Polgara the Sorceress (51 page)

I hadn’t altered Alreg’s size, nor tampered in any way with his clothing, so there was a man-sized toad in a mail-shirt and with a sword belted at its thick waist crouched bug-eyed on the royal throne, croaking in a shrill kind of panic.

The entire process had taken several minutes, and since Alreg’s throne stood upon a dais, it had been visible to every Cherek, drunk or sober, in the entire hall.

I sensed one of the bearded Chereks behind me reaching for his sword. When he grasped what he thought was his sword-hilt, though, he wrapped his hand firmly about the head and neck of a large, angry snake instead. ‘Don’t do that any more,’. I told him, without bothering to look around. ‘You’d better tell your retainers here to behave themselves, Alreg,’ I suggested to the enthroned toad. That’s unless you have replacements handy. My father doesn’t want me to kill people, but I think I can get around that. I’ll just bury them without bothering to kill them first. They’ll probably die of natural causes – after a while – so father won’t have any cause for complaint, now will he?’

‘All right!’ the warty creature on the throne of Cherek squealed. ‘I’ll do anything you say! Please, Polgara! Please! Change me back!’

‘Are you sure, Alreg?’ I asked pleasantly. ‘You look rather imposing this way. Think of how proud it’ll make all your warriors to tell the entire world that they’re ruled by a toad. Besides, you’ve got all these lazy, bearded louts lounging around drinking beer. You could put them all to work catching flies for you to eat. Wouldn’t a nice fat fly taste delicious about now?’

I think his mind started to slip about then, because the squalling intensified and he bounded off his throne and began to hop around in circles.

I changed him back to his own form with a single thought, but he was evidently not aware of it because he continued
to hop and squeal. His warriors all shrank back from him with looks of panic and revulsion on their faces.

‘Oh,
do
get up, Alreg!’ I told him. ‘You look positively ridiculous doing that.’

He stood up, trembling violently, and stumbled back to his throne. He fell into it, staring at me in sheer terror.

‘Now, then,’ I said sternly, ‘Sendaria’s under my protection, so get your people out of there and bring them back here where they belong.’

‘We’re following Belar’s commands, Polgara,’ he protested.

‘No, Alreg, you’re not. Actually, you’re following the orders of the Bear-Cult. If you want to jump to the tune of a group of feeble-minded religious fanatics, that’s up to you, but get out of Sendaria. You can’t even
begin
to imagine just how nasty things are going to get if you don’t.’

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ a thin, bearded Cherek, his eyes aflame with the burning light of religion, declared fervently, ‘but I’m not going to take orders from a mere woman!’

‘In point of fact, old boy, I’m not a mere
anything.’

‘I am an armed Cherek!’ he almost screamed. ‘I fear nothing!’

I made a small gesture, and his gleaming mail-shirt and his half-drawn sword rather quickly stopped gleaming and became dull red instead. Then they began to crumble, showering down onto the floor in a cascade of powdery rust. ‘Don’t you find that sort of disarming?’ I suggested. ‘Now that you’re no longer an armed Cherek, aren’t you just the teensiest bit afraid?’ Then I grew tired of all their foolishness. ‘ENOUGH!’ I thundered. ‘Get out of Sendaria, Alreg, or I’ll tow the Cherek peninsula out to sea and sink it. Then you can try being the king of the fish for a while. Now call your people home!’

It wasn’t the most diplomatic way to bring the Chereks into line, but the smug chauvinism of Alreg’s court had irritated me. ‘Mere Woman’ indeed! Just the sound of it still makes my blood boil!

There was one beneficial side effect to my little visit to Val Alorn, incidentally. After enduring a few months of
hysterical protests from discontented Bear-Cultists, Alreg moved decisively to suppress the cult once again. I’ve noticed that the Bear-Cult has to be put down every fifty years or so in the Alorn kingdoms.

In the century or so that followed, I receded further and further back into the pages of dusty old history books, and I seldom had occasion to visit my manor house on Lake Erat. The last of my caretakers there died, and I saw no reason to replace him. I still loved the house, though, and the notion of having it casually looted and burned didn’t sit well with me, so early one spring I crossed the Sendarian Mountains to take steps to protect it I wandered through the dusty rooms immersed in nostalgic melancholy. So much had happened here that had been central to my life. The ghosts of Killane and Ontrose seemed to accompany me down every dusty corridor, and the echoes of long ago conversations seemed to still reverberate through almost every room I entered. Erat had gone back to being Sendaria, and my duchy had shrunk down to this single lonely house.

