The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Ask him,” Curran said simply. “This afternoon. Take this—”

  “No, Curran. You found it. You should be the one to show it—”

  He grinned. “Shovel found it. Anyway, we all want to know, and no telling when he’ll loom at us out of whatever fog he’s in again.” He folded her hand around the mystery. “Of course, you might mention my name.”

  She slid the disk into her pocket and, a little later, drove back across the bridge, leaving the others to catch the trams, since no one else knew what to do with a car. She left it under the jealous and attentive care of the royal chauffeur, who had taught her how to drive.

  Peverell Castle, named after the ancient line of Belden’s rulers, had been a drafty, thick-walled, narrow-windowed, manyturreted fortress when it was first built near the bank of the Stirl a couple of centuries after the school on the hill had opened. The realm of Belden had been pounded together by tooth, nail, sword, and bow after the upstart invader, Oroh, had gotten lost looking for another land, anchored his ships in the fog on the Stirl, and led his army ashore. His bard, Declan, wandering across the land with the king and memorializing his battles with an infusion of glory and proper rhyme, had fallen in love with the plain. He returned to it upon relinquishing his position, went to live in an ancient watchtower on top of the hill among the oak and the standing stones, where he was sought out by would-be bards for his great gifts. So the school on the hill had come into existence, built to house students and teachers over the frigid winters on the plain. The rulers of Belden took their time settling somewhere. Moving from court to court across the realm periodically exhausted the coffers of their hosts and kept them from spending their money on armies. Finally, the realm quieted. Irion, the seventh of the Peverells to rule Belden, looked about for a place to keep his court and built it along the Stirl.

  The original castle had long been swallowed up in many layers of changing fashions. Beatrice had explored all of it in her early years. The servants got used to finding the princess anywhere at all: in the laundry room examining water pipes, following the line of an ancient wall into the butler’s pantry, in the wine cellar with her face smudged, her hair veiled with cobwebs, trying to see the blocked-up archway behind the wine racks. Her father, King Lucian, encouraged her, finding books and old maps for her in his library, showing her secret passageways and where the dungeons had been bricked over for a plumbing sluice. At formal court functions, she found him often in conversation with the sour-eyed Jonah Cle, who, otherwise impeccable, always looked as though he had just dunked his head in a bucket of cold water. Their words, glinting, mysterious references to history, old ballads, to a past older than she could yet imagine, invariably sent her back to her father’s library. Somehow—maybe asking the right question, venturing a little-known detail of her own explorations—she began to be included, welcomed into their discussions.

  And now, she thought with wonder, digging the disk out of her pocket before the chambermaid disposed of her dirty clothes, she worked for Jonah Cle.

  Showered, freshly coiffed, and dressed in what she called her marzipan clothes, pastel and sugary, she put the disk back into a pocket, where it sagged in the thin, creamy silk frock like cannon shot. She took it back out; she and her lady-in-waiting studied it doubtfully.

  “A ribbon?” she suggested.

  “Must you, Princess Beatrice?”

  “Yes, I must. Or else back into my pocket it goes.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” She picked a thin gold chain out of Beatrice’s jewel box, threaded it into the disk, and clasped it around the princess’s neck, where it hung gracelessly within her rope of pearls. They studied it again, the tall, rangy Beatrice with her gold-brown hair and lightly freckled face, her calm cobalt eyes, and the willowy, elegant Lady Ann Never, with her critical green eyes, her black, sleek hair, and her unfailing sense of fashion.

  “Can’t you hide it in your shoe?” she asked, pained. “It’s really dreadful.”

  Beatrice laughed. “My father will love it.”

  Her mother did not. Queen Harriet, standing next to the king in the reception line, looked at it incredulously, then closed her eyes upon it and her daughter. It was a rather moldy shade of green, Beatrice knew, and it had fallen chicken-track-side up above her beaded neckline. The frothy afternoon frock didn’t show it to its best advantage. But the king didn’t care.

  “Happy birthday, Father,” she said, kissing his cheek.

