Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint- Wizard of Yurt - 2 (6 page)

“But why would he do it?” I burst out. “He’s retired, he doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone

any more.

‘When he decided to retire, back before you came to Yurt, he told al of us that he wanted to spend more time on his research. Maybe this is what he’s been researching.”

“I stil can’t understand it,” I said gloomily, catching Joachim’s intense gaze for a second and looking away again. “He knows as wel as anyone the perils of dealing with the forces of evil.”

‘Do you want me to talk to him?”

I actualy considered this for a moment. It was certainly appealing to contemplate someone else going down to the little green house at the edge of the woods to confront my cantankerous predecessor. But he had never liked Joachim; “young whippersnapper” was about his most flattering term for the chaplain.

“I’m afraid he wouldn’t say anything to you,’ I said. “It wil have to be me.”

“But isn’t it my duty, as Royal Chaplain, to talk to someone who might be imperiling his soul?”

This was the difficulty of having a conversation with Joachim. Sooner or later I always ran up against the fact that he was a priest. I shook my head. ‘This is a magical problem.”

‘Then let’s get under way.”

We had ridden only a short distance down the valey when a young man suddenly ran out from behind the trees toward us. Between the nymph and the great homed rabbits, my ability to see sudden motion without jerking convulsively was limited.

Joachim, however, reined in and turned calmly toward the young man. “What is it, my son?”

He was very young, not much more than a boy. His head was shaved and he wore scraps of rough, dark cloth held together by safety pins. He dropped on his knees before the chaplain, holding up clasped hands. “Oh, Father, please forgive me, and please tel me. Are you going to take our holy master from us?”

“The hermit?” said Joachim in surprise. “I have no intention of taking him from you. Why did you think I might?”

The young man flushed but pushed on determinedly. I noticed, back under the trees near the stone huts, several others with shaved heads watching warily from a distance. “Ever since those people built their booth at the top of the cliff, we’ve feared that someone from the cathedral would be here sooner or later,” he said breathlessly.

“At least for now,” said the chaplain gently, “I see no reason why the hermit should leave Saint Eusebi-us’s shrine, at least until God summons him home.” The boy’s face was transformed by a sudden smile. “Thank you, thank you!” He jumped up and ran like a deer back into the trees. As we turned back down the valey, I could see him and the other ragged young men talking excitedly.

Apprentice hermits, I thought. Wizards, too, used

to be trained as apprentices. It would have been hard enough being trained under my predecessor; these young men’s apprenticeship must be made even more difficult by the fact that a hermit rarely speaks to anyone, including his apprentices.

Joachim suddenly seemed to remember he was in a hurry to send the bishop a message. He slapped his legs against his horse’s flanks and, in a moment, the apprentices were far behind. We rode at a trot until the road started the steep climb out of the valey.

“What do you think?” I asked as our horses slowed to a walk. “Is it just coincidence that the entrepreneurs decided to set up their booth at precisely the same time as somebody wrote the bishop to ask for Eusebius’s toe? And why do you think they don’t have their basket or their souvenirs ready yet?’

Joachim looked at me sharply, but the ghost of a smile was on his lips. “You have a suspicious mind,” he said. “I thought of it, too. Since Eusebius is widely considered to be a, wel, troublesome saint, one could suspect that those priests in the distant city thought the easiest way to get his relics was to be sure ne became irritated with life in Yurt.”

“Do you suspect it?”

“I don’t know.” His dark eyes grew troubled. “According to the bishop, the priests were very positive that the saint wanted to move his relics to their city, yet the hermit here is equaly positive that the saint wants to remain. The difficulty is that I don’t know which came first. Did Eusebius appear in a vision to the priests after these entrepreneurs decided to make money off him and that’s why the priests have written the bishop now? Or did the priests first decide they wanted him and then tried to ensure by devious means that he’d be happy to go?”

“We’d better speak again to the man at the booth,” I said. “We’l find out how recently they set up and if they realy plan to put in this elaborate basket-on-a-puliey contraption—it sounds horribly dangerous to

me, I must say. If the talk of baskets and souvenirs is no more than talk, then we’l know it’s only a fagade, designed to make the saint angry.” But when we reached the top and rode back along the rim of the valey, we did not see the man in the feathered cap. The sign on the empty booth stil invited us to see the Holy Toe.

