Polgara the Sorceress (59 page)

‘What was that all about?’ I demanded.

‘He didn’t believe me when I told him that the pelts he was trying to sell me weren’t very good.’

That’s not what I meant, Davon.
What
is it that’s not for sale?’

‘You, Aunt Pol,’ Davon said innocently. ‘His offer
was
very attractive, though. You should be flattered.’

‘What?’
Alnana almost screamed.

‘It’s a peculiarity of Nadrak culture, dear,’ I explained. ‘Women are considered property, and they can be bought and sold.’

‘Slavery?’

‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Alnana. I’ll explain it to you someday – when we’re alone.’

A month or so later, a demure young woman with dark blonde hair came into the shop, ostensibly to look at sable muffs.

‘That’s the one, Pol,’
mother’s voice came to me.

‘I sort of noticed that myself,’
I sent the thought back.
‘It’s almost like a bell ringing, isn’t it?’

‘You’re getting better at this, Pol. A few more generations and I’ll be out of a job.’

The blonde girl’s name was Ellette, and she and Alten evidently also heard the bell mother and I’d been talking about.

They were married the following winter, and Alten didn’t seem
too
unhappy about giving up bachelorhood.

We were all quite happy in Darine, but just between you and me, I had some reservations about the situation there. The family was still just a little too prosperous – and too
much in the public eye – to suit me. There were also inevitable contacts with foreigners. Kablek was a friend of the family, and I more or less trusted him – as far as I’ve ever trusted any Angarak – but I’d have felt much better had we never met. The best-intentioned Angarak in the world will still tell any Grolim who comes by just about anything the Grolim wants to know. I decided during our stay in Darine that port cities should be avoided, and large interior cities as well. Villages would undoubtedly be safer. Townsmen are too busy and too self-important to pay all that much attention to strangers, but villagers don’t really have that much to talk about, so every passing stranger is the main topic of conversation in the village tavern for a week or so. That in itself would give me plenty of warning, since there are ways for me to listen in on such discussions without being forced to endure the sour reek of stale beer. Village life can be boring, but the safety it’d provide would more than make up for the tedium.

The family prospered in Darine, and we lingered there for probably too many years. In 4071, Alten’s wife Ellette gave birth to a son, whom Alten insisted on naming Geran in honor of his grandfather. I didn’t really think that was a good idea, all things considered, but Alten was adamant. Davon continued to buy furs from Nadraks and occasional Drasnians, and Alten continued to convert those furs into garments that sold very well. Alnana died in 4077, and Davon went into a steep decline after her death. That’s more common than you might think. Sometimes grief will carry you off faster than any disease.

It was in the year 4080 that one of those itinerant pestilences which roamed the ancient world sprang up again in Darine, and it wiped out half the population, including Davon, Alten, and Ellette, who all died within a few hours of each other despite my best efforts to save them. That was one time when I didn’t flee from some inquisitive Murgo. I fled that disease instead. Immediately after the funeral, I closed up the house and the shop, took whatever money was lying around, and young Geran and I left Darine, going to – where else – the safety of my house by the lake.

We stayed there for several years, and to pass the time
– and provide for the future – I taught Geran the rudiments of the healing arts. He was an attentive, though hardly gifted, student, and I had some hopes for his future. When we came out of seclusion and I set him up in practice in Medalia, however, I soon realized that he’d never be a firstrate physician. He seemed to lack the ability to diagnose the illnesses his patients brought to him.

He married late – in his mid-thirties – and his wife bore him a son to continue the line, and four daughters as well.

Despite my disappointment in Geran professionally, I’ll concede that his status as a mediocre physician served our ultimate purpose far better than might have been the case were he a world-renowned healer. He earned enough to get us all by, but that was about all, and that helped to lower his son’s expectations. The first Geran had been a prince, and Davon and Alten had been extremely prosperous tradesmen. The second Geran was a near-failure in his own profession, so his son didn’t grow up in a splendid house surrounded by servants. He was good with his hands, though, so I apprenticed him to a carpenter when he was about twelve. Circumstances seemed to be cooperating with Hattan’s grand scheme for submerging Iron-grip’s heirs in obscurity.

