The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The modern historian can only suspend disbelief and conclude that the king, requesting that Declan find a successor to a bard with like powers, must have been well aware of the extremely hard nut he handed to the aging bard to crack.

  And back he came, her faithless love,

  In the night from the village below.

  She stood upon the tower above,

  Heard him singing in the snow.

  Hot tears spiraled down the ice,

  Whittled it sharp as love and lack.

  She called him once, she called him twice,

  He heard the deadly crack.

  He looked up and saw her eyes,

  Then he felt the blow.

  His heart’s blood froze around the ice,

  Colder than the snow.

  “BALLAD OF THE FAITHLESS BARD,” ANONYMOUS: POSSIBLY BY A STUDENT OF DECLAN’S

  And so death was the seed planted in Declan’s mind that split and sent up a shoot that leafed and branched and finally flowered into the first bardic competition held in the Kingdom of Belden.

  Before he announced it, even to his own students, he gathered the few who had been struggling over his twig-scratches and finally allowed them to see one another’s faces.

  They met in one of the rooms that Declan occupied midway up the tower, in which he kept his instruments and counseled his students. The students, grateful for rugs and fur underfoot, huddled close to the fire and eyed one another with dour surprise. None in the mangy, winter-bitten lot seemed to emit any kind of particular brilliance; they all worked hard, played well, sang well, and seemed to have no inkling of what in any of the others had persuaded Declan that they should be included in his secret circle.

  There were five: the handsome, arrogant, ivory-haired Blayse, son of a Grishold nobleman; the plump and earnest Drue, whose father was a wealthy merchant in Estmere; the lovely, lanky Shea, with her hard violet eyes and a horse’s tail of chestnut hair, whose father owned the village brewery; the angular scarecrow Osprey, whose father was steward in one of the great houses of what was once the southern kingdom of Waverlea; and Nairn the crofter’s son.

  They encountered one another daily; none were particularly close, not even Nairn and Shea, who had shared a summer’s eve in passing, once, on a flowery riverbank. It seemed a very long time ago, Nairn thought, and in a green, warm, sweetly scented world long vanished from the plain. Shea, dripping with a cold, cast a brief, bleary glance in his direction and sniffed, maybe a comment, maybe not.

  “My father taught me how to write,” she said, “to do accounts. But nothing ever like this.”

  “Nobody taught me,” Nairn said. “I thought that this is how everyone writes.”

  Blayse made a faint, rude noise. The pedantic Drue said solemnly, “I can understand how you could make such a mistake if you had never tried to write before. But you would have realized soon enough that you had run out of words. For instance, there would be, I think, no word for ‘innkeeper,’ or even ‘garden,’ such concepts being unimaginable to primitive people who did not differentiate between—”

  “Or for ‘tavern,’ ” Osprey interrupted irreverently. “Or, for that matter, ‘beer.’ ”

  “There have been hops grown on the plain for centuries, my father says,” Shea argued. “My father says—”

  “Hops,” intoned Drue, “first came from the fields of Estmere. The art of growing them and making beer was brought to Stirl Plain long after the stones were raised.”

  “My father—” Shea persisted stubbornly.

  “The earliest people on the plain had no word for ‘beer.’ ”

  “Well, they must have drunk something,” Osprey said. He appealed to the bard, who was at his table, rapidly writing twigs. “Master Declan—”

  “I have in my company the most gifted and promising of all my students, and all you can find to talk about is beer?”

  They looked at him, surprised: what else better in that bleak world?

  He gave them his rare, faint smile and rose. “Here,” he said, passing lines of twigs written on parchment to each of them. “When you finish translating this, come and tell me what it means. It is the keystone of your art. Go,” he urged them gently, as they stared blankly at the lines, turned the papers helplessly on their heads and back again.

  “But, Master Declan, there are over two dozen lines,” Shea protested.

  “Then you’d best get started. Oh,” he added, as they turned reluctantly from the fire, “you may ask one another for help.”

