‘You might put it that way, my friend, but I’m actually doing this out of fondness for these people. I want to gently herd them in the direction of independence. Grownups don’t really need to have mother tell them when it’s time to change their clothes. Oh, one other thing, too. Why don’t we let that “Erat” business fall into disuse. This land was called “Sendaria” even before anybody lived here. Let’s go back to that name. The designation of the people here as “Eratians” has always set my teeth on edge, for some reason. Encourage them to start thinking of themselves as “Sendarians”.’
‘Why not do that with a proclamation, your Grace?’
‘I’d rather not make it that formal, Killaneson. My goal here is to just quietly fade out of sight. If we do this right, a few generations from now, nobody will even remember the Duchess of Erat.’
Killaneson’s voice had an almost childish note when he said, ‘Please don’t run off and leave us alone, Mommy.’
‘Stop that,’ I chided him.
Then we both laughed.
It was at the end of the thirty-first century that the debacle in the harbor at Riva took place. The Tolnedrans, convinced that there was vast hidden wealth on the Isle of the Winds, sent a fleet north to try to persuade the Rivans to open their gates to do business. The Rivans weren’t really interested, so they methodically sank the Tolnedran fleet instead. Things were very tense for a while, but after the Cherek Ambassador at Tol Honeth advised Ran Borune XXIV that the Alorn kingdoms would demolish Tolnedra in response to any hostilities directed at the Isle, things settled back down to normal.
The Honethites succeeded the Borunes in the imperial palace at Tol Honeth. Say what you will about the Honeths, they are probably the best administrators of all the great families of the empire, so things quieted down.
As we moved into the early years of the thirty-second century, I began to reduce the staff of my manor house on Lake Erat until there were finally only a few caretakers there. I made arrangements for the rest of the Killaneson family, and I gradually began to fade from the memories of the people who had formerly been subject to me. They called themselves Sendarians now, and I had largely receded into history books and folk-lore.
I did have to come out of my seclusion at mother’s cottage a few times, though. In the mid-thirty-second century, the Bear-Cult in Cherek persuaded King Alreg that Sendaria was a natural extension of his kingdom, and that Belar, the Alorn God, would be angry if Cherek failed its religious obligation to annex my former duchy. Once again I was going to have to try to talk some sense into some thick-headed Alorns. After one particularly offensive earl named Elbrik had stormed ashore and looted Darine, I went falcon and flew on up to Val Alorn to have a few words with the King of Cherek. I settled on to the battlements of Alreg’s rambling palace and went on down several flights of stairs to his smokey throne-room.
King Alreg was an enormous man with a great, bushy blond beard. Despite the fact that there was no real need for it, he wore a steel helmet and a chain-mail shirt as he lounged, beer tankard in hand, on his oversized throne. Quite clearly, Alreg considered himself to be a warrior king.
One of the mailed guards at the door seized my arm as I entered. ‘You’re not supposed to be in here, woman!’ he said roughly to me. ‘Men only in Alreg’s throne-room!’
‘Did you want to keep that hand?’ I asked, pointedly staring at the offending member.
‘Now, see here, woman–’ He did let go of my arm, though.
Then he went rolling across the rush-strewn floor as the force of my Will struck him full in the chest. I enhanced my voice to make myself audible over all the drunken babble. ‘Alreg of Cherek!’ I thundered, and the very walls shook to that overwhelming sound.
The King of Cherek, obviously about half drunk, reeled to his feet. ‘Who let that woman in here?’ he demanded.
‘I let myself in, Alreg,’ I told him. ‘You and I are going to have a talk.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Get un-busy – right now!’ I strode on down past the smoky fire-pit in the center of his barn-like throne-room, bowling over any Cherek warriors who tried to get in my way. Even in his slightly befuddled state, Alreg realized that something unusual was going on. I reached the foot of the dais upon which his throne stood and fixed him with a very unfriendly stare. ‘I see that the seat of Bear-shoulders has descended to a drunken fool,’ I noted scathingly. ‘How sad. I know he’d be disappointed.’
‘You can’t talk to me that way!’ he blustered.