  “What in the world is that?” he asked, his eyes already riveted.

  “I have no idea. Curran unearthed it with his shovel this morning.”

  “I hope you are giving it to me as my birthday present.”

  “I would love to, but I believe Master Cle should make that gesture.”

  “He’s not here yet,” the king murmured, turning the disk to its hidden side. “He’ll never know.”

  The queen cleared her throat, indicated the long line of wellwishers that Beatrice had effectively brought to a standstill. She moved out of the way, joined the group of her siblings, their various guests, mates, and children.

  “Hello, Bea.” Harold, oldest son and heir, handed her a glass of champagne off a passing tray. He was quite tall, big-boned, and red-haired, a throwback, their father said, to the primitive Peverells. “Been digging up the city again? And wearing it, I see.” He raised his own glass toward the latest of the succession of appendages on his arm. “Do you know Lady Primula Willoughby? My sister Princess Beatrice.”

  “Yes, of course,” Beatrice and Lady Primula said together, both smiling hugely and both wondering, the princess guessed, where on earth they had met. Lady Primula, with apple cheeks and corn-silk hair, looked alarmingly full of crisp country air, and Beatrice, who spent her life in holes, could barely find her way out of the city. They were diverted by the young son of Beatrice’s sister, Charlotte, plopping himself abruptly on the floor and beginning to crawl away between feet.

  “Marcus!” Charlotte cried, making a dive for him. “Come and kiss your auntie Beatrice.” She swooped him up and deftly plunked him into Beatrice’s hold, where he promptly began teething on the disk. “Ah, no, Marcus!” Charlotte chided ineffectually. She took after their mother: ivory skin and hair, all cheekbones and fluttery blue eyes. She took a swallow of champagne and a closer look at what her son was biting. “Nasty thing—whatever is it, Bea?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “Something we just dug up.”

  “What a peculiar thing to have around your neck. Do you mind Marcus chewing on it?”

  “Well, it’s been buried in a hole under some plumbing pipes for at least decades,” Beatrice answered amiably. “I doubt that much could hurt it now.”

  Charlotte’s eyes widened. She downed her champagne, plucked the boy from Beatrice’s arms, and winced at the sudden bellow in her ear. Beatrice drank what Marcus hadn’t kicked out of her glass and looked around for Jonah Cle.

  The hall was filling rapidly. Musicians played softly in the gallery above the hall, sweet notes from flute and violin echoing purely within the ancient walls. Only the vastness of the room and the massive stone hearth, big enough to hold hundred-year-old oak logs and guarded by dragons, was left of King Irion’s great hall, where his knights had tossed bones to the hunting dogs as they ate their supper. The walls had gone through various transformations through the centuries. They were overlaid with wood now, painted, and hung with the framed faces of every ancestor the present royal family possessed, it seemed. Past watched the present goings-on with varying degrees of interest and approval. Couches and chairs and potted plants were scattered everywhere; everyone stood around them, talking across them with a great deal of vigor, clusters growing deeper as the reception line dwindled. A tiered cake half as big as the hearth stood on a table at the other end of the room. An army of servants, bearing trays of champagne and elegant little savories, followed their own mysterious patterns through the crowd. Beatrice, listening absently to her other brother, Dam
on, and his beautiful, garrulous betrothed describe endless wedding plans, finally saw Jonah’s harrowed, sardonic face across the room. His charming wife, Sophy, hand on his arm, was drawing him toward the end of the reception line. Phelan flanked him on the other side, his expression imperturbable while his eyes searched the room for escape. Only Sophy, tossing comments to friends as they passed, sailed with oblivious good humor through the crush.

  Beatrice waited a few minutes, until they had greeted the king. Jonah lingered there; Phelan, his face loosening as he sighted a friend, plunged one way into the currents; Sophy, waving, went another. Beatrice moved then, as the long line finally came to an end, and the king turned to speak to Jonah.

  The king had evidently asked about the peculiarity adorning his daughter; they were both looking for Beatrice before she reached them.

