The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Two

Across a thousand years of poetry, we have come to know Nairn the Wanderer, the Fool, the Cursed, the Unforgiven intimately through hundreds of poems, ballads, tales. We know his adventures, his loves, his failures, his despair. We have explored his most intimate passions and torments. He is named in any given century; he wears the face, the clothes, the character of those times. Even now, he speaks through our modern voices as he inspires new tales of love and loss, of his endless quest for death. His trials become ours and not ours: we seek to avoid his fate as we are equally fascinated by it.

But of the man behind, within the music and the poetry, who cast his unending shadow across a millennium and more, we know astonishingly little.

He is first named in the records of the village of Hartshorn as the son of a farmer in the rugged wilds of the north Belden known then as the Marches, during the reign of its last king, Anstan. That much at least is documented. Between his birth and the next documented detail of his life, we can only rely on later ballads, which give him the name “Pig-Singer” as a child for his astonishing voice, which he exercised frequently while tending to his father’s pig herd. According to more ribald versions of the “Ballad of Nairn the Unforgiven,” he was often pelted with pig shit by his older siblings for spending more time sitting on the sty posts and singing than attending to his other chores. How the pigs responded to his remarkable gifts of voice and memory has not been documented outside of poetry. He vanished, probably with good reason, out of village life and into folklore at an early age, to surface again in history, a dozen or so years later, in a tavern on the edge of the North Sea, where he was pressed into service as a marching bard for the final battle of King Anstan’s doomed reign: the Battle of the Welde.

Nairn was the youngest of seven sons, and a hardscrabble lot they were, scraping a living with their fingernails out of the rocky, grudging soil of the mountains in the southern Marches. He learned to dance early: away from that foot, this elbow or great ham hand, one or another careless hoof, or some cranky goose’s beak. His mother took to a corner of the hearth after he was born and refused to budge. Hers was the first singing voice he heard when the crazed house was empty, and he could finally hear beyond the thunder of his brothers’ clumping boots and shouts and laughter, their father’s harsh rasping bark that could cut short their clamor like the sound of the blunt edge of an ax head smacking the side of an iron pot. So young Nairn was then that he still lay at his mother’s breast as he listened to the high, pure voice threading word and sound into something he could not see or touch or taste, only feel.

Later, when he could separate words into tales and drink out of a cup, his mother went away, left him alone with his bulky, milling brothers as oblivious to their flailing limbs as cows were to their tails and hooves. A woman as round as the moon, with hands as big and hard as theirs, came to cook and mend for them. She sang, too, sometimes. Her voice was deep, husky, full of secrets, odd glints and shadows, like a summer night. She held Nairn spellbound with her singing; he would stand motionless, wordless, his entire body an ear taking in her mysteries. She would laugh when she saw that, and as often as not slip something into his grubby hand to eat. But she clouted his brothers when they sniggered at him, and her swinging fists were not always empty; they learned to dance, too, away from cleavers and the back sides of spoons. One day, standing so ensorcelled, Nairn opened his mouth suddenly and his own singing voice flew out.

It was worse than the time his brothers caught him in the barnyard one night trying to peel the moon from a puddle of water. Far worse than when they heard him trying to talk to crows, or drumming the butter churn with his mother’s wooden clogs. It was standing in the muck of the pigsty, singing to the pigs while his brothers made bets on which would knock him over first. It began to dawn on him then that his brothers had a skewed vision of the world. They couldn’t hear very well, either. The pigs seemed to like his singing. They crowded around him, gently snorting, while his brothers laughed so hard that they never noticed their father banging out of the house to see what the racket was about until he came up behind them and shoved as many as he could reach off the fence and into the muck. Nairn went down, too, drowning in a rout of startled pig. His father pulled him up, choking and stinking, tossed him bodily into the water trough.

“Time you went to work, Pig-Singer,” he told Nairn brusquely. “Sing to the pigs all you want. They’re your business now.

So he did, and got a scant year older before his voice, drifting over hedgerows and out of the oak wood, attracted the attention of passing villagers and, one day, an itinerant minstrel. He showed Nairn the instruments he wore on his belt and slung over his shoulder.

