The Bards of Bone Plain

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Master Cle.”

  “Phelan sent me to get you,” he said, stepping onto the ladder and descending. “So this is what you’ve found. Where is everyone?”

  “They went off to hear the music. I just came—I had to see this again.” She gestured inarticulately at the mystery. “I couldn’t help myself. Master Cle, have you ever seen anything like this?” He did not answer; she took her eyes off it finally to glance at him. “Master Cle?”

  He was utterly motionless, not even breathing, as far as she could tell, his face so white she thought he might collapse there at the bottom of the dig. She touched him. He moved then, gripped her fingers.

  “Yes,” he said harshly. “I have seen it before. Or something very like it.” He dropped her hand, turned abruptly toward the ladder. “Come with me.”

  “But what is it? What does it say? I don’t recognize that symbol at all. We searched for it—my father and Master Burley and I—in all the runic dictionaries, and we couldn’t find it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But—”

  He was halfway up the ladder; he gestured for her to follow. “There’s no time. I think Phelan may be in terrible danger.”

  “From what?” she asked bewilderedly. “An old tomb door?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  She guessed anyway. “Kelda,” she said abruptly. “You think—Master Cle, I have no idea what you’re thinking. What would happen to Phelan in front of everyone in the middle of the competition ?”

  “What happened to me,” he answered grimly, and she felt her throat close, dry with fear.

  “Is Phelan that good?” she asked shakily, starting up the ladder.

  “Only when he thinks of you. I want to be where I can see him. And Kelda.” He gave her a hand onto the upper ground, paused briefly to take in her impossible attire.

  “I brought clothes in the car,” she told him quickly. “I’ll change at the amphitheater.”

  “Good,” he said with relief, and added, dourly, “If it’s still standing. Kelda has already played once this morning. The place might be a heap of rubble by now, with all the shouting and stomping he caused.”

  “Magic?”

  He shook his head, the lines on his face as rigid as the runes. “Not yet. He doesn’t need it yet.”

  Beatrice told the guard to park the car down by the royal barge, got out of her dig clothes and into a frock in the private rooms reserved for king and courtiers. She went outside and climbed to the highest circle, at a level with the stage on its scaffolding, where she found Sophy under the flapping pavilion. It was Quennel’s preferred spot as well, Beatrice noticed; the old bard sat along the rim, wearing his formal robe of kingfisher blue, his ivory hair in a tuft, his expression as tense as Jonah’s.

  “He went to speak to Phelan,” Sophy told her, before she could ask. “Isn’t that your aunt Petris under that wonderful hat? All those plumes look as though they’re about to fly away with her.”

  “How is Phelan?” Beatrice asked anxiously.

  “Better, I’m sure, now that you’re here. He’s playing—” She paused to put her spectacles on, study the program. “Quite soon, I think. With Zoe.”

  “There’s my mother,” Beatrice breathed, startled as she recognized the flowery hat next to the plumes. “I hardly thought she’d be interested ...” She applauded at the sound of it around her, as one bard’s song ended and a court bard took her place, wearing instruments like body armor that flared with light at every note, as though the sun played his music for him.

  Her thoughts strayed again; she tried to find Phelan, sitting in the shadows under the scaffolding. She missed him; maybe he was somewhere with Jonah. But Jonah had come back, sat down next to Sophy, before the sun’s song came to an end. Beatrice’s hands moved mechanically; her face turned to Jonah’s grim, closed face, a question pending for when the noise died down again. She drew breath to ask it, then lost it again as Zoe began to sing.

  Beatrice stared at the stage, forgetting entirely to close her mouth. Two figures, one dark-haired, dressed in silks like blowing flames, the other pale-haired, in blue shot with silver threads down which light rilled like water, seemed to pull music not from their voices, their instruments, but out of the grass roots of the plain, the lichen on the ancient stones, the words carved into them as old as Belden. She felt her eyes burn, put a hand to her mouth. Surely, that was the sound of the spiraling circle on the tomb: that was its voice; the music pouring into her heart was the word itself, saying its name. The world blurred around her, flashing, melting. As the tears finally fell, she heard Jonah’s sudden exclamation.

