Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint- Wizard of Yurt - 2 (16 page)

I had almost decided we should start for the duchess’ castle before it became any later when I heard Evrard catch his breath. I turned my head very slowly.

She leaned against the pale trunk of a beech, as I had seen her before, her enormous violet eyes fixed on us but no expression on her face.

“Good day,” said Evrard tentatively, which drew no response.

But I began at once with the words of the Hidden Language. When I finished the spel I paused, watching her. Her expression altered like ice breaking up in the spring. She began to smile, a smile both delighted and delightful.

“The spel worked!” I thought and just managed not to say it out loud.

“Greetings, Wizards!” she said. “It’s been a lone time since a wizard has been here, much less two! Her eyes twinkled. “If I’m not mistaken, one of you is the new Royal Wizard of Yurt and the other, the new Ducal Wizard.”

“Greetings, Lady,” said Evrard, apparently perfectly at ease. “Daimbert has been Royal Wizard for two years, but he hasn’t had a chance to meet you before. I’m Evrard, the duchess’ wizard. I’ve just recently arrived in the kingdom.”

She turned swiftly, smiling at us over her shoulder, and stepped behind a trunk. When we folowed her a second later, we saw no one. But almost immediately a voice caled from the branches above. “Come up!’

I put together the flying spel and rose slowly upwards. Evrard bit his lip, frowned, and then folowed, without enough hesitation to make it worth commenting.

Forty feet up, a number of branches growing close together formed a hidden platform on which were spread rugs and cushions. Rustling green leaves formed a partial roof but from the platform one could also

look out and up, toward the magnificent crown of the tree, the white limestone cliffs of the valey, and the deep blue of the sky beyond.

The wood nymph was already seated in the green shadows. As we arrived, she held out a wooden bowl toward us. “Have some raspberries.” As she leaned toward us, offering the bowl, her hair fel over her shoulder and brushed my hand. It was just as soft as it looked. I almost expected the berries to vanish, but they stayed real and delicious al the way down my throat.

Evrard looked around thoughtfuly. “Is this al there is to your house?”

She smiled. “It’s al I need. It’s humans, not wood nymphs, who try to build and create.”

“What do you do when it rains?”

The nymph laughed, a charming sound like wind through the leaves. “I thought the necessary magic would be obvious to a wizard.” Evrard shook his head, almost blushing. “You live and breathe magic, Lady. We wizards have to learn it and I’m afraid I m stil learning. Have you lived here long?”

‘Tve lived here al my life,” she said with another smile. Even Evrard knew better than to ask her how long that had been.

m

We sat on her cushions, eating raspberries and drinking spring water, while the blue slowly faded from the sky far above us. Tiny breaths of wind fluttered the leaves and touched our faces as gently as a caress. The water—or maybe the wood nymph’s conversation—went to my head like fine wine. Sheltered as we were by branches above us and on either side, the broader world soon seemed very inconsequential.

The worrisome affairs of the duchess, Nimrod, and

Dominic shrank in importance, becoming something trivial they’d work out for themselves. It was clear that Saint Eusebius would never realy want to leave such a lovely place—I could have stayed here forever myself.

Trie nymph asked us questions about the royal castle of Yurt, listened to our answers with her ful attention, laughed approvingly at our jokes, and kept our water glasses ful. Her own wit kept us teasingly at bay and invited further confidences. Every movement was graceful, every look and word from her as sensuous as a sunwarmed breeze.

If I had not already been in love with the queen, I would have been in love at once. I tore my eyes away from the nymph long enough to look toward Evrard. He had never even met the queen and he didn’t have a chance.

With a start, I realized it was evening. I glanced upward to find that al the branches above us had lost their detail in darkness, and the sky beyond was only a somewhat lighter shade of gray. When I looked again toward Evrard and the wood nymph, they were invisible, hidden in shadows. I had been able to see perfectly until a glance upward, to the world outside of the nymph’s cozy nest, showed me that it was so dark I shouldn’t have been able to see for the last hour.

The nymph, too, knew it was late. I could hear her standing up. “Come see me again tomorrow,” she said, the smile clear in her voice.

