The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  “Greetings, my son,” he said to me, and “Bless me, Father,” to Joachim and knelt before him.

  Joachim blessed him in evident embarrassment and helped him back to his feet. “I should rather kneel to you, Father,” he said. “Priests who are busy with the sins and affairs of the world have much to learn from hermits whose days are spent in contemplation and prayer.”

  The hermit looked at him more closely. “You’re the Royal Chaplain, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you.”

  Joachim beckoned to me. “Let me present Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt and my close friend.”

  Mollified at being called the chaplain’s close friend, I made the hermit the full formal bow, first the dipping of the head, then the wide-spread arms, finishing by dropping to both knees. I reassured myself that to kneel in this way to a living holy hermit, as a wizard might to a superior wizard or to his king, would not be a discredit to the position of institutionalized magic. Besides, Joachim looked pleased.

  “Have you come to see the wood nymph?” the hermit asked me. I rose and met his eyes. I had somehow expected them to be distant and dreamy, but they were surprisingly sharp under long, shaggy eyebrows.

  “That’s right,” I said, deciding not to worry him with the horned rabbit.

  “It’s those poor souls up on the top of the cliff that are worrying you?” the hermit asked Joachim with another smile.

  “That, and a letter the bishop has received.” I could hear the unease in the chaplain’s voice and realized that the hermit must not yet know that certain priests were insisting the Holy Toe be taken two hundred miles from his grove. Since I didn’t particularly want to be there when he received the news, I excused myself as they sat down on mossy stones beside the pool.

  The area around the pool itself, next to the shrine, seemed an unlikely place to find a nymph, but the grove stretched further along the bottom of the cliff. I walked slowly on spongy soil, following slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originally expected, sending smaller trickles of water to join the larger stream.

  I picked my way across an especially muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefully trimming dead twigs from a small tree.

  It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local village girl.

  She turned toward me, but her face was perfectly still, with the intense beauty of a pastoral landscape. She leaned back against the pale trunk of a beech, one arm stretched above her head, and watched me with no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategically placed leaves. Both her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a brilliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.

  “Excuse me,” I faltered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt. Are you the wood nymph of this grove?”

  She moved her head slightly, neither nodding in affirmation nor denying it.

  “I’d been hoping to meet you,” I pushed on. My heart began beating rapidly, and I felt much more flustered than I should have. Still she did not answer.

  “Have you lived here long?” I asked inanely.

  This time, she did more than not answer. She disappeared. One second she was standing before me, and the next she was gone. It seemed as though she might have slipped quickly around the tree, but when I looked there was no one behind it. I glanced up. Far above me, I saw for one second a motion that might have been the leaves on the tree or might have been a swift form among the branches.

  I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing all the little upwellings of water and all the smooth-trunked trees, but no more sign of the nymph.

  I returned to where Joachim and the hermit were sitting. “But the saint often appears to me,” the hermit was saying to the chaplain with a pleasant smile. “I know some people have nicknamed him ‘the Cranky Saint,’ but I have always been blessed by seeing his gentle side. He came to this grove originally, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put the city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”

  I continued past them, following the path back down along the waterfall to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints, or nymphs.

  I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out the packet of lunch the count’s cook had prepared for us, not so much because I was hungry as because eating would give me time to consider.

  There was more happening here, I could sense, than I had yet been told. Negotiating with a holy old hermit, who from his demeanor might be declared a saint himself one day, and finding a way to deal with souvenir sellers, who might not be doing anything illegal but who still seemed scandalous, even to me, could turn out to be more serious responsibilities than I had originally thought. Joachim might well be right that the bishop was testing him to see if he was the sort of priest they wanted in the cathedral chapter.

  I didn’t like this any more than the chaplain did, although for different reasons, but right now I had responsibilities of my own, which I’d been neglecting. To maintain the good name of wizardry, I should set about finding and coping with the strange magical creature the count and his men had seen.

  As I strapped up my saddlebag, I caught a glimpse of motion from the corner of my eye and turned slowly.

  And there two of the creatures, the size of small dogs but shaped like rabbits. My first hope was that they were some bizarre illusion, but they were very real. They came hopping awkwardly along the edge of the stream, ignoring my presence. Rather than ears, they had long, pointed horns.

  I stepped back involuntarily. Instead of broad rabbits’ teeth, they had protruding fangs, and instead of wide, placid rabbit eyes, they had small red nasty eyes. And those horns looked sharp.

