‘What if I choose wrong when the time comes?’
I shrugged. ‘We’ll lose.’
‘Pol!’ his protest was anguished.
I laid my hand on his. I liked this man. ‘Don’t worry, Brand. You won’t be permitted to make the wrong choice.’
Then we’ll win?’
‘That’s not certain either. Torak also has to choose. His choice may be better than yours. The two Purposes are very evenly matched. Sometimes one wins, and sometimes the other does.’
‘Then I’m not going to be anything but the voice of this Purpose? It makes the choice, and I announce it?’
‘No dear one. You make the choice.’
‘I wish I were dead,’ he said glumly.
That’s not one of the choices available to you, Brand. At this point, I don’t even think you could kill yourself. Like it or not, you are going to meet Torak in Arendia, and you are going to make a choice.’
‘What if I refuse to make a choice?’
‘That’s also a choice, Brand. You can’t get out of this. Now, stop worrying about the fact that Torak’s a God and you aren’t. That doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. You’ll be equals when the two of you meet. That’s all the rank you need. Father and I’ll explain this to the others, so there won’t be any arguments. You will be in command.’ I paused. ‘We’ll put it to the other kings rather gently,’ I continued, ‘so I don’t think you’ll need to beat Eldrig over the head with it. A casual announcement that you’re the Purpose of the Universe might make him start questioning your sanity.’
‘I’m already questioning it, Pol,’ he admitted. ‘Is this conversation really happening, or am I just imagining it?’
I unfastened a brooch from the neck of my gown and quite deliberately stabbed him in the back of the hand with the pin.
He gave a startled exclamation and jerked his hand back. ‘Why did you do that?’ he demanded.
‘Let it bleed, Brand,’ I told him. Then I blotted the drop of blood from his hand with my handkerchief and handed the frilly little piece of cloth to him. ‘Keep this tucked away somewhere, dear one,’ I instructed. ‘You must never question your own sanity in this. Any time you start to have doubts, take this out and look at the blood spot. This conversation is really happening, and you really are the Child of Light – or you will be when the time comes. I’m a physician, Brand, so you can believe me when I tell that you’re not insane. Now, go wash that hand, and I’ll bandage it for you.’
We held our meetings in the traditional conference room high in one of the towers of Iron-grip’s Citadel. A lot of memories crowded in on me there, but I pushed them back to concentrate on the business at hand. Most of our discussions involved a guessing game. Torak had surprised us once, and we couldn’t really afford another surprise like that, so we argued at some length about his next probable move. King Rhodar of the lost nation of Drasnia didn’t say very much, but he didn’t have to. His face was careworn anyway, and his mournful, sorrowing presence was a constant rebuke to all of us and a constant reminder of the consequences of guessing wrong.
Since we couldn’t really respond until Torak made his next move, the conference didn’t produce anything very meaningful. My only real contribution was the suggestion that it might be the neighborly thing to do to advise the other western kingdoms that the end of the world was at hand.
Father and I left the Isle of the Winds by ship, and we were deposited on a rainy beach on the north side of the Hook of Arendia to begin our search for the elusive Asturians.
After the Mimbrates had destroyed Vo Astur, the Asturian nobility had taken to the woods to engage in centuries of guerrilla warfare. In the Asturian view of the world, shooting a lone Mimbrate traveler in the back with an arrow constituted a major victory to be celebrated around the campfires for weeks on end. The Mimbrates, quite naturally, disapproved of that practice, and so armored knights made periodic sweeps through the forest to locate and destroy those bands of enthusiasts. The Asturians grew quite adept at concealing their encampments, so father and I spent a delightful week and a half searching for the elusive Duke of Asturia, Eldallan. The almost perpetual rain seething down among the trees added whole new dimensions to the word ‘uncomfortable’.
Unless driven by hunger, predators normally sit out rain-storms in some sheltered place, but there was one wolf and one owl in that soggy forest who were obliged to move around almost constantly.
Have you any idea at all of just how bad a wet wolf smells when he gets near a campfire? Just the thought of father’s fragrance during our search turns my stomach.