  Not likely, their faces said, as the students headed for the door. Not a chance. Declan’s smile deepened, Nairn saw, at the scent of competition.

  Curious, he spent his hours after supper matching the patterns on the page to the patterns on his list. “Plain,” he found easily, and “circle,” “stone,” “bone,” and others as simple and fundamental. Some patterns eluded him. Words he had not learned yet? Words newer in the world than the early, prosaic words of daily life?

  On a plain of bone,

  In a circle of stone ...

  He pored over the unknown words so long that he nearly fell asleep. They blurred in front of his eyes, swam together, made new patterns. He shook himself awake, translated all he could. Unable to write his own familiar language, he simply added them to memory, words making images in his head, as stark and elemental as the words themselves.

  Three ...

  The speaking stone

  The full cauldron

  The spiral tower ...

  Mesmerized, he gazed at the mute patterns until they entered his head as well, filling the spaces in his poem he could not render. His tiny room was soundless; the school might well have vanished around him. Only his candle made a sound now and then, a sizzle of wick into melted wax, a flutter at an errant draft that shifted light into shadow for a blink of time on his page.

  Three ...

  Three what? A bird’s nest of twigs followed, then another “three,” followed by two pair of crossed twigs. He stared at them stubbornly, willing them to speak, say what they meant, reveal what lay within the patterns.

  And suddenly they did.

  He felt his heart melt and his hair stiffen at the same time, at a vision of riches, at a vision of an enormity that came at him out of the shadows like a swipe of a vicious claw. His blood pounded; his eyes filled with gold, crowns, jewels, all tossed carelessly into a glittering pile that grew as its image filled his mind. Treasure. Terror. Treasure.

  He blinked incredulously at the twigs, and they spoke again. He whispered, echoing them.

  Three terrors ...

  Three treasures ...

  Sometime later—hours, days, another night—he stumbled through the dreaming school, the paper in his hand, the words burning in his mind. He ran up the tower steps to Declan’s private chamber door and pounded on it.

  Declan opened it. He was still dressed, his expression unruffled by sleep; he might have been waiting for someone, and he seemed completely unsurprised that it was Nairn. Nairn lifted the parchment; it shook in his hand.

  “What is this?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “Perhaps the oldest poem in Belden. I found it on a standing stone during King Oroh’s first battle on Stirl Plain.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “I think it means exactly what it says. Come to the fire. You’re trembling.” He opened the door wider; Nairn crossed Declan’s bedchamber to the hearth, tried to breathe in the warmth, pull it into his embrace.

  “They spoke to me,” he said finally, huskily. “They told me what they meant. I saw into them.” He closed his eyes; the bright words burned in his head, waiting for his need of them.

  “Tell me what they said.”

  “‘On a plain of bone, in a ring of stone ...’ ” He went through it effortlessly, his eyes still shut, seeing again image after image guiding him to the strange, bitter end. “‘... No end of days nor memory.’ ” He opened his eyes, finally beginning to feel the heat, an
d looked at Declan. “What was that? What did I do?”

  The bard looked as strangely pleased as he had when Nairn had coaxed the jewels from his harp. “You found the magic in the words; they spoke to the magic in you. That’s the beginning of power. You were born with the great gift for it, but you had no use for it until you met me. No one here could explain it to you. The bards of the land forgot their magic long ago.”

  Nairn was silent, still gazing at him. He had no idea what such words meant before that night; now, he knew enough to begin to feel his way into them, as into unknown waters, find their depths, their hidden currents, their dangers.

  “It was always in you,” Declan added. “Born in you. You just had no use for it before. In this land, the bards have forgotten their magic.”

  “It’s not that obvious,” Nairn commented, still clinging like a lover to the warmth, as close as he could get to the boundary between desire and danger. “Looking for magic in the simple language of your Circle of Days. ‘Fish,’ ‘Thread,’ ‘Eye.’ ” He heard the words he spoke and shivered suddenly despite the flames. “What made you look there?”

