The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  At the bottom of the stairs, he found his father, who drew him with a compelling hand away from the musicians, back into the stone archway from which they had emerged.

  “What are you doing?” Jonah demanded, when they were out of earshot.

  Phelan gazed at him wordlessly, seeing again that strange double vision of his father: Nairn the Deathless, the Unforgiven, imposed over the father he had grown up with, history pleated endlessly across a moment in time.

  “Nothing,” he said finally. “Just playing. Zoe asked me to.”

  “Get yourself disqualified,” Jonah said succinctly.

  “Oh, I will. I probably already have.”

  “Not playing like that you won’t.”

  Phelan looked at him silently again, trying to imagine what Jonah thought he saw. “I played it for Beatrice,” he said finally, his only explanation for any power the ballad had beyond the ordinary. “What are you afraid of? There are court bards here who play songs as old as the five kingdoms. They could blow me off the scaffold with a riffle of flute notes.”

  “That’s not the point,” Jonah said irritably.

  “What is the point?”

  “If Kelda is who I think he is, you could be in grave danger, that’s the point. He destroyed my music. I won’t let him take you from me as well. That would destroy me all over again. I couldn’t live with that, and I am not able to die. So stop playing to the princess. Stop playing with your heart.”

  Phelan opened his mouth; nothing came out. He shook himself out of Jonah’s grip, finally, and pulled his father back to the end of the archway, where they could hear the court bard playing above. “Listen,” he said fiercely, trying to keep his voice down. “Listen to that.” The bard was playing three instruments at once, it sounded like, and singing at the same time. “That’s what he plays every morning for the Duke of Estmere’s breakfast. Do you think that any world exists in which I can compete with that?”

  “His heart’s not in it,” Jonah muttered doggedly.

  “You’re being unreasonable.” He heard himself and laughed shortly. “What am I saying. You’ve been unreasonable all your life. Now I understand why, but Kelda isn’t interested in either one of us. He has his eye on Zoe, and I promised her I’d give her all I had just to stay in the competition.” Jonah groaned. “I barely remembered I had a heart, then,” Phelan added dryly. “Even so, nobody has ever suggested that it’s any kind of substitute for skill.”

  “How could you fall in love at a time like this?” his father said, exasperated. “Anyway, that’s not the point, either. The point is—”

  “I don’t see the point of arguing about it,” Phelan said, exasperated himself, “if you can’t tell me what the point is. Sit with me and listen to the music.”

  “I’ve heard it all before,” Jonah said inarguably.

  Phelan sighed. “Well, I haven’t. Try to stay out of trouble while I listen.”

  He saw Beatrice leave at midmorning. He watched the empty place where she had sat for some time after, hoping she would change her mind, decide not to join the digging crew and reappear as the one point in the dizzying multitudes of faces where his eyes could rest. Attendants passed among the musicians, offered water, fruit, tea, juices, and more hefty fare for the nerveless. Phelan, sipping chilled citrus juice, listened to Kelda work his magic over the crowd, causing vendors roaming the tiered stone walkways to stop in their tracks as the deep, honed voice flooded the amphitheater and the plain, until the distant hillocks seemed to take up and echo his song. Phelan, moved in spite of himself by the unfortunate lovers in the ballad, searched for Beatrice again and found his father instead, sitting beside Sophy and drinking something no doubt forbidden to the vendors to sell. Or maybe it was just tea; he offered the flask to Sophy, and she accepted it. Phelan’s attention lingered on his father, as applause roared like a sea-wave around him. Still stunned by Jonah’s tale, and hopelessly trying to imagine such a life, he knew that it would be his own lifelong predicament to wonder at the mystery until he watched Jonah watch him die.