I considered several options, but the solution was really quite simple, and it came to me one glorious spring evening as I stood on the terrace of the south wing looking out at the lake and at the veritable jungle of my untended rose-garden. What better way to conceal and protect my house than to bury it in roses?

I set to work the following morning ‘encouraging’ my rose-bushes to expand and encroach on the fair meadow that stretched on down to the lake. When I was done, they were no longer bushes, but trees, and they were so tightly interlaced that they’d become a thorny, impenetrable barrier that would keep my beloved house forever inviolate.

It was with a great deal of self-satisfaction that I returned to mother’s cottage and my continuing studies. Now that I’d preserved the past, I could turn my attention to the future.

It’s an article of my family’s faith that the future lies hidden in the Darine and Mrin Codices, and studying the collected ravings of a senile old Alorn warrior and a profoundly retarded idiot who’d had to be chained up for his
own protection can be very frustrating. I kept coming across veiled references to my father and me, and that was probably what kept me from throwing my hands up in disgust and taking up ornithology or horticulture instead. I gradually came to grasp the idea that there was another world superimposed on our mundane, day to day reality, and in that other world tiny events had enormous significance. A chance meeting between two tradesmen on the streets of Tol Honeth or an encounter between a pair of gold-hunters in the mountains of Gar og Nadrak could be far more important than a clash of armies. Increasingly, I came to understand that those ‘incidents’ were EVENTS – those very brief confrontations between the two entirely different prophecies, only one of which would ultimately determine the fate of not merely
this
world, but of the entire universe as well.

The study of something of that magnitude so totally engrossed me that I began to ignore time, and more often than not I couldn’t have told you what century it was, much less what year.

I
do
know – largely because I checked some Tolnedran history books later – that in the year 3761 the last emperor of the second Borune Dynasty
chose
his successor rather than leaving the choice up to the infinitely corruptible Council of Advisors. That childless Borune emperor, Ran Borune XII, was obviously a man of great foresight, because his decision brought the Horbite family to the imperial throne, and the Horbites – at least at that particular time – proved to be extraordinarily gifted. In many respects, the Horbites had largely been an appendage of the Honeths, in much the same way that the Anadiles are an extension of the Borunes. The first of that line, Ran Horb I, immersed himself in the Borune hobby of building highways to link Tolnedran commerce to the rest of the world. It was his son, Ran Horb II, however, who took that hobby to the point of obsession. Almost overnight, you couldn’t look anywhere in the west without seeing Tolnedran construction crews carving out new highways. The Tolnedran diplomatic corps dropped everything else and concentrated on ‘treaties of mutual cooperation for the good of all’, thus
creating the fiction that Tolnedra was just being neighborly, when in fact the highways were quite nearly for the sole use of Tolnedran merchants.

When word of all the road construction taking place in my former domain reached me at mother’s cottage, I decided that I’d better set my studies aside and go to Tol Honeth to have a word with Ran Horb II to find out just exactly what his intentions were.

For once, I decided not to just pop in on the emperor, but chose instead to rely on the good offices of the Drasnian ambassador. Despite their faults – and they
do
have faults – the avaricious Drasnians are well respected by the Tolnedrans. I had to introduce myself to Prince Khanar, the nephew of King Rhalan of Drasnia, since I’d been more or less in seclusion for the past eight centuries. Khanar was no Dras Bull-neck by any stretch of the imagination. He was a small, wiry man with a quick mind and a perverted sense of humor. I was fully prepared to give him a quick demonstration of my ‘talent’, but oddly, that wasn’t necessary. He accepted me at my word and took me across town to the palace compound. After we’d waited for an hour or so, we were escorted into the large, cluttered office of his Imperial Majesty, Ran Horb II. The emperor was a stout, businesslike fellow with receding hair and a preoccupied expression. ‘Ah, Prince Khanar,’ he said to my small companion, ‘so good to see you again. What’s afoot in Boktor?’

