Polgara the Sorceress (53 page)

I immediately dismissed the notion of ‘tampering’. Father’s warning about Grolims was probably quite close to the mark, and ‘tampering’ makes a characteristic noise that would draw every Grolim in Sendaria right to me. Geran was a sturdy little boy, but his legs weren’t very long yet, so walking wasn’t getting us away from the beach fast enough for my comfort. Obviously, we were going to need a horse. I checked the purse I always keep tucked under my clothing and found that I had adequate funds with me, so I sent out a probing thought, searching for a farm of some size along the road ahead. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for only a few miles away.

I dozed from time to time during that long night. Under the circumstances, a deep sleep might not have been a good idea. Then, when dawn began to touch the eastern sky, I stirred up our small fire and began cooking breakfast.

‘Good morning, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said when the smells of hot food woke him. ‘I’m really hungry, you know?’

‘Little boys are always hungry, Geran.’

‘How far is it to your house?’

‘About ninety leagues – almost three hundred miles.’

‘My feet are really sore, Aunt Pol. I’m not used to walking all day.’

‘It’ll get easier in just a bit, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘There’s another farm just ahead. I’ll buy a horse there, and then we can ride.’

‘That’s a
very
good idea, Aunt Pol.’ He seemed quite enthusiastic.

There
was
one brief problem about that when we reached the farm and I’d chosen the horse I wanted.

‘Ah – these are very old coins, ma’am,’ the farmer said dubiously. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen any quite so old.’

‘They’re part of my inheritance, good farmer,’ I lied
quickly. ‘My family’s a bit on the tight-fisted side, and once they get their hands on a coin, they tend to keep it’

‘That’s a commendable trait, but I don’t really know what these are worth in today’s money.’

‘Silver’s silver, good farmer. It’s the weight that’s important, not whose picture’s stamped on the front of the coin.’

‘Well – I suppose you’re right about that. Only –’

‘I’m really in a bit of a hurry, friend. My nephew and I absolutely
must
get to Sulturn before the week’s out. Why don’t I just add three of these coins to cover any possible difference in value?’

‘I wouldn’t want to cheat you, ma’am.’ In a very real sense, I’d created the Sendarian character, and now it was coming back to haunt me.

In the end, the honest farmer and I settled for two extra coins, and I became the owner of a mottled grey horse named Squire. The good farmer threw in an almost worn-out saddle, and Geran and I prepared to leave. First, however, I had a talk with Squire, who hadn’t been ridden all winter and who was feeling frisky. I took him – firmly – by the chin and looked straight into his large eyes. ‘Behave yourself, Squire,’ I advised him. ‘Do your prancing and cavorting around on your own time. You
really
don’t want to make me cross, now do you?’

He seemed to get my point, and after a mile or so of getting used to each other, we settled into a rolling canter that literally ate up the miles.

‘This is
much
better than walking, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said enthusiastically after a little while. ‘I’ll bet my feet won’t be sore tonight.’

‘No, probably not, but some other part might be.’

Geran and Squire hit it off well almost immediately, and I felt that to be a good thing. The young prince was carrying a heavy load of grief, and his friendship with our horse helped to take his mind off that.

We reached Sulturn in two days, but I bypassed the city and took a room in a village inn rather than one of the more opulent lodging houses in Sulturn itself. I felt that it was safer that way.

We continued on toward the northeast for the next several
days, and I spent a fair amount of that time giving Geran instructions in the fine art of being unobtrusive. To further that end, I dyed his characteristic sandy-colored hair black. It was just possible that Ctuchik’s Grolims might know that virtually everybody in the line of Iron-grip and my sister had the same color hair and they’d be looking for blond little boys. I also concealed the tell-tale lock in my own hair with some intricate braiding. If some Grolim happened to be searching for ‘a lady with a white streak in her hair and a sandy-haired little boy’, he’d look right past us.

As we approached Medalia in central Sendaria, the probing thought I kept more or less continually sweeping on ahead of us bore fruit. I caught a flash of that dull black color that identified an Angarak. It wasn’t the glossy black of a Grolim, but at this particular time, I didn’t want to encounter
any
Angarak, be he Murgo, Nadrak, or Thull.