  He was rescued abruptly from such dark thoughts by the first wild, exuberant note out of the next musician’s throat. He felt his skin prickle. He barely recognized the voice; it seemed as though one of the ancient stones, warmed by the bright smile of the sun, had broken into song. It made him yearn for an instrument—anything, a blade of grass, a singing reed—to play along with her. She seemed as serenely confident of her powers as a full moon drifting to airy nothing above the horizon, as strong as an old oak tree carrying generations of nests in its enormous boughs or a mischievous wind blowing any thought of death away as lightly as last year’s dried leaf. He laughed, even as tears stung his eyes. Kelda could not matter against this. Nothing mattered, only the exhilaration and generosity in the voice that must have swept across the plain to startle the eagles on the crags of Grishold and make the old stones dance along the edge of the northern sea.

  The musicians rose, clapping for her, even Kelda, as she came back downstairs. The unfortunate who had to follow her dropped a kiss on Zoe’s cheek, laughing as they passed on the stairs. Zoe found Phelan; the musician beside him moved aside for her to sit with him.

  The little, taut smile on her face, the absolute fearlessness in her eyes made him stare at her with awe.

  “You’ve declared war,” he breathed.

  She shook her head. “Not war,” she whispered tightly, as the musician on the stage above them began her song. “Not yet.”

  Late in the afternoon, the last of the competitors played, a dilettante so inept he didn’t bother to finish his song, just broke off with a laugh and a wave. The musicians stretched their legs, had a bite to eat, talked tensely as they awaited the first round of eliminations. The amphitheater began to empty. An hour later the list of the musicians requested to return on the second day was read by one of the masters on the stage.

  To his surprise, Phelan was among them.

  “Good,” Zoe said simply, when they heard. “We are allowed to play with each other and against each other, tomorrow, if we request it. I’ll put us down together.”

  “Why bother?” Phelan asked. “You should play against someone who might win. One of the court bards.” She only laughed at that. “Kelda, then.”

  “That will come,” she said softly, seeing it, her smile gone for the moment. Then she looked at him again, and it returned. “Who would you rather lose to, than me?”

  He smiled. “All right. Just tell me what to practice.”

  She told him, then left to find Chase in the crowd lingering outside the amphitheater. Phelan looked for Beatrice, saw only Jonah, and went out another way to elude the argument waiting for him outside the Musicians Gate.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The princess looked reluctantly up from under the earth toward the end of the day, deliberately not thinking of what lay ahead, only wondering how Phelan had fared. He had sung to her all afternoon, the tender ballad echoing in her head, in a lovely diversion, like a songbird on her shoulder as she brushed and probed and sweated under the cascade of midsummer light. Finally, the light faded, went elsewhere; around her, tools began to slow.

  The work crew stood silently, pondering the mystery pulled deep underground by its own ponderous weight.

  “It has to be,” Campion said tiredly, leaving streaks from his fingers across his face as he rubbed an eyebrow. They all wore a pelt of dust over clothes and skin, as though they were slowly turning into strange burrowing creatures who measured their days by the hours they could spend underground and left their thoughts there when they came up, blinking, into the world.

  The massive wall of yellow stone was riddled everywhere with runes, except for what they called the door stone; the center of that squat, massive oblong held only one symbol: a dot that coiled around and around itself until it ended in a perfect circle. Ida had uncovered it earlier, absently chattering to them all the while, telling some story of a disastrous party while her vigorous brush
ing was revealing another story entirely.

  “Why,” she asked plaintively, gazing at the door. “Maybe it’s a sort of pantry. Or some kind of sweat lodge, an early spa—”

  “Could be, I suppose,” Hadrian said dubiously, bending his thin frame backward and forward to unkink his spine.

  “Doors,” Curran pointed out, “are meant to be used. Unless they’re meant to open once, then close something inside. Has to be a tomb. Likely we’ll never know, the way that stone is wedged in there now—looks so old it’s slumped and melted into itself.”

  “A king’s tomb, maybe,” Beatrice murmured. “All that writing, that special mark on the door ...”

  “Well.” Campion reached for his tool belt, slung it over his shoulder. “Jonah will know. Odd he hasn’t come to look at it yet.”

  “He’s been at the competition,” Beatrice said, adding as they looked at her questioningly, “Phelan is playing.” She felt the warmth in her face as she said his name; luckily, she was so grimy nobody noticed.

