The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He’s good,” someone murmured beside her. “I’ll give him that. Zoe, do you know where I can find your father?”

  She closed her eyes, opened them again, finally shaken fully awake and astonished at herself. She turned her head, met Phelan’s preoccupied eyes.

  “Didn’t you hear that?” she whispered.

  “Of course I did. I followed you out here.”

  “I mean—the trees singing. Didn’t you hear the oak sing?”

  He shook his head. “I must have missed that part.” He was silent a moment, peering at her; then he smiled. “You look bewitched. Even your hair seems full of elflocks. He’s been having that effect. Frazer looks even more spell-raddled than you. Do you know where—”

  “No.” Then she pulled her thoughts together. “My father’s not in the tower? He’s usually still there at noon.” Phelan shook his head. “Then I don’t know where—Why? Is it important?”

  “Yes, but only to me. He suggested I search some of the old stewards’ records for my paper.”

  She shrugged, her mind straying again to the peculiarity in the oak grove. “Just take them,” she suggested. “He wouldn’t care. Most of them are covered with cobwebs and dust.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The bard, she saw suddenly, was looking at them across the crowd spilling out from under the grove. She couldn’t read his expression, but she could guess at it. He had unraveled his heart for them, spun it into gold and woven gold into a web. The two flies buzzing obliviously on the outermost strand of it would cause the bard dissatisfaction greater than his pleasure in all the trapped and motionless morsels within the shining threads.

  “Yes,” she whispered quickly, and turned her back on the bard, followed Phelan into the clear and genial light of day. “I’m going to see Quennel,” she told him when they were out of earshot. “He asked me to visit him today. I’ll let my father know you’ve borrowed his books. If he even notices.”

  “Thank you.”

  She mused equally over Kelda and Phelan on her way to the castle. About what she had heard, and what Phelan had not. She had been as transfixed, as spellbound as anyone, she admitted. Anyone except Phelan, who had blundered through such beauty as though his ears were corked like kegs. He had heard the notes, but he had missed the music. Why?

  She had neglected to change her clothes, so determined she had been to get out of the broad range of Kelda’s attention. Something was askew with him, brilliant as he was, something amiss. Her student’s robe and her familiar face eased her way into the castle; she was escorted to Quennel’s chambers and promptly admitted.

  His color was better, she saw immediately. Not so his mood. He smiled when he saw her; his pleasure was genuine but brief, before the frown turned the smile upside down. He was still in bed, she saw with surprise, covered with silk and eyelet lace, with a cap on his willful hair.

  “My throat is raw,” he said disgruntledly. “I can’t sing tonight.”

  “You could play,” she urged him, inspired. “I’ll sing for you.”

  The thought brought out his smile again. It faded more slowly as he looked at her silently, his reddened eyes unblinking, an expression in them she couldn’t fathom.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said finally, when she thought he might be drifting off to sleep again.

  “Yes,” she said quickly. “Anything.”

  “I have been thinking about this yesterday evening, and most of the night, and this morning. You understand that I’ve given it my most careful attention.”

  “Yes.”

  “So don’t argue with me. I am going to relinquish my position as Royal Bard of King Lucien’s court.” She opened her mouth; nothing came out but a rush of air. “I would wait until Lord Grishold leaves,” he added distastefully, “if I had any hope that his bard would actually leave with him.”

  “You’re going to retire? Because of a mouthful of salmon?”

  “So why wait?”

  “But—” She started to sit on air, looked around hastily to pull a chair into place. She sat, leaned forward, her hands folded tightly among the bed linens, her eyes wide, studying his face as though the answer lurked within his bones. “But why? There’s no need. You are still vigorous, your voice as tuned and resonant as ever, your ear as fine, your fingers—”

  “My ear, my voice, my fingers are all telling me that as well,” he said so dryly his voice rasped. “But I saw my fate in that mouthful of fish. This is what I must do. I will announce my impending retirement but continue to play as Royal Bard until the moment a new bard is chosen.”

  “There will be a competition,” she whispered, feeling even her lips go cold. “Between bards from all over the realm for the highest position. They will come to Caerau to compete, and I will be here to see it.”