“Follow the moon,” he advised the boy. “Sing to her, and she’ll light your path. There are places you can go to learn, you know. Or maybe you don’t?”

Nairn, speechless, spellbound with the sounds that had come so easily out of wood and string, as easily as his own voice came out of his bones, could not answer. The minstrel smiled after a moment, blew a ripple of notes out of his smallest pipe, and gave it to Nairn.

“Maybe not yet. Give this a try. The birds will like it.”

Later, when he had found all the notes in the pipe and could flick them into the air as easily as his voice, a passing tinker, pots and tools on his wagon chattering amiably in the sun, pulled his mule to a halt and peered into the oak trees.

“You must be the one they call Pig-Singer,” he said to the scrawny, dirty urchin piping among the rooting pigs. “Let me hear you.”

Nobody had ever asked him that before. Surprised, he lost his voice a moment, then found it again, and raised it in the first ballad his mother had ever sung to him. The tinker threw something at him when he was done; used to that, Nairn ducked. Then, as the wheels rolled on, he saw the gleam of light among the oak leaves under his feet, and picked it up.

He looked at it for a long time: the little round of metal with a face on one side and hen scratches on the other. Such things appeared in his father’s life as often as a blue moon and vanished as quickly. And here he sat, with one of his own in his hand, and all for doing what he loved.

He piped the pigs home and wandered off into his destiny.

He found his way, year by year, as far north as he could get without falling into the sea and living with the selkies. Somewhere during the long road between his father’s ramshackle farm in the southern Marches and the bleak sea with its voice of golden-haired mermaids and great whales, he grew into himself. He had walked out of that skinny, feral urchin with his singing voice so pure it could set the iron blade of a hoe humming in harmony. Slowly, through the dozen and more years of wanderings, odd jobs, stealing when he had to, charming when he could to keep himself fed, finding and learning new instruments, and listening, always listening, his stride lengthened, his face rearranged itself, his voice turned deep and sinewy, his eyes and ears became vast doorways through which wonders ceaselessly flowed, while his brain worked like a beehive to remember them.

Stepping onto the sand on the farthest northern shore, he left a trail of footprints broadened by travel. He stood at the waves’ edge, watching the foam unfurl, flow over the smooth gold sand, fray into holes and knots of lacework. It touched the tip of his sandal and withdrew. He shrugged off his pack, his harp, his robe, and ran naked after the receding song.

Later, coming up out of the roil, he heard a tendril of human song.

He dressed and followed it.

The noise came from a hovel near the sea: half a dozen crofters and fishers banging their tin mugs on a table and bawling out a ballad he’d never heard. He picked it up easily enough on his pipe; a few songs later, he switched to his harp. That got him his first meal of the day: ale and cheese and a stew of some briny, gritty, slithery pestilence that, by the last bite, he was trying to scrape out of the hollows of his bowl.

“Oysters,” the one-eyed tavern keeper told him, kindly fetching more. He added, incomprehensibly, “They make pearls. Where are you from, lad?”

“South,” Nairn said with his mouth full.

“How far?” one of the shaggy-haired men behind him growled. “How far south?”

Nairn turned, sensing tension; he fixed the man with a mild eye, and said, “I’ve been wandering around. Never beyond the Marches. I go where the music is. Yours brought me here.”

They snorted and laughed at the thought. Then they refilled their cups and his. “That old song,” one said. “My granny taught it to me. My dad sang it, too, while he mended his nets. So you haven’t seen what’s going on, south of the Marches.” He paused at Nairn’s expression. “Or even heard?”

He shook his head. “What?”

“War.”

He shook his head again. All he knew of war was in old songs. But as he stood there in the ramshackle place, the plank door groaning in the wind, the endless, wild roar without, the spitting, fuming fire within, he suddenly felt the eggshell fragility of the stone walls. Something beyond fire, wind, tide, there was to fear. Something he, with all his footsteps leaving crisscrossing paths across the Marches, might not recognize until it was too late. He shivered slightly; the men, watching him around one of the two battered tables in the place, nodded.

“Best stay low, boy. The king will be looking for warriors to defend the Marches, even this far north.”

