‘Why are we stopping?’ Emmy asked.
‘We’ve been pushing the horse a bit. I’ll walk alongside to give him a rest.’ He looked around at the sun-baked fields. ‘Skimpy,’ he observed.
‘What is?’
‘This year’s crop. It looks to me as if it’s hardly going to be worth the trouble to harvest it.’
‘It’s the drought, pet. It doesn’t rain much any more.’
‘We should be getting close to the coastline, Em. It always rains along the coast.’
‘We’re a long way from where the coast is now, pet. We talked about that back in the House, remember? The ice locks up more of the world’s water every year. That causes the drought and lowers the sea-level.’
‘Are we going to be able to repair that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Melt the ice so that things go back to the way they’re supposed to be.’
‘Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?’
‘When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.’
‘What gave you the absurd idea that it’s broken?’
‘It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.’
‘Now which one of us is thinking the way Daeva thinks?’
‘Drying up the oceans and turning the world into a desert doesn’t make things better, Em.’
‘Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.’
‘The sea-coast shouldn’t move around,’ he declared stubbornly.
‘You can tell it to stop, if you’d like. It might listen to you, but I wouldn’t make any large wagers on it, if I were you.’ She looked around. ‘We should reach the place we’re looking for sometime tomorrow.’
‘Have we been looking for someplace special?’
‘Sort of special. It’s the place where you’re going to start working for your living.’
‘What an unnatural thing to suggest.’
It’ll be good for you, love – fresh air, exercise, wholesome food –’
‘I think I’d sooner take poison.’
They set up a rudimentary camp in a scraggly thicket some distance back from the road that evening and started out again shortly after dawn.
‘There it is,’ Emmy said after they’d ridden for a couple of hours.
‘There what is?’
‘The place where you do some honest work, pet.’
‘I wish you’d stop rubbing my nose in that.’ He looked across what appeared to be a long-abandoned field at a kind of knoll, sparsely covered with stunted, tired-looking grass, ‘Is that it?’ he asked.
‘That’s the place.’
‘How can you tell? It’s just a hill. We’ve passed dozens of others just like it.’
‘Yes, we have. This one isn’t an ordinary hill, though. It’s the ruins of an old house that’s been covered with dirt.’
‘Who buried it like that?’
‘The wind. The ground’s very dry now, so the wind picks up dirt and carries it along until it comes to something that blocks it. That’s where it drops the dirt.’
‘Is that the way all hills get built?’
‘Not all of them, no.’
Althalus squinted at the rounded hillock. ‘I think I’m going to need some tools. I’ll dig if you insist, Em, but I’m not going to do it with my bare hands.’
‘We’ll take care of it. I’ll tell you the word to use.’
‘I still think it’d be easier just to rob somebody.’
‘There’s more gold in that hill than you’re likely to find in a dozen of the houses we’ve passed. You say that you’ll need gold to buy Eliar and the Knife from Andine. All right, there’s the gold. Go dig it up.’
‘How do you know there’s gold there?’
‘I just do. There’s more gold in those ruins than you’ve ever seen before. Fetch, boy, fetch.’
‘That’s starting to make me a little tired, Em.’
‘If you’d do as you’re told the first time, I wouldn’t have to keep telling you over and over again. You’re going to do what I tell you to do eventually anyway, so why not just do it immediately instead of arguing with me?’
‘Yes, dear,’ he gave up.
‘Good boy,’ she said approvingly. ‘Good boy.’
She gave him instructions on how to manufacture a shovel with a single word and then directed him to a spot about fifty paces up the south side of the slope. As he led his horse up the hill, he saw some very ancient limestone building blocks half buried in the soil. They’d obviously been sawed square when the house had been erected, but wind and weather had rounded them to the point that they were almost indistinguishable from native stone. ‘How long ago was the house abandoned?’ he asked.
‘About three thousand years ago. The man who built it started out in life as a plowman. Then he went up into Arum before anybody else went up there. He wasn’t really looking for gold, but he found some.’
‘Probably because he got there first. Why did he go to Arum if he didn’t know there was gold there, though?’
‘There’d been a slight misunderstanding about the ownership of a certain pig. His neighbors were a little excited about it, so he decided to go up into the mountains for a while to give them time to calm down. I’m sure you understand. This is the place, pet. Get down off the horse and start digging.’
