Polgara the Sorceress (8 page)

And then Anrak brought Riva to our rooms. I’ll grant that he was physically impressive. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone – except the other men in his family – quite so tall. He had blue eyes and a black beard, and I hated him. He muttered a brief greeting to my father, and then he sat down to look at Beldaran.

Beldaran looked right back.

It was probably the most painful afternoon I’d spent in my entire life up until then. I’d hoped that Riva would be more like his cousin, Anrak, blurting out things that would offend my sister, but the idiot wouldn’t say anything! All he could do was look at her with that adoring expression on his face, and Beldaran was almost as bad in her obvious adoration of him.

I was definitely fighting a rear-guard action here.

We all sat in absolute silence watching them adore each other, and every moment was like a knife in my heart. I’d lost my sister, there wasn’t much question about that. I wasn’t going to give either of them the satisfaction of seeing me bleed openly, however, so I did all of my bleeding inside. It was quite obvious that the separation of Beldaran and me which had begun before we were ever born was now complete, and I wanted to die.

Finally, when it was almost evening, my last hope died, and I felt tears burning my eyes.

Rather oddly – I hadn’t been exactly polite to him – it was father who rescued me. He came over and took my
hand. ‘Why don’t we take a little walk, Pol?’ he suggested gently. Despite my suffering, his compassion startled me. He was the last one in the world I’d have expected
that
from. My father
does
surprise me now and then.

He led me from the room, and I noticed as we left that Beldaran didn’t even take her eyes off Riva’s face as I went away. That was the final blow, I think.

Father took me down the hallway to the little balcony at the far end, and we went outside, closing the door behind us.

I tried my very best to keep my sense of loss under control. ‘Well,’ I said in my most matter-of-fact way, ‘I guess that settles that, doesn’t it?’

Father murmured some platitudes about destiny, but I wasn’t really listening to him. Destiny be hanged! I’d just lost my sister! Finally, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. With a wail I threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his chest, weeping uncontrollably.

That went on for quite some time until I’d finally wept myself out. Then I got my composure back. I decided that I wouldn’t
ever
let Riva or Beldaran see me suffering,
and
, moreover, that I’d take some positive steps to show them that I really didn’t care that my sister was willingly deserting me. I questioned father about some things that wouldn’t have concerned me before – baths, dressmakers, combs, and the like. I’d show my sister how little I really cared. If
I
was suffering, I’d make sure that
she
suffered too.

I took particular pains with my bath. In my eyes this was a sort of funeral – mine – and it was only proper that I should look my best when they laid me out. My chewed off fingernails gave me a bit of concern at first, but then I remembered our gift. I concentrated on my nails and then said, ‘Grow.’

And that took care of that.

Then I luxuriated for almost an hour in my bath. I wanted to soak off all the accumulated dirt, certainly, but I was surprised to discover that bathing
felt
good.

When I climbed out of the barrel-like wooden tub, I toweled myself down, put on a robe, and sat down to deal
with my hair. It wasn’t easy. My hair hadn’t been washed since the last rain-storm in the Vale, and it was so tangled and snarled that I almost gave up on it. It took a lot of effort, and it was very painful, but at last I managed to get it to the point where I could pull a comb through it.

I didn’t sleep very much that night, and I arose early to continue my preparations. I sat down in front of a mirror made of polished brass and looked at my reflection rather critically. I was somewhat astonished to discover that I wasn’t nearly as ugly as I’d always imagined. As a matter of fact, I was quite pretty.

‘
Don’t let it go your head, Pol
,’ mother’s voice told me. ‘
You didn’t actually think that I’d give birth to an ugly daughter, did you
?’

‘
I’ve always thought I was hideous, mother
,’ I said.

‘
You were wrong. Don’t overdo it with your hair. The white lock doesn’t need any help to make you pretty
.’

The blue dress father’d obtained for me was really quite nice. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I was just a little embarrassed by what I saw. There wasn’t any question that I was a woman. I’d been more or less ignoring certain evidences of my femaleness, but that was no longer really possible. The dress positively screamed the fact. There
was
a problem with the shoes, though. They had pointed toes and medium heels, and they hurt my feet. I wasn’t used to shoes, but I gritted my teeth and endured them.

