Patricia McKillip: The Bards of Bone Plain

Then, one morning, she came in the wee hours, slid next to him on the pallet in the loft.

“Himself is out with the early tide,” she whispered. “And my father’s sleeping with his deaf ear up. Just don’t think this is more than what it is.”

“No,” he promised breathlessly, embarking upon yet another path with no end in sight. “Yes. Of course, no.”

He spent his evenings playing in the tavern. His days were his own. He roamed the coastal barrens, searching out the tiny stone huts of fishers and shepherds, coaxing songs from their toothless grandparent stirring the fire, the child chanting over its game of driftwood and shells, the wife rocking a babe in the cradle with one foot and singing as she churned. Ancient words, they sang in this part of the world; his quick, hungry ear picked up hints of far older tales within the simple verses. Sometimes they’d tell him tales of magic and power, the toothless, dreamy-eyed old ones, as they hugged the hearths for warmth. All true, they assured him. All true, once, a long time ago ... Children taught him their counting rhymes; older girls showed him their love charms, bundles of tiny shells, dried flowers, locks of hair, tied up with colored threads. They told him where to bury them, what to sing as he did.

“This one you cover with sand in the exact center of the Hag’s Teeth. You’ll see. The dark stones down the beach that look like fangs.”

“This one you give to the Lady Stone as the full moon rises.”

“This one you burn at the King Stone, on top of the hill across from Her. There’s a charred circle around it, old as the stone, some say. So many have burned love-gifts there, it must be true, don’t you think so?”

He found the stones.

They watched him, he felt a couple of times, these immense, battered old shards of time set deep into the earth by who knew what fierce, single-minded urgings. He played to them, leaning against them; he saw what they saw: sunrise, moonrise, the tides rushing in, rushing away. They watched him, looming over him when a young mother brought her sleeping baby with her, let it lie in a hollow of sea grass and strawberry vines while she fed the wanderer wild strawberries between her lips. They watched.

So little time, such scant weeks passed, that none of the men had yet offered the honey-voiced wanderer a flat-eyed glance, a comment less than friendly, before the next stranger entered the tavern following a song.

The fishers crowding the tables looked upon him suspiciously enough. But he carried no arms, only his harp in a fine, worn leather case. His robe and cloak were simply fashioned, embroidered here and there with once-bright threads. His lean face was lined, his red hair, streaked with white along the sides, was cut short and neat as a fox’s pelt. His strange eyes were gold as a snow owl’s. They went first to the harper on his bench by the hearth. Then he nodded to the men, and they nodded back silently, not knowing what to make of the stranger in their midst, especially one verging, in such an unlikely place, on the exotic.

He bought them all ale immediately; their first impressions changed, and their tongues loosened. He had a strange accent, an odd lilt to his sentences, but that was explained easily enough when they asked. He wasn’t from the Marches but from the smaller, mountainous kingdom to the south and west, whose king, everybody knew, lived on a crag with the eagles to keep an eye on his rambunctious nobles.

“My name is Declan,” he told them. “I am the court bard of Lord Ockney of Grishold. We received word from the King of Grishold that a stranger is trying to overrun the five kingdoms, take them for himself. The barbarian, who calls himself King Oroh, sailed up the Stirl River with his army and challenged the King of Stirl, whose own army was massed across the plain on both sides of the river. The battle was fierce and terrible. The Stirl, we heard, ran red. The King of Stirl surrendered to the invader, who has now turned his eyes west of the plain toward Grishold. The King of Grishold sent several of his nobles, Lord Ockney among them, to plead with your king Anstan and his nobles for help, men, arms. With the plain taken, we are cut off from the other kingdoms, Waverlea and Estmere. We were forced to find our way north up the rugged western coast to get here. If King Oroh conquers Grishold, he won’t stop there. He’ll come north to the Marches, strike while the weather is fair.”

“I thought the barbarian king was already nipping at us,” a fisher said heavily. “That he’s just over the border hills of the Marches.”

The bard shook his head. “No. He was moving his army toward Grishold when we left. It’s rough country, and the nobles there are contentious. It may not fall so easily to him as the kingdom on the plain.”

“What are you doing all the way up here,” another asked, “if your Lord Ockney wants the king? Court’s in the south.”

“My lord stopped in your western mountains to plead for help from the hill clans.” He paused, added with wonder, “They have some very strange music there,” and the men laughed. “He sent me up here to seek out the great, rich courts of the northern coasts, to soften the nobles’ hearts with my music, so that when he came begging, they would be generous.”

There was more laughter, brief and sardonic, at that. “Not much up here besides the fishing villages,” the innkeeper explained.

“Ah.”

“Surely you didn’t come up here alone? The northerners are generous, but they don’t bother to bar their doors, that’s how little they have. They’ll give you their best for the asking: chowder and a moldy pallet. You won’t find an army here, and the only nobles we have are the standing stones.”

Declan smiled. “I offered to come. I’ve heard the bladder-pipes of the hill clans. I wanted to hear what strange music has grown along the edge of the world.”

They studied him curiously, all suspicion gone. “Another wanderer,” one decided. “Like Nairn.”

“Nairn.”

They gestured toward the young harper. “He can play anything; he’s been everywhere around the Marches. He’s heard it all.”

The golden eyes, glinting like coins, studied Nairn. Nairn, meeting the unblinking, dispassionate gaze, felt oddly as though his world had shifted sideways, overlapped itself to give him an unexpected vision of something he didn’t know existed. The feeling echoed oddly in his memories. Astonished, he recognized it: the other time he had wanted something with all his bones and didn’t know what it was.

Declan smiled. Wordless, Nairn tipped his harp in greeting. The older bard came over to him, sat on the bench beside him.

“Play,” Declan urged. “Some song from the sea.”

Nairn shook his head slightly, found his voice. “You first. They’re all tired of listening to me by now, and so am I. Play us something from your world.”

The men rumbled their agreement. Declan inclined his head and opened his harp case.

The harp came out dancing with light. Uncut jewels inset deeply into the face of the harp glowed like mermaid’s tears: green, blue, red, amber in the firelight. The men shifted, murmuring with wonder, then were dead still as the harper played a slow, rich, elegant ballad the like of which Nairn had never heard. It left a sudden, piercing ache in his heart, that there might be a vast sea-kingdom of music he did not know and might never hear. The wanderer who had enchanted the pigs with his voice and had callused his feet hard as door slats had glimpsed the castle in the distance, with its proud towers and the bright pennants flying over them. Such lovely, complex music was no doubt common as air within those walls. And there he stood on the outside, with no right to enter and no idea how to charm his way in. With a bladder-pipe?