I nudged Squire into a side road, and Geran and I bypassed Medalia and continued on toward the northeast along the back roads, avoiding Ran Horb’s highways entirely.

All in all, it took us about two weeks to reach Lake Erat. I concealed Geran and Squire in a thicket on the south shore of the lake along about evening, went off a ways, and donned white feathers. I wasn’t going to blunder into anything without looking it over very carefully, and owls have very good eyes in the dark.

The east side of Lake Erat was very sparsely populated in those days, and I soon located all my neighbors. As it turned out, there weren’t any foreigners in the area at that time, so I judged that it’d be safe for us to go through the barrier I’d erected and get inside the protective walls of my house. I flew directly there and advised my rose-bushes that I’d returned and that I’d be very happy if they opened a path for me. Then I went back to fetch my nephew and his horse.

It was almost midnight when Squire waded across the river just to the south of my house, and we rode on up to the edge of the thicket and on along the narrow path the roses had opened for us.

‘It’s a very big house, isn’t it?’ Geran observed a little nervously, ‘but isn’t it awfully dark?’

‘Nobody lives there, Geran,’ I replied.

‘Nobody at all?’

‘Not a soul.’

‘I’ve never lived in a place where there weren’t any other people around, Aunt Pol.’

‘We don’t
want
other people around, Geran. That was the whole idea.’

‘Well–’ He said it a bit dubiously. The house isn’t haunted, is it, Aunt Pol? I don’t think I’d like to live in a haunted house.’

I didn’t even smile. ‘No, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘The house isn’t haunted. It’s just empty.’

He sighed. ‘I think I’m going to have to learn how to do some things I’m not used to doing,’ he said.

‘Oh? Such as what?’

‘Well, we
will
need firewood and things like that, won’t we? I’m not good with tools, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. There were all kinds of servants in grandfather’s citadel, so I never really learned how to use an axe or a shovel or things like that’

‘Look upon it as a chance to learn, Geran. Let’s put Squire in the stable, and then we’ll go inside. I’ll fix us some supper and then we’ll see about some beds.’

‘Anything you say, Aunt Pol.’

We had supper, and then I set up a pair of cots in the kitchen. We could explore the house and choose more suitable quarters in the morning.

The house had been untended for quite a long time, so there were cobwebs in the corners and a thick layer of dust over everything. That was intolerable, of course. Over the years I’d paid occasional visits to my former seat of power and I’d customarily tidied up with a wave of my hand. I decided that this time I’d do it a little differently. My youthful charge had just emerged from a crushing tragedy, and I didn’t want him brooding about it. He needed something to keep his mind – and his hands – busy. Cleaning the house from top to bottom and from one end to the other would probably keep us both out of mischief for quite some
time. It would
also
avoid alerting any stray Grolims to our presence. At that particular time I wasn’t familiar enough with Grolims to know just exactly how skilled they were in the exercise of their talents, so it was better to be a little on the safe side.

I arose just before dawn and started preparing breakfast. My kitchen had been built to feed quite a number of people, so the stoves and ovens were very large. It seemed just a little ridiculous to heat up a stove bigger than a farm wagon just to feed two people, but it was the only stove available, so I laid in the kindling and piled on firewood that had lain in the wood-box for generations. Geran had been right about one thing, it appeared. He
was
going to be spending a lot of time chopping wood.

Geran woke up when the smell of breakfast began to reach him. I’ve known a lot of little boys over the years, and that’s one characteristic they all have in common. As a group, I’ve noticed that they’re always hungry.

‘What are we going to do today, Aunt Pol?’ he asked me after he’d spooned down his second bowl of porridge.

I ran one finger across the back of an unused chair and held it out for his inspection. ‘What do you see, Geran?’ I asked him.

‘It looks sort of dusty to me.’

‘Exactly. Maybe we ought to do something about that.’

He looked around the kitchen. ‘It shouldn’t take us too long,’ he said confidently. ‘What shall we do when we’re finished?’

‘There’s more than one room in the house, Geran,’ I pointed out.

He sighed mournfully. ‘I was sort of afraid you might feel that way about it, Aunt Pol.’

