Chapter Twelve
It’s here, around the time of Declan’s
competition, that the boundaries of history begin to blur into the
fluid realm of poetry, much as a well-delineated borderline might
falter into and become overwhelmed by the marsh it crosses. Where,
the historian might ask bewilderedly, did the border go? Nothing
but this soggy expanse of uncertain territory in front of us, where
we were stringently following the clear and charted path of
truth.
That Declan called the gathering of the bards is
recorded in many places. Oroh’s court chronicles mention it: “At
last Declan gave the king hope that he would have a bard once again
at his side, for counsel and for diversion, for the king loved his
music greatly and would hear none but the best.” We might pause
here and give King Oroh a measure of sympathy, for no bard in his
new court, however gifted, would know the cherished ballads and
poetry of his native land; Declan and death had taken them
away.
Evidence in other chronicles, in letters, in
household records indicating the absence of a family member “who
rode to Stirl Plain for the gathering of bards”: all give us proof
beyond poetry of the event. And indeed the bards came from high and
low, from near and far, from the wealthiest court, the meanest
tavern, from the northern fishing villages, the crags of the west,
the salt marshes of the south. From every part of Belden, bards,
musicians, minstrels, anyone with an instrument or a voice to sing
with, converged upon Stirl Plain.
Fortunately, Declan allowed the villagers the
few brief months between winter and midsummer to prepare for them.
Before the bards came the builders and the traders, the barges
carrying lumber from the northern forests, wagons carrying a wealth
of other things, followed by people hoping for work after the
terrible winter. One can imagine buildings sprouting like mushrooms
up and down the riverbanks, crowding along the road leading up the
hill to the school. Inns, taverns, shops flew up as both the
wealthy and the poor began to make their way across the
plain.
It was, as we can guess, the beginnings of the
great city that later became the official residence of the rulers
of Belden.
At the same time, it must have seemed a magical
place, in which all the music of the five kingdoms might be heard,
and, along with the bards, came their audience to listen and marvel
at the best that Belden had to offer.
But before that, the fading shadow of winter
left a stranger in its wake, an elusive, ambiguous figure sighted
only briefly, at a tangent, in the poetry of the time, and in
history only between the lines.
The oldest bard came, even he,
From the beginning of the world.
Old as poetry he was,
Old as memory.
From the beginning of the world.
Old as poetry he was,
Old as memory.
The music on Stirl Plain
Woke the stones on Bone Plain,
And he came out from under
To play the first songs of the world,
That no one else remembers.
Woke the stones on Bone Plain,
And he came out from under
To play the first songs of the world,
That no one else remembers.
FRAGMENT FROM “THE GATHERING OF THE BARDS,”
ANONYMOUS
The stranger came at the forefront of the flow of
musicians on the plain, so soon after Declan had sent out word of
the competition that it seemed only the trees and stones of Stirl
Plain could have gotten the word any earlier. Sometime afterwards,
Nairn realized that was exactly so; earlier, he was simply
surprised at the efficiency of Declan’s methods. The bard spoke;
the harper appeared almost before the moon had decided to change
the expression on her face.
The students of the Circle of Days had grown oddly
closer since Drue’s death. With all their spiky differences and
sharp opinions, they were bound not only by an ancient, secret
language, but by a vision of the breathtaking randomness of life:
not even they, possessing the oldest name for death, could see it
coming. Sometime during the ebb of the endless winter, they had
begun to meet, in the evening once or twice a week, at the tavern
Shea’s father the brewer had built on the other side of the river.
They drank his ale, drew runes with burned twigs on his rackety
tables and in the ashes sifting out of the grate, and challenged
one another obliquely, in one language, to answer with the patterns
of another.
Nairn, still struggling with the power and deadly
potential of the ancient words, played their tavern games
cautiously and ventured few opinions about what value Master
Declan’s list of words might have when the students finally learned
them all. They had no clue, Nairn learned with wonder. The thought
that he had flung his heart into a burning icicle and sent it
plunging down onto Drue’s oblivious head would never have crossed
their minds.
“Do you think they would have believed you if you
had blamed yourself?” Declan asked succinctly when Nairn had come
to explain to him how Drue died. “You’re the crofter’s son who sang
his first songs to the pigs in the sty, and who can barely write
his own name. You couldn’t claim such power without having to prove
it, and how would you do that with all the fear that festers in you
now? Drue’s death was an accident. Let it lie.”
“And lie and lie,” Nairn retorted bitterly, white
with horror and pacing circles around the bard in his work chamber.
The golden eyes flashed at him, but Declan stayed silent. “And
you’re right. I am afraid, now. I don’t know enough to know how to
be careful. It was like killing someone with a love song you were
playing to someone else entirely. Death was the last thing on my
mind. Then it was all.”
“Accept it. It happened. Learn from it so that it
never happens again.”
“I could just stop. Just. Stop. I don’t need magic.
Only my harp and the road—”
“You have gone too far, learned too much, to return
to innocence,” Declan said evenly. “Better to learn to control your
great power than to carry such potential for disaster around with
you and always be afraid of it.” Nairn opened his mouth; the bard,
reading his expression or his mind, interrupted. “Think,” he urged.
“You can live in ignorance and uncertainty, or with the knowledge
and the certainty that you will never kill again without intent.
