The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Nairn searched constantly among the strangers for the mysterious harper who knew the language of the standing stones and had carved it onto his harp. What the harp said, he didn’t know; the twig-letters, vanishing so swiftly into the harp case, were a complete jumble in his head.

  What Declan said when Nairn told him about the harper, he remembered very clearly, once the bard had finally retrieved his voice.

  “Find him,” he said sharply. “Bring him to me.” He was silent again, pacing a circle around his chamber in the spiraling tower. Then he added tersely, “It’s one thing to take on the magic of another land that everyone there has forgotten. It’s another to meet the one who has not forgotten. Be careful.”

  Nairn wondered at that: the eccentric harper seemed harmless and reasonably civilized. He kept looking for Welkin, enormously curious about this man who had discomposed the imperturbable Declan, and who could hide himself in wood smoke and shadows, and leave no footprints in the snow. But not even the brewer, whose tavern swarmed with musicians by the beginning of summer, had seen him after that winter evening.

  The noise had driven the harper away, Nairn decided. Or maybe his competition had. Bards were coming from courts all over the realm, playing music far more intricate than Welkin’s on instruments adorned with a filigree of gold rather than a fretwork of scars from a knife. When the bell beside the main door sounded one morning as Nairn passed, he pulled the door open absently, expecting yet another musician, newly arrived on the plain and anticipating Declan’s immediate interest and attention.

  “I heard Declan wants to see me,” the musician said, and the sound of the deep, rumbling, rough-hewn voice left Nairn speechless. He reached out, grasped Welkin’s brawny arm, and drew him across the threshold before he could vanish again.

  “Yes,” he said, guiding the harper through the empty hall to a side entry to the tower that bypassed the kitchen where, from the sound of the clanging and splashes below, Muire was scouring pots in the cauldron. “He does. I’ve been looking for you for months. Did you leave the plain?”

  “After a fashion,” Welkin agreed, and added, to make himself entirely clear, “I’m back now.”

  “ ‘After a fashion,’ ” Nairn breathed. “What fashion?” He didn’t expect an answer. Welkin, climbing up the winding steps, only glanced out the slitted windows without offering him one.

  “Strange place for a tower,” he commented. “What was it for, when it was built?”

  “A signal tower, I suppose. A watchtower. I don’t know. No one does. It’s older than anyone’s memory, around here. How did you know that Declan wants to see you?”

  Welkin shrugged. “Word travels, in a crowd like this.”

  Nairn gave up. “It took long enough,” he said dryly, wondering in what language that particular word had traveled. He rounded a curve, found the door open and Declan waiting for them: word had, in whatever fashion, preceded them up the stairs.

  The two took a measure of one another briefly, silently, there on the threshold. Then Welkin smiled a tight smile framed by fanning lines, and Declan shifted so that he could enter.

  Nairn asked uncertainly, “Do you want me to—”

  “Stay,” both said at once, so he came into Declan’s work chamber. Welkin prowled a moment, looking at the small collection of rare and ancient instruments kept there, while Declan watched him. Then Welkin turned, said something guttural and incomprehensible, and Nairn, struggling to understand, felt the silent bolt of Declan’s shock across the room.

  “You speak it,” Declan whispered. “You know how it sounds.”

  Welkin tossed him a smile again. “I am grateful to you,” he said. “I haven’t heard that language, even in anyone’s thoughts, for—oh, longer than you’d care to know.”

  “Who are you?”

  Welkin touched a ram’s horn with holes whittled down the curve, its openings ringed with gold. He said softly, “On a plain of bone, in a ring of stone ...”

  “Is that what you said just now?” Declan asked hoarsely.

  “It is.” He opened his harp case, took out the instrument to show Declan the twig-words carved over every possible space. Nairn recognized them, then. “I cut them there to remind myself. ” He touched a letter, then looked up to hold Declan’s gaze with his mismatched eyes. “It’s all I’ve got, this battered old harp, to play against the fine, complex instruments of the court bards out there. It might do. I’m hoping it will. So you see, I have everything to lose all over again, and I will do what I can to win.” He loosed Declan’s eyes finally, gave a glance out the broader window the bard had built into the stones. “That’s a pleasant sight, the river there. Well. If there’s nothing else, I’ll see you on the day, then.” He nodded to the completely bewildered Nairn and to the bard just opening his mouth to speak.

  Then, like a shaft of sunlight melting into cloud, he was gone.

  Nairn felt the breath rush out of him. Declan closed his mouth, looking astonished, and so grim Nairn scarcely recognized him.

  “Who is he?” Nairn demanded, his voice shaking. “Who in the world is he?”

  Declan tried to answer; answers tangled, apparently; he could not speak. He went to Nairn, put a hand on his shoulder; his hold grew so tight he might have been falling headlong out of his window and struggling to hold on.

  “You must win this competition,” he said tightly, and shook Nairn a little to rattle the notion into his head and settle it there. “Win it. Or he will, and I have no idea what I will be loosing into King Oroh’s court.”