‘You’re a prince, Geran,’ I reminded him. ‘I wouldn’t want to offend you by making you live in a dirty house.’

‘It takes a lot to offend me, Aunt Pol.’ He said it hopefully.

‘It just wouldn’t do for us to live in all this filth, Geran. We’ll have the house all bright and shiny in no time at all.’

‘It’s a very big house, Aunt Pol.’

‘Yes, it is rather, isn’t it? It’ll give you something to do, and you can’t go outside to play.’

‘Couldn’t we just close off the parts where we won’t be living? Then we could clean the three or four rooms we’ll be staying in and let the rest go.’

‘It wouldn’t be right, Geran. It just wouldn’t do.’

He sighed with a kind of mournful resignation.

And so the Rivan King and I started cleaning house. He wasn’t
happy
about it, but he didn’t sulk
too
much. The one thing I
didn’t
tell him had to do with the fact that dust keeps right on settling and web-spinning spiders are the busiest creatures in the world. Just because you cleaned a room yesterday is no guarantee that it’s not going to need cleaning again tomorrow.

We did other things, of course. There was a farm cart in one of the stables, and I periodically hitched Squire to the cart and went out to buy provisions from nearby farms. Geran didn’t go with me on those occasions. I left him in my library the first time, and when I returned, I found him sprawled in a chair looking disconsolately out the window. ‘I thought you’d be reading,’ I said.

‘I don’t know how to read, Aunt Pol,’ he admitted.

That gave us something else to do when we grew tired of cleaning house. Geran had a quick mind, and he was reading in a surprisingly short length of time.

We settled into a kind of routine, cleaning in the morning and lessons in the afternoons. It was a fairly comfortable way to live, and we were both quite content.

The twins kept me advised of the progress of father’s punitive expedition into Nyissa, and I passed the news on to Geran. He seemed to take a certain amount of satisfaction in his grandfather’s rampant destruction of the land of the Snake People.

Spring came, and my youthful charge and I took up gardening as a hobby. I suppose I could have continued to buy food from neighboring farms, but I didn’t really like to leave Geran alone, and if my face became
too
familiar in the area, a chance word dropped in some local tavern might alert a passing Murgo.

I think it was early summer when father and uncle Beldin come by to pay us a call. I still remember Geran coming down the stairs with a sword in his hand. He was very
young, but he knew that it was a man’s duty to protect his women-folk. I didn’t really
need
protection, but his little gesture touched me all the same. He greeted my father enthusiastically and immediately asked if the Old Wolf had kept his promise to kill the Serpent Queen.

‘She was dead the last time I looked,’ father replied. He was a little evasive about it, I thought.

‘Did you hit her for me the way I asked you to?’ Geran pressed.

“That he did, Laddy buck,’ uncle Beldin said. “That he did.’

Uncle Beldin’s distorted appearance seemed to make Geran just a little apprehensive, so I introduced them.

‘You aren’t very tall, are you?’ Geran blurted.

‘It has its advantages sometimes, Laddy Buck,’ uncle Beldin replied. ‘I’m almost never after hittin’ me head on a lowhangin’ branch, don’t y’ know.’

‘I
like
him, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said, laughing.

Then father went into some of the details of the little get-together he’d planned. He pointed out the fact that the assassination of Gorek had been a major EVENT and that we’d probably better all gather in the Vale to consider our various options. He advised us that he’d go on to the Isle of the Winds to fetch Brand while uncle Beldin escorted Geran and me to the Vale.

Before we’d even finished crossing the Sendarian mountains, Geran and uncle Beldin were fast friends. I’ve never completely understood why old men and little boys always seem to automatically take to each other, and I’m always a little offended when the white-haired member of that little group shrugs it off by saying, ‘It’s a man sort of thing, Pol. You wouldn’t understand.’ They can talk about ‘man things’ until they’re blue in the face, but my own suspicions strongly lean in the direction of approaching senility and its accompanying reversion to childhood, if not outright infantilism, on the part of one of them. It was
that
journey that persuaded me that no woman in her right mind should
ever
allow an old man and a little boy anywhere within five miles of any patch of water. Their hands will automatically sprout fishing poles, and nothing at all will get done for the rest of the day.