The Bards of Bone Plain (12 page)

“Where is Sagan? I sent him to the cellar an eon ago.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” the butler said, gliding like a phantom across the carpet, his hair and the tray upon which the bottle stood glowing silver in the sunlight. “I had to search the racks for this one.”

“Thank you, Sagan.” He glanced a question at Phelan, who shook his head.

“I'm working,” he said shortly, and stretched out on the sofa to read about Nairn while his father and the dusty amber bottle vanished somewhere into the depths of the house.

“Nairn,” the essayist had begun without preamble some three or four centuries earlier, “the Wandering Bard to whom the solace of death had been long forbidden by his abject and unforgiven failure at the Three Trials of Bone Plain, was seen at the Bardic School at Caerau, as was cited in the school records by Argot Renne thusly: ‘This day: Accounts paid to Colley Dale for three wheels of cheese, five crocks of butter, and ten gallons of milk. Accounts paid to Merlee Craven for nine wool blankets and two lambs. Accounts settled by one guest, a stranger, who paid for his supper by his dishwashing afterwards. Though he carried a harp, he would not play it, claiming that the last thing we needed in this place was another harper. Nor would he give his name. But considering this steward's daughter's description of the boulder inside the ring of stones on the hill turning abruptly into a man carrying a harp, and considering the craggy agelessness of his face, the unremitting dark of his eyes, and that he knew my name, Renne, though he had been stone all our lives, and considering above all, his astonishing question concerning the existence of the ancient Circle of Days, the secret conclave that vanished from history centuries before, I believe him to be the bard in search of his death: Nairn. By my hand, Argot Renne, School Steward.' This being,” the essayist continued dryly, “by far the wordiest entry of any of the stewards heretofore on record.”

Phelan blinked. The raw silk of the sofa beneath him seemed to breathe beneath his nape, along his backbone, like something quickening unexpectedly to life.

“Circle of Days,” he whispered, and saw in his mind's eye the path out of the interminable years at the school: the Wandering Bard, the Unforgiven, who once had a secret, been included in a mystery.

Phelan moved before he realized it, gathered the manuscripts, and stood for the journey back to the school archives. Something tugged at him before he took a step: his father with his head cluttered like a museum basement with brilliant facts and fantastic shards of past that rarely if ever emerged into the light of day.

What might he know about such mysteries?

Then Phelan laughed, which was all Jonah would do at the question, tell him he wasted his time; it was nonsense, a figment, and anyway, it had all been investigated, answered, written down centuries before Phelan drew his first breath, bellowed his first opinion at the world.

He left his father in the company he most preferred, and went to track a bard who was neither living nor dead, and to find where a circle began.

Nairn, opening his eyes the morning after his moonlit conversation with Declan, drew his first waking breath and did not think of Odelet. He pulled on his boots without thinking of her. In the kitchen, he took a bowl of porridge from her hand so absently that even she was startled. Her widening eyes, her faint, delicate flush penetrated his distant thoughts; he gazed back at her, perplexed, as one who has been spellbound might remember his enchantment like a sweet, strange, fading dream.

He was still ensorcelled; only the spell had changed.

Now the words that haunted him were fashioned of twigs and meant mysteries. He breathed them in; he drew them in dirt, scratched them on stone, traced them with a forefinger whenever he touched the outward face of one: “egg,” “grass,” “hill,” “knife,” “bread.” They took fire in his mind as once Odelet's name had burned, relentlessly bright, feeding on an inexhaustible fuel of possibilities. What lay beneath the prosaic images of language might lie dormant within the world itself: the busy egg within its shell, the seeded earth. Somehow music could bridge that great, hidden power between a word and what it truly meant. But Declan had not yet explained the method.

The Circle of Days, he called his lists of ancient language. Indeed, it seemed that commonplace, like someone's early household records. “Sun” and “moon,” they learned, “wash,” “arrow,” “king,” “owl,” “smock,” “fish,” and “hook,” “needle,” and “eye.” Nairn had no idea who among the students belonged to the enchanted circle destined to learn such wonders. They would know one another, Declan said, when they were ready.

Oddly enough, distracted from his humiliating passion by the fascinating otherness weighing in his brain, Nairn finally learned to talk to Odelet. The magic had left her, invaded other things. She still caught his eyes at every movement, charmed his heart with her voice and music. But, no longer spell-ridden, he could finally see her more clearly: the highborn lady who had learned to boil an egg and keep the fire burning under a cauldron of lentils for the sake of her music.

