The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Seven

The formal invitation to the queen’s supper in honor of her brother, Lord Grishold, reached Phelan, as usual, in haphazard fashion. He had wandered out of bed after a long night at the Merry Rampion to be faced with the impending day, which offered nothing, no matter which way he looked at it, but a vast, empty blankness of paper upon which he was expected to write. His father’s house stood on the bank of the Stirl, not far above Peverell Castle, where the city streets, broad and lined with huge old trees, grew quiet. The water traffic there tended toward rich barges and sailboats; working vessels rarely came that far beyond the docks except to pursue a run of fish. The house, built of fieldstone centuries earlier, retained a few of its early eccentricities, including a pair of unmatched windows inset on a side wall as awkwardly as flounders’ eyes. Inside, time sped forward into oak and marble walls, thick rugs and carpets, softly glowing lamps that revealed Jonah’s enormous collection of oddments from everywhere in the world, including several places that Phelan couldn’t find on a map. His mother, Sophy, herself an heiress with family connections to the Peverells, favored all the modern conveniences, only drawing the line at keeping a car. They were slow, she said, and noisy, and you couldn’t tell them what to do.

Sophy, fully dressed and wrestling with a skintight glove as she came upon the yawning Phelan in the living room, left a kiss somewhere in the vicinity of her son’s jaw and asked briskly, “Have you found your father?”

“Am I looking for him?”

Sophy nodded vigorously. Phelan had inherited her pale hair and gray eyes, even her charming smile, but not, he realized early, her stubbornly temperate disposition, which provided a formidable barrier to any questions about Jonah’s behavior. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“No.”

“Oh, dear. Well, you must find him for Lord Grishold’s supper—” She stopped, loosed a chuckle. “Not that the duke is planning to take a knife and fork to him, but we must all attend. The king wrote a tiny note on our invitation that he expressly desired Jonah’s presence, to finish a certain conversation.”

“When?”

“When, what, dear?”

“The supper?”

“Oh. In a day or two—I’ve forgotten—” She smiled at him brightly, patted his cheek. “Just find him, Phelan. You’re always so good at it. The invitation is around here somewhere. I must rush away. We are knitting socks today for Caerau’s poor, and then Ursula Baris’s cook’s grandmother will teach us how to divine the future in a bird’s nest.”

She left Phelan wordless, awake at last. He moved finally, stepped toward the cluttered desk in her study to look for the invitation, then veered abruptly at the door. It didn’t matter: clean, fed, his pockets clinking again, Jonah might be anywhere in the city. Phelan would either stumble across him in time for the occasion or not. He had a paper to write; his father could wait.

He did turn from his chosen path, walking across Dockers Bridge again for a quick search around the dig site, before he buried himself in the school library. In the clear morning light, the desolation lost its mystery and became simply the sad ruins of an earlier century, walls slumped into one another, charred window frames staring empty-eyed at the colorful buildings across the river, ruined warehouses and broken pilings haunting the abandoned waterfront. Fire had gutted it; everyone had gone to more prosperous parts of the city; no one had found a need to rebuild the waste. Still, in the eerie silence, Phelan heard voices, brisk and cheerful, with no visible owners and seemingly from underground.

He walked to the edge of Jonah’s latest project and looked down at the top of a head ascending. It was covered with a soft cloth hat; he couldn’t see the lowered face talking to someone below.

He did recognize the voice.

“Princess Beatrice,” he said, and the head came up abruptly. She smiled at him; the hat slid, its tie catching at her throat, loosing a burnished curl or two from her rigorously pinned hair.

“Phelan.” She accepted his hand briefly, politely, as she stepped off the ladder, then let go and beat a cloud of dust from her clothes. “Sorry,” she added as she stepped back, laughing. “I’m not fit for civilized company after I’ve been down here. Are you looking for your father?”

“Yes. Have you seen him?”

“He was here earlier for just a few moments; then he went off.”

“Do you have any idea where?” he asked without hope.