  She could see again, but in what world she had no idea.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Another harper played with them. Zoe heard the sweet, exuberant run of notes like a stream rilling and splashing into her music, then merging with it, sometimes deep, secret water, sometimes leaping into light. Phelan, attuned to her, eyes lowered to his hands, did not seem to notice at first. Then his head flicked up; he glanced at her. His eyes grew very wide; Zoe heard his fingers slow, lag after a beat, a sudden, startled absence before his fingers caught up with her.

  She was beginning to falter herself: a breath instead of a sound now and then, her skin prickling cold under the midsummer sun. The amphitheater seemed to have grown incredibly high. The plain shimmered beyond it, green and gold and blue melting into imprecise horizons, behind an endless rise of stones spiraling around them. A dream of stones, she thought. A memory of stones. The plain seemed oddly empty, the sentinel tree on the crown of the hillocks scattered hither and yon on the plain no longer shaded colorful gatherings of listeners. Caerau itself seemed to have vanished into a silvery mist on both sides of the river.

  She felt more breath than music flow out of her, a long, cold flash of river mist; even her bones had gone cold.

  “Don’t stop,” a voice said cheerfully between verses. Kelda, she thought at first. She heard Phelan beside her, fingers laboring doggedly, as though his quick, skilled hands had turned stiff as wood. The harper drove them now, kept the beat, chose the song they slid into, helplessly caught in his current, held them in the bright web of his strings.

  The amphitheater seemed empty, too. There was no amphitheater, she realized. The transparent stones surrounded them; they stood on a knoll somewhere on the plain, somewhere in time or memory, playing to the whims of the harper, who was not Kelda, she realized. He was no one she had ever met, an aging, craggy figure, like a battered old stone, one eye pale blue, the other twilight dark, his voice like the deep drag of waves on a rocky shore. She turned her head to see him more clearly, and he smiled.

  She recognized that smile: the kelpie’s fearless, teasing, perceptive glint.

  She could hear Phelan’s breathing begin to grow ragged with shock, fighting itself to finish the song. She waited. When the harper began yet another rollicking ballad, she wrested the notes away from him, slowed them into a wordless court dance to free their voices.

  The odd eyes narrowed at her, but the harper’s dancing fingers did not argue.

  “Phelan,” she said softly, letting her fingers carry the slow, lilting melody without her.

  He was looking around bewilderedly ; she wondered if he saw what she did, or if he had summoned up a private vision. He answered finally, huskily, “This is—”

  “Yes.”

  “How did we—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must have—I could—I could never have—”

  “You’re here,” she said inarguably, and he was silent again, face the color of bone, fingers loosing notes like a scatter of gold into the air.

  “Well, how do we—How do we get ourselves out of this? My father couldn’t find his way out.”

  If she had been singing when he said that, her voice would have shriveled with wonder and shock. Her throat closed; she couldn’t breathe for a moment. She could only keep playing until her wordless, frozen thoughts thaw
ed out a word or two, dredged up a memory.

  “Not—” she whispered, her voice still trapped. “Not—”

  “Yes.”

  “Nairn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” she said soundlessly, the word like a smooth, cold river stone in her mouth. The harper, restive or mischievous, tried to pull out of her rhythm suddenly. She fought him stubbornly, held him to her beat. He could be patient, she thought. He had nothing to fear. Nothing to lose.

  Or did he? She looked at him again, sitting on a stone merging like an old tooth from the grass. “Who are you?” she asked, with or without words; she wasn’t sure. “Are you Kelda?”

  “Welkin?” Phelan echoed incomprehensibly, and the harper only smiled, and played a note that melted Zoe’s heart, kindled it to flame, and then to poetry.

  “Oh,” she said again, astonished, and he nodded at her.

  “Play with me,” he said in his voice like the broken shards of the world.

  “Yes,” she said, or her heart answered; there was nothing in that moment she wanted more than to spin all the music she knew into that power, that gold, then to give it all away.

