Polgara the Sorceress (68 page)

‘Ah – no thanks, Master Beldin,’ Cerran replied with a faint smile. ‘We don’t know exactly what that date is, but we can make a pretty good guess.’

‘Oh?’

‘Kal Torak’s going to want Urvon in place near the southern border of Nyissa when that date gets closer. He’ll want to give himself plenty of time because a two-pronged attack doesn’t work very well if one of the prongs isn’t in place yet. That means that Urvon’s going to have to get an early start. Let’s ignore that, though, and use your six-month figure. The battle’s going to begin when Urvon marches out of Rak Hagga. We’ll want to start moving into place then. We’ll get confirmation when Torak abandons the siege of the Stronghold to come west. That’ll be forty-five days before the fighting starts. As you suggested, there are bound to be delays, but let’s use Kal Torak’s calendar just to be on the safe side. We’ll move when Urvon moves. We might get there early, but it’s better to be early than late.’

‘Tis a wonderful clever fellow th’ man is, don’t y’ know,’ Beldin said to my father.

‘Will you stop that?’ father said irritably. Then he dipped his head slightly to General Cerran. ‘You’re a very useful man to have around, General. Most of my military experience has been with Alorns, and they tend to make things up as they go along. Careful planning seems to bore them for some reason.’

‘Belgarath!’
the grey-bearded King Eldrig objected.

‘It’s just a difference in approach, your Majesty,’ General Cerran smoothed things over. ‘Experience has taught me that things go wrong during military operations, and I try to take those things into account. My estimates are very conservative, but even if Urvon and Kal Torak don’t exactly follow my timetable, we’ll still have our defenses in place
in plenty of time. I hate being late for social engagements, don’t you?’

‘You look upon war as a social engagement, General?’ father asked, sounding a bit startled.

‘I’m a soldier, Belgarath. A good war’s the closest thing a soldier has to a social life.’

‘He’s going to take some getting used to, isn’t he?’ Beldin chuckled. ‘He’s got a good mind, though.’

‘You’re too kind, Master Beldin,’ the general murmured.

Our strategy sessions progressed in a much more orderly fashion than they had at Riva. Cerran was a methodical man who ticked off such things as ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ on his fingers. We’d already decided that ‘when’ would be determined by some fairly visible activity on the part of the two Angarak forces. Then we moved on to ‘where’. The Mrin told us that the final battle would take place in Arendia, and our convenient fiction that our knowledge of that had come from Drasnian Intelligence had been accepted by the Tolnedrans as a verified fact. Arendia’s a big place, though, and it wasn’t until the sixth year of the siege of the Stronghold that the twins wrested the exact location out of the Mrin. After that,
we
knew that the battle would take place at Vo Mimbre. All we had to do then was convince the Tolnedrans that we knew what we were talking about.

After one of our sessions, I motioned to Brand, and the two of us took a stroll around the rain-drenched grounds of the imperial compound.

‘You wanted to speak with me, Pol?’ Brand asked me.

‘We’re going to have to lead General Cerran rather gently, Brand,’ I replied. ‘I think you’re best qualified to do that. Cerran knows that the Alorn kings all defer to you, even though he doesn’t know exactly why.’

‘My overpowering presence, perhaps?’ he suggested.

“The outcome of a dice-game might be more in keeping with the basic Alorn character, Brand,’ I twitted him.

‘Polgara!’ he protested mildly.

‘Whatever the reason, Cerran looks upon you as the leader of the Aloms, so he’s going to listen to you rather carefully. Cerran likes to reason things out, so we’re going
to have to stress the disadvantages of all other possible battlefields and then let
him
decide that Vo Mimbre’s the only possible place. If we don’t, he’ll feel obliged to have us spread our forces all over southern Arendia.’

‘That’d be disastrous,’ Brand exclaimed.

‘Moderately disastrous, yes. Now, then, I spent a great deal of time in Arendia during the third millennium, so I’m familiar with all the cities. You’re about to get an education in geography, dear boy. I want you to be very familiar with the terrain around every city in Mimbre. There are tactical disadvantages to almost any city on earth, and Mimbrate cities are no exception. Your job’s to stress the disadvantages of every town and city –
except
Vo Mimbre. It has its own disadvantages, but we’ll gloss over those. We don’t want General Cerran to choose any battleground except Vo Mimbre, so we’ll just close all the other doors to him so that he’s only got that one choice.’

