The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Eight

The winter that killed the bard who replaced Declan at King Oroh’s court seems to have been one of the harshest on record. The Stirl froze nearly all the way from the sea to the tiny village on the plain, which had grown enough to become a coherent entity, and which named itself Caerau. Court records of nobles all over Belden are filled with the sufferings of high and low. Even the king, who liked to keep his court in restless motion in order to exhaust the hospitality and the coffers of potential rebels, hunkered down for the season in the slightly milder climate of Estmere with Lord Deste, whose ample fields and woods provided food, game, and firewood enough even for the king’s entourage. His household books record the deaths of the very old and the very young; most succumbed to what was only known then as “fever.” The king’s own records also list the illnesses and deaths of aged courtiers as well as assorted riding and hunting accidents in the icy fields and woods. The death of his bard, Loyce, was listed among the hunting accidents: he was vigorously sounding the hunting horn when his galloping horse slipped on an icy patch buried under the snow. “Both horse and rider there died,” the records say tersely, disguising what must have been a poignant incident. Other sources across Belden record a “rain of birds frozen in their flight,” tree limbs overburdened with snow cracking and falling on hapless travelers and rooftops, bodies discovered frozen beneath the ice in rivers, ponds, and wells, bands of the poor, the outcast, and the outlawed living in caves and converging on the unwary “like a great swarm of crows upon the dead.” References to children stolen from their cradles by hungry animals are common; on rare occasions, but very likely true, they are eaten by their desperate neighbors.

For every death recorded, a dozen or a hundred probably went unnoticed by history, from the rough northern fishing villages and mountain clans who had little use for writing and kept everything in memory, to the isolated villages in the western crags, and in the southern marshlands of what was once known as Waverlea. As for the school, records list three students who fled the stark life to return to their more comfortable homes. There are accounts payable to a local healer for poultices and herbal remedies, as well as for a futile visit to a student who was struck by an icicle that plunged down from the tower. His death passed with perhaps untimely swiftness from a matter of household record into the speculations and wild surmises of ballad.

What the household records do not divulge is how a couple dozen students spending a deadly winter surrounded by snowcovered plain and cold stone, inadequately washed, living on monotonous winter fare, constantly in one another’s company, managed to deal with one another without a continual drain of “accounts rendered to Salix of Caerau, healer ...”

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.”

Nairn was silent, trying to hear what Declan wasn’t saying, what might lie within his words. He gave up. The bard was too subtle and he too ignorant to understand much more than his own seedling ambitions.

He said finally, haltingly, “And learning these simple words might—”

“Yes,” the bard said intensely. “Yes. Their power will open your path to King Oroh’s court. The language you are learning is rooted in his land; that power was born here, belongs here. You will use it, in his court, as you see best.”

“How can you possibly think—”

“I don’t think. I know. You have no idea of your own powers. Even King Oroh, who has few abilities in that direction, recognized yours. We let you flee that day on the Welde because I knew that you would find your own way back to me. Power recognizes itself, even in those most oblivious to it. You recognized what, beyond music, I have to give you.”

Nairn stood wordlessly again, unable to summon any argument, only wonder at where the path out of the pigsty had led. The harp spoke for him, his thumb picking at the single string again as he mused. When he looked up finally, Declan had gone.

Winter howled across the plain and stripped it bare. Along the dark, sluggish river, stone cottages seemed to huddle in the snow among the leafless trees. Declan, who said he felt the cruel season coming in his aging bones, had raided his coffers, gifts from the king, and laid in supplies and firewood for a siege. The world shrank daily, lost its far horizons. Days began and ended in the dark. Tempers grew short; noses ran; nerves frayed. Lovers quarreled by day and tangled again in the night for warmth. Nothing existed, it seemed, beyond the plain; its blanched earth, its vast silence, ringed the tiny island upon the hill like an eternally frozen sea.

Nairn, who regarded seasons with a lover’s eye, watched winter’s changing moods, its astonishing expressions, and learned to write its ancient words: fire and ice, breath and death, dark, night, end. The full moon hanging so clearly among the frozen stars that it seemed to take on dimensions was a word in itself, he thought; it spoke a silent mystery that was somehow connected to the list of patterns lengthening daily under his nib. The glittering path of its light across the dead white plain turned to music in his head; he fashioned its fiery white brilliance with his fingers, played it back to the moon.