Either way, you must live with the power. With yourself. Think.
Then tell me what you want.”
The bard was right, Nairn realized as days passed.
About that, and about the other thing: his fellow students of the
Circle of Days would have fallen out of their chairs laughing over
Nairn’s pretensions and arrogance if he had tried to claim Drue’s
death.
None of them, not even Nairn, noticed the stranger
in the tavern when he first appeared. Nairn’s eyes wandered toward
a dark mass at a table in the shadows that was farthest from the
fire. Something about it, or within it, made his glance glide over
it as though it were a bench or a floorboard, a thing too familiar
to bother naming. They were all nearing the bottom of their first
beers, and wildly guessing, since Shea’s father was back in the
brewery and they seemed the only company, what mysteries lay hidden
within the twig-words, when out of nowhere came the unmistakable
sound of a harp being tuned.
They all jumped. Osprey knocked over the last of
his beer. The man in the shadows, his craggy face oddly visible now
above the harp in his broad, blunt hands, spoke first as they
stared.
“You’re students of his, then? Master Declan? The
one who called the competition?”
Shea swallowed audibly, then cleared her throat of
any remnants of twig language. “Yes,” she said, and, unwontedly
flustered, she got to her feet and barked for her father. “Da!
Company!”
“Coming!” her father bellowed back briskly.
“You got here fast,” Osprey remarked, righting his
mug.
“I was passing across the plain.” His voice was
deep and gravelly, a sough of stones dragged in the undertow. “Am I
first, then?”
“But for us,” Blayse answered pointedly, and a
smile, or a sudden flare of light from the fire, glided over the
man’s face.
“But for you. You were here first.” He thumbed a
string, then raised his brows uncertainly. “I doubt you’ll want to
spare a coin for my harping, being bards yourselves, then. But I’m
all out, and as dry as any stone.”
“Play if you want,” Shea answered, shrugging.
“Others might come in and think you’re worth—”
“Play,” Nairn said abruptly, interrupting her.
“I’ll buy you a beer.”
“Me, too,” the genial Osprey echoed, and the man’s
smile was more than illusion, this time.
“That’s good of you,” he murmured.
His fingers seemed a trifle stiff on the strings,
as though he had not played in some time. But his notes were sweet
and true. Nairn, listening intently as was his habit, heard the
familiar phrase now and then, but always it wandered off in an
unexpected direction. Wherever he had learned his music, it was not
in the Marches, nor in any kingdom Nairn had passed through,
including Stirl Plain. It sounded old to him: simple and lovely and
haunted with ghosts of music he knew.
“Where are you from?” he asked, when the brewer had
brought the harper his beer. He waited while the man drank half of
it. Somewhere past young, he looked, hale and brawny as a
blacksmith; his leather boots and trousers were old and stained
with travel. His dark hair and the stubble on his chin were
streaked with white. His harp seemed worn as well, plain and
scarred with time, like the harper. He had strange eyes, both blue,
but one pale and one dark, as though he saw out of one by day and
the other by twilight. Both held the same narrowed, curious
expression; both seemed always on the verge of smiling.
The man set his tankard down finally.
“Upriver.”
“Upriver. The Stirl?”
He nodded. “At the northernmost edge of the plain.
My name is Welkin.”
“You walked a ways. I don’t suppose you’re hungry
as well?”
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.”
Welkin tossed him a smile again. “I am grateful to
you,” he said. “I haven’t heard that language, even in anyone’s
thoughts, for—oh, longer than you’d care to know.”
“Who are you?”
Welkin touched a ram’s horn with holes whittled
down the curve, its openings ringed with gold. He said softly, “On
a plain of bone, in a ring of stone ...”
“Is that what you said just now?” Declan asked
hoarsely.
“It is.” He opened his harp case, took out the
instrument to show Declan the twig-words carved over every possible
space. Nairn recognized them, then. “I cut them there to remind
myself. ” He touched a letter, then looked up to hold Declan’s gaze
with his mismatched eyes. “It’s all I’ve got, this battered old
harp, to play against the fine, complex instruments of the court
bards out there. It might do. I’m hoping it will. So you see, I
have everything to lose all over again, and I will do what I can to
win.” He loosed Declan’s eyes finally, gave a glance out the
broader window the bard had built into the stones. “That’s a
pleasant sight, the river there. Well. If there’s nothing else,
I’ll see you on the day, then.” He nodded to the completely
bewildered Nairn and to the bard just opening his mouth to
speak.
Then, like a shaft of sunlight melting into cloud,
he was gone.
Nairn felt the breath rush out of him. Declan
closed his mouth, looking astonished, and so grim Nairn scarcely
recognized him.
“Who is he?” Nairn demanded, his voice shaking.
“Who in the world is he?”
Declan tried to answer; answers tangled,
apparently; he could not speak. He went to Nairn, put a hand on his
shoulder; his hold grew so tight he might have been falling
headlong out of his window and struggling to hold on.
“You must win this competition,” he said tightly,
and shook Nairn a little to rattle the notion into his head and
settle it there. “Win it. Or he will, and I have no idea what I
will be loosing into King Oroh’s court.”
“But—”
“Just win it.” The owl’s eyes caught Nairn’s
fiercely, held them. “Any way you can.”