The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  What was the bard’s name? She tried to remember. He had not yet played formally for the court though she had heard soft strains of harping from the minstrels’ gallery the evening before. He would play that night, she knew, at the supper for Lord Grishold.

  “Beatrice?”

  They were all looking at her. She felt herself flush again, and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Father. I—my thoughts strayed.” She backed a step. “I should go. The tide is low now, and the others are waiting to be picked up.”

  “Wait, wait,” he said, laughing. “Before you rush away, tell us where this was found.”

  “Oh. Across Dockers Bridge, among the standing stones near the river.”

  “Really. And what inspired Master Cle to go exploring among the blighted ruins there?”

  “Father, nobody ever knows what inspires Master Cle.”

  “True enough. Well, if you must go, you must. Do try to dig up something suitably astonishing that you can show us all at supper tonight.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Maybe she felt the bard’s attention again as she opened the door; maybe it was only her own inclination that made her turn her head, look back before she crossed the threshold. He was watching her, his face a clear reflection of the surprise and interest in her own.

  She found herself, through the day, puzzling over that broad, clean-cut face, which somehow exuded energy and enigma at the same time. There seemed a wildness about it. Well, not exactly wildness, nothing the least feral; maybe it was only a suggestion of unpredictability, as was suitable for the court bard of the harsh and moody Grishold landscape. He would have plucked his music from high and low, lord’s hall and hovel, wherever he heard it. Maybe ... It kept coming between her eyes and her brush, that face, her eyes and her small pick, as she and Campion worked along the line of protruding stones, Campion whistling intermittently, sometimes asking questions about the disk that she barely heard herself answer.

  She did hear the sharp exclamation he gave toward the end of the afternoon. She looked at him, startled; he had dropped his brush and was rubbing his eyes.

  “You flicked your dust cloud right into my face, my lady,” he complained, half-laughing, half-snuffling at the dust up his nose.

  “I’m so sorry,” she exclaimed, groping for her handkerchief. “Here—use this—”

  “I can’t blow my nose on the monogram of the Peverell kings.”

  “Or course you can; I do it all the time.”

  He managed, despite his protest, with a great deal of enthusiasm; he mopped his streaming eyes, then tossed her a shrewd glance as he picked up his brush.

  “You haven’t heard a word anyone’s said for hours. Are you in love?”

  She stared at him, dumbfounded. “How can I be?” she heard herself say. “I only saw him this morning.”

  Such amusement erupted from the depths of the hole that must have unnerved even the hardened denizens of the ruins, she thought a trifle sourly, had there been any besides Master Cle.

  “Kelda,” Lady Anne said that evening, helping the princess dress for supper. “The bard’s name is Kelda.”

  Beatrice, who had tortured a good quarter hour of conversation bringing it around to the harper, felt a moment’s solace. “Odd name.”

  “Something musty out of Grishold history, I would imagine. Yet I’ve been hearing it all day.”

  Beatrice eyed her in the mirror as she dangled sapphires along the princess’s green satin neckline, then amber. “Really.”

  “Everyone’s been asking. All the queen’s ladies and most of yours are suddenly fascinated by the harp and have been paying visits to the minstrels’ gallery for lessons.”

  “Oh.” Deflated, she gazed at her tidy reflection, then studied Anne’s exquisite, aloof face, the arch of her fine nostril. “Not you, I take it?”

  “Too raw by far for me, Princess Beatrice. He’s spent his life in the wilds of Grishold, and he looks like a pony. A rather willful pony at that.” She held an elaborate, fussy, and quite hideous collar of gold roses twined around chunks of amethyst against Beatrice’s collarbone without, it seemed, actually seeing it. “Still. Something besides all that rustic homespun, a decent pair of boots, and a good haircut, he might just possibly ... especially with those shoulders ...” She caught the princess’s clear, speculative eye upon her and actually blushed, Beatrice saw to her amazement: a tint of old rose like something in an antique painting. “I beg your pardon, Princess; I was distracted. Well.” She snatched the necklace away quickly. “That won’t do at all.”

