The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Offended by such a confection? It’s a trifle, a fantasy, and your voice would make it a marvel, a shining jewel out of Grishold’s past.” He paused again. “There is, of course, the question of the different endings. Which do you prefer?”

  “My favorite,” she said, attuned to what was on his mind, “is the one where the kestrels fly in the opposite direction, for the language of birds is the language of love, at least once in their feathery lives, and they lead the scheming nobles away from the lovers.”

  “Yes,” Quennel exclaimed happily. “My favorite as well.”

  “Though I do like the long, dark notes of the ending where nobles chop off her true love’s head.”

  “Oh, no. Indeed, no.”

  “Too dark.”

  “Another supper, perhaps. Though,” he said, lowering his own sinewy voice as though the nobles were listening, “I do love those notes, too. Yet so rarely is there an appropriate occasion for them ...”

  Zoe smiled, answered as softly, “We could sing it now, together. The hall is empty; the guards will never tell.”

  They tuned their harps, began the centuries-old ballad, with its unhappy ending most likely as close to the truth of the matter as a bard ever got.

  They hadn’t yet reached it themselves when the great hall began an eerie counterpoint of its own: voices, a great many steps, some slowing, others tapping away in a spiderweb of directions, laughter, exclamations, all tangled together and becoming noisier. Quennel, looking both annoyed and perplexed, finally laid his hands flat on his strings, signaling silence. Zoe set her harp down reluctantly, regretting the unsung ending. She followed Quennel into the gallery, where they could look over the oak balustrade down into the hall.

  “He’s early,” Quennel murmured with surprise.

  A formidable bald man in brocade and black leather was kissing the queen, whose voice was raised in surprise as well. Courtiers hurried across the hall to join her; pages were running out to summon others; the duke’s wife and their entourage crowded in behind him, while footmen slipped behind them and out to see to the luggage. Zoe hung over the rail, watching the colorful crowd, the gathering of the king’s children hurrying through this door, that, to greet their uncle. The cacophony reached a lively crescendo before she saw the face in the crush watching her.

  A young, big, restive man with dark eyes, his long hair black and gleaming like a racehorse, had tossed his head back to scan the gallery. He heard us, Zoe thought with astonishment. All that noise around him, and he looked for the hidden musicians.

  “Who—” she began, and stopped herself, knowing who, of course, he must be, even before she spotted his harp.

  The duke’s bard smiled at her as though he had heard, through the tumult, even that fragment of a question. Her hands tightened a little on the wood. She amended her first impression.

  “Who is that kelpie?”

  She realized, at Quennel’s dry chuckle, that she had spoken aloud, and, from the glint in the midnight eyes, the sudden flash of teeth, that the kelpie had heard her as well.

  Chapter Six

  Neither history nor poetry adequately explains why Nairn decided to stay at Declan’s school. Aside from any ambiguous feelings about Declan, which are examined with great enthusiasm in ballads but rarely documented, the choice was unexpected. Most likely, Nairn had never been to a school in his life. They were few and far between in the Marches and of rare interest to a crofter’s son. Nairn was born to wander; he learned his craft on the road, and though he had roamed widely before reaching Stirl Plain, he still had much of Belden to lure him onward, new instruments to discover and learn, much music, in both taverns and courts, he had never heard.

  And yet, on Stirl Plain, he stopped and stayed.

  As a teacher or a student, no one is certain. Ballads tend to focus on the relationship between Nairn and Declan. The school itself becomes a backdrop for their competitions, their feuds, their friendship. They are thrall to the whims of changing story; truth becomes whatever suits the tale. They challenge one another to lengthy bardic riddle-games; they fall in love with the same woman (this apparently despite the difference in their ages); Nairn seeks revenge for Declan’s loyalty to the king who conquered the Marches. If there is any truth to these incidents, history remains mute. The most coherent documented references to Nairn at this time are in the household records of the school.

  For the scant year in question, they are noted daily by the first school steward. He began his records in the spring before Nairn joined the school, perhaps watching, as he wrote in his high tower room, the building going up around the tower beneath him that grew to look, by summer’s end, much as it does today.

  “Accounts rendered this day to Hewn Flout, cobbler, for six pair of sandals for various students and masters, and for patching Nairn’s boots.”

  “Accounts rendered this day to Lyth Holme for a breeding sow, chosen by Nairn.”

  “Accounts received this day by cloth merchant, Han Speller, his daughter and his servant for lodgings and for stable, and for one crockery washbasin broken by said daughter against a door Nairn closed behind him.”

  And so on, prosaic entries rarely referencing even an echo of the tumultuous ballads, all signed: “by my hand Dower Ren, Steward.”

  I leave the footprint of the fox behind me,

  I ride the night with owls’ wings,

  I am the key that opens the heart of a jewel,

  I am the heartwood of the sounding harp.

  Who am I?

  FROM “THE RIDDLING OF DECLAN AND NAIRN,” ANONYMOUS

  Her hair the froth of windblown wave,

  Her eyes the ancient woodland green,

  Pale hands that shape the music from the pipe,

  And stroke the wild sweetness from the harp.

