Polgara the Sorceress (61 page)

‘Yes, Adana?’

‘Is it possible that Darel and I are doing something wrong?’ She blushed furiously. ‘I mean, shouldn’t I be pregnant by now? I
really
want to have babies, but–’ she faltered.

‘Sometimes it takes a while, dear,’ I told her. ‘It’s not
exactly the same as nailing pieces of wood together. There’s always an element of luck involved, you know.’

‘I
do
so want to give Darel a son, Aunt Pol.’

‘Yes, dear,’ I said, smiling, ‘I know.’ Of course I knew. Producing children is the ultimate expression of love for any woman, and Adana loved her blacksmith husband with a peculiarly fervent passion. ‘Come here a moment, dear,’ I said to her.

She obediently came to me, and I laid one hand on her lower abdomen. Then I sent a gently probing thought out through my fingers, and found the source of the problem almost immediately. Adana’s problem was chemical in nature. There was an imbalance that interfered with normal procreation.

If you’re that curious about it, you could read some medical texts, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to rob you of the joy of discovery, so I won’t get too specific here.

‘I’ll have to take a little trip down to the Vale, Adana,’ I told her.

‘Is it permanent, Aunt Pol?’ she asked, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Am I barren?’

‘Don’t be such a goose, Adana,’ I laughed. ‘You just need a little tonic, that’s all. I need to look up the proper formula in one of the books in my father’s tower, that’s all.’ The word ‘tonic’ is very useful for physicians. Everyone knows that a tonic is good for you – and that it doesn’t taste very good. The patients always make faces at the taste, but they take it religiously.

The next morning I went a ways out of Aldurford, changed form and flew on down to the Vale to spend several days with father’s medical library. The twins told me that father was off in Sendaria merrily leading Chamdar around by the nose. Subtlety’s never been one of father’s strong points, so his normal method of luring Chamdar to another village involved the murder of any Murgo who was handy. Chamdar, of course, assumed that the murder was an indication that the Murgo had been hot on my trail, so he’d immediately rush to the village in question to try
to pick up that trail. Chamdar was no fool, so after about five or six of these casual murders, he knew exactly what father was doing, but he still couldn’t ignore the chance that
this
murder was significant, so he had no choice but to follow up on it. I’m sure it entertained my father enormously, and it
did
keep him out of mischief – more or less – and the whole business kept Chamdar so preoccupied that the idea that I might
not
be in Sendaria apparently never occurred to him.

I finally tracked down the proper concoction of herbs to normalize Adana’s chemical imbalance, and then I flew on back up to Aldurford and mixed up a large jar of the ‘tonic’. Adana didn’t much care for the taste of it, but she religiously drank three doses a day. It wasn’t too long before Darel came out of their bedroom one morning with that silly look on his face that all young men display when they’ve just been told the happy news. ‘Adana’s going to have a baby, Aunt Pol!’ he said excitedly. ‘I’m going to be a father!’

‘That’s nice, dear,’ I replied calmly. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ I just
love
to do that to young men when they get too full of themselves. Parenthood in a male-dominated society is one of those profoundly unfair things. The woman does all the work, and the man takes all the credit.

‘Could you fix something nice for Adana, Aunt Pol?’ he almost begged me. ‘I think she’s entitled to breakfast in bed, don’t you?’

‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed. It was going to be one of
those.
Every now and then I’ve come across a young man who’s absolutely convinced that pregnancy’s a form of invalidism, and he inevitably wants to chain his wife to the bed for nine months. It took me several days to clear away
that
idiocy.

It was in the year 4841 that Adana gave birth to a son, Garel – a good Rivan name – and I heaved a vast sigh of relief. This was the first time I’d encountered infertility in all the years of my stewardship, and the possibility that it might recur was a continuing nightmare that’s haunted me for centuries.