We floated slowly down toward the ground. Evrard was silent as we groped our way through the grove and then, once free of the trees, lifted to fly over the waterfal towards our mares, slightly paler gray shapes in the darkness. As we mounted, he gave a long, contented sigh. “She wants us to see her again tomorrow. I’d like to see her every day of my life.”

“You can’t bind yourself to a wood nymph,” I said reprovingly. “She’l live forever or at least for many more centuries, whereas a wizard isn’t good for more than two or three hundred years. And you know wizards don’t marry, anyway.”

Evrard’s laugh came out of the darkness. “You’re being a schoolteacher again, Daimbert.”

He was right but, at the moment, I was more concerned about our horses’ footing. My mare stopped, unwiling to go further on the uneven trail. I was not even sure we were stil on the trail. I looked toward the sky, a slice of stars between the darkness of the cliffs.

“We need a light,” I said. What we realy needed was a magic lantern. I tried lighting up my mare’s bit and bridle, which worked quite nicely to light up the path, but made her jerk her head so violently tnat I ended the spel at once.

“How far is it to the duchess’ castle?” Evrard asked. “Do you think we’l be able to make it?”

I had been wondering the same thing. “Her castle must be nearly ten miles from here and the old count’s isn’t much closer. I think we’d better stay here.”

“How about going back to the nymph’s tree?”

I’d known he’d suggest that. “We can’t very wel impose on her. Besides, I don’t want to grope around the grove, trying to find her. It was confusing enough in daylight.” Evrard gave another happy sigh. I realized with a shock that I had no clear idea what we and the nymph had discussed for the hours we had been in her tree, only the warm feeling that it had been a delightful conversation. If my purpose in coming to the valey was to persuade her to leave the Holy Grove, I was no closer to doing so than I had been before—in fact further, because I had as little wish as Evrard did to see her leave Yurt.

From the corner of my eye, I suddenly thought I saw a flash of light. There was a faint whispering sound that was not the whispering of the leaves. I probed quickly with magic and found several people moving toward us. After a startled second I remembered: the old hermit’s apprentices.

The young men approached us, carrying a torch. One stepped out of the shadows next to my mare, making her jerk hard against the bit. The torchlight gave his badly shaved head the unreal quality of something out of a bad dream. But his voice was both polite and frightened.

“Excuse me, Father, but we heard your voices. Has something happened to the hermit?”

I realized he must think I was Joachim. “I’m not the Royal Chaplain,” I said, “but the wizard who was with him when we saw you before. I’ve come to the valey with another wizard on a different mission entirely. As far as I know, no one is planning to take your master away from here.”

There was a pause and one of the other apprentices whispered something. “It’s the wood nymph, isn’t it?” said the apprentice who had already spoken.

“What do you know about the wood nymph?” I asked quickly. But he shook his head without answering.

“Is there somewhere near we could stay tonightr Evrard put in suddenly.

This seemed to delight the apprentices. Al of them stared at us for a second and then began to grin. “Hospitality,” said the one who appeared to be their leader. ‘We’ve had very little opportunity to practice hospitality and, yet, that is a duty of the solitary hermit. You can stay in our huts with us!”

The stone huts had never looked very appealing, but they had to be better than sleeping in the open. The apprentices lit our way with their torches.

I thought of saying, “Wel done, young wizard,” to Evrard but decided I had already sounded like a schoolteacher enough for one day. “Good work,” I said instead. “But don’t let them see any satisfied smirks if we talk to them about the nymph. We shouldn’t shock their chaste sensibilities.”

From the single blanket rol in the corner of the one-roomed hut, I assumed that only one of the apprentices lived here, probably the one who served as leader. Each of them must have his own hut in which to practice living in isolation. It didn’t look as though being an apprentice hermit was anywhere near as entertaining as being a student wizard.

Al five of the apprentices crowded in with us. “We need food for our guests,” said our host and two disappeared into the night. In a minute they returned with some lettuces, an earthenware jug of goat’s milk, and rather stale pieces of bread.

