The Haunted Wizard - Wiz in Rhym-6 (27 page)

"That charm, I mean," Buckeye said. "There is no spell you can lay that can keep me from you, no warding circle I cannot cross, for you have bound me to you by the naming of magic." Matt closed the circle and wrapped up the packet of powder, tucking it back inside his pouch.

"You cannot keep me out." The bauchan sounded miffed by Matt's silence. "Not even ignoring me can fend me off, the more so as I know you hear."

Finally Matt turned to him, grinning. "Who said I was laying the warding circle against you?"

"What… ?" Buckeye stared, taken aback. "But—But— what else has beset you?" Then anger gathered.

"Does someone else wreak mischief upon you? Nay, tell me the name of that foul sprite!"

"Not on me," Matt corrected. "I do occasionally take the side of someone else who's being bullied, you know."

"Someone else?" Buckeye stared. "When you yourself are not hurt in any way?" The concept was clearly foreign to him.

"Even when it doesn't affect me at all." Matt frowned, thinking that over. "No, that's not true—I have the naive notion that anything that affects anybody else has some effect on me, too, no matter how small."

"Outrageous!" Buckeye struggled with the concept, and lost. "What a positively outlandish notion!"

"Well, at least you realize it's positive." Matt pointed to the rectory. "There's a good man inside there, a friar, and a fake druid has just popped up to plague him. He threw a fireball at Friar Gode this afternoon, and I'd like to make sure this Banalix can't hurt him again in any way."

"Banalix!" The bauchan's face wrinkled in disgust. "A false druid indeed!"
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"Oh?" Matt looked up with interest. "How do you know?"

"Och, I remember the true druids, mortal! Five hundred years ago and more, and they were the salt of the earth, the sap and the fruit and the branch of the forest, and the forest of them! They treated me with the reverence that was my due, as they treated all the spirits! But they are gone, alas, except for the few left in that isle off the western shore—gone, and only you milk-blooded folk in their place, who idolize the plow and try to deny the forest!"

"Well, fanning does provide more food, and thereby keeps more of us alive." Matt spoke bravely, but he shivered inside at the thought of talking to a creature who was five hundred years old. He clung to the one fact that offered some promise. "You've heard of Banalix, then?"

"Of course! Would I let something so obscene as a false druid slip by me? He is bound for the oldest oak in the center of the woods this minute, for he has spread word through the village that all the folk who wish to bring the Old Faith to life again may meet him there!" Matt just stared at him for a minute—two minutes, four.

Buckeye actually grew nervous. "Wizard? Have I hit upon words that can turn you to stone?"

"No, I'm attuned to a completely different kind of rock," Matt told him. "You know, I was just going out for an evening stroll before bedtime anyway. Which way did you say this old oak was?"

Mama and Papa woke with the sun and were on the road early, but the peasants were already in the fields. The couple left the village, following the track, talking happily with one another, for it was a beautiful morning and they were both feeling at peace with nature.

Just beyond the village, though, the road crossed a small river. There was a ford, the water only two feet deep and the riverbed floored with extra stones to give a firm footing for crossing—but at the moment the women of the village had gathered there to do their laundry. There was a cheerful hubbub of talk as they lathered the fabric with soap and scrubbed it on the rocks.

"Washing day! What a happy chance!" Mama cried.

Papa frowned. "For what?"

"For gossip! Quickly, Ramon, give me the shirt off your back!"

"Always and willingly, my love," Papa sighed. He shrugged out of the shirt, pulled his vest back on, and stepped aside into the trees. "I assume it would be just as well if I were not seen."

"You are so understanding." Mama stretched up to kiss him on the cheek. Then she turned away, singing a little song, and Papa faded back under the leaves, watching.

As she came up to the ford, silence fell, and the women looked up at her.

"Good morning," Mama told them cheerfully. "This is fortunate—I have been wondering how I should wash my husband's shirt when we are traveling every day."

