Polgara the Sorceress (16 page)

‘Are you going to kill him?’ my uncle asked eagerly.

‘I doubt it. I don’t think any of us – either on our side or theirs – should do anything permanent until all those prophecies are in place. That’s what I want to talk with Ctuchik about. Let’s not have any more “accidents” like the one that divided the universe in the first place.’

‘I can sort of go along with that.’

‘Keep an eye on Polgara for me, will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t need a keeper, father,’ I said tartly.

‘You’re wrong about that, Pol,’ he told me. ‘You tend to want to experiment, and there are
some
areas where you shouldn’t. Just humor me this time, Pol. I’ll have enough on my mind while I’m on the way to Rak Cthol without having to worry about you as well.’

After father left, life in the Vale settled down into a kind of homey domesticity. The twins and I took turns with the cooking, and Beldin spent his time browsing through his extensive library. I continued to visit the Tree – and mother – during the long days, but evenings were the time for talk, and Beldin, the twins, and I gathered in this or that tower for supper and conversation after the sun had gone down each evening.

We were in uncle Beldin’s fanciful tower one perfect evening, and I was standing at the window watching the stars come out. ‘What sparked all this curiosity about healing, Pol?’ Beldin asked me.

‘Beldaran’s pregnancy, most likely,’ I replied, still watching the stars. ‘She
is
my sister, after all, and something was happening to her that I’d never experienced myself. I wanted to know all about it, so I went to Arell’s shop to get some first-hand information from an expert.’

‘Who’s Arell?’ Belkira asked.

I turned away from the stars. ‘Beldaran’s midwife,’ I explained.

‘She has a shop for that?’

‘No. She’s also a dressmaker. We all got to know her when we were getting things ready for Beldaran’s wedding. Arell’s a very down-to-earth sort of person, and she explained the whole process to me.’

‘What led you to branch out?’ Beldin asked curiously.

‘You gentlemen have corrupted me,’ I replied, smiling at them. ‘Learning just one facet of something’s never quite enough, so I guess I wanted to go on until I’d exhausted the possibilities of the subject. Arell told me that certain herbs help to quiet labor pains, and that led me to Argak the herbalist. He’s spent a lifetime studying the effects of various herbs. He’s even got a fair-sized collection of Nyissan poisons. He’s a grumpy sort of fellow, but I flattered him into giving me instruction, so I can probably deal with the more common ailments. Herbs are probably at the core of the physician’s art, but some things can’t be cured with herbs alone, so Arell and Argak took me to see Salheim the smith, who’s also a very good bone-setter. He taught me how to fix broken bones, and from there I went to see a barber named Balten to learn surgery.’

‘A barber?’ Belkira asked incredulously.

I shrugged. ‘You need sharp implements for surgery, uncle, and a barber keeps his razors very sharp.’ I smiled slightly. ‘I might have actually contributed something to the art of surgery while I was there. Balten usually got his patients roaring drunk before he started cutting, but I talked with Argak about it, and he concocted a mixture of various herbs that puts people to sleep. It’s faster and much more dependable than several gallons of beer. The only part of surgery I didn’t care for was grave-robbing.’

‘Grave-robbing?’ Beltira exclaimed, shuddering.

‘It’s part of the study of anatomy, uncle. You have to know where things are located before you cut somebody open, so surgeons usually dig up dead bodies to examine as a way to increase their knowledge.’

Uncle Beldin looked around at the groaning bookshelves that covered almost every open wall of his lovely tower. ‘I think I’ve got some Melcene texts on anatomy knocking around here someplace, Pol,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can dig them out for you.’

‘Would you please, uncle?’ I said. ‘I’d much rather get that information from a text-book than carve it out of somebody who’s been dead for a month.’

They all choked on that a bit.

My uncles were interested in what had happened on the Isle of the Winds, of course, since we were all very close to Beldaran, but they were
really
curious about the two Prophets. We had entered what the Seers at Kell call ‘the Age of Prophecy’, and the Master had advised my father that the two Necessities would speak to us from the mouths of madmen. The problem with that, of course, lay in the whole business of deciding
which
madmen to listen to.

