The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  I was about to protest, to tell her that if there was someone casting a powerful spell in this end of the kingdom then Evrard might need another wizard’s assistance, but I stopped myself in time. He should have a chance to show his new employer his abilities unimpeded. Besides, although I would have liked to put it off, I needed to talk to my predecessor as soon as possible.

  The count and countess thanked us for coming and waved from their gate as we all left their little castle. We had gone only a half mile, and Diana had just said she and Evrard would turn off the road in search of tracks, when she abruptly reined in. She started to speak, stopped, and merely pointed.

  A man was coming toward us on foot, walking easily with long strides. He wore a green cloak and had a heavy bow slung on his back. He would have looked entirely normal except for his height: he must have been over seven feet tall.

  I probed quickly with words of the Hidden Language, suspecting another magic creature. But there was nothing about him that suggested he was other than fully human.

  He continued toward us, his long blond hair blowing out behind him. Though his hair was unkempt, his beard was neatly trimmed. Ten feet short of the duchess’s horse, he stopped and went gracefully down on one knee.

  “Greetings, my lady. I hear you need a huntsman.” His voice was surprisingly cultured and very deep.

  The duchess looked flustered, which was surprising in her. “Where did you hear that?”

  He looked up and smiled. He had a slow smile that lit up his face like the sun. “It’s scarcely a secret that you’re trying to track some magic creatures. Horned rabbits, aren’t they?”

  “And you think you could help?” She almost sounded nervous, but not as though she felt any fear of this huntsman—rather, if it had been anyone but the duchess, I would have called it girlish shyness.

  He stood up and came over to her horse, where he faced her nearly at eye-level. “I’ve never failed as a hunter and tracker,” he said, still smiling. “Call me Nimrod.”

  “And Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord,” quoted Joachim in a low voice next to me.

  Diana studied him in silence for thirty seconds. “All right, Nimrod,” she said abruptly, almost triumphantly. “I’ll give you a chance to prove your ability. We’ve spotted the great horned rabbits several times. But we’ve never been able to catch one.”

  “Then let’s begin. I’ll leave you to place your huntsmen and your hounds.” He strode off purposefully toward the woods.

  “All right,” said the duchess. “Well, good-bye, and thanks again for your offer of help!” she added to me, then kicked her horse into motion. Evrard waved at us and galloped after her.

  Joachim and I looked at each other a moment in silence, then started up again for the long ride back to the royal castle. We had ridden a mile when Joachim asked, “Do you think he might have made the great horned rabbits himself?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It would take a wizard, and one wizard should always be able to recognize another. But he certainly seemed fully informed about them. Do you think the duchess already knew him?”

  “It seems unlikely,” said the chaplain. “After all, he had to tell her his name.”

  “I must say,” I answered slowly, “there seems to be a whole lot going on in this end of the kingdom that I don’t yet understand.”

  We had gotten a late start from the count’s castle, and the sun was setting by the time we came up the hill to the royal castle. In the courtyard, the staff was just finishing a volleyball game.

  “I think you should probably wait until morning to go see the old wizard,” said Joachim.

  “Of course,” I said, startled at the implication that I might not. I had no intention of going into a black forest, full of creatures composed of dead bones and magic life, to face a wizard who might be growing senile or might have sold his soul to the devil, or both.

  But the next morning saw me flying down the hill from the castle and into the woods below. In daylight, what I might find at the wizard’s cottage seemed at least slightly less terrifying than it had the night before.

  For a relatively brief distance, I was always happy to fly. The rush of air past my face was exhilarating, now that I had become good enough that I no longer had to give constant attention to my spells, and I liked the chance to show the old wizard that, even though I had been trained in the school he scorned, I was still perfectly competent. Not that he ever seemed fully convinced …

  I followed the brick road a few miles through the trees, gliding along five feet above it, turned off at a track marked by a little pile of white chalk, part of a giant protective pentagram the wizard had made for himself when he retired, and proceeded down his narrow green valley. As usual, an illusory lady and unicorn waited by a little bridge. The lady raised her sky-blue eyes to me as I passed over. Beyond, the wizard had a volley of magic arrows ready to repel the unwary, but the spell was tripped by someone walking down the valley floor, and no arrows bothered me today.

  Usually when I came to visit my predecessor, I found him sitting on a chair in front of his little green house, built under the spreading branches of an enormous oak. But today I saw no one, and the door was closed. I dropped to the ground, remembering guiltily that it had been several months since I had last come to visit.

  I thought again how strange it would be if someone who prided himself on being a wizard of light and air, who had even mocked me for the moon and stars on my belt buckle the first time I had met him, had descended into black magic.

  The wizard’s calico cat emerged from the long grass and pounced at my socks, making me jump. I squared my shoulders and raised my fist to knock at the door, expecting the old wizard to call for me to come in even before I had a chance to rap. Little happened in his valley of which he was unaware. But no voice called.

  I did knock then and had to wait several moments for an answer, even though I immediately heard a loud crash inside. But then the door opened, and the old wizard glared out at me.

  “It’s you,” he said, as though highly disappointed. Where I had been steeling myself to face someone deeply sunk in evil, I found only an irritable old man.

