The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  When we look through the records of the court chroniclers, busily taking notes on the plain, we find odd, conflicting comments about the end of the competition. Lord Grishold’s chronicler, Viruh Staid, confesses to a peculiar lapse of attention. He flirts with a bard’s wife; he wanders down to the river to relieve himself among the trees—whatever he found to do, it seems astonishing and highly suspicious that he chooses to do it in the middle of the final songs of the competition.

  His disclaimer makes more sense in light of King Oroh’s own chronicler’s mind-boggling description: “It seemed to me that the wind itself grew very old as the harpers played. The moon grew full, though it was scarce past half when it rose. My heart overspilled itself like a seething cauldron with wonder. The very stones within them turned and turned and the stones sang ... Such was my dream ... Then the dream blew into fragments. I woke, and the competition was at an end.”

  Others, writing letters or descriptions later in the calm of their own chambers, were equally nebulous about how the great event ended. They barely comment about the broken tower, as though that was the least of their memories. One remembers following the scent of an enormous cauldron, and how he craved the “heady broth” so much that he forgot to listen to the music, but no one offered him any. Another complains that an ill-chosen mushroom must have clouded his memory, for what he does remember of the final song could never have happened. And so on.

  At the end of the day, we have the results set down very succinctly by the king’s chronicler:

  “I watched the bard of the Duke of Waverlea given the title, by Declan himself, of Royal Bard of Belden.”

  ... No song, no peace, no poetry,

  no end of days, and no forgetting.

  “BONE PLAIN,” ANONYMOUS: TRANSLATED FROM THE RUNIC BY J. CLE

  They had never stopped playing. At sunrise, only Osprey and a couple of court bards were left in the tavern. Osprey’s head lay on the table in a ring of beer mugs. The court bards caught at melodies they knew with harp and pipe and small drum; otherwise, they listened silently, their faces stunned with weariness and wonder, to songs from all over the five kingdoms that had never been permitted to pass the thick stone walls surrounding court music.

  The brewer, who had gone to bed hours before, woke up and gave them all breakfast. Welkin and Nairn, drunk on music, chewed intermittently on bread and bacon as they tested one another, Nairn pulling music out of his back teeth, songs from his Pig-Singer days that he must have learned by listening to the grass grow, or to a blackbird’s passing whistle, for all he was taught back then. Welkin had the same teachers, it seemed; all his music sounded eldritch, haunted. Finally, they left their benches, accompanied by a ringing wake of gold tossed on the tables by the court bards, and moved up the hill.

  They barely noticed the gathering of musicians for the final day, so engrossed they were in their own competition. The two court bards left to play, then came back again, followed by others. Through the noon and afternoon, it became clear that the true contest pitted the young, charming student from the Marches with the scruffy, odd-eyed wanderer out of nowhere discernible. Their struggle was congenial and absolute. They matched song for song, took them back through their various changes, so far back sometimes that word and wind seemed to veer close enough to overlap, borne on the rilling notes of a brook or a bird cry.

  They were moving very close to the language of the Circle of Days. Nairn felt it like a tidal pull, a whirling exuberance that tugged, lured, tempted into its roil of beauty and danger. His craft sheered closer and closer to its wildness. Welkin heard it; the smile in his eyes grew deep, honed. The listeners, more and more of them drifting from the circle around the final competitors to this private battle, heard it as well. They stood, wordless and motionless as the stones on the hill, while court bard vied with court bard in some other world, until even they yielded to the irresistible and astonishing engagement that overwhelmed even their great gifts.

  By then the sun had crossed the plain to lower itself into the western forests, drawing long shadows of stone and tree and bard across the grass. Nairn, helpless in the crosscurrents around the vortex of power he and Welkin had opened between them, saw Declan’s face one last time: his gray eyes fixed on Nairn, his fierce, triumphant smile.

  The sun went down.

