The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The Bards of Bone Plain

  Patricia A. Mckillip

  Eager to graduate from the school on the hill, Phelan Cle chose Bone Plain for his final paper because he thought it would be an easy topic. Immortalized by poets and debated by scholars, it was commonly accepted-even at a school steeped in bardic tradition-that Bone Plain, with its three trials, three terrors, and three treasures, was nothing more than a legend, a metaphor. But as his research leads him to the life of Nairn, the Wandering Bard, the Unforgiven, Phelan starts to wonder if there are any easy answers...

  Patricia A. McKillip

  The Bards of Bone Plain

  Chapter One

  Phelan found his father at the river’s edge. It was morning, early and very quiet. Tide washed softly along the flank of one of the great, weathered standing stones scattered so randomly on both sides of the river that some said they moved about restively at night when the moon was old. That was one tale of the stones. Another was drifting drunkenly behind a pile of rubble from a wall that had collapsed wearily into the conjunction of water and earth.

  I was there when they went to war,

  The stones of Bek, the stones of Taran,

  And the doughty stones of Stirl.

  I saw them rage and thunder. I lived to tell the tale.

  Who am I?

  Phelan knew the answer to that one: there was no mistaking Jonah Cle’s rich, ragged voice, with the edge of careless mockery in it honed so fine it could flay. He sighed noiselessly, walked along the sucking mud that clung to each footstep. The mist was thick over the Stirl River; the entire plain seemed silent. Phelan might have been alone in the mist, and the world itself beginning all over again but for his father’s voice.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Much you’d care,” he reminded the pile of stone, and got a soft chuckle out of them.

  “Ah. Phelan. Good. I’m down to my last waterfowl.”

  Phelan clambered up the broken pile, sat at the top of it, his boots, slimy with mud, propped on a stone at a level with his father’s head. Jonah glanced up, gave his son a twisted smile. His handsome, ravaged, stubbled face was pale; his eyes were fire-rimmed. His long, dark hair was clotted with the leavings of the tide line: broken bird and snail shells, soggy pinfeathers, shimmering fish scales. A hooded homespun cloak he must have filched during his wanderings looked as though he had slept in it on the scabrous bank, washing in and out with the tide, for days.

  “I have a message for you,” Phelan told him.

  “How did you find me?” his father asked curiously. “You always find me.”

  “Maybe I smell you.” Phelan picked a twig out of Jonah’s hair, snapped it between his fingers. “I don’t think about it. If I must go looking for you, I prefer to get it over with as soon as possible.”

  “Did she send me some money?”

  “No. She wants you home.” His father rolled a narrowed eye at him; he shrugged. “Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? You have a home. You could stay there and drink.”

  Jonah felt around himself at the suggestion, came up with a broken bottle neck. He grunted, dropped it. “I don’t see why I should inflict this on your mother.”

  “Then why—”

  “Why does she want me? Is it important?” He reached out at Phelan’s silence, seized his filthy boot, shook it. “You know why. Tell me.”

  “No,” Phelan said flatly.

  “Well, do you have any money?”

  Phelan ignored that. He shifted out of reach, leaned back, brooding with the gulls along the bank and looking, with his pale hair and gray eyes, something like one. Like them, he watched the water for a ripple, a sign, direction. Water spoke, broke in a delicate froth upon the worthless clutter it had dredged up and laid like treasure upon the mud. Reeds stirred; a breeze had wakened. It would blow off the mist, the marches of that tiny, private patch of timelessness. Already the half-hidden standing stone nearest him, a blunt, creamy yellow tooth three times the height of a man, was losing its blurred edges, blowing clear.

  Phelan murmured, scarcely hearing himself, “I watch the comings and goings of water. Birds know me. I came here from the north, from the land of Noh. Look for me there, watching along the edge of the sea. Here I am, and there, since the beginning of words. What am I?”

  His father spat out something between his teeth: a fish scale, an inarticulate comment. He said succinctly, “Answer.”

