Polgara the Sorceress (84 page)

My, isn’t
that
gloomy?

Anyway, this particular plague had carried off large numbers of Drasnians, and among them had been the king. Father and I stayed long enough to attend the coronation of Crown Prince Rhodar. I questioned the chubby king-to-be rather obliquely and was pleased to discover that he
had
, in fact, been visited by a scruffy-looking young Nadrak named Yarblek.

After Rhodar’s coronation, father made an independent decision that I really didn’t like. He sold our horses and bought a rowboat. ‘We’ll go on down through the fens,’ he said in that irritatingly imperial tone he sometimes assumes.

‘We’ll do what?’

I think my tone might have conveyed my feelings about
that
decision. ‘There are a lot of people traveling the Great North Road this time of year, Pol,’ he explained defensively, ‘and there might be some unfriendly eyes concealed in that crowd.’ He
still
refused to even consider that most logical alternative. Even though it was spring and the waterfowl were migrating, the sky wasn’t really all
that
crowded.

And so he poled us down into that reeking swamp. The mosquitoes were very happy to see us, I’m sure, and they
also
butted their heads against us in greeting. My disposition turned sour after the first mile.

The mosquitoes weren’t the only creatures inhabiting the swamps, though. The turtles watched us glide by with dull-eyed reptilian indifference, but the fenlings, those small aquatic animals distantly related to otters, frolicked and played around our boat, and their squeaky chittering was almost like giggling. Evidently, the fenlings found the idea of humans stupid enough to deliberately come into the fens vastly amusing.

It was raining when father poled us around a bend in the slow-moving, meandering stream we were following through the reeds, and we caught sight of the neat, thatch
roofed cottage that was the home of Vordai, the witch of the fens.

Stories about Vordai had been surfacing in all manner of places for about three centuries, wild exaggerations as it turned out. Witches deal with spirits – and with the weather, of course. We don’t do things like that. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that witches deal with specifics, and we deal with generalities. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but isn’t almost everything?

The fenlings had alerted Vordai to our approach, and she was waiting in her doorway as father drove the nose of our boat up on to the muddy shore of her tree-covered little island. Her greeting wasn’t exactly cordial. ‘You might as well come inside,’ she said without much emotion – ‘at least until the rain lets up.’

Father and I got out of our boat and went up the path to her door. ‘So you’re Vordai,’ I said to the aged but still beautiful woman in the doorway.

‘And you would be Polgara,’ she replied.

‘You two know each other?’ Father sounded surprised.

‘By reputation, Old Wolf,’ I told him. ‘Vordai here is the one they call “the witch of the fens”. She’s been outcast, and this is the only place in Drasnia where she’s really safe.’

‘Probably because all the wood here is soggy enough to make burning people at the stake very difficult,’ she added. ‘Come in out of the rain.’

The interior of her cottage was scrupulously neat, her fireplace was well-banked, and there was a vase of wildflowers sitting on her table. The brown dress she wore reminded me of the dress my mother had been wearing that time I’d actually met her in the caves of Ulgo. Vordai, however, limped, and mother didn’t.

She wordlessly took our wet clothing, hung it near the fire to dry and gave us blankets in which to wrap ourselves. ‘Seat yourselves,’ she told us then, pointing at the table. ‘There should be enough in the pot for all of us.’ The odor coming from her pot identified the meal she’d prepared as a delicately seasoned fish soup. Vordai was clearly an outstanding cook.

‘You knew we were coming, didn’t you?’ I asked her.

‘Naturally. I am a witch, after all.’

Then one of the fenlings came loping in and reported something in that excited chittering sound.

‘Yes,’ Vordai answered the sleek little beast, ‘I know.’

‘It’s true then,’ I said. I’d heard some wild stories about Vordai’s ability to communicate with swamp creatures. ‘You shouldn’t really have tampered with them, you know.’

‘It didn’t hurt them,’ she said with a shrug, ‘and I find them to be much nicer to talk with than humans.’

There was an injured quality about this beautiful old woman that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Life hadn’t treated her well, granted, but there was something else I couldn’t quite fathom. She intrigued me more than I can say, and she also challenged the physician in me. Physicians fix things that have gone wrong, but my problem here was that I wasn’t exactly sure what was really wrong. And so I decided to find out. I’m not one to pass up a challenge – or had you noticed that?