  The crowd around them seemed to melt into the twilight. They might have been alone, he and Welkin, with the simplest and oldest words: wind, earth, stone, tree. The sky, in that misty realm neither day nor night, ringed the plain as gray as slate. For the first time, Nairn felt tired. Not in his fingers, or his voice, or his churning brain, but of the competition itself, which never ended, but drew and drew at him, forced him to reach ever deeper into memory and experience, farther than he thought even he had traveled in his life. The power in the ancient songs fed his hands, his harp, possessed him; he felt as though he were the instrument, sounding every note out of blood and bone marrow. Still it never ended, and still he would stand there until his feet took root in the ground and birds built nests in his hair before he would yield to Welkin.

  The first breath of evening breeze wafted over the plain. He nearly fell to his knees at the smell in it: tender salmon, onions, celery, peas, rosemary, lavender, pepper. The savory scents threatened to cloud his mind like errant fog, overwhelming even the forces that drove him until he yielded and followed his nose across the grass, where a great cauldron reflected the fires under it, turning copper to gold.

  Welkin smelled it, too; he spoke through their flurry of notes. “Could stop a moment.”

  “No.”

  “A swallow of cold water? Or ale? A mouthful of that?”

  “Help yourself,” Nairn said tersely.

  “I’m parched as a pebble in a desert. You may not be the better bard, but you’re the younger. Have mercy on an old worn harper. Call it a truce? We’ll go back to playing after—”

  “No. You may not be the better bard, but you’re the craftier. You make yourself comfortable inside a blizzard. I’m not stopping. I’ll stop, and you won’t, and you’ll claim victory.”

  Welkin gave one of his shard-shifting laughs. He was silent for a bit, while one tune ended, and he pulled another out of his inexhaustible memory that Nairn clawed out of his own by a thumbnail and a thread. They settled into it.

  Welkin spoke again, softly. “Ah, look.”

  Someone—Muire?—had come down the hill to add an apronful of something to the stew. She emptied it into the cauldron, gave it a stir. Smoke billowed, blurring her. She seemed taller, as it frayed around her again: willowy and graceful, with long, frothy hair of the palest gold. Nairn’s eyes widened; he nearly missed a note. Odelet? Doing what she had always done at the school: chopping, stirring, cooking, feeding the hungry?

  “I’d stop for such as that,” Welkin grunted, and showed Nairn the teasing smile in his twilight eye. An expected fury shot through Nairn that the old battered boot sole of a bard had riffled through his thoughts; he nicked a note so sharply, he nearly broke the string. He heard Welkin’s sudden, indrawn breath; a note under his thumb wavered weakly. Then he turned himself back into a solid slab of stone with hands. Nairn stared down at his own fingers, rage transformed to wonder. He had hurt the impervious Welkin with an errant harp note.

  What else might he do?

  He was so engrossed in possibilities that he barely noticed the figure standing in front of him sometime later, smiling, stirring a richly fragrant and steaming bowl.

  “Nairn. Shall I give you a bite?”

  It was darker now; the fire under the cauldron and the moon glowed brightly in the vast, tidal flow of night, but little else on the plain did. Her face was still blurred, shadowed with twilight; her sweet, clear voice sounded as distant as memory. A dream, a wish, his weary, hungry brain had conjured, he suspected. Or she was something Welkin had picked out of Nairn’s head and shaped with his harp string. Nothing that could possibly be real.

  He answered her ter
sely, “No.”

  She was gone so abruptly, in the blink of an eye, he knew she must have been an enchantment, until Welkin complained, “You might have been more polite about it. She would have offered me a bite, too, then, before you drove her off.”

  “Who?”

  “Who?” He snorted like a horse, then roused his harp and his voice into a long rollicking ballad. Nairn pulled his thoughts out of the mysterious realms of power and caught up with him within a beat or two. The moon ascended, flooding the plain with silver. It was strangely full, as though more time had passed during their private battle than he realized. The ballad seemed to last forever, Nairn picking verses out of his head so old he must have been born knowing them, for all he remembered where he had learned them.

  “We could walk down together,” Welkin suggested, when they had finished that and Nairn had challenged him with a dance he had only ever heard played on the bladder-pipe. Welkin only chuckled and leaped into it. “Charm her a bit, and she’ll feed us both.”

