(eng) Patricia A. McKillip by The Bards of Bone Plain

Author:The Bards of Bone Plain [Plain, The Bards of Bone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

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