The Christmas Chronicles (7 page)

At this Dasher grew alarmed. He stamped a hoof and snorted again. He rubbed Klaus with his glossy flank, as if trying to rally him. He caught Klaus’s gaze in his large, brown reindeer’s eyes, and to Klaus it seemed as if those eyes were urging him to do something. But what? He was
so tired. Impulsively he threw his arms around Dasher’s neck, his own eyes filling with sad and weary tears.

“Great heart,” he spoke low into the ear of the beast, “I feel my strength is gone. I feel I’m at the end of things. What shall I do?”

Now it happened that Dasher had been waiting through all these decades for Klaus to speak to him spirit to spirit. For though he was Anna’s deer, in truth he had been made for Klaus. And now that Klaus had finally spoken to him not as a man talks idly to a beast but as one soul seeks out another, Dasher was able at last to reply.

“Your strength is not gone, Klaus,” he said. “Indeed, the beginning of your true strength is about to come upon you.”

“Are you—are you
speaking
to me, old friend?” Klaus asked Dasher in amazement.

“I am,” Dasher said. “You have spoken to me as one soul to another. And that has unleashed the Magic. Cover your ears, O Man!” And then Dasher threw back his great antlered head and bugled as no reindeer had ever bugled before or ever has since. The sky rang with the immense sound as it echoed and re-echoed up into the Heavens. Then silence fell while Jupiter, Klaus’s Jovial star, beamed benevolently down on them.

“What will happen now?” Klaus asked in an awed whisper.

“Wait and see,” Dasher said. In the hush, the mountain, the man, and the reindeer, the very air, seemed poised for something—something even more extraordinary than Dasher finding speech at last. Klaus caught a scent in the air, clean and bracing.
Why, it’s peppermint,
he realized, and felt much better. Still he waited.

Then he heard the joyful sound of sleigh bells. He looked back down the track to see who was approaching. But the sound wasn’t coming from the track. Nor was it coming from anywhere on the shoulder of the mountain or from the valley below.

It was coming from above Klaus’s head.

He looked up in wonder, and this is what he saw: Coming fast from the north, cleaving the cold air in strict formation, were seven reindeer, six almost as large and deep-chested as Dasher; the seventh, a female, more dainty. And these reindeer were flying—not metaphorically, but really, truly flying. Swift as eagles, fast as racehorses, they galloped through a bank of cloud, and their antlers flashed in the moonlight as they scattered it in all directions. “I have seen many astonishing sights in my life,” Klaus reported years later, “but none to compare with that. They
were so fierce and alive, coming on like quicksilver, flashing across the sky. I shall never forget it.” And nor does anyone else who has had the privilege of seeing that sight.

One of the reindeer gripped a harness in its teeth, and it was the bells from this that Klaus was hearing. All alighted and pressed up against Dasher, as though to reacquaint themselves with him. “It has been long, brother,” Klaus heard one say. Dasher looked at Klaus and saw his deep bewilderment.

“We are not demons, Klaus, nor angels. We are reindeer, just as you see us. But we were awakened long ago for this very purpose. For the moment when your burden would prove too taxing. Harness us.”

And so, in a kind of dream, Klaus unhitched Dasher’s tack from the front of the sleigh and replaced it with the new harness. With Dasher in the lead, all eight reindeer stepped into their traces as one, and Klaus buckled them in. “Now get in the sleigh, Klaus, and hang on. For we,” Dasher shouted as all the reindeer pawed the snow, “are the Eight Flyers!” And just as Klaus found his seat in the sleigh—and not a split second too soon—the reindeer leapt into the air like arrows shot from a bow.

Klaus’s first flight was more glorious than any of us who have not ridden in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer can
ever know. After a few moments of initial vertigo and not knowing up from down, he took to flying in his sleigh as if he had been born to it, which of course he had. He exulted in the wind blowing through his hair and at the sight of the sleeping villages below and the wheeling stars above. And when he thought of how quickly he would be able to get his toys to the children now, and then when he thought that he could be let down to a roof rather than having to climb up to it, and then finally when he thought how quickly he would be back by Anna’s side, sheer joy bubbled up in him. “Hee, hee, hee!” he began. And then, “Ha, ha, ha!” he noted as he warmed to his theme. And then, finally, in his deep, rich bass, “Ho, ho, ho!” he laughed as he sailed through the roaring winter night.