  “No.”

  “Worse than your medallion, the other day. Did you find out what it was?”

  “In a way. Once it meant a great deal, and now it means nothing to anyone.”

  “A bit like—” She hesitated, considering the subject.

  “Yes. A bit like love. I think the sapphires.”

  “I think you’re right. The color offsets the pale green of your dress and complements your eyes.”

  “But what is it about him?” Beatrice wondered. “Is it something he does deliberately, or something he can’t help?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Lady Anne said slowly, clasping the necklace and settling the tiers of gold and deep, sparkling blue around the princess’s shoulders. “But may I suggest, Princess Beatrice, that finding out might be far more trouble than he’s worth?”

  Which, considering the troubling events of the evening, Beatrice thought later, proved her lady-in-waiting’s shrewd eye for it.

  It began predictably enough. Guests in their finery gathered in the long antechamber before supper to greet Lord Grishold and his family. Bottles were uncorked; platters carrying morsels of edible art followed trays of gleaming crystal in their labyrinthine paths through the crush. Flutes and viols sent their voices genially from the distant minstrels’ gallery to weave among the conversations below, all of them getting progressively louder as more guests were announced and added their own voices to the throng. Beatrice, drifting and making agreeable noises here and there, found her gaze straying through the gathering, searching, she realized, for the young, energetic face that had riveted her attention that morning. She felt herself flushing at the memory and pulled her attention resolutely back to the face in front of her: her brother’s affianced, she discovered, describing, inch by inch, the lace, piping, pearls, and ruches on the sleeves of her wedding gown.

  Beatrice smiled and nodded and drifted again as soon as politely possible. A dark head caught her eye. But it was the back of Jonah Cle’s head, not the bard’s. He was standing on the edge of the crowd, a glass in his hand. His son, who tended toward the opposite side of whatever room his father was in, stood unexpectedly next to him. Even more unpredictably, they seemed to be talking, at least until someone in the crowd caught Phelan’s attention, and he vanished into it.

  Beatrice, remembering the hooded face appearing at odd places in her father’s collection, put on her brightest smile, pretended to be deaf, and made her way to the fraying edges of the party.

  “Good evening, Master Cle.”

  His crabbed expression remained unchanged, but she did cause him to blink.

  “Princess. You clean up astonishingly well.”

  “Yes, don’t I? I wanted to ask you about that disk. I went to consult Master Burley this morning, and he pointed out the hooded face on several different pieces from entirely different centuries. He said that beyond the fact that it meant a secret, no one knows what the secret was. Do you have any idea?”

  He was still looking at her, but his heavy-lidded gaze had become fixed and very dark, as though his attention had shifted imperceptibly beyond her. As she glanced around, something equally dark loomed to her other side. She turned her head quickly, and there was Lord Grishold’s bard, all in black as usual, and smiling upon them.

  “Princess Beatrice,” he said, bowing his head to her. His deep, warm voice seemed to resonate in her bones, set them thrumming like harp strings. “Maste
r Cle. We have not met, but I had the privilege of seeing many of your finds this morning in the king’s collection. I understand you also studied at the bardic school on the hill?”

  It seemed to take forever for Jonah to answer. “Once,” he said finally, so dryly that Beatrice expected the word to puff into dust in the air.

  Then the bard turned to her once more. Tall as she was, his big bones made her feel oddly birdlike, more swallow than her usual stork, as though he could carry her on his fingers. She felt her skin warm beneath the sapphires as he spoke; again, she sensed the odd, jarring, intriguing juxtaposition of ancient mystery and youthful exuberance.

  “Princess, my name is Kelda. It’s an old crofter’s name in Grishold. What my father hoped I would become, except that he kept finding me sitting on the sty and singing to the pigs after I fed them.”

  “Charming,” Jonah breathed to one of the ancestors hanging around the room, and the bard’s smile turned rueful.

  “We in Grishold are a plainspoken lot. I learned my ballads in some rough places, where folk still sing the most ancient songs of the realm. I thought that, considering what you were wearing this morning, Princess, you would know something about earth.”

