The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She nodded, gazing at him a moment longer, sensing things awry, hidden behind his smile. She turned back to the old iron stove, dropped a lump of butter into the pan heating on it. Her own elegant face, lean and brown, hid little and flashed color, from her shrewd green eyes and her holly-berry mouth. Phelan’s pale coloring had first caught her curious gaze when she had come out of the refectory kitchen upstairs where her mother was cooking, and saw the small boy with his duck-fluff hair and his wide eyes as opaque as mist, sitting silently, expressionlessly beside his father.

  “I stayed with Chase,” she said over her shoulder. “Some bards out of the north came down to hear what kind of music the students play. They taught us some wonderfully rowdy songs. I just got back. How is your father?”

  “Why?”

  “You have that expression on your face.”

  She heard him lean back hard in his chair until it creaked. He answered dispassionately enough. “I found him in the wasteland across Dockers Bridge at dawn yesterday. That gave him a few hours to get cleaned up for the king’s party. He was sitting in the mud by the river, singing to the standing stones. He wonders how I find him, but even he is predictable. I just look around his most recent dig site.” He paused, added restively, “I don’t know what he’s looking for. I wish I did. Once I thought he was wandering around Caerau digging graves, trying to find his own death. But he keeps finding treasures instead ...”

  Zoe upended a chopping board full of onions, chives, sausages, into the frothing butter. She stirred them, said slowly, “Death is easy enough to find. Isn’t it? If you truly want it. So he must want something else.”

  “He has everything else,” Phelan said, then paused. His mouth crooked. “Except music. But if he put me in this school to make up for his own abysmal failure here, it makes no sense to let me turn my back to all I’ve learned and walk away—”

  “No,” Zoe said pointedly, rapping the spoon on the pan for emphasis. “No more than it makes sense for you to want to.”

  He ignored that. “He’s rich in so much else. Everything he touches turns to gold. The King of Belden calls him friend despite his eccentricities. Even my mother still loves him.”

  She glanced back at him. “Even you do.”

  He flung up a hand. “But why?”

  Zoe thought, but had nothing to add to the familiar litany of conjectures about Jonah that they had strung together through the years. She added salt to the mix, stirred it, sent the smells swirling through the kitchen.

  “How was your class this morning?” she asked to get them off the labyrinthine subject. “Everyone awake?”

  “Except me. I’ve started them memorizing the ninety verses of the ‘Catalog of Virtues.’ It’s enough to drive everyone to slavering mayhem in the streets of Caerau. Except for Frazer. He’s inhaling it all in through his pores. He thinks there’s magic between the lines.”

  Her eyes widened at the word; she stared hard into the pan, turning things mindlessly with her fork until the onion fumes bit at her eyes. She blinked. “Magic.”

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about. Except what you did yesterday at the king’s party. That song—I swear it nearly melted the expression on my father’s face. That was magic.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Where did you find it? It sounded as though you dug it out of a barrow.”

  She nodded, peppering the eggs vigorously. “It’s very old. Quennel taught it to me.”

  “The Royal Bard? That Quennel?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wouldn’t part with a song if you held fire to his feet.”

  “He likes me,” she answered cheerfully. “He says I’m what the plain would sound like if it sang, wind, bird, bone, and stone. Don’t ask me. That’s what he said. What exactly did Frazer say to you?”

  “Exactly, I don’t remember. Something about secrets. The secrets of the bardic arts. When he would be taught them.”

  “Strange,” she breathed. “Maybe you should do your research paper on that.”

  “On what? A connection between magic and poetry?”

  “When Oroh fought his only battle in the Marches, according to the ‘The Lament for the Marches,’ his bard Declan raised a fog with his poetry that blinded King Anstan’s army so badly they could not recognize one another’s faces. Anstan’s army fought itself; Oroh’s mostly stood and watched.” Phelan was silent behind her. “The magic was in the words. The words were the magic.”

  “That’s one reference,” he said dryly. “I just want to get out of here, not spend half my life tracking down obscure incidents of bardic magic. Let Frazer write that paper.”