  “Princess,” Jonah Cle said a trifle tiredly, as she came up. He looked very pale and very well scrubbed. “You look lovely. I would scarcely have recognized you.”

  “Thank you, I think, Master Cle. And so do you.”

  “What have you found for me?”

  “Curran found it,” she said, feeling for the chain clasp. “He asked me to give it to you.”

  “I was hoping,” the king interposed, “you might consider it my birthday present.” He had his own fine collection of oddments, many given to him by Jonah. “It would be a gracious gesture and very much appreciated.”

  “We have already left a very expensive present on your gift table.”

  “But this is merely a trifle, I’m sure. You probably have dozens of them.”

  Beatrice slid the stained copper disk off the chain, put it into Jonah’s hand. The runes were up; he studied them silently a moment, then turned it over to reveal the hooded face.

  Beatrice saw his eyes widen. Then his fingers closed abruptly over the disk; he threw back his head and laughed, an open and genuine amusement that caused heads to turn, Phelan’s startled face among them.

  He opened his hand again, offered the disk to the king. “Take it, with all my good wishes. Happy birthday, Your Majesty.”

  “But what is it?” he demanded.

  “What does it say?” Beatrice pleaded.

  Jonah was silent again, weighing words along with the disk on his palm. Then he gave up, flipped the disk lightly in the air, caught it, and held it out again to the king. “You both enjoy a challenge. The weave is there, the thread is there. Find and follow.”

  “But—” Beatrice and her father said at once. But the queen was suddenly among them, drawing the king’s attention to the Master of Ceremonies at her side.

  “Your Majesty,” he said softly. “The guest bard from the school is about to sing. Then Prince Harold will make his toast to you, and you will speak after. Then the Royal Bard will sing his birthday composition to you, after which they will cut the cake.”

  “We all must gather near the table,” the queen said.

  “Yes, my dear.” The king took the disk, dropped it resignedly into his pocket, and held out his arm to her.

  “Come along, Beatrice.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “I need a drink,” she heard Jonah mutter, as she turned to follow in the royal wake, then, in the musician’s gallery, the guest from the school stroked her harp and loosed her voice like some rich, wild, haunting echo out of the singing bones of the plain in a ballad about the Peverell kings that was as old as Belden.

  Chapter Four

  History next records Nairn’s presence, unlikely as it seems, at the ceremony after the Battle of the Welde during which Anstan ceded the Kingdom of the Marches to the invader, King Oroh, who was busily amassing the five kingdoms that would become Belden. Oroh’s bard, Declan, was also present. The exact nature of his extraordinary gifts is nebulous, and most often a matter of poetry rather than record. Whatever they were, his place was always at the king’s side. An odd tale rippled down the centuries from that ceremony, in ballads, in poetry fragments, and as metaphor: Nairn returns to Declan the jewels he had taken from the older bard’s harp. In some tales, he throws them at Declan. How he acquired them is also a matter of folklore, especially of the Marches. Some say he stole them; others that he took them with magic; though that is never adequately explained, certainly not to the historian. After that, Nairn once again vanishes from even the footnotes of history.

  He reappears, a few years later, at the bardic school that Declan started after King Oroh finished his campaigns. Pleading age and long years of service, Declan relinquished his duties as Oroh’s bard and returned to Stirl Plain, now under Oroh’s rule. There, on a small hill crowned with ancient standing stones and a watchtower overlooking the Stirl River, he retired to a life of contemplation. It did not last long, as bards and would-be bards from the five conquered kingdoms were drawn by his great knowledge and abilities to learn from him. There, on that hill, Nairn steps back into history.

  There he stands between two kings,

  The bard with his bitter eyes.

  His hand he lifts, and down he flings

  The jewels as he cries:

  “What worth are these from a bard who sings

  Treachery and lies?”

  FROM “THE BATTLE OF THE WELDE” BY GARETH LOMILY BROWN

  Fickle as jewels on a harp.