She pulled pins out of her hair, shook it again as it fell, releasing more dust. “I don’t.” She paused, thinking. Behind her, below ground, Phelan could hear the soft whisk of brushes, the cautious tink of a pick, an occasional word. The princess’s calm eyes shifted from Phelan’s face to the city beyond his shoulder. They were, he realized, the same inky blue as the asters growing out of a nearby midden. “I know he’s been asked to court, but that’s no help to you if that’s why you’re looking for him.” She turned abruptly, called down, “Does anybody know where Master Cle might have gone?”

There was a faint, ragged chorus of amusement; Phelan’s mouth crooked.

“Ah, well. I’ll find him. If you see him—”

“Yes, of course. I’m driving home now. Lady Hartshorn is giving a lunch for Lady Grishold that I couldn’t get out—I promised I’d attend. Can I drop you somewhere along the way?”

“Yes,” he said before he thought, then changed his answer reluctantly. “No. I should stay, look around here a little; it’s where I found him last. And I can spot him better on foot. I know a few of his favorite places.”

“If I do see him, can I give him a message?”

“Thank you, Princess. Just tell him we need him home.”

He sat at a table in the school library later, thinking idly of the encounter, then of Jonah, and then ruthlessly clearing his head to think of nothing at all. He gazed intensely at a sheet of paper, breath suspended, a word on the quivering point of his pen poised and waiting to fall. Monoliths of books and manuscripts rose around him. All were crammed with words, words packed as solidly as bricks in a wall, armies of them marching endlessly on from one page to the next without pause. He forced the pen in his tight grip a hairsbreadth closer to the paper so that the word stubbornly clinging to it might yield finally, flow onto the vast emptiness. Point and paper met. Kissed. Froze.

He sat back, breath spilling abruptly out of him, the pen laden with unformed words dangling now over the floor in his lax fingers. How, he wondered incredulously, did all those books and papers come into existence? In what faceted jewel of amber secreted in what invisible compartment of what hidden casket did others find that one word to begin the sentence that layered itself into a paragraph, that built itself into a page, that went on to the next page, and on, and on?

He straightened again, dropped the pen, reached randomly for beginnings from the piles around him.

“Does Bone Plain exist?” a recent paper inquired simply and succinctly. An older book introduced its argument murkily but more sonorously: “On the farthest horizon we can glimpse, back through time to the dawn of the five kingdoms, the place where history and poetry meet on Bone Plain.” Phelan snapped it shut, picked up another book, a thin, limp volume bound in fine leather. It began: “For centuries poets, bards, and scholars have run through rivers of ink arguing exactly which of the standing stones of Belden are also the standing stones of poetry enclosing the Three Trials of Bone Plain.”

He closed that one, put it back on its pile, and dropped his brow onto the stack, hoping without hope that the words he searched for would somehow seep through flaking parchment and antique leather into his brain. The library, oak floors carpeted with lozenges of light from the windows, tall mahogany bookcases, the priceless collection of scrolls and first editions donated by Jonah Cle installed under glass on various stands, was relentlessly sunny and dead quiet. Everyone else in the world had something better to do on that bright spring day than agonize over ancient history. Maybe his father was right, he thought resignedly. Everything had been said. There was nothing more to say, which was why he could not find a single word to add to the subject.

He got up finally, examined his father’s collection. Jonah had evidently considered the subject so tiresome that he gave away everything that had fallen into his hands. Phelan found, among other things, the earliest version of the tale written on parchment instead of stone, as well as an essay about Nairn by an obscure scholar who seemed to think that the bard, after failing the trials, was still wandering the earth a thousand years later. Phelan summoned the archivist from the depths of the library. The archivist, who would have thrown himself bodily across the doorway to keep the priceless manuscripts from leaving, said finally, in the face of Phelan’s desperation, that he could take them out as long as his father didn’t see them.

Of all the places Phelan might run into his father, home was the least likely, so he took them there. No one else was around; the house was silent except for an occasional distant noise from the kitchen. He settled on the sofa with the manuscripts, and began to read.