  “Maybe I’ll write it,” she said recklessly. She beat the eggs until they frothed, then added them to the pan, musing over the question. “I wonder what caused Frazer to ask.”

  “I think something he read.”

  “Well, what?”

  “I have no idea.” His voice shrugged the subject away. “Some old ballad, probably. He’ll figure it out, whatever it is he wants to know. He’s bright enough.”

  She drew breath to speak, then stared down into the pan again, without moving, wondering what in her head had leaped at the word without understanding the question at all, and what in Phelan, with all his gifts, failed to resonate with any interest whatsoever.

  She heard her father’s steps on the tower stairs and reached for a spatula to turn the eggs. The smells had wafted to him, pulled him out of the ancient room he used for his office. The chambers of the school steward were as old as the school itself: the four tower rooms up the winding stairs, the hoary kitchen at the bottom, with its huge maw of a hearth that could roast an entire sheep in the days when one sheep could feed the entire student body. Zoe loved the tower. The smoke-stained walls, their stones dug out of field and river, still spoke, she thought, of a time so long ago that the school on the hill with its broken tower and the tiny village called Caerau were surrounded only by grass and fields and the great standing stones so old nobody remembered when or how they had come to the plain.

  Now the oldest school building housed the masters in elegant rooms pieced together out of the hive of tiny stone cells the early school had occupied. The masters’ cook was upstairs in the pristine modern kitchen, supervising their breakfasts. Zoe’s mother had been the cook there until she died. She taught her very small daughter this and that when she was very young, to keep her from running underfoot in the busy kitchen. Even then, tiny Zoe’s singing, vigorous and pure as she stirred the flour and butter and pan juices into gravy, riveted the masters’ attention.

  She pulled plates out of the cupboard, lined them on the table, and divided the eggs between them. The butter was on the table, the fruit in its bowl, the bread already cut on its board. She sat finally. Her father, a tall, spare, graying man with the tidy habits becoming to a steward, greeted Phelan without surprise and asked about his paper. Zoe watched their faces together: the son her father hadn’t gotten around to having, the intelligent, calm, unambiguous father Phelan wished he had. Her thoughts strayed. The Royal Bard had invited her to sing again, during the visit of Queen Harriet’s brother. He was Lord Grishold, Duke of what was once one of the five kingdoms, in the mountains of west Belden. His new bard would be traveling with him. Zoe had never met him. The previous bard in Lord Grishold’s court had forgotten his verses, or mistuned a string, or otherwise embarrassed himself, and had relinquished his position several months before, pleading age. He was upstairs now, eating breakfast in the masters’ refectory, preferring to live out his years in the genial city rather than among the gloomy crags of Grishold.

  She mentioned as much to Phelan as they lingered over cups of tea and coffee, trying to delay the day.

  “I’ve been asked to sing during the formal supper for the guests from Grishold. Are you coming?”

  He looked blank. “I can’t remember if we’ve been invited. I hope not.”

  Bayley Wren set his cup down, asked gently
, “Is he missing again?”

  “Vanished like the dew upon the sloe berry, after the birthday party. I don’t think he even went home to change his clothes. I’m not sure where I’d look for him so soon. It’s easier to find him when he’s running out of money.”

  The steward raised his cup an inch, his pale eyes lowered, then set it down again. “You might try looking in the school’s household records.”

  “For my father?”

  “Well. I was thinking more of your paper.”

  “For some legendary stones?” Phelan said, still bewildered. “What would they be doing among the price of beer or a mended hole in a master’s boot?”

  Bayley gave his slow, thin smile that bracketed his mouth with lines inscribed, Zoe thought, by decades of such painstaking entries. “You’d be surprised at the odd things you can find in those records. They go back centuries, all the way to the first summer, when the first students began to put up the stone walls around this tower.”

  “But Bone Plain—it’s likely no more than a poem. A legend. A communal dream that got handed down from imagination to imagination through the centuries. That’s what most of the papers about it say. There’s no proof it existed in any real place. Every standing stone in Belden has been linked to Bone Plain in one paper or another, and every argument to prove it circles back to poetry. More myth and dreams.”