  “The poem itself. It promises such marvels to the bard who understands its riddles, its trials, and such sorrow beyond measure to those who fail to understand.”

  Nairn was silent. He turned away from the fire to ask the bard with wonder, “How could you read it? You were a stranger, faced with an ancient language carved in stone that no one else spoke.”

  He glimpsed the ghost of the bard’s smile, the flick of fire in his eyes. “I saw the power within the words before I even knew what they meant. The way you did, tonight. They made me feel them before they revealed themselves as the simple, ordinary language of daily life. I searched, as King Oroh moved across the five kingdoms, for those who understood that language. I found no one. Until I met you in the Marches, I thought the ancient knowledge had vanished completely from this land.”

  “The Circle of Days,” Nairn whispered, seeing such days on the plain, the simplicity of stone, root, spear. “I wonder how they used their power, the ones who spoke the words.”

  “I wonder, too,” Declan said softly. “We can only keep studying them; perhaps they’ll tell us that. They are your doorway into King Oroh’s court. Learn them. Work with them. Test them and yourself. But you must also face another test before you can be called Royal Bard of Belden. There is also the matter of music.” Nairn looked at him puzzledly. “The Royal Bard must also be the greatest musician in the realm. How would you fare against the court bards of Belden?”

  “I have no idea,” he answered, startled. “I never met one. Will I?”

  “By tradition, in my land, the king’s bard is chosen from a great meeting of bards who compete with both their music and their powers to win the position. I cannot do less for King Oroh in Belden. I have heard the music in courts throughout this land. Will you let me teach you?”

  Nairn could only stare at him, stunned by the thought of such a contest. One thing to be best at what no one else knew, he thought; another for the master of the bladder-pipe and the marching drum to challenge the court bards of the five kingdoms. Declan came to stand beside him at the hearth. He lifted a hand; poised above Nairn’s shoulder, it hesitated, finally settled. Nairn, looking down at the flames again, did not shake it off. The bard was offering him more than he had ever dreamed, he realized dazedly; he had only to accept it.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Teach me. How else can I learn what else I don’t know?”

  Declan smiled, a true smile for once, with neither bitterness nor reserve in it. “The court music will be the easy part,” he promised. “I have all the instruments they use.”

  “When—”

  “Soon, but not before you are ready.” His hand tightened briefly, then turned Nairn gently toward the door. “Get some sleep.”

  Nairn stopped at the threshold, looked at him again. “Were you waiting for me tonight?”

  “You kept me awake. Of course I was waiting.”

  Thus began Nairn’s brief and disastrous exploration of the most ancient bardic arts.

  The circle of his own days lost their boundaries then, became fluid, unpredictable. When he wasn’t learning exacting courtly music from Declan, he drifted like a dreamer or a drunkard, enchanted by every spoken word, every silent named thing around him, without paying attention to who had spoken, or what responsibility he might take for the things he saw: the dwindling pile of wood beside the fire, the candle guttering, drowning its wick in its wax, drawing the sudden dark behind it. He saw “wood,” “fire,” “dark” as separate, powerful entities; what they meant to him changed with every glimpse of them. He had no idea how the other students in the circle had fared with the task Declan had given them. They spoke around him; he might have been hearing their voices underwater, so intently did he separate their words from any human origin. Only that mattered: the word, spoken, and the image, the burning rose of power that blossomed at the sound.

  He heard Muire’s voice occasionally; it held another kind of power.

  “I miss you in the kitchen,” she said one morning when he came down for breakfast. “You used to scatter words like little gifts in odd places. You used to see what I needed done almost before I did.”

  He mumbled something absently around a bite of bread and butter, swallowed, and saw her face with unexpected clarity, instead of an indistinguishable blur in the background of his thoughts. It looked wistful, uncertain, words he hadn’t learned yet from the “Circle of Days.”

  “I’m finding my way into something,” he said a trifle incoherently. “I’ll come back one of these days, I think.”

