This was all Dominic’s fault, I thought, though I wasn’t going to say so. If he hadn’t been willing to accept a cut of the profits, he would have turned these entrepreneurs out of the kingdom long before the saint decided he had to leave.
Twice while we waited, the thin priest said, “Well, since that mystery is solved—” but the hermit always silenced him with a smile.
The apprentice was back at last, tired and sober. “No one was there,” he said. “But I wrote a message on a piece of paper I ripped out of the back of a booklet on the life of Saint Eusebius.” I myself would have wondered if it was sacrilegious to do so; that the apprentice had not hesitated told me more than anything he had already said of his real attitude toward the entrepreneurs.
“I left it at the booth,” he went on, “weighted down with a figurine of a dragon. They must be nearby, though they didn’t answer when I called.”
“And what did you say in your message?” asked the round priest.
“I told them that we had all sinned against God and that this enterprise must be ended at once.”
“Come here, my son,” said the hermit. “You have indeed sinned, but God will wipe away the tears of the truly repentant.” He blessed him and gave all his apprentices the kiss of the peace, while the priests from the city fidgeted.
“I think now,” the hermit said, still smiling, “that there can be no question of removing Saint Eusebius from the grove where he himself served God and where hermits have served that same Lord ever since.”
“We shall see,” said the round priest in notes of self-importance.
The three priests from the city, accompanied by Joachim, brought out candles and a censer and began arranging them around the shrine. They lit the candles, and the youngest priest began to swing the censer. The pungent smell of incense drifted through the grove.
The thin priest went down on his knees before the golden reliquary of the Holy Toe. “Oh, blessed Eusebius!” he called, as loudly as though the saint were up in the top of a tree with the wood nymph. “Listen to our prayers, we beseech thee! We seek to do thy will, in Christ’s name, but thy will has not yet been fully revealed to us. Show us a sign! Show us thy intention! Show us—”
A sharp crack rent the air, stopping the priest in mid-speech. I leaped up, convinced that the sound had been made by the monster, coming with its new mouth to eat us all.
But it was instead the sign the priest had asked for. A second later, thunder rolled across the cloudless sky, and we looked up to see smoke beginning to rise from the edge of the cliff. Lightning from heaven had set fire to the entrepreneurs’ windlass.
The thin priest, still on his knees, stared dumbfounded, as I’m sure I did as well. The Cranky Saint was beginning to be a little too active for my taste.
“I do hope those poor misguided souls had not invested too much in their figurines,” said the old hermit mildly.
Joachim appeared to be almost transfigured by the sight, and it took a minute for the three priests to recover their equilibrium. They did not seem to have expected anything this dramatic.
“This means—” blurted out the youngest priest.
But the thin priest silenced him at once. “It means the saint has listened to our poor prayers,” he said. “This has become a valley of sinful activities, of those who have perverted Christ’s pure purpose,” which seemed a little harsh on the apprentices, considering that the hermit had just forgiven them and promised them God’s forgiveness.
“Now that the sin has been rebuked,” added the round priest, “there can be no doubt that the saint will wish to leave for a more virtuous site.”
For a moment the old hermit looked stunned. “But the saint’s sign—” he began, almost pathetically.
“Wait,” I said suddenly. I had just thought of something. “You priests and hermits don’t want to start squabbling in front of a wizard about interpreting a saint’s intention.” I hoped the Cranky Saint would go along with this. “Once before, fifteen hundred years ago, priests from your city came to take the relic of the Holy Toe, and the saint revealed unambiguously his desire to remain. Test him again the same way!”
I stepped back, watching and waiting while they talked it over. The old hermit turned his smile full on me. The three priests brought out and lit more candles, then knelt in silent prayer for a moment. They then stepped up to the altar and all put their hands on the reliquary.
“Saint Eusebius, we wish to take thy holy relics with us, to honor them and serve thee devotedly,” said the thin priest. “Therefore we beg you to make your will explicit to us, your humble servants. We shall now most reverently lift your reliquary, and ask that you express your desire to accompany us by making the Golden Toe as light as a feather in our hands. In the name of the Father, and of—”
As the thin priest spoke, all three began to lift, but his voice faded as nothing happened. The reliquary remained as still as though nailed to the altar. It didn’t look as though today’s priests were having any better luck than their predecessors fifteen centuries earlier.
The thin priest bent down and looked at the base, as though suspecting a trick. “What’s with this? Let’s try it again,” he said in an undertone, not sounding pious at all.
“—and of the Son—” They gave another, more violent heave. The reliquary did not budge.
The old hermit stepped up beside them. “Let me see,” he said. He slipped one hand beneath the Golden Toe and lifted. It came up as light as a feather in his hand.
He set it back on the altar and turned to the priests. “Do you have your answer, my brothers?” he asked in genuine sweetness.
The round priest could not resist a last tug, mumbling “—and of the Holy Spirit!” but it was as ineffective as the first two.
