The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Stumbling back across the darkening battlefield, ignoring the black clouds of crows scattering up around him as he passed, Nairn managed to fashion King Oroh’s demand into words more akin to a preference. Anstan, slumped on a chair in his tent, surrounded by his generals, listened wordlessly to Nairn’s message. He gave an inarticulate growl, seized his crown with both hands, and flung it out the tent door. Then he followed it, stopping at the threshold long enough to say,

  “All of you. Here with me before sunrise.”

  He went out to mourn under the moon. So did Nairn, in an opposite direction, carrying his harp, which he hadn’t played in weeks. Whether the grieving king heard the sweet, melancholy harping, or he played only to the moonstruck faces of the dead, Nairn didn’t bother to wonder. He only hoped that the tin-eared king wouldn’t mistake him for Declan and send a knife after him in the dark.

  But Anstan surprised him in the predawn hour, when Nairn made his way into the king’s tent.

  “Bring your harp,” Anstan said tersely. “You honored the dead of the Marches last night.” He flicked a glance over the unkempt bard and gestured to a servant. “Find him something decent to put on. And wash your face. You look half-dead yourself. There must be some reason,” Nairn heard him grumble to his generals, “that barbarian gives his bard such status. Not that I can see it. We can at least pretend we have what he has.”

  Later, kneeling beside Anstan in the mist-soaked mud churned up by constant comings and goings outside the new king’s tent, Nairn watched an earthworm undulate between two clods of dirt and felt that even it had more status than he. Anstan’s crown and sword appeared in a corner of his vision, laid as low as they could get, on the mud at Oroh’s feet. It was then that he opened his clenched fist, let the jewels fall out of it to smolder like embers in the muck.

  “What’s this?” Oroh demanded. He was a tall, brawny man with tangled red hair and a deep, rumbling voice. A line of toggles made of boar tusks kept his loose tunic closed over his shirt and the flaps of his boots fastened. His crown was a jagged circle of golden tusks. He picked his words with less certainty than Declan did; Nairn heard the same unfamiliar lilt to his phrases.

  “Jewels from your bard’s harp,” Nairn said, too dispirited for courtesy. What king would expect good manners from a worm? “I took them from him.”

  There was a moment’s utter silence on the field. Not even a crow commented.

  Then Oroh hunkered down in front of the young bard, to his astonishment. “Look at me,” the king said. “Give me my title.”

  Nairn raised his head. The king’s eyes were the color of hazelnuts; they held Nairn’s for a long time, studying him, until Nairn heard himself say, “Yes, my lord.”

  Oroh turned his head finally, shifted that piercing, unblinking gaze to Declan. “How did he take them?”

  “They came to him, my lord.”

  “Indeed,” the king breathed, and straightened. “You are fortunate in your bard, sir.”

  “Yes,” Anstan agreed blankly, and added with bitter precision, “my lord.”

  “Perhaps too fortunate. He’s a weapon, and I will add him to the salvage of battle. Rise.”

  “He’s only a marching bard,” Anstan protested bewilderedly as he got to his feet.

  “Well, you won’t need him now.” Oroh turned, gesturing them to follow him into the tent. “Where I am from, bards are valued highly, and you will receive compensation for this one. He may go back now for his other instruments and possessions.” He nodded to a pair of guards, then raised a brow at Declan, asking a silent question.

  “They’ll do, my lord,” Declan said briefly. “His ignorance is abysmal.”

  “Ah? His misfortune is now our fortune.” He turned his curious gaze from Nairn to the guards. “Go with him.”

  They took him back across the field. While they walked, Nairn watched warriors searching for the wounded startle sudden, whirling black clouds of crow into the air. Nairn’s own thoughts whirled as darkly. He had failed, in Declan’s eyes, at some portentous task that might have turned the tide of yesterday’s battle. How, exactly, he could not imagine. Because Nairn had failed so miserably at that, Declan expected nothing more than failure from him. Singing the jewels out of the harp had been an aberration: an impulse of deep, impossible desire in which there was no hope, only longing. He felt very much like that again: filled with desire without a gnat’s worth of hope to get himself as far from that sad, smeared disaster and as far from Declan’s eerie eyes as he could get.