  “Is it?” He sipped his cooling coffee. Zoe wondered, not for the first time, what was on his mind. “You said you’d picked it for an easy topic. It doesn’t sound easy at all.”

  “It will be,” Phelan insisted. “I’ll write it with my eyes closed as soon as I figure out how to begin.”

  He took himself off to the library soon after. Bayley refilled his cup and carried it up into the tower. Zoe surveyed the mess in the kitchen, decided that it wasn’t going anywhere, and went to give singing lessons to half a dozen beginning students.

  They attracted an audience, the children with their pure, fluting voices, and Zoe tempering her own to roam in a high, sweet descant above theirs. A shadow crossed the open doorway of the small classroom, lingered. She flicked her eyes along it to its owner: the young, golden-haired Frazer, with his wolfish jaw-line and his light blue eyes burning with impatience, longing for mysteries, bewildered by his impulses and his own changing bones. Her voice had lured him, she realized; he was entranced, his eyes wide and cloudy, staring at her without recognition as though she had just sprung fully formed and unnamed from between the floorboards.

  He waited there until she finished the lesson and sent the students flowing out the door around him. Then he stirred, and finally spoke.

  “Zoe.” Like Phelan, she was on that indeterminate border between student and master, given authority but as yet untitled. “I was wondering ... I wanted to ask you something.”

  “About magic?” she guessed, and he flushed, his face tightening.

  “I thought it was secret,” he protested.

  “It’s so secret I don’t know anything about it either. What made you ask Phelan? I mean—I know why you would choose Phelan to ask, but what made you ask at all? Something you read?”

  He was looking at her incredulously by then; he wandered into the room toward her, pulled by some private, wayward path. “How can you ask me that? I hear it in you. Every word you sing says magic. Says power. How could the word itself exist if it means nothing?”

  She gazed back at him, startled, trying to imagine what he felt, what he meant.

  He came closer, his burning eyes haunted with a passion he could scarcely name. Somehow, in the way she could sense Phelan before she saw him, or her father, she felt Frazer’s blind hunger, his frustration, like something unruly, undefined, blundering its way into being.

  He passed it to her, like a gift or a curse, she couldn’t tell; she only knew that in that inexplicable, wordless moment, she recognized what it was he wanted.

  He spoke finally, huskily. “Tell me what it is.”

  “I don’t know.” Her own voice had vanished. “I have glimpsed it, here and there, within the notes of ancient ballads, between the lines: the shadow, the footprint, of something ancient, powerful. Memories, maybe. Resonances.”

  “Yes,” he said urgently. “Yes. Where do I go to learn more?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Still, his eyes clung to hers, wanting, willing answers out of her. You see it, too, he told her without words. You want it, too.

  “Who will you ask?” she heard, and was uncertain which of them had spoken aloud.

  She stepped back finally, drawing breath deeply as though she had been submerged in some timeless, nameless realm and had, for a moment, forgotten that she was human.

  “I don’t know,” she said a third time, feeling at once shaken and inordinately curious. “We may—we may be seeing only the remnants of something long gone from this world. Maybe you and I were just born with primitive eyes. Or hearts. Born with a gift for something that doesn’t exist anywhere any longer, and the recognition, the longing for it is all we’ll ever know.”

  He swayed toward her, as though she, understanding it, had become part of his longing. His face, at once ardent and tentative, looked suddenly very young. She had learned to dance around such impulses; she slipped past him, was at the door as he turned, surprised, searching for her.

  She said simply, “If I do stumble into an answer, I’ll tell you. And you must tell me. Promise.”

  He nodded after a moment, said finally, “I promise,” and she left him there, still wondering, from the look on his face, what had or hadn’t happened.