‘Father seems to think he’s found the answer to that problem,’ I told them one evening when we’d gathered in the twins’ tower. ‘He believes that the Necessity identifies itself by putting the words “the Child of Light” into the mouths of the
real
prophets. We all know what the expression means, and ordinary people don’t. At any rate, both Bormik and the idiot in Braca used the term.’

‘That’s convenient,’ Belkira noted.

‘Also economical,’ I added. ‘Bull-neck was a little unhappy about the expense of paying scribes to hover over every crazy man in his entire kingdom.’

It was during that time of homey domesticity that mother explained the significance of the silver amulet father had fashioned for me.
‘It gives you a way to focus your power, Pol,’
she told me.
‘When you’re forming the idea of what you want to do – something that you’re not really sure you can do – channel the thought through your amulet, and it’ll intensify your will’

‘Why does Beldaran have one, then, mother? I love her, of course, but she doesn’t seem to have “talent”.’

Mother laughed.
‘Oh, dear, dear Polgara,’
she said to me.
‘In some ways Beldaran’s even more talented than you are.’

‘What are you talking about, mother? I’ve never seen her do
anything.’

‘I know. You probably never will, either. You always do what she tells you to do, though, don’t you?’

‘Well –’ I stopped as
that
particular thought came crashing in on me. Sweet, gentle Beldaran
had
dominated me
since before we were born. ‘That isn’t fair, mother!’ I objected.

‘What isn’t?’

‘First she’s prettier than I am, and now you tell me that she’s more powerful. Can’t I be better at
something
than she is?’

‘It’s not a competition, Polgara. Each of us is different, that’s all, and each of us has different things we have to do. This isn’t a foot-race, so there aren’t any prizes for winning.’

I felt a little silly at that point.

Then mother explained that Beldaran’s power was passive.
‘She makes everybody love her, Pol, and you can’t get much more powerful than that. In some ways, she’s like this Tree. She changes people just by being there. Oh, she can also hear with her amulet.’

‘Hear?’

‘She can hear people talking – even if they’re miles away. A time will come when that’ll be very useful.’

Ce’Nedra discovered that quite some time later.

It was almost autumn when father returned from Rak Cthol. The sun had gone down when he came clumping up the stairs of his tower where I was preparing supper and talking with uncle Beldin. Making some noise when you enter a room where there’s someone with ‘talent’ is only good common sense. You don’t really want to startle someone who has unusual capabilities at his disposal.

‘What kept you?’ Uncle Beldin asked him.

‘It’s a long way to Rak Cthol, Beldin.’ Father looked around. ‘Where are the twins?’

‘They’re busy right now, father,’ I told him. ‘They’ll be along later.’

‘How did things go at Rak Cthol?’ Beldin asked.

‘Not bad.’

Then they got down to details.

My concept of my father had somehow been based on the less admirable side of his nature. No matter what had happened, he was still Garath at the core: lazy, deceitful, and highly unreliable. When the occasion demanded it,
though, the Old Wolf could set ‘Garath’ and all his faults aside and become ‘Belgarath’. Evidently,
that
was the side of him that Ctuchik saw. Father didn’t come right out and say it, but Ctuchik was clearly afraid of him, and that in itself was enough to make me reconsider my opinion of the sometimes foolish old man who’d sired me.

‘What now, Belgarath?’ uncle Beldin asked after father’d finished.

Father pondered that for a while. ‘I think we’d better call in the twins. We’re running without instructions here, and I’ll feel a lot more comfortable if I know that we’re running in the right direction. I wasn’t just blowing smoke in Ctuchik’s ear when I raised the possibility of a
third
destiny taking a hand in this game of ours. If Torak succeeds in corrupting every copy of the Ashabine Oracles, everything goes up in the air again. Two possibilities are bad enough. I’d really rather not have to stare a third one in the face.’

And so we called the twins to father’s tower, joined our wills, and asked the Master to visit us.

And, of course, he did. His form seemed hazy and insubstantial, but, as father explained to the rest of us later on, it was the Master’s counsel we needed, not the reassurance of his physical presence.

