Belgarath the Sorcerer (35 page)

‘A
what
?'

‘Polgara wants a new dress.'

‘What's wrong with the one she's got?'

‘Just do it, Anrak, don't argue with me. Oh, she wants a comb and brush, too. The dressmaker should be able to tell you where to find them.'

He looked mournfully into his half-full tankard.

‘Now, Anrak.'

He sighed and went on out.

‘What's this all about?' Beldin asked me.

‘Polgara's had a change of heart. She doesn't want to look like an abandoned bird's nest any more.'

‘What brought that on?'

‘I haven't got any idea, and I'm not going to ask. If she wants to look like a girl instead of a haystack, that's up to her.'

‘You're in a peculiar humor.'

‘I know.' Then I jumped into the air and crowed exultantly.

We were all stunned when Polgara came into the room the next morning. The plain dress she wore was blue, of course. Pol almost always wears blue. Her long, dark hair was pulled back rather severely and tied at the nape of her neck. Now that she was clean, we saw that her skin was
very fair, much like her sister's, and she was startlingly beautiful. It was her manner, however, that took us all by surprise. Even at sixteen, Pol was as regal as any queen.

Riva and Anrak both rose to their feet and bowed to her. Then Anrak sighed lustily.

‘What's the matter?' his cousin asked him.

‘I think I've made a mistake.'

‘There's nothing new about that.'

‘I think I'm going to regret this one, though. I might have had a chance with Lady Polgara if I'd pressed the issue. The Vale's pretty isolated, so she didn't have any other suitors. I'm afraid it's too late now, though. As soon as we get her to Riva, every young man on the Isle's going to pay court to her.'

Pol gave him a warm look.

‘Why did you let her get away?' Riva asked him.

‘You saw how she looked yesterday, didn't you?'

‘No, not really. I had my mind on other things.'

Beldaran blushed. They'd
both
had their minds on other things.

‘Please don't be offended, Lady Polgara,' Anrak said to my eldest daughter.

‘Not at all, Anrak,' she replied. She seemed quite taken with the idea of being called, ‘Lady Polgara.' Just about everybody in the world calls her that now, but I think she still gets a warm glow every time she hears it.

‘Well,' Anrak said, choosing his words carefully, ‘Lady Polgara was just a little indifferent to appearances when I first saw her. I think she's a sorceress - like her father. Of course, he's a sorcerer, not a sorceress, but you know what I mean. Anyway, all sorcerers are very deep, you know, and she'd probably been thinking about something for several million years, and -'

‘I'm only sixteen, Anrak,' Pol corrected him gently.

‘Well, yes, I know, but time doesn't mean the same thing to you people as it does to us. You can make time stop and start again any time you want, can't you?'

‘Can we do that, father?' she asked me with some curiosity.

‘I don't know.' I looked at Beldin. ‘Can we?'

‘Well, theoretically, I suppose,' he replied. ‘Belmakor and I discussed the possibility once, but we decided that it wouldn't be a good idea. You might get time all mixed up - one time in one place and a different time in another. It'd probably be very hard to get it all put back together right again, and you couldn't just leave it that way.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you'd be in two places at the same time.'

‘What's wrong with that?'

‘It'd be a paradox, Belgarath. Belmakor and I weren't sure what that might do to the universe - rip it to pieces, maybe, or just make it vanish.'

‘It wouldn't do that.'

‘I wasn't going to try it to find out.'

‘You see what I mean about how deep these people are?' Anrak said to his cousin. ‘Anyway, the Lady Polgara had flown up into a tree, and she was doing sorceress things. I sort of suggested that I might consider marrying her - since her sister was going to marry you, and twins always like to do things together. She didn't think too much of the idea, I guess, so I didn't press the issue. To be honest about it, she wasn't very tidy when I first saw her.' He stopped, looking at Pol with a certain consternation.

‘I was in disguise, Anrak,' she helped him out.

‘Really? Why was that?'

‘It was one of those sorceress things you mentioned.'