He went into the kitchen one morning and found, instead of the tall, calm beauty stirring the porridge, someone darker, slighter, with a tumble of untidy hair and eyes, when she glanced toward him, of a light, startling gray beneath level black brows. She filled a bowl for him briskly without explaining herself.

“Where is Odelet?” he asked, ladling bites into his mouth as he stood there, the way he was used to since they had become friends.

“Upstairs,” was the laconic answer, meaning: in the room with the great hearth and the tables where the more civilized students were eating.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Muire.” She took a poker to the fire under the cauldron with a great deal of energy, until the listless flame leaped to embrace all the wood it could reach. “Salix’s granddaughter. She sent me up here to help out.”

He nodded. Odelet, of the fairer climes in east Belden, suffered in the cold; her eyes and nostrils had been red-rimmed for weeks, and she had begun to make bullfrog noises, coughing in the night.

“Good. Do you know how to cook?”

Muire smiled thinly, as though he had asked if she knew how to gut a fish or milk a cow or pluck a hen or any other of a hundred things any idiot knew. “I can cook,” she said. He stood there chewing absently, watching her as she shook a lump of dough from a bowl, dropped it onto a patch of flour on the table, and pummeled it with her fingers until it lay round and plump as a cushion. She took a knife to it, slashed it delicately with one long line across its surface and a shorter line to each side of that, three twigs, he realized slowly, in the ancient pattern for “bread.”

“Do you know what that means?” he asked abruptly. “Those lines?”

She considered them, then him, her dark brows peaked. “My grandmother always does that,” she explained. “To me, it means ‘bread.’ ”

What other magic words had traveled down from ancient days to her? he wondered. Or to Salix? He took to visiting the kitchen when he had a moment, doing the odd task for Muire: bringing in firewood, scrubbing out the cauldron, hauling in water from the frigid well. He left her messages: a twig-word in a dusting of flour on the table, in a spill of gravy. A few she noticed and understood; others she swept up without question with her cloth. Declan, he knew, would have been appalled at him scattering secrets everywhere. But what the bard didn’t know he didn’t have to think about, and how would he find out anyway?

“How do you know these things?” Muire asked him, after he carved the twiglet-pattern for “willow” on top of the butter in the crock. “Salix puts signs like that in her jars and boxes. I thought she made them up for herself because she can’t write.”

“They’re very old,” he answered absently, his mind already traveling down the hill ahead of him. “I wonder where she learned them. I’d like to see your grandmother’s signs.”

Muire paused in the midst of chopping the pile of carrots and parsnips he had brought up from the root cellar. She pushed hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, said simply, “Follow me home, then, whenever you want. She won’t mind.” She resumed her quick, vigorous strokes with the cleaver, running down a foot of carrot in a breath, while Nairn eyed her silently, curiously. Her eyes had been lowered as she spoke, and she didn’t look back at him now, though she must have felt his swift attention. Another message, maybe, in the complex language of the body. Or maybe not.

He plucked a bite of carrot out of the wake of the flashing blade. “I will,” he said.

He did, a few days later, after supper on an evening so clear that stars and the half-moon hanging above the village shone luminous and upside down, like a migrant school of glittering fish, in the black waters of the Stirl.

Salix was a rangy, muscular woman with a cascade of white curls and eyes as dark as whortleberries. Her cottage by the river smelled oddly of smoke, rotting eggs, and lavender when they walked in. She laughed as she stirred the mass in her cauldron, and they reeled back out, pushing their weeping faces into the cold again to drag at air that burned like fire and gave them no relief.

“It’s a good poultice for wounds,” she said. “Graf Dix missed his chopping stump and came close to cutting off his foot with his ax this morning. I’m making a great pot of it for him. Nairn, isn’t it? You were scaring the wolves away from my granddaughter on her way home?”

“Something like that,” Nairn agreed.

