The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Page 13

  She smiled. “It’s all I need. It’s humans, not wood nymphs, who try to build and create.”

  “What do you do when it rains?”

  The nymph laughed, a charming sound like wind through the leaves. “I thought the necessary magic would be obvious to a wizard.”

  Evrard shook his head, almost blushing. “You live and breathe magic, Lady. We wizards have to learn it, and I’m afraid I’m still learning. Have you lived here long?”

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” she said with another smile. Even Evrard knew better than to ask her how long that had been.

  III

  We sat on her cushions, eating raspberries and drinking spring water, while the blue slowly faded from the sky far above us. Tiny breaths of wind fluttered the leaves and touched our faces as gently as a caress. The water—or maybe the wood nymph’s conversation—went to my head like fine wine. Sheltered as we were by branches above us and on either side, the broader world soon seemed very inconsequential.

  The worrisome affairs of the duchess, Nimrod, and Dominic shrank in importance, becoming something trivial they’d work out for them selves. It was clear that Saint Eusebius would never really want to leave such a lovely place—I could have stayed here forever myself.

  The nymph asked us questions about the royal castle of Yurt, listened to our answers with her full attention, laughed approvingly at our jokes, and kept our water glasses full. Her own wit both kept us teasingly at bay and invited further confidences. Every movement was graceful, every look and word from her as sensuous as a sun-warmed breeze.

  If I had not already been in love with the queen, I would have been in love at once. I tore my eyes away from the nymph long enough to look toward Evrard. He had never even met the queen, and he didn’t have a chance.

  With a start, I realized it was evening. I glanced upward to find that all the branches above us had lost their detail in darkness, and the sky beyond was only a somewhat lighter shade of gray. When I looked again toward Evrard and the wood nymph, they were invisible, hidden in shadows. I had been able to see perfectly until a glance upward, to the world outside of the nymph’s cozy nest, showed me that it was so dark I shouldn’t have been able to see for the last hour.

  The nymph too knew it was late. I could hear her standing up. “Come see me again tomorrow,” she said, the smile clear in her voice.

  We floated slowly down toward the ground. Evrard was silent as we groped our way through the grove and then, once free of the trees, lifted to fly over the waterfall towards our mares, slightly paler gray shapes in the darkness. As we mounted, he gave a long, contented sigh. “She wants us to see her again tomorrow. I’d like to see her every day of my life.”

  “You can’t bind yourself to a wood nymph,” I said reprovingly. “She’ll live forever, or at least for many more centuries, whereas a wizard isn’t good for more than two or three hundred years. And you know wizards don’t marry anyway.”

  Evrard’s laugh came out of the darkness. “You’re being a school teacher again, Daimbert.”

  He was right, but at the moment I was more concerned about our horses’ footing. My mare stopped, unwilling to go further on the uneven trail. I was not even sure we were still on the trail. I looked up toward the sky, a slice of stars between the darkness of the cliffs.

  “We need a light,” I said. What we really needed was a magic lantern. I tried lighting up my mare’s bit and bridle, which worked quite nicely to light up the path, but made her jerk her head so violently that I ended the spell at once.

  “How far is it to the duchess’s castle?” Evrard asked. “Do you think we’ll be able to make it?”

  I had been wondering the same thing. “Her castle must be nearly ten miles from here, and the old count’s isn’t much closer. I think we’d better stay here.”

  “How about going back to the nymph’s tree?”

  I’d known he’d suggest that. “We can’t very well impose on her. Besides, I don’t want to grope around the grove, trying to find her. It was confusing enough in daylight.”

  Evrard gave another happy sigh. I realized with a shock that I had no clear idea what we and the nymph had discussed for the hours we had been in her tree, only the warm feeling that it had been a delightful conversation. If my purpose in coming to the valley was to persuade her to leave the Holy Grove, I was no closer to doing so than I had been before—in fact further, because I had as little wish as Evrard did to see her leave Yurt.