  “You will compete in it,” he told her grimly, and she felt the full weight of his determination, anger, and despair. “And you will win.” She stared at him, breathless, mute. “You will win,” he said again, harshly. “You will find the roots and wellsprings of this land within you, and sing them until the moon herself weeps. Because if you don’t, that bard from Grishold, who is no bard but something ancient, dark, and dangerous, will sing in my place to the king, and I don’t know what will befall this land when he has finished his song.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It’s here, around the time of Declan’s competition, that the boundaries of history begin to blur into the fluid realm of poetry, much as a well-delineated borderline might falter into and become overwhelmed by the marsh it crosses. Where, the historian might ask bewilderedly, did the border go? Nothing but this soggy expanse of uncertain territory in front of us, where we were stringently following the clear and charted path of truth.

  That Declan called the gathering of the bards is recorded in many places. Oroh’s court chronicles mention it: “At last Declan gave the king hope that he would have a bard once again at his side, for counsel and for diversion, for the king loved his music greatly and would hear none but the best.” We might pause here and give King Oroh a measure of sympathy, for no bard in his new court, however gifted, would know the cherished ballads and poetry of his native land; Declan and death had taken them away.

  Evidence in other chronicles, in letters, in household records indicating the absence of a family member “who rode to Stirl Plain for the gathering of bards”: all give us proof beyond poetry of the event. And indeed the bards came from high and low, from near and far, from the wealthiest court, the meanest tavern, from the northern fishing villages, the crags of the west, the salt marshes of the south. From every part of Belden, bards, musicians, minstrels, anyone with an instrument or a voice to sing with, converged upon Stirl Plain.

  Fortunately, Declan allowed the villagers the few brief months between winter and midsummer to prepare for them. Before the bards came the builders and the traders, the barges carrying lumber from the northern forests, wagons carrying a wealth of other things, followed by people hoping for work after the terrible winter. One can imagine buildings sprouting like mushrooms up and down the riverbanks, crowding along the road leading up the hill to the school. Inns, taverns, shops flew up as both the wealthy and the poor began to make their way across the plain.

  It was, as we can guess, the beginnings of the great city that later became the official residence of the rulers of Belden.

  At the same time, it must have seemed a magical place, in which all the music of the five kingdoms might be heard, and, along with the bards, came their audience to listen and marvel at the best that Belden had to offer.

  But before that, the fading shadow of winter left a stranger in its wake, an elusive, ambiguous figure sighted only briefly, at a tangent, in the poetry of the time, and in history only between the lines.

  The oldest bard came, even he,

  From the beginning of the world.

  Old as poetry he was,

  Old as memory.

  The music on Stirl Plai
n

  Woke the stones on Bone Plain,

  And he came out from under

  To play the first songs of the world,

  That no one else remembers.

  FRAGMENT FROM “THE GATHERING OF THE BARDS,” ANONYMOUS

  The stranger came at the forefront of the flow of musicians on the plain, so soon after Declan had sent out word of the competition that it seemed only the trees and stones of Stirl Plain could have gotten the word any earlier. Sometime afterwards, Nairn realized that was exactly so; earlier, he was simply surprised at the efficiency of Declan’s methods. The bard spoke; the harper appeared almost before the moon had decided to change the expression on her face.

  The students of the Circle of Days had grown oddly closer since Drue’s death. With all their spiky differences and sharp opinions, they were bound not only by an ancient, secret language, but by a vision of the breathtaking randomness of life: not even they, possessing the oldest name for death, could see it coming. Sometime during the ebb of the endless winter, they had begun to meet, in the evening once or twice a week, at the tavern Shea’s father the brewer had built on the other side of the river. They drank his ale, drew runes with burned twigs on his rackety tables and in the ashes sifting out of the grate, and challenged one another obliquely, in one language, to answer with the patterns of another.

  Nairn, still struggling with the power and deadly potential of the ancient words, played their tavern games cautiously and ventured few opinions about what value Master Declan’s list of words might have when the students finally learned them all. They had no clue, Nairn learned with wonder. The thought that he had flung his heart into a burning icicle and sent it plunging down onto Drue’s oblivious head would never have crossed their minds.