As luck had it, a brief break in the weather dissipated the perpetual mist hanging in the forest, and I flew on up above the treetops and saw the smoke rising from a dozen or so campfires some distance off to the east. When we investigated, we found the encampment we’d been searching for.
Given their highly developed sense of romanticism, the costume of choice among the young Asturian ‘patriots’ consisted of green or brown tunics and hose and rakish caps decorated with long feathers. The Mimbrates had designated them as outlaws, and they were playing the part for all they were worth. Literature has its place, I suppose, but the ballads composed by third-rate poets extolling the exploits of this or that outlaw out to rob rich Mimbrates and to distribute the booty to the poor Asturian peasants set the imaginations of generations of brainless Asturian nobles afire, and they postured and posed in their green clothing and spent hours practicing with their bows, riddling whole battalions of straw dummies dressed in rusty Mimbrate armor with yard-long arrows.
All right, I’m prejudiced against Asturians. So what?
Duke Eldallan and his cohorts were less than cooperative when father and I entered their extensive encampment. We were not exactly taken prisoner, but there were a lot of arrows pointed in our general direction as we approached the rustic ‘throne’ where Eldallan sat with his eight-year-old daughter, Mayaserana, on his knee.
The Duke of Asturia was a thin man in his early thirties with long, carefully-combed blond hair. He wore forest green, his longbow was handy, and he obviously had a high opinion of himself. He received father’s introduction of us with a look of scepticism. My father’s customary shabby appearance obviously didn’t match the picture of ‘a mighty wizard’ as laid down in assorted Arendish epics. He might not have believed father, but a short while later he definitely believed me.
He shrugged off the news of the destruction of Drasnia as ‘an Alorn problem’, and made much of his near-religious obligation to exterminate the Mimbrates. I finally grew tired of his posturing and stepped in. ‘Why don’t you let me talk with him, father?’ I said. ‘I know Arends a little better than you do.’
‘Gladly,’ the Old Wolf grunted.
‘Please forgive my father, your Grace,’ I said to Eldallan. ‘Diplomacy’s not one of his strong points.’
Then Eldallan made the mistake of mentioning my former association with the Wacite Arends as if it had been some kind of major moral failing. I decided that since he wanted to be nasty about this, I’d give him more nasty than he was equipped to accept.
‘Very well, your Grace,’ I said rather coldly, ‘I’ll show you what the Angaraks did to Drasnia, and then I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you’d like to have the same thing happen here.’
‘Illusions!’ he snorted.
‘No, your Grace. Not illusions, but reality. I speak as the Duchess of Erat, and no true gentlemen would question the word of a noblewoman – or have I erred in assuming that there are gentlemen in Asturia?’
He bridled at that. ‘Are you questioning my honor?’
‘Aren’t you questioning mine?’
I don’t think he’d expected that. He choked on it a bit, and then he gave in. ‘Very well, your Grace,’ he said. ‘If you give me your word of honor that what you propose to show me really happened, I’ll have no choice but to accept it.’
‘Your Grace is too kind.’ I gently probed at h
is mind and found there an unreasoning terror of the notion of being burned alive. That gave me all that I needed.
I set a series of disconnected images before him and compelled him to watch them unfold with the force of my Will. There was enough generalized butchery in those images to keep him from guessing that I was concentrating my efforts on the one thing he feared the most. The seas of blood and the incidental dismemberments were in the nature of punctuation to the lovingly recreated scenes of screaming Drasnians trapped inside burning buildings or being bodily hurled into great bonfires by laughing Angaraks. I added the customary shrieks of agony and doused him with the sickening odor of burning flesh;
Eldallan began to scream and writhe in his chair, but I still went on and on until I was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t argue with us any more. I might have held him there longer, but the presence of his little daughter, Mayaserana, forced me to relent. Mayaserana was a beautiful little girl with dark hair and huge eyes, and her involuntary little screams and sobs as her father twisted and groaned tore at my heart.
‘What did you do to my father, bad Lady?’ she demanded in an accusing voice when I released Eldallan.
‘He’ll be fine in just a little bit, dear,’ I assured her. ‘He just had a nightmare, that’s all.’
‘But it’s daytime – and he isn’t even asleep.’
I took her in my arms. ‘That happens sometimes, Mayaserana,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be all right.’
