The Bards of Bone Plain (30 page)

On his first journey beyond Stirl Plain, where he had lived, in one shape or another, for over three hundred years, Nairn left his mark all over Belden.

As he had in his youth, he wandered, not in search of music this time, but in search of the Circle of Days. Within that source of power, he might revive his own shadowy, flickering powers that permitted him to mask his age and turn into a stone when he craved forgetfulness. But little else: he could not tune his harp to magic. He couldn't tune it to the simplest scale, either; he wondered if, rekindling his magic might fine-tune his ears again as well.

To that end, he sought out the burgeoning cities of Belden, put out a call to anyone who recognized it. He had all the time he needed to learn new professions, and many places in which to practice them. His seal, his sign, hung over different shop doors of all kinds; it marked jewelry, bread, weapons, books, anything that might attract the cognizant eye, the kindred mind. In each new place, he founded his own Circle of Days, following Declan's methods. Finding inquisitive minds, enthusiastic disciples with a penchant for mystery, ceremonial robes, and identifying disks wearing a convincing patina of age, was easy. Finding anybody with actual abilities in the prosaic kingdom seemed hopeless. It was as though the magic had died when the ancient words were relegated to the past, carved on stone that no one could pronounce anymore, even if they could, out of scholarly curiosity or dreams of sorcery, learn to decipher them.

He gave up finally, closed his last shop, bade farewell to friends, acolytes, and mistresses, and took the tide out of the sprawling city that the tiny village of Caerau had become, down the Stirl to the sea. The ship was bound for the land where King Oroh had been born.

The land was either lost in myth or prudently shrouded with magic against strangers. Maps were imprecise, sailors' information ambiguous; violent winds rose and blew them off course just when they finally seemed close. Nairn, recognizing the forces that hid the magic from him, wondered at such abilities even as the ship's mainmast snapped with a sound like a harp string breaking. He wondered with relief if he was finally going to die.

He woke on the tide line with his mouth full of sand and lifted his face groggily to the sight of birds with plumage of such rich hues that even he, with his jeweler's eye, could not precisely name the colors. They whistled cheerfully as they flew among great trees with massive trunks of dark, smooth wood streaked with tones of amber and ivory. He stared, then let his face fall back onto the sand, wearily recognizing the next turn in the tedious path of his life.

He took samples of the wood and the plumes back to Belden with him on the next passing ship, and, through the decades, despite his boredom and unending frustration, he became a staggeringly wealthy merchant. Later, he became a pirate and plundered his own ships; it only made him richer. He became a recluse for a while, a legend in Caerau, amassing books and allowing only traders with the most exotic rarities through his doorway. Then he closed up his mansion beside the Stirl and became a tavern keeper. Then a chef in a restaurant frequented by the nobles of the king's court. A thief, until he realized one day that most of what he stole he had owned at one time or another. A librarian. A museum curator. A traveler again, this time a professional forager into the debris and treasures of ancient history in other lands.

That made him wealthier still.

He had long lost track, by then, of how many wives and mistresses he had loved and mourned, how many children he had left to multiply all over Belden, how many different ways he had tried to die. He had forgotten the crimes he had committed that doomed him to hang or burn or lose his head: being a pirate, probably, or inciting treason against the Peverell kings, or trying to blow himself up in a public place, some such. Rain had doused the fire; the rope around his neck had broken, leaving him sprawled on the ground with a sorely strained knee, and the distinct plink, in his ears, of a harp string snapping. Even the executioner's ax had refused to touch him: its swooping blade flew off the handle and nearly decapitated an innocent bystander. In each case, according to murky tradition, the intent of the law was satisfied, and Nairn was freed on the grounds that he couldn't be killed twice for the same crime.

He gave up trying to die. Reinventing himself yet again, he became a young student in the bardic school on the hill, which was now completely surrounded by Caerau. As the only heir of deceased parents, his great wealth kept him at the school despite the fact that he was without a doubt the worst student ever to ignore all hints that he should leave. He couldn't distinguish one pitch from another; around him reeds split, harp strings broke, drums shrugged off any kind of rhythm. His voice, pleasant enough when he spoke, grew wavery, reedy, when he tried to sing. Great, gaping holes developed in whatever ballads or poetry he tried to memorize.

“You love music,” one of his masters told him bluntly. “It does not love you.”

“It's as though you are bewitched,” another said as perceptively. “Or under a curse. Perhaps you'd be more successful in another course of study?”

But he persisted, failing pretty much everything, though not, his teachers saw, without a great deal of utterly wasted, very hard work. He chose, for his final research paper, the hoary mystery of the location of Bone Plain, and failed, despite all his research and the books and manuscripts he had amassed through the centuries, to solve that puzzle as well.

When the pretty, rich, and well-connected Sophy Waverley, dabbling in classes at the school to pass the time, took pity on him and married him, he felt extraordinarily grateful. She took him away from the school to live in the antique house her father had bought them, and encouraged his eccentricities so that she could pursue her own activities, which mostly involved good works done in congenial surroundings. She introduced him at court, where the young King Lucien encouraged him in his forays into Caerau's past and marveled at his grasp of nearly anything that did not involve music.

