The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  An odd detail emerges from the king’s chronicler, who notes that one of the envoys later complained to the king that “the jewels in Declan’s harp were stolen out of it before it was buried with him.” The king, the chronicler continued, “evinced great interest in this, though he forbade any inquiry or accusations against the school.” Nothing ever came of that, at least to King Oroh’s benefit. The jewels followed their own path, and the Royal Bard Blasson kept his position for nearly thirty years, until King Oroh himself breathed his last of the “foreign airs” so far from the land where he was born.

  Two hundred and twenty-nine years after the fall of the school tower and the disappearance of Nairn, his name again surfaces in the school’s accounts, and with it the words that at last open the pathway between history and poetry. In Argot Renne’s meticulous records, we find this unexpected entry: “... considering the craggy agelessness of his face, the unremitting dark of his eyes, and that he knew my name, Renne, though he had been stone all our lives, and considering, above all, his astonishing question concerning the existence of the ancient Circle of Days, a secret conclave that existed briefly during Declan’s time, I believe him to be the bard in search of his death: Nairn.”

  The Circle of Days is the link we seek.

  He went in the front in his boots and trews

  And out the back in her shift,

  Vanished again amid cries and hues,

  With a coin as her parting gift.

  FROM “THE BALLAD OF THE WANDERING BARD,” ANONYMOUS

  For the second time in his life, Nairn, creeping in utter ignominy out of eyesight, felt as low as any earthworm. Lower: even the worms underfoot were good and useful creatures, leading unselfish and productive lives. He, by contrast, belonged nowhere, had nothing anyone could need or want. The poem, he thought grimly, tripping over rootwork and bouncing off trees in the dark, had left a few things out. Even the hero crushed beneath the dragon’s claw could breathe his last knowing that his intentions were worthy, his courage unfaltering; he had done all he could. His failure was honorable. The bard on Bone Plain, failing every trial, had no such consolation. The list of his failures was precise; judgment was unrelenting. What the poem had left out was the taste in the back of his throat, as though he had eaten the charred, dry, bitter ashes of yesterday’s fire. The poem had not mentioned that even his bones seemed to radiate shame. There was no comfortable place anywhere in his body that he could crawl into and hide. Unlike the hero, he could not even find release in the dragon’s claw ripping apart his heart.

  That was not the worst of it.

  The worst he discovered slowly through days and weeks and months. His harp would not stay in tune; his ears could no longer distinguish the point at which the tightening string spoke true. His fingers might as well have been overstuffed sausages, for all the dexterity left in them. He forgot lines, verses, sometimes entire songs. He could earn a coin or two on a village street playing for pity: the fool pulling tatters of a dance or a ballad out of his pitiful mind. It was as though he had burned himself to the heartwood playing against Kelda, and there was nothing left of his music but a few feeble, slowly fading embers.

  The poet had not mentioned those things.

  Nor had the poem warned of the constant loneliness, the need to hide himself, to change his name, to move constantly, but with none of the earlier curiosity and joy he had taken in his wanderings. Now he moved to escape himself and always took himself along. All this he learned in the first seasons of his changed life: that cruelly sweet, golden summer from which he had exiled himself, the first bright fires of autumn. Other things he learned took much longer. Still others took centuries.

  He dreamed incessantly during those first long months: the same terrible, fragmented visions of the tower. The idea that it might somehow return, and he could enter it again, remake his past and future, kept him hovering along the edges of the plain, in small farming villages near the forests, where he could find some mindless work, even a little money, move on, never any farther than where he could turn his head and see the wide, broad emptiness flowing green to the edges of the world, the gentle hillocks, the random, gnarled tree growing alone here and there in all that green, isolated and mysterious as a standing stone. Then he could almost hear the music within the wind, blown from the school, perhaps, or maybe from the memories of the plain itself. Then, he could almost remember what he had once loved.

  At night, if there was a standing stone close by, he would sleep against it, taking cold comfort in its own agelessness and hoping against hope that it might somehow merge with his dreams to shape the endlessly spiraling stones around him again, the place where he had entangled himself inextricably within the image and the word and the power.

  It took a few decades before he fully admitted the truth of the matter. Gradually, as years passed, he was almost able to forget the poem itself in the sheer ordinariness of his life. Crofter’s son he was born, crofter he became, working for others at first, then on his own piece of land at the edge of the plain. He built his house, relegated his harp to a forgotten corner of it, took a wife who bore him children, all of which made it easier for him to expect for himself the predictable fate of every other living thing. It was with stark horror that he found himself outliving everyone he knew in his tiny world, including his children. He would outlive his grandchildren, who would begin to eye him warily, soon enough, and count backward on their fingers to find his true age. No one living knew exactly how old he had been when he first put down a root in that particular patch of earth, but still ... It wasn’t natural. Time didn’t write his life on his face the way it did on others’; he seemed at once ageless and unfinished.

  He finally took his harp out of the cobwebs, walked out the door, and admitted who he was: the Unforgiven. He had no idea how to live with himself, and with nothing else occurring to him beyond sheer despair, he made his way back to the school.

