‘There’s a thought,’ Dras noted. ‘If the Murgos want horses, couldn’t we interest them in trade, too?’
Algar shook his head. ‘Not Murgos, no. Their minds don’t work that way. One of my clan-chiefs questioned a Thull who actually knew his right hand from his left. The Thull said that Ctuchik’s at Rak Goska. As long as he’s dominating Murgo society, there won’t be any peaceful contacts with them.’
‘Pol’s right, then,’ Beldin said. ‘We’re going to have to try to work through the Nadraks.’ He squinted at the ceiling. ‘I don’t think this Angarak migration poses much of a threat – at least not yet. There weren’t all that many people in Cthol Mishrak to begin with, and Ctuchik’s got them spread out fairly thin. The real threat is still Mallorea. I think I’ll go back there and keep an eye on things. The Angaraks on this continent are just an advance party. They’re probably here to build supply dumps and staging areas. You won’t have to start sharpening your swords until the Malloreans begin coming across. I’ll keep my ear to the ground over there and let you know when the military moves north out of Mal Zeth toward the bridge.’
Polgara pursed her lips. ‘I think we might want to establish closer ties with the Tolnedrans and the Arends.’
‘Why’s that, dear sister?’ Riva asked her. He was her brother-in-law now, and he automatically used that form of address. Family’s an important thing to Alorns.
‘We might need their help with the Malloreans.’
‘The Tolnedrans wouldn’t help unless we paid them to,’ Cherek disagreed, ‘and the Arends are too busy fighting with each other.’
‘They live here too, Bear-shoulders,’ she pointed out, ‘and I don’t think they’d want Malloreans on this continent any more than we would. The legions could be very helpful, and the Arends have been training for war since before Torak split the world. Besides, Chaldan and Nedra would probably be offended if we all went off to war and didn’t invite them to come along.’
‘Excuse me, Polgara,’ Dras rumbled, ‘but how did you learn so much about politics? As I understand it, this is the first time you’ve ever been out of the Vale.’
‘Uncle Beldin keeps me posted,’ she replied, shrugging slightly. ‘It’s always nice to know what the neighbors are up to.’
‘Is there any point to involving the Nyissans or the Marags?’ Riva asked.
‘We should probably make the offer,’ I said. ‘The current Salmissra’s a fairly intelligent young woman, and she’s as concerned about the Angaraks as we are. The Marags wouldn’t be of much use. There aren’t that many of them, and the fact that they’re cannibals might make everybody else nervous.’
Beldin laughed that ugly laugh of his. ‘Tell them to start eating Angaraks. Let the Murgos get nervous.’
‘I think maybe we’d all better start thinking about going home,’ Cherek suggested, rising to his feet. ‘The wedding’s over now, and if the Malloreans are coming, we’d better start getting ready for them.’
And that was more or less the extent of the first Alorn Council.
‘Is it always that much fun?’ Polgara asked me as we were returning to our quarters.
‘Fun? Did I miss something?’
‘Politics, father,’ she explained, ‘all this business of trying to guess what the other side’s going to do.’
‘I’ve always rather enjoyed it.’
‘I guess you really are my father, then. That was much more fun than leading young men around by their noses or turning their knees to water just by fluttering my eyelashes at them.’
‘You’re a cruel woman, Polgara.’
‘I’m glad you realize that, father. It wouldn’t be much fun at all to catch you unawares.’ She gave me one of those obscure little smiles. ‘Watch out for me, father,’ she warned. ‘I’m at least as dangerous as you are or Torak is.’
You did say it, Pol, so don’t try to deny it.
Our parting from Beldaran wasn’t one of the happier moments in our lives. My love for my blonde daughter had been the anchor that had hauled me back to sanity, and Polgara’s ties to her twin sister were so complex that I couldn’t even begin to understand them.
Beldin and I talked at some length before we separated. He promised to keep me advised about what was going on in Mallorea, but I had a few suspicions about Beldin’s motives for going back there. I had the feeling that he wanted to continue his discussion of white-hot hooks with the leprous-looking Urvon, and there was always the chance of coming across Zedar in some out-of-the-way place. There are nicer people in the world than Beldin.
I wished him the best of luck – and I meant it. There are nicer people than me out there as well. ‘Grat is not nice, after all.
My brother left from the headland just south of the harbor at Riva, spiraling upward on lazy wings. Pol and I, however, left by more conventional means. Bear-shoulders took us to the Sendarian coast in that dangerously narrow warboat of his. Even though I’d helped to design them, I don’t like Cherek war-boats. There’s no denying that they’re fast, but it always feels to me whenever I board one that it’s right on the verge of capsizing. I’m sure Silk understands that, but Barak never will.