  They loved her, the two great bards,

  Old and young, they loved her both.

  They went to her and bade that bright mouth tell

  Which of them she loved best? She spoke:

  “Play for me, and my heart will hear

  Who truly loves, and who loves only love.”

  FROM “THE PRINCESS OF ESTMERE” BY MRS. WELTERSTONE

  He would have walked away from Declan’s school without one last glance at his unfinished stew, but for that one unexpected thunderbolt: Lord Deste’s daughter. He had sung a thousand times a thousand tales and ballads about love and never felt it once. It was, he realized starkly the longer he lingered, like singing about fire without ever experiencing its warmth and wonders, its pain, its absolute necessity. He had strewn the word as freely as wildflowers along his path through the world, tossing it here, there, like a small, pleasing gift that cost nothing and would be forgotten even before it withered. He had never before come up against his own absolute ignorance of it.

  Declan tended to dwell on the question of Nairn’s ignorance as well, though he seemed to be complaining about something entirely different, when Nairn bothered to pay attention to him. Mostly he did not. He did whatever he was asked: he carried stones, shaped wood for beams and rafters, shared songs of the Marches with the other students, learned their songs, learned to read, without thinking about much of anything but the long-fingered, green-eyed beauty in the kitchen. Why Declan wanted him to learn his letters eluded him. His memory was faultless and inexhaustible. If the words were already in his head, why bother learning to write them? But he did what he was told, only for the privilege, twice or thrice a day, of putting himself next to Odelet, receiving a plate, a cup from her hands, and taking the memory of her expression, her low, sweet, voice, whatever words she spoke, away with him to contemplate during the rest of the busy, meaningless day.

  Declan snagged his attention once, when he told Nairn not to show his writing or speak of it to anyone. It seemed a suspicious request since the purpose of writing was to be seen, shared. But turn the request every which way and on its head as he did, Nairn made no sense of it.

  “You’re far too old to
be learning to read and write,” Declan told him briskly when he finally asked. “But it must be done, so do it quickly and quietly, and no one you care about will laugh at you. I have asked a few of the others to learn, too,” he added. “They will keep it secret as well, as I require.”

  It seemed easy enough to master. A few straight twiggy ink scratches turned this way and that fashioned a word that meant “shirt” or “egg” or “eye” depending on the pattern. They had other meanings as well, Declan told him, but did not say what, only that the meaning at its simplest contained its power.

  That much Nairn understood: he was learning daily the peculiar, poignant turmoil of the simplest, most common of words.

  “Heart” for instance. He was vaguely aware, from its rhythms, of the position of his heart in his body. But for the first time in his life, he was stumbling, will he, nil he, into an awareness of why so many emotions and abstractions in song and poetry were attached to that faithfully thumping organ. It acquired an unusual life of its own. It expressed itself in odd ways, pounding almost painfully at an unexpected view of Odelet in the kitchen garden, her graceful hands searching through green leaves for pea pods. At the sight of her emerging from the henhouse with an egg basket, her slender neck bending gracefully under the lintel, his heart would send the blood flashing through him with all the force and silent thunder of distant lightning. Around her his throat dried, his palms sweated, his feet grew enormous. He whispered her name to anything that would listen: the sun, the moon, the carrot tassels in the garden. Practicing his secret writing one morning, he felt an overwhelming urge to watch her name flow out of his quill. But none of the words he had learned from Declan came close to it.

  How many twiglet-strokes and in what pattern would mean “Odelet”?

  He could not ask her, and he would torment himself into oblivion before he opened his heart to Declan. His heart, a delicate object those days, would not permit him to bring the matter anywhere near Declan. It would shrivel within him at the bard’s amusement, cringe like a cur, and try to slink out of sight behind some stronger organ. No matter how he shaped the request, even at its simplest it would bring to life an impossible image: the lowly Pig-Singer casting his eyes at the daughter of an Estmere noble. Even in ballads, such tangles rarely ended happily. Usually someone died. Nairn doubted that Odelet, who seemed obliviously unruffled around him, would burst into the traditional storm of grief over him. She might, he imagined, let fall one cool pearl of pity at the idea of his torment, then promptly forget all about him.

  He finally remembered the one man who could write everyone’s name, and did, routinely, without paying the least attention to the complications of the heart, as long as they affected neither accounts rendered nor received.

  Nairn had never gone farther into the ancient tower than the kitchen. Somewhere up there, Declan taught his classes; somewhere up there, the school steward kept his records and himself. The students slept in a jumbled warren of tiny rooms whose walls they built themselves under the completed portion of the new building’s roof. There was little Declan taught that Nairn didn’t know, and he tried to stay out from under the bard’s yellow gaze: strange things happened when their paths crossed.

  But for the sake of seeing Odelet’s name flow out of the ink in his quill nib, he would venture into the unexplored regions of the tower.

  Odelet was chopping a chicken with a cleaver when he crossed the kitchen. She didn’t notice him until, watching her blade pierce the pale, plucked, hapless breastbone, Nairn walked into the edge of the open tower door. He winced and rubbed his nose, then glanced at her furtively to see if she had noticed his bumbling, just as she turned her face hastily away from him and gazed impassively down at the chicken. She raised the cleaver; he slipped across the threshold and up the stairs.