The wood nymph’s raspberries, highly satisfying while we were eating them, now seemed to have made no impact, and we ate hungrily. The dense bread wasn’t bad if eaten with enough lettuce and the goat’s milk was better than I had feared.

The apprentice hermits made a smal fire in the middle of the room and sat against the far wal from us, tugging their scraps of clothing around them as the evening air coming through the open doorway became cooler. I wondered where they had come from originaly and, if one of them eventualy replaced the hermit at the spring, what would happen to the rest.

“Have you ever seen the wood nymph?” Evrard asked conversationaly, brushing crumbs from his lap.

The apprentices glanced at and nudged each other for a moment, then one spoke who I thought had not spoken before—although they al looked very similar with their rags and shaved heads. “We’ve seen her,” he said slowly. “Up in the grove. I tried to talk to her once, but it was as though she didn’t even hear me.” Evrard and I gave each other quick, complacent glances.

“But our master, the hermit, often talks to her,” the apprentice continued. Evrard’s eyes became round with surprise and mine may have done the same. “He told us that only wizards can attract the wood nymph’s attention, unless she decides she wants to speak with

someone anyway. She likes to talk to him. I think—I think our master and the nymph talk about the saint.”

“Saint Eusebius?” I asked, managing not to refer to him as the Cranky Saint.

“The nymph knew the saint, you see,” the apprentice continued in a burst of confidence. “When Eusebius came to this valey fifteen hundred years ago—You did know that the saint was the first hermit at the Holy Grove, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Go on.” Maybe relations between the hermits of the Holy Grove and the wood nymph had been better al these years than I thought.

“When Saint Eusebius first came to this valey, the wood nymph was already here. I think her presence may at first have—bothered him, but our master has told us that she and the saint became friends and had many long conversations on spiritual issues. She had been a pagan, of course, but he was finaly able to convert her to Christianity.” Evrard frowned at me. My first thought was to find this highly unlikely, but then it occurred to me that, since I had no clear recolection myself of what Evrard and I had discussed with the nymph a very short time ago, someone else might decide after an afternoon with her that they had conversed on spiritual issues.

“Why does the hermit want to talk to her about the saint?” I asked. I was quite sure he had said nothing of this to Joachim.

The apprentices gave each other troubled frowns. “Maybe we shouldn t have said anything.”

“No, no,” I said reassuringly. “I’m sure it’s al for the best that you brought it up. My friend, the Royal Chaplain, specificaly asked me to try to find out more about the wood nymph. Why does your master talk to her about the saint?’

“He told me—” started one of the other apprentices uneasily. “He told me he needs her help! Saint Eusebius sometimes, wel, acts troublesome, and since she knew him when he was stil alive, our master has hoped ...”

He trailed off without finishing. If the old hermit felt this was an unsuitable topic to mention to the bishop’s representative, then his apprentices must have begun worrying that it could be a further reason to take their master away from them. It was rather ironic that these young men, dedicated to austere Christianity, thought it safe to express their fears to a couple of wizards, just because they knew we had no prim and fixed ideas about what was or wasn’t suitable behavior.

But in my attempt to assure them that I was Joachim’s friend, I may have started them wondering again if they should nave spoken at al. “Let’s be clear and open with each other,’ I said. “Neither I nor the Royal Chaplain thinks the old hermit should leave the grove, unless for some reason he decides to leave himself. But the chaplain is very concerned that the old hermit not be distracted from his prayer and contemplation.”

“No! No! Not at al! He’s not distracted at al! He’s a very holy hermit!” cried al the apprentice hermits together. ‘The wood nymph only comes to speak to him when he wants her to,’ added the one I assumed was the leader.

Joachim, I thought, might have trouble explaining this to the bishop but, if true, it certainly freed me from any responsibility of moving the nymph out of the grove.

“What have the hermit and the nymph decided about the Cranky Saint?” put in Evrard.

If they heard his flippant tone, they didn’t respond to it. Instead they al shook their heads. “He doesn’t tel us about their conversations. I think he believes we are not spiritualy ready.” Evrard shot me what I was afraid was a smirk, but I was able to ignore him.

“Have your master and the wood nymph discussed those entrepreneurs at the top of the cliff?” I asked.