The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  For a moment, her smile became genuine. “Well, I would like to know what Kelda said that took the scowl off your face.” She drew breath, held it, then stood up recklessly. “Why not? I’ll come and listen, at least.”

  “Good!” Kelda dropped a hand on Phelan’s shoulder, effectively keeping him in his seat. “You are welcome, too, of course. But since you seem to have someplace to be ...”

  “Yes,” Phelan said without moving, watching Zoe’s hand tremble as she brought her wineglass to her lips. She finished half of it in a couple of swallows and smiled brightly without meeting Phelan’s eyes.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back out the door,” Kelda said, gesturing to the group waiting for him along the far wall, “to a much quieter place. Only as far as that, this evening. How far later, who knows?”

  “I do,” a sinewy, drunken voice said from behind Phelan as they moved away, and he closed his eyes, stifling a groan. Kelda, his back to the voice, halted almost imperceptively midstep, then changed his mind and kept going toward the door. Frazer flung a startled glance behind them, but Zoe, her backbone rigid, relegated the problem to Phelan and drew Frazer along in her wake.

  Phelan rose quickly; Jonah, who hadn’t noticed him, blinked befuddledly at the apparition.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Drinking a beer,” Phelan answered. “Join me?”

  “No, thank you. I intend to join the party that just left.”

  “I don’t believe you were invited. Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Ask me later. I have a bone to pick with that bard. A salmon bone.”

  “Pick it later,” Phelan pleaded, not wanting to chase his father down the street to forestall a brawl. “I need to know what caused the top of the school’s tower to blow apart during the first bardic competition and rain down all over the grounds and nearly kill the school steward.”

  Jonah stared at him. Forgetting his query for the moment, he sat down slowly on the only vacant chair left in the place. “What have you been reading, boy?”

  “The school steward’s records.”

  “Dower Ren wrote all that down?”

  “Accounts were rendered for a new roof, for someone to clean up the grounds, and to Salish for healing—”

  “Salix.”

  “Whoever he was, for taking care of the steward’s scrapes when the roof fell into his chamber.”

  “She.”

  “Dower Ren was a woman?”

  “No, Salix.”

  “If it cost money, he wrote it down. Dower Ren did.” He paused, eyeing his father. “You’ve read this, then?”

  “No. I had no idea ... It couldn’t possibly have been ... What exactly did he say about the broken tower?”

  “Nothing much more. Only accounts rendered for three coffins for the remains of two students who were killed by the stones to be sent home in—”

  “Two students.”

  “The third was never found. Blown up like the tower, most likely, though the steward doesn’t speculate. He only wrote that since Nairn’s family was unknown, and there was no body to put into the third coffin, said coffin went back to the maker, and accounts already rendered for it were returned.” He paused, studying Jonah speculatively, while a waiter flourished his bar towel at a splash of Zoe’s wine and set a foaming mug down in front of Jonah. “Odd,” Phelan murmured finally. “That’s one thing I did notice.” Jonah, frowning down at his beer without tasting it, raised a brow at his son absently. “He never wrote that Salix was a woman. I had an image of a kindly, crusty village doctor in my head, with a huge hoary beard and hair in his ears. What have you read about those early years?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then how did you know—”

  “I don’t. Leave it—”

  “I can’t,” Phelan told him recklessly. “I’ve decided to do my paper on Nairn and the mysterious Circle of Days. Do you know anything about that?”

  Jonah glowered at him for no particular reason that Phelan could see. He raised his beer finally, downed half of it. “It’s been translated a dozen times,” he answered testily, coming up for air. “Mostly badly.”

  “How would you know?” Phelan asked curiously, and his father lurched up, beer dripping over his fingers.

  “You are foul company tonight,” he complained. “Not even your mother pesters me with questions like this. I have business with that bard.”

  Phelan sighed. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t.” Again Phelan was weighed into his seat, this time by Jonah’s far heavier hand. “I don’t want you anywhere near him. I’ll deal with him. Somehow.”