‘You’re wrong, Alreg. I can talk to you any way I choose. Get that barbarian Elbrik out of Darine immediately!’
‘You can’t order me around! Who do you think you are?’
But one of the more sober men standing just behind him had gone very pale. ‘Your Majesty!’ he said to his king in strangled tones, ‘that’s Polgara the Sorceress!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Alreg snapped. “There’s no such person!’
‘Look at her, your Majesty! Look at that white streak in her hair! That’s Polgara, daughter of Holy Belgarath! She can turn you into a toad if she feels like it!’
‘I don’t believe in any of that nonsense,’ Alreg scoffed.
‘I think you’re about to have a religious conversion, Alreg,’ I told him.
That ‘turn him into a toad’ business had been floating around for eons, you know, and most of the time it’s been nothing more than a tired old joke. What would be the point of doing something like that? This time, however, the notion had been planted at just the right moment. I was going to have to do something to Alreg to get his attention, and, although the sober Cherek noble who’d recognized me had probably just thrown the expression out at random, it had planted the idea, and the more I thought about it, the more the notion appealed to me. For once, an absolute absurdity would serve my purpose as well or better than anything else.
I wanted to make the entire process visible, so this time I did it in a slightly different way. Rather than simply injecting Alreg into the image of a toad, I altered his features one by one. It occurred to me that I didn’t really need the whole toad – just its head and feet. I could leave the rest of Alreg intact.
Alreg’s head slowly began to change shape, flattening out until it had a reptilian cast. His eyes were now at the top of his head, and they began to bulge upward. Since his eyes were already bulging anyway, that part wasn’t too hard. Then I dissolved his beard and extended the corners of his mouth.
‘No!’ It came out of that lipless mouth in kind of a squeaky croak. I’d decided that it might be useful if he could still talk. Then I altered his hands and feet into the flipper-like appendages of the amphibian. I slightly modified his hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows, and with shrill, pathetic croaks, the King of Cherek sank down into that frog-like crouch on the seat of his throne. Then I added the warts.
I hadn’t altered Alreg’s size, nor tampered in any way with his clothing, so there was a man-sized toad in a mail-shirt and with a sword belted at its thick waist crouched bug-eyed on the royal throne, croaking in a shrill kind of panic.
The entire process had taken several minutes, and since Alreg’s throne stood upon a dais, it had been visible to every Cherek, drunk or sober, in the entire hall.
I sensed one of the bearded Chereks behind me reaching for his sword. When he grasped what he thought was his sword-hilt, though, he wrapped his hand firmly about the head and neck of a large, angry snake instead. ‘Don’t do that any more,’. I told him, without bothering to look around. ‘You’d better tell your retainers here to behave themselves, Alreg,’ I suggested to the enthroned toad. That’s unless you have replacements handy. My father doesn’t want me to kill people, but I think I can get around that. I’ll just bury them without bothering to kill them first. They’ll probably die of natural causes – after a while – so father won’t have any cause for complaint, now will he?’
‘All right!’ the warty creature on the throne of Cherek squealed. ‘
I’ll do anything you say! Please, Polgara! Please! Change me back!’
‘Are you sure, Alreg?’ I asked pleasantly. ‘You look rather imposing this way. Think of how proud it’ll make all your warriors to tell the entire world that they’re ruled by a toad. Besides, you’ve got all these lazy, bearded louts lounging around drinking beer. You could put them all to work catching flies for you to eat. Wouldn’t a nice fat fly taste delicious about now?’
I think his mind started to slip about then, because the squalling intensified and he bounded off his throne and began to hop around in circles.
I changed him back to his own form with a single thought, but he was evidently not aware of it because he continued to hop and squeal. His warriors all shrank back from him with looks of panic and revulsion on their faces.
‘Oh, do get up, Alreg!’ I told him. ‘You look positively ridiculous doing that.’
He stood up, trembling violently, and stumbled back to his throne. He fell into it, staring at me in sheer terror.
‘Now, then,’ I said sternly, ‘Sendaria’s under my protection, so get your people out of there and bring them back here where they belong.’
