The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Nairn, who regarded seasons with a lover’s eye, watched winter’s changing moods, its astonishing expressions, and learned to write its ancient words: fire and ice, breath and death, dark, night, end. The full moon hanging so clearly among the frozen stars that it seemed to take on dimensions was a word in itself, he thought; it spoke a silent mystery that was somehow connected to the list of patterns lengthening daily under his nib. The glittering path of its light across the dead white plain turned to music in his head; he fashioned its fiery white brilliance with his fingers, played it back to the moon.

  He went into the kitchen one morning and found, instead of the tall, calm beauty stirring the porridge, someone darker, slighter, with a tumble of untidy hair and eyes, when she glanced toward him, of a light, startling gray beneath level black brows. She filled a bowl for him briskly without explaining herself.

  “Where is Odelet?” he asked, ladling bites into his mouth as he stood there, the way he was used to since they had become friends.

  “Upstairs,” was the laconic answer, meaning: in the room with the great hearth and the tables where the more civilized students were eating.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Muire.” She took a poker to the fire under the cauldron with a great deal of energy, until the listless flame leaped to embrace all the wood it could reach. “Salix’s granddaughter. She sent me up here to help out.”

  He nodded. Odelet, of the fairer climes in east Belden, suffered in the cold; her eyes and nostrils had been red-rimmed for weeks, and she had begun to make bullfrog noises, coughing in the night.

  “Good. Do you know how to cook?”

  Muire smiled thinly, as though he had asked if she knew how to gut a fish or milk a cow or pluck a hen or any other of a hundred things any idiot knew. “I can cook,” she said. He stood there chewing absently, watching her as she shook a lump of dough from a bowl, dropped it onto a patch of flour on the table, and pummeled it with her fingers until it lay round and plump as a cushion. She took a knife to it, slashed it delicately with one long line across its surface and a shorter line to each side of that, three twigs, he realized slowly, in the ancient pattern for “bread.”

  “Do you know what that means?” he asked abruptly. “Those lines?”

  She considered them, then him, her dark brows peaked. “My grandmother always does that,” she explained. “To me, it means ‘bread.’ ”

  What other magic words had traveled down from ancient days to her? he wondered. Or to Salix? He took to visiting the kitchen when he had a moment, doing the odd task for Muire: bringing in firewood, scrubbing out the cauldron, hauling in water from the frigid well. He left her messages: a twig-word in a dusting of flour on the table, in a spill of gravy. A few she noticed and understood; others she swept up without question with her cloth. Declan, he knew, would have been appalled at him scattering secrets everywhere. But what the bard didn’t know he didn’t have to think about, and how would he find out anyway?

  “How do you know these things?” Muire asked him, after he carved the twiglet-pattern for “willow” on top of the butter in the crock. “Salix puts signs like that in her jars and boxes. I thought she made them up for herself because she can’t write.”

  “They’re very old,” he answered absently, his mind already traveling down the hill ahead of him. “I wonder where she learned them. I’d like to see your grandmother’s signs.”

  Muire paused in the midst of chopping the pile of carrots and parsnips he had brought up from the root cellar. She pushed hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, said simply, “Follow me home, then, whenever you want. She won’t mind.” She resumed her quick, vigorous strokes with the cleaver, running down a foot of carrot in a breath, while Nairn eyed her silently, curiously. Her eyes had been lowered as she spoke, and she didn’t look back at him now, though she must have felt his swift attention. Another message, maybe, in the complex language of the body. Or maybe not.

  He plucked a bite of carrot out of the wake of the flashing blade. “I will,” he said.

  He did, a few days later, after supper on an evening so clear that stars and the half-moon hanging above the village shone luminous and upside down, like a migrant school of glittering fish, in the black waters of the Stirl.

  Salix was a rangy, muscular woman with a cascade of white curls and eyes as dark as whortleberries. Her cottage by the river smelled oddly of smoke, rotting eggs, and lavender when they walked in. She laughed as she stirred the mass in her cauldron, and they reeled back out, pushing their weeping faces into the cold again to drag at air that burned like fire and gave them no relief.

  “It’s a good poultice for wounds,” she said. “Graf Dix missed his chopping stump and came close to cutting off his foot with his ax this morning. I’m making a great pot of it for him. Nairn, isn’t it? You were scaring the wolves away from my granddaughter on her way home?”

  “Something like that,” Nairn agreed.

  “He wanted to see your pots, Gran,” Muire said, untying her cloak. “He’s learning your signs.”

  The spoon spiraling through the morass in the cauldron briefly stopped. “Is he now?”

  “He says they’re very old words. You never told me that.”

  “You never asked. They’re just some odd things passed down from my grandmother.” The spoon was moving again; Salix’s eyes, no more expressive than the dark face of the moon, considered Nairn. “And who might be teaching you? Surely not the bard who came with the barbarian king? Why would he have paid any attention at all to such distant past?”

  “The stones,” Nairn told her. “He saw that writing everywhere on the standing stones across the kingdoms.” He gazed back at her, feeling something flow out of her to meet him midway in the flickering lights and shadows of her cottage. “You know,” he breathed, scarcely hearing himself. “You know what they are.”