Over the next couple of centuries, I sampled most of the trades and crafts in Sendaria. I raised coopers and weavers, stone-cutters and cabinet-makers, blacksmiths and masons. My young nephews were all serious, rather self-effacing craftsmen who took some pride in their work, and with rare exceptions, I didn’t provide them with
too
many details about their heritage. Royal blood doesn’t really mean very much to a young fellow who spills it every time a tool slips and he barks his knuckles.

We weren’t exactly vagabonds, but we moved rather frequently, descending, in the view of some I’m sure, to smaller and smaller towns and villages with each move. The notion of all our neighbors serving as watch-dogs appealed to me, and it worked rather well. I received ample warning whenever a Murgo passed through whichever village we were living in, and if the Murgo lingered, I could
come up with ‘a family emergency’ to get us out of town in a hurry.

I was living in the improbably named village of Remote Rundorun which lay some leagues off the main road that linked Sendar and Seline. My only family at that time was a descendant of Iron-grip and Beldaran whose name was Darion. When the gossip about a Murgo merchant passing through town reached me, I decided that a change of scene might be appropriate. This time, however, I decided to change tack and move to a large town rather than an even smaller village with an even more ridiculous name. Darion and I packed up our clothing, and I paid a passing wagoner to take us to the town of Sulturn in central Sendaria.

I’ve always rather liked Sulturn anyway. It’s not as cramped as Medalia or Seline, and the breeze off the lake is refreshing during the hot summer months. Darion was about fourteen or so when we moved there, and I apprenticed him to a cabinet-maker. He was a strapping young man who gave some promise of being quite a bit larger than his immediate ancestors. He wouldn’t be quite as big as Bull-neck had been, but that was all right with me. Hiding giants might have been very challenging. Darion spent the first year of his apprenticeship whittling wooden pegs. The craftsman to whom he was apprenticed was a traditionalist who absolutely despised nails, believing that good furniture must be pegged together, since nails work themselves loose, and wobbly cabinets are a sin against the Gods.

After his year of whittling, Darion was allowed to start building the backs and sides of wardrobes – those freestanding clothes-closets that were popular in Sendaria at the time. A wardrobe is an awkward piece of furniture, but it
does
allow you to rearrange your bedroom in ways that aren’t possible when your clothes closets are built into the wall.

After a couple of years, Darion’s employer – I won’t use the traditional ‘master’, since it has a different meaning in my family – finally relented and allowed his apprentice to build the front of a cabinet. The gruff fellow inspected the result rather carefully, pointed out a slight flaw in a piece
of molding, and then grudgingly admitted that my nephew wasn’t a
total
incompetent.

Darion’s next project was a china cabinet, and try though he might, the sour tempered master-builder couldn’t find anything wrong with it.

By the time Darion was twenty, he was doing most of the work in the shop, and his teacher was puttering around building bird-houses and other frivolities. The people of Sulturn knew who was really producing the fine furniture that came out of the shop, and a number of them suggested to me that Darion might be wise to go into business for himself.

I had a simpler answer, however. I went to Darion’s employer and bought him out, suggesting that it might be nice if he were to spend his twilight years with his son and his grandchildren on their farm at the south end of the lake.

‘Where did you get the money, Aunt Pol?’ Darion asked me curiously when I told him what I’d done.

‘I have certain resources, dear,’ I replied evasively. Money’s always been a problem for me – not its lack, but its excess. Over those long centuries I almost always had several hundred Sendarian gold nobles tucked away somewhere. I didn’t make an issue of the fact, largely because a craftsman works harder if he doesn’t know about the treasure lying under the hearthstone or hidden inside a wall. I wanted those young men to be absolutely convinced that they were the family’s sole support, and frugality’s a virtue anyway, isn’t it?

In 4413, when Darion was about 22, he began ‘walking out’ with a very pretty Sendarian girl named Selana. That silent bell mother and I had spoken of was still working, and it rang inside my head the first time I saw the tall blonde girl.

Darion and Selana were married in the early spring of 4414, and prior to the wedding Darion put aside his cabinetry and started work on converting the loft over his shop into living quarters for us. Our lease on the somewhat shabby house near the lake was running out anyway, and our incipient groom thought it appropriate to bring his new wife home to a place he actually owned. There are some
drawbacks to living and working in the same building, but at least Darion didn’t have to walk very far to work in the morning.