  “Fine,” Phelan said wearily, hoping that Kelda and his band of disciples had vanished by now into the back streets of Caerau. “You do that. Let me know where you end up when I have to bail you out.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  What was it with everyone that evening? he wondered, watching Jonah wind his way through the merry company, gulping the last of his beer and pushing the mug into an outstretched hand raised in greeting. Kelda at his most annoying, Zoe trailing impulsively after him despite all her reservations, Jonah prickly as a hedgehog and threatening mayhem, everyone hinting of mysteries they particularly did not want Phelan to know ... The night revolved around Lord Grishold’s bard, it seemed, and Phelan stood abruptly, finishing his beer on the way up, yielding to the pull of Kelda’s oddly powerful orbit, into which his father seemed in imminent danger of falling facedown.

  He hovered on the top step outside the tavern door, peering over heads to find his father, shifting this way and that at the flow around him. He glimpsed the back of Jonah’s head finally, moving downriver along the road. Then a blur of purple coming up the steps hid Jonah again.

  “What are we looking for?”

  Phelan blinked. Princess Beatrice, in purple silks trimmed with blue the color of her eyes, her tawny hair in a tumble of curls down her back, had stopped on the step beside him to peer down the street.

  “My father,” Phelan explained tersely. “He’s out looking for trouble, in the shape of Lord Grishold’s bard.” He realized he was effectively blocking a very well dressed group of her friends, and shifted quickly. “I’m sorry, Princess.”

  She didn’t move. “Kelda. Yes, they seemed to know each other, didn’t they, last night?”

  “Did they?” he said, surprised.

  “Maybe it was my imagination.”

  He gazed at her silently, struck by her perception. “No. You’re right,” he said slowly. “Either they’ve met before, or my father feels a mystifying animosity toward a complete stranger.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said abruptly.

  “Princess Beatrice—”

  “I like working for your father, and I don’t want to lose my job because of some scandal to which my mother is forced to pay attention.” She turned for a word to her listening friends, who laughed and began to disappear into the Merry Rampion. “Which way did he go?” she asked, following Phelan into the street.

  “Downriver. But, Princess, surely you have more diverting plans for the evening than watching my father try to brain someone with a tavern sign—”

  “No,” she said with a suck of breath. “Has he really—”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, we were only going on to a breathtakingly boring party where my sister-in-law-to-be will chatter endlessly about swatches and ruches.”

  “Is that some weird new kind of hairstyle?”

  “You don’t want to know. Isn’t that your father? Just passing the fish-market stalls?”

  “Yes,” he said, tautly. “Thank you, Princess. Your presence might actually check some of his more lunatic impulses. But his brain is such a morass when he’s like this, you might find it tedious listening to him.”

  “He can’t be more tedious than my brother’s betrothed,” she murmured, hurrying beside him effortless
ly it seemed, her high violet heels tapping briskly along the worn cobbles. “He’s going into the fish market ... Would Kelda likely be there?”

  “Empty stalls are far quieter than the Merry Rampion ... Kelda was trailing a horde of disciples when he left, whom he promised to instruct in ancient magical arts.”

  She slowed, turning a wide-eyed gaze at him. “Magic. How strange ... so that’s what’s in his eyes.”

  “Whose?”

  “Kelda’s.” Then she flushed quickly, vividly, under a streetlight. Phelan, watching, opened his mouth; she shook her head quickly. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try,” Phelan suggested softly. “Please, Princess. If you saw something in him, then it might explain what my father sees, or thinks he does.”

  “I’m sorry.” She met his eyes again, patting her curls to order, it seemed, in lieu of her thoughts. “He confuses me, Kelda does.”

  “You aren’t alone, there,” he breathed grimly, thinking of the wine trembling in Zoe’s glass, his father’s incomprehensible obsession. “What is it about this bard that sets everyone on edge? He’s coming back out of the stalls.”

  She turned her head quickly. “Kelda?”

