The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Read online

  THE WOOD NYMPH AND THE CRANKY SAINT

  by

  C. Dale Brittain

  Copyright ã 1993 by C. Dale Brittain

  Originally published by Baen Books

  PART ONE - THE HERMITAGE

  I

  When it was over, the living back where they belonged—or some place else—and the dead buried, I thought again of the day it all began. I wanted to keep Yurt the charming, bucolic, little out-of-the-way kingdom it was, but I had also wished for a little excitement.

  A wizard should know better than to wish for something. Sometimes wishes come true.

  As Royal Wizard, arrayed in midnight blue velvet, I was supposed to give an air of deep wisdom to the court proceedings. But I no longer had the slightest idea what that day’s case was about.

  My king, however, seemed to have an excellent grasp of the details. I leaned against the wall and watched him. King Haimeric bent forward on the throne, pulling his ermine-trimmed cloak tighter around his thin shoulders as the late afternoon breeze came in the open doors and windows of the great hall.

  He settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose and looked at the people before him with shrewd eyes. “So even though he struck you, he didn’t try to deny that you had a right to bring your cows into the field?”

  “Of course he didn’t deny it!” “I only struck him when he started beating me with his stick!” “Don’t listen to him! You can’t believe someone who’d dig up a grave!” “Listen to his lies!” “Look at my leg, the bruises are there yet!” “His wife was the worst, and she knew she could thump me all she wanted, because I wouldn’t hit a woman!” “Anyone can tell you I cleared every stump out of that field with my own hands!”

  Two dozen men and women, all from a village located five miles away, stood in front of the throne. I still hadn’t sorted out which were the claimants, which members of their families, and which the character witnesses they had brought along. A young woman with straight flaxen hair was crying openly. Over to one side, apart from the rest, a man with very broad shoulders was moodily examining the tiles of the fireplace as though trying to dissociate himself from the whole quarrel.

  The knights of Yurt, ranged along the wall to help give authority to the proceedings, looked both bored and tired, with an air of having long ago stopped hearing what anyone said. Even the king’s burly nephew Dominic, who used to pay very close attention to legal cases, had wandered off, but then he had been acting somewhat distracted lately anyway.

  In pauses in the arguments, I could hear faint clangings from the kitchen. The smells of supper gradually became more pronounced. Several times already a servant had peeked around the door to see if we were done yet.

  Abruptly King Haimeric pushed aside his lap robe and stood up. “I’ve heard enough!” he exclaimed. The excited arguing of the group before him stopped short.

  “You brought this to me as a property dispute,” he said sternly. “But both your documents of property rights and your witnesses are highly suspect and highly contradictory.”

  “We already told you, Your Highness, that they stole our deed and substituted a lying fake!” one woman put in bravely.

  “And it’s become clear,” the king continued, not even pausing for the interruption, “that much more than property is involved. This field has become the excuse for verbal abuse and for physical violence, which you know I consider intolerable. Some of you have even claimed that others have dug up somebody’s relative and hidden the body—don’t interrupt me! And now you’ve told me that the quarrel over this field has even been the cause of a serious breach of promise.”

  I had missed this final detail amid everything else, but it explained the weeping young woman.

  “If those of you who were in the wrong originally,” the king continued, “hoped that by utter confusion you would avoid a ruling against you, you are mistaken.” All of the principal disputants looked jubilant, as though secure in the knowledge that not they but the others had originally been in the wrong.

  But the king’s next words took the smiles from their faces. “All of you are in the wrong. This case cannot be settled by a simple determination of right.”

  I certainly agreed with him there. I had even had to abandon what would have been my own solution, to divide the field down the middle between the two claimants—if indeed there were only two.

  The king crossed his arms and glared. “I have only one option left to me. I am going to swear you to peace!”

  The knights all straightened to attention and slapped their sword hilts ritually.

  “But in that case—” someone began.

  Again the king paid no attention. “You will have to work out for yourselves who has the right to plow and gather, who to pasture cows on the stubble, where your cousin is buried now, and who will marry whom, but you will have to do it without violence!”

  He turned and motioned toward Joachim, the royal chaplain, who had been standing on the other side of the throne from me. A dissatisfied murmuring and shuffling began with the king’s words but stopped immediately as the chaplain came forward, carrying a heavy Bible in both hands.

  He was as young as I, and didn’t even have my wizardly white beard to give an aura of mysterious wisdom. But the absolute seriousness of his gaunt face and his enormous and compelling black eyes always gave him an air of dignity and authority that I knew I would never be able to equal. This was made even worse by the knowledge that in his case the effect was entirely unintentional.

  The chaplain set the Bible on a table beside the king. “Come forward!” the king commanded. “Each of you, put your right hand on the Bible. Swear before God and the saints that you will practice violence no more, but that you will seek peace with these your neighbors.”

  With covert glances at the tall and silent chaplain, all the disputants and all their witnesses came forward, abashed, and swore individually. The broad-shouldered young man came over from the fireplace to swear last of all.