  “Do you think they would have believed you if you had blamed yourself?” Declan asked succinctly when Nairn had come to explain to him how Drue died. “You’re the crofter’s son who sang his first songs to the pigs in the sty, and who can barely write his own name. You couldn’t claim such power without having to prove it, and how would you do that with all the fear that festers in you now? Drue’s death was an accident. Let it lie.”

  “And lie and lie,” Nairn retorted bitterly, white with horror and pacing circles around the bard in his work chamber. The golden eyes flashed at him, but Declan stayed silent. “And you’re right. I am afraid, now. I don’t know enough to know how to be careful. It was like killing someone with a love song you were playing to someone else entirely. Death was the last thing on my mind. Then it was all.”

  “Accept it. It happened. Learn from it so that it never happens again.”

  “I could just stop. Just. Stop. I don’t need magic. Only my harp and the road—”

  “You have gone too far, learned too much, to return to innocence,” Declan said evenly. “Better to learn to control your great power than to carry such potential for disaster around with you and always be afraid of it.” Nairn opened his mouth; the bard, reading his expression or his mind, interrupted. “Think,” he urged. “You can live in ignorance and uncertainty, or with the knowledge and the certainty that you will never kill again without intent. Either way, you must live with the power. With yourself. Think. Then tell me what you want.”

  The bard was right, Nairn realized as days passed. About that, and about the other thing: his fellow students of the Circle of Days would have fallen out of their chairs laughing over Nairn’s pretensions and arrogance if he had tried to claim Drue’s death.

  None of them, not even Nairn, noticed the stranger in the tavern when he first appeared. Nairn’s eyes wandered toward a dark mass at a table in the shadows that was farthest from the fire. Something about it, or within it, made his glance glide over it as though it were a bench or a floorboard, a thing too familiar to bother naming. They were all nearing the bottom of their first beers, and wildly guessing, since Shea’s father was back in the brewery and they seemed the only company, what mysteries lay hidden within the twig-words, when out of nowhere came the unmistakable sound of a harp being tuned.

  They all jumped. Osprey knocked over the last of his beer. The man in the shadows, his craggy face oddly visible now above the harp in his broad, blunt hands, spoke first as they stared.

  “You’re students of his, then? Master Declan? The one who called the competition?”

  Shea swallowed audibly, then cleared her throat of any remnants of twig language. “Yes,” she said, and, unwontedly flustered, she got to her feet and barked for her father. “Da! Company!”

  “Coming!” her father bellowed back briskly.

  “You got here fast,” Osprey remarked, righting his mug.

  “I was passing across the plain.” His voice was deep and gravelly, a sough of stones dragged in the undertow. “Am I first, then?”

  “But for us,” Blayse answered pointedly, and a smile, or a sudden flare of light from the fire, glided over the man’s face.

  “But for you. You were here first.” He thumbed a string, then raised his brows uncertainly. “I doubt you’ll want to spare a coin for my harping, being bards yourselves, then. But I’m all out, and as dry as any stone.”

  “Play if you want,” Shea answered, shrugging. “Others might come in and think you’re worth—”

  “Play,” Nairn said abruptly, interrupting her. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Me, too,” the genial Osprey echoed, and the man’s smile was more than illusion, this time.

  “That’s good of you,” he murmured.

  His fingers seemed a trifle stiff on the strings, as though he had not played in some time. But his notes were sweet and true. Nairn, listening intently as was his habit, heard the familiar phrase now and then, but always it wandered off in an unexpected direction. Wherever he had learned his music, it was not in the Marches, nor in any kingdom Nairn had passed through, including Stirl Plain. It sounded old to him: simple and lovely and haunted with ghosts of music he knew.

  “Where are you from?” he asked, when the brewer had brought the harper his beer. He waited while the man drank half of it. Somewhere past young, he looked, hale and brawny as a blacksmith; his leather boots and trousers were old and stained with travel. His dark hair and the stubble on his chin were streaked with white. His harp seemed worn as well, plain and scarred with time, like the harper. He had strange eyes, both blue, but one pale and one dark, as though he saw out of one by day and the other by twilight. Both held the same narrowed, curious expression; both seemed always on the verge of smiling.

