the lamb. I have never fully understood his craft or his gift, only that it takes time and thought and much caring. But within a few days, when we were in need of food again, it was gamboling about on its long woolly legs in the manner of lambs that are well, and when he rode down to the village again he took it with him to return to its owner. When he came back, he bore not only food but seeds for the garden plot we were digging, and a chicken and a clutch of eggs.

  “Is the chicken ailing?” I asked.

  “No, the chicken is well.” He smiled, looking faintly shamed, as if he had somehow been bested. “It is for us to keep, and if the eggs hatch there will be more. The man set high value on that lamb.”

  I will not tell you the whole story of that spring and summer, for it would be only a tale of the ordinary things, hard work in sunlight and good food afterward and days passing one after the other as we made our house. We built it out of stones gathered from the mountain slopes, near the spring and flush against the rock of the northernmost peak for the less labor and for protection against the winter storms. It was only a cottage of a single small room, with a dressed stone for a hearth and a roof of slate, but to us it was home, our first true home, no prison but a haven such as Stanehold and Sacred Isle had never been. Under a sort of half cave or overhang we built a shelter for Bucca, faithful Bucca, who was learning to draw a plow. The chickens flocked everywhere; daily I hunted the eggs. And as the summer drew on there was a heifer. Someday there would be milk for us and for the babe and milk to spare, to set out for the logans. For the time, I left them bread and sometimes an egg, and the gifts were always gone in the morning.

  Arlen had given some gold for the heifer, but mostly it was a gift of gratitude from a man whose cart ox he had healed. His fame as a healer of animals was spreading. Every time
he went to the village for supplies there was word of another homesteader with need of him, and he would travel to see what he could do. He even went as far as the castle to tend to the lord’s lame charger—the lord, he told me, was fierce, but folks in these parts knew nothing of either Rahv or the Sacred Isle, and we were glad of it.

  I stayed in our mountaintop haven, my belly swelling with child, and never went down into the village at all. Arlen’s new friends knew of me, for he made no secret of it that he had a wife, but I would not go down among them, lest my death dog go with me and frighten them and set them against us. Nor did any of them ever come near me, for the village folk would not come up the mountain. It was a forbidden place, they said, the home of otherfolk and the oracular dead, and they feared to set foot there. I think they whispered among themselves about Arlen, that he was divinely sent to them, a demigod, even. His speech was somewhat different from theirs, he told me, and they seemed awkward with him at times, half in awe. But no one could long be frightened of Arlen, good heart that he was.

  In time, as more folk felt need of him more often, he took to going to the village every day in case some messenger awaited him. I would wave him on his way. And through the summer I gathered beans from our garden and made bread from the grain we had bought and gathered blackberries and felt the movement and the growing of the child in my belly.

  “Have you noticed,” Arlen said to me slowly one evening near autumn, “how the rats and snakes never take our chicks from us, as they do to others? And the cutworms have not been in our corn? And our spring continues to flow even though the season has been dry?”