‘Oh, one of those. It was a very good disguise, Lady Polgara. You were an absolute mess.'

‘I wouldn't push that too much further, Anrak,' Beldaran advised. ‘Why don't we have some breakfast and start packing instead? I really want to see my new home.'

We set sail later on that same day, and we arrived at Riva's city two days afterward. His people were all down at the beach waiting for us - well, for Beldaran, actually. I
don't imagine that the Rivans were very interested in looking at Beldin and me, but they
really
wanted to get a look at their new queen. Riva hovered protectively over her. He didn't want anybody admiring her
too
much.

I'm sure they got his point - at least where Beldaran was concerned. There were other things to be admired, however.

‘You'd better get yourself a club,' Beldin muttered to me.

‘What?'

‘A club, Belgarath - a stout stick with a big end.'

‘What do I need with a club?'

‘Use your eyes, Belgarath. Take a long, hard look at Polgara, and then look at the faces of all those young Alorns standing on the beach. Believe me, you're going to need a club.'

I didn't, exactly, but I made a special point of not letting Pol out of my sight while we were on the Isle of the Winds. I suspect that I might have been more comfortable if Pol had held off on emerging from her cocoon for a while. I was proud of her, of course, but her altered appearance made me
very
nervous. She was young and inexperienced, and the young men on the Isle were obviously very much taken with her.

My strategy was quite simple. I sat in plain view and scowled. I was wearing one of those ridiculous white robes people are always trying to foist off on me, and I carried a long staff - much as I had in Arendia and Tolnedra. I had quite a reputation among Alorns, and those absurd trappings enhanced it and got my point across. The young Rivans were polite and attentive - which was fine. But they didn't try to lure Polgara off into dark corners - which
wouldn't
have been.

Pol, of course, was having the time of her life. She didn't exactly
encourage
that crowd of suitors, but she smiled a great deal and even laughed now and then. It's a cruel thing to suggest, but I suspect that she even enjoyed the fact that young Rivan girls frequently left the room where
she was holding court so that they could go someplace private. Gnawing on your own liver isn't the sort of thing you want to do in public.

We'd been in the Hall of the Rivan King for about a week when a fleet of Cherek war-boats sailed into the harbor. The other Alorn kings had arrived for Riva's wedding.

It was good to see Cherek and his sons again, although we didn't really have much chance to talk. Pol assured me that she could take care of herself, but I didn't feel like taking chances.

 

Yes, Polgara, I was jealous. Aren't fathers
supposed
to be jealous? I knew what those young men had on their minds, and I was
not
going to leave you alone with them.

 

A couple of days after Cherek and the boys had arrived, Beldin came looking for me. I was in my usual place wearing my usual scowl, and Polgara was busy breaking hearts. ‘I think you'd better have a talk with Bear-shoulders,' he told me.

‘Oh?'

‘Riva's wedding's starting to give Dras and Algar some ideas.'

‘What kind of ideas?'

‘Grow up, Belgarath. Regardless of how Riva and Beldaran feel about each other, this
is
a political marriage.'

‘Theological, actually.'

‘It means the same thing. Dras and Algar are starting to think about the advantages that might be involved in a marriage to Polgara.'

‘That's ridiculous!'

‘I'm not the one who's thinking about it, so don't blame me if it's ridiculous. Sooner or later, one of them's going to go to Cherek and ask him to speak with you about it. Then he'll come to you with some kind of proposal. You'd better head that off before he embarrasses himself. We still need the Alorns on our side.'

I swore and stood up. ‘Can you keep an eye on Polgara for me?'

‘Why not?'

‘Watch out for that tall one with the blond hair. Pol's paying a little too much attention to him for my comfort.'

‘I'll take care of it.'

‘Don't do anything permanent to him. He's the son of a clan-chief, and this Isle's a little too confined for a clan war.' Then I went looking for Cherek Bear-shoulders.

I stretched the truth just a bit when I told him that Aldur had instructed me to keep Pol with me in the Vale and that she wasn't supposed to get married for quite some time. Once I'd headed off their father, Dras and Algar could make all the proposals to him they wanted to. He wouldn't act as their go-between.

