The Bards of Bone Plain

“Come along, Beatrice.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I need a drink,” she heard Jonah mutter, as she turned to follow in the royal wake, then, in the musician’s gallery, the guest from the school stroked her harp and loosed her voice like some rich, wild, haunting echo out of the singing bones of the plain in a ballad about the Peverell kings that was as old as Belden.

Chapter Four

History next records Nairn’s presence, unlikely as it seems, at the ceremony after the Battle of the Welde during which Anstan ceded the Kingdom of the Marches to the invader, King Oroh, who was busily amassing the five kingdoms that would become Belden. Oroh’s bard, Declan, was also present. The exact nature of his extraordinary gifts is nebulous, and most often a matter of poetry rather than record. Whatever they were, his place was always at the king’s side. An odd tale rippled down the centuries from that ceremony, in ballads, in poetry fragments, and as metaphor: Nairn returns to Declan the jewels he had taken from the older bard’s harp. In some tales, he throws them at Declan. How he acquired them is also a matter of folklore, especially of the Marches. Some say he stole them; others that he took them with magic; though that is never adequately explained, certainly not to the historian. After that, Nairn once again vanishes from even the footnotes of history.

He reappears, a few years later, at the bardic school that Declan started after King Oroh finished his campaigns. Pleading age and long years of service, Declan relinquished his duties as Oroh’s bard and returned to Stirl Plain, now under Oroh’s rule. There, on a small hill crowned with ancient standing stones and a watchtower overlooking the Stirl River, he retired to a life of contemplation. It did not last long, as bards and would-be bards from the five conquered kingdoms were drawn by his great knowledge and abilities to learn from him. There, on that hill, Nairn steps back into history.

There he stands between two kings,
The bard with his bitter eyes.
His hand he lifts, and down he flings
The jewels as he cries: 
“What worth are these from a bard who sings
Treachery and lies?”

FROM “THE BATTLE OF THE WELDE” BY GARETH LOMILY BROWN

Fickle as jewels on a harp.

NORTHERN SAYING

The Battle of the Welde lasted three days. By the time it started, Nairn, who had beaten a marching rhythm for Anstan’s army through the western mountains of the Marches, and summoned the clans with his bladder-pipe, then drummed the army east and south to meet the invader, had calluses on his calluses. He had never traveled so quickly or played so hard in his life. The Welde, a broad, lovely river valley along the border between the Marches and Stirl Plain, had laid down a soft carpet of creamy yellow wildflowers. So Nairn saw it at the beginning of the battle, when he blew the long, coiled, battered cornu someone had handed him and told him to sound. By the end of the battle, there were a few flowers left untrampled and about as many of Anstan’s warriors. King Oroh sent his bard, Declan, across the field to meet the king’s emissary and demand that Anstan surrender his kingdom.

Anstan, furious and heartsick, answered with what he, not being particularly musical, considered a last, futile gesture of contempt. He sent his bedraggled drummer on foot across the ravaged, bloody field where nothing moved, nothing spoke except the flies and the flocks of crows, to meet with Oroh’s bard.

Declan rode a white horse. He was dressed in dark, rich leather and silk; he carried his harp on his shoulder. As always, he was unarmed. He reined in his mount at the center of the field between the two royal camps and waited for the young, grimy minstrel in his bloodstained robe and sandals with one sole tied to his foot with rope where the laces had rotted during the long march. He still carried the cornu over his shoulder, the last instrument he had played to call retreat.

Nairn stopped in front of the bard; they looked at one another silently.

“You asked,” Declan said finally, “what I am.”

The taut mouth in the stained white mask of a face moved finally, let loose a few words. “Yes. I asked.” He was silent again, his bleak, crow eyes moving over Declan, narrowing as memory broke through, a moment of wonder instead of bitterness. “You’re Oroh’s spy,” he said tersely. “And his bard. But what else? I didn’t sing those jewels out of your harp. You gave them to me.”

The strange eyes glinted at him suddenly, catching light like metal. “You took them,” Declan said, and raised his eyes to ask of the sky, “Is this entire land ignorant of its own magic?”

“What?”

Declan tossed a hand skyward, relinquishing a comment. “I’ll answer that when you’ve learned to understand the question.”

“You’ll forgive me if this is the last I ever want to see of your face.”

“You may not be given the choice.” Nairn, staring at him, drew breath to protest; the bard didn’t yield him that choice, either. “Since you brought the matter up, we should deal with it. King Oroh will accept Anstan’s sword and crown and his pledge of fealty at dawn tomorrow.”

“Dawn,” Nairn interrupted recklessly. “What makes you think King Anstan will still be around?”

“Because I will be watching,” Declan answered softly, and Nairn, staring again, felt the short hairs prickle at his neck. “In return for Anstan’s pledge, he may keep one holding in the Marches for his family. As to other matters, the size of his retinue, tributes to King Oroh, such things will be left to the king’s counselors. For tomorrow, the king will be content with the sight of an unarmed, uncrowned man with one knee in the dirt in front of him. That is the price of peace.”

“I can’t tell King Anstan that,” Nairn said flatly. “He’d kill me.”

“He should honor you.”

“For what? Blaring a retreat out of this poor dented wheel of a horn?”

“He should honor you,” Declan repeated, “for all that you should have been able to do for him.”

“What—”

Again, the bard’s hand rose, inviting Nairn’s attention to the disaster around them.

“Who do you think you fought?” There was an odd note of exasperation in the fine, calm voice. “This entire field is ringed with King Oroh’s army. Most of them just stood and watched you flail at one another in the mist.”

Nairn felt his heart close like a fist, the blood vanish out of his face. The bard turned his horse, but not before Nairn glimpsed his weary revulsion.

“King Oroh’s tent,” he reminded Nairn without looking back. “At dawn.”

“You’re a bard,” Nairn pleaded to the retreating figure. “Put some poetry in the message, or I’ll be out among the dead at dawn, with the crows picking at my eyes.”

Declan glanced around at that, his expression composed again. “I’ve heard what you can do. Find your own poetry in that.”

Stumbling back across the darkening battlefield, ignoring the black clouds of crows scattering up around him as he passed, Nairn managed to fashion King Oroh’s demand into words more akin to a preference. Anstan, slumped on a chair in his tent, surrounded by his generals, listened wordlessly to Nairn’s message. He gave an inarticulate growl, seized his crown with both hands, and flung it out the tent door. Then he followed it, stopping at the threshold long enough to say,

“All of you. Here with me before sunrise.”