  One flicked its red eyes toward me and gave a much higher hop. At the same time, it emitted a cry, a low, hooting sound, almost like an owl. The other creature responded with the same cry. Both redoubled their speed, made a sharp turn, and disappeared rapidly across the meadow toward the base of the cliff.

  I stood idiotically, just watching them go. The count had only spoken of one great horned rabbit, not of two. They looked so ridiculous that I felt I ought to laugh. But that hooting, haunting call had stifled any laugh within me.

  I shook my head hard. I should be trying to catch them, not staring after them. I hurried across the meadow, putting together a probing spell to help me find them.

  As soon as I opened myself to it, I found that the valley was thick with magic, making it virtually impossible to probe for anything. Most of the magic seemed unfocused, which meant that it was wild, unchanneled by wizardry. And yet— Somewhere behind me, in the grove, I thought I could sense the presence of a powerful spell.

  I clenched my jaw. This was even worse than I had thought. If the rabbits were the product of that spell, then they were not magical creatures from the land of dragons, which would have been bad enough, but rather the creations of a renegade wizard. Since neither of the counts nor the duchess kept a wizard, and my predecessor was retired, I was, I had thought, the only active wizard in Yurt.

  As I started back toward the grove, I hesitated again. This was not where I had seen the rabbits disappear. How many of them might there be?

  When I came back into the grove, the denseness of magical forces made me lose track of the spell that had seemed so strong a moment ago. I walked swiftly along the little paths between the springs, without seeing anything but trees. But then something caught my eye in the muddy earth.

  It was a footprint, about the size of a man’s foot, even roughly the right shape, but somehow wrong. I knelt down for a closer look, but I already knew. That print had been made by nothing human.

  PART TWO - THE YOUNG WIZARD

  I

  Back at the shrine, Joachim and the hermit were still talking. I hesita
ted, not liking to mention the wood nymph before the hermit, and certainly not wanting to terrify him with the horned rabbits or that inhuman footprint.

  But the hermit beckoned me to join them. “Your chaplain’s been trying to tell me that Saint Eusebius has appeared to some priests in a vision, asking to leave the grove, but I’m sure they’re mistaken. Perhaps they are not aware of the miracle that occurred only a year after the saint’s death.”

  I sat down at the hermit’s feet, willing to listen while waiting for my mind to come up with better ideas than I had now.

  “You’ve doubtless heard that a reliquary was made immediately after the saint’s death,” continued the hermit, “to contain all of his mortal remains that had not been eaten by the dragon. You do know about the dragon?”

  “Yes, I know that story.”

  He smiled approvingly. “One sometimes hears that wizards are too dismissive towards concerns of the church, or even laugh at them, but I’ve never felt that myself.”

  I tried not to meet either his eyes or Joachim’s.

  “And so for a year,” the hermit continued, “the holy toe was peacefully kept here, at a shrine built onto the side of the little hermitage where the saint had spent his days—in fact, this very hermitage where I now live. One of Eusebius’s pupils lived there as a hermit in obedience to his master’s precepts.

  “But one day three priests arrived in the grove. They said they had come from the church where Eusebius had originally been made a priest and that they intended to take his holy relics back with them! The young hermit, as you can imagine, almost went mad with despair, and he fell on his face in the mud before the shrine and begged Saint Eusebius, his old master, not to leave him.

  “And the saint heard his prayer. For when the three priests tried to lift the reliquary, they found it so heavy they could not budge it. They went for a block and tackle and tried again, but they themselves were hurled into the pool from the strain. And yet when the young hermit lifted the reliquary, it was as light as a feather in his hand. And thus the saint showed that he wanted to stay here, rather than going back to the city he had purposely left behind him. And after all these centuries, after generations of hermits of which I am the last and the least worthy, he has not changed his mind.”

  I nodded, impressed in spite of myself.

  “As I already told you,” Joachim said quietly, “he seems to have changed his mind now. The letter the bishop received said that the saint was ‘fed up’ with having his relics here.”

  The hermit turned his smile on the chaplain. “Excuse me, Father, if I tend to discount the testimony of priests who spend their days on secular concerns. I’m sure they mistook his meaning. I realize the saint expresses himself forcibly at times—and error must always be rebuked firmly, as our Lord showed when He drove the money-changers from the Temple—but when he has appeared to me, it has always been with a gentle face and a willingness to be my guide.”

