The Bards of Bone Plain

Chapter Three

The king’s daughter Beatrice, who drove the graceless, snorting steam wagon over Dockers Bridge, narrowly missed hitting Jonah as he loomed out of the mists in the middle of the road. The work crew, tools of every kind prickling around them like pins in a pincushion, shrieked in unison. Beatrice’s feet hit the pedals hard; the vehicle skidded on the damp and came panting to a stop inches from Jonah. A rubber mallet continued its flight out of somebody’s tool belt, bounced off the hood, and landed magically in Jonah’s upraised hand.

Jonah laughed. Beatrice closed her eyes, opened them again. She unclenched her fingers from the steering wheel, managed a shaky, sidelong smile.

“Good morning, Master Cle.”

“Good morning, Princess.”

“So sorry—this mist. Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. What it takes to kill me has not yet been invented.” He stepped to the side of the steam wagon, proffered the mallet to his work crew. Curran took it, his face beet red under his already flaming hair.

“Sorry, Master Cle,” he said gruffly, his country vowels elongating under the stress. “Thought we were jobless, there for a moment.”

“Can I give you a ride to wherever you’re going?” Beatrice asked.

“I’ve been summoned home,” Jonah said a trifle acerbically, “though why eludes me.”

“Oh, yes. We passed Phelan on the bridge.” She paused, blinking at another illumination. Jonah’s shrewd eyes, black as new moons in his ravaged face, seemed to see his fate in her thoughts.

“You know why,” he said flatly, and she nodded, her long, slanted smile appearing again, partly apologetic, partly amused.

“Yes. I’m afraid it’s my father’s birthday party.” She waited until he finished groaning. “Shall I drop off the crew and come back for you, take you home?”

He ran his hands over his face, up through his disheveled hair, picked what looked like a small snail out of it. “Thank you, Princess,” he answered heavily. “I’ll walk. There’s always the chance that someone else will run over me.”

“All right, Master Cle,” she said, slipping the car into gear. “I’ll see you at the party, then.”

She continued into the fog and found her way to the appropriate hole in the ground in that blasted wilderness without mishap.

She had known Jonah Cle all her life. The museum he had built to house his finds from throughout the city had fascinated her since childhood. Antiquities of Caerau, mended, polished, and labeled, carefully preserved behind glass in their softly lit cases, gave her random details, like a trail of bread crumbs, into a story so old even the bards on the hill had forgotten it. Whose blown-glass cup was this? she would wonder. Whose beaded belt? Whose little bear carved out of bone? Surely they had names, these faceless people; they had left footprints when they walked; they had looked at the stars as she did and wondered. That and a peculiar fondness for holes, underground tunnels, forgotten doors, and scarred, weedy gates, rutted bits of alleyway, for noticing and exploring small mysteries no one else seemed to notice, had finally translated itself into a direction. She would go here, study that, do this with her life. The king, himself captivated by the history Jonah unburied, found no particular reason not to let her do what she wanted. Having three older children as potential heirs made his demands on his youngest a trifle perfunctory. Her mother assumed nebulously that Beatrice would quit clambering down holes and playing in the dirt when she fell properly in love.

She had, several times, by her own reckoning; so far that hadn’t stopped her from shrugging on her tool vest and following the dig crew down the ladders into Jonah’s latest whim. Great hollowed caverns of burned-out walls loomed around them in the thinning mist, watching out of shattered eyes. They were scarcely centuries old. What might lie hidden under layers of past in this particular hole, Beatrice guessed, would have its links to the far older stones: the monoliths among the ruins, watching them as well.

So far, this site had yielded little more than broken water pipes. The tide had gone out far enough that they didn’t have to use the pumps. Both Curran and wiry Hadrian cautiously wielded shovels to loosen the dirt. Beatrice, tiny blond Ida, and Campion, with his wildflower blue eyes, used the smaller tools, trowels and brushes, to comb through the rubble for treasure. Baskets of earth were slung on rope and hoisted up and out on a winch after it was picked through. So far, Ida had uncovered a plain silver ring, probably flushed down a pipe; Hadrian had unearthed a broad bone that Curran had identified as ox. Beatrice and Campion were working their way across an odd line of something, possibly a brick mantelpiece, that so far was only a vague protrusion of packed earth in the wall. Curran’s great find had been a layer of broken whelk shells, more likely from someone’s dinner than from an ancient intrusion of sea-life across the plain.

“Why here?” Curran wondered at one point, standing at the foot of the ladder, staring around blankly, sweating from winching up a basket of earth. He didn’t seriously want an answer; Jonah’s foresight was legendary, startling, always inexplicable.