  If he could crawl like a snake through the dead, if he could fly among the crows ...

  Lacking any better ideas, he left the guards rummaging through Anstan’s possessions and walked into the back partition of the tent, where he had left his things scattered among the useless paraphernalia of war. Neither the marching drum nor the battered cornu would fit into his pack, so he left them there reluctantly. He slit a seam along the floor of the tent with one of the generals’ swords, slid himself, his harp and pack and a pair of somebody’s boots out the back of the tent. He made his way quickly among the morning campfires of the remnants of Anstan’s army. The glum warriors watched him leave, raised a cup or two for luck. Then Nairn imitated the earthworm, slithering on his belly among the unburied dead, and made his way with more haste than caution to the thick trees along the river.

  No one rode him down, dragged him back. But someone watched him, he realized as he stood at the water’s edge. He felt that eerie prickling of awareness glide all through his body, chilling his skin, stiffening his bones. He looked behind him, then abruptly up, and found a snowy owl on a branch, staring down at him out of wide, golden eyes.

  A voice out of nowhere filled his head, at once lilting and sinewy.

  You found me once. You found me twice. The third time is the charm.

  A shout leaped out of Nairn that must have opened the eyes of the dead, and he began to run.

  He ran for days, it felt like, weeks, months, before he began to feel safe again and slowed a little. He disappeared into the southern forests of the Marches, keeping to small villages, the less ostentatious manor houses, crofters’ cottages so ancient their stones must have put down roots. As the bedraggled marching bard of the last king of the Marches, he was given sympathy and honor. Ballads he composed about the Battle of the Welde opened doors for him, gave him shelter, for events were so new few realized, in those quiet, unchanging places, that the ancient court of the northern kingdom was no more. Nairn managed to stay ahead of King Oroh’s soldiers and officials, hiding in isolated corners of the realm, where the oldest words, tales, and musical instruments might linger for centuries, and gossip tended to be a season or two older than events. So he learned, sometime after the facts, that Oroh had taken the last of the five kingdoms and had named his realm Belden.

  By then he had been roaming during fair seasons and finding places to winter in comfortable manses owned by farmers and merchants who had managed to elude the new king’s attention. As always, he paid for his lodging with his music and ferreted out ancient, unfamiliar songs while he was there. He scarcely noticed the passing of time, only that the king’s name, his face on coins, became more and more Oroh’s instead of Anstan’s, even in the timeless backwaters and pockets of the land. The old kings were easily confused in places that distant from the ancient court, whose rulers were known mostly as names in ballads about the battles they had fought. Imperceptibly, the shape of the world changed during Nairn’s travels, until there were no longer five kingdoms, only one, and Oroh was its king. Nairn was not paying much attention to where he was in the world one late summer when he passed out of the pleasant fields and woodlands of east Belden and onto Stirl Plain.

  He recognized it by the vast, flat green sea of grass he walked across, which began to flow and swirl into gentle hillocks and knolls around him the farther he wandered into it. Strangely colored standing stones had been planted here and there across the plain, some crowning knolls, others marching
along the river a ways, then stopping for no reason. Solitary trees grown huge and snarled with age stood sentinel on other hills. The Stirl River, welling up somewhere out of the northern mountains, cut the plain in two as it meandered toward the sea. No one lived along it except the stones, an unexpected, creamy yellow, all of them, in a place where stones in the river, boulders thrusting up through the grass, were drab as slate.

  Nairn was alone on the plain, it seemed after a day or three. Mountain and forest transformed into distant brushes of dark on the far horizons. By day, the world was soundless but for the wind, leaves chattering in the tree he rested under, the occasional passing greeting of a hunting falcon or a lark. By night, the only lights he saw glittered high above his head, too far for shelter or comfort. He played to the stars, his only audience. When he slept under a tree or a stone, wrapped in his cloak, head on his pack, breathing the scents of grass and earth and the great, worn lichen-stained slabs, he heard the wind whispering into his dreams, in a language as ancient as the standing stones.