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"Travelers?" A young woman looked up with keen interest "Be still, Meg," an older woman snapped, and the girl turned away, reddening. The older woman said to Mama, with a little frown, "You are of Merovence, by your speech."

"Of Merovence, yes," Mama said, kneeling down and taking off her pack. "We have lived there for three years. But we came from much farther away, to the west."

"Ibile?" Meg looked up, eyes wide with excitement.

"Theirs is my native tongue," Mama hedged.

"She has come a long way, Judy," another woman said.

"Very long." Mama wet the cloth and the soap.

"What could have brought you so far?" a fourth woman asked.

"This is not the safest of times," Judy added.

"Indeed not, with the poor queen locked up in her castle!" Mama said indignantly. "But when my husband's father was young, he was a footman at the castle of Petronille's father, the old Prince of the Pykta, and would never forgive Ramon if he did not go to deliver what help he could."

"A noble thought, Alys," Judy said.

"Aye," Alys answered, "but a foolish one, for her husband has come too late to be the queen's soldier."

"Why would he bring you with him on so perilous a journey?" a grandmother asked, frowning. Mama gave her a dazzling smile. "You do not think I would let him go without me, do you?" She turned back to rub soap into the shirt. "Besides, our son is grown, and I waste away at home."

"You are young to have a grown son!" a fifth woman exclaimed, staring. Mama gave her a wink. "It is more a matter of washing the skin every day, and staying out of the sunlight whenever you can."

"Only the one son?" The grandmother spoke in tones of pity.

"Only the one child," Mama sighed. "We wished for more, but God gives as He gives, and Heaven knows I am grateful that He gave me my Matthew!"

"Indeed, each child is a blessing." The older woman looked smug. "I have five."

"And your husband still lives, Jane," Alys reminded her.

"We're all blessed in that, especially with another war just rolled past us."

"I have heard it was your queen who brought that war," Mama said, frowning. "I could not believe it."
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"As you should not!" Jane exclaimed indignantly. "Was it Queen Petronille who took one lover after another? Was it she who tried to deny her second son his heritage?"

"The Pykta was her birthright," Judy maintained. "By what right did the king give it to his youngest?"

"Aye," Jane agreed. "Any woman would be right in taking any measures she could, to defend her child so!"

"And punish so wayward a husband," Alys said darkly.

Meg only listened, eyes wide.

Mama could almost see her revising her ideas about marital love, and interjected quickly, "Did Petronille lend no fuel to the quarrel? I have heard she has a sharp tongue." Had heard that tongue's sharpness herself, in fact, but she didn't say so.

"A queen should have a sharp tongue, if her husband seeks to lord it over her!" the grandmother said stoutly.

"We are poor, defenseless creatures," Judy said, "and must try to make our way through this world in any way we can."

"I cannot agree to so sweeping a statement," Mama said. "I have heard her sons were lacking in chivalry, except for Brion"

The women exchanged glances. The grandmother said, "I have never thought it good to lavish praise on one child, and tell all the others that they should seek to be like the favored one."

"It is true," Alys said. "She did make Brion most obviously her favorite, paying little attention to Gaheris and almost none to John."

"Who can blame her for that," Judy argued, "when the eldest is so odious, and the youngest such a horrid little man?"

"Perhaps they would not have been," said the grandmother, "if she had given them more love."

"It was amazing she gave as much as she did to Brion," Judy countered, "considering that her husband was forever dragging her all about the realm, and off to the Pykta or Deintenir with no warning. It was all she could do to bring one lad with her!"

"The others were safer here at home, in Dunlimon Castle," Alys agreed. Meg, listening wide-eyed, shivered at the thought. "To be separated from her babes for so long!"

"They had excellent nurses," Judy told her.

"Still, she might have let them take turns accompanying her," the grandmother pointed out. "She is skilled in healing, after all—surely she must have some notion of the hurts given the heart!"

"She is a wise woman, not a witch," Alys said scornfully, "a healer, not a sorceress."
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"Could not a woman so skilled heal also her sons' hearts?" the grandmother countered.

