The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint woy-2 Page 5

  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 valley, 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 us. We rode at a trot until the road started the steep climb back up out of the valley.

  “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, well, troublesome saint, one could suspect that those priests in the distant city thought the easiest way to get his relics was to be sure he 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 equally 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’ll find out how recently they set up, and if they really plan to put in this elaborate basket-on-a-pulley contraption-it sounds horribly dangerous to me, I must say. If the talk of baskets and souvenirs is no more than talk, then we’ll know it’s only a facade, designed to make the saint angry.”

  But when we reached the top and rode back along the rim of the valley, we did not see the man in the feathered cap. The sign on the empty booth still invited us to see the Holy Toe.

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

  II

  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 walls, 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 jolly smile. “Did you even get up onto the plateau, or did you spend all your time tracking the horned rabbit?”

  “I saw the horned rabbit, or rather two of them, in the valley 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 of my men reported seeing a great horned rabbit just west of here, and we spent several hours, without success, trying to pick up its trail. We were actually 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 came back down 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 tell 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 hall 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 still 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 of fashion. She and the queen were distant cousins and had the same midnight black hair, but Diana was some ten years older, and 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?”

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

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

  “I found him by writing to your wizards’ school, of course. After all, 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 really 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 small 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’ll be walking soon, I should 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’s 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 continually 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 all sorts of ideas on what spells 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 will he be coming to Yurt?”

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

  She turned and beckoned, and someone broke away from the small group by the fire, who I had assumed without looking were all 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 are most wizardry students, but then I spotted a few rather half-hearted red wisps on his chin. He wore a black velvet jacket, embroidered all 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 all about how you invented the far-seeing telephone, and within just a few months of taking your fir
st post-let me tell you, it’s a real inspiration to the rest of us!”

  I smiled modestly.

  “Especially you’re an inspiration to all 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 still 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 halls,” 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 wizardly. 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’ll 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 all 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 Zahlfast 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 didn’t 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 allude to the frogs again, and in more detail. “Therefore I was shocked when he called me in to tell me he had a post for me-I’d been afraid he was going to tell 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 generally rumored to have been the best student the school had ever had.

  “No, no, he’s still 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 actually 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 following our conversation with her hands on her hips and a pleased expression on her face. “Why didn’t you tell me, my lady?”

  “I scarcely needed permission from the Royal Wizard to hire my own wizard, did I?” she said 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?”

  “Ask Evrard himself what he needs,” I said, but the smile froze on my lips. This likeable young wizard had been in the kingdom for two weeks. Could he be responsible for the great horned rabbits?

  I did a little very rapid magic probing, which I hoped he wouldn’t notice, and felt my shoulders relax. If he had made the rabbits, it was certainly not with supernatural aid. I could understand a school-trained wizard, even one I had barely met, better than anyone else, and there was nothing about Evrard which suggested a plunge into black magic.

  At this point, dinner was announced. As we moved toward the table, I noticed the chaplain standing by himself. I had almost forgotten him.

  “Joachim,” I said, “let me introduce you to Evrard, the duchess’s new wizard.” His dark eyes had been distant, but at once they came back into focus. “Evrard, this is my very good friend, the Royal Chaplain of Yurt.”

  “I am glad to meet you,” said Joachim gravely, shaking Evrard’s hand.

  The young wizard winced; Joachim’s grip was strong. “I’m happy to meet you too,” he said.

  Joachim smiled then, which he had not done when he first met me. “I think Daimbert will be pleased to have another young wizard in the kingdom.”

  At dinner, the count asked us about our trip up to the high plateau. I merely mentioned the Holy Grove, because I wasn’t sure how much of the situation Joachim wanted generally known, talked a little more about the horned rabbits, and did not mention at all the strange footprint or the spell I had sensed.