It was in the year 4850 that the eclipse which has become so famous occurred. I’d seen eclipses of the sun before, but
this one was somehow quite different. Primitive man – and that term encompasses most of humanity – looks upon an eclipse with superstitious awe. Astronomers know what causes them, and can even predict them with a fair degree of accuracy. The eclipse of 4850, however, was an EVENT of the first magnitude, and its sudden appearance had been totally unpredictable, but the simple fact that it was
necessary
hasn’t yet occurred to them. All the prophecies speak of the eclipse, so it
had
to happen. It’s entirely possible that Torak himself simply obscured the sun to fulfill the prophecy which announced his coming. He
could
have done that, you know.

Did you want me to run through the mathematics involved in predicting an eclipse for you? No? I didn’t think so.

Anyway, while the world was still enveloped in that noontime darkness, mother’s voice startled me by its intensity.
‘This is what we’ve been waiting for, Pol,’
she declared triumphantly.
‘Start getting ready.’

‘Ready for what?’

‘Torak’s coming. He’s left Ashaba, and he’s on his way to Mal Zeth. He’ll set aside the current king and assume total control of all of Mallorea. Then he’ll come west to reclaim the Orb.’

‘How much time have we got?’

‘Probably not enough. You’ll lose more than your share of battles, but that won’t matter. This is one of those things that have to be settled by an EVENT. The Child of Light and the Child of Dark will meet in Arendia.’

‘Is Darel the Child of Light?’

‘No. The EVENT that involves Torak and the Rivan King’s still quite a ways off.’

‘Well, who
is
the Child of Light?’

‘At the moment, I am.’

‘You?’

‘I won’t be the one who meets Torak in Arendia, though, and neither will Darel. We’re involved in a series of EVENTS that’re preparing the way for the major one.’

‘Must you be so cryptic, mother?’
I asked with some asperity.

‘Yes, actually I must. If you know too much, you’ll do things differently from the way you’re supposed to do them. Let’s not tamper with this, Pol. This isn’t a good place for unrestrained creativity.’

And then she was gone.

An eclipse, that unnatural night at high noon, is normally followed by an equally unnatural-seeming brightness when the sun returns. The eclipse of 4850 was different. It
didn’t
get light again after the eclipse had passed because thick, heavy clouds had rolled in while the sun had been blotted out. Then it started to rain.

And it rained off and on for the next twenty-five years.

A day or so after ‘Torak’s Eclipse’, I sent my thought down to the twins in their tower in the Vale. Perhaps I should note in passing that I’m far more proficient in this mode of communication than the rest of my family because I’ve had more practice. I
did,
as you’ll recall, run my duchy from mother’s cottage following the fall of Vo Wacune. I kept Malon Killaneson hopping during those years, so I’m almost as good at
thinking
to people as I am at talking to them.

‘Uncles,’
I said to get the twins’ attention,
‘where’s my father?’

‘We haven’t heard from him, Pol,’
Belkira replied.

‘He’s probably running around warning everybody,’
Beltira added.
‘Wasn’t the eclipse spectacular?’

‘So’s the eruption of a volcano – or a tidal wave,’
I replied drily.
‘If the Old Wolf happens to check in with you, tell him that I need to talk with him – soon.’

‘We’ll pass it on, Pol,’
Belkira promised.

‘I’d appreciate it.’

The months rolled by, however, and there was still no word from my vagrant father. I started to grow irritated with him.

Then in the spring of 4851, Darel’s heart stopped beating while he was hammering at a piece of white-hot steel in his smithy. I’ve always taken these sudden heart stoppages as some kind of personal insult. There aren’t enough overt symptoms in advance to let you know that they’re coming. If the victim survives the first attack, a physician can do
things to prevent or delay the second. All too often, however, the first one is fatal. What appears to be a perfectly normal, healthy person simply dies in his tracks, and he’s dead before he hits the floor. It’s only then, in retrospect, that the physician realizes that there’ve been quite a number of subtle warnings that are so ordinary that they’ve been overlooked. I’d assumed that Darel had a red face because of the heat of his forge, and the fact that his left arm sometimes ached wasn’t remarkable, because his right arm also ached. He was a blacksmith, after all, and you don’t spend your days pounding on hot steel without earning a
few
aches and pains.

There was absolutely nothing I could do, and the frustration of that drove me almost wild.