  Sometimes he heard fragments of an unfamiliar, haunting music: from the singing wind, maybe, or the river water, or perhaps the voices of the standing stones resonating to the shifting fingers of moonlight as it drifted over the plain. The music would fade as he woke, struggling to open his eyes, glimpse the elusive musician, and finally seeing that no one else was there; he was alone on the plain, playing to himself in his dreams.

  One night, he saw the blurred, red glow of firelight on a distant hill. He walked in that direction the next day. That evening, he saw it again: a handful of red stars spiraling upward as though behind the windows of a tower. Another day brought him close enough to see the crown of standing stones upon a hill beside the river, and within the ring, a dark stone tower. As he neared the hill, he saw it clearly: a broad spiral of fieldstones shaped into what might have been a watchtower, left from sometime beyond memory, when there was something worth protecting on the plain. Through the narrow windows winding up the sides, he had seen its night fires; they had beckoned to him across the plain.

  Newer stonework, huddled up against the tower, was still growing. Piles of stone pulled out of the earth and from the riverbed lay among stacked logs. A well-trampled path between the top of the hill and the river had worn away the grass to uncover dark, rich soil. The logs, he guessed, would have come from the thick forests to the north and west, carried down by water to stop at this unlikely place, where no one but mice and meadow-larks seemed to live. But as he made his way toward the path, he saw other stone walls among the trees along the riverbank. A village was growing there, he realized with surprise. For no particular reason he could see: it was no less lonely and isolated than any other bend in the river. But people were building there. He caught the sweet, dank, familiar smell of broken earth, uprooted grass from fields and gardens he couldn’t see across the river. And then another familiar whiff: pig. People had come to stay. Curious now, and hungry as well, for his stash of bread and cheese had dwindled to a crust and a rind, he quickened his pace, turned onto the path running up the hill.

  As he walked between two of the bulky, sun-warmed standing stones, he heard, from within the half-finished building or the tower, a piper piping.

  After a breath of silence, a scattering of pipes joined it, raggedly but with spirit. Nairn stopped. It was a marching tune, one of the many he had played to get Anstan’s army through the mountains to the Welde. It had been well-known there: a folk song of the Marches. But here, on Stirl Plain, it sounded in his ear like a wrong note, a warning. The song should have stayed north where it was born, not traveled down here in the mind of someone else who had heard it, perhaps again and again, as the army slogged mindlessly, doggedly toward its bitter defeat.

  He gazed at the closed plank door with the sheep’s bell dangling from the latch, a breath away from turning, walking down the hill and vanishing among the trees along the riverbank, for no clear reason, just a prickling of old, sour memory. Then wind blustered over him, blown from the open back of the building, engulfing him in smells of meat cooking, hot bread, burning sap.

  He turned, followed it helplessly.

  It brought him past the newer walls expanding outward and around much of the tower, to a door opening into the bottom of the tower itself. He looked in. A young woman with long, pale, curly hair stirred a cauldron over an ancient hearth. She turned at his step across the threshold. Her face stopped his heart.

  It was a perfect oval, skin luminous as spindrift and pearl, cheekbones like half-moons, and a mouth, in all that pearl, as full and sweetly red as strawberry. Her eyes were pale green. The expression in them as she saw the lank-haired stranger with his harp and his pack and the hollows of hunger in his face was both discerning and reserved; it made her seem older than she looked.

  She spoke, and his heart started up again, erratically thumping. Low and melodious, her voice sounded like some fine, rare instrument. In that moment, he glimpsed the proud towers, the pennants, the rich tapestries in which such voices might be heard, and knew why, in all his wanderings, he had never encountered such music before.

  “Take a bowl from that stack,” the wondrous instrument said. “They’ll be finished playing and down in a moment. You’ve come just in time to help finish the roof. There’s water in that pitcher, and bread—Ah, you found it.”