  “My father.”

  “He’s crossing the street.”

  “He’s going into—”

  “The Wharf Rat.” Her long fingers closed briefly on his wrist, surprisingly strong. “Phelan—”

  “I’m not taking you in there,” he said adamantly. “It’s full of—”

  “Wharf rats? I suppose that would be high on the list of things that would cause my mother to pack me off to the country. No matter—he’s coming back out.”

  Windmilling back out, more precisely, Phelan thought, watching his father, on the next block, grappling at the air for balance as though he had been pushed out the door.

  Luck held him upright, though a couple of passing dockers Jonah careened against were not so fortunate. They hauled themselves off the cobbles, cursing Jonah loudly. But he had already rounded the corner into a side street, and Phelan picked up his pace.

  “There,” Princess Beatrice said quickly, as they took the turn onto the narrower, shadowy street in time to see Jonah walk through the gate of a low white picket fence without bothering to open it. “Well. There goes that herbaceous border. Is it an inn, or someone’s house?”

  Phelan sighed, recognizing the bowed front windows fashioned from ovals of warped glass, the picturesque walls covered with neatly pruned ivy. “The Stonedancer Inn. They know my father. The last time I found him in there, he was sitting on the floor surrounded by the contents of an entire tea trolley, with potsherds on his shoulders and the lid on his head.”

  “He’s going in—” The princess’s voice wobbled, steadied. “No. He’s going around the back.”

  “Then we’ll go in the front. Meet him halfway.”

  “But what would make him think that Kelda might be here?” the princess wondered, hurrying down the brick walkway after Phelan. “Kelda hardly knows his way around the castle, let alone the back streets of the Caerau waterfront. And why this prim little inn?”

  Phelan opened the door. The proprietor had abandoned the quaint reception desk. Doors along the creaky hallway were closed. Painted hands on signs pointed the directions of The Breakfast Room, The Library, The Lounge. Phelan turned to follow that finger.

  “Wait for me in the library?” he suggested to Princess Beatrice, who ignored him.

  He opened the door to the lounge abruptly, glimpsed a round table full of shadowy people next to a huge old hearth, whose fire provided the only light in the room. Then he heard a familiar sound that grew too loud, too fast, filling his ears, then the room, like the formless bellow of something as old as the world that had erupted from its sleep to rage at him.

  The sound flooded into him; he felt it vibrate through every bone in his body from skull to toe, and in that brief moment, he listened for the sound that his thrumming bones might make, astonished that there could be so many. Then he heard his father’s voice. The string that he had become keened and snapped, and he rattled down like a limp marionette onto the floor.

  He opened his eyes a moment or a night later. From that angle, under the table, he saw the lounge’s back door hanging open on broken hinges. A pair of strange boots seemed to be arguing vehemently with a pair of familiar boots that were cracked with misadventure and old enough to have attracted a crust of barnacles. A third pair of shoes, pretty violet heels, came toward him, slowed, stood motionlessly for a moment at the table. He remembered them, and lifted his head dizzily to see the princess’s face.

  She was staring at something on the table. Phelan heard her voice very clearly, somehow, beneath the escalating battle of voices belonging to the boots.

  “The Circle of Days.”

  Then her shoes spoke, coming toward him again, and he recognized the overwhelming sound that had driven into the marrow of his bones.

  A single harp note.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The steward’s records indicate none of the problems that Declan surely faced as he tried to fashion a fair and organized competition with the unwieldy number of musicians at every level of ability on the plain. This was not, beyond the occasional request for lodging, a matter of accounts rendered or received. For such detail we must explore other chronicles, letters, and court records, and even the ballads that took root in those scant days. The bard of the Duke of Grishold complained to the duke’s chronicler of having, on that first day, to compete with “minstrels, street pipers, and others of such ilk,” along with several bards well educated in the courtly traditions. He is happier on the second day, after the rigors of the first pared away novices, dilettantes, street and tavern players, and those without the hope of a chance, who could play a cheerful tune or two, and mostly had just come to listen.