‘You’re very good at this, Pol,’ he said admiringly.

‘I’ve had lots of practice. Wars are the national pastime among the Arends. A healthy sneeze can start a war in Arendia. I spent six hundred or more years trying to keep the Arends from sneezing at the wrong time. I’ll talk with Eldrig and the others, and they’ll back you up in your assessments of the various towns and cities.’

This would all be a lot easier if the Tolnedrans would just accept the fact that you and your father aren’t like other people.’

‘That goes against their religion, dear one,’ I said with a slight smile.

‘What
is
the basis of the Tolnedran religion, Pol?’

‘Money. The Tolnedrans invented it, so they think it’s holy. They’re afraid of magic because a magician could conceivably
create
money instead of swindling it out of others.’

‘Could
you
create money, Pol?’ His eyes had come alight at the mere mention of the idea.

I shrugged. ‘Probably, but why should I bother? I’ve already got more than I can spend. We’re getting off the path here. This Tolnedran superstition’s inconvenient, I’ll grant you, but we can work our way around it.’

After General Cerran had reached the conclusion we wanted him to reach, my father’s disposition started to go sour for some reason. I put up with his bad temper for about a week, and then I went to his room in the Cherek embassy to find out what his problem was.

‘This
is the problem, Pol!’ he exploded, banging his fist down on the scroll of the Mrin. ‘It doesn’t make sense!’

‘It’s not supposed to, father. It’s
supposed
to sound like pure gibberish. Tell me about your problem. Maybe I can help.’

Father’s discontent with the passage in the Mrin lay in the seeming suggestion that Brand was going to be in two places at the same time. His tone was decidedly grouchy as he read it to me.’ “And the Child of Light shall take the jewel from its accustomed place and shall cause it to be delivered up to the Child of Light before the gates of the golden city.”‘ His frustration seemed right on the verge of driving him to destroy the scroll.

‘Calm down, father,’ I told him. ‘Apoplexy’s not going to solve anything.’ I saw the answer immediately, of course, but how was I going to explain it? ‘How long would you say that one of these EVENTS takes to run its course?’ I asked.

‘As long as it takes, I suppose.’

‘Centuries? Oh, come now, father. As powerful as those two contending Necessities are, a confrontation like that would destroy the whole universe. A single instant’s probably closer to the truth. Then, after the EVENT’S taken place, that particular Child of Light doesn’t really have any further need of the title, does he? He’s done what he’s supposed to do, and the title can be passed on. One Child of Light will take the sword down off the wall, another will carry it here from Riva, and it’ll be handed over to Brand. They’ll be passing the title along at the same time they pass the sword.’

‘I think you’re straining to make it all fit, Pol,’ he said.

‘Can you come up with anything else?’

‘Not really. I guess I’d better go to the Isle.’

‘Oh? What for?’

‘To get the sword, of course. Brand’s going to need it.’ He’d obviously leapt to a conclusion that seemed to me to
have several large holes in it. He seemed to believe that
he
was going to be the Child of Light who’d take the sword down off the wall in the Hall of the Rivan King. By the time he got to Riva, though, mother’d already taken care of that, and the sword played no part in it. All glowing with blue light, she’d entered the Hall, removed the Orb from the pommel of Iron-grip’s sword, and embedded it in the center of a shield. I rather suspect that took some of the wind out of father’s sails. I
also
suspect that he began to understand – dimly – that mother wasn’t quite as dead as he’d believed. He seemed a bit crestfallen when he returned to Tol Honeth.

It was in the spring of 4874 that uncle Beldin returned again from southern Cthol Murgos to report that Urvon had left Rak Hagga to begin his trek across the continent. If General Cerran’s timetable was correct, we had less than a year to complete our preparations.
One
of those was already in progress. Brand reported to father that he was ‘hearing voices’. This isn’t the sort of thing a physician really wants to hear. When someone announces that he ‘hears voices’, the physician normally reserves a room for the poor fellow in the nearest asylum, since it’s a clear indication that the patient’s brains have sprung a leak.

