Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

She stopped at the edge of the great circle around the singing tree and saw the face of the music.

She blinked, shaken out of a dream, she felt, and waking to a conundrum.

The bard was singing, not the trees. The bard was Kelda, who had watched an old man choke on a bite of salmon. All around her, entranced faces still seemed caught in the dream; transfixed bodies scarcely breathed. The bard, engrossed in his expert playing, dreamed as well, drawing his listeners ever more deeply into his wonderful vision.

“He’s good,” someone murmured beside her. “I’ll give him that. Zoe, do you know where I can find your father?”

She closed her eyes, opened them again, finally shaken fully awake and astonished at herself. She turned her head, met Phelan’s preoccupied eyes.

“Didn’t you hear that?” she whispered.

“Of course I did. I followed you out here.”

“I mean—the trees singing. Didn’t you hear the oak sing?”

He shook his head. “I must have missed that part.” He was silent a moment, peering at her; then he smiled. “You look bewitched. Even your hair seems full of elflocks. He’s been having that effect. Frazer looks even more spell-raddled than you. Do you know where—”

“No.” Then she pulled her thoughts together. “My father’s not in the tower? He’s usually still there at noon.” Phelan shook his head. “Then I don’t know where—Why? Is it important?”

“Yes, but only to me. He suggested I search some of the old stewards’ records for my paper.”

She shrugged, her mind straying again to the peculiarity in the oak grove. “Just take them,” she suggested. “He wouldn’t care. Most of them are covered with cobwebs and dust.”

“Are you sure?”

The bard, she saw suddenly, was looking at them across the crowd spilling out from under the grove. She couldn’t read his expression, but she could guess at it. He had unraveled his heart for them, spun it into gold and woven gold into a web. The two flies buzzing obliviously on the outermost strand of it would cause the bard dissatisfaction greater than his pleasure in all the trapped and motionless morsels within the shining threads.

“Yes,” she whispered quickly, and turned her back on the bard, followed Phelan into the clear and genial light of day. “I’m going to see Quennel,” she told him when they were out of earshot. “He asked me to visit him today. I’ll let my father know you’ve borrowed his books. If he even notices.”

“Thank you.”

She mused equally over Kelda and Phelan on her way to the castle. About what she had heard, and what Phelan had not. She had been as transfixed, as spellbound as anyone, she admitted. Anyone except Phelan, who had blundered through such beauty as though his ears were corked like kegs. He had heard the notes, but he had missed the music. Why?

She had neglected to change her clothes, so determined she had been to get out of the broad range of Kelda’s attention. Something was askew with him, brilliant as he was, something amiss. Her student’s robe and her familiar face eased her way into the castle; she was escorted to Quennel’s chambers and promptly admitted.

His color was better, she saw immediately. Not so his mood. He smiled when he saw her; his pleasure was genuine but brief, before the frown turned the smile upside down. He was still in bed, she saw with surprise, covered with silk and eyelet lace, with a cap on his willful hair.

“My throat is raw,” he said disgruntledly. “I can’t sing tonight.”

“You could play,” she urged him, inspired. “I’ll sing for you.”

The thought brought out his smile again. It faded more slowly as he looked at her silently, his reddened eyes unblinking, an expression in them she couldn’t fathom.

“I need you to do something for me,” he said finally, when she thought he might be drifting off to sleep again.

“Yes,” she said quickly. “Anything.”

“I have been thinking about this yesterday evening, and most of the night, and this morning. You understand that I’ve given it my most careful attention.”

“Yes.”

“So don’t argue with me. I am going to relinquish my position as Royal Bard of King Lucien’s court.” She opened her mouth; nothing came out but a rush of air. “I would wait until Lord Grishold leaves,” he added distastefully, “if I had any hope that his bard would actually leave with him.”

“You’re going to retire? Because of a mouthful of salmon?”

“So why wait?”

“But—” She started to sit on air, looked around hastily to pull a chair into place. She sat, leaned forward, her hands folded tightly among the bed linens, her eyes wide, studying his face as though the answer lurked within his bones. “But why? There’s no need. You are still vigorous, your voice as tuned and resonant as ever, your ear as fine, your fingers—”

“My ear, my voice, my fingers are all telling me that as well,” he said so dryly his voice rasped. “But I saw my fate in that mouthful of fish. This is what I must do. I will announce my impending retirement but continue to play as Royal Bard until the moment a new bard is chosen.”

“There will be a competition,” she whispered, feeling even her lips go cold. “Between bards from all over the realm for the highest position. They will come to Caerau to compete, and I will be here to see it.”

“You will compete in it,” he told her grimly, and she felt the full weight of his determination, anger, and despair. “And you will win.” She stared at him, breathless, mute. “You will win,” he said again, harshly. “You will find the roots and wellsprings of this land within you, and sing them until the moon herself weeps. Because if you don’t, that bard from Grishold, who is no bard but something ancient, dark, and dangerous, will sing in my place to the king, and I don’t know what will befall this land when he has finished his song.”

It’s here, around the time of Declan’s competition, that the boundaries of history begin to blur into the fluid realm of poetry, much as a well-delineated borderline might falter into and become overwhelmed by the marsh it crosses. Where, the historian might ask bewilderedly, did the border go? Nothing but this soggy expanse of uncertain territory in front of us, where we were stringently following the clear and charted path of truth.

That Declan called the gathering of the bards is recorded in many places. Oroh’s court chronicles mention it: “At last Declan gave the king hope that he would have a bard once again at his side, for counsel and for diversion, for the king loved his music greatly and would hear none but the best.” We might pause here and give King Oroh a measure of sympathy, for no bard in his new court, however gifted, would know the cherished ballads and poetry of his native land; Declan and death had taken them away.

Evidence in other chronicles, in letters, in household records indicating the absence of a family member “who rode to Stirl Plain for the gathering of bards”: all give us proof beyond poetry of the event. And indeed the bards came from high and low, from near and far, from the wealthiest court, the meanest tavern, from the northern fishing villages, the crags of the west, the salt marshes of the south. From every part of Belden, bards, musicians, minstrels, anyone with an instrument or a voice to sing with, converged upon Stirl Plain.

Fortunately, Declan allowed the villagers the few brief months between winter and midsummer to prepare for them. Before the bards came the builders and the traders, the barges carrying lumber from the northern forests, wagons carrying a wealth of other things, followed by people hoping for work after the terrible winter. One can imagine buildings sprouting like mushrooms up and down the riverbanks, crowding along the road leading up the hill to the school. Inns, taverns, shops flew up as both the wealthy and the poor began to make their way across the plain.