The Wood Nymph, the Cranky Saint

predecessors. But wood nymphs, as I understand it, are immortal, and thus they are outside of the human drama of sin and salvation.”

And so, I thought, was whatever had made that footprint.

Joachim hesitated for a moment before continuing. “I’ve mentioned before,” he said at last, “that the bishop is very uneasy about my friendship with a wizard. But I wrote him that, in this case, it could be advantageous to have access to someone who might be able to influence a nymph. Therefore,” with a sideways glance from his enormous eyes, “I do hope you can do something.”

I said nothing for a moment but thought about this. The bishop seemed to have issued the chaplain a veiled threat: either I proved my ability and willingness to help the church, or else the bishop would pressure Joachim to end our friendship. I thought of suggesting that, if the bishop became angry with him, then he could stop worrying about being asked to join the cathedral chapter, but decided this would push him too far.

Instead I said, “I’ll try my best, but it may be hard if the nymph won’t even talk to me. I’ll want to consult my books, back at the royal castle, perhaps talk to my predecessor about her, and maybe even telephone the wizards’ school. They don’t want young wizards calling them up with every little problem, but if my books don’t give me much help I may have no choice.”

Joachim had started to mount his horse, but he seemed to hear something in my voice I had not meant him to hear. He swung back down and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of the need to get back to the count’s castle, to send the bishop a message by the pigeons immediately. But he can wait a little while longer. What’s really bothering you about the wood nymph?”

“It’s not the nymph,” I said. “It’s something else I saw.” And I told him about the horned rabbits, the footprint that was almost, but not quite, a man’s, and the strange sense of renegade spells lurking amid the magic of the valley.

“So I know now the horned rabbits aren’t creatures from the land of wild magic,” I finished. “It looks as though someone took dead rabbits, attached sheep’s horns, and then, I don’t know how, brought them back to life. Some wizard must have made them. But my predecessor and I are the only wizards in the kingdom.”

“Do you think the old wizard’s practicing black magic?” asked Joachim quietly.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said in despair. “I’ll have to go talk to him at once. He would have been almost the last person I’d suspect of dealing with the powers of darkness, but if he’s able to create life he’s gotten supernatural help from somewhere.”

Joachim nodded thoughtfully. “That’s the shortcoming of wizardry, isn’t it. Because it’s a natural power, you can’t use unaided magic to alter the earth’s natural cycle of birth and death.”

“But why would he do it?” I burst out. “He’s retired, he doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone any more.”

“When he decided to retire, back before you came to Yurt, he told all of us that he wanted to spend more time on his research. Maybe this is what he’s been researching.”

“I still can’t understand it,” I said gloomily, catching Joachim’s intense gaze for a second and looking away again. “He knows as well as anyone the perils of dealing with the forces of evil.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

I actually considered this for a moment. It was certainly appealing to contemplate someone else, other than me, going down to the little green house at the edge of the woods to confront my cantankerous predecessor. But he had never liked Joachim; “young whipper-snapper” was about his most flattering term for the chaplain.

“I’m afraid he wouldn’t say anything to you,” I said. “It will have to be me.”

“But isn’t it my duty, as royal chaplain, to talk to someone who might be imperiling his soul?”

This was the difficulty of having a conversation with Joachim. Sooner or later I always ran up against the fact that he was a priest. I shook my head. “This is a magical problem.”

“Then let’s get underway.”

We had ridden only a short distance down the valley when a young man suddenly ran out from behind the trees toward us. Between the nymph and the great horned rabbits, my ability to see sudden motion without jerking convulsively was limited.

Joachim, however, reined in and turned calmly toward the young man. “What is it, my son?”

He was very young, not much more than a boy. His head was shaved, and he wore only scraps of rough dark cloth, held together by safety pins. He dropped on his knees before the chaplain, holding up clasped hands. “Oh, Father, please forgive me, and please tell me. Are you going to take our holy master from us?”

“The hermit?” said Joachim in surprise. “I have no intention of taking him from you. Why did you think I might?”

The young man flushed but pushed on determinedly. I noticed, back under the trees near the stone huts, several others with shaved heads watching from a wary distance. “Ever since those people built their booth at the top of the cliff, we’ve feared that someone from the cathedral would be here sooner or later,” he said breathlessly.

“At least for now,” said the chaplain gently, “I see no reason why the hermit should leave Saint Eusebius’s shrine, at least until God summons him home.”

The boy’s face was transformed by a sudden smile. “Thank you, thank you!” He jumped up and ran like a deer back into the trees. As we turned back down the valley, I could see him and the other ragged young men talking excitedly.

Apprentice hermits, I thought. Wizards too used to be trained as apprentices. It would have been hard enough being trained under my predecessor; these young men’s apprenticeship must be made even more difficult by the fact that a hermit rarely speaks to anyone, including his apprentices.

Joachim suddenly seemed to remember he was in a hurry to send the bishop a message. He slapped his legs against his horse’s flanks, and in a moment the apprentices were far behind us. We rode at a trot until the road started the steep climb back up out of the valley.

“What do you think?” I asked as our horses slowed to a walk. “Is it just coincidence that the entrepreneurs decided to set up their booth at precisely the same time as somebody wrote the bishop to ask for Eusebius’s toe? And why do you think they don’t have their basket or their souvenirs ready yet?”

Joachim looked at me sharply, but the ghost of a smile was on his lips. “You have a suspicious mind,” he said. “I thought of it too. Since Eusebius is widely considered to be a, well, troublesome saint, one could suspect that those priests in the distant city thought the easiest way to get his relics was to be sure he became irritated with life in Yurt.”

“Do you suspect it?”

“I don’t know.” His dark eyes grew troubled. “According to the bishop, the priests were very positive that the saint wanted to move his relics to their city, yet the hermit here is equally positive that the saint wants to remain. The difficulty is that I don’t know which came first. Did Eusebius appear in a vision to the priests after these entrepreneurs decided to make money off him, and that’s why the priests have written the bishop now? Or did the priests first decide they wanted him and then tried to ensure by devious means that he’d be happy to go?”

“We’d better speak again to the man at the booth,” I said. “We’ll find out how recently they set up, and if they really plan to put in this elaborate basket-on-a-pulley contraption-it sounds horribly dangerous to me, I must say. If the talk of baskets and souvenirs is no more than talk, then we’ll know it’s only a facade, designed to make the saint angry.”

But when we reached the top and rode back along the rim of the valley, we did not see the man in the feathered cap. The sign on the empty booth still invited us to see the Holy Toe.

“I hope I can get my whole message to the bishop on a small enough piece of paper,” said Joachim.

II

We came over a rise and saw the count’s castle before us, its shadow stretching long over the grassy meadows around it. As soon as we were inside the walls, the chaplain hurried up to the pigeon loft in the tower to send his message.