Even I was startled when the first thing the Master did was come directly to me, saying, ‘My beloved daughter.’ I knew he liked me, but that was the first time he’d ever expressed anything like genuine love. Now,
that’s
the sort of thing that could go to a young lady’s head. I think it startled my father and my uncles even more than it startled me. They were all very wise, but they were still men, and the notion that I was as much the Master’s disciple as they were seemed to unsettle them, since most men can’t seem to accept the fact that women have
souls,
much less minds.

Father’s temporary disquiet faded when the Master assured him that Torak could not alter the Ashabine Oracles enough to send Zedar, Ctuchik, and Urvon down the wrong path. No matter how much Torak disliked his vision, he would not be permitted to tamper with it in any significant fashion. Zedar was with him at Ashaba, and Zedar was to some degree still working for us – at least insofar as he
would protect the integrity of prophecy. And even if Zedar failed, the Dals would not.

Then the Master left us, and he left behind a great emptiness as well.

Things were quiet in the Vale for the next several years, and our peculiar fellowship has always enjoyed those quiet stretches, since they give us a chance to study, and study is our primary occupation, after all.

I think it was in the spring of the year 2025 – by the Alorn calendar – when Algar Fleet-foot brought us copies of the complete Darine Codex and the half-finished Mrin. Algar was in his mid-forties by now, and his dark hair was touched with grey. He’d finally begun to put some weight on that lean frame of his and he was very impressive. What was perhaps even more impressive was the fact that he’d actually learned how to talk – not a great deal, of course, but getting more than two words at a time out of Algar had always been quite an accomplishment.

My father eagerly seized the scrolls and probably would have gone off into seclusion with them at once, but when Algar casually announced the upcoming meeting of the Alorn Council, I badgered my aged sire about it until he finally gave in and agreed that a visit to the Isle might not be a bad idea.

Fleet-foot accompanied father, Beldin and me to the city of Riva for the council meetings, though the affairs of state weren’t really very much on our minds. The supposed earth-shaking significance of those ‘councils of state’ were little more than excuses for family get-togethers in those days, and we could quite probably have taken care of the entire
official
agenda with a few letters.

In my case, I wanted to spend some time with my sister, and I’d clubbed my father into submission by suggesting that he ought to get to know his grandson.

That particular bait might have worked just a little too well. Daran was about seven that year, and father has a peculiar affinity for seven-year-old boys for some reason. But I think it goes a little deeper. I’ve noticed that mature men get all gushy inside when they come into contact with their grandsons, and my father was no exception. He and
Daran hit it off immediately. Although it was spring and the weather on the Isle was abysmally foul, the two of them decided to go off on an extended fishing expedition, of all things. What is this thing with fishing? Do
all
men lose their ability to think rationally when they hear the word ‘fish’?

The note my father left for us was characteristically vague about little things like destinations, equipment, and food supplies. Poor Beldaran worried herself sick about what our irresponsible father was up to, but there was nothing she could do. Father can evade the most determined searchers.

I was worried more about something else. My twin seemed very pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She coughed quite a bit and was at times listless almost to the point of exhaustion. I spent quite a bit of time with Arell and with our resident herbalist, who concocted several remedies for his queen. They seemed to help my sister a little, but I was still very concerned about the condition of her health.

Inevitably, Beldaran and I were growing further and further apart. When we’d been children, we’d been so close that we were almost one person, but after her marriage, our lives diverged. Beldaran was completely caught up in her husband and child, and I was involved in my studies. If we’d lived closer to each other, our separation might not have been so obvious and painful, but we were separated by all those empty leagues, so there wasn’t much opportunity for us to stay in touch.

This is very painful for me, so I don’t think I’ll pursue it any further.

After a month or so, father, Beldin, and I returned to the Vale and to the waiting Darine Codex.

It was late summer when we returned home from the Isle of the Winds. It’s nice to visit loved ones, but it always feels good to come back to the Vale. There’s a peace here that we find in no other place. I suppose that when you get right down to it, the Vale of Aldur is hardly more than an extension of the southern tip of Algaria, but I think that if you come here, you’ll notice the difference immediately. Our grass is greener, for some reason, and our sky seems a deeper blue. The land is gently rolling and dotted here and there with dark pines and with groves of snowy trunked birch and aspen. The mountains of Ulgoland lying to the west are crested with eternal snows that are always tinged with blue in the morning, and the starker mountains of Mishrak ac Thull that claw at the sky beyond the Eastern Escarpment are purple in the distance. My father’s tower and the towers of my uncles are stately structures, and since they were in no hurry when they built them, they had plenty of time to make sure that the stones fit tightly together, which makes the towers seem more like natural outcroppings than the work of human hands. Everything here is somehow perfectly right with nothing out of place and no ugliness anywhere to be seen.