Adana and Garel, who was ten at the time, were absolutely devastated by Darel’s death. The only good thing about a lingering illness lies in the fact that it prepares the family for the inevitable. Part of the tragedy of the death of a craftsman in most societies lies in the fact that his widow and orphans are not only bereaved but also immediately cast into poverty. With no money coming in, they frequently descend to the status of beggars at the local church door. My secret hoard of inconvenient money suddenly stopped being inconvenient. We were able to keep our house on the outskirts of Aldurford, and we ate regularly.

I’m sure that I profoundly disappointed several budding entrepreneurs in Aldurford by laughing in their faces when they made offers to buy Darel’s smithy. There are people in this world who are very much like vultures. They hover over death-beds drooling in anticipation. Then, when the new widow is virtually out of her mind with grief, they make ridiculously low offers for the family business. The vultures of Aldurford got a quick lesson in civil behavior when they came swooping in this time, however. I told them quite casually that I wasn’t interested in selling the smithy and that I was seriously thinking about expanding the business. By now I was conversant with almost all useful trades and crafts, so I talked of furniture marts, clothing shops, bakeries, and butcher shops – all attached to the
smithy. ‘It’d be so much more convenient for the people of Aldurford, don’t you think?’ I suggested brightly. “They wouldn’t have to spend whole days wandering around town to buy what they needed. They could do all their shopping – and buying – in one place.’

The local tradesmen all turned pale at the thought of that kind of well-organized competition, so they fomed a kind of consortium, pooled their cash reserves, and bought me out at about three times what the smithy was worth.

I
love
to do that to people who think they’re more clever than I am. It’s so much fun to watch that look of condescending superiority melt off their faces to be replaced by stark terror.

Finally, in the early summer of 4852, father spoke briefly with the twins and asked them to advise me that he was preparing to honor me with a visit. Between the time when he spoke with them and the time they finally passed the word to me, they evidently were permitted to make a breakthrough in one of the murkier passages of the Mrin. When they told me that Brand would be the Child of Light in the meeting in Arendia, I was just a bit put out with mother for being so cryptic about it during the eclipse. What had been the point? I was going to find out anyway, so why had she worked so hard to hide it from me? I suspected that her reasons may have been obscurely wolfish.

It took father about two weeks to finally get around to stopping by in Aldurford, and I was just a bit short with him when he finally arrived. It seemed that my whole family was getting some kind of vast entertainment out of keeping me in the dark.

The sky had temporarily cleared, and it was bright blue as father and I walked down to the river and on out past the last house in Aldurford. The sun was very bright, and a breeze rippled the surface of the water. ‘I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself, father,’ I said. I’ll admit that I was just a bit spiteful about it.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s been two years since the eclipse, Old Man,’ I pointed
out. ‘I hadn’t realized just how far down I was on your list of priorities.’

‘Don’t get your nose out of joint, Pol,’ he told me. ‘You know how to move at a moment’s notice. Other people take quite a bit longer. I wanted to get
them
moving before I came here. I wasn’t deliberately ignoring you.’

I turned that over a few times, trying to find something wrong with it. Then I gave up on that. “The twins asked me to pass something on,’ I told him.

‘Oh?’

‘Brand’s the one who’s going to met Torak when this all comes to a head in Arendia.’

‘Brand?’

‘That’s what the Mrin says.’ Then I quoted the obscure passage to him.

‘That’s ridiculous!’ he fumed. ‘Brand can’t take up Riva’s sword. The Orb won’t permit it. Give me your hand, Pol. You and I need to talk with the twins. I want some clarifications, and I think you’d better hear it too.’ Father absolutely refuses to admit that I’m much better at communicating with others over long distances than he is. He can be such a little boy sometimes.

The twins were having a great deal of difficulty with the Mrin, so about the best they could do was to give us a sketchy sort of outline of what we were supposed to do.

‘Absolutely out of the question!’
I responded when Beltira told me to take Garel and Adana to the Stronghold.
‘It’s directly in Torak’s path if he’s bound for Arendia.’

‘I’m only passing on what the Mrin says, Pol,’
Beltira replied.
‘The Stronghold won’t fall to Torak. The Mrin’s very clear about that. There’ll be a siege, but it won’t accomplish anything.’