  Phelan felt the change in her: the dancing rill turning suddenly into such a deep, strong, overriding current that he could barely keep himself afloat. He let his fingers think for him, move to her music while his brain told him he could never possibly do what he was doing, which was akin to keeping himself adrift by clinging to a leaf sailing above the current, balancing his life on a passing feather, letting a twig pull him through the swift, wild, frothing waters of the music that came out of her. He played accidentals, it seemed, hitting notes out of nowhere by the skin of his teeth, pulling music out of his prickling back hairs, out of runnels in his brain he never knew existed. It wasn’t fear of his father’s fate that kept them coming; he had no time even to think of that. He was grasping the lowest thread of Zoe’s hem, catching the edge of her shadow with his fingernails. There was no letting go; he could only go where she led him.

  So when what he thought was a standing stone on the crest of a nearby hill shouted his name, he rolled an eye at it confusedly and did not stop. The Oracular Stone, he assumed, though it sounded oddly like his father.

  “Phelan!”

  His fingers skipped a beat. It was his father, calling from the other side of the Turning Tower. Jonah shouted something more that got tangled up on Zoe’s voice. Phelan ducked his head, concentrated. If his father had any good advice, he thought grimly, he would have given it to himself all those centuries before. As though Jonah had read his mind, he began walking toward Phelan, a tiny, impossibly distant figure who would take days, years, eons, maybe, to cross the distance between them.

  The harper wrestled the next song out of Zoe’s closing notes and leaped away with it, nearly snarling Phelan’s fingers as he scrabbled to keep up. Something strange came out of Zoe. He saw her voice curl out of her in long banners of color, fluttering and dissolving into the wind. Her harp notes scattered like tiny, glittering insects that spread bright, metallic wings and swarmed away. He laughed suddenly, breathlessly, and tried to make that magic with his fingers. Nothing sparked to life from his notes, but she smiled at him anyway, all flaming silks and windblown hair, stepping out of her shoes then to stand barefoot in the long grass. How could she smile? he wondered. How could she not be afraid, caught in that dire web of power and poetry, with his father’s fate looming like a vast doorway into timelessness and trouble in front of them both?

  The harper spun the song away again; he and Zoe sang it together, voices swirling like wind songs over the plain, his deep, rough-hewn, blustery, hers soaring above it, the golds and reds and deep gray-blacks of clouds gathering to kindle the tempest. Phelan’s notes scattered like birds before the storm riding on their tail feathers.

  “Phelan!”

  Jonah’s voice sounded out of the weltering. Phelan couldn’t see him clearly through the blinding shafts of sunlight spearing through mists and billowings across the plain. He sounded closer, or else his voice had gotten stronger. What he could possibly do that wouldn’t plunge them all more deeply into the inexhaustible cauldron of time, Phelan couldn’t imagine. He wished Jonah would stop shouting. The incongruous sound, like a sudden voice breaking in upon a dream, made his fingers falter, miss the note that led to the next, then the next, until Zoe caught him out of his flailing, set him back where he was, balanced on the cliff’s edge by a breath, trying to keep time itself motionless beside him.

  The next time Jonah shouted, he was very close, and whatever word he loosed across the plain was not Phelan’s name.

  It cracked through the music like an oak bough breaking, and it silenced the old harper’s voice in the middle of a word.

  The brief hesitation was astonishing enough to freeze Phelan’s fingers as well. Zoe, fending for herself, seemed impervious to the disruption. She only glanced at Jonah when he appeared on the crest of the hill beside Phelan and pulled the harp from his hands.

  “What are you doing?” Phelan cried at him, wrenched off-balance and feeling as though his own misguided father had pushed him the wrong way over the cliff edge. “You can’t even whistle! Strings break when you look at them.”

  Jonah ignored him. The harper flung his glinting smile at them and found his voice again; Jonah’s fingers leaped after him. Phelan stared at him, sweating, trembling, torn from the embrace of his instrument, from the embrace of the whirling, deadly current of music, to stand empty-handed on the shore, music still clamoring in his head with no way out.

