Patricia McKillip - The Bards of Bone Plain

She had, several times, by her own reckoning; so far that hadn’t stopped her from shrugging on her tool vest and following the dig crew down the ladders into Jonah’s latest whim. Great hollowed caverns of burned-out walls loomed around them in the thinning mist, watching out of shattered eyes. They were scarcely centuries old. What might lie hidden under layers of past in this particular hole, Beatrice guessed, would have its links to the far older stones: the monoliths among the ruins, watching them as well.

So far, this site had yielded little more than broken water pipes. The tide had gone out far enough that they didn’t have to use the pumps. Both Curran and wiry Hadrian cautiously wielded shovels to loosen the dirt. Beatrice, tiny blond Ida, and Campion, with his wildflower blue eyes, used the smaller tools, trowels and brushes, to comb through the rubble for treasure. Baskets of earth were slung on rope and hoisted up and out on a winch after it was picked through. So far, Ida had uncovered a plain silver ring, probably flushed down a pipe; Hadrian had unearthed a broad bone that Curran had identified as ox. Beatrice and Campion were working their way across an odd line of something, possibly a brick mantelpiece, that so far was only a vague protrusion of packed earth in the wall. Curran’s great find had been a layer of broken whelk shells, more likely from someone’s dinner than from an ancient intrusion of sea-life across the plain.

“Why here?” Curran wondered at one point, standing at the foot of the ladder, staring around blankly, sweating from winching up a basket of earth. He didn’t seriously want an answer; Jonah’s foresight was legendary, startling, always inexplicable.

But at that point, Beatrice thought, it seemed a fair question.

“There are five standing stones around us,” she said, brushing as much dust onto her face as off the protrusion. “We’re exactly in the middle of them.”

“They walk around at night,” Campion said. “Don’t they? They’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. And we’ll be still here digging up drainpipes.”

Hadrian shrugged. “We get paid. And the glory, if we find the gold he’s seeded this with to raise the property values in the neighborhood.”

Curran chuckled. “Doesn’t need gold to raise them. They’ve fallen so far here, rumor could raise them. The word alone.”

“Rumor?”

“Gold.”

They were scarcely listening to one another, just tossing out words to pass the time. It was nearly noon, Beatrice guessed from the merry blue sky above and the light spilling over the lip of the site. She had to leave soon, go home, and turn into a princess for her father’s fifty-seventh birthday. Jonah would be there, she remembered.

“I’ll ask him,” she promised. “When I see him at my father’s party.”

She recognized the quality of the silence around her: the sudden suspension of thought and movement as they remembered the princess among them, disguised in her dungarees and boots, her curly hair swept up under a straw hat, her nails grimy with dirt. They had all been students together; they had gotten used to her years earlier.

Only some juxtaposition of incongruous detail—the king’s birthday, she and their employer together at the royal celebration—could still catch them by surprise.

Then Curran spoke, breaking the spell. “Will he tell, do you think? Will he know, even? What he’s looking for, honeycombing Caerau with all his diggings?” Or at the bottom of a bottle, he did not add. But they all heard it anyway. “You talk to Phelan, too. Does he have a guess?”

She turned tiredly away from the outcrop and smiled at them. “He’s never said. I don’t know either of them well enough to pry. Jonah pays us; we find things. Eventually.”

Campion smiled back at her, making her one of them again. “Inevitably,” he sighed. “We find wonders. But it never happens unless we complain first.”

Their spirits were raised considerably when Curran unearthed a copper disk with his shovel. The find, half the size of his broad palm, was green with age, stamped on one side with a worn profile and on the other with what looked like broken twigs. A little quarter moon attached above the blurred head indicated the chain or the leather ribbon from which it had hung. They all crowded around it as he brushed crumbs of earth carefully away from it.

“Master Cle will love this ...” Ida breathed. “Oh, Curran, you are the lucky one.”

“Whose face is that?” Campion wondered. “Doesn’t resemble any coin I’ve seen. Is that a crown?”

“Could be a coin,” Hadrian said dubiously. “Those markings might signify worth. But it looks like it’s meant to be worn.”

“Runes,” Beatrice said, feeling time stop in that sunny moment underground, as they stood face-to-face with a message out of the distant past. “Those twiggy things—”

“Hen scratches,” Curran suggested, as one intimately acquainted. He turned the disk in his hand to catch light in the little grooves.

“Early writing. Secret, sometimes.” She touched one of the twigs wonderingly, very gently, as though she might wake it. “I wonder what it says.”

“It’s a love note,” Ida said. “That’s the face of the lover. It says—”

“My heart is yours forever,” Hadrian intoned. “Meet me in the old oak grove beyond the cornfields and let me prove how much I love you.”

“All that in three twigs,” Curran marveled. He turned it; they studied the face again.

“Not,” Campion decided, “a love token. Look at that weird chin.”

“Love is blind?” Ida suggested.

“Mine never is.”

“Campion, you are such a romantic,” Beatrice murmured. “Still. There is something ...”

“Maybe it’s not a person,” Curran guessed. “Maybe a bird? It’s a beaky thing for certain, and that would explain the chin. The no chin.”

“Wouldn’t explain the hair.”

“Is that really hair?”

“Some flowing plumage, you think?”

“It’s a hood,” Beatrice said suddenly. “It’s hiding the chin. I’ve seen that profile in my father’s collection ... But where?” she wondered, as they looked at her expectantly.

“Ask him,” Curran said simply. “This afternoon. Take this—”

“No, Curran. You found it. You should be the one to show it—”

He grinned. “Shovel found it. Anyway, we all want to know, and no telling when he’ll loom at us out of whatever fog he’s in again.” He folded her hand around the mystery. “Of course, you might mention my name.”

She slid the disk into her pocket and, a little later, drove back across the bridge, leaving the others to catch the trams, since no one else knew what to do with a car. She left it under the jealous and attentive care of the royal chauffeur, who had taught her how to drive.

Peverell Castle, named after the ancient line of Belden’s rulers, had been a drafty, thick-walled, narrow-windowed, manyturreted fortress when it was first built near the bank of the Stirl a couple of centuries after the school on the hill had opened. The realm of Belden had been pounded together by tooth, nail, sword, and bow after the upstart invader, Oroh, had gotten lost looking for another land, anchored his ships in the fog on the Stirl, and led his army ashore. His bard, Declan, wandering across the land with the king and memorializing his battles with an infusion of glory and proper rhyme, had fallen in love with the plain. He returned to it upon relinquishing his position, went to live in an ancient watchtower on top of the hill among the oak and the standing stones, where he was sought out by would-be bards for his great gifts. So the school on the hill had come into existence, built to house students and teachers over the frigid winters on the plain. The rulers of Belden took their time settling somewhere. Moving from court to court across the realm periodically exhausted the coffers of their hosts and kept them from spending their money on armies. Finally, the realm quieted. Irion, the seventh of the Peverells to rule Belden, looked about for a place to keep his court and built it along the Stirl.