The more I looked in my mirror, the more I liked what I saw. The worm I’d always been had just turned into a butterfly. I still hated Riva, but my hatred softened just a bit. He hadn’t intended it, but it was
his
arrival in Camaar that had revealed to me what I
really
was.

I was pretty! I was something even beyond pretty!

‘What an amazing thing,’ I murmured.

My victory was made complete that morning when I demurely – I’d practiced for a couple of hours – entered the room where the others were sitting. I’d more or less taken the reactions of Riva and Anrak for granted. Uneducated though I was, I knew how they’d view me in my altered condition. The face I looked at was Beldaran’s.

I’d rather hoped to see just a twinge of envy there, but I should have known better. Her expression was just a little quizzical, and when she spoke, it was in ‘twin’. What passed between us was intensely private. ‘Well, finally,’ was all she said, and then she embraced me warmly.

I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed that my sister didn’t turn green with envy, but no triumph is ever total, is it?

Anrak’s face grew melancholy, and he sighed. He explained to Riva how much he regretted not having pressed his suit.

Isn’t that an absurd turn of phrase? It makes Anrak sound like a laundress with a hot flat-iron.

Sorry.

His rueful admission made my morning complete, and it opened whole new vistas to me. Being adored is a rather pleasant way to pass the time, wouldn’t you say? Not only that, both Anrak and his cousin automatically ennobled me by calling me ‘Lady Polgara’, and that has a rather nice ring to it.

Then Riva’s cousin came up with a number of profound misconceptions about what father calls our ‘talent’. He clearly believed that my transformation had been the result of magic and even went so far as to suggest that I could be in two places – and times – simultaneously. I rather gently tweaked his beard on that score. I found myself growing fonder and fonder of Anrak. He said such nice things about me.

It was perhaps noon by the time we went down to the harbor to board Riva’s ship. Beldaran and I had never seen the sea before, nor a ship, for that matter, and we both were a little apprehensive about our upcoming voyage. The weather was fine, though there were all those waves out there. I’m not sure exactly what we’d expected, but all the ponds in the Vale had absolutely flat surfaces, so we weren’t prepared for waves. There was also a peculiar odor about
the sea. It had a sharp tang to it that overlaid the more disgusting smells that characterize every harbor in the world. I suppose it’s human nature to dispose of garbage in the simplest way possible, but it struck me as improvident to dump it into a body of water that’ll return it to you on each incoming tide.

The ship seemed quite large to me, but I found the cabins below decks tiny and cramped, and everything seemed to be coated with a black, greasy substance. ‘What’s that smeared all over the walls?’ I asked uncle Beldin.

‘Tar,’ he replied with an indifferent shrug. ‘It helps to keep the water out.’

That sort of alarmed me. ‘The boat’s made of wood,’ I said. ‘Isn’t wood supposed to float?’

‘Only when it’s one solid piece, Pol. The sea wants to have a level surface, and empty places under that surface offend it, so it tries to seep in and fill up those spaces. And the tar keeps the wood from rotting.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘I’m sure your opinion hurts its feelings.’

‘You always have to try to be clever, don’t you, uncle?’

‘Look upon it as a character defect if you like.’ He grinned.

After Beldaran and I had deposited our belongings in our tiny cabin, we went back up on deck. Riva’s sailors were making the vessel ready to depart. They were burly, bearded men, many of whom were stripped to the waist. All that bare skin made me just a little jumpy for some reason.

There seemed to be ropes everywhere – an impossible snarl passing through pulleys and running upward in an incomprehensible tangle. The sailors untied the ropes that held the ship up against the wharf, and then pushed us a ways out and took their places at the oars. One ruffian with an evil face sat cross-legged in the stern and began to pound rhythmically on a hide-topped drum to set the pace for the oarsmen. The ship moved slowly out through the crowded harbor toward the open sea.

Once we were past the breakwater, the sailors pulled in their oars and began hauling on various ropes. I still don’t
fully understand exactly how a sailor can tell one rope from another, but Riva’s men seemed to know what they were doing. Large horizontal beams with tightly rolled canvas attached to them crept up the masts as the chanting sailors pulled on the ropes in a unison set by the rhythm of the chant. The pulleys squealed as the canvas-bearing beams rose to the tops of the masts. Then aloft, other sailors, agile as monkeys, untied the canvas and let it roll down. The sails hung slack for a few moments. Then a breeze caught them and they bellied out with a booming sound.

