Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

“He went to speak to Phelan,” Sophy told her, before she could ask. “Isn’t that your aunt Petris under that wonderful hat? All those plumes look as though they’re about to fly away with her.”

“How is Phelan?” Beatrice asked anxiously.

“Better, I’m sure, now that you’re here. He’s playing—” She paused to put her spectacles on, study the program. “Quite soon, I think. With Zoe.”

“There’s my mother,” Beatrice breathed, startled as she recognized the flowery hat next to the plumes. “I hardly thought she’d be interested ...” She applauded at the sound of it around her, as one bard’s song ended and a court bard took her place, wearing instruments like body armor that flared with light at every note, as though the sun played his music for him.

Her thoughts strayed again; she tried to find Phelan, sitting in the shadows under the scaffolding. She missed him; maybe he was somewhere with Jonah. But Jonah had come back, sat down next to Sophy, before the sun’s song came to an end. Beatrice’s hands moved mechanically; her face turned to Jonah’s grim, closed face, a question pending for when the noise died down again. She drew breath to ask it, then lost it again as Zoe began to sing.

Beatrice stared at the stage, forgetting entirely to close her mouth. Two figures, one dark-haired, dressed in silks like blowing flames, the other pale-haired, in blue shot with silver threads down which light rilled like water, seemed to pull music not from their voices, their instruments, but out of the grass roots of the plain, the lichen on the ancient stones, the words carved into them as old as Belden. She felt her eyes burn, put a hand to her mouth. Surely, that was the sound of the spiraling circle on the tomb: that was its voice; the music pouring into her heart was the word itself, saying its name. The world blurred around her, flashing, melting. As the tears finally fell, she heard Jonah’s sudden exclamation.

She could see again, but in what world she had no idea.

Another harper played with them. Zoe heard the sweet, exuberant run of notes like a stream rilling and splashing into her music, then merging with it, sometimes deep, secret water, sometimes leaping into light. Phelan, attuned to her, eyes lowered to his hands, did not seem to notice at first. Then his head flicked up; he glanced at her. His eyes grew very wide; Zoe heard his fingers slow, lag after a beat, a sudden, startled absence before his fingers caught up with her.

She was beginning to falter herself: a breath instead of a sound now and then, her skin prickling cold under the midsummer sun. The amphitheater seemed to have grown incredibly high. The plain shimmered beyond it, green and gold and blue melting into imprecise horizons, behind an endless rise of stones spiraling around them. A dream of stones, she thought. A memory of stones. The plain seemed oddly empty, the sentinel tree on the crown of the hillocks scattered hither and yon on the plain no longer shaded colorful gatherings of listeners. Caerau itself seemed to have vanished into a silvery mist on both sides of the river.

She felt more breath than music flow out of her, a long, cold flash of river mist; even her bones had gone cold.

“Don’t stop,” a voice said cheerfully between verses. Kelda, she thought at first. She heard Phelan beside her, fingers laboring doggedly, as though his quick, skilled hands had turned stiff as wood. The harper drove them now, kept the beat, chose the song they slid into, helplessly caught in his current, held them in the bright web of his strings.

The amphitheater seemed empty, too. There was no amphitheater, she realized. The transparent stones surrounded them; they stood on a knoll somewhere on the plain, somewhere in time or memory, playing to the whims of the harper, who was not Kelda, she realized. He was no one she had ever met, an aging, craggy figure, like a battered old stone, one eye pale blue, the other twilight dark, his voice like the deep drag of waves on a rocky shore. She turned her head to see him more clearly, and he smiled.

She recognized that smile: the kelpie’s fearless, teasing, perceptive glint.

She could hear Phelan’s breathing begin to grow ragged with shock, fighting itself to finish the song. She waited. When the harper began yet another rollicking ballad, she wrested the notes away from him, slowed them into a wordless court dance to free their voices.

The odd eyes narrowed at her, but the harper’s dancing fingers did not argue.

“Phelan,” she said softly, letting her fingers carry the slow, lilting melody without her.

He was looking around bewilderedly ; she wondered if he saw what she did, or if he had summoned up a private vision. He answered finally, huskily, “This is—”

“Yes.”

“How did we—”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have—I could—I could never have—”

“You’re here,” she said inarguably, and he was silent again, face the color of bone, fingers loosing notes like a scatter of gold into the air.

“Well, how do we—How do we get ourselves out of this? My father couldn’t find his way out.”

If she had been singing when he said that, her voice would have shriveled with wonder and shock. Her throat closed; she couldn’t breathe for a moment. She could only keep playing until her wordless, frozen thoughts thawed out a word or two, dredged up a memory.

“Not—” she whispered, her voice still trapped. “Not—”

“Yes.”

“Nairn?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she said soundlessly, the word like a smooth, cold river stone in her mouth. The harper, restive or mischievous, tried to pull out of her rhythm suddenly. She fought him stubbornly, held him to her beat. He could be patient, she thought. He had nothing to fear. Nothing to lose.

Or did he? She looked at him again, sitting on a stone merging like an old tooth from the grass. “Who are you?” she asked, with or without words; she wasn’t sure. “Are you Kelda?”

“Welkin?” Phelan echoed incomprehensibly, and the harper only smiled, and played a note that melted Zoe’s heart, kindled it to flame, and then to poetry.

“Oh,” she said again, astonished, and he nodded at her.

“Play with me,” he said in his voice like the broken shards of the world.

“Yes,” she said, or her heart answered; there was nothing in that moment she wanted more than to spin all the music she knew into that power, that gold, then to give it all away.

Phelan felt the change in her: the dancing rill turning suddenly into such a deep, strong, overriding current that he could barely keep himself afloat. He let his fingers think for him, move to her music while his brain told him he could never possibly do what he was doing, which was akin to keeping himself adrift by clinging to a leaf sailing above the current, balancing his life on a passing feather, letting a twig pull him through the swift, wild, frothing waters of the music that came out of her. He played accidentals, it seemed, hitting notes out of nowhere by the skin of his teeth, pulling music out of his prickling back hairs, out of runnels in his brain he never knew existed. It wasn’t fear of his father’s fate that kept them coming; he had no time even to think of that. He was grasping the lowest thread of Zoe’s hem, catching the edge of her shadow with his fingernails. There was no letting go; he could only go where she led him.

So when what he thought was a standing stone on the crest of a nearby hill shouted his name, he rolled an eye at it confusedly and did not stop. The Oracular Stone, he assumed, though it sounded oddly like his father.

“Phelan!”

His fingers skipped a beat. It was his father, calling from the other side of the Turning Tower. Jonah shouted something more that got tangled up on Zoe’s voice. Phelan ducked his head, concentrated. If his father had any good advice, he thought grimly, he would have given it to himself all those centuries before. As though Jonah had read his mind, he began walking toward Phelan, a tiny, impossibly distant figure who would take days, years, eons, maybe, to cross the distance between them.