But at that point, Beatrice thought, it seemed a fair question.

“There are five standing stones around us,” she said, brushing as much dust onto her face as off the protrusion. “We’re exactly in the middle of them.”

“They walk around at night,” Campion said. “Don’t they? They’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. And we’ll be still here digging up drainpipes.”

Hadrian shrugged. “We get paid. And the glory, if we find the gold he’s seeded this with to raise the property values in the neighborhood.”

Curran chuckled. “Doesn’t need gold to raise them. They’ve fallen so far here, rumor could raise them. The word alone.”

“Rumor?”

“Gold.”

They were scarcely listening to one another, just tossing out words to pass the time. It was nearly noon, Beatrice guessed from the merry blue sky above and the light spilling over the lip of the site. She had to leave soon, go home, and turn into a princess for her father’s fifty-seventh birthday. Jonah would be there, she remembered.

“I’ll ask him,” she promised. “When I see him at my father’s party.”

She recognized the quality of the silence around her: the sudden suspension of thought and movement as they remembered the princess among them, disguised in her dungarees and boots, her curly hair swept up under a straw hat, her nails grimy with dirt. They had all been students together; they had gotten used to her years earlier.

Only some juxtaposition of incongruous detail—the king’s birthday, she and their employer together at the royal celebration—could still catch them by surprise.

Then Curran spoke, breaking the spell. “Will he tell, do you think? Will he know, even? What he’s looking for, honeycombing Caerau with all his diggings?” Or at the bottom of a bottle, he did not add. But they all heard it anyway. “You talk to Phelan, too. Does he have a guess?”

She turned tiredly away from the outcrop and smiled at them. “He’s never said. I don’t know either of them well enough to pry. Jonah pays us; we find things. Eventually.”

Campion smiled back at her, making her one of them again. “Inevitably,” he sighed. “We find wonders. But it never happens unless we complain first.”

Their spirits were raised considerably when Curran unearthed a copper disk with his shovel. The find, half the size of his broad palm, was green with age, stamped on one side with a worn profile and on the other with what looked like broken twigs. A little quarter moon attached above the blurred head indicated the chain or the leather ribbon from which it had hung. They all crowded around it as he brushed crumbs of earth carefully away from it.

“Master Cle will love this ...” Ida breathed. “Oh, Curran, you are the lucky one.”

“Whose face is that?” Campion wondered. “Doesn’t resemble any coin I’ve seen. Is that a crown?”

“Could be a coin,” Hadrian said dubiously. “Those markings might signify worth. But it looks like it’s meant to be worn.”

“Runes,” Beatrice said, feeling time stop in that sunny moment underground, as they stood face-to-face with a message out of the distant past. “Those twiggy things—”

“Hen scratches,” Curran suggested, as one intimately acquainted. He turned the disk in his hand to catch light in the little grooves.

“Early writing. Secret, sometimes.” She touched one of the twigs wonderingly, very gently, as though she might wake it. “I wonder what it says.”

“It’s a love note,” Ida said. “That’s the face of the lover. It says—”

“My heart is yours forever,” Hadrian intoned. “Meet me in the old oak grove beyond the cornfields and let me prove how much I love you.”

“All that in three twigs,” Curran marveled. He turned it; they studied the face again.

“Not,” Campion decided, “a love token. Look at that weird chin.”

“Love is blind?” Ida suggested.

“Mine never is.”

“Campion, you are such a romantic,” Beatrice murmured. “Still. There is something ...”

“Maybe it’s not a person,” Curran guessed. “Maybe a bird? It’s a beaky thing for certain, and that would explain the chin. The no chin.”

“Wouldn’t explain the hair.”

“Is that really hair?”

“Some flowing plumage, you think?”

“It’s a hood,” Beatrice said suddenly. “It’s hiding the chin. I’ve seen that profile in my father’s collection ... But where?” she wondered, as they looked at her expectantly.

“Ask him,” Curran said simply. “This afternoon. Take this—”

“No, Curran. You found it. You should be the one to show it—”

He grinned. “Shovel found it. Anyway, we all want to know, and no telling when he’ll loom at us out of whatever fog he’s in again.” He folded her hand around the mystery. “Of course, you might mention my name.”

She slid the disk into her pocket and, a little later, drove back across the bridge, leaving the others to catch the trams, since no one else knew what to do with a car. She left it under the jealous and attentive care of the royal chauffeur, who had taught her how to drive.