  “Now take each other by the hands in fellowship,” the king continued. “All of you. Take each one’s hand to symbolize the peace that now exists between you.”

  The flaxen-haired woman, her cheeks still wet but no longer weeping, went at once to the young man. She stopped as though abruptly shy two feet short of him, but he reached for her hands and said something to her. She slowly started to smile. While the rest went back and forth, shaking each other’s hands, sometimes with what I thought unnecessary firmness, the two stood silently, looking at each other’s faces. When the whole group left a moment later, they were still holding hands.

  The king, the chaplain, and I went out into the courtyard with them and through the gates, to watch them walk down the hill from the royal castle of Yurt. The sun was low and red in the west. The king continued to stare sternly after them until they were out of sight.

  “Well,” said King Haimeric in satisfaction, his usual good humor reappearing as soon as they were gone, “I don’t think we’ll hear from them again. And that’s the last of this month’s cases. I don’t know about you two, but I find giving justice hungry work. It’s hard for an old man to have to wait for supper!”

  We went back into the great hall, where just in the few moments we had been gone the servants had illuminated the magic lamps that dated back to my predecessor’s time and brought out the trestle tables for supper. Now they were spreading the table cloths and lighting the fire in the fireplace. In the little balcony high on the wall, the castle’s brass choir tuned their instruments.

  “In fact,” said the king, “there shouldn’t be any more urgent cases this summer. I think I deserve a vacation, say for a month or six weeks. How would y
ou two like to try running the kingdom?”

  The chaplain and I exchanged surprised glances. In the two years I had been wizard of Yurt, I had never known the king to leave his castle for more than a few days at a time.

  “You mean,” I said, “exercising royal authority—” I had only recently managed to make myself into a passably competent wizard, and it would certainly be a challenge to become a competent substitute for a king.

  The king smiled. “No, I wouldn’t really make you two act as regents. But I am serious about taking a vacation.”

  The knights and ladies of the royal court were assembling in the hall. The queen came in, carrying the baby boy all of us considered the most important person in the castle. His nurse hurried behind, frustrated as usual because the queen kept stepping in to do things the nurse felt were her proper duties.

  “So you finished up the last case?” said the queen, smiling at the king affectionately. She was less than half his age and the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my life. “I’m sure you handled them all with justice and wisdom!”

  She set the little prince down on the flagstone floor. He crawled determinedly to the table, took hold of a table leg, and started cautiously pulling himself to a standing position. His face carried an expression of intense concentration.

  The queen caught him just before he reached the table cloth. Holding onto one of her hands with both of his, the prince swayed a little but remained standing and gave a wide smile of triumph. He already had four teeth. “Dwrg,” he said.

  “Did you hear that?” asked the queen in delight. “He called you ‘Daddy.’”

  The king seemed happy to believe it. I decided not to mention that just the day before the little prince had looked directly at me and indubitably said, “Gizward.”

  Above us, the brass choir began to play, and we went to our seats, the king at the head of the main table and the queen, with the prince in her lap, at the foot.

  The king had said nothing to the queen in my hearing about a vacation. I glanced again toward the chaplain, whose place was directly across the table from mine. He gave a slight shrug, with no better idea than I. Could the king really be planning to leave Yurt?

  Servants brought steaming trays from the kitchen, and we all began to eat, too hungry for more than minimal conversation. It was early summer when the days are longest, and yet the sun was setting outside. But as we reached dessert, people settled back more comfortably to talk. I sat at the table, as I always did, with the queen’s aunt on my right side and the king’s nephew on my left.

  Dominic, royal nephew and presumptive heir until the birth of the baby prince, was built along the lines of a bear, large and solid. The layer of fat that had begun to replace his muscles did not conceal the fact that plenty of muscle still remained. Like a bear too, he moved slowly—these last few months especially—but there was always the suggestion that he could move very rapidly if he wanted to.

  The Lady Maria, on the other hand, gave an impression of constant motion even when quite still. Although in the two years since I had come to Yurt her golden curls had turned a rather attractive ash gray, and she had given up lacy gowns for dark colors and severe styles, her manner still verged on the girlish.

  “I’m always so impressed with King Haimeric when he gives judgment,” she told me. “He cuts right through to the truth!”

  “He certainly had a complicated case this afternoon,” I agreed.

  “I’m sure it’s a great help to him to have the assistance of a Royal Wizard at his side!” she added with a smile. “Our old wizard hardly ever assisted in legal affairs.”

  The implied insult to my predecessor, I realized, was actually supposed to be a compliment to me. “I can claim no credit, my lady; the settlement today was all the king’s idea.” It was interesting to hear that my predecessor had not stood, as I had, through long afternoons of complicated quarrels. I could appreciate his point of view. Listening to dull court cases was not the challenge to my magical powers I had anticipated when becoming a royal wizard.