  She returned to the tower, went upstairs to take off her robe in her room, and downstairs again to see if the kitchen had somehow cleaned itself. It hadn’t. But something of Frazer’s chaotic impulses still clung to her thoughts; the chaos in the kitchen seemed to mirror them. She turned abruptly, went outside, across the school grounds, scarcely seeing the tranquil gardens, the lawns, the gnarled oak, the dreaming stones. She walked down the hill until she spotted a lumbering steam tram, and took it to the bottom. There, along the noisy waterfront, she walked again, on ancient cobbles past docks and fish markets and every kind of shop, until she reached a doorway with a painted sign above it: blue lilies cavorting in a ring beneath the sun’s smiling face. The Merry Rampion, the sign proclaimed, and she went in.

  There she found Chase Rampion drying glasses behind the bar. He noticed her and smiled like the sun, cheerful and benign, golden rays of his uncombed curly hair petaling out around his face. She went behind the bar, threw her arm around his neck, and kissed him, feeling like the parched traveler in the desert stumbling into the unexpected spring. When she loosed him finally, the world within her head had straightened itself out, grown familiar again. The handful scattered among the little wooden tables were chuckling; so was he, when he could finally speak.

  “Good morning to you, too, love. What was that for?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and sat down with him awhile to talk of everything but.

  She found a note from the Royal Bard on the kitchen table next to the crusty frying pan when she got back.

  A day later, she went down the hill again and walked in the opposite direction along the river to Peverell Castle. She wore her students’ robe over the finest of her silks, long skirt and tunic and a colorful filmy scarf chosen to match the colors of the oak leaves dying and reviving on her robe. “I have several suggestions,” Quennel had written in his fine, antique hand, “as to what you might sing for the Duke of Grishold’s supper. Bring your harp.”

  He met her in a little antechamber off the minstrels’ gallery. Decades ago, he had been a student at the school, then, briefly, a master, until the Royal Bard had suddenly and fortuitously died. Custom, which Declan himself had brought into Belden, demanded a competition of all bards interested in the position. In Declan’s own turbulent times, after he had retired from Oroh’s court and opened the school, the competition to choose h
is successor’s successor had been fierce.

  The numbers Quennel had bested were legendary: bards had come from all over the realm vying for the highest position; countless more had come to watch and listen. He had sung one song and everyone had put down their instruments in defeat. Or all their harp strings had snapped. Or one by one, over forty days and forty nights, he had picked them off, put them to shame, sent them packing. The truth of the matter depended on the ballad. Now he was aging, but still vigorous, a hale old man in a long robe the kingfisher blue of his eyes, his short ivory hair still springy and apt to curl if he neglected to prune it.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling fondly at her. He had brought his own harp with him, itself a thing of legend. The uncut jewels on its face were said to have fallen out of Declan’s harp at his death. They had wandered the realm in the pockets of thieves, in the crowns of queens, having their own extraordinary adventures until chance or story found them a haven in Quennel’s harp.

  “I’m honored,” Zoe answered, sitting on a bench beside him. Musicians waited their turns to play, or tuned their instruments in this room. As she took her harp from its case, she could almost hear centuries of overlapping notes echoing around her, resonating in her strings.

  “Yes,” the old bard agreed cheerfully, “you are. But so are you rare and wonderful, and I do all that I can to manipulate events so that I can hear that astonishing voice of yours. Have you had any thoughts about what you would like to sing for the duke?”

  “A ballad about Grishold, I think. Beyond that—” She shook her head, guessing that he had already chosen for her.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of Grishold, most certainly.” He hesitated disingenuously, continued, “I wondered if this perhaps had suggested itself to you: ‘The Duel of the Kestrels.’ Two rivals for the Duke—well, in the ballad they called him king, back then—the King of Grishold’s daughter. You know it?”

  “Of course. They had a competition with their falcons for the privilege of courting her. The one whose bird killed first would win her. It’s a lovely song, wheeling and turning like the birds high in the air, crying out as they see what the nobles cannot: the princess in the distance, riding off with her true love.” She plucked a string, added dubiously, “Do you think he might be offended? Considering that the princess’s true love trounces her father roundly when he attacks to get her back.”