  It was going through difficult times, as well. Towns were prospering all over Belden. The solitary village of Caerau, so promising that one summer, seemed to be withering away as the harsh winters drove out all but the hardiest and most stubborn. The school’s reputation had spread far and wide, causing bardic schools to spring up everywhere to emulate it. It had become legendary, and as happens with legends, it was relegated mostly to the imagination. Worthy, gifted students, inspired by its existence, went to more comfortable schools that were closer to home; the poor and brilliant came to be taught and to teach at the school on the plain, drawn by tales of Declan and the first great competition. When the Wanderer returned and stood in the dark listening to the music coming out of it, nearly a century later, it didn’t seem much different from the school in his memories.

  He sat down on the hillside among the ring of standing stones, where he could see a scant handful of lights along the river, and the immense flow of icy stars above the plain. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t play the harp he carried; he could barely remember the glittering lengths of verse, long enough to unfold across the plain, which he had once carried so effortlessly in his head. He doubted that, if he revealed himself, anybody would remember him, or even much care. If anyone even believed him.

  He worked some magic, then, which surprised him enormously, as he felt it overwhelm him. He made a wish, sitting there with an abandoned past and no future except forever. He gazed at the crown of stones on the hill and wished he were one of them, rooted and bound to the plain, an ordinary battered old boulder with no need to explain anything and none but the most primitive of memories. As he felt the unexpected, welcome change reworking his mind, his heart, his breath and bones, he must have left a path open for his own return, as he wondered, in the final instant, why he had not tried that before.

  So, for a couple of centuries, Nairn became stone. Oddly enough, in his absence, he flourished. In ballad and poetry, his reputation grew like a hardy weed, scattering seed on the wind, blown into every corner of Belden. He lived many lives in spi
te of himself as he slept the still, slow-dreaming sleep of a hoary, lichen-covered boulder, only waking very slightly, somewhere deep inside himself, when students sat on him to practice their music.

  It was a song that woke him completely, reached into stone and found the human heart of him. He opened an ear to listen to it, and then another. He opened his eyes finally to see the singer with that treasure of a voice as wild and pure as the wind on the plain. He found his feet out of long-forgotten habit and pulled himself out of the earth that the boulder had shifted around and settled into to make itself more comfortable. The singing stopped abruptly. He stood in a morning that smelled of spring, new grass, turned earth, a harp on his shoulder he’d forgotten he possessed, blinking stone out of his brain under the wide-eyed stare of a dark-haired young woman picking wild strawberries among the stones.

  She was absolutely motionless for a breath, stunned with amazement. He cleared his throat. At the sound, all the bones in her tried to escape at once out of her body. Then she whirled and fled headfirst into a hawthorn hedge and out the other side, leaving an uproar of mating finches startling into the air behind her.

  Nairn watched the birds settle. The hedge was new. He walked around it, testing his movements. The school grounds looked oddly civilized, broken into flower gardens and swaths of lawn. There was a road downhill, neatly lined with low stone walls that ran to a bridge across the river. The village had grown far down both sides of the river. New houses and barns had gone up since he’d closed his eyes. A bit of cobbled road divided the houses across the far side of the river. In the distance, a great massive thing was growing beside the water, the fieldstones mortared into walls, and spiraling upward into eerie unfinished towers that seemed to mirror the broken tower of the school.

  All around Caerau, the flowing green had been divided, hedged, walled, in squares and fans and lozenges of black, tilled earth.

  He wondered how long he had been stone.

  Something intruded into his thoughts. He recognized it finally and went, out of habit, around to the back of the school, where he smelled food for the first time in a couple hundred years.

  He had to open a gate in the wall that surrounded the substantial kitchen garden. The shadow of the broken tower loomed over him, and he reared back, staring up at it, as more memories wakened of the moment the stones had begun to fall. He wondered confusedly which tower he had brought down. The Turning Tower, he had thought. Maybe this one had gotten hit by the explosion of ghostly stones. Or was the Turning Tower truly the shadow of the ancient watchtower on the hill? It had never been rebuilt, which he found strange. Did anyone really remember the magic that had ripped through those stones? Or did it just stand like a question on the plain? A mystery out of the past: the place where something terrible or wonderful had once happened, but nobody remembered what.

  He found the young woman again, inside the open kitchen door.

  She gazed at him mutely, as she gave a stir to the stew bubbling in the cauldron over the fire. He felt his body come suddenly, painfully to life again, at the smells in the smoky air of leeks, mushrooms, lamb.

  He heard her voice again, faint and shaking slightly. “You can go up those stairs. The students are eating now. Sit, and I’ll bring you a bowl.”

  He nodded gratefully, remembered the words. “Thank you.”

  “If you—if you want to play for them, they’ll listen. Most musicians pay that way, and the students are always glad to hear a stranger’s song.”

  He turned to the familiar, worn stairs. “I have no new songs.” His own voice sounded harsh with disuse, a stone’s voice, weathered and hard. “Only the oldest in the world.”