  “Excuse me, Master,” I said. “I don’t want to interrupt your experiments, but I need your wisdom and advice.” He was not in fact my master, but I had always called him that, feeling it was appropriate for his superior age and experience.

  “No wonder, being trained at that school,” the old wizard snapped. He seemed unusually brusque, even for him. I wondered briefly how the Cranky Saint would hold up against him in a contest of irritable natures.

  “I won’t keep you very long.” I glanced around surreptitiously, wondering how I could bring up the topic of the great horned rabbits. “But with your knowledge of the magic of earth and growing things, I thought you might be able to counsel me what do about the wood nymph.”

  To my surprise, his expression immediately softened. “The wood nymph,” he said with even a hint of a smile. “I haven’t seen her in years.”

  Emboldened by his mood change, I asked, “May I come in?”

  He scowled again at once, but then he nodded grudgingly. “You might as well.”

  I probed, very quickly, for supernatural influences, and did not find them. There was nothing about him, any more than there had been about Evrard, that indicated the use of black magic. He turned and I followed him inside, enormously relieved but still wary.

  I was shocked when I came through the green door into the cottage’s single room. Even though it had always been full of herbs, books, mortars and pestles, and piles of dishes, he had managed to preserve some semblance of order, and the floor had always been swept clean. Now mounds of decayed plant material were heaped on the floor and the furniture, amidst dirty crockery. There was an acrid smell to the place I could not identify. Shards of broken glass lay in front of the fireplace, the result, I guessed, of the crash I had heard. The calico cat sensibly refused to come in with me
.

  “Find a chair,” said the old wizard with a vague wave of his hand. The word “find” seemed well-chosen; it took a moment for me to identify which of the shapeless masses around me might be a chair at base. “I’m afraid the place has gotten a little messy.”

  I let this understatement pass and shifted a pile of dead leaves and a plate with the remains of what might once have been a fried egg. Having thus uncovered a chair, I pulled it up next to his rocking chair, the only piece of furniture not covered with debris.

  He sat down himself and arranged his long white beard over his lap. It seemed full of twigs and bits of food, at which he picked as he rocked. Even his ring, shaped like an eagle in flight, was dirty and tarnished. But nothing here suggested he had been using diabolical power to bring dead rabbits back to life.

  The old wizard had already been well past two hundred years old when he had abruptly decided to resign as Royal Wizard of Yurt. If he was starting to feel himself old and even incapable two years ago, when he moved down here from the castle, I wondered uneasily if his decline might have been accelerated by living alone, with no one to talk to besides his cat.

  He kicked half-heartedly at the broken glass and continued to rock in front of his cold hearth. He seemed willing to let the silence stretch out until I finally decided to break it myself. “I need your advice,” I began, “on how I might be able to shift the wood nymph out of her grove.” If I started with her, I might be able to work around to the rabbits—and whatever had made that inhuman footprint. “I gather she’s been there for generations. Is it even possible to shift a nymph?”

  The old wizard smiled, quite pleasantly for him. “Are you sure you want to move her? Leave her where she is, treat her gently and with dignity, and she may agree to come down out of her trees so you can see her.”

  “I did see her,” I said. “She was down from the trees at least for a moment, but when I tried to speak to her she disappeared at once, without saying anything.”

  “A nymph’s conversation takes time,” he answered, again with a reminiscent smile. “But it’s worth it in the end.” He leaned forward abruptly. “Why do you want to move her out of the grove anyway?”

  “Well,” I said uneasily, “the bishop had asked the royal chaplain to ask me what I could do. The church considers that grove a holy grove, and they don’t like having a nymph in it.”

  The old wizard stopped smiling and snorted as though thoroughly disgusted. “I thought I’d warned you about becoming too good friends with that chaplain. Why should you do errands for the Church anyway? They’ve always done their best to discredit wizardry, so we certainly don’t owe them any favors. Why should a wood nymph have to leave the grove where she’s always been happy, just because some bishop becomes fastidious about her proximity to an old hermit? Afraid she’s going to corrupt him, is that it?”

  I did not try to deny it. Clearly I would get no help from the old wizard here. I almost agreed with him anyway, and would have agreed completely if Joachim had not seemed so troubled.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Master,” I said hastily, trying to recover something from this conversation before he threw me out. “But I have another question for you. Some strange magic creatures have started appearing in the kingdom, and it looks as if they were made with wizardry.”

  “Strange magic creatures,” he interrupted with another snort, “and you, a supposedly competent wizard, can’t even deal with them yourself?”

  I pushed ahead. “I had merely hoped, since you’d been in Yurt so long, you might have seen something similar before and would have some suggestions. They look like rabbits, but big rabbits, and they have horns.”

  “Horned rabbits,” he said, looking at me thoughtfully. “So there are horned rabbits in the kingdom, and you don’t know what to do about them. I hope you weren’t going to accuse me of making something so silly. Unless you created them yourself, eh? I suggest you talk to your fancy school. An apprentice wizard in the old days wouldn’t have had these problems!”