“I hope I can get my whole message to the bishop on a smal enougn piece of paper,” said Joachim.

n

We came over a rise and saw the count’s castle before us, its shadow stretching long over the grassy meadows around it. As soon as we were inside the wals, the chaplain hurried up to the pigeon loft in the tower to send his message.

The count’s constable took our horses and the count came out to meet me with his joly smile. “Did you even get up onto the plateau, or did you spend al your time tracking the horned rabbit?”

“I saw the horned rabbit, or rather two of them, in the valey cut into the plateau,” I said, puzzled.

His smile dropped away. “That means there are at least three of them. I’d hoped there was only the one. Almost immediately after you left, one 01 my men reported seeing a great homed rabbit just west of here and we spent several hours, without success, trying to pick up its trail. We were actualy rather surprised not to see you there, too, because we’d assumed you would have spotted it.” The expression, “multiplying like rabbits,” flitted through my mind, but it seemed best not to say it.

Joachim returned from the tower. “It took three pigeons for my whole message to the bishop,’ he said. He looked relieved. He did have one advantage over me in not being a wizard, though I wasn’t going to tel him this. Once he had told the bishop about his

visit to the Holy Grove, it was, at least for the moment, out of his hands. But there was no one to whom I could pass the responsibility for the wood nymph, the great horned rabbits, and whatever had made that footprint.

As we came into the great hal for dinner, I saw a slim woman’s figure silhouetted against the fire. She came toward me, holding out her hands to take mine. It was the Duchess Diana.

I had always liked the duchess. She had ruled in solitary splendor for over twenty-five years, ever since the old duke, her father, died when she was stil a girl. When not treating my wizardly abilities with respect—something that didn’t happen very often—she enjoyed teasing me as if I had been a friend’s favorite younger brother.

Duchess Diana prided herself on the knowledge that a number of people considered her outrageous. She was wearing a long dress the color of marigolds, which even I could recognize as hopelessly out ofiash-ion. She and the queen were distant cousins and had the same midnight black hair, but Diana was some ten years older. Other than their hair, the two women were very dissimilar.

“I’m delighted to see you,” she said with a wide smile. “I’ve got a surprise for you!”

“A surprise?”

“Wel, you know you’ve been teling me for over a year that I ought to hire my own ducal wizard. I finaly decided to do so!”

“About time, my lady! How wil you find one?”

“I found him by writing to your wizards’ school, of course. After al, I’d met the Master of the school the other Christmas. I said that I wanted someone as much like you as possible.”

“You don’t realy want someone like me, my lady,” I began, but she wasn’t listening.

“My father always kept a wizard, back when I was

little, so I decided it was high time the duchy had one again.” She smiled up at me, her gray eyes dancing.

“This is very good news,” I said, wondering if the school would send her one of the young wizards I knew. They would not send a wizard who had been first in his class to a post in a smal ducal court, but then I had been far from first in my class myself. “What made you decide at last?”

She stopped smiling for a moment. “I think it was the baby prince. If my young cousin the queen can have a baby who’l be walking soon, I shoula certainly be able to set up a proper establishment myself, and the first thing I needed was my own wizard.”

I was oddly reminded of Dominic. But I didn’t want to worry about why the baby prince should make apparently sensible people feel discontented.

Abruptly, I found myself looking forward enormously to the arrival of the duchess’ wizard. Even though Joachim and I managed to be friends much of the time, the differences between us kept coming up and always would. Another wizard would not continualy be disturbed by deadly serious moral dilemmas that wouldn’t bother me for a moment. And he should have more recent memories than mine of some of the lectures in the advanced courses and might have al sorts of ideas on what spels would work in the problem of the great horned rabbits. Since Diana had asked the school for someone like me, her wizard should even have a sense of humor.

“When wil he be coming to Yurt?”

“That’s the real surprise—here he is!”

She turned and beckoned, and someone broke away from the smal group by the fire. I had assumed, without looking, they were al members of the count’s court. This one was no young lord—this was a wizard.