  “But—”

  “Just win it.” The owl’s eyes caught Nairn’s fiercely, held them. “Any way you can.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Phelan sat on the floor of the broken tower, surrounded by dusty tomes. There was a threadbare carpet across the stones, almost as ancient as the record books, the first of which had been started during Declan’s time. The forgotten history Phelan held in his hands made him reluctant to abscond with them; he would wait, he decided, for Bayley Wren’s permission. There were over three dozen of them, all fat, every page meticulously lined with precise and mundane detail of the school’s long past: “To Trey Sims, woodcutter, for two wagonloads of wood from the north, and for the labor of it, and the journey ... To Haley Coe for nine casks of ale and five bottles of elderberry wine ... To Gar Holm for six fat salmon from the Stirl and twice as many eel ... Accounts received for room and board of student Ansel Tige from his father, late again ... Accounts received for one night’s lodging from Master Gremmell, and two servants, on their way across the plain ...”

  Why Bayley kept his office and his bedchamber within the chill walls of the tower instead of in the comfortably renovated portion of the ancient building, Phelan understood easily. The stewards charted and guarded the history of the school, and the silent walls were steeped in it. Declan himself had lived there, and had left the echoes of the music of the first Royal Bard of Belden. Phelan and Zoe had explored the place thoroughly when they were children. Worn stairs spiraled up and up the curved walls, where apertures scarcely wider than a knife blade eked out miserly glimpses of the city and the Stirl. The steps debouched now and then into a small chamber where the curious leavings of centuries, like remnants from a flood, gathered dust and owl droppings. The steward’s office was as high as it could be without using the sky for a roof. Above it, the walls were jagged with the mysterious violence that had torn through the top of the tower, left the chamber they circled open to the seasons. There, as high as they could climb up the broken steps, the young Zoe and Phelan had sat, singing to the sun and the moon rising over the plain, watching in wonder as the oldest words in the world moved to their stately rhythms by day and by night, oblivious to the busy city crusting the shores of the ancient water.

  There, once, he and Zoe had made love under the moonlight on the top of the broken tower. Phelan remembered that with a smile. But they knew each other far too well, which is why the experiment had been both succes
s and failure. They had been grateful for the knowledge but too curious to be content with one another.

  “This day by my hand: Lyle Renne, Steward ...”

  Phelan considered that. He closed the book, reached for another.

  “This day by my hand, Farrel Renn ...”

  Intrigued, he put down that book, opened another. And then another. Days flowed through months, years, centuries of detail: a new washtub for the kitchen, half a dozen student robes made by Mistress Cassell, a scullery maid promoted to cook, three bags of flour, a new master hired, a coffin for the death of an elderly master, accounts rendered to a midwife for the birth of the child of a student whose parents refused to take her back. All accounts signed for that day by some variant of Wren. Back and back Phelan looked, amazed, while the writing became awkward; letters changed shape; spelling grew fluid, arbitrary. Ren became Wren, became Renne, became Renn, and then, leaping forward through time, again Wren.

  “Wren,” he murmured, and there Bayley Wren was, opening the office door, crossing the room. Phelan gazed at him, this relic of history. With his gray-gold hair and the hollows in his strong face, he did seem balanced on the cusp of forever.

  “What?” the steward inquired mildly of Phelan’s expression.

  “You’re in here,” Phelan marveled. “All the way back to the beginning of Belden. Like the Peverell kings.”

  “There has been a Wren at the school for as long as the school has existed. One in each generation was born with a taste for detail, for order, and for paying bills. It does seem an inherited position.”

  Phelan got to his feet, brushing at the dust of centuries and frowning as he contemplated the present generation. “I can’t see Zoe entering accounts rendered in the records.”

  Bayley gave his rare, dry chuckle. “Nor can I. I wonder myself how history will find its way around her.” He glanced at the untidy pile at Phelan’s feet. “Something in particular?”

  “Yes. Nairn.”

  “Ah,” Bayley said softly.

  “Also, a certain Circle of Days.”

  The steward shook his head over that one. “I haven’t read all of the account books. I do remember Argot Ren’s reference to Nairn. I have no idea what he meant by the Circle of Days. If it involved accounts rendered or received, it will show up in the records somewhere.”

  Phelan brooded a moment. “I have to start somewhere. It might as well be at the beginning. May I take the earliest books home with me?”

  Master Wren hesitated at that, looking as though Phelan had asked to make off with his fingers. “Those books have never left this tower. If you can persuade them to cross the threshold ...”

  Phelan left with the three oldest, pledging his father’s fortune as collateral if he left them on a tram or dropped them into the Stirl. The house was quiet when he came in. Sophy and Jonah were both out, he suspected on wildly different errands on opposite sides of the city. He settled himself on the sofa, opened the first account book, and, within a dozen pages, fell headlong into it.

  He surfaced sometime later, at a query from Sagan as to whether he might like a lamp turned on, and would he be dining at home that evening?

  “No,” he said dazedly, rolling off the sofa. He collected the books, feeling off-balance in that world, two vastly different centuries clamoring for precedence in his brain. “I’m going out, thanks.”

  “Shall I take those books for you?”

  “No,” he said again, quickly, having a vision of his drunken father finding them, riffling through his bookmarks and snorting with laughter at the latest moldy turn of Phelan’s paper. “I’ll hide them myself.”