After we’d eaten, I sent a silent, not so subtle message to my father.
‘Go away,’
I told him.

‘What?’

‘Go outside. I need to be alone with Vordai. Go. Now.’

His face grew slightly sullen. ‘I’m going out to turn the boat over,’ he said aloud. There’s no point in letting the rain fill it up with water.’ Then he got up and left, looking slightly ridiculous in that blanket.

‘I’ll help you with the dishes,’ I told our hostess. The little domestic chores we share bring women closer together, but Vordai stubbornly refused to open her heart to me – so I did it the other way. I reached out with a tenuous thought, and once I was past her defensive barrier, I found the source of her life-long bitterness. It was a man, naturally. The origin of women’s problems almost always is. It was a pedestrian thing, actually. When Vordai had been about fifteen, she’d fallen deeply – and silently – in love. The man had been quite a bit older than she was, and to put it bluntly, he was as stupid as a stump. They’d lived in a soggy little village on the edge of the fens, and Vordai’s efforts to attract and
capture the heart of the lumpish fellow had been unconventional. She used her gifts to help her neighbors. Unfortunately, her quarry was religious – in the worst possible way. He yearned in the depths of his grubby soul to ‘stamp out the abomination of witchcraft’, and it had been
he
who had led the mob which had been out to burn her at the stake. She’d been forced to flee into the fens, leaving behind her all hope of love, marriage and children. And that was why – even after three hundred years – she was out here in the fens devoting all her boundless love to the fenlings. Hers was a silly little story of a deep, but misplaced, affection that still burned in her heart.

‘Oh, dear,’ I said, my eyes suddenly filling with tears.

She gave me a startled look, and she suddenly realized that I’d subtly invaded her mind. At first her reaction was one of outrage at my unwelcome invasion, but then she realized that I’d done it out of compassion. I was a sorceress after all, so I had no real objection to witchcraft. Her defensive wall crumbled, and she wailed, ‘Oh, Polgara!’ She began to weep, and I took her in my arms and held her gently for quite some time, stroking her hair and murmuring comfort to her. There wasn’t really anything else I could do. I knew what was wrong now, but there was no way that I could fix it.

The rain let up, and father and I put our now-dry clothes back on and resumed our journey. I spent a lot of time pondering those two meetings while father poled us on though the swamp. Both in the Nadrak mountains and again in Boktor, father had come up with very lame excuses for us not to simply fly back to Annath. Father could come up with all kinds of excuses to
avoid
work, but on these occasions, his excuses put him directly in its path, and that was so unusual as to get my attention immediately. For some reason, we’d
had
to meet that old man in the Nadrak mountains and Vordai in the fens. I finally gave up. Father and I
weren’t
the center of the universe, after all, and perhaps those meetings were for someone
else’s
benefit.

Well, of
course
I know who they were for –
now.
Vordai and the gold-hunter were to be part of
Garion’s
education,
and father and I were little more than bystanders. If s so obvious that I’m surprised you missed it.

We reached Aldurford and made our way along the eastern foothills of the Sendarian Mountains until we struck the little-used track leading up a long valley to Annath. It was mid-afternoon when we reached the stone quarry, and Geran, the newest heir, was waiting for us. Geran had been a gangling adolescent when I’d left for Gar og Nadrak, but he was a young man now. That happens frequently, you know. Sometimes it happens overnight. Unlike most of the young men I’ve raised, Geran had dark, almost black hair, and his eyes were a deep, deep blue. He wasn’t as tall, but he looked a great deal like Riva Iron-grip himself. ‘Aunt Pol!’ he exclaimed with some relief. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t make it back in time for the wedding.’

‘Which wedding was that, dear?’ I’m not sure why I said that I
knew
which wedding he was talking about.

‘Mine, of course,’ he replied. ‘Ildera and I are getting married next week.’