  The man set his tankard down finally. “Upriver.”

  “Upriver. The Stirl?”

  He nodded. “At the northernmost edge of the plain. My name is Welkin.”

  “You walked a ways. I don’t suppose you’re hungry as well?”

  The man, riffling over the harp strings, stilled his fingers and gave Nairn an unfathomable look. “Depends,” he said finally, doubtfully. “How do you like my harping?”

  Nairn smiled. “Very much. You play songs I’ve never heard.”

  “Ah, it’s all old. You’re a kind young man.”

  “I’ve done my share of walking. I know how the road goes.” He glanced at Shea, who huffed an exasperated sigh and got to her feet.

  “Da! Food!”

  “Coming!”

  She threw her cloak around her, added tersely to Nairn, “I’m going back up, now we’re finished talking. Coming?” she demanded of Blayse, and he shifted reluctantly, finished his beer on the way up. “Well, I’m not walking up in the dark by myself. Not after what happened to Drue.”

  “I’ll stay to walk with you,” Osprey said gravely to Nairn. “Fend off the slavering icicles.”

  “It’s not funny,” Shea snapped, and flounced out with Blayse in her wake. “Da! Night!”

  “Good night, girl!”

  Nairn and Osprey stayed to drink beer and listen, after Welkin emptied another tankard and a bowl of root vegetables and mutton stewed in beer. When Osprey laid his face on the ta
ble and began to snore, Nairn woke him with a scatter of moldy coins from the Marches and stood up. The brewer, a big, beefy man with florid cheeks, heard the sound of money through the music and appeared to bid them farewell. Welkin finished his song and moved to warm himself before he, too, wandered out into the night.

  “Where will you stay?” Nairn asked him.

  “I’ll find a place,” the harper answered vaguely. “That’s never a problem.” He set his harp on the table, opened his hands to the fire.

  “You might find a bed at the school.”

  “Maybe. One of these nights.”

  Nairn wrapped himself against the brittle cold, taking a closer look at Welkin’s harp. The scores on it were deliberate, he saw, made with a knife. Then the lines arranged themselves into some very familiar patterns, and his thoughts froze.

  The harper took one hand away from the warmth, as though he had heard the sound of Nairn’s brain stumbling over itself, and reached back to pick up his harp. “I’m grateful for the beer and food,” he said. Nairn shifted his eyes to follow the path of the harp, saw it disappear into its matted sheepskin case. He met the harper’s eyes then; the faint, enigmatic smile had deepened. “Good night to you, young masters.”

  “Stay,” the brewer said abruptly. “Sleep by the fire there. It’s brutal out tonight.”

  The harper shook his head. “I’ll find my own way, but thank you, master brewer.”

  He opened the door. Osprey, yawning hugely, followed. Nairn bumped into him as the door closed; he was stopped dead and peering bewilderedly here and there at the tangled moon shadows of tree limbs.

  “He just vanished, the harper did. Just—” His teeth had already begun to chatter.

  “Never mind,” Nairn said, pulling him into motion again. “You heard him.”

  “But—”

  “He can take care of himself.”

  By the time Nairn saw the harper again, the cruel winter had finally melted away into spring. Grass flowed over the plain again, green to the farthest horizons; its gentle hillocks melted into vivid blue. The Stirl melted and surged, bringing musicians, workers and wood for building, farm animals to feed the visitors. The plain buried its stillness deep in the earth; what went on above it was now a constant clatter of hammering, wagons coming and going, people camping on it, keeping a wild, colorful motley of music going that reminded Nairn of a barnyard before breakfast. Rich pavilions went up next to small tents that had mushroomed into circles on the grass overnight. Stalls selling anything imaginable rose on their ramshackle frames; fires burned from dawn to midnight as food was cooked and sold to the arriving bards. The village, so sparse and coldly gray during the winter, became, half a season later, unrecognizable, buildings flying up like magic, some for the few months before the competition, others to last past a lifetime.