  He walked along the river, vaguely aware of the lights flickering on in the twilight, from streetlamps and buildings, streaking the water with their colorful reflections. The evening was warm; market skiffs still plied the waters among the gilded, lantern-lit barges that had rowed out for a meal or a party on the water. He wondered if his mother was on one of them. Jonah was probably sitting on top of a standing stone with a bottle in hand, trying to pick an argument with the moon. Phelan had little idea where he was going; he let his feet lead him. When, a mile or two later, they turned into the city’s oldest tavern on the waterfront, the Merry Rampion, he was not surprised.

  The crowd was a noisy mix of students and masters, dockers and fishers on their way home, and well-dressed patrons out on the town. He glanced around for Jonah, was relieved not to find him there. Chase Rampion greeted him genially, brought him beer, and left him alone in the crush, gazing out of the grimy, whorled window at the gulls wheeling above the darkening water.

  Something portentous had happened between the time Nairn had first appeared in the records and when his name was no longer mentioned. Exactly what lay between the lines. The first school steward, Dower Ren, must have written his entries with his teeth clenched, so terse were they: “This day accounts rendered to Wil Homely, stonemason, for repairs to what is now the tower roof, and for removing the fallen stones from the school grounds.” A day or two earlier, accounts had been rendered “to Salix, for tending to the minor wounds of the school steward, and to Brixton Mar, carpenter, for a new desk and bed frame for same. Ink and a new pot procured with thanks rendered to Salix, and to the school kitchen.”

  The old school tower had apparently fallen in, or blown itself up, or cracked in two, right in the middle of the first bardic competition. Struck by age, by an errant wind, by an earthquake, by an oak tree falling on it? The steward did not say. Whatever happened was beyond the pale of accounts rendered and received.

  “Phelan.”

  He started. Someone had slipped into the empty chair at his tiny table. Zoe, he saw with relief; at least he would not have to make inane noises.

  She had an odd expression on her face. A new one, he realized with surprise, after all those years of knowing her. The tavern keeper came to greet her, carrying a glass of her favorite wine.

  “Thank you, Chase,” she said, kissing him; he lingered a moment, puzzling, like Phelan, over the distraction in her eyes and the deep frown between them.

  Then someone called him away, and she took a deep breath.

  “Phelan,” she said again, very softly, touching his wrist; her fingers were cold.

  “What?” he asked abruptly. “Is it your father? Mine?”

  “No—it’s Quennel.”

  “Is he dead?”

  She shook her head quickly, leaned even closer to him. “No. He’s—he’s going to call a bardic competition. He wants to retire.”

  Phelan sat back in his creaky chair, astonished. “Now? I thought he’d die on the job in a decade or two, with his harp strings breaking along with his heart.”

  “No.” She hesitated; he waited, riveted. “He—he said things—I don’t know if he’s imagining them or not. He wants—Phelan, are you going to compete?”

  He stared at her, appalled. “Of course not.”

  “Oh, good. I didn’t want to compete against you. Quennel said—Well, he asked me to.”

  “Of course he would want you to replace him.”

  “I tried to persuade him not to retire, but he seems to have lost heart.” She took a swallow of wine, her frown deepening. Phelan watched her.

  “What,” he wondered, “are you not telling me?”

  “Just something Quennel said.” She put her glass down, dipped a finger absently, and ran it along the rim of the glass, brooding again, as the glass sang. “I want to be sure he’s right, before ... So don’t ask. I’ll tell you when I need to.”

  “All right,” he said, mystified. Her eyes shifted beyond him, widened, and he turned, hearing a roil of boots and voices flowing through the open door, breaking across the room. Someone cried Zoe’s name; she closed her eyes briefly. Then she put a smile on her face as Frazer reached her, with Kelda so close behind him they might have been racing, Phelan thought dourly, though if he had placed a bet, it wouldn’t have been on Frazer.

  “Come with us,” the young man
pleaded. He added, belatedly, “And you, too, Phelan.”

  “No, thanks. I’m leaving.”

  Frazer lowered his voice a trifle. “There’s a group in the back waiting for Kelda. He’s going to teach us an ancient language. He says the letters are magical. We hoped to find you—you must join us, Zoe. We’re going to form a secret society—” He stopped, reddening, as Kelda chuckled. “Well, not secret now, I suppose, after my babbling.” Zoe’s eyes moved from his ardent face to Lord Grishold’s bard, her expression complex again, reserved and oddly wary, despite her vivid smile.

  “Magical?” she echoed.

  “Grishold folklore,” Kelda explained easily. “Something I picked up in my wanderings. It probably evolved from an ancient bardic exercise. Frazer brought up the subject—”

  Phelan laughed; the bard’s dark eyes queried him. “It’s Frazer’s constant question, these days. I’m glad someone can finally give him an answer. I’m tone-deaf when it comes to the subject of magic.”

  “Yes, so I thought,” the bard said cheerfully without bothering to explain himself.

  “Please join us,” Frazer urged Zoe. “Kelda says that your voice alone is sorcery, and you understood, that day, what I was asking you. You know you did—I felt it.”