Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

“What—”

Again, the bard’s hand rose, inviting Nairn’s attention to the disaster around them.

“Who do you think you fought?” There was an odd note of exasperation in the fine, calm voice. “This entire field is ringed with King Oroh’s army. Most of them just stood and watched you flail at one another in the mist.”

Nairn felt his heart close like a fist, the blood vanish out of his face. The bard turned his horse, but not before Nairn glimpsed his weary revulsion.

“King Oroh’s tent,” he reminded Nairn without looking back. “At dawn.”

“You’re a bard,” Nairn pleaded to the retreating figure. “Put some poetry in the message, or I’ll be out among the dead at dawn, with the crows picking at my eyes.”

Declan glanced around at that, his expression composed again. “I’ve heard what you can do. Find your own poetry in that.”

Stumbling back across the darkening battlefield, ignoring the black clouds of crows scattering up around him as he passed, Nairn managed to fashion King Oroh’s demand into words more akin to a preference. Anstan, slumped on a chair in his tent, surrounded by his generals, listened wordlessly to Nairn’s message. He gave an inarticulate growl, seized his crown with both hands, and flung it out the tent door. Then he followed it, stopping at the threshold long enough to say,

“All of you. Here with me before sunrise.”

He went out to mourn under the moon. So did Nairn, in an opposite direction, carrying his harp, which he hadn’t played in weeks. Whether the grieving king heard the sweet, melancholy harping, or he played only to the moonstruck faces of the dead, Nairn didn’t bother to wonder. He only hoped that the tin-eared king wouldn’t mistake him for Declan and send a knife after him in the dark.

But Anstan surprised him in the predawn hour, when Nairn made his way into the king’s tent.

“Bring your harp,” Anstan said tersely. “You honored the dead of the Marches last night.” He flicked a glance over the unkempt bard and gestured to a servant. “Find him something decent to put on. And wash your face. You look half-dead yourself. There must be some reason,” Nairn heard him grumble to his generals, “that barbarian gives his bard such status. Not that I can see it. We can at least pretend we have what he has.”

Later, kneeling beside Anstan in the mist-soaked mud churned up by constant comings and goings outside the new king’s tent, Nairn watched an earthworm undulate between two clods of dirt and felt that even it had more status than he. Anstan’s crown and sword appeared in a corner of his vision, laid as low as they could get, on the mud at Oroh’s feet. It was then that he opened his clenched fist, let the jewels fall out of it to smolder like embers in the muck.

“What’s this?” Oroh demanded. He was a tall, brawny man with tangled red hair and a deep, rumbling voice. A line of toggles made of boar tusks kept his loose tunic closed over his shirt and the flaps of his boots fastened. His crown was a jagged circle of golden tusks. He picked his words with less certainty than Declan did; Nairn heard the same unfamiliar lilt to his phrases.

“Jewels from your bard’s harp,” Nairn said, too dispirited for courtesy. What king would expect good manners from a worm? “I took them from him.”

There was a moment’s utter silence on the field. Not even a crow commented.

Then Oroh hunkered down in front of the young bard, to his astonishment. “Look at me,” the king said. “Give me my title.”

Nairn raised his head. The king’s eyes were the color of hazelnuts; they held Nairn’s for a long time, studying him, until Nairn heard himself say, “Yes, my lord.”

Oroh turned his head finally, shifted that piercing, unblinking gaze to Declan. “How did he take them?”

“They came to him, my lord.”

“Indeed,” the king breathed, and straightened. “You are fortunate in your bard, sir.”

“Yes,” Anstan agreed blankly, and added with bitter precision, “my lord.”

“Perhaps too fortunate. He’s a weapon, and I will add him to the salvage of battle. Rise.”

“He’s only a marching bard,” Anstan protested bewilderedly as he got to his feet.

“Well, you won’t need him now.” Oroh turned, gesturing them to follow him into the tent. “Where I am from, bards are valued highly, and you will receive compensation for this one. He may go back now for his other instruments and possessions.” He nodded to a pair of guards, then raised a brow at Declan, asking a silent question.

“They’ll do, my lord,” Declan said briefly. “His ignorance is abysmal.”

“Ah? His misfortune is now our fortune.” He turned his curious gaze from Nairn to the guards. “Go with him.”

They took him back across the field. While they walked, Nairn watched warriors searching for the wounded startle sudden, whirling black clouds of crow into the air. Nairn’s own thoughts whirled as darkly. He had failed, in Declan’s eyes, at some portentous task that might have turned the tide of yesterday’s battle. How, exactly, he could not imagine. Because Nairn had failed so miserably at that, Declan expected nothing more than failure from him. Singing the jewels out of the harp had been an aberration: an impulse of deep, impossible desire in which there was no hope, only longing. He felt very much like that again: filled with desire without a gnat’s worth of hope to get himself as far from that sad, smeared disaster and as far from Declan’s eerie eyes as he could get.

If he could crawl like a snake through the dead, if he could fly among the crows ...

Lacking any better ideas, he left the guards rummaging through Anstan’s possessions and walked into the back partition of the tent, where he had left his things scattered among the useless paraphernalia of war. Neither the marching drum nor the battered cornu would fit into his pack, so he left them there reluctantly. He slit a seam along the floor of the tent with one of the generals’ swords, slid himself, his harp and pack and a pair of somebody’s boots out the back of the tent. He made his way quickly among the morning campfires of the remnants of Anstan’s army. The glum warriors watched him leave, raised a cup or two for luck. Then Nairn imitated the earthworm, slithering on his belly among the unburied dead, and made his way with more haste than caution to the thick trees along the river.

No one rode him down, dragged him back. But someone watched him, he realized as he stood at the water’s edge. He felt that eerie prickling of awareness glide all through his body, chilling his skin, stiffening his bones. He looked behind him, then abruptly up, and found a snowy owl on a branch, staring down at him out of wide, golden eyes.

A voice out of nowhere filled his head, at once lilting and sinewy.

You found me once. You found me twice. The third time is the charm.

A shout leaped out of Nairn that must have opened the eyes of the dead, and he began to run.

He ran for days, it felt like, weeks, months, before he began to feel safe again and slowed a little. He disappeared into the southern forests of the Marches, keeping to small villages, the less ostentatious manor houses, crofters’ cottages so ancient their stones must have put down roots. As the bedraggled marching bard of the last king of the Marches, he was given sympathy and honor. Ballads he composed about the Battle of the Welde opened doors for him, gave him shelter, for events were so new few realized, in those quiet, unchanging places, that the ancient court of the northern kingdom was no more. Nairn managed to stay ahead of King Oroh’s soldiers and officials, hiding in isolated corners of the realm, where the oldest words, tales, and musical instruments might linger for centuries, and gossip tended to be a season or two older than events. So he learned, sometime after the facts, that Oroh had taken the last of the five kingdoms and had named his realm Belden.