Our fawn-colored deer are so tame as to sometimes be a nuisance, and underfoot there are always long-eared rabbits with puffy white tails. The fact that the twins feed them might have something to do with that. I feed my birds, too, but that’s an entirely different matter.

It’s probably because our Vale lies at the juncture of two mountain ranges that there’s always a gentle breeze blowing here, and it undulates the grass in long waves, almost like a sea.

When we returned home father seemed quite fully prepared to go into absolute seclusion with the Darine Codex
clasped to his bosom, but my uncles would have none of that. ‘Hang it all, Belgarath,’ Beltira said with uncharacteristic heat one evening as the sun was touching the sky over Ulgo with fire, ‘you’re not the only one with a stake in this, you know. We all need copies.’

Father’s expression grew sullen. ‘You can read it when I’m finished. Right now I don’t have time to fool around with pens and ink-pots.’

‘You’re selfish, Belgarath,’ uncle Beldin growled at him, scratching at his shaggy beard and sprawling deeper into his chair by the fire. ‘That’s always been your one great failing. Well, it’s not going to work this time. You aren’t going to get any peace until we’ve all got copies.’

Father glowered at him.

‘You’re holding the only copy we have, Belgarath,’ Belkira pointed out. ‘If something happens to it, it might take us months to get a replacement.’

‘I’ll be careful with it.’

‘You just want to keep it all to yourself,’ Beltira accused him. ‘You’ve been riding that “first disciple” donkey for years now.’

That has nothing to do with it.’

‘Oh,
really?’

‘This is ridiculous!’ Beldin burst out. ‘Give me that thing, Belgarath.’

‘But–’

‘Hand it over – or do we want to get physical about it? I’m stronger than you are, and I can
take
it from you if I have to.’

Father grudgingly handed him the scroll. ‘Don’t lose my place,’ he told his gnarled little brother.

‘Oh, shut up.’ Beldin looked at the twins. ‘How many copies do we need?’

‘One for each of us, anyway,’ Beltira replied. ‘Where do you keep your ink-pots, Belgarath?’

‘We won’t need any of that,’ Beldin told him. He looked around and then pointed at one of father’s work-tables which stood not far from where I was busy preparing supper. ‘Clear that off,’ he ordered.

‘I’m working on some of those things,’ father protested.

‘Not very hard, I see. The dust and cobwebs are fairly thick.’

The twins were already stacking father’s books, notes, and meticulously constructed little models of obscure mechanical devices on the floor.

My father’s always taken credit for what Beldin did on that perfect evening, since he can annex an idea as quickly as he can annex any other piece of property, but my memory of the incident is very clear. Beldin laid the oversized scroll Luana had prepared for us on the table and untied the ribbon that kept it rolled up. ‘I’m going to need some light here,’ he announced.

Beltira held out his hand, palm-up, and concentrated for a moment. A blazing ball of pure energy appeared there, and then it rose to hang like a miniature sun over the table.

‘Show-off,’ father muttered at him.

‘I told you to shut up,’ Beldin reminded him. Then his ugly face contorted in thought. We all felt and heard the surge as he released his Will.

Six blank scrolls appeared on the table, three on either side of the original Darine. Then my dwarfed uncle began to unroll the Darine Codex with his eyes fixed on the script. The blank scrolls, now no longer blank, unrolled in unison as he passed his eyes down the long, seamless parchment Fleet-foot had sent to us.

‘Now that’s something that’s never occurred to me,’ Beltira said admiringly. ‘When did you come up with the idea?’

‘Just now,’ Beldin admitted. ‘Hold that light up a little higher, would you, please?’

Father’s expression was growing sulkier by the minute.

‘What’s
your
problem?’ Beldin demanded.