  Phelan laughed a little, soundlessly, at the blank face of the morning. “You answer it,” he breathed. “Tell me what you are. Tell me how I can understand why you are here, sitting in mud and rubble on the river’s edge at dawn in this desolate wasteland.” He waited without expectation. The mist was fraying, pulling threads out of itself to reveal a glint of light, a dead fish floating by, the slab of yet another stone, which had picked itself up and waded, sometime in the past centuries, deeper into the river. Any hope of an answer shredded away with the breeze. He straightened. “I have to go.”

  Jonah glanced up at him again, his eyes slitted and glittering under a sudden shift of light. “I won’t like it, will I? What she wants me home for.”

  “You can put up with it,” Phelan said wearily. “Take a bath, refill your pockets.”

  “You won’t tell me.”

  “You know I won’t.”

  “Lend me—”

  “No.”

  Jonah lay back on the rubble, began the litany, intoning it melodically and with charm: “Stubborn, pigheaded, obstinate, iron-hearted, pitiless, remorseless—”

  “I know, I know.” Phelan rose, scrabbled back over the pile. “Never a doubt I am your son. I’ll see you there.”

  “Where?” the rock pile demanded. He turned his back to it, crossed the weedy road, and nearly fell into his father’s latest vision.

  The city was becoming riddled with Jonah’s obsessions, Phelan thought dourly as he caught his balance at the edge of this one. He paused a moment to peer into the shadow, then turned and found his way through the barrens to the bridge across the Stirl.

  Midway across, he stepped out of the clammy ambiguities of fog, gray water, stone, into the full astonishment of light.

  A long, roofless vehicle, half car, half wagon, gave Phelan a goose’s honk as it passed and sent a plume of steam into the air. He waved, turning for a glimpse of the princess. But the car plunged too quickly into the ribboning mist behind him, carrying the work crew to his father’s inexplicable project. He hoped they wouldn’t run over Jonah along the way. There was no other traffic on that bridge, ending where it did in the broken memories and weed-strewn ghosts of past so distant no one was left there to remember it. Why his father chose to haunt that bleak smudge in the heart of the city, Phelan had no idea.

  The rest of the immense royal city of Caerau, cheerfully colored under the sun with riotous hues of marble, paint, and brick, spread itself across half the plain on both sides of the Stirl River. Merchant ships lined the docks, sails furled, engines silent, busily loading and unloading; others had begun to follow the outgoing tide, unfurling sails bright and individual as butterfly wings, to follow the Stirl to the sea. Fishing boats, elegant barges, swift, slender market skiffs plied the water around them. On the crown of the only hill in the city, Phelan could see his destination: the ancient school, the thick-walled building hugging the broken tower rising out of it, making a dark gray stroke among the brighter walls of later centuries around it.

  On the noisy, busy streets at the other end of the bridge, he caught a horse-drawn tram to the school on the hill.

  He kept a robe along with his books and papers in the oak cupboards lining the staff room in the pink and gray edifice t
hat had been funded by, and named appropriately for, Jonah Cle. Several other of the younger student teachers were pulling on their robes as well, yawning and muttering comments in the early hour. Like Phelan, they were nearly finished with years of study; they lacked only one last subject to master, a class or two to teach, a final research paper, before they could go out into the world and call themselves bards. The robes they wore over their clothes were still the students’ gold and green. But as masters in training, they were allowed to leave them casually unbuttoned, revealing leathers, homespun, silks, brocades, sometimes looking as tavern-glazed and frayed as their wearers.

  Phelan heard his name spoken, glanced around absently as he sorted through books and papers.

  “Have you got a topic for your final paper, yet?” a young man asked. He was a fine musician, ferociously hardworking except on anything that wasn’t music. “I hate history. I hate reading. And above everything, I hate writing. I can’t come up with an idea that would compel me to sit for days in a chair with a pen in my hand writing an endless succession of words that nobody but one or two masters will read, and only because they have to. What are you going to write about? Have you decided?”

  Phelan shrugged. “Something easy. I just want to get out of here.”

