The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Page 3

  It also did not seem a place to be quarreling with the chaplain. “We’ll want to rest the horses for a few minutes anyway,” I said. “Why don’t we change the harnesses now?”

  He turned his dark eyes on me, then unexpectedly smiled, a genuine smile that worked its way up from his mouth to his cheekbones and eyebrows. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m being both silly and stubborn.” He swung down off the mare. “I wanted to arrive early at the hermitage, but fifteen minutes isn’t going to make any difference. Let’s give the horses a rest, and I can tell you what we’re likely to find.”

  Whether the chaplain felt he needed a wizard’s protection against the horned rabbit, or he was worried about the wood nymph, I was pleased he might still want the company of someone who didn’t appreciate moral issues.

  But he hesitated for a moment before beginning. “As you may know,” he said at last, “there is a deep limestone valley cut into this plateau. The hermitage is located in a grove at the upper end, where the valley’s river is born. I visited it once when I first came to Yurt, before you became royal wizard. The hermitage is also a shrine, sacred to the memory of Saint Eusebius.” He paused for a long look at me. “Did you ever hear of Saint Eusebius of Yurt?”

  I shook my head. Wizards don’t learn very much about saints.

  “I know you,” he said slowly, “so I feel I should warn you. There’s a special relic of the saint at the shrine, and the hermit will not appreciate it if you laugh at the relic.”

  “But why should I laugh at a relic?” I protested.

  “Because,” he answered, almost reluctantly, “because it’s the saint’s big toe.” He had turned away, but for a moment I half imagined he might find this funny himself.

  “The saint’s big toe? But what happened to the rest of the saint?”

  “Eusebius was eaten by a dragon,” said Joachim, looking at me as soberly as if it had never occurred to him that a saint’s toe could be amusing.

  “When was this?” I was amazed that I had never heard the story.

  “It must be,” he hesitated as though calculating, “a good fifteen hundred years ago, long before the kingdom of Yurt or the rest of the western kingdoms even existed, back in the latter days of the Empire.” That explained why I had never heard of Saint Eusebius; I had never been strong on history, especially ancient history.

  The morning sun shone on our heads, and what looked like a hawk soared high above. It was hard to believe in either saints or dragons—or, for that matter, in great horned rabbits—on a lovely June day like this.

  “Saint Eusebius himself was living in the grove, then,” Joachim continued. “He lived alone, spending his days in devotion and contemplation. But when a dragon appeared up on the plateau and started eating the people’s flocks, he felt he had to do something.”

  “He should have called on a wizard,” I provided. “I know there were wizards, even back then.”

  Other than giving me a quick look, he paid no attention to my interruption. “Saint Eusebius took his crucifix and went to face the dragon, to command it in the name of Christ to leave the area.”

  “But Joachim, you know that wouldn’t work. It might work with a demon, but dragons aren’t inherently evil, just magic.”

  It was harder this time for him to ignore my interruption, but he managed. “Inspired by the devil, the dragon began to eat the holy man. But a desperate group of peasants had banded together, armed with spears and meat hooks. When the dragon tried to swallow the saint, it miraculously began to gag and choke on him. While the dragon was thus occupied, the peasants burst out of hiding and attacked it. One of them got in a lucky stroke with a meat hook and pierced the dragon’s throat at the one spot where it was vulnerable.”

  He paused, as though the horror of it were almost too much. “But they were too late to save Saint Eusebius. All that remained of him was his left big toe.”

  I felt rather proud that I did not even smile. “And so they preserved the relic at the hermitage where he had lived,” I said, “and subsequent generations of hermits have succeeded Eusebius there ever since. Is that it? But what do you have to investigate now?”

  “Saint Eusebius was always a rather, well, difficult—if holy—man, even while he was alive. Now, fifteen hundred years after his death, some say he’s a difficult saint.”

  “What do you mean, difficult?”