After the wedding of Darion and Selana, we settled down in a kind of blissful domesticity. Selana and I cooked and kept house upstairs, and Darion built and sold cabinetry down below. In many respects our circumstances were an ideal fulfillment of Hattan’s design for the proper way for an heir to live. Darion was respected as a reliable craftsman, but he was not prominent. He made a comfortable living, but a man who lives upstairs over his shop could hardly be called a merchant prince.

And then in the late autumn of 4415, my father paid us a call. Over the years, I’d sensed his presence in my general vicinity any number of times, but this was the first time he’d actually thrust himself upon us. I’d expected him to keep an eye on me, and I’d probably have been disappointed in him if he hadn’t. Though he was not as intimately involved with the family as I was, he was nonetheless interested in them.

Father’s a little clumsy when he releases his Will, so I heard him enter the shop downstairs before he even came up to the second floor. When he burst in on us, I saw that he’d disguised himself by taking the form of a tall man with a dense black beard that seemed to start just under his lower eyelids. I’m sure the disguise worked on others, but I recognize my father’s mind, not his outward appearance, so when he came in while we were eating supper, I recognized him immediately. ‘What are you doing here, Old Man?’ I demanded. ‘I thought I told you to stay away from me.’

‘We’ve got to get you and the children out of here, Pol,’ he replied urgently, shifting back into his real form.

That
really
startled Darion and Selana. ‘Who is this man, Aunt Pol?’ Darion demanded in a half-strangled tone.

‘My father,’ I replied, making it sound deprecating.

‘Holy Belgarath?’ I hadn’t really kept my background a secret, and father’s got a sort of towering reputation – a reputation that tarnishes rather quickly once you get to know him.

That “holy” might be open to some question,’ I replied, not so much for Darion’s benefit as for father’s. I still enjoy tweaking his beard now and then.

“This is an emergency, Pol,’ father said. ‘We’ve got to leave Sulturn right now. If you’re not going to learn how to use hair dye, you probably shouldn’t unpack when you move into a new town. Every Grolim in the world knows about that lock in your hair.’

‘What are you talking about, father?’

‘There’s a Murgo at an inn down by the waterfront west of here, and he’s been asking after you. He’s pouring beer into a very talkative Sendar, so he knows exactly where you are by now. Start packing.’

‘Why didn’t you just kill him, father? A dead Murgo doesn’t pose much of a problem.’

‘Aunt Pol!’
Darion exclaimed in horror.

‘How much does he know, Pol?’ father asked, pointing at Darion.

‘As much as he needs to know.’

‘Does he know who he is?’

‘In a general sort of way.’

‘Oh,
Poll’
father said disgustedly. ‘Keeping a secret just for the sake of having a secret is childish. Start packing while I explain to him who he really is. Just take the necessities. We can buy what you need in Kotu.’

‘Kotu?’
I hadn’t expected that, and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea.

‘Sendaria’s getting too dangerous, Pol. You’ve had to cut and run a few too many times. The Murgos – and Grolims – are starting to concentrate their attention here. Let’s get you and the children into one of the Alorn kingdoms for a while. Throw some things in a bag while I explain the situation to Darion and his wife.’

‘I still think you should have run a knife into the Murgo.’

‘That’d just be a waste of time, Pol. Word of a dead Murgo in an alley would get back to the Grolims, and they’d be crawling all over you in less than a week.’

He was going to buy horses, he said, but I brushed that idea aside. Selana was a healthy girl, but she was pregnant, and bouncing around in a saddle isn’t good for pregnant
ladies. I didn’t pay much attention while father explained a few realities to Darion and Selana. I’d heard the story before – and lived through most of it. Darion looked slightly skeptical, but he
behaved
as if he believed my father. Then he suggested that we leave town in his somewhat wobbly delivery cart. Father liked the notion immediately, since it reminded him of the Master’s favorite disguise. Then, though I hate to admit it, the Old Wolf had a stroke of genius. ‘I think a fire here might be useful,’ he mused.