  Her face, the skin clinging so to her bones that it seemed ageless, softened into reminiscence. “Once. Once maybe, when I was your age, I caught a glimpse inside them. What they truly mean underneath what they say they are. But my gran died, and there was no one else to teach me.”

  “But what are they?” Muire asked bewilderedly. “If they’re not what they mean? I never knew they meant anything at all but what you called them: ‘comfrey’ and ‘mandrake’ and such.”

  “That’s all they are to me now,” Salix said, “those ancient words.” She gave the spoon a turn or two silently, her eyes going back to Nairn. They smiled faintly; she added softly, “I can feel them in you, wanting to speak. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Yes,” he said breathlessly. “How do I—”

  “I have no idea. But that bard knows, or he wouldn’t be teaching it to you.” She lifted the spoon, rapped it against the iron rim. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know that, either. Come and let me know, will you, when you find out?” He nodded wordlessly. “You’d best go back up now; the wild things are out tonight, hunting under the moon.” She chuckled. “Though they’ll give you a wide berth when they catch a whiff of you. Muire, make him a brand to light his way.”

  She slipped out with him, for another clean breath, she said, as she handed him the torch. But the air between them spoke, brittle as it was, and then her smile did, in the firelight. He wondered, as he bent to catch her kiss, what pattern of twigs that lovely word might make.

  When he climbed back up the hill, he found the snow around the school churned by wagon wheels and horses. The broad room the students used both as refectory and study was full of wealthy travelers and guards dripping at the hearth. A young man with Odelet’s grace and coloring stood at the hearth, talking earnestly to Declan. The students around them softened their playing so they could hear the news. Nairn, taking off his cloak and watching Odelet come from her chamber wrapped head to heel in a great quilt, realized what they had come for.

  “I sent for Odelet’s brother,” Declan explained to the students. “Her health is frail; she ne
eds to be cared for at home.”

  Her wan smile, in a face as pallid as eggshell but for her raw nose, seemed genuinely grateful. Nairn bade farewell to her reluctantly the next day, for the band of courtiers, guards, and hunters wanted to get back across the plain before the storms returned.

  “Perhaps you’ll come to play in Estmere someday,” she told Nairn. “I hope so.”

  He gazed mutely at her lovely face, felt his suddenly heavy heart overladen with wishes, promises, resolves. He saw himself on a fine white horse, riding beside King Oroh to her father’s castle, trumpets sounding, doors opening at their approach. “I will come,” he said huskily; his eyes clung to her as she turned, a shapeless bundle of furs helped into the well-appointed wagon by her ladies.

  As the students gathered around the retinue, a couple piping their farewells, Odelet’s brother stopped his mount beside Declan.

  “Thank you,” he said. “This is most likely the only way she would have permitted herself to be taken home.” He paused, shook his head like a restive horse, and added, “I forgot. I was asked to give you a message from King Oroh, who is staying with my father. The bard you chose as your replacement died in an unfortunate accident. The king wants you to find him a new bard.” He paused, squinting into the rare winter sunlight and pulled words slowly out of memory. “You know what he needs, the king said, and he will be patient. This must be a bard to bring honor to the new realm of Belden, and he has utmost trust in you that you will recognize the bard he needs.”

  He raised his hand in farewell and shouted to the wagon driver, leaving the old bard still as a standing stone in the snow, and even more wordless.

  Chapter Nine

  Princess Beatrice found the face on the disk in her father’s private collection of antiquities. It lay in a case of rosewood and glass, this time on the page of an open book. She could not read the language; it was all in chicken-track runes, probably carved on stone originally, and comprehensible only to those chosen few who kept its secrets. Whoever had copied them had sketched the disk as well: the hooded face on the circle, its beaky profile already grown nebulous with centuries. The book had lain there, open to that page, for years. She must have glanced at it many times in passing until it imprinted itself into her memory, and the memory had stirred to wake when Curran’s shovel brought the face to light at the bottom of the dig site.

  But who was it? she wondered. Or did that matter? Was it simply the recognition of a symbol among those in the know that mattered?

  She rang a little bell hung to one side of a shadowy oak corridor to summon the curator. He appeared out of his mysterious warren of offices, workrooms, storage closets. He was a tall, bulky man who always dressed in black; his portentous and slightly annoyed expression melted away when he saw Beatrice.

  “Princess,” he exclaimed, smiling.

  “Good morning, Master Burley.” He had been down that corridor all her life, looking much the same, beetle-browed and bald as a bedpost, even in the early years when she had to stand on her toes to see into the cases.

  “On your way to work, I see.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, cheerfully. Her digging clothes appalled her mother, so Beatrice usually made a point of fleeing out the nearest door of the castle as soon as she had pulled on her dungarees and boots. But she had taken the detour on impulse that morning, guessing that her father, occupied with business and guests, would not have had time to delve into the mystery yet. “I wonder if you could tell me something about this face?”

  Master Burley followed her through the dustless, softly lit, spaciously enclosed spoils of history: jeweled chests and weapons, pipes and harps, coins and clothes, ornately carved cups and platters, to the case in the corner.

  He looked at the face, and said softly, “Ah.”

