Joachim shook his head. “As long as they do not impede the free access of the faithful to the Holy Grove and the saint’s relics, they’re not actually doing anything sinful. It’s shameful, of course, to be trying to make money from Saint Eusebius as though he were a two-headed calf at a fair, but it isn’t evil or even against church law. But if the saint was ‘fed up’ to begin with, this must make him furious.”
He shot me a quick, worried glance. “I’d assumed that we, the bishop and I, would try to persuade those priests two hundred miles away that they had no right to the saint’s holy relics. Now I’m not so sure. And it may be difficult to break that news to the hermit.”
As we rode, the sound of rushing water became louder and louder in front of us. We came around a corner to see a waterfall, white water splashing in the sunlight. Long grass and dark green ferns festooned the edges of the falls.
At the top of the falls I could see a small level area, dense with trees. Beyond the trees, the white cliff face rose abruptly. My eyes traveled up it to the top. That was where we had stood, looking down; the cliff appeared even higher and steeper from below than it had from above.
Looking to the right I was able to spot the steps that had been cut into the cliff for a quicker descent than we and the horses had taken. They were still little more than toeholds, in spite of the entrepreneurs’ “improvements.” Here, presumably, was where they were planning to set up a pulley and a basket to lower the pious if less agile pilgrim-and the adventurous tourist.
“If you don’t mind,” said Joachim, “I’d like to introduce you to the hermit. He and I will have a lot to discuss after that, but you might be interested in trying to find the wood nymph.”
We tied our horses’ reins to a branch and scrambled up a steep track at the side of the waterfall. At the top, the stream emerged from the dark shadow of a grove of trees. We continued along its edge, ducking our heads where the branches swung low. Here the water course widened into a swirling pool. In a few more yards, I saw what seemed to be a stone hut, like those we had seen further down the valley.
But I was more interested in the river. When Joachim had spoken of its source, I had visualized a spring where water gurgled up from the earth, and I was wondering how the river could carry so much water and so rapidly. I went a little further, with Joachim following, and then spotted the real source.
The river did not gurgle up from the earth but rather poured out of the face of the cliff. A cave mouth, only a few feet high but at least twenty feet broad, opened in the limestone, and the water boiled from it. A faint but steady wind accompanied the rushing river. After emerging and making a quick eddy under the branches of the grove, the water rushed over the edge of the falls and disappeared on down the valley.
“Has anyone ever gone into the cave to follow the river back further?” I asked. There seemed to be a low, damp ledge along one side of the river, along which it might be possible to walk or crawl.
“I don’t think so. The cave’s too small, and there’s too much water,” said Joachim absently. We walked back to the stone hut, and he went down on one knee before it, dropping his head reverently.
I saw then that it was not merely a hut, but that the side toward us contained a stone altar, only partially protected from the elements by protruding stone walls. Next to the rough wooden crucifix on the altar was a reliquary, a shining box where the saint’s relics would be kept. From where I stood, it looked as though it was made of pure gold. It was indubitably made in the shape of a giant toe.
I hung back, having no intention of going down on my knees before the preserved toe of a long-dead saint who had not even had the sense to ask a wizard for help against a dragon.
Joachim rose again after a minute. At the same time, I caught a flicker of motion in the shadows beyond the hut. I turned toward it quickly, hoping it was the great horned rabbit-or, even better, the wood nymph.
Instead it was an old man in a coarse brown robe that reached to his ankles. Below the robe, his feet were bare; I noticed that he himself had very large and horny toes.
This, then, was the hermit. My eyes had become adjusted to the dim light in the grove, and I could see that the hut, beyond the altar, would make an adequate shelter for someone who had deliberately given up comfort. The old hermit had a ropy beard that reached nearly to his knees and a beatific smile that he turned on both of us.
“Greetings, my son,” he said to me, and “Bless me, Father,” to Joachim and knelt before him.
Joachim blessed him in evident embarrassment and helped him back to his feet. “I should rather kneel to you, Father,” he said. “Priests who are busy with the sins and affairs of the world have much to learn from hermits whose days are spent in contemplation and prayer.”
The hermit looked at him more closely. “You’re the Royal Chaplain, aren’t you? I thought I recognized you.”
Joachim beckoned to me. “Let me present Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt and my close friend.”
Mollified at being called the chaplain’s close friend, I made the hermit the full formal bow, first the dipping of the head, then the wide-spread arms, finishing by dropping to both knees. I reassured myself that to kneel in this way to a living holy hermit, as a wizard might to a superior wizard or to his king, would not be a discredit to the position of institutionalized magic. Besides, Joachim looked pleased.
“Have you come to see the wood nymph?” the hermit asked me. I rose and met his eyes. I had somehow expected them to be distant and dreamy, but they were surprisingly sharp under long, shaggy eyebrows.
“That’s right,” I said, deciding not to worry him with the horned rabbit.
“It’s those poor souls up on the top of the cliff that are worrying you?” the hermit asked Joachim with another smile.
“That, and a letter the bishop has received.” I could hear the unease in the chaplain’s voice and realized that the hermit must not yet know that certain priests were insisting the Holy Toe be taken two hundred miles from his grove. Since I didn’t particularly want to be there when he received the news, I excused myself as they sat down on mossy stones beside the pool.
The area around the pool itself, next to the shrine, seemed an unlikely place to find a nymph, but the grove stretched further along the bottom of the cliff. I walked slowly on spongy soil, following slightly drier paths marked with rows of tiny white stones. Here there did seem to be several springs of the sort I had originally expected, sending smaller trickles of water to join the larger stream.
I picked my way across an especially muddy patch of ground and looked up. A young woman stood directly before me, carefully trimming dead twigs from a small tree.
It took only the briefest glance to realize that this was not some local village girl.
She turned toward me, but her face was perfectly still, with the intense beauty of a pastoral landscape. She leaned back against the pale trunk of a beech, one arm stretched above her head, and watched me with no apparent expression. Her only clothes were a few strategically placed leaves. Both her skin and her hair were dusky, the color of shadows deep within the woods, and her eyes a brilliant violet. Her unbound hair, which hung to her waist, looked incredibly soft.
“Excuse me,” I faltered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt. Are you the wood nymph of this grove?”
She moved her head slightly, neither nodding in affirmation nor denying it.
“I’d been hoping to meet you,” I pushed on. My heart began beating rapidly, and I felt much more flustered than I should have. Still she did not answer.
“Have you lived here long?” I asked inanely.
This time, she did more than not answer. She disappeared. One second she was standing before me, and the next she was gone. It seemed as though she might have slipped quickly around the tree, but when I looked there was no one behind it. I glanced up. Far above me, I saw for one second a motion that might have been the leaves on the tree or might have been a swift form among the branches.
I spent the next fifteen minutes walking through the grove, seeing all the little upwellings of water and all the smooth-trunked trees, but no more sign of the nymph.
I returned to where Joachim and the hermit were sitting. “But the saint often appears to me,” the hermit was saying to the chaplain with a pleasant smile. “I know some people have nicknamed him ‘the Cranky Saint,’ but I have always been blessed by seeing his gentle side. He came to this grove originally, as a young hermit, because he wanted to put the city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”
I continued past them, following the path back down along the waterfall to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints, or nymphs.
I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out the packet of lunch the count’s cook had prepared for us, not so much because I was hungry as because eating would give me time to consider.