Peverell Castle, named after the ancient line of Belden’s rulers, had been a drafty, thick-walled, narrow-windowed, manyturreted fortress when it was first built near the bank of the Stirl a couple of centuries after the school on the hill had opened. The realm of Belden had been pounded together by tooth, nail, sword, and bow after the upstart invader, Oroh, had gotten lost looking for another land, anchored his ships in the fog on the Stirl, and led his army ashore. His bard, Declan, wandering across the land with the king and memorializing his battles with an infusion of glory and proper rhyme, had fallen in love with the plain. He returned to it upon relinquishing his position, went to live in an ancient watchtower on top of the hill among the oak and the standing stones, where he was sought out by would-be bards for his great gifts. So the school on the hill had come into existence, built to house students and teachers over the frigid winters on the plain. The rulers of Belden took their time settling somewhere. Moving from court to court across the realm periodically exhausted the coffers of their hosts and kept them from spending their money on armies. Finally, the realm quieted. Irion, the seventh of the Peverells to rule Belden, looked about for a place to keep his court and built it along the Stirl.

The original castle had long been swallowed up in many layers of changing fashions. Beatrice had explored all of it in her early years. The servants got used to finding the princess anywhere at all: in the laundry room examining water pipes, following the line of an ancient wall into the butler’s pantry, in the wine cellar with her face smudged, her hair veiled with cobwebs, trying to see the blocked-up archway behind the wine racks. Her father, King Lucian, encouraged her, finding books and old maps for her in his library, showing her secret passageways and where the dungeons had been bricked over for a plumbing sluice. At formal court functions, she found him often in conversation with the sour-eyed Jonah Cle, who, otherwise impeccable, always looked as though he had just dunked his head in a bucket of cold water. Their words, glinting, mysterious references to history, old ballads, to a past older than she could yet imagine, invariably sent her back to her father’s library. Somehow—maybe asking the right question, venturing a little-known detail of her own explorations—she began to be included, welcomed into their discussions.

And now, she thought with wonder, digging the disk out of her pocket before the chambermaid disposed of her dirty clothes, she worked for Jonah Cle.

Showered, freshly coiffed, and dressed in what she called her marzipan clothes, pastel and sugary, she put the disk back into a pocket, where it sagged in the thin, creamy silk frock like cannon shot. She took it back out; she and her lady-in-waiting studied it doubtfully.

“A ribbon?” she suggested.

“Must you, Princess Beatrice?”

“Yes, I must. Or else back into my pocket it goes.”

“Well, we can’t have that.” She picked a thin gold chain out of Beatrice’s jewel box, threaded it into the disk, and clasped it around the princess’s neck, where it hung gracelessly within her rope of pearls. They studied it again, the tall, rangy Beatrice with her gold-brown hair and lightly freckled face, her calm cobalt eyes, and the willowy, elegant Lady Ann Never, with her critical green eyes, her black, sleek hair, and her unfailing sense of fashion.

“Can’t you hide it in your shoe?” she asked, pained. “It’s really dreadful.”

Beatrice laughed. “My father will love it.”

Her mother did not. Queen Harriet, standing next to the king in the reception line, looked at it incredulously, then closed her eyes upon it and her daughter. It was a rather moldy shade of green, Beatrice knew, and it had fallen chicken-track-side up above her beaded neckline. The frothy afternoon frock didn’t show it to its best advantage. But the king didn’t care.

“Happy birthday, Father,” she said, kissing his cheek.

“What in the world is that?” he asked, his eyes already riveted.

“I have no idea. Curran unearthed it with his shovel this morning.”

“I hope you are giving it to me as my birthday present.”

“I would love to, but I believe Master Cle should make that gesture.”

“He’s not here yet,” the king murmured, turning the disk to its hidden side. “He’ll never know.”

The queen cleared her throat, indicated the long line of wellwishers that Beatrice had effectively brought to a standstill. She moved out of the way, joined the group of her siblings, their various guests, mates, and children.

“Hello, Bea.” Harold, oldest son and heir, handed her a glass of champagne off a passing tray. He was quite tall, big-boned, and red-haired, a throwback, their father said, to the primitive Peverells. “Been digging up the city again? And wearing it, I see.” He raised his own glass toward the latest of the succession of appendages on his arm. “Do you know Lady Primula Willoughby? My sister Princess Beatrice.”

“Yes, of course,” Beatrice and Lady Primula said together, both smiling hugely and both wondering, the princess guessed, where on earth they had met. Lady Primula, with apple cheeks and corn-silk hair, looked alarmingly full of crisp country air, and Beatrice, who spent her life in holes, could barely find her way out of the city. They were diverted by the young son of Beatrice’s sister, Charlotte, plopping himself abruptly on the floor and beginning to crawl away between feet.