I was struck first by his hair. It was so thoroughly auburn that it glowed nearly carrot-colored in the firelight. His cheeks were spattered with freckles below wide-set and very light blue eyes. At first I thought he was clean-shaven, as were most wizardry students, but then I spotted a few rather half-hearted red wisps on his chin. He wore a black velvet jacket, embroidered al over with moons and stars.

“Evrard,” said the duchess, “I’d like to introduce you to Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt.”

He turned to me with an amazed grin and wrung my hand. “You’re Daimbert? Of course you are! What an honor! We learned al about how you invented the far-seeing telephone—and within just a few months of taking your first post. Let me tel you, it’s a real inspiration to the rest of us!”

I smiled modestly.

“Especialy you’re an inspiration to al of us who’ve never worked very hard, because we know that you spent as much time in the city taverns as with your books. And of course, in transformations class, old Zahlfast always uses your experiences that time with the frogs as a warning!”

My smile faded.

He looked at me with his head cocked for a minute. “I knew who you were—or thought I did—when you were stil at school, even though I’m not sure I ever talked to you. But I don’t know if I would have recognized you now. You look a lot older than the person I thought I remembered.”

“I remember sometimes seeing you in the hals,” I said, “but I’m afraid that’s it. You probably don’t recognize me because of the white beard.” He tugged in disgust at one of the wisps on his own chin. “Your beard looks very wizardry. Mine is coming in red, so I’m afraid I’m going to look more like a bandit than a wizard. If it ever grows in, maybe I’l try bleaching mine, too.”

My hair and beard were, in fact, not bleached; they had turned white overnight, six months after I first came to Yurt, but I didn’t want to go into that rather harrowing episode now. “How is Zahlfast?” I asked instead.

“Doing fine. He and the rest of the teachers always seem to be above the problems and the worries of al the students. He warned me, which I’d expected, that I was on my own now, that I couldn’t expect the school to come help me with ‘every little problem.’ He did ask to be remembered to you and said you’d probably see him later this summer.” Every year or so, one of the teachers would visit the young wizards at their posts throughout the western kingdoms. With luck, I would be able to present Zahl-fast, when he arrived, with a tidy solution to the problem of the great horned rabbits.

“You know,” Evrard continued, “I’ve always rather liked old Zahlfast, but after what happened to me in the transformations practical, I didnt dare meet his eye for the rest of the semester.” In spite of being highly curious about what had happened to him, I didn’t dare ask for fear he’d alude to the frogs again and in more detail. “Therefore, I was shocked when he caled me in to tel me he had a post for me—I’d been afraid he was going to tel me the school had decided to take my diploma back!”

We both laughed. “But I did pay more attention in my classes this last year,” continued Evrard. “Did you know, Elerius came back to teach a course?”

“Elerius? You mean they’ve put him on the faculty already?” Elerius, three years ahead of me, was generaly rumored to have been the best student the school had ever had.

“No, no, he’s stil Royal Wizard in that big kingdom way off at the base of the eastern mountains. He just taught the one course. It was very interesting, some of the old-fashioned magic of earth and stone the school doesn’t teach any more. He said he’d learned it from an old magic-worker who lived high up in the mountains and who taught it to Elerius just before he died.” I was jealous at once. I had thought I was rather unusual in learning herbal magic from my predecessor at Yurt, and here Elerius had not only learned some of the old magic, but was actualy being invited to teach it.

But I couldn’t say that to Evrard. “So have you just arrived here in Yurt?” I asked.

“No, I’ve been here for two weeks.”

I turned to the duchess, who was folowing our conversation with her hands on her hips and a pleased expression on her face. “Why didn’t you tel me, my lady?”

“I scarcely needed permission from the Royal Wizard to hire my own wizard, did I?” she saiu with a laugh. “Besides, I wanted to wait until after King Haimeric had gotten safely off on his trip before I distracted the royal court with anything else. So, how do you like my wizard? As someone who’s been in Yurt longer, do you have any recommendations? Are there certain books I should buy? Should I get in some crucibles and pestles and special herbs?”