Nairn lingered in the kitchen now instead of sneaking through it; he chopped carrots and onions just to listen to her, stayed to scrub pots after a meal. He was awed by her courage in coming to that isolated hillock on the plain, and he wondered if she, too, had been drawn there by more than music.

He drew an ancient word in spilled flour one morning while she was making bread: three twigs that she brushed away without a glance, so he guessed that she was not a part of Declan's secret group. But they did have one thing in common: both had run away from home.

“I had a horse, and I knew where I was going,” she observed wryly. “You had nothing but your feet.”

They had gone outside after supper to sit on the hillside and play songs of Estmere and the Marches to one another, she on her harp, he on a pipe. The long summer had drawn to an end; the oak leaves were turning. Somewhere in the dark, Declan played, down by the river maybe, like them watching a full moon as golden as his eyes detach itself from the earth and drift. A tangle of music and voices within the walls behind them seemed engulfed by the vast, cloud-streaked dark.

“It's easier doing something when you're that young and don't know what you're doing,” Nairn answered. “And look what you chose to leave: wealth, servants, a loving family, a soft bed, to come here where you cook for everyone and sleep on a pallet on a makeshift floor. All I left was a crusty father with a backhand like the wallop of an iron shovel, and brothers who would toss me into the pigsty as soon as look at me.”

“I left to follow the music. So did you.”

“Declan's music,” he said softly, with a latent touch of bitterness.

“Yes. All the beauty of it. We both came to learn that from him.”

He glanced at her, found her eyes full of that rich moonlight. “I didn't follow him,” he said softly. “But in the end I found him.”

She pulled her fine cloak close around her against the chill night wind just beginning to rouse and send the yellow leaves spinning out of the oak boughs.

“I have no illusions about my talents,” she said simply. “I'll return home when I'm ready, marry, and teach my children what I learned. I know that my father is tearing his hair over me; my brother Berwin has come here twice to tell me that. They are angry with me for so many things, not the least for preferring the company of the usurper's bard to theirs. But I am angry, too, at my father. He loves me, I know. I also know that I'm worth more to him now than I will be again. I might as well be sitting on a scale he looks at every day to weigh the gold I'll bring him, calculate the property. My mother told me that he can't help it; fathers are made that way. No matter how they start out, one day they look at you despite themselves and only see what they can get for you.”

“I think you would be worth a great deal to someone who truly loves you,” Nairn said soberly. He saw her eyes flash toward him in the dark, felt the question in them. But he stayed silent, for once in his self-indulgent life, for his only true hope of her lay at the end of a long and complex road. And he knew that Declan had told him one true thing at least: he had no idea what love meant.

 

 

 

He took his harp up to the tower roof to play late one night, when most of the students had gone to bed. Leaning against the battlements, he played back at the gusty winds, the brilliant, icy stars, the owls, the dry, chattering leaves that the winds gathered and tossed and let fall again like some largesse from the dead. He was naming and remembering as he played, envisioning the twigs in his mind for “owl,” “leaf,” “wind.” They burned brightly in his head, but they did not sound; no one knew how to say them anymore. They would not open, either, not even to his harping, though he coaxed them as sweetly, as passionately as he could. They remained mute instruments. He let his harp fall silent finally except for one note under his thumb that he stroked softly, absently like a slow heartbeat while he pondered how to hear a language spoken, for so many centuries, only by stone.

A dark figure took shape against the stars across the roof. He started, his thumb careening across the strings, wondering what he had summoned out of the night. Then he recognized the tall, cloaked, wind-blurred form.

“I heard you playing,” Declan said. “I came up to listen to you. You didn't notice.”

“I was thinking about the words,” Nairn told him after a moment. “About how to waken them. Hear them.”

“I know. I heard you.”

Nairn stared at him across the dark. “What else can you do besides hear my thoughts?” he asked, his voice harsh with uncertainty, “and blind a king's army with a fog until it slaughters itself? What else does it take to become a Royal Bard in your country?”

“It took a great deal more than a simple fog,” Declan answered slowly. “Anstan's army was neither that blind nor that inexperienced. What it took, I did: I blurred minds, I roused ghosts, made memories real ... They fought with courage and skill, those warriors. Not all the dead were on your side. Belden is at peace, now. It's unlikely that King Oroh's bard will be asked to do such things for some time. The bard who took my place in his court is a fine musician, but not so adept in other ways. We hope he will not need to be, now that Belden is united and all King Oroh's determination is bent toward peace. A Royal Bard in peaceful times opens the king's court to the finest music and musicians, uses other arts only to keep the peace.”