Pol and I took our time returning to the Vale. There was no real hurry, after all. In a curious sort of way, Beldaran’s marriage made peace between Polgara and me. We didn’t talk about it, we just closed ranks to fill in the gap that had suddenly appeared in our lives. Pol still made those clever remarks, but a lot of the bite had gone out of them.
It was midsummer by the time we got home, and we spent the first week or so giving the twins a full description of the wedding and of Pol’s conquests. I’m sure they noticed the change in her appearance, but they chose not to make an issue of it.
Then we settled back in. It was after dinner one evening when Polgara raised something I’d been cudgeling my brains to find a way to bring up myself. As I remember, we were doing the dishes at the time. I don’t particularly like to dry dishes, since they’ll dry themselves if you just leave them alone, but Polgara seems to feel a kind of closeness in the business, and if it made her happy, I wasn’t going to disturb the uneasy peace between us by objecting.
She handed me the last dripping plate, dried her hands, and said, ‘I guess it’s time for me to start my education, father. The Master’s been harping on that for quite some time now.’
I almost dropped the plate. ‘Aldur talks to you, too?’ I asked her as calmly as I could.
She gave me a quizzical look. ‘Of course.’ Then the look became offensively pitying. ‘Oh, come now, father. Are you trying to say that you didn’t know?’
I know now that I shouldn’t have been so surprised, but I’d been raised in a society in which women were hardly more than servants. Poledra had been an entirely different matter, of course, but for some reason the implications of what Polgara had just told me were profoundly shocking. The fact that Aldur had come to her in the same way that he came to me was an indication of a certain status, and I simply wasn’t ready to accept the idea of a female disciple. I guess that sometimes I’m just a little too old-fashioned.
Fortunately, I had sense enough to keep those opinions to myself. I carefully finished drying the plate, put it on the shelf, and hung up the dishtowel.
‘Where’s the best place to begin?’ she asked me.
‘The same place I did, I suppose. Try not to be offended, Pol, but you’re going to have to learn how to read.’
‘Can’t you just tell me what I need to know?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know everything you’ll need to learn. Let’s go sit down, Pol, and I’ll try to explain it.’ I led her over to that part of the tower that I devoted to study. I’d never even considered building interior walls in the tower, so it was really just one big room with certain areas devoted to certain activities. We sat down at a large table littered with books and scrolls and obscure pieces of machinery. ‘In the first place,’ I began, �
��we’re all different.’
‘What an amazing thing. How is it that I never noticed that?’
‘I’m serious, Pol. This thing we call “talent” shows up in different ways in each of us. Beldin can do things I wouldn’t even attempt, and the others also have certain specialties. I can give you the basics, but then you’ll be on your own. Your talent’s going to develop along lines that’ll be dictated by the way your mind works. People babble about “sorcery”, but most of what they say is pure nonsense. All it is – all it can be – is thought, and each of us thinks differently. That’s what I meant when I said you’re on your own.’
‘Why do I need to read, then? If I’m so unique, what can your books tell me that’ll be of any use?’
‘It’s a short-cut, Pol. No matter how long you live, you’re not going to have time to rethink every thought that’s ever occurred to everyone who’s ever lived. That’s why we read – to save time.’
‘How will I know which thoughts are right and which ones aren’t?’
‘You won’t – at least not at first. You’ll get better at recognizing fallacies as you go along.’
‘But that’ll only be my opinion.’
‘That’s sort of the way it works, yes.’
‘What if I’m wrong?’
‘That’s the chance you have to take.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘There aren’t any absolutes, Pol. Life would be simpler if there were, but it doesn’t work that way.’
‘Now I’ve got you, old man.’ She said it with a certain disputational fervor. Polgara loves a good argument. ‘There are things we know for certain.’
‘Oh? Name one.’
‘The sun’s going to come up tomorrow morning.’
‘Why?’
‘It always has.’
‘Does that really mean that it always will?’
A faint look of consternation crossed her face. ‘It will, won’t it?’
‘Probably, but we can’t be absolutely certain. Once you’ve decided that something’s absolutely true, you’ve closed your mind on it, and a closed mind doesn’t go anywhere. Question everything, Pol. That’s what education’s all about.’
‘This might take longer than I thought.’
‘Probably so, yes. Shall we get started?’
Pol needs reasons for the things she does. Once she understood why reading was so important, she learned how in a surprisingly short time, and she got better at it as she went along. Perhaps it was something to do with her eyes. I can probably read faster than most because I can grasp the meaning of an entire line at a single glance. Pol picks up whole paragraphs in the same way. If you ever have occasion to watch my daughter reading, don’t be deceived by the way she seems to be idly leafing through a book. She isn’t. She’s reading every single word. She went through my entire library in slightly more than a year. Then she went after Beldin’s – which was a bit more challenging, since Beldin’s library at that time was probably the most extensive in the known world.