The written poem was followed by an account of the wonders and tribulations of bards who had dared the trials for the sake of such power over their words, such glory in their world. Very few could be tracked, like Nairn, out of poetry and into history. Most of the unfortunates had been invented to bear the tales of their failures. Despite the dire consequences predicted, the more noble-hearted of the adventurers were given chances to mitigate their fates. They returned home scarred only with the memory, and rewarded with a tale that would be embroidered more colorfully and grow in detail with every telling.

The manuscript itself was so old that Phelan held his breath as he turned the pages, lest a parchment word flake away into the air of a distant century. The scribe or bard who plucked the poem out of common memory and wrote it down saw no reason to add a name or a date or a place of origin. The tale itself was far older, Phelan knew from various scholarly papers on the subject. In itself, it gave no clues to where exactly a bard had to go to find Bone Plain. But Phelan knew that already, having memorized the entire poem by the time he was ten. He had taken the manuscript on the chance that seeing the ancient written words might spark some thought, some recognition, maybe even some impulse to pick up a pen.

It was there, sprawled on a sofa with both manuscripts on his chest, that he glanced up at a faint stir of carpet threads and found his father.

Jonah eyed the priceless manuscripts, grunted in recognition, and dropped into a chair near Phelan’s feet. Phelan could see his face. It looked predictably pale and curdled, but there was a peculiar expression in his eyes, and he seemed, in broad daylight, astonishingly sober.

“Is something wrong?” Phelan asked tentatively. “Did you kill somebody? Accidentally get married again?”

“No.”

“Find a gold mine in one of your digs?”

Jonah shook his head. He shifted, started to say something, stopped and started again. “That supper,” he managed finally. “When is it?”

Phelan stared at him, amazed. “Why do you care? Anyway, how did you know about it? You never pay attention to those things.”

“Don’t give me grief, boy, just tell me.”

“I would if I knew.” He paused, studying his father, found the words finally, for what he saw. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I may have,” Jonah breathed. “I may have, indeed.”

Phelan started to sit, caught the manuscripts sliding off his chest. Jonah raised a brow at them; he said quickly, “I hid them under my school robe; nobody saw me take them.”

“Don’t try to be noble; it only makes you sound unctuous,” Jonah said with so little bite that Phelan frowned. He sat up, still gazing at his father, laying the manuscripts carefully on the sofa beside him.

“Whose ghost?”

Jonah shook his head irritably, but the subject haunting the air between them refused to go away. “A particularly noisome bit of past,” he said finally. He held up a hand as Phelan opened his mouth. “Just leave it. It’s mine; I’ll deal with it.”

“But where did you see it?” Phelan demanded. “Him. Her.”

“Riding through the river park in Lord Grishold’s entourage. I was just stepping into the Arms of Antiquity, after checking some things in the Royal Museum. I looked back and there it was, the ghost behind Grishold, all in black and grinning like the sun. When is that supper again?” he added restively.

“A day or two—Does this mean I won’t have to roam all over the city searching for you?”

“I’ll be there,” Jonah promised, his voice so thin and dry that a dozen questions leaped to life in Phelan’s brain, all clamoring together. He gazed, fascinated, at his father, suddenly looking forward to what had sounded like a long and tedious evening. Jonah, forestalling his curiosity, shifted the subject adroitly, reaching for the manuscripts. “Are these of any help?”

“They may be,” Phelan answered with no great hope. “I’ve read nearly everything else.”

“I told you—”

“I know, I know.”

“Your heart’s not in it,” Jonah said, carefully turning pages. “How can you find Bone Plain when nothing in you wants anything to do with it?”

“It’s only a paper,” Phelan said with unaccustomed sharpness. “Of course, I don’t want to go there. That’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s what I want to leave that’s everything to me.” Jonah sniffed but otherwise refrained from comment. “Anyway, I haven’t read the piece about Nairn, yet. It might inspire an idea.”

“It’s hard to imagine that damp squib inspiring anything,” his father muttered. He sat back, brooding at the work in question but did not open it. Phelan watched him, wondering, as always, in what torturous labyrinths of Jonah’s brain his father continually lost himself. Jonah rose abruptly under Phelan’s scrutiny, gave a wrench to a sturdy bell rope.

“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.