‘You’re cheating.’

‘Of course I am. We all cheat. It’s what we do. Are you only just now realizing that?’

Father spluttered at that point.

‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed.

‘What’s the matter, Pol?’ Belkira asked me.

‘I’m living with a group of white-haired little boys, uncle. When
are
you old men ever going to grow up?’

They all looked slightly injured by
that
particular suggestion. Men always do, I’ve noticed.

Beldin continued to unroll the original codex while the twins rapidly compared the copies to it line by line. ‘Any mistakes yet?’ the dwarf asked.

‘Not a one,’ Beltira replied.

‘Maybe I’ve got it right then.’

‘How much longer are you going to be at that?’ father demanded.

‘As long as it takes. Give him something to eat, Pol. Get him out of my hair.’

Father stamped away, muttering to himself.

Actually, it took Beldin no more than an hour, since he wasn’t actually reading the text he was copying. He explained the process to us later that evening. All he was really doing was transferring the
image
of the original to those blank scrolls. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘that’s that. Now we can all snuggle up to the silly thing.’

‘Which one’s the original?’ father demanded, looking at the seven scrolls lined up on the table.

‘What difference does it make?’ Beldin growled.

‘I want my original copy.’

And then I laughed at them, even as I checked the ham we were having for dinner.

‘It’s not funny, Pol,’ father reprimanded me.

‘I found it fairly amusing. Now, why don’t you all go wash up? Supper’s almost ready.’

After we’d eaten, we each took up our own copy of Bormik’s ravings and retired to various chairs scattered about father’s tower to be alone with the word of the Gods – or with the word of that unseen Purpose that controlled the lives of every living thing on the face of the earth.

I took my copy to my favorite oversized chair beside the fireplace in the kitchen area and untied the ribbon that kept it rolled up. There was a brief note from Luana inside. ‘Lady Polgara,’ Bormik’s daughter began. “Thus I’ve kept my part of our bargain. I feel I must thank you once more for your gift to me. I’m living in central Algaria now, and would you believe that I actually have a suitor? He’s older, of
course, but he’s a good, solid man who’s very kind to me. I thought that I’d never marry, but Belar’s seen fit to provide me a chance for happiness. I can’t begin to thank you enough.’

It hadn’t been Belar who’d rewarded Luana, of course. Over the years I’ve noticed again and again that the Purpose that created everything that is, that was, or ever will be has a sense of obligation, and it always rewards service. I don’t have to look any further than the faces of my own children and my husband to see mine.

The handwriting on Luana’s note was identical to the script in which our copies of the Darine Codex were cast, a clear indication that she’d meticulously copied off the document her scribes had produced. It hadn’t really been necessary, of course, but Luana appeared to take her obligations very seriously.

The Darine Codex, despite its occasional soarings, is really a rather pedestrian document, since it seems almost driven by a need to keep track of time. I know why now, but when I first read through it, it was tedious going. I thought that the tediousness was no more than a reflection of Bormik’s deranged mentality, but I now know that such was not the case.

Uncle Beldin ploughed his way through the Darine in about six months, and then one evening in midwinter he trudged through the snow to father’s tower. ‘I’m starting to get restless,’ he announced. ‘I think I’ll go back to Mallorea and see if I can catch Urvon off guard long enough to disembowel him just a little bit.’

‘How can you disembowel somebody just a little bit?’ father asked with an amused expression.

‘I thought I’d take him up to the top of a cliff, rip him open, wrap a loop of his guts around a tree stump and then kick him off the edge.’

‘Uncle,
please!’
I objected in revulsion.

‘It’s something in the nature of a scientific experiment, Pol,’ he explained with a hideous grin. ‘I want to find out if his guts break when he comes to the end or if he bounces instead.’

‘That will
do,
uncle!’

He was still laughing that wicked laugh of his as he went down the stairs.

‘He’s an evil man,’ I told my father.

‘Fun, though,’ father added.

The twins had watched Beldin’s mode of copying the Darine Codex very closely and had duplicated the procedure with the uncompleted Mrin. I think it was that incompleteness that made us all pay only passing attention to the Mrin – that and the fact that it was largely incomprehensible.