  NORTHERN SAYING

  The Battle of the Welde lasted three days. By the time it started, Nairn, who had beaten a marching rhythm for Anstan’s army through the western mountains of the Marches, and summoned the clans with his bladder-pipe, then drummed the army east and south to meet the invader, had calluses on his calluses. He had never traveled so quickly or played so hard in his life. The Welde, a broad, lovely river valley along the border between the Marches and Stirl Plain, had laid down a soft carpet of creamy yellow wildflowers. So Nairn saw it at the beginning of the battle, when he blew the long, coiled, battered cornu someone had handed him and told him to sound. By the end of the battle, there were a few flowers left untrampled and about as many of Anstan’s warriors. King Oroh sent his bard, Declan, across the field to meet the king’s emissary and demand that Anstan surrender his kingdom.

  Anstan, furious and heartsick, answered with what he, not being particularly musical, considered a last, futile gesture of contempt. He sent his bedraggled drummer on foot across the ravaged, bloody field where nothing moved, nothing spoke except the flies and the flocks of crows, to meet with Oroh’s bard.

  Declan rode a white horse. He was dressed in dark, rich leather and silk; he carried his harp on his shoulder. As always, he was unarmed. He reined in his mount at the center of the field between the two royal camps and waited for the young, grimy minstrel in his bloodstained robe and sandals with one sole tied to his foot with rope where the laces had rotted during the long march. He still carried the cornu over his shoulder, the last instrument he had played to call retreat.

  Nairn stopped in front of the bard; they looked at one another silently.

  “You asked,” Declan said finally, “what I am.”

  The taut mouth in the stained white mask of a face moved finally, let loose a few words. “Yes. I asked.” He was silent again, his bleak, crow eyes moving over Declan, narrowing as memory broke through, a moment of wonder instead of bitterness. “You’re Oroh’s spy,” he said tersely. “And his bard. But what else? I didn’t sing those jewels out of your harp. You gave them to me.”

  The strange eyes glinted at him suddenly, catching light like metal. “You took them,” Declan said, and raised his eyes to ask of the sky, “Is this entire land ignorant of its own magic?”

  “What?”

  Declan tossed a hand skyward, relinquishing a comment. “I’ll answer that when you’ve learned to understand the question.”

  “You’ll forgive me if this is the last I ever want to see of your face.”

  “You may not be given the choice.” Nairn, staring at him, drew breath to protest; the bard didn’t yield him that choice, either. “Since you brought the m
atter up, we should deal with it. King Oroh will accept Anstan’s sword and crown and his pledge of fealty at dawn tomorrow.”

  “Dawn,” Nairn interrupted recklessly. “What makes you think King Anstan will still be around?”

  “Because I will be watching,” Declan answered softly, and Nairn, staring again, felt the short hairs prickle at his neck. “In return for Anstan’s pledge, he may keep one holding in the Marches for his family. As to other matters, the size of his retinue, tributes to King Oroh, such things will be left to the king’s counselors. For tomorrow, the king will be content with the sight of an unarmed, uncrowned man with one knee in the dirt in front of him. That is the price of peace.”

  “I can’t tell King Anstan that,” Nairn said flatly. “He’d kill me.”

  “He should honor you.”

  “For what? Blaring a retreat out of this poor dented wheel of a horn?”

  “He should honor you,” Declan repeated, “for all that you should have been able to do for him.”

  “What—”

  Again, the bard’s hand rose, inviting Nairn’s attention to the disaster around them.

  “Who do you think you fought?” There was an odd note of exasperation in the fine, calm voice. “This entire field is ringed with King Oroh’s army. Most of them just stood and watched you flail at one another in the mist.”

  Nairn felt his heart close like a fist, the blood vanish out of his face. The bard turned his horse, but not before Nairn glimpsed his weary revulsion.

  “King Oroh’s tent,” he reminded Nairn without looking back. “At dawn.”

  “You’re a bard,” Nairn pleaded to the retreating figure. “Put some poetry in the message, or I’ll be out among the dead at dawn, with the crows picking at my eyes.”

  Declan glanced around at that, his expression composed again. “I’ve heard what you can do. Find your own poetry in that.”