Bear-shoulders had aged since we'd gone to Mallorea. His hair and beard were shot with grey now, and a lot of the fun seemed to have gone out of his eyes. He told me that the Nadraks had been scouting along Bull-neck's eastern border and that the Murgos had been coming down the eastern escarpment and probing into Algaria.

‘We probably ought to discourage that,' I told him.

‘Dras and Algar are taking care of it,' he replied. ‘Technically speaking, there's still a state of war between us and the Angaraks, so we could probably justify a certain amount of firmness if the issue ever came up in court.'

‘Cherek, we're talking about international politics here. There aren't any laws, and there aren't any courts.'

He sighed. ‘The world's getting more civilized all the time, Belgarath,' he said mournfully. ‘The Tolnedrans are always trying to come up with picky little restrictions.'

‘Oh?'

‘They've been trying to get me to agree to outlaw what they call “piracy”. Isn't that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard of? There aren't any laws on the high seas. What happens out there isn't anybody's business. Why drag judges and lawyers into it?'

‘Tolnedrans are like that sometimes. Tell Dras and Algar to find wives someplace else, would you please? Polgara's not available at the moment.'

‘I'll mention it to them.'

The Alorn calendar was a little imprecise in those days. The Alorns kept a count of years, but they didn't bother attaching names to the months the way the Tolnedrans did. Alorns just kept track of the seasons and let it go at that, so I can't really give you the precise date of the wedding of Beldaran and Riva. It was three weeks or so after the arrival of Riva's father and brothers, though. About ten days before the wedding, Polgara set aside her campaign to break every heart on the Isle of the Winds, and she and Beldaran went into an absolute frenzy of dressmaking. With the help of several good-natured Alorn girls, they rebuilt Beldaran's wedding dress from the ground up, and then they turned their attention to a suitable gown for the bride's sister. Beldaran had always enjoyed sewing, but Pol's fondness for that activity dates from that period in her life. Sewing keeps a lady's fingers busy, but it gives her plenty of time to talk. I'm not really sure what those ladies talked about during those ten days, because they always stopped whenever I entered the room. Evidently it was the sort of thing ladies prefer not to share with men. Polgara apparently gave her sister all sorts of advice about married life - although how
she
found out about such things is beyond me. How much information could she have picked up sitting in a tree surrounded by birds?

Anyway, the happy day finally arrived. Riva was very nervous, but Beldaran seemed serene. The ceremony took place in the Hall of the Rivan King - Riva's throne room. A throne room probably isn't the best place to hold a wedding, but Riva insisted, explaining that he wanted to be married in the presence of the Orb and that it might have been a little inappropriate for him to wear his sword into the temple of Belar. That was Riva for you.

There are all sorts of obscure little ceremonies involved
in weddings, the meanings of which have long since been lost. The bridegroom is supposed to get there first, for example, and he's supposed to be surrounded by burly people who are there to deal firmly with anyone who objects. Riva had plenty of those, of course. His father, his brothers, and his cousin, all in bright-burnished mail shirts, bulked large around him as he stood at the front of the hall. I'd firmly taken Bull-neck's axe away from him and made him wear a sheathed sword instead. Dras was an enthusiast, and I didn't want him to start chopping up wedding guests just to demonstrate how much he loved his younger brother.

Once they'd settled down and the clinking of their mail had subsided, Beldin provided a fanfare to announce the bride's arrival. Beldin absolutely adored Beldaran, and he got a bit carried away. I'm almost positive that the citizens of Tol Honeth, hundreds of leagues to the south, paused in the business of swindling each other to remark, ‘What was that?' when the sound of a thousand silver trumpets shattered the air of the Rivan throne room. That fanfare was followed by an inhumanly suppressed choir of female voices - a few hundred or so, I'd imagine - whispering a hymn to the bride. Beldin had studied music for a couple of quiet centuries once, and that hymn was very impressive, but eighty-four-part harmony is just a little complicated for my taste.