Klaus was through with his deliveries so early on this astonishing Christmas Eve that he thought for once he would be able to get half a good night’s sleep. The Flyers landed the sleigh with a hiss of runners between his house and Dasher’s stable. “Thank you, Comet. Thank you, Vixen, my girl,” he said. “Thank you, Cupid and Donner and Prancer and Blitzen and Dancer.” He put a hand on Dasher’s neck. “And thank you, my old friend. What a night!”

“Good night, Klaus,” said Dasher. He yawned like a
cavern. “We’ll sleep under the pines tonight. Sort accommodations out in the morning.” And he trotted away with his brothers and sister.

Through the window Klaus saw a candle lit in their bedroom. He smiled to think how surprised Anna would be to see him home so early.

But when he got to his bedroom, what he saw at first was not Anna, but Father Goswin. He was sitting in a chair drawn up to their big bed, dressed in his church vestments and murmuring Latin. When Klaus entered the room, the priest looked up, and Klaus saw the tears on his face. Then he saw his beloved wife, small and still under the coverlet on the bed, her eyes closed. He did not understand. Anna was never still.

“I’m so sorry,” Father Goswin said. “I have administered the Last Rites.”

Klaus collapsed in a swoon.

Rolf Eckhof, of course, had fled long ago.

K
laus was dreaming. In his dream he was racing in a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer up a tremendously steep, shining Road of ice that ran straight and true, right into the sky. It was dawn, and as the sun rose, Klaus glimpsed above the gilded clouds a far, wintry country. There were parklands and mountains and a waterfall spilling through a hole in a frozen lake. In the midst of it all was a magnificent castle of green and silver and pearl.
I’m going home,
Klaus thought in his dream.
Home to Anna.

But the thought of Anna brought Klaus’s dream to a dark, abrupt end, as though all the light had suddenly been snatched from the world. He struggled to wake up. Sleep still clouded his memory, but he knew something terrible beyond calculation had happened, something to his beloved wife. And then suddenly, with a sickening shock, he remembered.

“Anna!” he called out in anguish before he even opened his eyes.

A familiar hand took his. A familiar voice said, “Yes, dear Klaus. I’m here. Merry Christmas!”

Klaus opened his eyes, and there she was. Anna, as real and warm and alive as ever. He sat bolt upright in bed, for that was where he was, and hugged her tight. Then he held her at arm’s length and looked at her in wonder. “Aren’t you dead, Anna?” he asked.

“Not anymore,” she said. “It’s best I not be, apparently.” Klaus looked as confused at this as you or I would have been. “Oh, I was dead. Killed by Rolf Eckhof’s herbs, which I was fool enough to put into my broth.”

“Last night, out on the mountain, I felt something,” Klaus said. “Something cold coming up from down here in the valley.”

“I think that must have been the hate and spite of poor Rolf Eckhof.”

“
Poor
Rolf Eckhof!” Klaus growled. “When I find him, I’ll stuff his herbs down his throat!”

“That’s how I felt, too, at first,” said Anna thoughtfully. “I wanted to tear him limb from limb after I died. Or at least haunt him. But then they talked to me, and, well, I don’t feel that way now.”

Klaus paid no attention. He sprang from the bed. “Where is he?” he roared, and glared around the bedroom as though Rolf Eckhof might be hiding behind a chest of drawers. (And it was lucky for Rolf Eckhof that he was not.) His hard carpenter’s hands were in fists and his gentle face was twisted with rage. “Where is Eckhof!?”

“Calm down, Klaus,” Anna said mildly.

“I
am
calm!” Klaus yelled. “Where are my boots?”

