Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint- Wizard of Yurt - 2 (5 page)

“Have you come to see the wood nymph?” the hermit asked me. I rose and met his eyes. I had somehow expected them to be distant and dreamy, but they were surprisingly sharp under long, shaggy eyebrows.

“That’s right,’ I said, deciding not to worry him with the horned rabbit.

“It’s those poor souls up on the top of the cliff who are worrying you?” the hermit asked Joachim with another smile.

“That and a letter the bishop has received.” I could hear the unease in the chaplain’s voice and realized that the hermit must not yet know that certain priests were insisting the Holy Toe be taken two hundred miles from his grove. Since I didn’t particularly want to be there when he received the news, I excused myself as they sat down on mossy stones beside the pool.

The area around the pool itself, next to the shrine, seemed an unlikely place to find a nymph, but the grove stretched further along the bottom of the cliff. I walked slowly on spongy soil, folowing slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here, there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originaly expected, sending smaler trickles of water to join the larger stream.

I picked my way across an especialy muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefulfy trimming dead twigs from a smal tree.

It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local vilage girl.

She turned toward me. Her face was perfectly stil, with the intense beauty of a pastoral landscape. She leaned back against the pale trunk of a beech, one arm stretched above her head, and watched me with

no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategicaly placed leaves. Her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a briliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.

“Excuse me,” I faltered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt. Are you the wood nymph of this grove?” She moved ner head slighdy, neither nodding in affirmation nor denying it.

“I’d been hoping to meet you,” I pushed on. My heart began beating rapidly and I felt much more flustered than I should nave. Stil she did not answer.

“Have you lived here long?’ I asked inanely.

This time, she did more than not answer. She disappeared. One second she was standing before me, and the next she was gone. It seemed as though she might have slipped quickly around the tree, out when I looked, there was no one behind it. I glanced up. Far above me, I saw for one second a motion that might have been the leaves on the tree or might have been a swift form among die branches.

I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing al the little upwelings of water and al the smooth-trunked trees, but no more sign of the nymph.

I returned to where Joachim and the hermit were sitting. “But the saint often appears to me,” the hermit was saying to the chaplain with a pleasant smile. “I know some people have nicknamed him ‘the Cranky Saint,’ but I have always been blessed by seeing bis gentle side. He came to this grove originaly, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put trie city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”

I continued past them, folowing the path back down along the waterfal to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints or nymphs.

I reached into my saddlebag and puled out the packet of lunch the count’s cook had prepared for us, not so much because I was hungry, as because eating would give me time to consider.

There was more happening here, I could sense, than I had yet been told. Negotiating with a holy old hermit who, from his demeanor, might be declared a saint himself one day, and finding a way to deal with souvenir selers who might not be doing anything ilegal but who stil seemea scandalous, even to me, could turn out to be more serious responsibilities than I had originaly thought. Joachim might wel be right that the bishop was testing him to see if he was the sort of priest they wanted in the cathedral chapter.

I didn’t like this any more than the chaplain did, although for different reasons, but right now I had responsibilities of my own which I’d been neglecting. To maintain the good name of wizardry, I should set about finding and coping with the strange magical creature the count and his men had seen.

As I strapped up my saddlebag, I caught a glimpse of motion from the comer of my eye and turned slowly.

And there were two of the creatures, the size of smal dogs but shaped like rabbits. My first hope was that they were some bizarre ilusion, but they were very real. They came hopping awkwardly along the edge of the stream, ignoring my presence. Rather than ears, they had long, pointed horns.

I stepped back involuntarily. Instead of broad rabbits’ teeth, they had protruding fangs, and instead of wide, placid rabbit eyes, they had smal, red nasty eyes. And those horns looked sharp.

One flicked its red eyes toward me and gave a much higher hop. At the same time, it emitted a cry—a low, hooting sound, almost like an owl. The other creature responded with the same cry. Both redoubled their speed, made a sharp turn and disappeared rapidly across the meadow toward the base of the cliff.