  “Then I’ll tell this to the bishop,” said Joachim, rising to his feet. I was glad of the excuse to stand up as well; the damp moss on which I was sitting had started soaking through my trousers.

  After the chaplain and the hermit exchanged final expressions of esteem and reverence, we picked our way back down the steep path by the waterfall to where we had left the horses. I surreptitiously looked for footprints in the mud and saw none but our own.

  “Will this settle it?” I asked. “Will the priests who wanted the saint’s relics take the hermit’s word that the saint doesn’t want to leave?”

  “It depends on whether the bishop takes the hermit’s word for it,” said Joachim distractedly. He pulled the lunch out of his saddle bag and started eating, but not as though he tasted it. “Did you find the wood nymph, then?”

  “I found her and even tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t answer.”

  “That’s something else the bishop was worried about. He feels that it has been a mistake having both a saint’s shrine and a nymph share the same grove all these centuries. The modern Church needs to eradicate all remnants of superstition, and the uneducated may find it a stumbling block to their faith if they come to worship God and His saints and find themselves in the realm of a wood nymph.”

  “Especially one as lovely as she is,” I provided.

  Joachim gave me a quick look. “I think the bishop knows better than that,” he said, answering a question I had not directly asked. “There has never been the least doubt about the moral purity of this hermit—or any of his predecessors. But wood nymphs, as I understand it, are immortal, and thus they are outside of the human drama of sin and salvation.”

  And so, I thought, was whatever had made that footprint.

  Joachim hesitated for a moment before continuing. “I’ve mentioned before,” he said at last, “that the bishop is very uneasy about my friendship with a wizard. But I wrote him that, in this case, it could be advantageous to have access to someone who might be able to influence a nymph. Therefore,” with a sideways glance from his enormous eyes, “I do hope you can do something.”

  I said nothing for a moment but thought about this. The bishop seemed to have issued the chaplain a veiled threat: either I proved my ability and willingness to help the church, or else the bishop would pressure Joachim to end our friendship. I thought of suggesting that, if the bishop became angry with him, then he could stop worrying about being asked to join the cathedral chapter, but decided this would push him too far.

  Instead I said, “I’ll try my best, but it may be hard if the nymph won’t even talk to me. I’ll want to consult my books, back at the royal castle, perhaps talk to my predecessor about her, and maybe even telephone the wizards’ school. They don’t want young wizards calling them up with every little problem, but if my books don’t give me much help I may have no choice.”

  Joachim had started to mount his horse, but he seemed to hear something in my voice I had not meant him to hear. He swung back down and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of the need to get back to the count’s castle, to send the bishop a message by the pigeons immediately. But he can wait a little while longer. What’s really bothering you about the wood nymph?”

  “It’s not the nymph,” I said. “It’s something else I saw.” And I told him about the horned rabbits, the footprint that was almost, but not quite, a man’s, and the strange sense of renegade spells lurking amid the magic of the valley.

  “So I know now the horned rabbits aren’t creatures from the land of wild magic,” I finished. “It looks as though someone took dead rabbits, attached sheep’s horns, and then, I don’t know how, brought them back to life. Some wizard must have made them. But my predecessor and I are the only wizards in the kingdom.”

  “Do you think the old wizard’s practicing black magic?” asked Joachim quietly.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said in despair. “I’ll have to go talk to him at once. He would have been almost the last person I’d suspect of dealing with the powers of darkness, but if he’s able to create life he’s gotten supernatural help from somewhere.”

  Joachim nodded thoughtfully. “That’s the shortcoming of wizardry, isn’t it. Because it’s a natural power, you can’t use unaided magic to alter the earth’s natural cycle of birth and death.”

  “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 all of us that he wanted to spend more time on his research. Maybe this is what he’s been researching.”

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

  “Do you want me to talk to him?”

  I actually considered this for a moment. It was certainly appealing to contemplate someone else, other than me, going down to the little green house at the edge of the woods t
o confront my cantankerous predecessor. But he had never liked Joachim; “young whipper-snapper” was about his most flattering term for the chaplain.

  “I’m afraid he wouldn’t say anything to you,” I said. “It will 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 underway.”

  We had ridden only a short distance down the valley when a young man suddenly ran out from behind the trees toward us. Between the nymph and the great horned 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 only 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 tell 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 from a wary 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 Eusebius’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 valley, I could see him and the other ragged young men talking excitedly.