“I’m a minstrel. I carry a knife to skin a hare for my supper or carve a reed for my bladder-pipe. Nothing more.”

“You’re a strong, healthy man with two feet to march with, two ears to hear orders, and enough fingers to wield a sword or a bow. That’s what they’ll see.”

“What’s a bladder-pipe?” someone wondered.

He pulled it out of his pack. “I heard it played in the western hills. They use it to call their families together across the valleys. The songs differ, but the sound could blast the feathers off a hawk.”

He played it, had them groaning and pleading for mercy in a minute. He threatened to keep at it until they sang for him again. By evening’s end, they were slumped against one another, humming softly to his harping. The tavern keeper came up to him, where he sat by the fire, dreamily accompanying the song sung in the dark by the moon-tangled tides.

“Stay,” the man suggested softly. “There’s a loft up in the eaves where my daughter slept before she married. I’ll feed you, give you a coin when I can. And all the oyster stew you can hold. It’s safer than roving around in the kingdom, just now.”

“For a while, then,” Nairn promised.

It was a shorter while than he intended, but sweeter than he expected, especially after he met the tavern keeper’s daughter, with her eyes the silver-green of willow leaves and her rare, rich laugh. She came early to get the cooking started for the day: the bread, the pots of soup and stew, the slab of mutton turning on the hearth. She clouted Nairn when he first turned the full, dark depths of his wistful gaze upon her. But she was laughing a moment later. For days after, he felt her eyes when she thought he wouldn’t notice: little, curious glances like the frail pecks of hatchlings tapping at their boundaries.

Then, one morning, she came in the wee hours, slid next to him on the pallet in the loft.

“Himself is out with the early tide,” she whispered. “And my father’s sleeping with his deaf ear up. Just don’t think this is more than what it is.”

“No,” he promised breathlessly, embarking upon yet another path with no end in sight. “Yes. Of course, no.”

He spent his evenings playing in the tavern. His days were his own. He roamed the coastal barrens, searching out the tiny stone huts of fishers and shepherds, coaxing songs from their toothless grandparent stirring the fire, the child chanting over its game of driftwood and shells, the wife rocking a babe in the cradle with one foot and singing as she churned. Ancient words, they sang in this part of the world; his quick, hungry ear picked up hints of far older tales within the simple verses. Sometimes they’d tell him tales of magic and power, the toothless, dreamy-eyed old ones, as they hugged the hearths for warmth. All true, they assured him. All true, once, a long time ago ... Children taught him their counting rhymes; older girls showed him their love charms, bundles of tiny shells, dried flowers, locks of hair, tied up with colored threads. They told him where to bury them, what to sing as he did.

“This one you cover with sand in the exact center of the Hag’s Teeth. You’ll see. The dark stones down the beach that look like fangs.”

“This one you give to the Lady Stone as the full moon rises.”

“This one you burn at the King Stone, on top of the hill across from Her. There’s a charred circle around it, old as the stone, some say. So many have burned love-gifts there, it must be true, don’t you think so?”

He found the stones.

They watched him, he felt a couple of times, these immense, battered old shards of time set deep into the earth by who knew what fierce, single-minded urgings. He played to them, leaning against them; he saw what they saw: sunrise, moonrise, the tides rushing in, rushing away. They watched him, looming over him when a young mother brought her sleeping baby with her, let it lie in a hollow of sea grass and strawberry vines while she fed the wanderer wild strawberries between her lips. They watched.

So little time, such scant weeks passed, that none of the men had yet offered the honey-voiced wanderer a flat-eyed glance, a comment less than friendly, before the next stranger entered the tavern following a song.

The fishers crowding the tables looked upon him suspiciously enough. But he carried no arms, only his harp in a fine, worn leather case. His robe and cloak were simply fashioned, embroidered here and there with once-bright threads. His lean face was lined, his red hair, streaked with white along the sides, was cut short and neat as a fox’s pelt. His strange eyes were gold as a snow owl’s. They went first to the harper on his bench by the hearth. Then he nodded to the men, and they nodded back silently, not knowing what to make of the stranger in their midst, especially one verging, in such an unlikely place, on the exotic.