  I would have expected that the duchess would be most interested in the horned rabbits, especially since she had come here at the count’s request to hunt them, but instead she started talking about the shrine. “That’s where the toe of Saint Eusebius, the Cranky Saint, is kept, isn’t it?” she said. “He’s not a saint to trifle with! Who was that man,” turning to the count, “your great-grandfather?”

  “Great-great-grandfather,” he said as though embarrassed.

  “Anyway,” continued Diana, “our present count’s ancestor was a noted rapscallion and sinner.” It was hard to imagine anyone related to the white-haired count as a rapscallion. “But when he was dying, he started worrying about his soul at last, and he asked to be buried in the Holy Grove, near the shrine. But the Cranky Saint didn’t want someone with so many sins on his soul buried that close. So he rerouted the river so it flowed between the grave and his shrine!”

  Everyone but Joachim laughed. The count nodded sheepishly. “That’s right. That count’s son, my own great-grandfather, was so embarrassed he had him dug up and reburied in our castle cemetery. The next day, the river was back in its normal bed.”

  I wondered briefly if the Cranky Saint himself might have made the horned rabbits, but realized that someone with that sort of supernatural power would need no spells. If Evrard hadn’t made the rabbits, there might be still another wizard wandering around Yurt. I wasn’t going to let that go on in my kingdom. Or, as I had thought earlier, the retired Royal Wizard had lost all his good sense and summoned the powers of evil.

  I was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a voice in the room with me. “Dear God.”

  Abruptly awake, I lay still for a moment in the darkness, trying to remember where I was. There was rapid, shallow breathing from the far side of the room.

  Then I remembered that we were still in the count’s castle, not home in the royal castle, which was why my bed felt so unfamiliar. I sat up and lit a candle. “Joachim? Are you all right?”

  He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked toward me. The flickering light and shadow from the candle flame made his eye sockets black and empty. But then he turned his head slightly, and his eyes came back. “I had a dream.”

  “I was dreaming, too,” I said. “A nightmare about the great horned rabbits. But you’re awake now, and it’s not real.”

  He flopped back down without speaking. I reached for the candle to extinguish it, but my hand froze as he spoke. “It was real.”

  He wa
s silent so long that I thought he would say nothing more, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear it anyway. I felt abruptly that there were not enough blankets on the narrow beds in the count’s second-best guest chamber.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” he said at last. “It was a vision. Saint Eusebius appeared to me.”

  My immediate reaction was highly interested curiosity. I had never had a vision in my life. I wondered how Joachim had known it was the saint, and if he had had the sense to ask what the saint knew about the entrepreneurs on the top of the cliff. I thought of asking if the entire saint had appeared to him, or just the toe, but decided against it. From the strain in Joachim’s voice, seeing a saint had been a deeply disturbing experience. “What did he say?” I contented myself with asking.

  There was another long pause. “He doesn’t want to stay at the hermitage,” said Joachim at last. He sounded distant, almost as if he were no longer in the room with me, although I could see his back in the candlelight. “He was very clear on that point. But he wouldn’t tell me where he wanted to go instead.”

  He rolled abruptly around to face me. “It was horrible, Daimbert! I’ve never been addressed like that. His face was like a living flame. Yet there is nothing evil in him, only the overwhelming power of good. The sin is in me, not to be able to bear it.”

  He put his hands over his face. I blew out the candle and slowly stretched back out in my bed. He said nothing more, and after a while I fell asleep again, although my dreams were more troubled than ever.

  III

  Diana was surprisingly unwilling to have me help her search for the great horned rabbits. Even though it was the count, not the duchess herself, who had summoned me from the royal castle, I would have expected her to welcome any magical assistance.

  “My own wizard and my huntsmen will be plenty,” she told me firmly the next morning. She wore a man’s leather tunic now and a disreputable old stained cloak, her only ornaments the wide gold bracelets she always wore. She realized she usually did not look like a woman of the high aristocracy and enjoyed people’s reactions to her refusal to be conventional. “You can go home and keep an eye on Dominic.”