And so death was the seed planted in Declan’s mind that split and sent up a shoot that leafed and branched and finally flowered into the first bardic competition held in the Kingdom of Belden.
Before he announced it, even to his own students, he gathered the few who had been struggling over his twig-scratches and finally allowed them to see one another’s faces.
They met in one of the rooms that Declan occupied midway up the tower, in which he kept his instruments and counseled his students. The students, grateful for rugs and fur underfoot, huddled close to the fire and eyed one another with dour surprise. None in the mangy, winter-bitten lot seemed to emit any kind of particular brilliance; they all worked hard, played well, sang well, and seemed to have no inkling of what in any of the others had persuaded Declan that they should be included in his secret circle.
There were five: the handsome, arrogant, ivory-haired Blayse, son of a Grishold nobleman; the plump and earnest Drue, whose father was a wealthy merchant in Estmere; the lovely, lanky Shea, with her hard violet eyes and a horse’s tail of chestnut hair, whose father owned the village brewery; the angular scarecrow Osprey, whose father was steward in one of the great houses of what was once the southern kingdom of Waverlea; and Nairn the crofter’s son.
They encountered one another daily; none were particularly close, not even Nairn and Shea, who had shared a summer’s eve in passing, once, on a flowery riverbank. It seemed a very long time ago, Nairn thought, and in a green, warm, sweetly scented world long vanished from the plain. Shea, dripping with a cold, cast a brief, bleary glance in his direction and sniffed, maybe a comment, maybe not.
“My father taught me how to write,” she said, “to do accounts. But nothing ever like this.”
“Nobody taught me,” Nairn said. “I thought that this is how everyone writes.”
Blayse made a faint, rude noise. The pedantic Drue said solemnly, “I can understand how you could make such a mistake if you had never tried to write before. But you would have realized soon enough that you had run out of words. For instance, there would be, I think, no word for ‘innkeeper,’ or even ‘garden,’ such concepts being unimaginable to primitive people who did not differentiate between—”
“Or for ‘tavern,’ ” Osprey interrupted irreverently. “Or, for that matter, ‘beer.’ ”
“There have been hops grown on the plain for centuries, my father says,” Shea argued. “My father says—”
“Hops,” intoned Drue, “first came from the fields of Estmere. The art of growing them and making beer was brought to Stirl Plain long after the stones were raised.”
“My father—” Shea persisted stubbornly.
“The earliest people on the plain had no word for ‘beer.’ ”
“Well, they must have drunk something,” Osprey said. He appealed to the bard, who was at his table, rapidly writing twigs. “Master Declan—”
“I have in my company the most gifted and promising of all my students, and all you can find to talk about is beer?”
They looked at him, surprised: what else better in that bleak world?
He gave them his rare, faint smile and rose. “Here,” he said, passing lines of twigs written on parchment to each of them. “When you finish translating this, come and tell me what it means. It is the keystone of your art. Go,” he urged them gently, as they stared blankly at the lines, turned the papers helplessly on their heads and back again.
“But, Master Declan, there are over two dozen lines,” Shea protested.
“Then you’d best get started. Oh,” he added, as they turned reluctantly from the fire, “you may ask one another for help.”
Not likely, their faces said, as the students headed for the door. Not a chance. Declan’s smile deepened, Nairn saw, at the scent of competition.
Curious, he spent his hours after supper matching the patterns on the page to the patterns on his list. “Plain,” he found easily, and “circle,” “stone,” “bone,” and others as simple and fundamental. Some patterns eluded him. Words he had not learned yet? Words newer in the world than the early, prosaic words of daily life?
He pored over the unknown words so long that he nearly fell asleep. They blurred in front of his eyes, swam together, made new patterns. He shook himself awake, translated all he could. Unable to write his own familiar language, he simply added them to memory, words making images in his head, as stark and elemental as the words themselves.
Mesmerized, he gazed at the mute patterns until they entered his head as well, filling the spaces in his poem he could not render. His tiny room was soundless; the school might well have vanished around him. Only his candle made a sound now and then, a sizzle of wick into melted wax, a flutter at an errant draft that shifted light into shadow for a blink of time on his page.
Three what? A bird’s nest of twigs followed, then another “three,” followed by two pair of crossed twigs. He stared at them stubbornly, willing them to speak, say what they meant, reveal what lay within the patterns.
And suddenly they did.
He felt his heart melt and his hair stiffen at the same time, at a vision of riches, at a vision of an enormity that came at him out of the shadows like a swipe of a vicious claw. His blood pounded; his eyes filled with gold, crowns, jewels, all tossed carelessly into a glittering pile that grew as its image filled his mind. Treasure. Terror. Treasure.
He blinked incredulously at the twigs, and they spoke again. He whispered, echoing them.
Sometime later—hours, days, another night—he stumbled through the dreaming school, the paper in his hand, the words burning in his mind. He ran up the tower steps to Declan’s private chamber door and pounded on it.
Declan opened it. He was still dressed, his expression unruffled by sleep; he might have been waiting for someone, and he seemed completely unsurprised that it was Nairn. Nairn lifted the parchment; it shook in his hand.
“What is this?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Perhaps the oldest poem in Belden. I found it on a standing stone during King Oroh’s first battle on Stirl Plain.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I think it means exactly what it says. Come to the fire. You’re trembling.” He opened the door wider; Nairn crossed Declan’s bedchamber to the hearth, tried to breathe in the warmth, pull it into his embrace.
“They spoke to me,” he said finally, huskily. “They told me what they meant. I saw into them.” He closed his eyes; the bright words burned in his head, waiting for his need of them.