Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

“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.