  From the corner of my eye, I suddenly thought I saw a flash of light. There was a faint whispering sound that was not the whispering of the leaves. I probed quickly with magic and found several people moving toward us. After a startled second I remembered: the old hermit’s apprentices.

  The young men approached us, carrying a torch. One stepped out of the shadows next to my mare, making her jerk hard against the bit. The torch light gave his badly-shaved head the unreal quality of something out of a bad dream. But his voice was both polite and frightened.

  “Excuse me, Father, but we heard your voices. Has something happened to the hermit?”

  I realized he must think I was Joachim. “I’m not the royal chaplain,” I said, “but the wizard who was with him when we saw you before. I’ve come to the valley with another wizard on a different mission entirely. As far as I know, no one is planning to take your master away from here.”

  There was a pause, and one of the other apprentices whispered something. “It’s the wood nymph, isn’t it,” said the apprentice who had already spoken.

  “What do you know about the wood nymph?” I asked quickly. But he shook his head without answering.

  “Is there somewhere near here we could stay tonight?” Evrard put in suddenly.

  This seemed to delight the apprentices. All of them stared at us for a second and then began to grin. “Hospitality,” said the one who appeared to be their leader. “We’ve had very little opportunity to practice hospitality, and yet that is a duty of the solitary hermit. You can stay in our huts with us!”

  The stone huts had never looked very appealing, but they had to be better than sleeping in the open. The apprentices lit our way with their torches.

  I thought of saying, “Well done, young wizard,” to Evrard but decided I had already sounded like a schoolteacher enough for one day. “Good work,” I said instead. “But don’t let them see any satisfied smirks if we talk to them about the nymph. We shouldn’t shock their chaste sensibilities.”

  From the single blanket roll in the corner of the one-roomed hut, I assumed that only one of the apprentices lived here, probably the one who served as leader. Each of them must have his own hut in which to practice living in isolation. It didn’t look as though being an apprentice hermit was anywhere near as entertaining as being a student wizard.

  All five of the apprentices crowded in with us. “We need food for our guests,” said our host, and two disappeared back out into the night. In a minute they returned with some lettuces, an earthenware jug of goat’s milk, and rather stale pieces of bread.

  The wood nymph’s raspberries, highly satisfying while we were eating them, now seemed to have made no impact, and we ate hungrily. The dense bread wasn’t bad if eaten with enough lettuce, and the goat’s milk was better than I had feared.

  The apprentice hermits made a small fire in the middle of the room and sat against the far wall from us, tugging their scraps of clothing around them as the evening air coming through the open doorway became cooler. I wondered where they had come from originally, and, if one of them eventually replaced the hermit at the spring, what would happen to the rest.

  “Have you ever seen the wood nymph?” Evrard asked conversationally, brushing crumbs from his lap.

  The apprentices glanced at and nudged each other for a moment, then one spoke who I thought had not spoken before—although they all looked very similar with their rags and shaved heads. “We’ve seen her,” he said slowly. “Up in the grove. I tried to talk to her once, but
it was as though she didn’t even hear me.”

  Evrard and I gave each other quick, complacent glances.

  “But our master, the hermit, often talks to her,” the apprentice continued. Evrard’s eyes became round with surprise, and mine may have done the same. “He told us that only wizards can attract the wood nymph’s attention, unless she decides she wants to speak with someone anyway. She likes to talk to him. I think— I think our master and the nymph talk about the saint.”

  “Saint Eusebius?” I asked, managing not to refer to him as the Cranky Saint.

  “The nymph knew the saint, you see,” the apprentice continued in a burst of confidence. “When Eusebius came to this valley fifteen hundred years ago— You did know that the saint was the first hermit at the Holy Grove, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Go on.” Maybe relations between the hermits of the Holy Grove and the wood nymph had been better all these years than I thought.