The ship rolled slightly to one side, and then it began to move. Water foamed as the bow of the ship cut into the waves, and the breeze of our passage touched my face and tossed my hair. The waves were not high enough to be alarming, and Riva’s ship mounted each one with stately pace and then majestically ran down the far side.

I absolutely loved it!

The ship and the sea became unified, and there was a music to that unification, a music of groaning timbers, creaking ropes, and booming sails. We moved out across the sun-touched waves with the music of the sea filling our ears.

I’ve frequently made light, disparaging remarks about Alorns and their fascination with the sea, but there’s a kind of holiness in it – almost as if true sailors have a different God. They don’t just love the sea; they worship it, and in my heart I know why.

‘I can’t see the land any more!’ Beldaran exclaimed that evening, looking apprehensively sternward.

‘You aren’t supposed to, love,’ Riva told her gently. ‘We’d never get home if we tried to keep the Sendarian coast in plain sight the whole way to the Isle.’

The sunset on the sea ahead of us was glorious, and when the moon rose, she built a broad, gleaming highway across the glowing surface of the night-dark sea.

All bemused by the beauty around me, I sat down on a convenient barrel, crossed my arms on the rail, and set my chin on them to drink in the sense of the sea. I remained
in that reverie all through the night, and the sea claimed me as her own. My childhood had been troubled, filled with resentments and a painful, almost mortifying sense of my own inadequacy. The sea calmed those troubled feelings with her serene immensity. Did it really matter that one little girl with skinned knees felt all pouty because the world didn’t genuflect every time she walked by? The sea didn’t seem to think so, and increasingly as the hours passed, neither did I.

The dawn announced her coming with a pale light just above the sternward horizon. The world seemed filled with a grey, shadowless luminescence, and the dark water became as molten silver. When the sun, made ruddy by the sea mist, mounted above the eastern horizon, he filled my heart with a wonder such as I’d never known before.

But the sea wasn’t done with me yet. Her face was like molten glass, and then something immense swelled up from beneath without actually breaking the surface. The resulting surge was untouched by foam or silly little splashings. It was far too profound for that kind of childish display. I felt a sudden sense of superstitious terror. The mythology of the world positively teems with sea-monsters, and Beltira and Belkira had amused Beldaran and me when we were very young by telling us stories, usually of Alorn origin. No sea-going people will ever pass up the chance to talk about sea-monsters, after all.

‘What’s that?’ I asked a sleepy-eyed sailor who’d just come up on deck, and I pointed at the disturbance in the water.

He squinted over the rail. ‘Oh,’ he said in an off-hand way, ‘those be whales, my Lady.’

‘Whales?’

‘Big fish, my Lady.’ He squinted at the sea again. ‘It’s the time of year when they flock together. I’d guess that there be quite a few down there.’

‘Is that why the water’s bulging up like that – because there are so many?’

‘No, my Lady. One whale all by himself can make the sea heave that way.’

I was sure he was exaggerating, but then an enormous
dark form erupted from the water like a mountain aborning. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! Nothing alive could be that big!

Then he crashed with a boom back into the sea, sending great sheets of water in all directions, and he slapped his tail down against the surface with another huge noise and disappeared.

Then he jumped again, and again.

He was playing!

And then he was not alone. Other whales also came surging up out of the sea to leap and play in the morning sun like a crowd of overgrown children frolicking in a play yard.

And they laughed! Their voices were high-pitched, but they were not squeaky. There was a profound depth to them and a kind of yearning.

One of them – I think it was that first one – rolled over on his side to look at me with one huge eye. There were wrinkles around that eye as if he were very, very old, and there was a profound wisdom there.

And then he winked at me and plunged back into the depths.

No matter how long I live, I’ll always remember that strange meeting. In some obscure way it’s shaped my entire view of the world and of everything that’s hidden beneath the surface of ordinary reality. That single event made the tedious journey from the Vale and this voyage worthwhile – and more.

We were another two days reaching Riva, and I spent those days filled with the wonder of the sea and of those creatures she supported as a mother supports her children.