  “Thank you,” he said huskily around a bite. He forced his eyes from her face and found her hands. Two poems, he thought, entranced: long, tapered, graceful fingers, the nails a bit work worn, but warmly suffused with rose, while in the veins along her ivory wrists, the blood ran blue.

  He asked with an effort, not really caring, just trying, now, to drag his attention from her fingers, “What is this place?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m on my way across the plain. It’s a broad, lonely stretch of nowhere, with no one to talk to but those great stones. I saw the firelight on a hill a few nights ago and came looking for it. Then I smelled your stew.”

  She smiled; he watched the pale skin glide like silk over her bones. “I am still learning how to cook,” she said, ladling stew into a bowl. “We all do what work we can, and I’m no good at lifting stones or shaping logs.” She dropped a spoon into the bowl and handed it to him. “Be careful; it is very hot. When I saw your harp, I assumed that you had come to join the school.” A hot bite rendered him mute; he could only raise his brows at her until she enlightened him. “Declan’s school.”

  He swallowed too quickly; the pain made his voice harsh. “Declan.”

  “King Oroh’s bard. You harp; you must have heard of him. He came here to live when he relinquished his position at King Oroh’s court two years ago. He fell in love with this plain. He says that wind and leaves and stones here speak the oldest language in the world and that he can teach us to understand it. By then, he had played everywhere in the five—Belden, it is now. He wasn’t alone here long. Rumor found him, and then we did.”

  “How?” His voice still sounded seared. “How did rumor find a way across this emptiness?”

  “Who knows? A bird told a fox who told a tinker’s mule ... Word traveled. Declan played for my father, Lord Deste, at his court in Estmere when I was fifteen, six months after my brothers battled King Oroh for Estmere. I left home to come to Stirl Plain the day I learned Declan was here. My father and brothers tried to stop me, but ... His music has that effect. I wasn’t his first student, and more musicians kept coming after I did. Winter here is pitiless, and this tower grew too small for us. So we began to build around it.”

  A ragged flow of voices preceded the clatter of feet down the ancient watchtower steps behind her. Nairn shifted his eyes, a bite of mutton frozen between his teeth. The lean, fox-haired bard spiraled into view first, his harp over his shoulder, and a shepherd’s pipe in one hand. He looked back at Nairn without surprise.

  “You took your time,” he commented.

  Nairn, still transfixed, stared at him, as the students, a
motley crowd of men and women of varying ages and circumstances, jostled past them. He felt his skin constrict suddenly, as he guessed that those owl’s eyes must have watched every step he had taken across the plain, and maybe even down his secret, crooked path before that.

  “The third time,” he whispered, hearing the charm behind him begin to ladle stew for the others. “How did you know I would find you?”

  “Where else,” Declan asked, his voice mingling patience and exasperation, “in this utterly oblivious land, could you go?”

  It was a while before Nairn understood that question, a little longer than that before he realized how right the bard was, and far too late when he understood at last how wrong.

  Chapter Five

  The guest bard, Zoe Wren, was cooking breakfast for her father in the ancient cavern of the tower kitchen when Phelan knocked and walked in. She broke off midline of the ribald song she had encountered at the Merry Rampion sometime in the wee hours after the king’s birthday and reached for a couple more eggs without bothering to look. She knew the sound of his knuckle and the sound of his knock in exactly the middle of which slat in the door ever since they were both five, and the knock was a lot lower down on the door. They had known each other that long. Wood wailed against stone as he pulled out a chair. The scarred deal table creaked as his knee hit a leg; the glass teapot and butter dish lids trembled; one elbow thumped as she broke an egg. It splashed, as the other thumped, into the bowl of liquid, floating suns.

  He spoke then. “Someday,” he warned. “Someday you’ll think it’s me, and it won’t be—”

  “Nonsense. I feel you come in like an old familiar song, only without the sound.” She turned finally, laughing at herself. “You know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t.” He was smiling, maybe at the sight of her bare feet, the sleeves of her school robe shoved back to her elbows over yesterday’s silks, a strand of her rumpled dark hair trying to join the eggs in the bowl. “Late night?”