  It is difficult for the city dweller to imagine what Stirl Plain must have looked like to those used to the lonely silent stretches of grass and standing stones. From “sunrise to moonset,” as one writer put it, the plain was covered with tents, wagons, campfires, pavilions, horses, oxen, dogs, with all the attendant noises, smells, colors. The school steward does list several of King Oroh’s nobles whom Declan invited to stay at the school. In various chronicles and private letters, they comment on the vivid crowd, the motley of musicians, and though, in the opinion of Lord Cleaver, King Oroh’s general and himself a musician, there are those “of great talent with their instruments, none seem trained in the necessary arts which King Oroh will expect of his bard, and which Declan brought with him to this benighted land.”

  None except, perhaps, for an unusual harper.

  This musician, of little charm, no wealth, and vague background, summons such art out of his simple harp that even the rich instruments of the high-court bards grow mute as he plays. Whence he comes he does not say, and his only name is Welkin.

  FROM “ON STIRL PLAIN” VIRUH STAID, CHRONICLER TO THE DUKE OF GRISHOLD

  By the end of the first day of the first bardic competition on Stirl Plain, one word fell from everyone’s lips like an enchanted jewel that contained the entire range of human feeling. Awe, disgust, envy, perplexity, suspicion, adoration, longing, curiosity, delight, and chagrin infused that single word; it changed every time it was spoken. That a craggy, threadbare, unknown musician with a battered harp, no family name or history, and only a vague direction as a place of origin, could render experienced court bards incoherent with his playing stunned everyone. On that first day, his name was most often followed by a more familiar word: Who?

  Who was Welkin? Out of what nowhere had he come? Where had he learned to play like that? As though his harp were strung with the sinews of the heart, with sounds from the deep, shifting bones of the earth, with all the memories of music in the world before day ever opened its eye and night and time began?

  Declan, moving through the crowds with his usual composure, confessed himself as ignorant as anyone of the harper’s
past. Nairn, who had spent his life listening for such wonders, was transfixed by the harper’s skill until a skewed vision of Welkin dressed in leather and silk, riding at King Oroh’s side, counseling the king and using his magic at Oroh’s whim, bumped up against the homespun harper with the mysterious past, the glint in his eyes, and powers even Declan could only guess at.

  Declan, only in private and only to Nairn, betrayed the one word that Welkin’s harping truly inspired in him.

  “Do something,” he demanded of Nairn, when the contenders stopped to eat before they played the sun down.

  “What exactly?” Nairn asked, disconcerted by Declan’s fear. “He plays better than I do.”

  “Listen to him.”

  “I do. I have been, all day. How could I not? He plays—he plays music the standing stones must have heard when they were new.”

  “Listen to the magic,” Declan insisted. “He uses those words I taught you in his music.”

  “How—”

  “Learn that from him. You know the words; you have the power. Learn to use it. I can’t teach you that. You must find it in yourself. You were born with it. I breathe the air of this land, I walk on its earth, but I was not born out of it, rooted in it, the way you and Welkin are. I carry the powers, the music I was born with; there are overtones, undertones I will never hear in yours. You must learn from him, now. He knows the language of your power.”

  “I don’t understand,” Nairn said, genuinely bewildered. “He wants to be King Oroh’s bard. He has what the king needs. He’s why you called this competition. Why are you so afraid he’ll win?”

  Declan, pacing restlessly through his private chamber like an empty vessel pushed back and forth on a roil of tide, swung impatiently. “Use your head. You saw those words on his harp. He’s something ancient pulled out of this plain by words I’ve wakened and by the hope of another chance.”

  “A chance.”

  “A chance to die, if we are fortunate. That could be all he wants. But I doubt it. This time, I think he wants everything he failed to get the first time. He wants all the powers within the Three Great Treasures. All that, he will take to the court of this foreign invader, and he will bring it down with a single plucked string.”