  The old wizard, who had been Royal Wizard of Yurt for a hundred and eighty years before me, through five generations of kings, was still alive. He lived by himself with his magical roots and herbs in a little green house down in the woods. Although I had when I first came to Yurt negotiated a truce with him, which is about the best one can hope for between young and old wizards, and he had taught me some of his herbal magic, there were still a large number of things about him I did not know.

  But the Lady Maria moved on to other topics. As dinner ended, people rose and stood talking around the fireplace. The evening air, coming through the hall doors laden with the scent of roses, was just cool enough to make the fire’s warmth welcome.

  The king said to me, “How about some of your illusions to round out the evening, Wizard? I may not get a chance to see many more of them for a while.”

  So he really did mean to go. As I put together the words of the Hidden Language to shape my spells and produced a few simple but effective illusions—a golden egg that pulsated with fire and hatched into a phoenix, and then a twenty-foot giant who strode the length of the hall while waving its club and roaring silently—I wondered how he could bear to leave. I couldn’t imagine wanting to go anywhere else.

  II

  And yet I also surprised myself by envying him. Wherever the king was going, he would see new people, new sights. Yurt was a wonderful place, but sometimes I had to admit, very quietly to myself, that it could be a little dull.

  I went to talk to him the next morning. Every morning that the weather was fair King Haimeric spent a few hours in his rose garden outside the castle walls, weeding, pruning, trimming off faded blossoms, examining the bushes for slugs and insects, and planning which varieties to plant or breed next. It was hard to imagine the castle without the king in it. As I came across the drawbridge, I saw that the barred garden gate was swung open and could hear his and the queen’s voices at the far end of the garden. I proceeded slowly along the grassy paths, taking time to admire the roses.

  Some bushes were tall and robust, others propped against tiny trellises. Some blossoms had scores of petals and were as big as saucers, while other bushes were covered with tiny blooms no bigger than my thumb nail. Every shade of white, pink, and red was represented. At the far end, where the voices came from, was a section of yellow roses. The king had begun his rose garden when a young prince, but he had only started on the yellows within the last eight or ten years. The mingled scents from the different blossoms was almost overwhelming.

  I spotted the king and queen sitting together on a bench. He looked happy and not at all regal, with a broad-brimmed straw hat on his white head and grass stains on his knees. A bowl of cut roses and his garden shears were beside him. The queen had put the baby prince down on a blanket, but he kept crawling off it. As I watched, he reached for her skirts to try to pull himself upright. She reached down and lifted him into her lap with a smile of affection and maternal solicitude that made my heart turn over.

  I had been in love with the queen since the first moment I saw her. As a mother, she seemed even more beautiful to me than ever. However, this was certainly something I had never felt appropriate to tell the king. For that matter, my feelings had also never been something to tell a woman so obviously in love with her husband as the queen—even if he was more than twice her age.

  “I thought I saw you come in, Wizard,” said King Haimeric. “Come join us. We were just talking about our trip. And look at my new bush; the buds started opening today.”

  It was one of his yellows, with pale blooms almost the color of parchment but tinged very delicately with red on the edges. I bent down to get a faint whiff of scent. “So where are you going?”

  “To visit my parents,” the queen answered. “I think Baby Buttons here is old enough to travel safely.”

  The castle without the queen in it would be even worse. “Why can’t your parents come visit us?” I asked.<
br />
  The queen laughed. “They visited here last year, when their grandson was born. And you know they hate traveling. I think they got their fill six or seven years ago, going around the western kingdoms trying to find someone appropriate to marry me to—until I found someone myself!” with a smile for the king.

  “I’m still a little concerned about my garden,” said the king. “You know, I’ve never been away from the roses in June. Some of the bushes haven’t bloomed yet, and I’m starting to worry about them.”

  The little prince looked up at me from his mother’s lap. He had startlingly bright emerald eyes, the same shade as hers. He gave an unexpected chortle. “Gizward,” he said.

  “Did you hear that?” asked the queen, so quickly that I almost wondered if he might not have said what had seemed so clear. “He just said ‘Wizard’!”

  In spite of the king’s concerns about leaving his rose bushes in June, the trip almost immediately became something for which the whole castle was preparing. The king and queen would travel with a relatively small party: the baby’s nurse, the queen’s Aunt Maria, a few ladies, and a half dozen knights. The king was leaving his chaplain and me behind, although we had often accompanied him on short trips.

  “You’d be bored silly in two days,” he told me with a conspiratorial smile. “The queen’s parents are very dear people, but— Besides, I trust you to keep an eye on Dominic.”

  Since they planned to be gone over a month, the king took the precaution of appointing his burly nephew as regent. Prince Dominic listened to the announcement without any apparent emotion. He merely nodded and slowly twisted the ruby ring he always wore on his second finger. The ring’s setting was a golden snake, with the jewel resting on its coils, and I had always felt it would be a much better ring for a wizard than for a prince. This regency, I thought, might be the closest Dominic would ever come to being king of Yurt, and I would have expected more reaction from him.