Brand, however, hadn’t gone crazy. The voice he was hearing was that of the Necessity, and it was very carefully coaching him in exactly what he was going to have to do during his face-to-face confrontation with Torak. That confrontation was fast approaching, but for right now, our unseen friend was more concerned about the deployment of the Tolnedran forces. Quite obviously, General Cerran’s legions would tip the balance at Vo Mimbre. The problem, of course, was that the legions were in the south preparing to keep Urvon from reaching Vo Mimbre in time for the battle. The Necessity assured Brand that Urvon wasn’t going to be a problem, but convincing Cerran of that fact immediately raised yet another problem. ‘God told me so’ doesn’t really carry much weight in any argument. And the declaration that ‘I changed myself into a bird and flew on down there to have a look’ carries even less. We decided not to do it that way.

Then, in the early spring of 4875, Torak gave up at the Stronghold and started marching west. If Cerran’s timetable held true, the Angaraks would be at the gates of Vo Mimbre in about a month and a half – and the legions were still in the south. As I’d rather expected he would, UL took a hand in things at that point. The cat-eyed Ulgos came out of their caves by night and wreaked havoc in Torak’s sleeping army. The Angaraks didn’t move very fast after that.

It was while the Angaraks were cautiously inching their way across the mountains of Ulgo that Uncle Beldin gleefully advised my father that an unnatural snowstorm had buried Urvon and Ctuchik up to the ears in the great desert of Araga. And
that,
incidentally, explained the quarter-century-long rain-storm that’d plagued us all. The weather patterns had changed just in preparation for the blizzard that stopped Torak’s second army dead in its tracks.

Father was chortling with glee when he conveyed Beldin’s message to me, but he stopped chortling when I pointed out the fact that the blizzard wouldn’t mean anything until General Cerran knew that it’d happened. ‘I don’t think he’ll just take our word for it, father,’ I predicted. ‘He’ll demand proof, and there’s no way we can provide that proof – unless you’d like to pick him up and carry him down to that desert so that he can see for himself. He won’t abandon that southern frontier just on our say-so – particularly since both he and Ran Borune know that we’d really like their company at Vo Mimbre.’

We presented our information as having come from our ‘usual reliable sources’, and, as I’d suspected he might, General Cerran received the news with profound scepticism.

Eventually, it was Ran Borune who suggested a compromise. Half of the southern legions would come north, and the other half would stay where they were. Cerran was a soldier, so even when he received orders that he didn’t entirely agree with, he expanded them to make them work better. He added the eight ceremonial legions from Tol Honeth and nineteen training legions to make it appear that the Tolnedran presence at Vo Mimbre was larger than it
really was. The ceremonial legions probably couldn’t march more than a mile without collapsing, and the raw recruits in the training legions could probably walk, but marching in step was still beyond their capabilities. When Torak looked out the window of his rusty tin palace, though, he’d see about seventy-five thousand legionaries bearing down on him, and he’d have no way of knowing that better than a third of them wouldn’t know which end of a sword was which. The Chereks would ferry the southern legions and the imaginary ones from around Tol Honeth and Tol Vordue to the River Arend. We could only hope that they’d get there in time.

Then the twins arrived, and they privately advised us that the battle would last for three days and that – as we’d expected – the whole issue would be decided by the meeting of Brand and Kal Torak. The chore facing my father and me was fairly simple. All we had to do was make sure that Torak didn’t reach Vo Mimbre before all our forces were in place, and that probably wouldn’t be much more difficult than reversing the tides or stopping the sun in its orbit.

The two of us left Tol Honeth as evening fell over the marble city, and we entered a grove of birch-trees a mile or so north of town.

‘You’d better tell him that you’ll be using our owl during all this, Pol,’
Mother’s voice suggested.
‘He won’t like it very much, but let’s get him into the habit of seeing the owl from time to time.’

‘I’ll take care of it, mother,’
I replied.
‘I’ve come up with a way to head off all those tiresome arguments.’

‘You have? Some day you’ll have to share that with me.’

‘Just listen, mother,’
I suggested.
‘Listen and learn.’

‘That was tacky, Pol, very tacky.’

‘I’m glad you liked it.’.

Father was squinting off toward the west. ‘We’ll lose the light before long,’ he noted. ‘Oh, well, there aren’t any mountain ranges between here and Vo Mimbre, so we’re not likely to crash into anything in the dark.’