Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker Page A

little wooden box. They simply stared at her, too polite or exhausted to ask why she hadn’t traded something so valuable as a box of self-starting matches for a potato, or a lump of bread.
    â€œDo you really got some in there? Do they work?”
    â€œSure!”
    The mad young woman took one out, scraped it along the cave floor, and held the light up, grinning. Once-lustrous red hair matteddown in loose clumps under her shawl, her stomach swollen—with hunger or a child, Ruth couldn’t tell.
    â€œWho knows? Who knows what gold they buried with their kings?”
    â€œOur kings.”
    â€œAll right, then. Anyt’ing we find, we split it all ways even.”
    â€œAgreed!”
    She looked around at the twenty or so half-starved men and women and thought that if they found a gold crown and scepter, the first gombeen man they met could have it from them for a bucket of soup.
    Dividing the spoils of their wishes—but that was all they had, after all.
    She followed them down into the tomb, walking in a crouch under the vast stone slabs that stretched into the hill. The madwoman casually lighting one match from another. The air getting closer, damper, the sound of rushing water somewhere ahead in the darkness—
    â€œJesus God, what was that?”
    An old man’s voice pricked with hope as he stumbled over something in the pitch-black darkness, imagining it to be a king in his armor. Another match flared up, hovering over the ground.
    â€œJay-sus!”
    They hovered around the rotting corpse, the cheeks collapsed, bones poking out through gnawed fingers that still grasped a blanket clutched up to the chin. No ancient, shriven king—just a woman dead some few days. They sidled slowly past her, moving still farther into the tomb. Tripping and bumping now into more bodies, some still breathing, laid down to die where they were along the cool, dark sides of the dolmen.
    â€œAnything here’s been plucked long ago—”
    â€œYa can’t know,” the stoop-shouldered man insisted mildly. “I heared there was a child found a gold collar, not two leagues from here—”
    The match blew out, and they stopped where they were in the darkness, waiting while the mad girl fiddled around for another one. She was getting low now, they could hear her fingers scraping along the bottom of the wood box. They had moved past the bodies, too fardown the winding passage for anyone more to drag themselves even for the privilege of dying alone. But still they were reluctant to go back without seeing the end of it.
    The girl lit up another match, grinning triumphantly, and they shuffled slowly onward. The water sounded louder here, the air was a little clearer, and it gave them hope. There was a sudden curve in the passageway, one so well disguised they almost walked straight into the rock—and then they rounded the bend and came face-to-face with an immense skeleton, seated on a rock.
    â€œJay-sus, here it is!”
    â€œOh, we’ll eat now!”
    â€œPig every night!”
    The very sound of such words sent a pang through their shriveled stomachs, and Ruth considered again that they were mad. Undeniably, though, there was a skeleton. A formidable one at that, seated on its rock throne as serenely as if it had been expecting them. The bones indeed ancient, stripped of all flesh and colored a waxy yellow-brown—
    â€œIt must be Brian his own self. Eight feet tall, if he’s a hand!”
    â€œIt’s a king for certain. Who else could it be?”
    But there was nothing else to the kingly skeleton—no royal raiments, or armor, or clothes at all. No gold crown or collar for them. And they understood, presently, that there was something else the matter, something altogether unnatural about the thing.
    â€œHere, he ain’t a king at all!”
    â€œHow d’ya know? How d’ya know? ” the mad girl demanded, furious. Lighting up another