Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

The man, riffling over the harp strings, stilled his fingers and gave Nairn an unfathomable look. “Depends,” he said finally, doubtfully. “How do you like my harping?”

Nairn smiled. “Very much. You play songs I’ve never heard.”

“Ah, it’s all old. You’re a kind young man.”

“I’ve done my share of walking. I know how the road goes.” He glanced at Shea, who huffed an exasperated sigh and got to her feet.

“Da! Food!”

“Coming!”

She threw her cloak around her, added tersely to Nairn, “I’m going back up, now we’re finished talking. Coming?” she demanded of Blayse, and he shifted reluctantly, finished his beer on the way up. “Well, I’m not walking up in the dark by myself. Not after what happened to Drue.”

“I’ll stay to walk with you,” Osprey said gravely to Nairn. “Fend off the slavering icicles.”

“It’s not funny,” Shea snapped, and flounced out with Blayse in her wake. “Da! Night!”

“Good night, girl!”

Nairn and Osprey stayed to drink beer and listen, after Welkin emptied another tankard and a bowl of root vegetables and mutton stewed in beer. When Osprey laid his face on the table and began to snore, Nairn woke him with a scatter of moldy coins from the Marches and stood up. The brewer, a big, beefy man with florid cheeks, heard the sound of money through the music and appeared to bid them farewell. Welkin finished his song and moved to warm himself before he, too, wandered out into the night.

“Where will you stay?” Nairn asked him.

“I’ll find a place,” the harper answered vaguely. “That’s never a problem.” He set his harp on the table, opened his hands to the fire.

“You might find a bed at the school.”

“Maybe. One of these nights.”

Nairn wrapped himself against the brittle cold, taking a closer look at Welkin’s harp. The scores on it were deliberate, he saw, made with a knife. Then the lines arranged themselves into some very familiar patterns, and his thoughts froze.

The harper took one hand away from the warmth, as though he had heard the sound of Nairn’s brain stumbling over itself, and reached back to pick up his harp. “I’m grateful for the beer and food,” he said. Nairn shifted his eyes to follow the path of the harp, saw it disappear into its matted sheepskin case. He met the harper’s eyes then; the faint, enigmatic smile had deepened. “Good night to you, young masters.”

“Stay,” the brewer said abruptly. “Sleep by the fire there. It’s brutal out tonight.”

The harper shook his head. “I’ll find my own way, but thank you, master brewer.”

He opened the door. Osprey, yawning hugely, followed. Nairn bumped into him as the door closed; he was stopped dead and peering bewilderedly here and there at the tangled moon shadows of tree limbs.

“He just vanished, the harper did. Just—” His teeth had already begun to chatter.

“Never mind,” Nairn said, pulling him into motion again. “You heard him.”

“But—”

“He can take care of himself.”

By the time Nairn saw the harper again, the cruel winter had finally melted away into spring. Grass flowed over the plain again, green to the farthest horizons; its gentle hillocks melted into vivid blue. The Stirl melted and surged, bringing musicians, workers and wood for building, farm animals to feed the visitors. The plain buried its stillness deep in the earth; what went on above it was now a constant clatter of hammering, wagons coming and going, people camping on it, keeping a wild, colorful motley of music going that reminded Nairn of a barnyard before breakfast. Rich pavilions went up next to small tents that had mushroomed into circles on the grass overnight. Stalls selling anything imaginable rose on their ramshackle frames; fires burned from dawn to midnight as food was cooked and sold to the arriving bards. The village, so sparse and coldly gray during the winter, became, half a season later, unrecognizable, buildings flying up like magic, some for the few months before the competition, others to last past a lifetime.

Nairn searched constantly among the strangers for the mysterious harper who knew the language of the standing stones and had carved it onto his harp. What the harp said, he didn’t know; the twig-letters, vanishing so swiftly into the harp case, were a complete jumble in his head.

What Declan said when Nairn told him about the harper, he remembered very clearly, once the bard had finally retrieved his voice.

“Find him,” he said sharply. “Bring him to me.” He was silent again, pacing a circle around his chamber in the spiraling tower. Then he added tersely, “It’s one thing to take on the magic of another land that everyone there has forgotten. It’s another to meet the one who has not forgotten. Be careful.”

Nairn wondered at that: the eccentric harper seemed harmless and reasonably civilized. He kept looking for Welkin, enormously curious about this man who had discomposed the imperturbable Declan, and who could hide himself in wood smoke and shadows, and leave no footprints in the snow. But not even the brewer, whose tavern swarmed with musicians by the beginning of summer, had seen him after that winter evening.

The noise had driven the harper away, Nairn decided. Or maybe his competition had. Bards were coming from courts all over the realm, playing music far more intricate than Welkin’s on instruments adorned with a filigree of gold rather than a fretwork of scars from a knife. When the bell beside the main door sounded one morning as Nairn passed, he pulled the door open absently, expecting yet another musician, newly arrived on the plain and anticipating Declan’s immediate interest and attention.

“I heard Declan wants to see me,” the musician said, and the sound of the deep, rumbling, rough-hewn voice left Nairn speechless. He reached out, grasped Welkin’s brawny arm, and drew him across the threshold before he could vanish again.

“Yes,” he said, guiding the harper through the empty hall to a side entry to the tower that bypassed the kitchen where, from the sound of the clanging and splashes below, Muire was scouring pots in the cauldron. “He does. I’ve been looking for you for months. Did you leave the plain?”

“After a fashion,” Welkin agreed, and added, to make himself entirely clear, “I’m back now.”

“ ‘After a fashion,’ ” Nairn breathed. “What fashion?” He didn’t expect an answer. Welkin, climbing up the winding steps, only glanced out the slitted windows without offering him one.

“Strange place for a tower,” he commented. “What was it for, when it was built?”

“A signal tower, I suppose. A watchtower. I don’t know. No one does. It’s older than anyone’s memory, around here. How did you know that Declan wants to see you?”

Welkin shrugged. “Word travels, in a crowd like this.”

Nairn gave up. “It took long enough,” he said dryly, wondering in what language that particular word had traveled. He rounded a curve, found the door open and Declan waiting for them: word had, in whatever fashion, preceded them up the stairs.

The two took a measure of one another briefly, silently, there on the threshold. Then Welkin smiled a tight smile framed by fanning lines, and Declan shifted so that he could enter.

Nairn asked uncertainly, “Do you want me to—”

“Stay,” both said at once, so he came into Declan’s work chamber. Welkin prowled a moment, looking at the small collection of rare and ancient instruments kept there, while Declan watched him. Then Welkin turned, said something guttural and incomprehensible, and Nairn, struggling to understand, felt the silent bolt of Declan’s shock across the room.

“You speak it,” Declan whispered. “You know how it sounds.”