“No, Klaus,” said Anna, and took one of his fists and kissed it. “We don’t have to worry about any of that. Isn’t it lucky?”

“But he harmed you!” Klaus growled, though, to his annoyance, he found that Anna’s kiss had dissipated a good deal of his anger.

“He killed me dead,” she replied cheerfully and kissed
his other fist. And then she smiled dazzlingly at him. It was no good. The last vestige of the only real anger Klaus had ever felt in his life promptly deserted him. He took his wife in his arms. “Oh, Anna!” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here!” And he gave her a resounding kiss.

“Yes,” she said. “They decided that was better than taking you over. So I’m alive again now, good as new.”

“They?” Klaus asked.

“The ones who brought me back. The ones who laid you on our bed after you swooned. Which was very sweet of you to do.”

“But who are they?” Klaus asked.

“It’s time you met them.” She steered him to the bedroom door, opened it, and led him through.

Klaus was never sure later how to describe what greeted his eyes next. The rest of his and Anna’s house was mostly one all-purpose living room where they cooked and worked and drew chairs up to the fireplace. But at first he could find no trace of that room. Where was the cookstove? Where were the table and chairs, where the familiar hearth? Ah, there they were. He could just make them out scattered around the edges of a new room that had displaced and was at least three times larger than the old one.
“So for that Christmas Day,” Klaus reported later, “our house was bigger inside than it was outside.”

Right in the center of this new room was a beautiful round table surrounded by six chairs so tall and carven that they looked like thrones—Klaus could not help but admire the workmanship. Four of the chairs were occupied.

“We sent the priest home,” said one of the people sitting at the table. He was a tall man with a long sweeping beard and a kindly expression, and like the other three sitting with him, he glowed faintly. “He will not remember that we were here. He will recall only that he did something quite stupendously heroic to save Anna’s life.” He grinned affectionately at the thought of Father Goswin. “No doubt he will make a sermon of it, taking full credit. Sit down, Klaus, sit down. Yes, these thrones are meant for you and Anna!”

So Klaus and Anna sat shyly at the table and looked around at the others. Never had they been in such company!

“I am your namesake, Klaus,” said the man with the kindly face. “In my own country a thousand years ago I was called Nikolaos. Or as you would say, Nicholas.”

“
Saint
Nicholas,” said one of the other men at the table,
raising his finger. He was the color of burnished black walnut wood.

“A thousand years ago!” Klaus blurted out. “But how can that be?”

“Because he is dead, of course,” the burnished man said impatiently. “Or what you would call dead. We all are.”

“This is Saint Babukar,” Nicholas said. “He was one of the wise astrologers who sought and found the Holy Infant.”

Babukar stood and bowed to Klaus. “Here they call me Balthazar. They have never been to Africa, so I do not blame them.”

I have stumbled into a world of wonders
, thought Klaus.
A day ago I would not have believed a reindeer could talk. Or fly. And now I am in the company of Saints.

“I am Abigail,” said a quiet woman sitting on the other side of Nicholas.

“You will have heard of her,” Babukar said. “For she it was that when that son of a jackal—”

“Babukar!” cried Nicholas.

“Sorry.” Babukar rose and bowed again. “I meant to say, when that
innkeeper
would not give a room to the Holy Family, she it was who led them to the stable.” Anna looked at Abigail, and the Saint turned and held her gaze
for a moment. She radiated a compassion and empathy so intense that Anna felt a strong desire to tell her about the one sorrow lodged in her heart.
But no
, thought Anna,
that is not why they have come
.

“And this is Saint Farouk,” Nicholas said of a handsome man with jet-black hair and a neatly clipped beard. “He was a herder of sheep, the first to leave his flock and hasten to the stable when he heard the glad tidings.” Farouk rose, touched his fingers to his forehead and his breast, and then bowed with an elegant flourish. “The blessings of all Animal Creation be upon you,” he said.

“Now, Klaus,” Nicholas said, “like you, I know something about slipping gifts into houses late at night. And so I am head of this commission. We are called the Green Council, named for all that stays alive in the winter.”