"There are skills, and there are other skills," Mama said. "Skill with herbs does not mean a woman has the skill to read the hurts that do not show."

"There is some truth to that," the grandmother admitted. "Still, she is supposed to be so very adept, even in elf-lore and spirit-lore, that I should think she would be skilled in the matters of human spirits while they are still within their bodies."

"Or perhaps out of them," Judy said darkly.

The women fell quiet, and the grandmother looked up, frowning. "What rumor have you heard that we have not?"

Judy glanced about, as though to make sure no spirits were listening, then whispered, "I went to the wise woman yesterday, for her potion to ease my monthly pain—and she told me that Prince Brion was not quite dead when the marshal left him under guard on the battlefield. She said that it was Queen Petronille's men who stole him away, and that when the battle was done, she fanned the coal of his life to a flame."

"Surely you do not mean that she was so skilled a healer that she could raise the dead!" Mama exclaimed—but also in a whisper.

"She said the prince was not quite dead," the grandmother snapped.

"Not fully dead," Judy agreed, "nor could the queen bring him fully to life. She sent his body secretly to the cathedral at Glastonbury, where he sleeps while he waits for a greater sorcerer to waken him." Half an hour later Mama was walking down the road toward the next town, telling all the gossip to Papa, who seemed somewhat dazed by it. He did manage to say, though, "Thus legends begin."

"And thus they grow," Mama agreed, "as they are passed from person to person." Papa smiled, amused. "Before long, they will have the sleeping Brion be waiting for love's first kiss to waken him."

"No doubt," Mama agreed, "at least, according to Rumor." Matt never knew where Buckeye had hidden his peasant's clothing. He only knew that he looked up toward a nightingale's song for half a minute, and when he turned back, the bauchan was wearing his disguise. Matt blinked, but knew better than to ask. Besides, it would probably gall Buckeye no end when he didn't.

An owl hooted almost overhead, making Matt jump, but when he looked up, he couldn't see any kind of bird anywhere. He shivered and walked a little faster, a little closer to Buckeye—he wasn't the only spirit abroad in the wood that night.

Then it occurred to Matt that the deeper they went, the nearer to primeval forest they came—the forest that had been there a thousand years, oaks that had harbored mistletoe for the original druids. He shivered again and stepped up right behind the bauchan, wishing for a little light. It occurred to him that if Buckeye really had a nasty sense of humor, the bauchan could just disappear and leave him stranded in
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the midnight forest.

Fortunately, the bauchan seemed to be planning on a more elaborate joke than that. He led Matt silently onward until suddenly the wood opened onto a broad clearing with a ghost floating at one end, surrounded by fairy lights. Ancestral superstitious fears yammered in Matt for a second before twentieth-century skepticism came to his rescue and made him look more closely. The fairy lights were of course only fireflies, and the "ghost" was a synthodruid in a white robe made luminous by moonlight, standing atop some sort of pedestal or platform, as dark as the huge old oak behind it. Matt stared—that certainly was a grandfather of a tree, at least five feet thick, its branches covering the whole far end of the clearing.

He scanned the rest of the open space, noticing there were fireflies all through it—then saw what else was there, with a nasty shock. Faces, scores of faces. Moonlight-scatter showed him their clothing, a darker mass beneath their faces. There was at least a quarter of the village there.

"A comforting sight, is it not?" Buckeye asked, grinning.

"For whom?" Matt demanded. "Belenos?"

"Is that what they would call the human who has organized and begun this travesty of the Old Faith?"

"I don't know." Matt turned to him with a frown. "What would you call him?"

" 'Your Majesty,' perhaps?" the bauchan suggested.

Matt stared, then said, "I very much doubt it."

But it did make sense, when he thought about it. The Church always had been the biggest single obstacle between the Crown and absolute tyranny—a counterpower that served as a restraint upon the despotism of a monarch. How more easily to remove that obstacle than to replace it with a religion of your own, securely under your control?