The Bards of Bone Plain

brain, all clamoring together. He gazed, fascinated, at his father, suddenly looking forward to what had sounded like a long and tedious evening. Jonah, forestalling his curiosity, shifted the subject adroitly, reaching for the manuscripts. “Are these of any help?”

“They may be,” Phelan answered with no great hope. “I’ve read nearly everything else.”

“I told you—”

“I know, I know.”

“Your heart’s not in it,” Jonah said, carefully turning pages. “How can you find Bone Plain when nothing in you wants anything to do with it?”

“It’s only a paper,” Phelan said with unaccustomed sharpness. “Of course, I don’t want to go there. That’s got nothing to do with anything. It’s what I want to leave that’s everything to me.” Jonah sniffed but otherwise refrained from comment. “Anyway, I haven’t read the piece about Nairn, yet. It might inspire an idea.”

“It’s hard to imagine that damp squib inspiring anything,” his father muttered. He sat back, brooding at the work in question but did not open it. Phelan watched him, wondering, as always, in what torturous labyrinths of Jonah’s brain his father continually lost himself. Jonah rose abruptly under Phelan’s scrutiny, gave a wrench to a sturdy bell rope.

“Where is Sagan? I sent him to the cellar an eon ago.”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” the butler said, gliding like a phantom across the carpet, his hair and the tray upon which the bottle stood glowing silver in the sunlight. “I had to search the racks for this one.”

“Thank you, Sagan.” He glanced a question at Phelan, who shook his head.

“I’m working,” he said shortly, and stretched out on the sofa to read about Nairn while his father and the dusty amber bottle vanished somewhere into the depths of the house.

“Nairn,” the essayist had begun without preamble some three or four centuries earlier, “the Wandering Bard to whom the solace of death had been long forbidden by his abject and unforgiven failure at the Three Trials of Bone Plain, was seen at the Bardic School at Caerau, as was cited in the school records by Argot Renne thusly: ‘This day: Accounts paid to Colley Dale for three wheels of cheese, five crocks of butter, and ten gallons of milk. Accounts paid to Merlee Craven for nine wool blankets and two lambs. Accounts settled by one guest, a stranger, who paid for his supper by his dishwashing afterwards. Though he carried a harp, he would not play it, claiming that the last thing we needed in this place was another harper. Nor would he give his name. But considering this steward’s daughter’s description of the boulder inside the ring of stones on the hill turning abruptly into a man carrying a harp, and considering the craggy agelessness of his face, the unremitting dark of his eyes, and that he knew my name, Renne, though he had been stone all our lives, and considering above all, his astonishing question concerning the existence of the ancient Circle of Days, the secret conclave that vanished from history centuries before, I believe him to be the bard in search of his death: Nairn. By my hand, Argot Renne, School Steward.’ This being,” the essayist continued dryly, “by far the wordiest entry of any of the stewards heretofore on record.”

Phelan blinked. The raw silk of the sofa beneath him seemed to breathe beneath his nape, along his backbone, like something quickening unexpectedly to life.

“Circle of Days,” he whispered, and saw in his mind’s eye the path out of the interminable years at the school: the Wandering Bard, the Unforgiven, who once had a secret, been included in a mystery.

Phelan moved before he realized it, gathered the manuscripts, and stood for the journey back to the school archives. Something tugged at him before he took a step: his father with his head cluttered like a museum basement with brilliant facts and fantastic shards of past that rarely if ever emerged into the light of day.

What might he know about such mysteries?

Then Phelan laughed, which was all Jonah would do at the question, tell him he wasted his time; it was nonsense, a figment, and anyway, it had all been investigated, answered, written down centuries before Phelan drew his first breath, bellowed his first opinion at the world.

He left his father in the company he most preferred, and went to track a bard who was neither living nor dead, and to find where a circle began.

Chapter Eight

The winter that killed the bard who replaced Declan at King Oroh’s court seems to have been one of the harshest on record. The Stirl froze nearly all the way from the sea to the tiny village on the plain, which had grown enough to become a coherent entity, and which named itself Caerau. Court records of nobles all over Belden are filled with the sufferings of high and low. Even the king, who liked to keep his court in restless motion in order to exhaust the hospitality and the coffers of potential rebels, hunkered down for the season in the slightly milder climate of Estmere with Lord Deste, whose ample fields and woods provided food, game, and firewood enough even for the king’s entourage. His household books record the deaths of the very old and the very young; most succumbed to what was only known then as “fever.” The king’s own records also list the illnesses and deaths of aged courtiers as well as assorted riding and hunting accidents in the icy fields and woods. The death of his bard, Loyce, was listed among the hunting accidents: he was vigorously sounding the hunting horn when his galloping horse slipped on an icy patch buried under the snow. “Both horse and rider there died,” the records say tersely, disguising what must have been a poignant incident. Other sources across Belden record a “rain of birds frozen in their flight,” tree limbs overburdened with snow cracking and falling on hapless travelers and rooftops, bodies discovered frozen beneath the ice in rivers, ponds, and wells, bands of the poor, the outcast, and the outlawed living in caves and converging on the unwary “like a great swarm of crows upon the dead.” References to children stolen from their cradles by hungry animals are common; on rare occasions, but very likely true, they are eaten by their desperate neighbors.

For every death recorded, a dozen or a hundred probably went unnoticed by history, from the rough northern fishing villages and mountain clans who had little use for writing and kept everything in memory, to the isolated villages in the western crags, and in the southern marshlands of what was once known as Waverlea. As for the school, records list three students who fled the stark life to return to their more comfortable homes. There are accounts payable to a local healer for poultices and herbal remedies, as well as for a futile visit to a student who was struck by an icicle that plunged down from the tower. His death passed with perhaps untimely swiftness from a matter of household record into the speculations and wild surmises of ballad.

What the household records do not divulge is how a couple dozen students spending a deadly winter surrounded by snowcovered plain and cold stone, inadequately washed, living on monotonous winter fare, constantly in one another’s company, managed to deal with one another without a continual drain of “accounts rendered to Salix of Caerau, healer ...”

This day at sunrise:
we make bread.
At noon by the river
we clean the clothes and pots.
Until the waning light of day
we weave our baskets
and bead the hunters’ armbands.
At the rising moon
we speak our dreams,
we sing to the dead.
We sleep.
We dream.

FROM “CIRCLE OF DAYS” TRANSLATED FROM THE ANCIENT RUNIC BY HERMIA CREELEY- CORBIN

Nairn, opening his eyes the morning after his moonlit conversation with Declan, drew his first waking breath