  “What’s easy?” the young man pleaded. “Tell me.”

  “The standing stones.”

  “The stones of Caerau?” someone interjected. “That’s been done. Once a decade at least for the last five hundred years. What’s left to say about them?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? Anyway, not Caerau. I’m researching the standing stones of Bone Plain.”

  A dour young woman who taught beginners to write their notes groaned. “Twice a decade for five hundred years.”

  Phelan smiled. “You sound like my father; he said exactly that after he asked me what I would write. It’s simple: all the hard work has been done, and I won’t have to think when I write.”

  “You haven’t started yet?” she guessed shrewdly. Phelan shook his head. She gazed at him silently a moment, asked abruptly, “How can you possess such astonishing gifts and so little ambition?”

  He hefted papers and books in one arm, closed the cupboard, and gave her his wry, charming smile, then turned away without bothering to explain that his entire life up to that point was his father’s idea.

  Phelan had long given up trying to understand him. Enough that Jonah had had his thumb on Phelan’s destiny since he was five, when he was ruthlessly ensconced in the school on the hill with a promise of freedom and wealth if he stayed to the end of the long course of studies. The end, after all those years, was a step or two away: one last boring class to teach, the final paper. A hundred times he had nearly walked away from the school; a hundred times he had chosen to stay. The most compelling reason—far more compelling than his father’s promises—was that somehow he could, by doing as Jonah insisted, unravel Jonah’s convoluted mind and finally understand him.

  He had, sometime before, bitterly admitted defeat. Now he only wanted to walk one final time from the school on the hill down to the streets of Caerau and never look back.

  The class he taught was held, by tradition, or on days it didn’t rain, in the oak grove on the crown of the hill. By the school steward’s estimation, the grove was on its fifth generation of oak. Across the lawn, Phelan could see his seven students already sitting under them. The immense, golden boughs that could catch lightning, that created thunder when they broke, flung shadows like webs; the students sitting on the ground seemed obliviously tangled in them. A couple of the hoariest trees had already dropped a bough, huge, moldering bones that the gardeners, with an eye for the picturesque, had let lie.

  The students, ranging in age from twelve to fifteen, were midway through their rigorous studies. They blinked sleepily at Phelan, who was beginning to feel the lack of his breakfast. No one, not even the teacher, opened a book or used paper or pen in this class: it was an archaic and exacting exercise in memory.

  “Right,” Phelan said, dropping down into their circle on the lush grass. “Good morning. Who remembers what we’re trying to remember?”

  “‘The Riddle of Cornith and Corneath,’ ” the round-faced twelve-year-old, Joss Quinn, answered earnestly.

  “Which is about?”

  “Two bards having a contest to see who becomes Royal Bard of King Brete.” Joss stuck, his mouth still open, Sabrina Penton, a neat, confident girl whose father was the king’s steward, picked up the thread.

  “They try to guess each other’s secret names by asking questions.”

  “How many questions?”

  “A hundred,” the irrepressible eldest, Frazer Verge, breathed. “A thousand. How could anyone ever have performed this without everyone falling asleep facedown in their plates?”

  “It was a game,” Phelan said, pausing to swallow a yawn. “And a history lesson as well. Remember the order of the first letter of each line. There is the pattern, your aid to memory. Around the circle, one line apiece.” He looked for the eyes that avoided him; the slight, fair Valerian seemed most uncertain. “You first, Valerian.”

  The boy gave his line without mishap. The lines began to ratchet like clockwork around the circle. Phelan’s thoughts wandered back to the earlier hour. His father would return home as his wife requested, only who knew by what route? A birthday party awaited him; he would not be pleased. At least it wasn’t his own.

  He became aware, suddenly, of the wind in the oak leaves, the distant clamor of the city. The clock had stopped. His eyes flicked around the circle, found the daydreaming face everyone else was looking at.

  “Frazer.”

  The young man blinked, fell back to earth. “Sorry. I drifted.”

  “We await the next line.” P, was it? Or T? He couldn’t remember, either.