I stood idioticaly, just watching them go. The count had only spoken of one great horned rabbit, not of two. They looked so ridiculous that I felt I ought to laugh. But that hooting, haunting cal had stifled any laugh within me.

I shook my head hard. I should be trying to catch them, not staring after them. I hurried across the meadow, putting together a probing spel to help me find them.

As soon as I opened myself to it, I found that the valey was thick with magic, making it virtualy impossible to probe for anything. Most of the magic seemed unfocused, which meant that it was wild, unchanneled by wizardry. And yet—Somewhere behind me, in the grove, I thought I could sense the presence of a powerful spel.

I clenched my jaw. This was even worse than I had thought. If the rabbits were the product of that spel, then they were not magical creatures from the land of dragons, which would have been bad enough, but rather the creations of a renegade wizard. Since neither of the counts nor the duchess kept a wizard and my predecessor was retired, I was, I had thought, the only active wizard in Yurt.

As I started back toward the grove, I hesitated again. This was not where I had seen the rabbits disappear. How many of them might there be?

When I came back into the grove, the denseness of magical forces made me lose track of the spel that had seemed so strong a moment ago. I walked swiftly along the little paths between the springs, without seeing anything but trees. But then something caught my eye in the muddy earth.

It was a footprint, about the size of a man’s foot, even roughly the right shape, but somehow wrong. I knelt down for a closer look, but I already knew. That print had been made by nothing human.

Back at the shrine, Joachim and the hermit were stil talking. I hesitated, not liking to mention the wood nymph before the hermit, and certainly not wanting to terrify him with the horned rabbits or that inhuman footprint.

But the hermit beckoned me to join them. “Your chaplain’s been trying to tel me that Saint Eusebius has appeared to some priests in a vision, asking to leave the grove, but I’m sure they’re mistaken.

Perhaps they are not aware of the miracle that occurred only a year after the saint’s death.”

I sat down at the hermit’s feet, wiling to listen while waiting for my mind to come up with better ideas than I had now.

“You’ve doubtless heard that a reliquary was made immediately after the saint’s death,” continued the hermit, “to contain al of his mortal remains that had not been eaten by the dragon. You do know about the dragon?”

“Yes, I know that story.”

He smiled approvingly. “One sometimes hears that wizards are too dismissive toward concerns ot the church, or even laugh at them, but I’ve never felt that myself.” I tried not to meet either his eyes or Joachim’s.

“And so for a year,” the hermit continued, “the holy toe was peacefuly kept here, at a shrine built onto the side of the little hermitage where the saint had spent his days—in fact, this very hermitage where I now live. One of Eusebius s pupils lived there as a hermit in obedience to his master’s precepts.

“But one day three priests arrived in the grove. They said they had come from the church where Eusebius had originaly been made a priest and that they intended to take his holy relics back with them! The young hermit, as you can imagine, almost went mad with despair. He fel on his face in the mud before the shrine and begged Saint Eusebius, his old master, not to leave him.

“And the saint heard his prayer. For when the three priests tried to lift the reliquary, they found it so heavy they could not budge it. They went for a block and tackle and tried again, but they themselves were hurled into the pool from the strain. And yet when the young hermit lifted the reliquary, it was as light as a feather in his hand. And thus the saint showed that he wanted to stay here, rather than going back to the city he had purposely left behind him. And after al these centuries, after generations of hermits of which I am the last and the least worthy, he has not changed his mind.” I nodded, impressed in spite of myself.

“As I already told you,” Joachim said quietly, “he seems to have changed his mind now. The letter the bishop received said that the saint was ‘fed up’ with having his relics here.” The hermit turned his smile on the chaplain. “Excuse me, Father, if I tend to discount the testimony of priests who spend their days on secular concerns. I’m sure they mistook his meaning. I realize the saint expresses himself forcibly at times—and error must always be rebuked firmly, as our Lord showed when He drove the money-changers from the Temple—

but when he has appeared to me, it has always been with a gentle face and a wilingness to be my guide.”