He bought them all ale immediately; their first impressions changed, and their tongues loosened. He had a strange accent, an odd lilt to his sentences, but that was explained easily enough when they asked. He wasn’t from the Marches but from the smaller, mountainous kingdom to the south and west, whose king, everybody knew, lived on a crag with the eagles to keep an eye on his rambunctious nobles.

“My name is Declan,” he told them. “I am the court bard of Lord Ockney of Grishold. We received word from the King of Grishold that a stranger is trying to overrun the five kingdoms, take them for himself. The barbarian, who calls himself King Oroh, sailed up the Stirl River with his army and challenged the King of Stirl, whose own army was massed across the plain on both sides of the river. The battle was fierce and terrible. The Stirl, we heard, ran red. The King of Stirl surrendered to the invader, who has now turned his eyes west of the plain toward Grishold. The King of Grishold sent several of his nobles, Lord Ockney among them, to plead with your king Anstan and his nobles for help, men, arms. With the plain taken, we are cut off from the other kingdoms, Waverlea and Estmere. We were forced to find our way north up the rugged western coast to get here. If King Oroh conquers Grishold, he won’t stop there. He’ll come north to the Marches, strike while the weather is fair.”

“I thought the barbarian king was already nipping at us,” a fisher said heavily. “That he’s just over the border hills of the Marches.”

The bard shook his head. “No. He was moving his army toward Grishold when we left. It’s rough country, and the nobles there are contentious. It may not fall so easily to him as the kingdom on the plain.”

“What are you doing all the way up here,” another asked, “if your Lord Ockney wants the king? Court’s in the south.”

“My lord stopped in your western mountains to plead for help from the hill clans.” He paused, added with wonder, “They have some very strange music there,” and the men laughed. “He sent me up here to seek out the great, rich courts of the northern coasts, to soften the nobles’ hearts with my music, so that when he came begging, they would be generous.”

There was more laughter, brief and sardonic, at that. “Not much up here besides the fishing villages,” the innkeeper explained.

“Ah.”

“Surely you didn’t come up here alone? The northerners are generous, but they don’t bother to bar their doors, that’s how little they have. They’ll give you their best for the asking: chowder and a moldy pallet. You won’t find an army here, and the only nobles we have are the standing stones.”

Declan smiled. “I offered to come. I’ve heard the bladder-pipes of the hill clans. I wanted to hear what strange music has grown along the edge of the world.”

They studied him curiously, all suspicion gone. “Another wanderer,” one decided. “Like Nairn.”

“Nairn.”

They gestured toward the young harper. “He can play anything; he’s been everywhere around the Marches. He’s heard it all.”

The golden eyes, glinting like coins, studied Nairn. Nairn, meeting the unblinking, dispassionate gaze, felt oddly as though his world had shifted sideways, overlapped itself to give him an unexpected vision of something he didn’t know existed. The feeling echoed oddly in his memories. Astonished, he recognized it: the other time he had wanted something with all his bones and didn’t know what it was.

Declan smiled. Wordless, Nairn tipped his harp in greeting. The older bard came over to him, sat on the bench beside him.

“Play,” Declan urged. “Some song from the sea.”

Nairn shook his head slightly, found his voice. “You first. They’re all tired of listening to me by now, and so am I. Play us something from your world.”

The men rumbled their agreement. Declan inclined his head and opened his harp case.

The harp came out dancing with light. Uncut jewels inset deeply into the face of the harp glowed like mermaid’s tears: green, blue, red, amber in the firelight. The men shifted, murmuring with wonder, then were dead still as the harper played a slow, rich, elegant ballad the like of which Nairn had never heard. It left a sudden, piercing ache in his heart, that there might be a vast sea-kingdom of music he did not know and might never hear. The wanderer who had enchanted the pigs with his voice and had callused his feet hard as door slats had glimpsed the castle in the distance, with its proud towers and the bright pennants flying over them. Such lovely, complex music was no doubt common as air within those walls. And there he stood on the outside, with no right to enter and no idea how to charm his way in. With a bladder-pipe?

The ballad ended. The men sat silently, staring at the harper.