After the Duke of Asturia had recovered, father proposed a truce between Asturia and Mimbre,’ – a temporary truce, you understand, just during the present emergency. Of course, if you just happen to find peace with the Mimbrates entertaining, you and Aldorigen might want to consider extending it.’
‘You’re surely not proposing an actual meeting between me and that Mimbrate butcher, are you?’
‘Only if you’ll both agree to be chained to the walls at opposite ends of the room, Eldallan. I’ll make arrangements with the Sendarian ambassador in Vo Mimbre. We’ll have the Sendars serve as go-betweens – at least until the Angaraks actually invade Arendia. When that happens, we’ll come up with a way to keep you and the Mimbrates at opposite ends of the battlefields.’
Then father and I went on down across the rain-soaked plain of southern Arendia to Vo Mimbre. Once again I was almost overwhelmed with memories. I don’t think my father has ever fully understood just how great an attachment I have for Arendia. Arends are a child-like people, and in a very real sense I had been their universal mother for almost six hundred years.
The dark-haired Duke – or ‘King’ as he preferred it – Aldorigen was terrified of snakes, of all things, and that seriously strained my creativity, since there aren’t very many snakes in Drasnia. I’ll confess to a deliberate falsehood here. I created an Angarak ‘custom’ out of whole cloth, and Duke Aldorigen found my imaginary snake pits into which whole Drasnian villages were cast while shrieking in terror entertaining enough to bring him around to our way of thinking.
All right, it was dishonest. Did you want me to suspend the story while we discuss the ethical implications of ‘ends justifying the means’ for a week or two?
After father had rammed his truce down Aldorigen’s throat and had more or less commanded the Sendarian ambassador to serve as liaison between Mimbre and Asturia, we prepared to leave the golden city. Before we left, however, I took a very long look at Aldorigen’s sandy-haired son, Korodullin. He was eight or nine years old, as I recall. To be honest, the word ‘coincidence’ never even occurred to me. I was just a little surprised to discover that the ‘bell’ which has periodically rung inside my head isn’t always set off by the descendants of Beldaran and Riva Iron-grip. Other destined arrangements also make it ring. I clearly remember listening to it the first time Relg met Taiba. Oddly, though, I didn’t hear any bells the first time I met Durnik.
Aldorigen provided us with horses, and so my father and I, bundled up to ward off that perpetual rain, forded the River Arend about ten leagues downstream from Vo Mimbre and plodded on down through northern Tolnedra to that gleaming island that is Tol Honeth.
When we reached the marble-clad imperial palace, we were taken directly to the emperor without the usual delay. Father’s earlier visit had convinced Ran Borune that he was an emissary for the Alorn kings, which wasn’t exactly true, though it did have some basis in fact, I suppose. The obliteration of Drasnia had brought the kingdoms of the north to the forefront of Ran Borune’s attention, and he hungered for any information anyone could provide. ‘Ah, there you are, Belgarath,’ he said crisply when we were escorted into his somewhat overly ornate office. ‘Dreadful about Drasnia. Please convey my deepest sympathy to Rhodar the next time you see him. Have the Alorns come up with any ideas about where Kal Torak might strike next?’
‘Tentatively, your Imperial Majesty,’ father replied. ‘Oh, this is my daughter Polgara, by the way.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ the young emperor said perfunctorily. Ran Borune and I were not getting off to a good start. ‘I really need to know where Torak’s going to go, Belgarath. Have you got any spies in his army?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call them spies, Ran Borune,’ father said a bit sourly. ‘Kal Torak doesn’t have any non-Angaraks in his army – at least not yet. We haven’t seen Melcenes or Dals or Karands among his forces.’
‘Have the Alorns made any sort of plans as yet?’
‘Nothing very definitive. They’re trying to keep defenses in place on all the likely fronts. Our major advantage lies in the mobility of the Alorns. Those Cherek war-boats can put an army down on any beach in the western world in a very short period of time. The defensive forces in Algaria, Cherek, and Sendaria should be sufficient to delay Torak until reinforcements arrive.’
‘Are there any clues in those religious writings?’
The prophecies, you mean?’