  “Well,” said Joachim after an almost imperceptible pause, “here’s an example. A lady, a very lovely and vain one, went to his shrine to pray for help in overcoming her faults. The saint began with her vanity, by putting a giant wart on her nose.”

  I could see the problem. What was the church supposed to do when the forces of good turned out to be a real pain?

  Joachim hurried on without waiting for a response. “His, uh, difficult nature is why the bishop sent me here. Certain priests, in a church two hundred miles from here, have written to the bishop. They say that Eusebius appeared to them in a vision, saying that he was ‘fed up’ with having his relics at this shrine, and that he wanted his toe to be preserved at their church.”

  Although a saint who induced giant warts had seemed to have promising possibilities, the situation now sounded like the confusing and dangerous churchly concerns they used to warn us against at the wizards’ school. “If he’s been dead so long, why does it matter where his toe is?” I asked irritably.

  Joachim answered with infuriating patience. “The saints are still here with us on earth at the same time as they are in heaven. Even you must know that.”

  “But why would priests in a distant city want an old dead saint’s toe anyway?”

  Joachim sighed. “This may be hard for you to understand. Their church, the church where Eusebius originally made his profession, has wanted his relics for fifteen hundred years. He was a priest in their city, the son I believe of a provincial administrator under the Empire, before he came to this valley to become a hermit.”

  A city boy like me, I thought, or least like I used to be.

  “After the saint was martyred,” Joachim continued, “the priests there even rededicated their church in his name.”

  “But that was all so long ago!”

  Joachim shook his head, with the air of someone who had known all along that I wouldn’t understand. “Individuals forget, and individuals die. But churches are undying institutions, and they never forget.” He took a deep breath. “But you don’t need to worry about either the saint or the hermit who lives there now. That’s my responsibility. I want you to worry about the wood nymph.”

  He stood up and took the offending bridle with bells off his horse. In a few moments, with our harnesses where they should be and the stirrups readjusted, we continued on across the plateau.

  In another mile, the road turned abruptly to the left. Ahead of us was a low stone wall. Rather than turning, Joachim rode his bay up to the wall. “Look at this.”

  Although one could not see it until almost on top of it, before us was a narrow and very deep valley. I pulled my mare’s head up more sharply than necessary when I realized we were standing at the very edge of a cliff, with only the low wall between us and an abrupt drop. The morning mists still lingered below in the shadow of the valley walls. Beneath the vertical white cliffs, an intensely green valley curved away, a narrow river rushing down its center.

  “Directly below us,” said Joachim, pointing downward, “hidden by those trees, is the hermitage, built at the source of the river. There is a direct path down—or I should rather say steps cut into the cliff—just a little farther along, but the road itself takes two more miles to get down to the valley floor.” Off to our left, at a spot where the cliffs were not quite so steep, I could see the white line of the road winding its way sharply down into the valley, appearing and disappearing among the beeches.

  Joachim shook his horse’s reins and started along the road. I followed after one more look down. I could have flown down myself easily enough, but I would not want to t
ry it carrying the mare.

  We had gone less than a hundred yards when Joachim stopped again, pulling up the reins so hard that his normally gentle bay half reared and gave a protesting whinny. Wondering if it might be the mysterious horned rabbit, I hurried my horse to join him, then stared with equal surprise.

  Before us was a little wooden booth. No one was inside, but a large brightly-colored sign proclaimed, “See the Holy Toe! Five pennies on foot, fifteen pennies in the basket.”

  I was trying to work out what this could mean, if perhaps whoever had painted the sign was offering us a chance to see the holy toe on someone else’s foot, and why a toe in a basket should be more valuable, when there was movement under a nearby tree. A young man in a feathered cap stood up and came out from the shadows.

  “Greetings, my fine gentlemen!” he said in the hearty tones of someone manning a booth at a fair. “Are you here to see the Holy Toe of Saint Eusebius the Cranky? I’m afraid we don’t have the basket ready quite yet, but if you want to go down on foot it’s not a bad climb—and cheaper, too!”