  “Right. You’ll wait until my mouth is full and I can’t sing a note and you’ll call victory while I’m trying to swallow.”

  Welkin shrugged. “Who’s to notice? No one’s paying attention but him.”

  That seemed true enough. Everyone had wandered off to listen to the last of the court bards, maybe, but for the tall old man standing with his back to the moon. He was cloaked from head to heel. Nairn saw a flutter of hair white as moonlight out of the hood he wore, but nothing of his face.

  Then his vision shifted, became clearer in the deceptive light.

  “That’s not a man,” he said. “Just one of the standing stones.”

  “You’re in poor shape if you can’t tell stone from man. We’ve been playing for a night and a day and about to begin another night. How much longer can you keep up with me? I’ve a long, long road behind me that crisscrossed all over this land. You’ve gone a mile or so from your pigsty.”

  “Farther than that,” Nairn retorted. “I’m still standing. And you’re the one who brought up the words. Food. Ale. You’re the one who needs them.” He nodded at the stone. “Maybe he’ll fetch them for you, if you ask.”

  Nairn gave his gravelly laugh. “I could make him dance. I could make him sing.”

  “He’s stone.”

  “I could make him tell our fortunes, which of us is still on his feet and playing by the dawn. I’ll make you a wager: whichever of us makes him speak goes down and charms her back up here with her bowl of stew.”

  “He’s stone. And you’ll cheat.”

  “You’re just afraid of facing her.”

  “What ‘her’? She’s just something you’ve conjured up with your harp strings. I’m not wasting my fingers or my breath trying to make a stone speak. I intend to be standing right here, come the dawn, and you’ll be wondering where the magic in your harp went.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Yes, old man,” he said between his teeth. “I’ll find the way to make it so.”

  Welkin laughed.

  The sky darkened; stars gathered thick as the crowd on the plain, more and more of them pushing out to listen. Nairn played and sang to them, for they were all he saw. Even the night fires across the plain had been neglected, except for the one still burning beneath the great cauldron. No one else seemed to be eating from it either. They were all gathered somewhere in the dark, he guessed, somewhere beyond time, silent and entranced, waiting to see which of them would come to the end of songs and put down his harp, and finally feel the exhaustion, the torn fingers, the throat so raw and swollen nothing but a toad-croak would ever come creeping out of it again.

  Even then, as the wheel of stars turned above them, he heard Welkin’s playing strengthen, gather energy from the night, at once so unfalteringly wild and so precise that the question nobody could answer welled again through Nairn:

  Who are you?

  The old harper’s eyes caught starlight, glinted at him. He heard Declan’s voice again, his only answer:

  The magic is in the harp.

  The strings played themselves, maybe; Welkin had only to stay on his feet and remember the verses. It didn’t make a great deal of sense, but nothing did, not the cauldron full of food that no one ate, the crowd that never danced or sang with the bards, or even spoke, the only one visible even in the dark either a hooded man or a stone, either way as silent as the rest.

  Something prickled over Nairn then, like a chill breath from the midsummer moon. His fingers went cold; his eyes grew swollen and dry, too dry even to blink, look away from what he recognized, must have known long before, in some part of his mind that was not busy trying to overwhelm the bard beside him with his brilliance.

  I know this song, he thought, but not of the one under his fingers. The one in the plain in front of him. The cauldron. The stone. The tower of night around him, stars endlessly turning, turning. The ancient plain itself, everyone on it as mute and ephemeral as ghosts.

  Bone Plain.

  He felt a sudden, fierce shock of exultation and dread. It was what he wanted, he knew then: an end to the never-ending competition. The tower appeared first in his memory’s eye: rooted close to where he and Welkin stood, its stones coiling endlessly upward into the stars. He had watched it appear once before in all his innocence and ignorance, before he knew it had a name. Now he knew it. He named it, gazing at it with his heart’s knowing eye, willing it to appear, build itself note by note, stone by stone, spiraling out of him, a stone for every note, a swirl of stars crowning its ascent into the night. It was what they both wanted, he and Welkin: the only place where they could finally be judged.

