The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “You barely know the steward.”

  “I knew he would tell me the truth, how to spell the word I wanted, not give me some other word like ‘bell’ or ‘butter’ instead of ‘O—’ ” He stopped, clamped his mouth down on the word, but too late.

  A sound came out of the bard’s nostrils, a snort, a laugh, or just a passing spore, expelled. “Odelet?”

  Nairn’s fists clenched. “I knew you’d laugh. You keep your secrets and laugh at everything. You came as far north as you could go in this land just to spy on fishers and shepherds and lie to them—”

  “I’m not laughing,” Declan interrupted sharply. “I would not laugh at the only thing that keeps you here. Do you always tell the truth?”

  “Yes. No. When it’s important. That’s not the point—” He stopped, thinking back at his piecemeal life, all that it had taken to bring himself here to sit on a hill with the greatest bard in five kingdoms.

  “Music doesn’t lie,” the bard said after a moment. “If you play a false note, it sounds. But words can shift their meanings so easily, weigh so lightly one moment, fly like a star, or drop like a stone in the next. How many times have you spoken the word ‘love’ and meant anything but that?” Nairn, staring rigidly down at him, blinked. “And now that you finally think you know what the word means, you find it impossible to say. Who would believe you?”

  “That’s not—” he protested. “That’s not exactly—She—Anyway, I didn’t come to talk about that. How do you know? I’ve never said anything to anyone—”

  “Your face speaks every time you look at her. Your feet speak when you trip over them in her presence. Your fingers speak when they tremble on a pipe note. You talk about her all the time, in ways that I would wager my harp strings that you, with your gifts and your comely face, have never had to speak before.”

  Nairn was silent, gazing back at the eavesdropping moon. He drew breath finally, loosed it. “True enough. Am I that pitiful a creature around her?”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “I hadn’t—I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You haven’t been paying attention to anyone else. According to her brother, she left a very wealthy noble waiting for an answer to come here.”

  “Oh,” he said, deflated.

  “You might talk to her now and then.”

  “Maybe. She makes all the words vanish out of my head. And so do you,” he added restively. “This is not at all what I came out here to talk about.”

  “At least you are talking to me,” Declan breathed. “What did you come to talk about?”

  “Why are you teaching me to write ‘water’ with scratches that are as ancient as the standing stones and that nobody understands anymore?”

  “Because it’s the language of secrets, the language of power, the language of lost arts. The word only looks like ‘water.’ Beneath the surface, it becomes something else entirely. And you have the gift to use that power. You told me that in the grubby tavern by the sea when you took the jewels from my harp.” He turned its face; they glittered with a familiar warmth and beauty at Nairn. “They recognized you.”

  Nairn gazed back at them expressionlessly, remembering with what power and what innocence he had taken them. He shifted his eyes to Declan’s barely visible face, the cold tear of moonlight in his owl’s eyes.

  “Why do you want me here?” he asked slowly, sensing he would not like the answer. “Why are you teaching me this?”

  “I am learning this as well,” Declan reminded him. “I took the language from your ancient stones. It’s the forgotten power of your land I am trying to waken. The kings of my land know how to use their bards; the greatest of the musicians are the most powerful mages. I can teach you what you will need to know to become the Royal Bard of Belden.”

  Nairn took a step back, nearly lost his balance and tumbled down the hill. “No,” he said harshly. “No. I will never work for that usurper.”

  “Think,” Declan said softly. “Think. Of what your status would be in the king’s court. Of the music you have never heard: the court music of the five lost kingdoms and of King Oroh’s land. Of the instruments you could play. Of the knowledge that would come your way. The advantages of wealth and rank, as the king’s most honored bard, would open every court in Belden to you. Even Lord Deste, Odelet’s father, would welcome you under his roof.”

  Nairn whispered, trembling, “How do I know—”

  “That I’m not lying to you again? This was the final request of the King of Belden to me when I left his court: that I find and train the bards most capable of magic in this land. I am doing so. Think about all this. Then decide to stay or go. If you stay, that is what I offer you, in the name of the king.”

  “You didn’t answer—”

  “You’ll never know, will you? If you leave.”

  Nairn stood, mute again, gazing down at the shadowy figure as Declan picked up his harp, ran his fingers down it, shook a glitter of notes into the moonlight.

  He said haltingly, as Declan began to play again, “When I—when I went up the tower steps to talk to Dower Ren, I saw, out of one window, a great, dark tower on the flat land at the bottom of the hill, rising so high that it seemed to stretch into the stars, and they became part of it. Is that what you mean by the power of the land? You must have seen it, too. You were out here playing, then.”

  The harp stilled midphrase; it seemed, for a moment, that Declan’s voice had frozen with his fingers. Nairn heard him draw breath, hesitate; he answered finally, looking up at Nairn, his face in shadow but for his moonstruck eyes.

  “I was out here, yes. I was watching the moonrise and thinking about the music of my own land, wondering how much of it will be remembered without its history, how much will wither on this foreign soil. The bell jangled when you opened the front door. It pulled me out of my memories; I began to play, then.