  “When Saint Eusebius first came to this valley, the wood nymph was already here. I think her presence may at first have—bothered him, but our master has told us that she and the saint became friends and had many long conversations on spiritual issues. She had been a pagan, of course, but he was finally able to convert her to Christianity.”

  Evrard frowned at me. My first thought was to find this highly unlikely, but then it occurred to me that, since I had no clear recollection myself of what Evrard and I had discussed with the nymph a very short time ago, someone else might decide after an afternoon with her that they had conversed on spiritual issues.

  “Why does the hermit want to talk to her about the saint?” I asked. I was quite sure he had said nothing of this to Joachim.

  The apprentices gave each other troubled frowns. “Maybe we shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, no,” I said reassuringly. “I’m sure it’s all for the best that you brought it up. My friend the royal chaplain specifically asked me to try to find out more about the wood nymph. Why does your master talk to her about the saint?”

  “He told me—” started one of the other apprentices uneasily. “He told me he needs her help! Saint Eusebius sometimes, well, acts troublesome, and since she knew him when he was still alive, our master has hoped …”

  He trailed off without finishing. If the old hermit felt this was an unsuitable topic to mention to the bishop’s representative, then his apprentices must have begun worrying that it could be a further reason to take their master away from them. It was rather ironic that these young men, dedicated to austere Christianity, thought it safe to express their fears to a couple of wizards, just because they knew we ourselves had no prim and fixed ideas about what was or wasn’t suitable behavior.

  But in my attempt to assure them that I was Joachim’s friend, I may have started them wondering again if they should have spoken at all. “Let’s be clear and open with each other,” I said. “Neither I nor the royal chaplain thinks the old hermit should leave the grove, unless for some reason he decides to leave himself. But the chaplain is very concerned that the old hermit not be distracted from his prayer and contemplation.”

  “No! No! Not at all! He’s not distracted at all! He’s a very holy hermit!” cried all the apprentice hermits together. “The wood nymph only comes to speak to him when he wants her to,” added the one I assumed was the leader.

  Joachim, I thought, might have trouble explaining this to the bishop, but if true it certainly freed me from any responsibility of moving the nymph out of the grove.

  “What have the hermit and the nymph decided about the Cranky Saint?” put in Evrard.

  If they heard his flippant tone, they didn’t respond to it. Instead they all shook their heads. “He doesn’t tell us about their conversations. I think he believes we are not spiritually ready.” Evrard shot me what I was afraid was a smirk, but I was able to ignore him.

  “Have your master and the wood nymph discussed those entrepreneurs at the top of the cliff?” I asked.

  To my surprise, this question made them fall silent as our other questions had not. “We don’t really know,” said an apprentice at last.

  They must be afraid, I decided, that if a chaplain had come to accuse their master of consorting with a nymph, then two wizards must be here to accuse him of trying to make a quick profit. Before I could try to reassure them again, they all stood up hastily, and their leader snatched up his blankets from the corner.

  “We’ll let you have this hut to yourselves,” he said. “Thank you again for accepting our hospitality, and God bless you. Good night!” All five rushed out, leaving Evrard and me looking at each other.

  “Let’s get the horse blankets,” he said. “At first when they started talking about their master having long discussions with the nymph, I was able to imagine all sorts of intriguing scenes, but I’m afraid it must in fact have been very dull and pure—if one could imagine the nymph being dull! I’m glad I never had any foolish ideas about studying to be a hermit. Can you imagine what my hair would look like as shaved red stubble?”

  “Peach fuzz,” I said. “On a particularly unappetizing peach.”

  There was no door to the hut, but we settled down close to the opposite wall. The small fire in the middle of the room had burned down to darkly glowing coals.

  “It sounds as though making money off pilgrims as you lower them down the cliff,” Evrard said thoughtfully, “may be shocking to religious sensibilities, as well as of course extremely dangerous.”