“Sad,” one breathed finally, of the princess who had fled her life on her own bare feet to meet her true love in secret, only to find him dead in their trysting bower with her husband’s wedding ring lying in the hollow of his throat.

Another spoke, after another silence. “Reminds me of a ballad my wife sings. Only it’s a sea-maid, not a princess, and her husband is seaborn as well, but her own true love is a mortal man, drowned by a wave and found in the sand with a black pearl on his throat.”

Nairn saw a familiar kindling in Declan’s eye. “Please,” the bard said. “Sing it for me.”

“Ah, no,” the man protested, trying to shift to safety behind his friends. “I couldn’t. Not for you.”

“I’ll sing with you,” Nairn suggested promptly. “I know it.”

You see? their faces told Declan as Nairn began. He knows everything.

They were all singing it toward the end, all the villagers with their voices rough as brine-soaked wool, trying to imitate the older bard’s deep, tuned, resonant voice. Declan listened silently, harp on his knee, hands resting upon it. He was hardly moving. Maybe it was his breathing that kept the harp moving imperceptibly, the jewels glittering with firelight, then darkening, then gleaming again, catching at Nairn’s eyes as he played. For the first time in his life he saw some use for what he only knew as words in poetry: gold, jewels, treasure. He was born poor; he took his music for free; it cost no more than air or water. But there were other songs, he realized, other music, maybe even other instruments secreted away where only those who possessed gold, wore jewels, were permitted to go.

The jewels, fair blue as sky, green as river moss, fire red, teased him, lured his eyes when he ignored them. He met Declan’s eyes once, above the jewels; they told him nothing more than mist. He had stolen things in his life, but only to keep on living: eggs out of a coop, a cloak left on a bush to dry, a pair of sandals when his feet grew bigger than his shoes. Things he needed. Never anything like this. Never anything he wanted, mindlessly, with all his heart: these jewels, useless, brilliant, indolent creatures, doing no one any good, just flaunting their wealth and beauty on the face of a harp whose supple, tender voice would not change so much as a tremor if the jewels vanished.

He heard Declan’s voice then, softly pitched to reach him beneath the singing.

“Take them. If you can.”

He met the bard’s eyes again, found them again wide, unblinking, oddly metallic, the pupils more like coins than human eyes. Like the jewels burning on his harp, they lured, teased, challenged.

Nairn dropped his eyes, pitched every note, sang every word of longing and passion in the ballad to all the music he had never heard, might never hear, the treasure hoard of it, hidden away like forbidden love behind windowless walls, within indomitable towers.

He scarcely noticed when the ballad came to an end; he heard only the longing and loss in his heart. His fingers stilled. He heard an ember keen, a twig snap. No one spoke, except the fire, the wind, the sea. Then, as he stirred finally, he heard an odd ping against the flagstones, then another, as though, beneath his feet, some very ancient instrument were turning itself.

Another.

He looked down, found the jewels had melted like tears down the harp face, slid to his feet.

He stared at Declan, whose eyes held a pleased, human smile. The men at the tables were beginning to shift a bone, draw a breath.

“They go where they are summoned,” the bard said. “Take them. They came to you.”

Nairn felt his skin prickle, from his nape to the soles of his feet, as his view of that tiny piece of the world expanded to contain inexhaustible questions. He whispered the first one.

“What are you?”

“Good question.” The bard bent, picked up the jewels, pushed them into Nairn’s hand. The tavern keeper cleared his throat, gripped the crockery jug to refill their cups.

The door flew open as though the wind had pushed it. Nairn’s hand locked painfully on the jewels. He recognized the strangers entering by their swords, their chain mail, their gaunt, tired, merciless faces. They ignored the rigid villagers, the aging bard watching them out of his yellow eyes; their attention homed instantly onto Nairn.

“You,” one said to him. “Get your things. There’s an army coming at us from Stirl Plain, and King Anstan needs a marching drum. And a bladder-pipe to call the clans if you’ve got one.”

Finally, one of the fishers spoke, said bewilderedly to Declan, “I thought you told us the army is on the move south toward Grishold.”

“I was wrong,” he said, rising and putting away his harp. When Nairn came down from the loft with his pack, there was no sign of the bard; he had vanished back into the blustery night.