‘My, my,’ I said. ‘Imagine that’

Village weddings normally involve village people – the bride and groom in particular. Not infrequently, they’re neighbors, and they’ve usually grown up together. This time, however, they not only came from different places, but were of different nationalities. The problems that arose out of those differences didn’t involve the happy couple this time, though. The problems arose from their mothers, Geran’s mother, Alara, and Ildera’s mother, Olane. They detested each other. Ildera’s father, Grettan, was the Chief of his clan, and that seems to have gone to Olane’s head. She made no secret of the fact that to her way of looking at it, Ildera was marrying beneath herself. In Alara’s eyes, her son was the Crown Prince of Riva, and Olane’s condescension
really
grated on her nerves. I had to virtually ride herd on her constantly to keep her from proudly announcing her son’s eminence. It was a very harrowing time for me.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been away during the final stages of the courtship, I might have been able to head things off,
but now it was too late. It had reached the point where the bride and groom were secondary. The personal animosity between Alara and Olane had spread, and the local Sendars and the clansmen from Algaria were unspoken antagonists.

‘All right, gentlemen,’ I said to father and Darral one evening, ‘we’ve got a problem. I’ll keep Alara and Olane from each other’s throats, but
you
two are going to have to keep order in the streets – and in the local tavern. I don’t want any bloodshed before the ceremony. If these idiots want to beat each other into a large communal pulp, it’s your job to make sure that they do it
after
the wedding.’

‘I could talk with Knapp, the tavern owner,’ Darral said dubiously. ‘Maybe I could persuade him to close for renovations or something. He might agree. A general brawl would probably wreck his place of business.’

Father shook his head. ‘They’re bad-tempered enough already,’ he said. ‘Closing the tavern would just make it worse.’

‘Close the border, maybe?’ Darral was reaching for straws there. ‘Grettan might agree to that. Or maybe we could stampede their cows. That might keep the Algars busy for a while.’

‘I don’t really care how you do it, gentlemen,’ I told them, ‘but keep the peace. That’s an order, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

Geran and Ildera seemed oblivious to the undeclared war between their mothers. They’d reached that happy stage of mindless obliviousness to everything going on around them that’s the usual prelude to a happy marriage. I’d seen it before, of course. That afternoon in Camaar sort of leaps to mind. It always does, since that was the day I lost my sister. Geran and Ildera didn’t go
quite
as far as Beldaran and Riva had gone, but they came close.

The antagonism between Alara and Olane didn’t find its outlet in open violence, but rather in competition. They tried to outdo each other in every single detail of the upcoming occasion. They bickered with false smiles frozen in place on their faces about which of them was going to provide the flowers. I headed
that
off by announcing that
I’d
take care of it, ‘since you ladies have so many other things to
attend to. Besides, I can do it much less expensively than either of you can.’ I even fell back on thrift to fend off an incipient clash of arms.

Then Olane smugly showed off Ildera’s wedding gown, and Alara began to chew on her own liver over that. She tore Annath apart and finally found an out of date and ill fitting doublet for Geran to wear at the ceremony. The doublet was of a faded purple, and it really didn’t, look all that nice, but she crammed her reluctant son into it and then paraded him in front of Olane with a spiteful little smile on her face. I assessed the impact of the dress and the doublet and silently ruled that clash to be a draw. Draws didn’t set too well with the competitors, though. The wedding supper, jointly prepared, was a clear win for Olane. She
did
have access to unlimited beef, after all. Alara took the one about the officiating priest, however. Olane’s champion was the clan’s priest of Belar, but Alara’s was the local Sendarian priest. Sendars are ecumenical to a fault, so Alara’s priest could invoke the blessing of all seven Gods. I kept my mouth shut about UL, fearing that Alara might postpone the wedding until she could make contact with the Gorim of Ulgo. Alara and Olane bickered back and forth, their faces both locked in those icy smiles that absolutely reeked of false politeness and were meant to conceal their real feelings but didn’t even come close to succeeding. Spurious reasoning about the two priests flowed back and forth until we were all knee-deep in logical fallacies. ‘Both of them!’ I decided finally, just to put an end to it.

‘I didn’t quite follow that, Pol,’ Alara said sweetly.

‘Both priests will officiate.’

‘But–’

‘No buts. Both priests, ladies, and that’s the end of this.’ I had to do that fairly often during that undeclared war.