‘Ah – it might be helpful if I knew your father’s name, Polanna. I’m sure I could run him down eventually, but having his name might speed things up.’
‘How silly of me. I’m sorry, Khendon.’ Then I gave him a sly sidelong glance. ‘Maybe you should go back to the academy for a quick refresher course, though. I’m a bit hurt that you didn’t recognize me the moment I came through the door.’
Then he looked more closely at me, ignoring the leather clothing and the daggers. Then he blinked and rose quickly to his feet. ‘Your Grace,’ he said with an exquisite bow. ‘The very building trembles in your august presence.’
‘Your embassy was built by Nadrak laborers, Khendon. A good sneeze would make it tremble.’
‘Nadrak construction is a bit slap-dash, isn’t it,’ he agreed. His eyes narrowed, and one of his cheeks started to twitch. ‘Some things are starting to fit together now,’ he noted. ‘This business with Yarblek was all your idea, wasn’t it?’
‘How perceptive of you, Margrave. It all has to do with something that’s going to happen on out in the future. I needed to establish a connection between Yarblek and King Drosta – and between Drosta and Prince Rhodar. It’s going to have a serious impact on something fairly significant. Don’t ask questions, Javelin, because you’re not going to get any answers. I’m having enough trouble keeping my father from tampering with the future, so I don’t need you muddying up the waters as well.’ I pushed the note I’d written and sealed that morning across his desk. ‘Just see to it that my father gets this. It explains everything to him. Don’t bother prying it open. It just tells him to come here and to buy me from Gallak. The Purpose of the Universe will be ever so grateful to you for this service.’
‘You’re taking a lot of the fun out of this, you know,’ he accused.
‘Just do as you’re told, and don’t ask questions, Javelin. All shall be revealed unto thee in the fullness of time.’ I just threw that in.
Javelin picked up on it immediately. ‘I shall be guided by thee in this, your Grace,’ he replied extravagantly. ‘I will, however, will thee or nil thee, make a few guesses.’
‘Guess all you want, dear boy, but don’t start dipping your fingers into it just yet.’ I rose from my chair. ‘Absolutely splendid talking with you, old chap,’ I added lightly. ‘Oh, incidentally, remind my father to bring lots of money with him when he comes to Yar Nadrak. I think he may be a bit surprised to discover how much I’m really worth.’
Javelin set aside his normal business and made the trip to Annath in person. I was a sort of living legend, after all. That can be tiresome now and then, but there are a few advantages to it, I suppose.
Father took his time getting to Yar Nadrak, naturally. Father takes his time about almost everything. After you’ve lived for seven thousand or so years, time doesn’t really mean all that much to you, I guess. Then again, it’s altogether possible that he had some trouble making a decision about buying me. He was extremely fond of that gold he and Yarblek’s ancestor had extracted from that stream-bed up near the lands of the Morindim, and parting with some of it may have been causing him a few problems.
Eventually, however, he passed the test – and make no mistake about it, it was a test – and he showed up in Yar Nadrak with a saddle-bag filled with gold. Apparently I was worth something to him, after all.
I sensed his presence when he was a couple of miles out of town, and I accompanied Gallak to his place of business that morning. Gallak had a warehouse, of course, but he did most of his business in a tavern. Where else?
I waited until the old vagabond was about three doors away from the tavern, and then I told Gallak that I felt like dancing. I thought that might be a nice way to welcome father to Yar Nadrak – and let him know that he was getting his money’s worth.
He entered the front door unobtrusively. Father’s very good at unobtrusiveness. He seemed just a trifle surprised when he saw what I was doing. I definitely got his attention. Then, to entertain him, I exaggerated the performance just a bit. The tavern patrons started cheering, and father’s eyes hardened into a kind of possessive belligerence. What a dear man he was! He still cared for me, even as he had before Beldaran’s wedding. Three thousand years slipped away, and we were right back at the same place we’d been when I was only sixteen. My grip on him hadn’t slipped a bit.
I concluded my dance to deafening cheers and then strutted back to Gallak’s table. Father pushed his way through the crowd trying his best to conceal his pugnaciousness. ‘That’s quite a woman you’ve got there, friend,’ he observed. ‘Would you care to sell her?’
They exchanged a few wary pleasantries, and then we got down to some serious haggling about my price.
Father started out with an insultingly low bid, and I stepped in and countered with an absurdly high one. Then father raised his offer, and Gallak reduced his price. I started to get irritated when father stubbornly refused to go higher than ten bars of gold. What is this thing men have with the number ten? There’s nothing magic about it, is there?
Along toward the end, I once again added my own voice to Gallak’s. The ultimate price wasn’t really all that important. I just wanted to push my father off that ten. Eleven would have satisfied me, but Gallak surprised me by holding out, and he and father eventually settled on twelve. That’s a fairly respectable price, I suppose. Father’s gold bars weigh ten ounces apiece, and a hundred and twenty ounces of gold – sixty of which would be mine – isn’t bad, I guess.