  “I saw no tower. I heard no harping but my own. All the magic was for you.”

  Chapter Seven

  The formal invitation to the queen’s supper in honor of her brother, Lord Grishold, reached Phelan, as usual, in haphazard fashion. He had wandered out of bed after a long night at the Merry Rampion to be faced with the impending day, which offered nothing, no matter which way he looked at it, but a vast, empty blankness of paper upon which he was expected to write. His father’s house stood on the bank of the Stirl, not far above Peverell Castle, where the city streets, broad and lined with huge old trees, grew quiet. The water traffic there tended toward rich barges and sailboats; working vessels rarely came that far beyond the docks except to pursue a run of fish. The house, built of fieldstone centuries earlier, retained a few of its early eccentricities, including a pair of unmatched windows inset on a side wall as awkwardly as flounders’ eyes. Inside, time sped forward into oak and marble walls, thick rugs and carpets, softly glowing lamps that revealed Jonah’s enormous collection of oddments from everywhere in the world, including several places that Phelan couldn’t find on a map. His mother, Sophy, herself an heiress with family connections to the Peverells, favored all the modern conveniences, only drawing the line at keeping a car. They were slow, she said, and noisy, and you couldn’t tell them what to do.

  Sophy, fully dressed and wrestling with a skintight glove as she came upon the yawning Phelan in the living room, left a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of her son’s jaw and asked briskly, “Have you found your father?”

  “Am I looking for him?”

  Sophy nodded vigorously. Phelan had inherited her pale hair and gray eyes, even her charming smile, but not, he realized early, her stubbornly temperate disposition, which provided a formidable barrier to any questions about Jonah’s behavior. “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, you must find him for Lord Grishold’s supper—” She stopped, loosed a chuckle. “Not that the duke is planning to take a knife and fork to him, but we must all attend. The king wrote a tiny note on our invitation that he ex
pressly desired Jonah’s presence, to finish a certain conversation.”

  “When?”

  “When, what, dear?”

  “The supper?”

  “Oh. In a day or two—I’ve forgotten—” She smiled at him brightly, patted his cheek. “Just find him, Phelan. You’re always so good at it. The invitation is around here somewhere. I must rush away. We are knitting socks today for Caerau’s poor, and then Ursula Baris’s cook’s grandmother will teach us how to divine the future in a bird’s nest.”

  She left Phelan wordless, awake at last. He moved finally, stepped toward the cluttered desk in her study to look for the invitation, then veered abruptly at the door. It didn’t matter: clean, fed, his pockets clinking again, Jonah might be anywhere in the city. Phelan would either stumble across him in time for the occasion or not. He had a paper to write; his father could wait.

  He did turn from his chosen path, walking across Dockers Bridge again for a quick search around the dig site, before he buried himself in the school library. In the clear morning light, the desolation lost its mystery and became simply the sad ruins of an earlier century, walls slumped into one another, charred window frames staring empty-eyed at the colorful buildings across the river, ruined warehouses and broken pilings haunting the abandoned waterfront. Fire had gutted it; everyone had gone to more prosperous parts of the city; no one had found a need to rebuild the waste. Still, in the eerie silence, Phelan heard voices, brisk and cheerful, with no visible owners and seemingly from underground.

  He walked to the edge of Jonah’s latest project and looked down at the top of a head ascending. It was covered with a soft cloth hat; he couldn’t see the lowered face talking to someone below.

  He did recognize the voice.

  “Princess Beatrice,” he said, and the head came up abruptly. She smiled at him; the hat slid, its tie catching at her throat, loosing a burnished curl or two from her rigorously pinned hair.

  “Phelan.” She accepted his hand briefly, politely, as she stepped off the ladder, then let go and beat a cloud of dust from her clothes. “Sorry,” she added as she stepped back, laughing. “I’m not fit for civilized company after I’ve been down here. Are you looking for your father?”

  “Yes. Have you seen him?”

  “He was here earlier for just a few moments; then he went off.”

  “Do you have any idea where?” he asked without hope.

  She pulled pins out of her hair, shook it again as it fell, releasing more dust. “I don’t.” She paused, thinking. Behind her, below ground, Phelan could hear the soft whisk of brushes, the cautious tink of a pick, an occasional word. The princess’s calm eyes shifted from Phelan’s face to the city beyond his shoulder. They were, he realized, the same inky blue as the asters growing out of a nearby midden. “I know he’s been asked to court, but that’s no help to you if that’s why you’re looking for him.” She turned abruptly, called down, “Does anybody know where Master Cle might have gone?”

  There was a faint, ragged chorus of amusement; Phelan’s mouth crooked.

  “Ah, well. I’ll find him. If you see him—”

  “Yes, of course. I’m driving home now. Lady Hartshorn is giving a lunch for Lady Grishold that I couldn’t get out—I promised I’d attend. Can I drop you somewhere along the way?”

