Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

That much Nairn understood: he was learning daily the peculiar, poignant turmoil of the simplest, most common of words.

“Heart” for instance. He was vaguely aware, from its rhythms, of the position of his heart in his body. But for the first time in his life, he was stumbling, will he, nil he, into an awareness of why so many emotions and abstractions in song and poetry were attached to that faithfully thumping organ. It acquired an unusual life of its own. It expressed itself in odd ways, pounding almost painfully at an unexpected view of Odelet in the kitchen garden, her graceful hands searching through green leaves for pea pods. At the sight of her emerging from the henhouse with an egg basket, her slender neck bending gracefully under the lintel, his heart would send the blood flashing through him with all the force and silent thunder of distant lightning. Around her his throat dried, his palms sweated, his feet grew enormous. He whispered her name to anything that would listen: the sun, the moon, the carrot tassels in the garden. Practicing his secret writing one morning, he felt an overwhelming urge to watch her name flow out of his quill. But none of the words he had learned from Declan came close to it.

How many twiglet-strokes and in what pattern would mean “Odelet”?

He could not ask her, and he would torment himself into oblivion before he opened his heart to Declan. His heart, a delicate object those days, would not permit him to bring the matter anywhere near Declan. It would shrivel within him at the bard’s amusement, cringe like a cur, and try to slink out of sight behind some stronger organ. No matter how he shaped the request, even at its simplest it would bring to life an impossible image: the lowly Pig-Singer casting his eyes at the daughter of an Estmere noble. Even in ballads, such tangles rarely ended happily. Usually someone died. Nairn doubted that Odelet, who seemed obliviously unruffled around him, would burst into the traditional storm of grief over him. She might, he imagined, let fall one cool pearl of pity at the idea of his torment, then promptly forget all about him.

He finally remembered the one man who could write everyone’s name, and did, routinely, without paying the least attention to the complications of the heart, as long as they affected neither accounts rendered nor received.

Nairn had never gone farther into the ancient tower than the kitchen. Somewhere up there, Declan taught his classes; somewhere up there, the school steward kept his records and himself. The students slept in a jumbled warren of tiny rooms whose walls they built themselves under the completed portion of the new building’s roof. There was little Declan taught that Nairn didn’t know, and he tried to stay out from under the bard’s yellow gaze: strange things happened when their paths crossed.

But for the sake of seeing Odelet’s name flow out of the ink in his quill nib, he would venture into the unexplored regions of the tower.

Odelet was chopping a chicken with a cleaver when he crossed the kitchen. She didn’t notice him until, watching her blade pierce the pale, plucked, hapless breastbone, Nairn walked into the edge of the open tower door. He winced and rubbed his nose, then glanced at her furtively to see if she had noticed his bumbling, just as she turned her face hastily away from him and gazed impassively down at the chicken. She raised the cleaver; he slipped across the threshold and up the stairs.

The narrow windows spiraling up the walls gave him glimpses of the long summer evening, the plain turning and turning around him as he moved. Yellow-gray sky at one horizon where the sun had gone down changed in the next elongated frame to the river winding its way to yet another horizon, trees along its banks bending protectively over the mystery of water. Moonlight spilled across the next window, silvering the distant sky. Beyond the next, massive stones watched the guttering end of day, watched for the stars. The next slit sparked with a sudden glow as someone lit a lamp at the tavern door beside the river. Nairn passed Declan’s chambers, then: the lower, where he taught, the higher, where he slept. Both doors were closed. At the next window, Nairn heard someone harping in the twilight, softly, dreamily: Declan, perhaps, sitting in the ring of stones and watching moonlight crust the dark, massive tower on the field below, rising so high it seemed crowned with stars.

Nairn stopped. He clung to that meager opening with both hands, trying to widen it as he pushed his face to the stones and stared at the tower. He blinked. It vanished as he opened his eyes; he saw the familiar emptiness below, rapidly misting into night. He let go of the stones finally, stepped back, still staring. A moon shadow, he conceded finally, flung by the watchtower itself across the grass. He turned, continued his climb up the seemingly endless steps, the harper’s music drifting along with him.

He reached the steward’s door at last, somewhere near the roof, and marked by the book and quill he had sketched beside a series of incomprehensible shapes. He knocked.

The steward called out from within. Nairn found him at his table, quill in hand, looking up from his massive book, his eyes still full of numbers. He was around Nairn’s age; other than that, the two young men might have been born on different stars. Ink ran in the steward’s veins, Nairn guessed. His heart beat by rote: it would go on counting one number after another until it stopped. Still, the steward was a kindly young man, for all his gravity. He asked no questions about Nairn’s odd request, just began flipping pages in his book.

“Odelet. I remember an entry, just before you came here.”

Nairn looked over his shoulder, watched as the steward settled on a page and ran his fingers down the lines.

“Here. Accounts received for three nights’ lodging and stable from Berwin Deste, brother of Odelet Deste.” He pointed to a flowing fragment within the line of knots and coils. “This word spells her name.”

Nairn studied it. He brushed at the hair over his eyes and studied it again. “What is that?”

“What?”

“That.” He ran his hand through the air above the page. “What came out of your quill.”

“It’s writing.”

“No, it’s not.”

The steward raised his head abruptly, met Nairn’s eyes. After a moment, he pushed the book toward Nairn, dipped his quill, and offered it. “Show me. There in that blank space. What your writing looks like.”

Entirely ignoring Declan’s requirement for secrecy, Nairn leaned over the page, arranged four twiglets into a pattern.

“Ah,” Dower said softly, gazing at the twigs. “I understand why you are confused. That’s an ancient way of writing. I don’t know it, though I’ve seen it here and there, carved into standing stones. No one writes like that anymore. I should say: I didn’t know that anyone still does.”

“Then why is Declan teaching it to me?”

“I don’t know.” The steward’s head was still lowered as he studied the word Nairn had left in the margin. “You’ll have to ask him. What does this mean?”

“Onion. Yes. I will ask. Can you show me—” He took another look at the onion-shaped circle that began Odelet’s name, and shook his head hopelessly. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I mean: not to her.”

Dower was silent, flicking the feathered end of the quill at the page. He looked up at Nairn finally. “Why don’t you just tell her?”

Nairn’s heart spoke first, sent the blood roiling through his body. That language, he realized, was clear. “I’m terrified,” he mumbled, his tongue stumbling over the word.

The steward straightened, dipped his nib again, wrote a word on a corner of the page and tore it carefully free. “Here. That’s how she would write her name.”