“Marcus!” Charlotte cried, making a dive for him. “Come and kiss your auntie Beatrice.” She swooped him up and deftly plunked him into Beatrice’s hold, where he promptly began teething on the disk. “Ah, no, Marcus!” Charlotte chided ineffectually. She took after their mother: ivory skin and hair, all cheekbones and fluttery blue eyes. She took a swallow of champagne and a closer look at what her son was biting. “Nasty thing—whatever is it, Bea?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Something we just dug up.”

“What a peculiar thing to have around your neck. Do you mind Marcus chewing on it?”

“Well, it’s been buried in a hole under some plumbing pipes for at least decades,” Beatrice answered amiably. “I doubt that much could hurt it now.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened. She downed her champagne, plucked the boy from Beatrice’s arms, and winced at the sudden bellow in her ear. Beatrice drank what Marcus hadn’t kicked out of her glass and looked around for Jonah Cle.

The hall was filling rapidly. Musicians played softly in the gallery above the hall, sweet notes from flute and violin echoing purely within the ancient walls. Only the vastness of the room and the massive stone hearth, big enough to hold hundred-year-old oak logs and guarded by dragons, was left of King Irion’s great hall, where his knights had tossed bones to the hunting dogs as they ate their supper. The walls had gone through various transformations through the centuries. They were overlaid with wood now, painted, and hung with the framed faces of every ancestor the present royal family possessed, it seemed. Past watched the present goings-on with varying degrees of interest and approval. Couches and chairs and potted plants were scattered everywhere; everyone stood around them, talking across them with a great deal of vigor, clusters growing deeper as the reception line dwindled. A tiered cake half as big as the hearth stood on a table at the other end of the room. An army of servants, bearing trays of champagne and elegant little savories, followed their own mysterious patterns through the crowd. Beatrice, listening absently to her other brother, Damon, and his beautiful, garrulous betrothed describe endless wedding plans, finally saw Jonah’s harrowed, sardonic face across the room. His charming wife, Sophy, hand on his arm, was drawing him toward the end of the reception line. Phelan flanked him on the other side, his expression imperturbable while his eyes searched the room for escape. Only Sophy, tossing comments to friends as they passed, sailed with oblivious good humor through the crush.

Beatrice waited a few minutes, until they had greeted the king. Jonah lingered there; Phelan, his face loosening as he sighted a friend, plunged one way into the currents; Sophy, waving, went another. Beatrice moved then, as the long line finally came to an end, and the king turned to speak to Jonah.

The king had evidently asked about the peculiarity adorning his daughter; they were both looking for Beatrice before she reached them.

“Princess,” Jonah Cle said a trifle tiredly, as she came up. He looked very pale and very well scrubbed. “You look lovely. I would scarcely have recognized you.”

“Thank you, I think, Master Cle. And so do you.”

“What have you found for me?”

“Curran found it,” she said, feeling for the chain clasp. “He asked me to give it to you.”

“I was hoping,” the king interposed, “you might consider it my birthday present.” He had his own fine collection of oddments, many given to him by Jonah. “It would be a gracious gesture and very much appreciated.”

“We have already left a very expensive present on your gift table.”

“But this is merely a trifle, I’m sure. You probably have dozens of them.”

Beatrice slid the stained copper disk off the chain, put it into Jonah’s hand. The runes were up; he studied them silently a moment, then turned it over to reveal the hooded face.

Beatrice saw his eyes widen. Then his fingers closed abruptly over the disk; he threw back his head and laughed, an open and genuine amusement that caused heads to turn, Phelan’s startled face among them.

He opened his hand again, offered the disk to the king. “Take it, with all my good wishes. Happy birthday, Your Majesty.”

“But what is it?” he demanded.

“What does it say?” Beatrice pleaded.

Jonah was silent again, weighing words along with the disk on his palm. Then he gave up, flipped the disk lightly in the air, caught it, and held it out again to the king. “You both enjoy a challenge. The weave is there, the thread is there. Find and follow.”

“But—” Beatrice and her father said at once. But the queen was suddenly among them, drawing the king’s attention to the Master of Ceremonies at her side.

“Your Majesty,” he said softly. “The guest bard from the school is about to sing. Then Prince Harold will make his toast to you, and you will speak after. Then the Royal Bard will sing his birthday composition to you, after which they will cut the cake.”

“We all must gather near the table,” the queen said.

“Yes, my dear.” The king took the disk, dropped it resignedly into his pocket, and held out his arm to her.

“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.