The Isle of the Winds is a bleak, inhospitable place that rises out of a usually storm-tossed sea, and when viewed from the water the city seems as unwelcoming as the rock upon which it’s built. It rises steeply from the harbor in a series of narrow terraces, and each row of houses stands at the brink of the terrace upon which it’s built. The seaward walls of those houses are thick and windowless, and battlements surmount them. In effect this makes the city little more than a series of impenetrable walls rising one after
another to the Citadel which broods down over the entire community. Whole races could hurl themselves at Riva with no more effect than the waves have upon the cliffs of the Isle itself. As the Master said, ‘All the tides of Angarak cannot prevail against it,’ and when you add the Cherek fleet patrolling the waters just off the coast, you have the potential for the extinction of any race foolish enough even to contemplate the notion of making war on the Rivans. Torak’s crazy, but he’s not
that
crazy.

Beldaran and I had taken some rather special pains to make ourselves presentable that morning. Beldaran was to be Queen of Riva, and she wanted to make a good impression on her future subjects. I was
not
going to be the queen, and my target was a certain specific segment of the population. I was rather carefully taking aim at all the young men, and I think I hit most of them. What a glorious thing it is to be universally adored! My father’s slightly worried expression made my morning complete.

‘
Don’t let it go to your head, Polgara
,’ mother’s voice cautioned me. ‘
What you’re seeing on all those vacant faces isn’t love. Young males of all species have urges that they can’t really control. In their eyes you’re not a person; you’re an object. You don’t really want to be no more than a thing, do you
?’

The prospect of incipient thinghood put a slight damper on my enjoyment of the moment.

Traditionally, Rivans wear grey clothing. As a matter of fact, the other western races call them ‘grey-cloaks’. Young people, however, tend to ignore the customs of their elders. Adolescent rebellion has been responsible for all manner of absurd costumes. The more ridiculous a certain fashion is, the more adolescents will cling to it. The young men crowding the edge of the wharf with yearning eyes put me in mind of a flower garden planted by someone with absolutely no sense of taste. There were doublets down there in hues I didn’t even have names for, and some of those short jackets were varicolored, and the colors clashed hideously. Each of my worshipers, however, was absolutely convinced that his clothing was so splendid that no girl in her right mind could possibly resist him.

I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to burst out laughing.
My father’s concern about what he felt to be my fragile chastity was totally inappropriate. I wasn’t going to surrender to some adolescent whose very appearance sent me off into gales of laughter.

After the sailors had snubbed up the mooring ropes, we disembarked and started up the stairs that lead from the harbor to Riva’s Citadel. That series of stair-stepping walls that are part of the city’s defenses were revealed as a part of the houses in which the Rivans lived. The houses seemed bleak on the outside, but I’ve since discovered that the interiors of those houses are places of beauty. In many ways they are like the Rivans themselves. All the beauty is on the inside. The streets of Riva are narrow and monotonously straight. I strongly suspect that Riva had been guided by Belar in the construction of the city. Everything about it has a defensive purpose.

There was a shallow courtyard surrounded by a massive wall at the top of the stairs. The size of the roughly squared-off stones in that wall startled me. The amount of sheer physical labor which had gone into the construction of the city was staggering. We entered the Citadel through a great iron-bound door, and I found the interior of my sister’s new home depressingly bleak. It took us quite some time to reach our quarters. Beldaran and I were temporarily ensconced in a quite pleasant set of rooms. I say temporarily because Beldaran would soon be moving into the royal apartment.

‘You’re having fun, aren’t you, Pol?’ My sister asked me once we were alone. Her voice seemed just a bit wistful, and she spoke in ‘twin’.

‘I don’t exactly follow you,’ I replied.

‘Now that you’ve decided to be pretty, you’ve got every young man you come across fawning all over you.’

‘You’ve always been pretty, Beldaran,’ I reminded her.

She sighed a rather sweet little sigh. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I never got the chance to play with it. What’s it like to have everybody around you dumbstruck with adoration?’

‘I rather like it.’ I laughed. They’re all very foolish, though. If you’re hungry for adoration, get yourself a puppy.’

She also laughed. ‘I wonder if all young men are as silly as these Rivans are. I’d sort of hate to be the queen of the idiots.’

‘Mother says that it’s more or less universal,’ I told her, ‘and it’s not just humans. Wolves are the same way, and so are rabbits. She says that all young males have what she calls “urges”. The Gods arranged it that way, I guess – so that there’ll always be a lot of puppies.’

‘That’s a depressing turn of phrase, Pol. It sort of implies that all I’m here for is to produce babies.’