He and Sophy had a son.

Nairn began to roam, then, at night through the quiet city streets, the corridors of stone standing so high above him they blocked the stars instead of speaking to them, as the ancient stones did. He sought out the places where past and present merged, where ancient songs lingered among the abandoned hulks of worn-out buildings. He craved the company of the moon, of old winds that swept through burned-out windows, doorways that had lost their doors and long forgotten where they led. In such places, the lost winds spoke an ancient tongue; the moon seemed to have wandered overhead from a distant time. With its pale light sliding over ruins, making shadows out of nothing, it seemed to search for a past it remembered. This dreaming moon could not see the complex, modern city, with its engine-driven ships and snorting steam trams. Nairn could speak to this moon, and often did, settled on a pile of rubble with a bottle in hand and another one beside him.

“You must know where it is,” he pleaded, demanded, shouted. “You must have seen it. Touched it. Tell me where it is.”

Sometimes, he set his digging sites on places the ancient moon illuminated. Why not there, as well as any other place? He could afford the expense of his impulses, and he did not have to explain himself to anyone. Enough oddities and valuables were found in those sites to transform his lunacy to prescience. He donated the findings to the city museum, or to the private collection of the king. What he searched for seemed, in broad daylight, as ephemeral as that moon. But he existed; he was proof of it; he had lived every hour, every year, every century under its curse.

It was death he searched for in those sites.

A stone. A cauldron. A tower.

One hint of that plain where he had risked everything and lost, that's all he wanted from the moon. A chance to find it, to change his life. To make it ordinary. To tune a harp to true, to feel his singing voice. For once in his endless life to talk to his child without the stark, unbearable burden of foreseeing both their fates.

For that he pleaded with the moon, littered Caerau with holes, and found only more treasures, more of what he already had, never the arrow pointing the way to the doorposts, the lintel, the ancient threshold stone, the passage to Bone Plain.

That moon alone, of everyone in his life, had seen what happened there. He could talk about it to the pale, distant face that never judged him, just ignored him, as he sat among the charred bones of the past, and went her way like the hunched, mumbling old woman in a tale, collecting twigs on the forest floor for her fire. She alone knew his name.

He had read every paper ever written about Bone Plain. Nobody knew where it was. A poet's dream, they said. Or perhaps within this particular ring of stones, or that one. The burial mound where the great bards were interred along with their memories and instruments to swap songs for all eternity. Obviously a metaphor for death. For life. For the process of creativity. A mangled fragment from far older times, a jumble of mixed metaphors, images whose origins had grown obscure, shards of ancient tales, all tossed together and carved in stone to torment the brains of scholars for the next millennium or two.

What exactly had he done on Bone Plain?

He had killed an old harper. At least he thought he had. He seemed to have blown the roof off the school tower as well, according to his son. He thought he had shattered the Turning Tower with that last harp note, the one that had sung the depth of his longing, his latent magical powers, his dreams. The one he played to break Welkin's harp strings. As he had snapped the icicle on the tower roof and killed Drue, so his misbegotten magic had struck Welkin and silenced both him and his harp. Jonah remembered stones burning out of the sky like falling stars, thudding on the ground around him. Cries from those who had been as silent as the standing stones, who had vanished, it seemed, into the night. He remembered the plain suddenly coming to life again, with a hundred cooking fires, the smells of bubbling cauldrons. He remembered running. But then so was everyone else, under that onslaught of stones, smacking into one another, and tripping over tent pegs. Children wailing, dogs barking, birds startling out of the trees, sweeping over the plain.

Not a song, a note of music left anywhere on it. Just shouts and children howling like the dead as Nairn slunk through the chaos he had made, left it behind him, not realizing then exactly how much and how thoroughly he had lost.

He had killed the best harper in the kingdom and had indelibly engraved his own name into the unforgiving annals of poetry.

At least he thought he had, until he saw that ancient, knowing smile in Kelda's eyes.

Princess Beatrice, finally uncovering stone under the dust and packed dirt of centuries, gazed at it blankly. The level line of outcropping she had freed with such painstaking care had become as firmly defined in her mind as it was entrenched in the earth: an old brick mantelpiece, maybe from a basement apartment that had succumbed to the silt and water of the Stirl swelling over its bed. Something chipped, hollowed, worn, but as recognizable and prosaic as that. She would find the rest of it farther down under the protruding ledge: the walls, the hearth-stone between them, with probably some smoke staining it and bits of charcoal mingled with the river silt.

So she had thought.

Her silence slowed work around her; the others glanced up, vaguely aware of broken patterns of sound, the pause of predictable movements. Campion, working with her at the other end of the protrusion, broke off his brushing to see what had mesmerized her.

“It's stone,” she told him. “Not brick.”