Joachim cleared his throat. “The test has been clearly rendered,” he said. “The saint’s purpose may have been ambiguous before, but there can be no ambiguity now. Indeed—”
He stopped speaking and looked up. The sky above us darkened, and a swirling wind suddenly surrounded the grove. The air touched us, very lightly in spite of a force strong enough, I felt, to have lifted us from the ground. I would have expected the wind to smell of the trees and river, or even of the priests’ incense. But it smelled of neither, being instead of an almost overpowering sweetness, even sweeter than the king’s best roses.
I stared although I could see nothing beyond the valley itself, gripped by emotion that combined great fear with great joy. Just for a second, although I could never reconstruct the explanation afterwards, I knew I did not need to question what the saint had or had not done, and felt overcome with awe and humility.
In the middle of the wind, I heard a voice, a woman’s voice, high in the trees above us, and realized that it was the wood nymph. She called, “Eusebius!”
The echo of her voice murmured up and down the valley, and then the wind was gone as suddenly as it had came up. I felt a bump, mental rather than physical, as I fell back to myself out of the swirling air.
Joachim passed a hand over his brow. I knew how he felt. But the chaplain spoke calmly. “Indeed,” he said, continuing where he had left off, “we can no longer doubt the will of the saint. He wishes his relics to remain in this valley, where they have been since the day of his martyrdom. I am sorry you had such a long and difficult trip, my brothers.”
The priests’ eyes came back into focus, and they went from looking dreamy to looking highly irritated: with Joachim, with the hermit, with me, and most of all with the Cranky Saint. But there was little answer they could give. The youngest priest began blowing out the candles that had not been extinguished in the wind.
I glanced around the grove, mentally catching my breath, and suddenly realized who was missing. “Joachim,” I said, taking him by the arm, “where is he? Where is Evrard?”
“The other wizard?” said the youngest priest. “He went off in that direction a while ago.” He gestured vaguely, but there was no question of the dire
ction. He was motioning toward the cave.
PART EIGHT - THE MONSTER
I
I turned from the priests and began walking as fast as I could, cold with fear, toward the cave. I realized I had not seen Evrard since the leader of the apprentices had begun scaling the cliff.
He had wanted all along to try to catch the monster on his own. He must have taken advantage of the rest of us being distracted, first by the apprentices’ confession and then by the Cranky Saint, to slip away to the cave. If he thought I was being too deeply drawn into the affairs of the Church, then he might think it was his duty as a wizard to look for the monster without me.
Joachim caught up. There was no need to explain to him what had happened. “I’ve got the old wizard’s staff for light,” I said.
We reached the cave entrance and looked in. I did not sense the immediate presence of the monster, but there were fresh sooty marks on the limestone, showing that someone had come this way very recently with a torch.
I illuminated the silver ball on top of the staff, and we hurried, bent double, down the first stretch of tunnel and into the great chamber. I had no time to waste admiring the walls glinting like jewels in the light. I went immediately to the passage on the far side which the old wizard and I had taken. Lying on the cave floor, almost invisible among the gravel, was a pale line of kinked thread.
“He paid out the thread yesterday,” said Joachim, “and then wound it back up as we ran into each dead end.”
We hurried along the tunnel, the wizard’s staff tipped forward so that the silver ball showed the faint line of the thread we followed.
“Evrard!” I shouted inside my mind. “Where are you?”
I heard his answering mental voice at once. “I’m fine. I’ll see you shortly.”
I was only slightly reassured, and we hurried on. But in less than ten more minutes we saw a light flickering ahead of us that was not the light of my wizard’s staff, and Evrard came around the corner, carrying a torch.
“Sorry if I worried you,” he said, almost nonchalantly. “But with all that business about the saint, it didn’t seem as though I was needed. I just wanted to explore the cave a little more. By the way, Daimbert, I did find your magic marks. Did the Cranky Saint ever make it clear what he wanted to do?”
Joachim told him briefly what had happened, Evrard tidily winding the thread back up while we walked. I tried addressing him sternly, mind to mind, but he now had his thoughts well shielded. I shrugged and gave it up. We knew at any rate that the monster was still deep within the cave.
Back in the valley, the three priests were grumpily packing, preparing to go. There was no sign of the hermit or his apprentices.
“I think we’d better go too,” I said. “I need to get back to the royal castle, to bury my predecessor as quickly as possible.”
“It’s already late,” said Joachim. “We can’t possibly make it there tonight.”
“I am leaving this valley,” I said as distinctly as I could. “I can use the magic light to show our way after dark.”
The chaplain looked at me in assessment and shook his head. “You’re already exhausted, in body and in spirit. And even your magic staff won’t cast enough light for the horses. Let’s go to the duchess’s castle tonight, and on to the royal castle tomorrow.”
As we all rode down the valley, the wizard’s coffin strapped to the priests’ pack horse, I wondered uneasily if my desire to be free at last of the valley had distorted my judgment. I had stayed in the valley even when I knew my duty as a wizard was to go in search of the monster. Now I had a duty both to bury my predecessor at home and to catch the monster here, and my strongest drive was to get out the valley, not necessarily because it was the best choice, but because I had been unable to do so before.