  “Yes,” she answered a trifle dazedly. “I do. In my other life, I dig things up for Master Cle.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t that an unusual occupation for a king’s daughter?”

  “I suppose, judging from old ballads, you would think that we all sat around doing needlepoint and waiting for our true loves to ride up to our door. Doors.” She was gabbling, she felt, under his smiling eyes, and wished she had pulled a glass off the champagne tray disappearing beyond him.

  “Of course I do,” he answered with disarming candor. “Tales are all I know of princesses, in Grishold. But why do you like old things?”

  She flushed again, as though the question were somehow intimate, and he knew it. She answered more slowly, studying his face helplessly as she spoke, entranced by the ambiguities in it. “I like—I like recognizing—I mean finding—what’s lost. Or rather what’s forgotten. Piecing people’s lives together with the little mysteries they leave for us. I like seeing out of earlier eyes, looking at the world when it was younger, different. Even then, that long ago, it was building the earliest foundations of my world. It’s like searching for the beginning of a story. You keep going back and back, and the beginning keeps shifting, running ahead of you, always older than the puzzle piece you hold in your hand, always pointing beyond what you know.”

  He nodded vigorously, his flowing hair catching rivulets of light. “That’s what I feel when I come across a new ballad,” he exclaimed. “I keep listening for the older form of it, the place where language changes, hints at something past, the place where the story points even farther back.”

  “Yes,” she agreed quickly, and noticed Phelan, then, coming to a stop beside the bard and gazing at her, entirely oblivious to the tray of wine intruding in front of him. Jonah took a glass promptly, and she saw it then, the older story: the flick of perceptive amusement in the young bard’s face, the faint, narrowed, teasing glance, the odd familiarity with the man he had never met. She stood with her mouth left hanging gracelessly open, forgetting even to reach for wine herself. Then Phelan greeted her, and she closed her mouth again quickly.

  “Princess Beatrice,” he said, looking so innocently amazed, she could have kissed him. “You’ve stepped out of an old fairy tale.”

  “Let me guess,” she heard herself babble breathlessly, just to keep her startled eyes off the bard. “The one about the maiden who cleans hearths by day and dances with the prince by moonlight.”

  He nodded, smiling. “She rises from the ashes, phoenixlike, under the fires of the moon. I suppose that tale would be apt, though ash bins were farthest from my mind.”

  She felt the bard’s dark gaze drawing at her as Phelan spoke; somehow, in that crush, she heard his indrawn breath, gathering words to speak, to force her to look at him. But another voice blundered into his, deep and jovial, trained to command attention and overwhelm the competition.

  “Ah, good. Here you are, Master Kelda. I would like you to meet Zoe Wren, whose voice you will hear tonight. She is a young bard from the school, nearly finished with her studies there. We are, of course, also eagerly anticipating your own performance.”

  The impervious Royal Bard Quennel, his white hair tufted like a skylark’s crest, beamed upon the gathering. Zoe, in flowing, twilight-colored silks, greeted the princess first with her usual courtesy, then shifted her sharp, lovely eyes to the bard. She seemed oddly impervious to his charms.

  “Master Kelda,” she said briskly in her strong, sweet voice. “I do look forward to your playing. I expect you will work magic in the great hall.”

  That caused Jonah Cle to snort in his wine for some reason. Kelda regarded Zoe with interest, as though she were an unfamiliar species. “I have heard your voice,” he remarked. “Very clearly, when we all arrived. It was, as Master Quennel says, astonishing.”

  She smiled cheerfully. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  A platter of tiny glazed tarts shaped like scallop shells carrying an oyster beside a black pearl of roe presented itself and was ignored, except by Beatrice, who nibbled when she was unnerved by undercurrents, and by Quennel, who swallowed the briny mouthful whole and engulfed them all again in his pleasure.

  “Tell us, Master Kelda, do you travel often beyond Grishold? I don’t believe we have seen you before in King Lucien’s court. Nor, indeed, in his father’s, though you might have been a student then. I have been here in this court so long I lose track of the years.”