  She brought him a great bowl of stew, bread and cheese, the strawberries she had picked. He ate every crumb, grateful for her perception that an old boulder that had been around since before she was born might be hungrier than most. No one spoke to him, although most threw curious glances at him and his harp. But he did not offer to play for his meal, and the students went off, leaving their empty cups and bowls scattered across the tables.

  He could do that much, at least, he thought, and went back down to the kitchen. It was empty. He found a tray to stack the dirty dishes on and brought them down. He was in the middle of washing them when he heard steps on the tower stairs.

  A man followed the young woman down; he carried their own emptied bowls. Nairn glanced up and saw him hesitate briefly between the bottom step and the floor, brought up by whatever was in Nairn’s eyes. Even after so many years, he recognized that studious, attentive expression: that hadn’t changed, though his face was older, grayer, than the one Nairn remembered.

  “A Ren?” he guessed, taking the bowls. “School steward? You’re still up in that tower, then.”

  The man nodded cautiously. “Argot Renne. This is my daughter Lynnet. And you?”

  Nairn turned back to his wash water. “No one. Just a stranger who needed a meal.”

  “I told him,” the girl murmured in her voice like a rippling stream, “he could play for his meal.”

  “That’s the last thing you need around here, another harper. I’ll finish this and leave.”

  “Where?” the steward asked abruptly. “Where will you go?”

  Nairn looked at him. Argot Renne was staring again, his gray eyes wide, stunned with conjecture, as though he recognized the tale that pulled itself out of the earth and stone to walk into the tower kitchen and do the dishes.

  “I don’t know,” Nairn said at last, scrubbing the bowl in his hands. “I haven’t thought, yet.”

  “There’s an empty chamber in the tower. You could stay awhile. Think here.”

  Nairn shook his head. “No,” he said tersely. “Not here.”

  “Well.” The steward paused; Nairn could sense him groping for coherence. “Is there—is there anything I can do for you? Before you go?”

  Nairn rinsed the bowl; Lynnet reached out silently, took it from him to dry. He remembered the voice that had wakened him, brought him back to life, then his own magic that had laid him to earth.

  “Maybe,” he answered huskily, “you could tell me how long it’s been since Declan died?”

  The steward told him. He calculated, and was amazed.

  “All that time ... No wonder I was hungry.” He scrubbed another bowl, a question flitting around his head like a butterfly until it finally lighted and he caught it. “Is there—is there anything like the Circle of Days still in existence?”

  The steward opened his mouth, closed it. “The Circle of Days ...” he repeated finally, very softly.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes. I’ve read the old—I read about it. No. Nothing I’ve ever heard of around here.” He paused again, musing. “Maybe somewhere else, though. There are many bardic schools open now across Belden. You might ask at them.”

  Nairn considered the idea, handed a cup to Lynnet. “I might do that. Do some traveling.” He handed another bowl to the girl and smiled at her, his face feeling its way into it slowly, creakily. “You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” he told her, and surprised a tentative answering smile out of her. “You remind me of someone I knew once, a long time ago ... She worked in the kitchen, too, and she sang like dawn breaking over the world.”

  He finished the dishes and left the tower to look for the Circle of Days.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Phelan began stalking his father.

  He hadn’t made a coherent decision to do so. Reason had nothing to do with it. Why he found himself in peculiar places at odd hours of day or night, hiding behind a trash bin or an elegant steam carriage and watching to see where Jonah went next, he didn’t bother trying to explain even to himself. Some nuggets of research he’d tripped over, a conjunction of wildly disparate facts he could barely remember, had sparked against each other like flint against steel. The light had fallen upon Jonah. Once he saw what he saw in that light, Phelan couldn’t stop looking. He could not have di
scussed it rationally with anyone else, least of all Jonah. He was looking for something he had glimpsed beyond language, between the lines, and it drove him, as nothing his father had ever done, to resolve the conundrum that was Jonah Cle.

  So distracted, he rarely noticed the constant influx of musicians into the city, except when the streets and taverns were so full of strangers that they hindered his pursuit of Jonah. Sometimes, an unfamiliar song caught his ear, as a would-be bard from some far corner of Belden was moved by the ancient history and legends of the occasion to add to it on the sidewalk. Phelan, pausing in surprise, would remember why Caerau was filling with music and people. Then he would hear the phrase that had stopped him in his tracks echoing in his heart, and he would place it to memory, as he had been taught, music woven into the smell of fish chowder, the clamor of gulls on the docks, the glitter of light along the musician’s instrument, for future reference, and move on.

  When Jonah eluded him completely, left the house in the odd hours Phelan slept, fitfully and most often with a book over his face, he would find himself retracing his father’s haunts: the museums, forgotten dig sites, standing stones along the Stirl, where the footprints, the bottles dropped into the mud, might well be Jonah’s. He remembered to teach his class; he worked on his paper sporadically on the rare occasions when he and Jonah were in the house together. The pile of pages was slowly growing as he rummaged through the school library or the steward’s records. Like his thoughts, the pages of his paper were homing toward something that could not yet emerge into the light of language; he could not finish it until he had found his own way through the labyrinth of fact, conjecture, and wild improbability that was Jonah’s life.

  Jonah was stalking the bard Kelda.