  Then he heard Jonah’s music melding with Zoe’s like silver braided with gold, like sunlight with sky, small birds flying out of his harp, and butterflies out of hers, their voices winding together, sweet, sinewy, strong as bone and old as stone. Together, they transfixed him, spellbound in their spell, his mouth still hanging open, and all the unplayed music in him easing out of his heart with every breath.

  He didn’t notice when the old harper stopped playing. Sometime before that, the mist of stones around them had begun to float away, like clouds breaking up after a maelstrom. Phelan, sitting on the ground by then, watched wordlessly as the harper slipped the harp from his shoulder, reached for its case. Phelan saw the markings on the harp then, secrets all over it, whittled into the wood.

  He found his voice finally, whispered, “Who are you? Are you Kelda?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I’m Welkin. Sometimes ...” He shrugged. “I go where the music is.”

  “What is—What is your true name?”

  The paler eye narrowed at him, catching light. “Ask your father. He knows.”

  Phelan gazed up at his father, who was still playing as though his fingers were trying to let loose a millennium’s worth of unspent notes. “What did you do to him? He couldn’t play a blade of grass before today. He couldn’t find the beat in a pair of spoons.”

  “I didn’t do anything. You did.” He slid the harp into the case, fastened the old leather ties, and patted it fondly, whereupon it disappeared. Phelan stared at the nothingness where it had been; his eyes were pulled away to follow the harper’s gesturing arm. “He’s been trapped in this tower since he tried to kill me with his music. That time, he only brought down that old watchtower. This time, he found a better way to deal with me. He turned his heart inside out to rescue you from his fate. Not,” he added, as Phelan opened his mouth, “that you were anywhere near it. But he didn’t know. He pulled down the tower walls with his music for you.”

  Phelan felt his skin constrict. “Who are you?” he asked again, his voice a wisp, a tendril of itself.

  The harper smiled. “Just an old stone,” he said, and became so, a weathered boulder embedded in the crown of the hill, scaly with lichen and the faint patterns of what might once have been words, drowsing in the afternoon sun.

  Phelan shifted to lean against it after a while, as he listened to his father and Zoe. After a longer while, he heard the stone prophesy:

 
; “She’ll be the next bard of this land. She’ll sing the moon down and the sun up, and not a bard will be left standing against her magic.”

  After a time even longer than that, Beatrice found him.

  She came up the knoll, carrying her high-heeled sandals, looking windblown, uncertain, even, he saw with astonishment, as he rose, somewhat fearful. He went to meet her, saw the tears still drying on her face. He put his arms around her, felt again the strong, sweet embrace of the music in her.

  “I couldn’t see you,” he said.

  “You’re all I could see. I was so frightened. I’ve never been so frightened. Everyone else had faded away, and I knew from your father’s tale where you and Zoe had gotten to. Kelda tricked you—”

  He started to shake his head, then stopped and smiled crookedly. “Well. I suppose he did.”

  “I tried to follow your father into the tower. But I couldn’t find my way until now. What happened to them?”

  “My father managed to topple the right tower this time.”

  She turned her head, looked over his shoulder; he felt her indrawn breath against his ear. “That’s Jonah. All this time I thought it was Kelda, playing with Zoe. I couldn’t see anything very clearly until now. I’ve never heard your father play before.”

  “Neither have I. He finally remembered how.”

  Her hair brushed his mouth as she shifted again. “Where is Kelda?”

  Phelan hesitated, found it easiest just to say it. “He turned back into Welkin and reminded my father how to play again. Then he turned himself back into that.”

  He gestured to the boulder breaking out of the ground. He felt the princess’s tremor of astonishment. She loosed him slowly, dropping her sandals, all her attention on the stone now, he noticed wryly, with the labyrinth of weathered lines on it.

  She knelt beside it, touching it, caressing it, her splayed fingertips finding and tracing the ancient scorings, smiling even as her mouth shook with wonder and tears fell onto the sunlit stone. “The oldest words,” she whispered. “The oldest magic ... Oh, Phelan, look at this.” He crouched down beside her, drew a salty kiss from her, wishing he lay under those gently searching fingers and wondering if, in whatever dream the old bard inhabited, he felt them. “It’s the spiraling circle.”