‘All the usual chicanery, your Majesty,’ Khanar shrugged. ‘Lying, cheating, stealing – nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary.’

‘Does your uncle know how you speak of his kingdom when you’re in the presence of strangers, Khanar?’

‘Probably, your Majesty. He has spies everywhere, you know.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lady?’

‘I was getting to that, your Majesty. I have the distinct honor to present the Lady Polgara, Duchess of Erat and the daughter of Holy Belgarath.’

Ran Horb looked at me skeptically. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘just for the sake of argument, I’ll accept that – tentatively,
of course. I’ll hold off on asking for proof until later. To what do I owe the honor of this visit, your Grace?’

‘You’re a very civilized man, your Majesty,’ I noted. ‘Most of the time I have to perform a few little tricks before people will listen to me.’

‘I’m sure you could startle me out of my shoes, if you chose to,’ he replied. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I’m just seeking information, your Majesty,’ I assured him. ‘You’re building highways in Sendaria.’

‘I’m building highways almost everywhere, Lady Polgara.’

‘Yes, I know. I have a certain interest in Sendaria, though. Is this construction a prelude to annexation?’

He laughed. ‘Why on earth would I want to annex Sendaria?’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s a nice enough country, but I don’t really want to own it. Those highways I’m building up there are just a way to keep the Chereks out of my purse. They’ll provide a route to Boktor that bypasses the need to transport goods through that whirlpool in the Cherek Bore. Those bearded pirates in the north charge outrageous fees to carry Tolnedran cargoes from Kotu through the Bore, and that’s cutting into my tax revenues.’

‘It’s all strictly commercial, then?’

‘Of course. If I want farm produce, I can buy it right here in Tolnedra. I don’t have to go all the way to Sendaria for beans and turnips. The only thing that interests me about that place is its location.’

The glimmer of an idea flickered through my mind. ‘Then stability in Sendaria would be to your advantage, wouldn’t it, your Majesty?’

‘Naturally, but that’s what the legions are for.’

‘But legions are expensive, aren’t they, Ran Horb?’

He shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t
believe
how expensive.’

‘I might.’ I squinted at the ornate ceiling. ‘Sendaria hasn’t really had a central government since I ruled there around the turn of the millennium,’ I mused. ‘That lack of a government has invited all sorts of incursions from the outside. If there were a king and a government –
and
an army – the people would be secure from outside adventurers, and you wouldn’t have to keep ten or so legions stationed there to maintain order.’

‘Ah,’ he said,
‘that’s
what the “Polgara” business was all about. You want to be the Queen of Sendaria.’

‘Most definitely not, your Majesty. I’m far too busy for any more of that nonsense – nothing personal intended there, of course.’

‘No offense taken, your Grace.’ Then he leaned back in his chair. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s the one thing that’s always made me skeptical when I hear stories about you and your father. If Belgarath’s as powerful as they say he is, he could rule the world, couldn’t he?’

‘He wouldn’t be very good at it, your Majesty. My father absolutely hates responsibility. It interferes with his entertainments.’

‘Now you’ve got me baffled, my Lady. If
you
don’t want to rule Sendaria, who
do
you want me to put on the throne? – some lover, perhaps?’

I gave him an icy look.

‘Sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I’ll agree that a formal government in Sendaria would be to everyone’s advantage, but which Sendarian do we saddle with the throne?’

‘We’re talking about a nation of turnip-farmers, your Majesty,’ Khanar noted. ‘Some of them may have titles, but they’re still out in their fields at the crack of dawn just like their neighbors.’

‘I think you’re underestimating them, Prince Khanar,’ I told him. ‘A successful farmer has many more administrative skills than you might imagine, and he’s probably far more practical than some spoiled noble brat who’s been raised on Arendish epics where nobody ever eats or takes a bath. At least a farmer knows how to pay attention to details.’

‘Now,
that’s
deflating, isn’t it, your Majesty?’ Khanar said to the emperor. ‘I absolutely
devoured
Arendish epics when I was a boy, and to be shrugged off as a “spoiled noble brat” bites sort of close to the bone.’

‘This would be in the nature of an experiment, then, wouldn’t it?’ Ran Horb suggested. ‘Do I appoint a king?’