  Joachim dismounted and looked sternly at him. “So you’re charging people just for the privilege of climbing down the cliff to the Holy Grove?”

  The man gave a start, as though feeling the impact of the chaplain’s eyes, but he recovered almost immediately. “Excuse me, Father, I didn’t notice your vestments at first. If you’re worried that we’re restricting access to the relics, you needn’t be; people can still go around by the road for free. We’re just providing an extra service.”

  “Charging them to climb down the steps is an extra service?”

  “Ah, but we’ve improved the path!” said the man proudly. “And our real service is going to be the basket. As I said, we don’t have it ready quite yet, but we should in a few weeks.”

  “What is this basket?” I asked.

  The man looked at me properly for the first time. “Excuse me,” he said with a delighted smile, “but are you a wizard? You are? This is wonderful! You have no idea how much we’d been hoping to be able to attract a wizard.

  “You see,” he went on, “the basket is all very well, but it would be so much better if we could have a wizard working with us. Wouldn’t it be more exciting and appealing to have people carried up and down the cliff by magic than lowered in a big basket at the end of a pulley? I’m sure we could charge more, too. We’d give you a fair cut of the profits, you needn’t worry about that. You wouldn’t even need to be here! Just set up the spell and teach us how to keep it working, and we’ll do the rest.”

  There were so many things wrong with his assumptions I scarcely knew where to begin. “I’m afraid a spell to lower people down the cliff couldn’t just be ‘set up’ and then kept working with no wizard here,” I said at last.

  He looked thoughtful. “That might be a problem. But maybe you’d prefer to be here yourself, at least during the summer months when business will be best! I’m sure this will be enormously profitable, once word gets out. Do you have a post at the moment?”

  “I’m Royal Wizard of the kingdom of Yurt,” I said gravely, “and this is the Royal Chaplain. I don’t need any extra income.”

  The man was taken aback for a moment, but he seemed to have quick powers of recovery. “Well, then, maybe you know some other wizard who might be interested. Or maybe you’d even like to lend a hand yourself when the king doesn’t need you! I should put the proposition up to him myself, explain that this will really make Yurt a well-known place, not just a novelty as one of the smallest of the western kingdoms.”

  “We’ll take the road down to the Holy Grove,” said Joachim, abruptly swinging back up into the saddle.

  “But I haven’t even had a chance yet to tell you about all our souvenirs, Father!” the man said eagerly. “As you can see, we’re not quite ready for business yet, but in the next week or two we hope to have reproductions of the Holy Toe itself, figurines of a dragon—children always like things like that—and booklets telling of the life and miracles of the Cranky Saint.”

  Joachim’s shoulders stiffened into rigidity, but he made no answer. Instead he kicked his horse sharply into a trot. I was right behind him. The man in the feathered cap waved cheerfully after us.

  After three-quarters of a mile, as the road left the level plateau and began its steep descent toward the valley floor, I had suppressed silent laugher enough that I dared ask a question. Even for me, originally the son of a city merchant, this seemed to have gone much too far. “Had you known about all this?”

  “The bishop made a brief reference to ‘some inappropriate activities’ at the site,” said Joachim, looking straight ahead. “But I hadn’t realized it was this bad. No wonder Saint Eusebius wants to leave.”

  V

  For the next twenty minutes, we had to give all our attention to our horses, keeping them at a slow walk as the steep road wound and twisted its way down the side of the valley. The road leveled out at last, and we rode back toward the grove at the head of the valley, parallel to the road we had followed at the top of the cliffs. There were some stone huts near the road, but we saw no people. A few goats, feeding in the meadows along the merrily running stream, lifted their head to look at us in surprise—apparently travelers to the Holy Grove were not all that frequent. The air was fresh and cool, the valley and the trees intensely lovely.