  The narrow windows spiraling up the walls gave him glimpses of the long summer evening, the plain turning and turning around him as he moved. Yellow-gray sky at one horizon where the sun had gone down changed in the next elongated frame to the river winding its way to yet another horizon, trees along its banks bending protectively over the mystery of water. Moonlight spilled across the next window, silvering the distant sky. Beyond the next, massive stones watched the guttering end of day, watched for the stars. The next slit sparked with a sudden glow as someone lit a lamp at the tavern door beside the river. Nairn passed Declan’s chambers, then: the lower, where he taught, the higher, where he slept. Both doors were closed. At the next window, Nairn heard someone harping in the twilight, softly, dreamily: Declan, perhaps, sitting in the ring of stones and watching moonlight crust the dark, massive tower on the field below, rising so high it seemed crowned with stars.

  Nairn stopped. He clung to that meager opening with both hands, trying to widen it as he pushed his face to the stones and stared at the tower. He blinked. It vanished as he opened his eyes; he saw the familiar emptiness below, rapidly misting into night. He let go of the stones finally, stepped back, still staring. A moon shadow, he conceded finally, flung by the watchtower itself across the grass. He turned, continued his climb up the seemingly endless steps, the harper’s music drifting along with him.

  He reached the steward’s door at last, somewhere near the roof, and marked by the book and quill he had sketched beside a series of incomprehensible shapes. He knocked.

  The steward called out from within. Nairn found him at his table, quill in hand, looking up from his massive book, his eyes still full of numbers. He was around Nairn’s age; other than that, the two young men might have been born on different stars. Ink ran in the steward’s veins, Nairn guessed. His heart beat by rote: it would go on counting one number after another until it stopped. Still, the steward was a kindly young man, for all his gravity. He asked no questions about Nairn’s odd request, just began flipping pages in his book.

  “Odelet. I remember an entry, just before you came here.”

  Nairn looked over his shoulder, watched as the steward settled on a page and ran his fingers down the lines.

  “Here. Accounts received for three nights’ lodging and stable from Berwin Deste, brother of Odelet Deste.” He pointed to a flowing fragment within the line of knots and coils. “This word spells her name.”

  Nairn studied it. He brushed at the hair over his eyes and studied it again. “What is that?”

  “What?”

  “That.” He ran his hand through the air above the page. “What came out of your quill.”

  “It’s writing.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The steward raised his head abruptly, met Nairn’s eyes. After a moment, he pushed the book toward Nairn, dipped his quill, and offered it. “Show me. There in that blank space. What your writing looks like.”

  Entirely ignoring Declan’s requirement for secrecy, Nairn leaned over the page, arranged four twiglets into a pattern.

  “Ah,” Dower said softly, gazing at the twigs. “I understand why you are confused. That’s an ancient way of writing. I don’t know it, though I’ve seen it here and there, carved into standing stones. No one writes like that anymore. I should say: I didn’t know that anyone still does.”

  “Then why is Declan teaching it to me?”

  “I don’t know.” The steward’s head was still lowered as he studied the word Nairn had left in the margin. “You’ll have to ask him. What does this mean?”

  “Onion. Yes. I will ask. Can you show me—” He took another look at the onion-shaped circle that began Odelet’s name, and shook his head hopelessly. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I mean: not to her.”

  Dower was silent, flicking the feathered end of the quill at the page. He looked up at Nairn finally. “Why don’t you just tell her?”

  Nairn’s heart spoke first, sent the blood roiling through his body. That language, he realized, was clear. “I’m terrified,” he mumbled, his tongue stumbling over the word.

  The steward straightened, dipped his nib again, wrote a word on a corner of the page and to
re it carefully free. “Here. That’s how she would write her name.”

  Nairn took the tiny paper triangle wordlessly. In his chamber, a cell in the hive containing a pallet, a couple of dowels shoved between stones in the wall for hanging clothes and instruments, and a rough table for his candle and oddments, he studied the word, repeating it over and over until he remembered every curve and angle, every spike and cross. Then he pushed the paper through the hole in the sound box of his harp, where it would tremble and resonate to all the music he played.

  Then he went to talk to Declan.

  The bard was easily found: Nairn stuck his head out the door into the night and heard his harping. He followed it to where Declan sat in his favorite place, leaning against one of the great standing stones on the crown of the hill and playing to the moon. It must have been his harping that Nairn had heard as he climbed up the tower; it stopped as Nairn halted beside him, glancing puzzledly down the hill for the outlines of the unfamiliar tower in the dark.

  Then he felt Declan’s eyes on him, and he said brusquely, “You lied to me again.”

  For a moment, the bard was silent, motionless. Then he set his harp beside him in the grass and answered evenly, “Then you spoke of what I asked you to keep secret. How else would you know?”

  “It’s such a small thing—Why would you lie about something that unimportant?”

  “Whom did you tell?”

  “Dower Ren. I went to him to ask him how to spell one word—”

  “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  Nairn felt himself redden, said shortly, “It was private.”