‘We’re following Belar’s commands, Polgara,’ he protested.
‘No, Alreg, you’re not. Actually, you’re following the orders of the Bear-Cult. If you want to jump to the tune of a group of feeble-minded religious fanatics, that’s up to you, but get out of Sendaria. You can’t even begin to imagine just how nasty things are going to get if you don’t.’
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ a thin, bearded Cherek, his eyes aflame with the burning light of religion, declared fervently, ‘but I’m not going to take orders from a mere woman!’
‘In point of fact, old boy, I’m not a mere anything.’
‘I am an armed Cherek!’ he almost screamed. ‘I fear nothing!’
I made a small gesture, and his gleaming mail-shirt and his half-drawn sword rather quickly stopped gleaming and became dull red instead. Then they began to crumble, showering down onto the floor in a cascade of powdery rust. ‘Don’t you find that sort of disarming?’ I suggested. ‘Now that you’re no longer an armed Cherek, aren’t you just the teensiest bit afraid?’ Then I grew tired of all their foolishness. ‘ENOUGH!’ I thundered. ‘Get out of Sendaria, Alreg, or I’ll tow the Cherek peninsula out to sea and sink it. Then you can try being the king of the fish for a while. Now call your people home!’
It wasn’t the most diplomatic way to bring the Chereks into line, but the smug chauvinism of Alreg’s court had irritated me. ‘Mere Woman’ indeed! Just the sound of it still makes my blood boil!
There was one beneficial side effect to my little visit to Val Alorn, incidentally. After enduring a few months of hysterical protests from discontented Bear-Cultists, Alreg moved decisively to suppress the cult once again. I’ve noticed that the Bear-Cult has to be put down every fifty years or so in the Alorn kingdoms.
In the century or so that followed, I receded further and further back into the pages of dusty old history books, and I seldom had occasion to visit my manor house on Lake Erat. The last of my caretakers there died, and I saw no reason to replace him. I still loved the house, though, and the notion of having it casually looted and burned didn’t sit well with me, so early one spring I crossed the Sendarian Mountains to take steps to protect it I wandered through the dusty rooms immersed in nostalgic melancholy. So much had happened here that had been central to my life. The ghosts of Killane and Ontrose seemed to accompany me down every dusty corridor, and the echoes of long ago conversations seemed to still reverberate through almost every room I entered. Erat had gone back to being Sendaria, and my duchy had shrunk down to this single lonely house.
I considered several options, but the solution was really quite simple, and it came to me one glorious spring evening as I stood on the terrace of the south wing looking out at the lake and at the veritable jungle of my untended rose-garden. What better way to conceal and protect my house than to bury it in roses?
I set to work the following morning ‘encouraging’ my rose-bushes to expand and encroach on the fair meadow that stretched on down to the lake. When I was done, they were no longer bushes, but trees, and they were so tightly interlaced that they’d become a thorny, impenetrable barrier that would keep my beloved house forever inviolate.
It was with a great deal of self-satisfaction that I returned to mother’s cottage and my continuing studies. Now that I’d preserved the past, I could turn my attention to the future.
It’s an article of my family’s faith that the future lies hidden in the Darine and Mrin Codices, and studying the collected ravings of a senile old Alorn warrior and a profoundly retarded idiot who’d had to be chained up for his own protection can be very frustrating. I kept coming across veiled references to my father and me, and that was probably what kept me from throwing my hands up in disgust and taking up ornithology or horticulture instead. I gradually came to grasp the idea that there was another world superimposed on our mundane, day to day reality, and in that other world tiny events had enormous significance. A chance meeting between two tradesmen on the streets of Tol Honeth or an encounter between a pair of gold-hunters in the mountains of Gar og Nadrak could be far more important than a clash of armies. Increasingly, I came to understand that those ‘incidents’ were EVENTS – those very brief confrontations between the two entirely different prophecies, only one of which would ultimately determine the fate of not merely this world, but of the entire universe as well.
The study of something of that magnitude so totally engrossed me that I began to ignore time, and more often than not I couldn’t have told you what century it was, much less what year.