  “Does Jonah even know about this?” Curran asked.

  “Oh, yes. I told him.”

  Campion grunted. “Phelan must be good, to keep Jonah’s mind off his digs.”

  “He roams at night,” Curran said wryly. “Along with the standing stones. Likely he’s already seen it.”

  They clambered out then, leaving the mystery to the moon. They washed their faces in water and leftover tea from the thermoses, and pounded the dust off their clothes. Beatrice gave them a ride across the bridge, dropped them to catch their various trams, and turned reluctantly toward the awaiting squall. The last she had seen of the queen had been at the garden party. Beatrice had sent her a message from Jonah Cle’s house that evening, a rather incoherent one, she recalled, but who could be entirely rational after emerging in tattered stockings and a party dress out of a sewer in the company of a thousand-year-old legend?

  The answer from the castle had been ominous silence.

  She had time, at least, to wash and change before the summons came. Unexpectedly, it was from her father.

  She found the king pacing among his antiquities, tossing comments over his shoulder to Master Burley.

  “Beatrice. Your mother told me to talk to you,” he said brusquely. “Do you have any idea why?”

  She smiled, enormously relieved. “Nothing to be concerned about,” she answered.

  “Good. She said that you ran away after a party two days ago and were seen this morning in the company of Sophy Cle.” He picked up an ancient bone rattle, shook it absently, the whirling bones clicking wildly, to Master Burley’s consternation. “Anything you need to talk about?”

  “I don’t think so, really. I think—somehow I might have fallen in love with Phelan Cle.”

  His brows rose. “Phelan.” He gave the rattle a final spin, put it back down. “H’m.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” His hand hovered over a fine, very early piece of pottery. Master Burley closed his eyes. Beatrice watched her father’s expression change slowly, as he mused. He dropped his hand abruptly, leaving the pottery intact. “Well,” he said again, looking hopeful. “That could work. Couldn’t it? It gets tedious, trying to discuss antiquities with your brothers and Marcus. Anything else upsetting your mother?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Good. Then we can move on to what you’ve unearthed in that dig of Jonah’s. Your mother said it was all you could talk about at her party. What on earth did you find?”

  “Father, it’s the most amazing thing,” she told him eagerly. “A great creamy yellow stone tomb-looking sort of thing completely covered with runes. Except for the door. At least we think it’s a door. There’s only one symbol on that.”

  “What symbol?” both the king and the curator demanded together.

  “A circle that coils inward to a dot. Or maybe the other way around.”

  “A coil,” her father murmured, and glanced at Master Burley. “Anything come to mind?”

  “Nothing immediately, my lord. Perhaps the princess could draw it.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll find some dictionaries.”

  He disappeared, came back with pencil, paper, and an armload of books. Beatrice drew the spiral within the circle, and they all pored among the books, draping themselves in various positions over the collection cases: Beatrice with both elbows on the glass covering a case of early spear and ax heads, studying a translation from the runic; the king leaning against a cupboard full of pottery pieces and flipping through a dictionary of early symbols.

  “Anything?” the king murmured. Master Burley, poised like a bookend on the other side of the pottery cupboard, shut one book, opened another impatiently.

  “You would think that such a simple, memorable symbol would be more easily found.”

  “Not like ‘bread,’ ” Beatrice commented absently, twirling the pencil through her hair. “Perhaps it’s someone’s name?”

  “Lucien!” the queen said despairingly, and the cases rattled alarmingly as they all straightened. She eyed her daughter frostily, then tossed her hands. “I give up, I really do. Have you even tried, Lucien? Have you spoken to your daughter at all?”

  “Of course I have. She says everything is fine. Oh, and that it may well be a tomb.” The queen stared at him. He smiled at her. “Shall I take your brother there tomorrow, show him what Beatrice has found? He fell asleep during the bardic competition today. Perhaps he prefers tombs.”

  “Bards,” Beatrice echoed abruptly. “Kelda will know.”

  “What?”