  “Yes,” he said before he thought, then changed his answer reluctantly. “No. I should stay, look around here a little; it’s where I found him last. And I can spot him better on foot. I know a few of his favorite places.”

  “If I do see him, can I give him a message?”

  “Thank you, Princess. Just tell him we need him home.”

  He sat at a table in the school library later, thinking idly of the encounter, then of Jonah, and then ruthlessly clearing his head to think of nothing at all. He gazed intensely at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words, words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall, armies of them marching endlessly on from one page to the next without pause. He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairsbreadth closer to the paper so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally, flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met. Kissed. Froze.

  He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on?

  He straightened again, dropped the pen, reached randomly for beginnings from the piles around him.

  “Does Bone Plain exist?” a recent paper inquired simply and succinctly. An older book introduced its argument murkily but more sonorously: “On the farthest horizon we can glimpse, back through time to the dawn of the five kingdoms, the place where history and poetry meet on Bone Plain.” Phelan snapped it shut, picked up another book, a thin, limp volume bound in fine leather. It began: “For centuries poets, bards, and scholars have run through rivers of ink arguing exactly which of the standing stones of Belden are also the standing stones of poetry enclosing the Three Trials of Bone Plain.”

  He closed that one, put it back on its pile, and dropped his brow onto the stack, hoping without hope that the words he searched for would somehow seep through flaking parchment and antique leather into his brain. The library, oak floors carpeted with lozenges of light from the windows, tall mahogany bookcases, the priceless collection of scrolls and first editions donated by Jonah Cle installed under glass on various stands, was relentlessly sunny and dead quiet. Everyone else in the world had something better to do on that bright spring day than agonize over ancient history. Maybe his father was right, he thought resignedly. Everything had been said. There was nothing more to say, which was why he could not find a single word to add to the subject.

  He got up finally, examined his father’s collection. Jonah had evidently considered the subject so tiresome that he gave away everything that had fallen into his hands. Phelan found, among other things, the earliest version of the tale written on parchment instead of stone, as well as an essay about Nairn by an obscure scholar who seemed to think that the bard, after failing the trials, was still wandering the earth a thousand years later. Phelan summoned the archivist from the depths of the library. The archivist, who would have thrown himself bodily across the doorway to keep the priceless manuscripts from leaving, said finally, in the face of Phelan’s desperation, that he could take them out as long as his father didn’t see them.

  Of all the places Phelan might run into his father, home was the least likely, so he took them there. No one else was around; the house was silent except for an occasional distant noise from the kitchen. He settled on the sofa with the manuscripts, and began to read.

  On a plain of bone

  In a ring of stone

  The Three Trials, the Three Terrors,

  The Three Greatest Treasures of All:

  The Oracular Stone

  The Inexhaustible Cauldron

  The Turning Tower.

  The bard whose voice melts stone and makes it prophesy

  The bard whose heart fills the cauldron and feeds the world

  The bard who forges death into song,

  madness into poetry

  night into dawn

  That bard will possess the most ancient powers of all

  language.

  These are the Three Trials of Bone Plain

  The Three Treasures

  Beware the Three Terrors:

  The bard who fails to wake the stone

  will sing stones henceforth

  Who fails to fill the cauldron

  will go hungry henceforth

  Who fails to turn the night to poetryr />
  will be broken on the shards of language

  and taken by the night.

  Who fails the Three

  will find no song, no peace, no poetry,

  no rest, no end of days, and no forgetting.

  The written poem was followed by an account of the wonders and tribulations of bards who had dared the trials for the sake of such power over their words, such glory in their world. Very few could be tracked, like Nairn, out of poetry and into history. Most of the unfortunates had been invented to bear the tales of their failures. Despite the dire consequences predicted, the more noble-hearted of the adventurers were given chances to mitigate their fates. They returned home scarred only with the memory, and rewarded with a tale that would be embroidered more colorfully and grow in detail with every telling.

  The manuscript itself was so old that Phelan held his breath as he turned the pages, lest a parchment word flake away into the air of a distant century. The scribe or bard who plucked the poem out of common memory and wrote it down saw no reason to add a name or a date or a place of origin. The tale itself was far older, Phelan knew from various scholarly papers on the subject. In itself, it gave no clues to where exactly a bard had to go to find Bone Plain. But Phelan knew that already, having memorized the entire poem by the time he was ten. He had taken the manuscript on the chance that seeing the ancient written words might spark some thought, some recognition, maybe even some impulse to pick up a pen.

  It was there, sprawled on a sofa with both manuscripts on his chest, that he glanced up at a faint stir of carpet threads and found his father.

  Jonah eyed the priceless manuscripts, grunted in recognition, and dropped into a chair near Phelan’s feet. Phelan could see his face. It looked predictably pale and curdled, but there was a peculiar expression in his eyes, and he seemed, in broad daylight, astonishingly sober.

  “Is something wrong?” Phelan asked tentatively. “Did you kill somebody? Accidentally get married again?”

  “No.”

  “Find a gold mine in one of your digs?”