It was late summer by the time father and I left Yar Nadrak, and we traveled west at father’s usual pace, which ranges from a slow walk to a dead stop, and so it was autumn by the time we reached the range of high mountains which forms the spine of the continent. Father took a look at the turning leaves and the mountains lying ahead of us, and he picked up the pace a b t. By then, of course, it was too late. Winter’s been catching up with my father for eons now, and he always seems surprised and slightly offended when it does.
The blizzard which caught us on the eastern slopes of the mountains was fairly savage, and it howled around our makeshift shelter for three days. I’m rather proud of the fact that I didn’t once use the word ‘dawdling’ or the expression ‘poking along’ during our conversations in those three days.
Then we set out again, but it was obviously not getting us anywhere. The snow on level ground was about four feet deep, and the drifts were much deeper. ‘There’s no help for it, father,’ I said finally. ‘We’re going to have to change form and fly out of here.’
His refusal surprised me just a bit, and his excuse, ‘There might be Grolims around,’ was really very flimsy. If we went falcon, we could be over Drasnia long before any Grolim got to within five miles of our present location. We plodded on through the snow, and we must have covered almost an entire mile before that first blizzard’s second cousin swept in, forcing us to put up another rude shelter.
The wind howled all night, and about the middle of the next morning, we heard someone hail our makeshift little hut. ‘Hello, the camp,’ a voice called to us. ‘I’m coming in. Don’t get excited.’
He was old. My father’s old, but father seems to ignore it. This fur-garbed fellow in some peculiar way seemed to have outgrown it. His hair and beard were of that rare silvery-white, almost luminous color, and his eyes were of a deep blue. I got the strange feeling that he saw everything. His face almost nestled in the deep fur of his collar, and his lushly-furred hat was nearly rakish. ‘Looks like you two got yourselves in trouble, didn’t you?’ he suggested humorously as he trudged up to our shelter.
‘We thought we could outrun it,’ father replied with some resignation.
‘Not much chance of that. These mountains are the natural home of snow. This is where it lives. Which way were you bound?’
‘Drasnia,’ father said.
‘I’d say you got a late start – too late. You won’t make Drasnia this winter.’ He sighed. ‘Well, there’s no help for it, I guess. You
’d better winter with me. I’ve got a cave about a mile from here. Gather up your belongings and bring your horses. I guess I can put up with some company for one winter.’
Father accepted the invitation a bit too quickly. ‘We don’t really have much choice, Pol,’ he muttered to me as we packed our things in bundles to tie to our saddles.
I decided not make an issue of it, but we did in fact have a choice – the same choice we’d had since we left Yar Nadrak. Either my father was choosing to ignore it, or he was being encouraged to forget it. I spent the winter trying to figure out which.
The old fellow never did tell us what his name was. For all I could tell, he’d forgotten it. He told us that he’d spent his life up in these mountains looking for gold, but he didn’t seem particularly obsessed by it. He just liked the mountains.
His cave was really fairly comfortable. It was quite large, and he kept it neat and orderly. When we entered through the narrow opening, he stirred up his fire and then showed us where to put our horses. His donkey was there, and after a little while, the donkey and our horses became friends. The donkey, however, seemed more like a dog than a beast of burden. The old gold-hunter allowed – or encouraged – him to roam at will through the cave. That caused me a number of problems that winter. The donkey was a curious little beast, and he was forever getting in my way. He absolutely had to see what I was doing. I think he liked me, because he was continually nuzzling me or gently butting me with his head. He loved to have his ears rubbed. I rather liked him, but I didn’t like being awakened every morning by his snuffling at my neck. What bothered me the most, however, was his stubborn insistence on watching me while I bathed. I knew it was absurd, but his watching always made me blush for some reason.
Father and the old man spent the winter talking without really saying anything. They obviously liked each other, though they really didn’t have much in common. After a while, I began to get a strong odor of tampering here. I don’t think it was anything particularly earth-shaking, but for some obscure reason father and I were supposed to spend some time with this old fellow. The thing that struck me the most about him was the fact that there was quite probably nobody in the entire world more free than this solitary old man in the mountains.
Every now and then when my life has become hectic, I’ll think back to that snowy winter, and a great peace seems to descend on me. Maybe that was the reason for our stay. It has helped me retain my sanity any number of times.
Spring finally came to the mountains, and father and I resumed our journey. ‘Did that make any sense to you, father?’ I asked when we were a few miles up the trail.
‘What was that, Pol?’ he asked, his face aglow with pleasant incomprehension.
I gave up. Quite obviously he hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was talking about. ‘Never mind,’ I sighed.
We reached Boktor about a week later, and the city still had a frightened, wary air about it. A pestilence had swept the country the preceding summer – one of those virulent diseases that strikes without warning, kills off about a third of the population, and then disappears as quickly as it had come. Had I not been so intent on returning to Annath, I might have investigated the disease in hopes of finding some remedy. The majority of humanity is carried off by one disease or another, and as a physician I find that offensive. Philosophically, however, I’m forced to admit its practicality. In the light of human fertility, there almost has to be some means of controlling the population; and in the long run, disease is more humane than war or starvation.
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 abou
t 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.
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 162