  The Turning Tower.

  He dreamed it as he played. In another world, a harper with sweat dripping onto his harp strings, his muscles burning, fingers cracked and bleeding, wrenched yet one more song out of himself. In his dream, the massive tower grew to engulf the plain, the campfires burning on it scarcely bigger than the flickering stars within the stones. Grave and kindly voices filled it, stopped the interminable competition. The Trials and the Terrors were simple matters compared to the song he was dragging out of his anklebones, his ear bones. The voices commanded; he did as he was told; he accepted the justice demanded in the ancient lines of poetry; at last he could rest.

  He only had to open the tower door ...

  He could see it: a paler oblong of stone in the dark wall, the color of the standing stones. Twig-words ran across the lintel stone; a single word glowed in the middle of the door: a circle containing an endless spiral that started in the center and whorled around itself to merge with the outer ring and begin its backward spiral. The word teased at Nairn. He knew it; he did not know it. Declan had not taught it to him, but his fingers knew it. They kept trying to play it like a song, pull it out of the strings, shape it, say it in ways his weary brain could not begin to form. He felt Welkin’s eyes on him, as though he heard the changes in Nairn’s music, the odd patterns, the unexpected rhythms that drove him. It was the door latch, that word. It was the lock and the bar and the turning key. Sweat stung his eyes, blinding him; he shook it away, felt the limp, wet strands of his hair. They had played for a night and a day, and now began another night, and little had passed his lips except his own sweat. It didn’t matter. Not even Welkin mattered anymore. Only that word, drawn by fire, it seemed, on the face of the door.

  He closed his eyes, let it fill his mind, whatever it was, and let his fingers speak. He felt it before he heard it: a wild, jarring sound like a string breaking, or a small animal crying out in sudden pain. He opened his eyes again, startled.

  He heard his own voice, then, loosed in a ragged shout of pure terror. His fingers froze.

  Death, the word on the door said, and it surrounded him: ghost after ghost pulling themselves out of their bones laid to rest on slabs of creamy yellow stone and long picked clean by time. The wraiths wore their memories of wealth and honor, fine robes and mantels of many colors, adorned with soft fur, intricate emb
roidery, buttons of carved bone. Their armbands and collars and hairpins were fashioned of silver and gold. Precious stones gleamed on the instruments they carried; other instruments encased in fine leather leaned against the burial pallets. The ghosts were the oldest bards of the plain, Nairn guessed, looking much as they might have the day before they died, except for their eyes. All were empty and black as skull sockets, swimming with the reflections of fire from the single torch beside the open door.

  “Welcome.”

  He was greeted in the language he had heard Welkin speak. This time he understood it. He backed a step, not wanting, in any language, to be welcomed into the company of the dead. But he was, he reminded himself, where he had wished to be: inside the lines of the oldest poem in the realm.

  Welkin answered, and Nairn started, remembering that he was not alone, that the bard had his own very powerful reasons to be there, and they had a contest to finish.

  “What must we do?” Nairn’s voice came out as a poor, shredded phantom of itself, splintered between fear and wonder and the endless songs he had sung to get where he stood.

  “Play,” Welkin answered grimly. “Play your heart out. That’s the only true door out of here.”

  “Play,” a wraith echoed, a woman robed in orange and purple, her gray-gold braids wound with golden thread. “The ‘Ballad of Enek and Krital.’ You, Pig-Singer. Play it the way I sang it.”

  Nairn’s mind went instantly blank. These were all court bards, he knew, no matter how forgotten the courts, and he doubted that even Declan’s knowledge had reached as far back as they went. But his fingers were moving again, suddenly, along the path of a teasing little phrase that had danced out of nowhere into his head. The wraith was smiling by the end of it, the rich threads in her hair spiraling with reflections of fire as she nodded. She said nothing. Another bard, an old man in white, with long hair and a longer beard, broke the brief silence after Nairn finished.

  “Play ‘The Gathering of Crows,’ Welkin.”