‘Then I’l tel this to the bishop,” said Joachim, rising to his feet. I was glad of the excuse to stand up as wel; the damp moss on which I was sitting had started soaking through my trousers.

After the chaplain and the hermit exchanged final expressions of esteem and reverence, we picked our way back down the steep path by the waterfal to where we had left the horses. I surreptitiously looked for footprints in the mud and saw none but our own.

“Wil this settle it?” I asked. “Wil the priests who wanted the saint’s relics take the hermit’s word that the saint doesn’t want to leave?”

“It depends on whether the bishop takes the hermit’s word for it,” said Joachim distractedly. He puled the lunch out of his saddlebag and started eating, but not as though he tasted it. ‘ Did you find the wood nymph, then?”

“I found her and even tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t answer.”

“That’s something else the bishop was worried about. He feels that it has been a mistake having both a saint’s shrine and a nymph share the same grove al these centuries. The modern church needs to eradicate al remnants of superstition, and the uneducated may find it a stumbling block to their faith if they come to worship God and His saints and find themselves in the realm of a wood nymph.”

“Especialy one as lovely as she is,” I provided.

Joachim gave me a quick look. “I thinx the bishop knows better than that, he said, answering a question I had not directly asked. “There has never been the least doubt about the moral purity of this hermit—

or any of his predecessors. But wood nymphs, as I

understand it, are immortal and, thus, they are outside of the human drama of sin and salvation.”

And so, I thought, was whatever had made that footprint.

Joachim hesitated for a moment before continuing. “Ive mentioned before,” he said at last, “that the bishop is very uneasy about my friendship with a wizard. But I wrote him that, in this case, it could be advantageous to have access to someone who might be able to influence a nymph. Therefore,” with a sideways glance from his enormous eyes, “I do hope you can do something.” I said nothing for a moment but thought about this. The bishop seemed to have issued the chaplain a veiled threat: Either I proved my ability and wilingness to help the church or else the bishop would pressure Joachim to end our friendship. I thought of suggesting that if the bishop became angry with him, then he could stop worrying about being asked to join the cathedral chapter, but decided this would push him too far.

Instead I said, “I’l try my best, but it may be hard if the nymph won’t even talk to me. I’l want to consult my books back at the royal castle, perhaps talk to my predecessor about her, and maybe even telephone the wizards’ school. They don’t want young wizards caling them up with every little problem, but if my books don’t give me much help, I may have no choice.” Joacnim had started to mount his horse, but he seemed to hear something in my voice I had not meant him to hear. He swung back down and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of the need to get back to the count’s castle, to send the bishop a message by the pigeons immediately. But he can wait a little while longer. What’s realy bothering you about the wood nymph?”

“It’s not the nymph,” I said. “It’s something else I saw.” And I tola him about the horned rabbits, the footprint that was almost, but not quite, a man’s, and the strange sense of renegade spels lurking amid the magic of the valey.

‘ So I know now the horned rabbits aren’t creatures from the land of wild magic,” I finished. “It looks as though someone took dead rabbits, attached sheeps’ horns, and then, I don’t know how, brought them back to life. Some wizard must have made them. But my predecessor and I are the only wizards in the kingdom.’

“Do you think the old wizard’s practicing black magic?” asked Joachim quietly.

‘ I don’t know what to think,” I said in despair. “I’l have to go talk to him at once. He would have been almost the last person I’d suspect of dealing with the powers of darkness, but if he’s able to create life, he’s gotten supernatural help from somewhere.”

Joachim nodded thoughtfuly. “That’s the shortcoming of wizardry, isn’t it. Because it’s a natural power, you can’t use unaided magic to alter the earth’s natural cycle of birth and death.