“He wanted to see your pots, Gran,” Muire said, untying her cloak. “He’s learning your signs.”

The spoon spiraling through the morass in the cauldron briefly stopped. “Is he now?”

“He says they’re very old words. You never told me that.”

“You never asked. They’re just some odd things passed down from my grandmother.” The spoon was moving again; Salix’s eyes, no more expressive than the dark face of the moon, considered Nairn. “And who might be teaching you? Surely not the bard who came with the barbarian king? Why would he have paid any attention at all to such distant past?”

“The stones,” Nairn told her. “He saw that writing everywhere on the standing stones across the kingdoms.” He gazed back at her, feeling something flow out of her to meet him midway in the flickering lights and shadows of her cottage. “You know,” he breathed, scarcely hearing himself. “You know what they are.”

Her face, the skin clinging so to her bones that it seemed ageless, softened into reminiscence. “Once. Once maybe, when I was your age, I caught a glimpse inside them. What they truly mean underneath what they say they are. But my gran died, and there was no one else to teach me.”

“But what are they?” Muire asked bewilderedly. “If they’re not what they mean? I never knew they meant anything at all but what you called them: ‘comfrey’ and ‘mandrake’ and such.”

“That’s all they are to me now,” Salix said, “those ancient words.” She gave the spoon a turn or two silently, her eyes going back to Nairn. They smiled faintly; she added softly, “I can feel them in you, wanting to speak. Isn’t that strange?”

“Yes,” he said breathlessly. “How do I—”

“I have no idea. But that bard knows, or he wouldn’t be teaching it to you.” She lifted the spoon, rapped it against the iron rim. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know that, either. Come and let me know, will you, when you find out?” He nodded wordlessly. “You’d best go back up now; the wild things are out tonight, hunting under the moon.” She chuckled. “Though they’ll give you a wide berth when they catch a whiff of you. Muire, make him a brand to light his way.”

She slipped out with him, for another clean breath, she said, as she handed him the torch. But the air between them spoke, brittle as it was, and then her smile did, in the firelight. He wondered, as he bent to catch her kiss, what pattern of twigs that lovely word might make.

When he climbed back up the hill, he found the snow around the school churned by wagon wheels and horses. The broad room the students used both as refectory and study was full of wealthy travelers and guards dripping at the hearth. A young man with Odelet’s grace and coloring stood at the hearth, talking earnestly to Declan. The students around them softened their playing so they could hear the news. Nairn, taking off his cloak and watching Odelet come from her chamber wrapped head to heel in a great quilt, realized what they had come for.

“I sent for Odelet’s brother,” Declan explained to the students. “Her health is frail; she needs to be cared for at home.”

Her wan smile, in a face as pallid as eggshell but for her raw nose, seemed genuinely grateful. Nairn bade farewell to her reluctantly the next day, for the band of courtiers, guards, and hunters wanted to get back across the plain before the storms returned.

“Perhaps you’ll come to play in Estmere someday,” she told Nairn. “I hope so.”

He gazed mutely at her lovely face, felt his suddenly heavy heart overladen with wishes, promises, resolves. He saw himself on a fine white horse, riding beside King Oroh to her father’s castle, trumpets sounding, doors opening at their approach. “I will come,” he said huskily; his eyes clung to her as she turned, a shapeless bundle of furs helped into the well-appointed wagon by her ladies.

As the students gathered around the retinue, a couple piping their farewells, Odelet’s brother stopped his mount beside Declan.

“Thank you,” he said. “This is most likely the only way she would have permitted herself to be taken home.” He paused, shook his head like a restive horse, and added, “I forgot. I was asked to give you a message from King Oroh, who is staying with my father. The bard you chose as your replacement died in an unfortunate accident. The king wants you to find him a new bard.” He paused, squinting into the rare winter sunlight and pulled words slowly out of memory. “You know what he needs, the king said, and he will be patient. This must be a bard to bring honor to the new realm of Belden, and he has utmost trust in you that you will recognize the bard he needs.”

He raised his hand in farewell and shouted to the wagon driver, leaving the old bard still as a standing stone in the snow, and even more wordless.