  Kelda shook his head, causing Jonah to emit another peculiar noise. “I travel rarely. And I have never been in the ancient school on the hill.”

  “You must go, then!”

  “Yes, tomorrow. The masters have invited me, and Lord Grishold will not need me. But surely, Master Quennel, you have played for three kings in this court: King Lucien’s grandfather as well.”

  “Ah, yes—I became Royal Bard just before he died. I’m surprised that you remembered. I did not.”

  “We listen greedily in Grishold for news of Caerau. It takes the chill out of the long winter evenings. I’m in awe of your stamina. Your musicianship. You have been in this position for so long that surely you are tempted, now and then, to yield such strenuous duties to a younger bard?”

  “Never,” Quennel said complacently. “I have the voice and fingers of a far younger man, and a memory rigorously trained in the school on the hill. I forget that I am old when I play.”

  “You make us all forget,” Phelan murmured, glancing askance at the visiting bard and the turn he had given the pleasantries. That brought him Kelda’s attention.

  “You are also at the school, I believe?”

  “I am,” Phelan answered, sounding like Jonah at his most arid. “But I have no ambitions and no interest at all in trying to fill Quennel’s boots. He is a very great bard, an example to us all, and I can only wish him to keep playing for the Peverell kings as long as he himself wishes.”

  “Which would be,” Quennel added, smiling, “until I draw my final breath between lines and leave one last verse unsung to haunt these old stones forever.”

  “Admirable,” Kelda said with enthusiasm, and stopped a tray of toast points bearing minute molds of salmon, with capers for eyes. “We can all learn from your example.”

  “You see,” Quennel began affably, and paused to pop a salmon into his mouth before he continued. He swallowed, paused again, swallowed again. Beatrice, working on her own fish, saw his face flush the hue of well-cooked salmon, then of uncooked beef. She nearly inhaled her own bite. Jonah said something sharply to Quennel, who was beginning to sag oddly against the startled Zoe. She struggled to hold him upright. As he slid, Jonah threw out his arm; it struck the old man hard below his ribs. The wine in Jonah’s hand splashed all over Quennel, and the salmon flew out of him like the fin
al word on the subject before he slumped to the floor at their feet.

  Chapter Ten

  Given the mysterious nature and gifts of the bard who honored King Oroh’s court and sat at his right hand at councils, the king had handed Declan a conundrum. Declan had replaced himself, the first time, with someone he already knew and trusted, a skilled musician, presumably with the kinds of talents Oroh expected. This bard had also traveled in the king’s company from their native land. The court chronicler’s notes on the matter indicate that the bard’s sudden and completely unexpected death was indeed a stunning loss for the king. In his own land, the bard might have been easily replaced. In the new Kingdom of Belden, bards were trained far differently, and what King Oroh had come to expect in his Royal Bard simply did not exist. “The young bard left no one in this wild country to replace him,” the chronicler wrote. “King Oroh has no choice but to summon Declan back to him if he can find no other of such necessary skills.”

  What exactly were these “necessary skills”?

  Either they were kept secret, or alluded to between the lines, or everyone so easily recognized them that there was no need for explanation. Any of these are possible, since nobody ever explained why a gifted bard native to any of the five lost kingdoms would not have suited Oroh as easily. References are made to Declan’s unusual powers, both in historical records and in ballads. But in records, the references are brief, subtle, and sometimes barely there.

  “The mist that flowed that third day over the adversary [at the Battle of the Welde] Declan raised with his skills, and thus was the King of the Marches brought low.”

  Is Oroh’s chronicler actually telling us that Declan raised a fog that blinded only King Anstan’s army?

  If so, such gifts that died with Oroh’s latest bard must have been extremely difficult to replace. Indeed, the terse passage casts a glance askew at all of King Oroh’s victories, and explains, in some occult fashion, his swift, triumphant usurping of the powers of five kings. He anchored his fleet in the foggy waters of the Stirl in early spring; by the next spring he declared himself King of Belden.