I told myself that a saint who could summon lightning from a clear sky would not let a creature of magic and bone hurt those who served his shrine, that the monster might now wander aimlessly in the cave for weeks. But I also told myself that barring miracles, and miracles by their very nature could not be counted on, religion was primarily useful for dealing with the supernatural and the hereafter. The priests might try to explain to wizards the deep metaphysical significance of the forces of the material universe, but they always seemed to leave us with the full responsibility for dealing with those forces.
Evrard and I rode in front, and as we started up the steep road a tree branch before us suddenly dipped. For a second we saw the wood nymph, who smiled and gave us a cheerful wave before disappearing again among the leaves.
She had called the saint’s name as the wind had whirled around the shrine, and although I refused to speculate about whether that might mean she had a soul after all, I guessed that her old friend Eusebius had spoken to her at last.
At the top of the cliff, the wreckage of the booth and the windlass still sent thin plumes of smoke into the late afternoon air. As we approached, I was surprised to see the young man in the feathered cap. He and three others, whom I recognized as the men I had thought were pilgrims, were poking through the ashes. So far they had found half a dozen unbroken ceramic figurines.
The “pilgrims” stepped back rather self-consciously, but the young man looked up and gave his customary smile, in spite of the ruins of his plans—and, for that matter, of Dominic’s. “Greetings, Wizard,” he said to Evrard, ignoring the rest of us. “I know I told you I’d get back to you about your offer to come help us with your magic, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to start until later this summer, and maybe not this year at all.”
“Oh?” asked Evrard impassively.
“As you can see, we had a little accident. And the people who were sponsoring us seem to have pulled out. We aren’t going to be able to make our ‘overhead’ costs, much less any profit at this rate. We haven’t even quite made up our minds yet whether we should continue to try to set up here.” None of us were fooled by this comment. “But if we need a wizard for another project, we’ll be sure to keep you in mind!”
“Thank you,” said Evrard gravely. “Just remember my fee scale.” It was not until we were another quarter mile down the road that he began to laugh.
Shadows were long when we reached the duchess’s castle. So far, it appeared, no one there had married anyone, but both Dominic and Nimrod were still at the castle, neither apparently speaking to the other. Joachim hurried up to the pigeon loft to send the bishop his message, but the rest of sat down in the great hall in something of an exhausted daze.
Diana was mellower toward her wizard than I had expected. After she had set her constable to finding accommodations for all of us, she sat down to listen to his account of what had happened in the valley in the two days since she had left. Evrard told her most of the story, even though he had missed the Cranky Saint’s miraculous demonstration of his intention to stay at the grove and had gotten the details from Joachim and me. As for any information about the death of the old wizard, other than the bald fact that the monster had killed him, I had not told anyone and did not intend to.
I hardly heard their conversation, giving all my attention instead to hot soup and new bread and butter. But I did rouse myself at the end of the meal to address the duchess.
“My lady, do you think it would be possible for you to send some food on a regular basis to the hermit and his apprentices?”
Diana actually looked embarrassed. “Of course. I should have thought of that myself. The valley is surrounded by my duchy,” with a sharp look toward Dominic. “I’ll arrange for them to get fresh bread from my kitchens every week, starting tomorrow.”
When Evrard and I went up to the freshly repainted wizard’s room at the top of the duchess’s castle, I fell at once into exhausted sleep. But some time after midnight I awoke with a gasp, drenched with sweat and feeling my heart pounding with nightmare terror.
Listening to Evrard’s peaceful breathing, I tried to persuade myself that it was indeed only a nightmare, that Saint Eusebius, after
all that had happened, was unlikely now to send me a true vision.
Slowing my heart with long, deep breaths, I settled back down, but as soon as I closed my eyes against the room’s darkness I could see it again: the monster roaring, wide-mouthed, as it had when it had killed the old wizard, but this time, standing helpless before it, were all the people I loved in Yurt.
II
We buried the old wizard at the royal graveyard of Yurt late in the afternoon of the following day. Joachim read the service while the rest of us stood silently, including the priests of Saint Eusebius, who now threatened to become as cranky as their saint, and the duchess, with Dominic and Nimrod on either side of her.
They offered me the shovel to toss the first load of dirt onto the coffin. I was still young enough that even though I might fear violent death, I had no idea how I would react to the prospect of slowly growing old and weak. I couldn’t be sure what I might think in another two hundred years, but I hoped fervently I wouldn’t be tempted to try what my predecessor had.
The royal constable, who had nearly despaired of seeing any of us again after the knights of Yurt had come home with wild stories of the monster and of the duchess’s two suitors, had been overjoyed when we rode up to the castle. He promised to have the old wizard’s books and effects brought up to the castle in the next few days and to find a home for the calico cat.
Dominic fell into step beside me as we started back up the hill from the cemetery. I glanced at him in trepidation, wondering if I was going to be fired even before I had a chance to pursue the monster.
But the regent only seemed thoughtful. “Wizard, have you ever suddenly wished you could go somewhere and start over, leave all your problems and responsibilities behind, but discover you’ve said and done things which commit you far too deeply even to try?”
I felt a sudden and completely unprecedented burst of affection for the royal nephew. “I’m glad you understand,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “That’s exactly how I feel.”
The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Page 26