  “You,” he heard Sabrina breathe to Frazer, and memory opened its door, shed light upon teacher and student.

  “‘Up or down go you at night,’ ” Frazer recited promptly, “ ‘or by the light of day?’”

  Phelan emitted a dry sound from the back of his throat, but no other comment. He shifted his attention to the dark-haired, strawberry-cheeked Estacia, next in the circle, who picked up the rhythm without a falter.

  “‘Vine are you to twine and bind the branching hawthorn bough?’ ”

  “The clues,” Phelan said glibly when they had muddled their way through the rest of the riddles, “will become obvious to those who complete their years of study and training here. The more you learn of such ancient poetry, the more you realize that all poetry, and therefore all riddles, are rooted in the Three Trials of Bone Plain. Which are what?”

  “The Turning Tower,” Frazer said quickly, perhaps to redeem himself.

  “And?”

  “The Inexhaustible Cauldron,” said the rawboned Hinton, all spindly shanks and flashing spectacles.

  “And?”

  “The Oracular Stone,” answered Aleron the indolent, who was bright enough, but preferred the easy question.

  “Yes. Now. Of all the bards in the history of Belden, which bard passed all three tests?”

  There was silence again. A dead oak leaf, plucked by the spring wind, spiraled crazily off a branch and sailed away. “Your muses are everywhere around you,” Phelan reminded them as the silence lengthened. “Your aids to memory, and creation. Sun, wind, earth, water, stone, tree. All speak the language of the bard. Of poetry.” The leaf was flying across the grass toward the great standing stones that circled the crown of the knoll above the river in a dance that had begun before Belden had a name.

  “Where,” Frazer asked suddenly, “exactly, is Bone Plain? Are we on it?”

  “Maybe,” Phelan answered, quoting his research. “No one has yet found conclusive evidence for any particular place. Most likely it existed only in the realm of poetry. Or it was translated into poetry from some more practical, prosaic event, which a mortal bard might have a chance of enduring. As we know, stones d
o not speak, nor do cauldrons yield an unending supply of stew except in poetry. Do you remember the bard who passed the tests?”

  Frazer shook his head. Then he guessed, “Nairn?”

  “No. Not Nairn. Great a bard as he was, he failed even the least complicated of the trials: the Test of the Flowing Cauldron. Which was what? Anyone?”

  “The test of love, generosity, and inspiration,” Sabrina said.

  “Thereby rendering himself at once immortal and uninspired. Not a good example to follow.”

  “So where is he?” Frazer asked.

  “Who?”

  “Nairn. You said he’s immortal.”

  There was another silence, during which the teacher contemplated his student. Frazer’s wild face, with its lean, wolfish bones framed by long, golden hair, looked completely perplexed.

  “Where is your mind today?” Phelan wondered mildly. “Lost, it seems, along with Nairn in the mists of poetry. Between the lines. He did exist once; that is a matter of documented history. But the exacting demands of storytelling, requiring a sacrifice, transformed him from history into poetry.”

  “But—”

  “Into a cautionary tale.”

  “About what?” Frazer persisted. “I’m confused. Why a cautionary tale about an illusion, if that’s what Bone Plain is? And if not, then where do we go to find the tower that will give us three choices: to die, or go mad, or to become a poet? I want to become a bard. I want to be the greatest bard that Belden has ever known. Must I enter that tower? That metaphor?”

  “No,” Phelan said gravely, hiding an urge to laugh at the notion. “It’s not a requirement of this school. Nor of the Kings of Belden. You can go looking for the tower if you choose. Or the metaphor. At the moment, I’d prefer you just answer my question.” Frazer only gazed at him, mute and stubborn. Phelan glanced around. “Anyone?”

  “The bard Seeley?” the quiet, country-bred Valerian guessed diffidently.

  “Good guess, but no. Prudently, he never tried.” He waited. “No one? You do know this. You have all the history and poetry you need to unravel this mystery. Do so before I see you again. The weave is there, the thread is there. Find and follow.”