  She gazed at her father without seeing him, seeing instead the dark, mystifying face of the bard, his teasing smile hinting of ambiguities. “What the symbol is. He knows them all, the old runes.”

  “Good. We’ll invite him to supper tonight and ask him. That is, unless Jonah is joining us,” he added. “There seems some odd tension between them. Do you understand it, Beatrice?”

  “Ah—”

  “Of course not, how could you? Some sort of misunderstanding, very likely.” He glanced around at a strangled sound from the queen. “What is it, Harriet? Are we late for something?”

  Neither Jonah nor Kelda appeared in the hall that evening. Quennel played alone, slow, old ballads and ancient court dances. There was an odd, distant look on his face, as though, beneath his own music, he could hear the music all over the plain as bards contended in private bouts in taverns, on hillocks under the moon, among the standing stones. His brows were drawn; his expression, on one of his final nights as Royal Bard, seemed more harsh than nostalgic. Beatrice guessed whose music he listened for, drifting across the long summer evening, and was both relieved and disturbed that the young bard with his raptor’s glance, his perceptive smile, was nowhere in sight.

  It was a smaller family gathering than usual around the tables. Charlotte and her family had left for the country, the queen told Beatrice, who was sitting in her sister’s customary place beside their mother. Damon and Daphne were at yet another engagement supper; even Harold was out somewhere. The king was left to make desultory conversation with Lord Grishold. The queen’s voice, carefully modulated, had lost some of its implacable resolve. Beatrice wondered if she was already regretting the loss of Quennel, who had played at every important occasion in the castle since her marriage. Even Lord Grishold, the most unmusical of men, seemed to respond to the change in the Royal Bard.

  “I understand I might have to find another bard myself,” Beatrice overheard him say to her father. “I’ve heard the odds are on Kelda to win. People tell me his voice is magical. I can’t hear it myself; music all sounds alike to me, like bees—can’t tell one note from another. But Petris and our daughters will miss him.”

  “Charlotte’s invitation to you still stands, of course,” the queen murmured to Beatrice. “In the event that, after a little time, you need a place to think things over.”

  About Phelan, her mother meant. In case he turned out to
be as exasperating as his father, and Beatrice, having lost her heart to one who broke it, lost her job as well. How her mother imagined that Beatrice could have a solitary moment to trail through dewy mornings, scattering wildflower petals and brooding, with Small Marcus and Tiny Thomasina always with her, she had no idea.

  “There are other digs,” she answered calmly. “I think quite clearly when I’m working.” She heard her mother’s sigh under the genial clatter of cutlery, and added, somewhere between humor and exasperation herself, “It’s what I do. If you don’t want to look at me in my dungarees, I’ll go up north. They’re digging up an entire ancient village in the Marches.” The queen flung her a horrified glance. “I am sorry, Mother,” Beatrice added softly. “Truly. But, honestly, how long could you stand living among country roads and cows and hobby farms? If you insist I go there, I’ll only find the nearest dig site and disappear into it. There are some wonderful barrows and tombs in that part of the country.”

  Her mother’s knife scraped gracelessly across the porcelain. “At least Charlotte talks about shoes at the supper table,” she said darkly. “Not tombs. You really are hopelessly like your father.”

  “I suppose so,” Beatrice agreed amiably, while on her mother’s other hand, Lady Petris picked the word eagerly out of the air.

  “Shoes?” she exclaimed, actually drawing a second syllable out of the word. “I adore them, don’t you? I have so many I had to turn the old nursery into a closet. Tell me, Harriet—”

  Jonah found the princess at midmorning the next day, alone at the site except for the guard in the car, who glanced up from his book and recognized the interloper. Everyone else had gone to the competition for a few hours, to experience the historical anomaly of it, as Campion put it. Beatrice had been drawn back to the runes. Only for an hour, she told herself, brushing dirt out of the deep scores in the stone. They had haunted her dreams the night before, like mute faces trying to speak. She searched for the rayed circle within the silent, continuous chatter patterning the face of the tomb. The sudden shadow falling over her startled her as deeply as if one of the runes had spoken.