Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

He found the young woman again, inside the open kitchen door.

She gazed at him mutely, as she gave a stir to the stew bubbling in the cauldron over the fire. He felt his body come suddenly, painfully to life again, at the smells in the smoky air of leeks, mushrooms, lamb.

He heard her voice again, faint and shaking slightly. “You can go up those stairs. The students are eating now. Sit, and I’ll bring you a bowl.”

He nodded gratefully, remembered the words. “Thank you.”

“If you—if you want to play for them, they’ll listen. Most musicians pay that way, and the students are always glad to hear a stranger’s song.”

He turned to the familiar, worn stairs. “I have no new songs.” His own voice sounded harsh with disuse, a stone’s voice, weathered and hard. “Only the oldest in the world.”

She brought him a great bowl of stew, bread and cheese, the strawberries she had picked. He ate every crumb, grateful for her perception that an old boulder that had been around since before she was born might be hungrier than most. No one spoke to him, although most threw curious glances at him and his harp. But he did not offer to play for his meal, and the students went off, leaving their empty cups and bowls scattered across the tables.

He could do that much, at least, he thought, and went back down to the kitchen. It was empty. He found a tray to stack the dirty dishes on and brought them down. He was in the middle of washing them when he heard steps on the tower stairs.

A man followed the young woman down; he carried their own emptied bowls. Nairn glanced up and saw him hesitate briefly between the bottom step and the floor, brought up by whatever was in Nairn’s eyes. Even after so many years, he recognized that studious, attentive expression: that hadn’t changed, though his face was older, grayer, than the one Nairn remembered.

“A Ren?” he guessed, taking the bowls. “School steward? You’re still up in that tower, then.”

The man nodded cautiously. “Argot Renne. This is my daughter Lynnet. And you?”

Nairn turned back to his wash water. “No one. Just a stranger who needed a meal.”

“I told him,” the girl murmured in her voice like a rippling stream, “he could play for his meal.”

“That’s the last thing you need around here, another harper. I’ll finish this and leave.”

“Where?” the steward asked abruptly. “Where will you go?”

Nairn looked at him. Argot Renne was staring again, his gray eyes wide, stunned with conjecture, as though he recognized the tale that pulled itself out of the earth and stone to walk into the tower kitchen and do the dishes.

“I don’t know,” Nairn said at last, scrubbing the bowl in his hands. “I haven’t thought, yet.”

“There’s an empty chamber in the tower. You could stay awhile. Think here.”

Nairn shook his head. “No,” he said tersely. “Not here.”

“Well.” The steward paused; Nairn could sense him groping for coherence. “Is there—is there anything I can do for you? Before you go?”

Nairn rinsed the bowl; Lynnet reached out silently, took it from him to dry. He remembered the voice that had wakened him, brought him back to life, then his own magic that had laid him to earth.

“Maybe,” he answered huskily, “you could tell me how long it’s been since Declan died?”

The steward told him. He calculated, and was amazed.

“All that time ... No wonder I was hungry.” He scrubbed another bowl, a question flitting around his head like a butterfly until it finally lighted and he caught it. “Is there—is there anything like the Circle of Days still in existence?”

The steward opened his mouth, closed it. “The Circle of Days ...” he repeated finally, very softly.

“Do you know what that is?”

“Yes. I’ve read the old—I read about it. No. Nothing I’ve ever heard of around here.” He paused again, musing. “Maybe somewhere else, though. There are many bardic schools open now across Belden. You might ask at them.”

Nairn considered the idea, handed a cup to Lynnet. “I might do that. Do some traveling.” He handed another bowl to the girl and smiled at her, his face feeling its way into it slowly, creakily. “You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” he told her, and surprised a tentative answering smile out of her. “You remind me of someone I knew once, a long time ago ... She worked in the kitchen, too, and she sang like dawn breaking over the world.”

He finished the dishes and left the tower to look for the Circle of Days.

Phelan began stalking his father.

He hadn’t made a coherent decision to do so. Reason had nothing to do with it. Why he found himself in peculiar places at odd hours of day or night, hiding behind a trash bin or an elegant steam carriage and watching to see where Jonah went next, he didn’t bother trying to explain even to himself. Some nuggets of research he’d tripped over, a conjunction of wildly disparate facts he could barely remember, had sparked against each other like flint against steel. The light had fallen upon Jonah. Once he saw what he saw in that light, Phelan couldn’t stop looking. He could not have discussed it rationally with anyone else, least of all Jonah. He was looking for something he had glimpsed beyond language, between the lines, and it drove him, as nothing his father had ever done, to resolve the conundrum that was Jonah Cle.

So distracted, he rarely noticed the constant influx of musicians into the city, except when the streets and taverns were so full of strangers that they hindered his pursuit of Jonah. Sometimes, an unfamiliar song caught his ear, as a would-be bard from some far corner of Belden was moved by the ancient history and legends of the occasion to add to it on the sidewalk. Phelan, pausing in surprise, would remember why Caerau was filling with music and people. Then he would hear the phrase that had stopped him in his tracks echoing in his heart, and he would place it to memory, as he had been taught, music woven into the smell of fish chowder, the clamor of gulls on the docks, the glitter of light along the musician’s instrument, for future reference, and move on.

When Jonah eluded him completely, left the house in the odd hours Phelan slept, fitfully and most often with a book over his face, he would find himself retracing his father’s haunts: the museums, forgotten dig sites, standing stones along the Stirl, where the footprints, the bottles dropped into the mud, might well be Jonah’s. He remembered to teach his class; he worked on his paper sporadically on the rare occasions when he and Jonah were in the house together. The pile of pages was slowly growing as he rummaged through the school library or the steward’s records. Like his thoughts, the pages of his paper were homing toward something that could not yet emerge into the light of language; he could not finish it until he had found his own way through the labyrinth of fact, conjecture, and wild improbability that was Jonah’s life.

Jonah was stalking the bard Kelda.

Phelan realized that after the third court occasion that Jonah had turned up at sober, on time, and without elaborate machinations on Sophy’s part. He could, Phelan noted, pass intelligent and appropriate comments while seeming to absorb the young bard’s music through the black, implacable gaze he trained on Kelda during every note. Kelda was never at all discomposed by it. Meeting Jonah in a crush, he would exchange a genial remark, generally about the impending bardic contest, which would only render Jonah’s expression even more bleak until, satisfied, Kelda wandered off with a smile to charm a fairer face.

I am watching you, Jonah’s eyes said. I have my eye on you. But to what end, Phelan wasn’t sure; Jonah’s only response to the imminence of Kelda was to reach for the nearest passing drink. So Phelan thought, at any rate until he found himself following Jonah through an abandoned sewer.