  “What does ‘ah’ mean? Master Cle laughed inordinately when he saw it. What would make him do that?”

  “Really? I had no idea he knew how. That particular face—what we can see of it—has appeared here and there through the centuries, on the odd metal disk or coin at its earliest; later on this seal, as the frontispiece of this book, even stamped into the silver guard of this sword.” He moved as he spoke, taking her from case to case, from century to random century. “Here we see it even on this delicate ivory cameo. So we must conclude that the face is suggestive of many different things: secrets, scholarship, violence, love, power.”

  “All that,” she said, entranced. “But, Master Burley, who in the world is it?”

  “No one,” he answered with more complacency than she could have summoned. Apparently, he had learned to live with this mystery. “Scholars have suggested various possibilities. The only thing they agree on is that the importance seems a matter not of identity—the owner of the face, or the original artist having died centuries ago—but of symbolism. Of recognition.”

  “Of what?” she demanded.

  “We don’t know that, either, Princess. Perhaps of the language. Or the secrets it hides.”

  “So if you recognize the face, you are one who knows the secrets?”

  “Roughly,” he agreed.

  “Well, then, what does the secret language say? Surely somebody has translated it.”

  He nodded. “There have been several translations.”

  “And?”

  “Well.” He passed a hand over his smooth head, looking bemused. “Scholars agreed on a common title for the work: ‘The Circle of Days.’ It seems to be a sort of journal of the daily lives of early dwellers in this land. Cooking, planting, chipping arrowheads, making clothes, washing them—”

  “Laundry?” she said incredulously.

  “That sort of thing.”

  “Who would keep a journal about laundry when you have to whittle the letters onto tree bark or stone?”

  “That has come up in scholarly debates.”

  “The secrets,” she guessed abruptly, “are hidden in the laundry. Cooking, carving—they all mean something else. Something secret.”

  Master Burley nodded. “Exactly, Princess. And there we stand. At the edge of the mystery, without a clue as to what anything might mean.”

  She pondered that and smiled a little, reluctantly. “I suppose that’s why Master Cle laughed. He recognized the face of the inexplicable. So that’s as far as we can go.”

  “Until the scholar is born who can understand the riddles inherent in primitive methods of laundry, we are indeed at a standstill.”

  “How extraordinarily peculiar.” She stood a moment longer, reluctant to give up on the question but having nowhere else to go for a better answer. “Well. Thank you, Master Burley. My father will probably be in to ask the same thing. I’ll tell him what you’ve told me, of course, but he’ll think I’ve missed something, or you have, or generations of—”

  The doors opened suddenly, and there he was, the king, strolling through the cases with an entourage of guests: Lord Grishold, his wife, Lady Petris, assorted courtiers and elderly cousins at whose names Beatrice faltered, and the big, dark-eyed man who was Lord Grishold’s bard, come, no doubt, to view the antique instruments. And here she was, the princess remembered suddenly, dressed like a bricklayer in yesterday’s laundry, for all the world to see.

  She quelled a laugh and an urge to hide herself in the curator’s closets. It was too late, anyway. Her father saw her face above the cases, and, as he grew closer, the rest of her. His expression didn’t flicker; most likely he didn’t notice, having a broad tolerance for peculiar objects. Lady Petris did: her painted brows tried to leap off her face.

  “My dear,” she said, bravely dropping a kiss near Beatrice’s face. “How unusual you look.”

  “Don’t I? I’m just on my way to dig.”

  “To dig. Yes.”

  “My daughter has unusual interests,” the king said briskly. “She drives herself across the Stirl and vanishes underground for much of the day, then comes home, if we are fortunate, with forgotten pieces of history. Such as this.” He flashed the di
sk he was carrying, and the aged cousins murmured. Lord Grishold leaned in for a closer look. The king added to Beatrice, “Your uncle has taken an interest in antiquities.”

  “Yes, they are always plowing up the odd bits in my fields,” he murmured. His bard was taking a long look at the disk as well. Beatrice found herself taking a long look at him as he did so. She couldn’t tell immediately if he was unusually handsome or simply compelling, the way he seemed to inhabit more space than he physically needed. Perhaps, she thought, he just inhabited, in some spirit, more of his burly, big-boned body than most were aware they possessed at any given moment. Even his long hair, left fashionably loose as musicians wore it, seemed to glow, like a well-groomed horse pelt, with black light.

  He raised his eyes abruptly from the disk, met hers. They, too, held that black light; it seemed, for an instant, to flow into her. In that brief moment, the vigorous young man seemed insubstantial as air, as time, little more than a mask for the nameless, ancient piece of past that had found its way under her father’s roof. She was used to looking at old things; something in her recognized him as yet one more.

  She blinked herself free after a heartbeat, remembered to breathe. She saw his compelling face again, looking back at her gravely, curiously. She felt the blood surge through her, then, color her brightly from breastbone to brow. She shifted her gaze with an effort; even then she felt his eyes.

  Or she imagined it: when she lifted her eyes again, he had turned his attention to her father, who was saying to the curator, “Yes, Beatrice has brought us a mystery, as she told you. This is what came out of the dig.”