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.’
‘You’re not going to like this, father,’ I warned him, ‘but I’ve been instructed to use the form of that snowy owl between now and the EVENT, so you’ll have to grit your teeth and accept it. I am going to follow my instructions, whether you like it or not.’
‘Am I permitted to ask who’s giving you those instructions?’ he grated.
‘Of course you can ask, father,’ I said graciously. ‘Don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer, though–’
‘I hate this,’ he complained.
I patted his cheek. ‘Be brave, Old Man,’ I said.
Then I shimmered into that familiar form.
It was well past midnight when the two of us came to roost atop the battlements of Aldorigen’s palace in the center of Vo Mimbre. The sentries pacing the battlements may have noticed a pair of birds soaring in, but they didn’t pay much attention. They were on the lookout for men, not birds. We settled in some deep shadows near the head of a flight of stairs, and as soon as a plodding sentry had passed, we resumed our natural forms, went on down the stairs, and proceeded directly to the throne-room to wait for Aldorigen. ‘Why don’t you let me handle this, father?’ I said. ‘I’m more familiar with Arends than you are, so I won’t offend them. Besides, Aldorigen’s already afraid of me, so he’ll pay closer attention if I’m the one who’s talking.’
‘Feel free, Pol. Trying to talk with Arends always makes me want to start screaming, for some reason.’
‘Oh, father!’ I said wearily. ‘Here,’ I said, then, willing a small scroll into existence and handing it to him. ‘Just look wise and pretend to be reading this while I do all the talking.’
He looked at the scroll. ‘This is blank, Pol,’ he objected.
‘So what? Were you expecting a bed-time story? You’re the performer, father. Improvise. Simulate reading something of earth-shaking importance. Try to keep your exclamations of astonishment and wonder to a minimum, though. If you get too excited, Aldorigen might want to look at the scroll.’
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Pol?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.’ I gave him that smug little look, and he knew what that meant.
Dawn was turning the cloud-bank piled up on the eastern horizon a fiery red when Aldorigen and his now-grown son Korodullin entered the throne-room in the midst of an argument. ‘He is a miscreant, sire,’ Korodullin asserted, ‘an outlaw. His presence here would profane the most sacred place in all Arendia.’
‘I know that he is a scoundrel and a rogue, Korodullin,’ Aldorigen replied, trying to placate his hot-headed son, ‘but I have given mine oath. Thou shalt not speak disparagingly unto him, nor offer any impertinence whilst he is within the confines of Vo Mimbre. If thou canst not restrain thine ire, remain in thy chambers until he doth depart. I will have thy pledge to that effect, or I shall have thee confined.’
The archaic language immediately took me back to the third millennium, and when I spoke, it seemed almost that I was taking up a conversation that’d broken off two thousand or so years back. ‘Good morrow, your Majesty,’ I greeted Aldorigen with a curtsey. ‘Mine aged father and I have but recently arrived from Tol Honeth, and, though all bemused by the splendor of this most renowned of cities, have we come straightway hither to consult with thee and to divulge unto thee certain information concerning that which hath come to pass and which doth concern thee and thy realm most poignantly.’
Aldorigen responded with fairly typical Mimbrate long-windedness, and we exchanged pleasantries for the obligatory half hour or so, and then we got down to business. My message – instruction, if you’d prefer – was simple. I was there to prohibit a Mimbrate assault on the Angaraks who’d soon be camped outside Vo Mimbre until we were ready for them to come out of the city. That took a while. It’s very hard to persuade someone who believes that he’s invincible that a bit of prudence might be in order.
While I was pounding this into his head, he advised me that his Asturian counterpart, Eldallan of Asturia, was coming to Vo Mimbre for a council of war. I saw an enormous potential for disaster in that plan, given a thousand or so years of senseless slaughter in the Asturian forest. Putting a Mimbrate and an Asturian in the same room was very likely to be hard on the furniture, if not the entire building. Korodullin was already well on the way to a number of quaint forms of greeting, darkly hinting that the rascally Asturian duke would most probably seize the opportunity to defect to the Angarak side in the attack on Vo Mimbre to insure the city’s destruction.
Father threw a quick thought at me, but I was already well ahead of him. I. don’t think father ever fully comprehended the significance of my title, ‘Duchess of Erat’, nor the persistence of old traditions in Arendia. I had been – and still was – the equal of Aldorigen and Eldallan. They both knew that, and they also knew that I could make them very uncomfortable if I chose.
I proceeded then to shame A iorigen and his hot-headed son into a semblance of good nanners. When you throw words such as ‘timid’ and ‘womanish’ into a Mimbrate’s teeth, you’ll definitely get his attention.