  I expected in fact that an apprentice wizard of a century or two earlier would have had just as much trouble, but I didn’t say so. Rather, I decided I ought to leave before I did any more damage to our always rather dubious relationship.

  “And how many horned rabbits have you seen?” he asked as I stood up to go.

  “There are at least three of them.” I wondered if there had been great horned rabbits in Yurt before, or if the old wizard was just pleased to see me facing—certainly not for the first time!—a problem I didn’t know how to handle.

  The old wizard smiled grimly. “If you’ve got a renegade wizard here in the kingdom making horned rabbits—rabbits!—there may be a lot more before you’re through.”

  I left with this discouraging comment. As I flew back home, I thought that at least the old wizard himself didn’t seem to be creating great horned rabbits, or anything else at the moment, and certainly not with diabolical assistance. But that left me back at the beginning. Where had they come from, and why had they now appeared in Yurt?

  IV

  That evening, as I’d hoped, the telephone call came from the castle, halfway to the great City, where the queen’s parents lived, telling us that the royal party had arrived safely. Dominic himself spoke to the king, but standing at his side I could see the king with the queen and the baby prince behind him, tiny figures in the base of the glass telephone.

  “Yes, we’re all well,” said the king. “Any problems yet you can’t handle, Dominic?”

  The royal nephew and regent took this comment entirely seriously. “Nothing I can’t handle, sire.”

  I thought that, on the contrary, there was a great deal happening in Yurt over which Dominic had no control. I wondered if it could be pure coincidence that Nimrod and the great horned rabbits had both appeared in the kingdom at the very time the king left. I even wondered for a moment if Dominic himself might be responsible, if he had arranged for the kingdom to be invaded by magic creatures in the king’s absence to demonstrate his ability to deal with them.

  But this seemed a little far-fetched. There was no question, however, that Dominic was throwing himself into the role of royal regent. When we had reached home the day before, we had found him sitting on the throne in the great hall, gripping the arms and staring grimly at nothing in particular.

  Hearing from the king made everyone more cheerful, except for Joachim, who was still waiting to hear from the bishop. He had hoped that an answer to his message of the preceding day would be here when we reached the royal castle yesterday, but no pigeons had arrived. The cathedral had never put in a telephone, probably afraid that to do so would be a concession to the forces of institutionalized wizardry, and Joachim could do nothing but mutter about pigeons being lost or caught by hawks—all of which was quite possible—before going up to bed early.

  Perhaps the most cheerful person in the castle was Gwen, the assistant cook. She and I had been friends since I first arrived in Yurt, when she was still a kitchen-maid. Not only was she glad the royal family was safe, she was also pleased that they were at least temporarily out of the way. She and her husband, who played in the castle’s brass choir, were the only people in Yurt who did not consider the baby prince the most important person in the kingdom. That honor they gave to their own baby daughter.

  “I think she’s going to start crawling soon,” Gwen said to me. Her daughter was lying on a rug on the flagstone floor of the great hall. “Look at her kicking!”

  The little girl, four months younger than the royal prince, was indeed kicking with great enthusiasm and pride of accomplishment.

  I sat down on the floor next to her and patted her on her diapered bottom. She gave me a wide, toothless smile. “I like baby girls,” I said to Gwen. “She’s so full of energy; are you sure she isn’t going to get into trouble once she starts moving around?”

  Little Gwennie grabbed the hem of my trouser leg and tried to pull it toward her mouth. Gwen disengaged her.
“There is a lot she could crawl into in the kitchens—they’re much more dangerous than anything the little prince is likely to get into,” she added pointedly.

  We were interrupted at this point by Dominic coming toward us. I frequently had the uncomfortable feeling that, despite his silence and apparent slowness, he saw and recognized every one of my inadequacies—and probably a lot of inadequacies I didn’t even have. But he was also capable of surprising me by speaking to me on occasion as though he had no doubts of my competence.

  “It sounds as if the count and the duchess are having a great deal of trouble in their neighborhood these days,” he said as I scrambled to my feet, “what with great horned rabbits and a troublesome nymph.” I had of course given him a sketch of our trip as soon as we returned. From the stony look I had received then I was rather surprised how much of it he’d understood, even though he didn’t now mention the people trying to restrict access to the holy relics. “Do you think it would help if I rode over to that side of the kingdom tomorrow with a few knights?”

  “Not for several days, anyway,” I said. “Brute force won’t be any good against the nymph. If any of our knights are good trackers, however, I’m sure the duchess would appreciate their help tracking the horned rabbits.”

  Dominic considered, as though wondering again why his uncle the king had even taken me on in the first place. “And are you doing anything about these strange events?”

  “I’m checking what my books of magic have to say about such things,” I said with dignity. Since I had been meaning to get to my books very soon, I didn’t feel this was too great a prevarication.

  Unexpectedly, Dominic’s frown turned into a smile. “It was good to hear the royal family is well,” he said, “especially the little prince.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly, although somewhat surprised, since Joachim had felt Dominic might be jealous.

  “His hair is so light blond it’s almost white,” continued Dominic with a sentimental smile. “They tell me mine was just the same color when I was his age. Tell me, Wizard,” with a sudden sharp look, “have you ever thought of getting married?”