By Weight

Seventeen gold rings came up at Skaun, near four hundred grams, eighteen hundred years in the ground. The man who found them handed them in.

That summer the museum said unique. A few months on it said payment gold, the common kind, and paid him by the gram, the metal and a tenth, a record for a finder.

Somebody once cut these to the weight of what was owed and set them in a pan across from it. Now the museum does the same.

You could call that an insult. They were never made to be rare. They were made to match, ring for ring, so a stranger's hand could trust them, and they still match. Laid out in a row they might say how far the paying went, and how often. Nobody pays for a row.