It was precisely at noon when Duke Eldallan and his very pretty daughter, Mayaserana, arrived and were rather coldly escorted into Aldorigen’s throne-room.
Then I heard that internal bell again, and when I saw the looks of hereditary hatred Mayaserana and Korodullin were exchanging, I almost laughed aloud. This promised to be a very interesting – and noisy – courtship.
‘You’re getting more perceptive, Pol,’ mother’s voice complimented me.
‘Perhaps so, but how am I going to keep them from killing each other before the ceremony?’
‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’
The air in the throne-room positively reeked of animosity, and I realized that this ill-advised conference hovered right on the edge of an absolute disaster, so I stepped in and threw my rank into their faces again. ‘This will cease immediately!’ I commanded Aldorigen and Eldallan. ‘I cannot believe mine ears! I had thought that ye were serious men, but now I perceive mine error. Can it truly be that the rulers of Asturia and Mimbre have grown so childish? Are ye both so foolish as to cuddle animosity to your breasts as ye would some cherished toy from earliest childhood? The world about us is on fire, my Lords. Ye must set aside this petty bickering and join with the Alorns and Tolnedrans in quenching it. This absurd exchange of threat and insult doth weary me, and presently shall I be obliged to demonstrate the full extent of mine irritation. Thou, Eldallan, shall join thine archers with the Sendars and Rivans and move against the Angarak rear. And thou, Aldorigen, shalt defend thy walls but make no move ‘gainst thy besiegers until the third day of the battle, and shalt emerge only at the pre-arranged signal. Since it doth appear that ye have played at war for two eons and more and still have no better grasp of the art than the newest recruit in a Tolnedran legion, I must here assert mine authority. These are mine instructions, and ye shall obey, lest ye bring down my wrath upon your heads.’ I sighed then, a bit theatrically, I’ll admit. ‘Clearly I was in error in the third millennium when I had hoped that my beloved child, Arendia, might someday reach maturity. That was obviously a vain hope. Arends might grow old and grey, but they will never mature. Mine alternative in those by-gone years was clear, but my love for Arendia had made it most repugnant. Now I see that I should have set that repugnance aside and performed my duty. Since all Arends are incapable of adulthood, I see now that I should have annexed both Mimbre and Asturia and ruled them by imperial decree. I am sure that it would not have overtaxed my abilities to teach ye how to kneel in the presence of thine empress and to obey her commands utterly.’
That jerked them both up short. I pretended to consider the idea further, looking them both up and down like sides of beef. ‘Perchance it is not yet too late for that to come to pass. I shall consider it. Thou, Aldorigen, and thou, Eldallan, are presentable, and could be – with firm instruction – suitably well-spoken, so ye would make adequate vassals to mine imperial throne. I will think on it and advise ye of my decision anon. But first, we must deal with Kal Torak.’
Well, of course I didn’t have imperial ambitions! Where are your brains? Still, ‘Empress Polgara of Arendia’ does sort of have a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say?
I think it was the notion of change of government that made Aldorigen and Eldallan suddenly very polite to each other, and Eldallan’s suggestion that after the battle they might have a friendly little get-together – with swords – to discuss their differences at greater length sealed the whole bargain.
Aldorigen provided father and me with suitable quarters, and after we settled in, the Old Wolf stopped by. ‘You weren’t really serious about the “empress” business, were you, Pol?’ he asked a bit nervously.
‘Don’t be absurd, father.’
‘I wouldn’t be too quick to throw away a good idea, though,’ he mused. ‘It’d be one way to put an end to this silly civil war.’
‘Feel free to annex the notion, father. You’d make a splendid emperor.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘I was just going to ask you the same question. Have you heard from uncle Beldin?’
‘He and General Cerran are riding south to start the legions marching toward the coast. Eldrig’s war-boats are already on their way down there to pick them up.’
‘It’s going to take time for them to get here, father,’ I reminded him. ‘Have you come up with a way to delay Torak as yet?’
‘I’m still working on it.’
‘Work a little faster. I’ve got some very personal reasons to want a lot of soldiers around me when Torak arrives.’
‘Oh?’
‘We can talk about it later. Get to work, father.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I thought’I might spend an hour or so in my bathtub.’
‘You’re going to melt if you don’t stop spending so much time bathing, Pol.’
‘I rather doubt that, father. Run along now.’
He slammed the door behind him as he went out.
Father’s strategy for delaying the Angarak army verged on genius, though I hate to admit that. Not only did it slow Torak’s advance to a crawl, but it also locked a pair of Arends who’d previously hated each other into a lifelong friendship that boded well for the future of poor Arendia. The only fault I could find with it lay in the fact that I was the one who was to have the dubious pleasure of herding a group of Asturians around. I wasn’t really very fond of Asturians for reasons that should be obvious.