‘I hate that word,’ Ran Borune said just a bit absently. ‘It absolutely reeks of superstition.’
‘Possibly,’ father admitted, ‘but there are enough correspondences between the Alorn prophecies and the Angarak ones that they might give us some clues about what this fellow who calls himself Kal Torak will try next. A man who thinks he’s a God usually tries to fulfill any prophecy that’s handy in order to prove his divinity.’
Just a word here. Note that none of us ever came right out and told Ran Borune that the invader from the east was really Torak himself. We maintained the fiction that we were dealing with an Angarak madman instead. There wasn’t much point in offending Tolnedran sensibilities by arguing theology with them when there were easier ways to get their cooperation.
‘I guess I hadn’t thought about that,’ Ran Borune conceded. ‘Will the Aloms need some of my legions in the north?’
‘I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.’
‘Are you and Lady Polgara planning to stay here for long? Can I offer you the hospitality of the palace here?’
‘We appreciate the thought, Ran Borune,’ I told him, ‘but it might cause you some problems. The Honethites and Vorduvians could make hay of the fact that you’re consorting with “heathen sorcerers”.’
‘I’m the emperor here, Lady Polgara, and I’ll consort with whomever I bloody-well please. If the Vorduvians and Honethites don’t like it, that’s just too bad.’ He gave me an odd look. ‘You seem quite conversant with our little peculiarities, my Lady.’
‘A diversion of mine, your Majesty,’ I replied. ‘I find that reading Tolnedran political commentary puts me to sleep at night almost as fast as Arendish epics do.’
He winced. ‘I think I had that coming, didn’t I?’ he said ruefully.
‘Yes, your Majesty, you did. Look upon it as instructional. Father always tells me that it’s our duty to teach up the young.’
‘Please,’ he said lightly, ‘no more thrusts. I surrender.’
‘Wise decision there, Ran Borune,’ father said. ‘People who fence with Pol usually come away leaking from
all sorts of places. We’ll be staying at the Cherek embassy, I think. I need to move around and contact several people, and an escort of palace spies trailing along behind me might be a little cumbersome. I’ll also need to stay in contact with the Alorn kings, and the Cherek ambassador’s got a war-boat available. Who’s the current Nyissan ambassador?’
‘A slithery sort of fellow named Podiss.’
‘I’ll talk with him. Let’s keep Salmissra advised. She’s got some resources I might need later on, so I don’t want her to be sitting in a corner someplace pouting. We’ll keep you advised, so don’t waste time putting spies on my trail.’
Then father and I went to the Cherek embassy. Late that night, Beltira’s voice reached father just as he was dropping off to sleep. He reported that Torak’s forces had marched into Algaria, and then he got down to the bad news. Uncle Beldin had advised the twins that a second Mallorean army under Urvon had massed at the Dalasian port of Dal Zerba and had already begun crossing the Sea of the East to southern Cthol Murgos. Quite clearly, the closing of the caravan routes in both the north and in the south had been ordered to keep troop movements a secret. Now we had two Angarak armies to worry about.
Father and I went back to the palace and bullied the emperor’s servants into waking him. He wasn’t too happy about the news we brought him. We suggested that he stay flexible and not commit his forces to either front, and then father and I left for Nyissa.
I’d never been in the land of the snake-people before nor met one of that interminable string of identical Salmissras. The Serpent-God, Issa, unlike the other gods, had not taken several disciples as Torak or our Master had, but had devoted all his love to one handmaiden, the original Salmissra. The notion of extending her life had evidently not occurred to the sluggish Issa, and so the Nyissans had simply replaced her when she’d died. The first qualification had been a physical resemblance to the original, and a lengthy education had imprinted the personality of the first Salmissra on all the candidates. They had good reason to study very hard, since nineteen of those candidates were put to death immediately after the selection of the new Serpent Queen. As a result, one Salmissra was virtually indistinguishable from her predecessors. As father put it, ‘If you’ve met one Salmissra, you’ve met them all.’ I had no real reason to be fond of those Salmissras, but father persuaded me that we might need the rather specialized talents of the Nyissans at some time during the course of the Angarak invasion, so I was civil – barely – when we entered that garish, snake-infested palace in Sthiss Tor.
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 143