  She nodded. “That’s what Salix told me. She asked about you.”

  Salix. She had words, he remembered, all over her jars and boxes, sewn into cloth bags full of dried things. Already Muire’s face was fading; the unknown words glowing in his head, brighter than all the old, familiar words surrounding him.

  “Salix.” He tore another piece from the loaf, shambled off with it. “I’ll go and see her.”

  He did so, wandering out the door with his breakfast in one hand, his cloak in the other. He hardly noticed the steady fall of snow the clouds were sifting out of themselves, and how he slid on the fresh layers as he walked down the hill. He entered Salix’s cottage without knocking, prowled silently around, examining the collection of twigs she left like a secret path he was compelled to follow, all the while a tall, white-haired figure stood just beyond his attention, stirring and stirring her cauldron over the fire.

  “What are you doing?” he heard, and then himself, just as distantly:

  “Taking your words.”

  “Nairn,” she said, and he blinked. Another world fell into place around him: the old healer’s cottage, with her weavings on the floor, across the backs of chairs, her tidy shelves full of all her makings, neatly stored and labeled.

  He looked at her and blinked again, feeling as though she had shaken him awake. So she had, he realized; she had said the word that meant him.

  She gave him a smile that was somewhere between exasperated and amused. “Muire said you had become entirely impossible. ‘Distracted’ was the word she used. ‘Witless’ was maybe what she thought. Do you need a potion?”

  “A potion?”

  “Is there anything,” she said slowly and clearly, “I can make for you?”

  “Oh.” He shook his head. “I think there’s no cure for what I’ve got.”

  “Is there a name for it?”

  “I think—” He hesitated, looking at it, this ravening monster in him that ate words like fire ate twigs. “I think its name is magic. It goes where it goes. I follow.” He added, pulling up a useful word that he’d all but forgotten: “Sorry.”

  “Ah, well,” she said ruefully. “I wish I had been able to understand it better. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Do you know that yet?”

  “No.” Already the warm cottage walls were wavering, blurring behi
nd all the words he had learned within them. “Not yet. I’ll tell you when I know.”

  The snow had stopped falling; the world around him, as he walked back up the hill, seemed mute as midnight. Even the river, narrowed to a slit of dark water between encroaching boundaries of ice, ran silently under the pallid sky. The school on the hill seemed shrunken, huddled against the cold. The narrow tower windows, the tiny, thick panes in the students’ chambers, were barred with frozen tears of ice. The tower’s battlements were a thick, upside-down crown of ice, from which jagged, fist-thick shards hung down like barbaric jewels. Nairn, busy patterning everything he saw with ancient letters, forgot, for a brief moment, the shape of the word for ice. He stopped, gazing up at the massive icicles hanging high on the battlements and saw the patterns of the twigs in the way the icicles fell: long and short, long and long and short, randomly, the way the world sometimes made things. Or was it only the tiniest fragment of a pattern so vast, so intricate, that it would take a different kind of vision to see the whole?

  The sun came out then, unexpectedly, slipping a sudden, astonishing shaft of light between the sullen clouds. It struck the tower, ignited the crown of ice to golden fire, and Nairn’s breath caught in his throat. The word in his head kindled as well, light running along the ancient pattern like a finger across harp strings, as the sun was doing, making a music of its own on a winter’s morning. The word in Nairn’s head leaped up to meet the fire within the ice.

  There was a sudden crack just as, below, the scholarly Drue, bundled like a sausage, opened the door and stepped out.

  The icicle struck him with all the force of a spear thrown from the battlements. Nairn, the breath turned to ice in his mouth, watched him spin and crumple, heard the ice shatter against the threshold stone. The sunlight faded. A swath of blood, the only color in the world, melted the snow around Drue’s head. Nairn, frozen in that slow, amber moment of time, saw a flicker at the tower window above the door: Declan, disturbed in his music room, looking down, then across the yard at Nairn.