Father’s plan was not particularly complex. The River Arend had numerous tributaries, all running bank-full after a quarter century of steady rainfall. Those tributaries were all spanned by bridges. Father thought it might be useful to take a thousand Mimbrate knights to the foot of the Ulgo mountains and start tearing down those bridges. I was assigned the chore of taking a thousand Asturian bowmen to the same vicinity to hinder the Angarak attempts to rebuild those bridges.
The knight who led the Mimbrate bridge-wreckers was Baron Mandor, a descendant of Mandorin and Asrana and an ancestor of our own Mandorallen. The leader of the Asturian bowmen was the happy-go-lucky Baron Wildantor, an irrepressible red-head from whom Lelldorin was descended. Necessity was tampering again, obviously.
Despite my long-standing prejudice against Asturians, I found Wildantor almost impossible to dislike. His bright red hair was like a flame, and his sense of humor infectious. I think the only time he wasn’t laughing, chuckling, or giggling was when he was drawing his bow. Then, of course, he was all business. Baron Mandor wasn’t really equipped to deal with someone like Wildantor. Mandor was a very serious man with virtually no sense of humor at all, and once it finally dawned on him that almost everything Wildantor said was intended to be funny, he gradually began to discover just how much fun it could be to laugh. The joke that ultimately sealed their unnatural friendship, however, came from Mandor’s lips, and I’m sure it was unintended. When Wildantor tossed off the suggestion, ‘Why don’t we agree not to kill each other when this is over?’ Mandor pondered the implications of it for several moments and then gravely replied, ‘Doth that not violate the precepts of our religion?’ Wildantor collapsed, laughing uncontrollably. What really made it funny was the fact that Mandor was absolutely serious. He flushed slightly at the Asturian’s laughter, and then, slowly realizing that his sincere question lay at the very center of the ongoing tragedy that was Arendia, he too began to laugh. It was rueful laughter at first, but then it grew more joyous. The two of them had finally realized that Arendia was really nothing more than a very bad joke.
Despite the growing friendship between the two, however, father and I were obliged to concentrate quite a bit of effort to keep the other Mimbrates and Asturians separated.
Father was devious enough to let the Angaraks rebuild the bridg
es across the first three tributaries unmolested. On the fourth rushing stream, however, Murgo bridge-builders quite suddenly started sprouting Asturian arrows. After that, the Angaraks grew very cautious, and it took them a long time to cross each river. That was the whole idea, of course.
The final cementing of the growing friendship came when Wildantor was showing off. He stood alone on a trembling, undermined bridge, single-handedly holding off the entire Angarak force. I’ve never seen anyone shoot arrows so fast. When an archer has four arrows in the air all at the same time, you know that he’s really attending to business.
‘Pol,’ mother’s voice said calmly, ‘he’s going to fall into the water. Don’t interfere, and don’t let your father get involved, either. Mandor will save him. It’s supposed to happen that way.’
And it did, of course. The bridge Wildantor stood on shuddered and collapsed, and the river swept the red-haired Asturian downstream. Mandor raced down-river to the next destroyed bridge, dashed out to the broken end, and reached down toward the seething water. ‘Wildantor!’ he bellowed. ‘To me!’
And the half-drowning Asturian veered across the turbulent stream, reached up, and their hands crashed together. In a symbolic sense, neither of them ever let go again.
Chapter 33
We continued our slow withdrawal – I won’t say retreat – for the next several days, and our little force became more adept as they gradually came to accept the fact that their alliance was holding firm. The Mimbrate knights and Asturian bowmen, reassured perhaps by the growing friendship between Mandor and Wildantor, began to lay aside their hereditary animosity to concentrate their efforts on the task at hand. The Mimbrates grew more skilled at bridge-wrecking with practice, and several impromptu alliances began to crop up. One little group of knights grew very adept at weakening bridges rather than destroying them outright, and the knight in charge spoke with his Asturian counterpart, suggesting that the archers might restrain their enthusiasm just enough to allow the span to become crowded with advancing Murgos. That was the point at which several knights concealed upstream started rolling logs into the swiftly flowing river. The weakened bridge collapsed when the logs smashed into the already shaky underpinnings, and several hundred Murgos went swimming – for a short while, anyway. A suit of steel chain-mail isn’t the best swimming costume in the world, I noticed. The celebration involving those knights and archers that evening was rowdy, and I saw Mimbrates and Asturians linked arm in arm singing ancient drinking songs as if they’d known each other all their lives.
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 148