‘It’s all jumbled together,’ father complained to the twins and me one snowy evening after we’d eaten supper and were sitting by the fire in his tower. ‘That idiot in Braca has absolutely no concept of time. He starts out talking about things that happened before the cracking of the world and in the next breath he’s rambling on about what’s going to happen so far in the future that it makes my mind reel. I can’t for the life of me separate one set of EVENTS from another.’

‘It think that’s one of the symptoms of idiocy, brother,’ Beltira told him. ‘There was an idiot in our village when Belkira and I were just children, and he always seemed confused and frightened when the sun went down and it started to get dark. He couldn’t seem to remember that it happened every day.’

‘The Mrin mentions
you
fairly often though, Belgarath,’ Belkira noted.

Father grunted sourly. ‘And usually not in a very complimentary way, I’ve noticed. It says nice things about Pol, though.’

‘I’m more loveable than you are, father,’ I teased him.

‘Not when you talk
that
way, you aren’t.’

I’d browsed into various passages in the Mrin myself on occasion. The term the Prophet used most frequently to identify father was ‘ancient and beloved’, and there were references to ‘the daughter of the ancient and beloved’ – me, I surmised, since the daughter mentioned was supposed to do things that Beldaran was clearly incapable of doing. The incoherent time-frame of the Prophecy made it almost impossible to say just exactly
when
these things were going
to happen, but there was a sort of sense that they’d be widely separated in time. I’d always rather taken it for granted that my life-span was going to be abnormally long, but the Mrin brought a more disturbing reality crashing in on me. Evidently I was going to live for thousands of years, and when I looked at the three old men around me, I didn’t like that idea very much. ‘Venerable’ is a term often applied to men of a certain age, and there’s a great deal of respect attached to it. I’ve never heard anyone talking about a venerable woman, however. The term attached to
us
is ‘crone’, and that didn’t set too well with me. It was a little vain, perhaps, but the notion of cronehood sent me immediately to my mirror. A very close examination of my reflection didn’t reveal any wrinkles, though – at least not yet.

The four of us spent about ten years – or maybe it was only nine – concentrating our full attention on the Darine Codex, and then the Master sent father to Tolnedra to see to the business of linking the Borune family with the Dryads. Father’s use of chocolate to persuade the Dryad Princess Xoria to go along with the notion has always struck me as more than a little immoral.

No, I’m
not
going to pursue that.

The twins and I remained in the Vale working on the Darine Codex, and a sort of generalized notion of what lay in store for mankind began to emerge. None of us liked what we saw ahead very much. There was a lot of turmoil, frequent wars, and incalculable human suffering yet to come.

Three more years passed, and then one night mother’s voice came to me with an uncharacteristic note of urgency in it.
‘Polgara!’
she said.
‘Go to Beldaran
– now!
She’s very ill! She needs you!’

‘What is it, mother?’

‘I
don’t know. Hurry! She’s dying, Polgara!’

That sent a deathly chill through me, and I ran quickly to the twins’ tower. ‘I have to leave,’ I shouted up the stairs to them.

‘What’s wrong, Pol?’ Beltira called to me.

‘Beldaran’s ill – very ill. I have to go to her. I’ll keep in
touch with you.’ Then I dashed back outside again before they could ask me how I knew that my sister was so sick. Mother’s secret absolutely
had
to be protected. I chose the form of a falcon for the journey. Speed was essential, and owls don’t fly very fast.

It was the dead of winter when I left the Vale and sped north along the eastern edge of the mountains of Ulgoland. I chose that route since I knew I’d encounter storms in those mountains, and I didn’t want to be delayed. I flew almost as far north as Aldurford, keeping a continual eye on the range of peaks that separated Algaria from the Sendarian plain. It was obvious that the weather was foul over those mountains. Finally, there wasn’t any help for it. I had to turn west and fly directly into the teeth of that howling storm. It’s sometimes possible to fly above a storm. Summer squalls and spring showers are fairly localized. Winter storms, however, involve great masses of air that tower so high that going over the top of them is virtually impossible. I pressed on with the wind tearing at my feathers and the stinging snow half blinding me. I was soon exhausted and had no choice but to swirl down into a sheltered little valley to rest and regain my strength.