  He fell silent for several minutes, and I had thought he had fallen asleep, when he suddenly rolled over with a great rustling of his blanket. “Daimbert, how did you manage to get involved in all this in the first place? What does a wizard have to do with chaplains and bishops and hermits?”

  “In the school,” I said lightly, “they teach us about the super natural power of demons, and warn us against using black magic. Doesn’t it make sense for a wizard to try the other side, to learn how to trick the supernatural power of good into helping us?”

  But Evrard, for once, was not willing to be dismissed with a joke. “But how about you?” he demanded. “How did you become involved in the affairs of a Cranky Saint?”

  “I sometimes wonder the same thing,” I said slowly. Although he was only a foot or so away, I could sense him more than see him. “Yurt is important to me. If there are problems in the kingdom, no matter what kind of problems, I want to see what I can do about them. You’ve only been here a couple of days, but you’ll see.”

  “So you’ve dedicated yourself, heart and soul, to this little kingdom?” His voice wasn’t exactly scornful, but it was close.

  I hesitated a long moment before answering. The royal court, I was sure, would find this a riveting conversation. “No,” I said at last. “Not heart and soul. The only thing I belong to heart and soul is magic itself—and maybe not even that, because if I did I’d probably be better at wizardry than I am. But freedom is useless unless it gives you the opportunity to choose, and I’ve chosen to try to help my friends in Yurt.”

  “But why these people?”

  “Because I love them.”

  Evrard did not respond at once, and after a moment’s silence I rather hoped he would not. But then a coal settled with a hiss, sending up a brief shower of golden sparks, and with the silence between us broken Evrard, irrepressible, spoke again. “But how did you, a wizard, ever become such good friends with a chaplain?”

  “Joachim saved my life.”

  “He did? When was this?”

  “The first year I came to Yurt. I had an encounter with the other supernatural powers.”

  “Oh, Daimbert, I’m sorry!” said Evrard, at once highly contrite. “I didn’t know. But you hadn’t said anything about it, and I never heard anybody mention it at the school.”

  “They wouldn’t have.”

  When the resulting pause seemed highly strained, I added, “I do hope you realize I have not become a pawn of organized religion. When I heard the
duchess had hired you, I was delighted at the thought of having a wizard to talk to, someone whom I thought I would be able to under stand better than I could any priest, and who might even understand me.”

  Silence fell again. Evrard did settle down at last and began to breathe deeply—doubtless dreaming of the wood nymph. I shifted, trying to find a less hard and bumpy patch of dirt on the hut floor, and pulled the scratchy blanket up around my ears.

  I was drifting off to sleep at last when abruptly I was brought back to full consciousness by a distant, repeated call. It could have been an owl, a real owl, it could have been the horned rabbits, or it could have been something far worse. I lay perfectly still, but heard only Evrard’s peaceful breathing and the strangely ominous rustle of leaves. Talking to the wood nymph had removed the terrors of my predecessor’s cottage to a comfortable distance, but now they were back again in this dark hut, made worse by the winds of night and the slightly lighter rectangle that marked the open doorway. I listened for a long time, but the call did not come again.

  IV

  We did not wake until well into the morning. I sat up and looked across the hut to see Evrard just opening his eyes. He jumped up at once when he saw the sunlight outside. “It’s late. The wood nymph is going to wonder where we are.”

  “And the apprentice hermits must be wondering when they’ll be able to have their hut back.”

  “Do you think their hospitality extends to breakfast?”

  But we didn’t see the apprentices when we came out. We checked my net for horned rabbits, but it had caught nothing yet. I renewed the paralysis spell, and Evrard dropped in some fresher herbs.

  “Maybe the nymph will have something today besides berries,” he said as we scrambled up beside the little waterfall toward the grove. “A doughnut and a cup of tea would be even nicer.”

  “I doubt the nymph does her own baking,” I said. “For that matter, I wonder where the apprentices get their food.”

  “From the store,” said the city-bred Evrard.