  “Can’t you, as the bishop’s representative, just make them stop?” I ventured at last.

  Joachim shook his head. “As long as they do not impede the free access of the faithful to the Holy Grove and the saint’s relics, they’re not actually doing anything sinful. It’s shameful, of course, to be trying to make money from Saint Eusebius as though he were a two-headed calf at a fair, but it isn’t evil or even against church law. But if the saint was ‘fed up’ to begin with, this must make him furious.”

  He shot me a quick, worried glance. “I’d assumed that we, the bishop and I, would try to persuade those priests two hundred miles away that they had no right to the saint’s holy relics. Now I’m not so sure. And it may be difficult to break that news to the hermit.”

  As we rode, the sound of rushing water became louder and louder in front of us. We came around a corner to see a waterfall, white water splashing in the sunlight. Long grass and dark green ferns festooned the edges of the falls.

  At the top of the falls I could see a small level area, dense with trees. Beyond the trees, the white cliff face rose abruptly. My eyes traveled up it to the top. That was where we had stood, looking down; the cliff appeared even higher and steeper from below than it had from above.

  Looking to the right I was able to spot the steps that had been cut into the cliff for a quicker descent than we and the horses had taken. They were still little more than toeholds, in spite of the entrepreneurs’ “improvements.” Here, presumably, was where they were planning to set up a pulley and a basket to lower the pious if less agile pilgrim—and the adventurous tourist.

  “If you don’t mind,” said Joachim, “I’d like to introduce you to the hermit. He and I will have a lot to discuss after that, but you might be interested in trying to find the wood nymph.”

  We tied our horses’ reins to a branch and scrambled up a steep track at the side of the waterfall. At the top, the stream emerged from the dark shadow of a grove of trees. We continued along its edge, ducking our heads where the branches swung low. Here the water course widened into a swirling pool. In a few more yards, I saw what seemed to be a stone hut, like those we had seen further down the valley.

  But I was more interested in the river. When Joachim had spoken of its source, I had visualized a spring where water gurgled up from the earth, and I was wondering how the river could carry so much water and so rapidly. I went a little further, with Joachim following, and then spotted the real source.

  The river did not gurgle up from the earth but rather poured out of the face of the cliff. A cave mouth, only a few feet high but at least twenty feet broad, opened in the lim
estone, and the water boiled from it. A faint but steady wind accompanied the rushing river. After emerging and making a quick eddy under the branches of the grove, the water rushed over the edge of the falls and disappeared on down the valley.

  “Has anyone ever gone into the cave to follow the river back further?” I asked. There seemed to be a low, damp ledge along one side of the river, along which it might be possible to walk or crawl.

  “I don’t think so. The cave’s too small, and there’s too much water,” said Joachim absently. We walked back to the stone hut, and he went down on one knee before it, dropping his head reverently.

  I saw then that it was not merely a hut, but that the side toward us contained a stone altar, only partially protected from the elements by protruding stone walls. Next to the rough wooden crucifix on the altar was a reliquary, a shining box where the saint’s relics would be kept. From where I stood, it looked as though it was made of pure gold. It was indubitably made in the shape of a giant toe.

  I hung back, having no intention of going down on my knees before the preserved toe of a long-dead saint who had not even had the sense to ask a wizard for help against a dragon.

  Joachim rose again after a minute. At the same time, I caught a flicker of motion in the shadows beyond the hut. I turned toward it quickly, hoping it was the great horned rabbit—or, even better, the wood nymph.

  Instead it was an old man in a coarse brown robe that reached to his ankles. Below the robe, his feet were bare; I noticed that he himself had very large and horny toes.

  This, then, was the hermit. My eyes had become adjusted to the dim light in the grove, and I could see that the hut, beyond the altar, would make an adequate shelter for someone who had deliberately given up comfort. The old hermit had a ropy beard that reached nearly to his knees and a beatific smile that he turned on both of us.