I do know – largely because I checked some Tolnedran history books later – that in the year 3761 the last emperor of the second Borune Dynasty chose his successor rather than leaving the choice up to the infinitely corruptible Council of Advisors. That childless Borune emperor, Ran Borune XII, was obviously a man of great foresight, because his decision brought the Horbite family to the imperial throne, and the Horbites – at least at that particular time – proved to be extraordinarily gifted. In many respects, the Horbites had largely been an appendage of the Honeths, in much the same way that the Anadiles are an extension of the Borunes. The first of that line, Ran Horb I, immersed himself in the Borune hobby of building highways to link Tolnedran commerce to the rest of the world. It was his son, Ran Horb II, however, who took that hobby to the point of obsession. Almost overnight, you couldn’t look anywhere in the west without seeing Tolnedran construction crews carving out new highways. The Tolnedran diplomatic corps dropped everything else and concentrated on ‘treaties of mutual cooperation for the good of all’, thus creating the fiction that Tolnedra was just being neighborly, when in fact the highways were quite nearly for the sole use of Tolnedran merchants.
When word of all the road construction taking place in my former domain reached me at mother’s cottage, I decided that I’d better set my studies aside and go to Tol Honeth to have a word with Ran Horb II to find out just exactly what his intentions were.
For once, I decided not to just pop in on the emperor, but chose instead to rely on the good offices of the Drasnian ambassador. Despite their faults – and they do have faults – the avaricious Drasnians are well respected by the Tolnedrans. I had to introduce myself to Prince Khanar, the nephew of King Rhalan of Drasnia, since I’d been more or less in seclusion for the past eight centuries. Khanar was no Dras Bull-neck by any stretch of the imagination. He was a small, wiry man with a quick mind and a perverted sense of humor. I was fully prepared to give him a quick demonstration of my ‘talent’, but oddly, that wasn’t necessary. He accepted me at my word and took me across town to the palace compound. After we’d waited for an hour or so, we were escorted into the large, cluttered office of his Imperial Majesty, Ran Horb II. The emperor was a stout, businesslike fellow with receding hair and a preoccupied expression. ‘Ah, Princ
e Khanar,’ he said to my small companion, ‘so good to see you again. What’s afoot in Boktor?’
‘All the usual chicanery, your Majesty,’ Khanar shrugged. ‘Lying, cheating, stealing – nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary.’
‘Does your uncle know how you speak of his kingdom when you’re in the presence of strangers, Khanar?’
‘Probably, your Majesty. He has spies everywhere, you know.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lady?’
‘I was getting to that, your Majesty. I have the distinct honor to present the Lady Polgara, Duchess of Erat and the daughter of Holy Belgarath.’
Ran Horb looked at me skeptically. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘just for the sake of argument, I’ll accept that – tentatively, of course. I’ll hold off on asking for proof until later. To what do I owe the honor of this visit, your Grace?’
‘You’re a very civilized man, your Majesty,’ I noted. ‘Most of the time I have to perform a few little tricks before people will listen to me.’
‘I’m sure you could startle me out of my shoes, if you chose to,’ he replied. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m just seeking information, your Majesty,’ I assured him. ‘You’re building highways in Sendaria.’
‘I’m building highways almost everywhere, Lady Polgara.’
‘Yes, I know. I have a certain interest in Sendaria, though. Is this construction a prelude to annexation?’
He laughed. ‘Why on earth would I want to annex Sendaria?’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s a nice enough country, but I don’t really want to own it. Those highways I’m building up there are just a way to keep the Chereks out of my purse. They’ll provide a route to Boktor that bypasses the need to transport goods through that whirlpool in the Cherek Bore. Those bearded pirates in the north charge outrageous fees to carry Tolnedran cargoes from Kotu through the Bore, and that’s cutting into my tax revenues.’
‘It’s all strictly commercial, then?’
‘Of course. If I want farm produce, I can buy it right here in Tolnedra. I don’t have to go all the way to Sendaria for beans and turnips. The only thing that interests me about that place is its location.’
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 131