Unfortunately, Polgara argues with books – out loud. I was engaged in my own studies at the time, and it’s very hard to concentrate when a steady stream of ‘Nonsense!’ ‘Idiocy!’ and even ‘Balderdash!’ is echoing off the rafters.
‘Read to yourself!’ I shouted at her one evening.
‘But, father dear,’ she said sweetly, ‘you directed me to this book, so you must believe what it says. I’m just trying to open your mind to the possibility of an alternative opinion.’
We argued about philosophy, theology and natural science. We haggled about logic and law. We screamed at each other about ethics and comparative morality. I don’t know when I’ve ever had so much fun. She crowded me at every turn. When I tried to pull in the wisdom of ages to defend my position, she neatly punctured all my windy pomposity with needle-sharp logic. In theory, I was educating her, but I learned almost as much as she did in the process.
Every so often, the twins came by to complain. Pol and I are vocal people, and we tend to get louder and louder as an argument progresses. The twins didn’t really live all that far away, so they got to listen to our discussions – although they’d have preferred not to.
I was enormously pleased with her mind, but I was somewhat less pleased with the wide streak of vanity that was emerging in her. Polgara tends to be an extremist. She’d spent her young girlhood being militantly indifferent to her appearance. Now she went completely off the scale in the opposite direction. She absolutely had to bathe at least once a day – even in the winter time. I’ve always been of the opinion that bathing in the winter is bad for your health, but Pol scoffed at that notion and immersed herself up to the eyebrows in warm, soapy water at every opportunity. More to the point, though, she also suggested that I should bathe more frequently. I think she had some sort of mental calendar ticking away inside her head, and she could tell me – and frequently did – exactly how long it had been since my last bath. We used to have long talks about that.
So far as I was concerned, if she wanted to bathe five times a day, that was up to her. But she also insisted on washing her hair each time! Pol has a full head of hair, and our tower seemed to be filled with a perpetual miasma. Damp hair is not one of my favorite fragrances. It wasn’t so bad in the summer time when I could open the windows to air the place out, but in the winter I just had to live with it.
I think the last straw was when she moved Beldaran’s standing mirror into a position where she could watch herself reading. All right, Polgara had grown up to be at least as pretty as Beldaran, but really –
She did things to her eyebrows that looked terribly painful to me.
I know as a matter of fact that they were painful, since I woke up one morning with her leaning placidly over me plucking out mine – hair by hair. Then, still not content, she started on my ears. Neatness is nice, I guess, but I drew the line there. The hair in a man’s ears is there for a reason. It keeps out bugs, and it insulates the brain from the chill of winter. Polgara’s mother had never objected to the fact that I had furry ears. Of course, Poledra looked at the world differently.
Pol spent inordinate amounts of time with her hair.
She combed.
She brushed.
She made me crazy with all that fussing. Yes, I know that Polgara has beautiful hair, but it crackles when the weather turns cold. Try it sometime. Let your hair grow until you can sit on it; then stroke it with a brush on a chill winter morning. There were times when she looked like a hedgehog, and bright sparks flew from her fingers whenever she touched anything even remotely metallic.
She used to swear about that a lot. Polgara doesn’t really approve of swearing, but she does know all the words.
I think it was during the late spring of her eighteenth year when she finally stepped over the line and demonstrated her talent while I was watching. It’s an obscure sort of modesty with Pol. She doesn’t like to have anyone around to see what she’s doing when she unleashes it. I suspect that it may have something to do with nakedness. Nobody – and I do mean nobody – has ever seen Polgara step all dripping from her bath wearing nothing but that dreamy smile. She conceals her gift in that self-same way – except in an emergency.
It wasn’t actually an emergency. Pol had been deep into a Melcene philosophical tract, and she was concentrating on it very hard. I sort of suggested that it had been two days since we’d eaten. It was the end of winter, and I suppose I could have gone wolf and chased down a fieldmouse or two, but I really wanted something to eat. Fieldmice are nice, but they’re all fur and bones, and that’s not really very satisfying for a full-grown animal.
‘Oh, bother,’ she said, and made a negligent sort of gesture – without even looking up from her book – and there was quite suddenly a hind-quarter of beef smoking on the kitchen table – without benefit of platter.
I looked at it with a certain amount of chagrin. It was dripping gravy all over my floor, for one thing, and it wasn’t quite fully done, for another. Polgara had provided
cow. Cooking and seasoning to taste was my problem.
I bit down very hard on my lower lip. ‘Thanks awfully,’ I said to her in my most acid tone.
‘Don’t mention it,’ she replied without raising her eyes from her book.
Chapter 24
The world outside the Vale was changing. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about that; the world is always changing. About the only difference this time lay in the fact that we noticed it. The open grasslands to the north of us had always been uninhabited before – unless you count the wild horses and cattle. But now the Algars lived there.
I always rather liked Algar Fleet-foot. He was clearly the most intelligent of Cherek’s sons. The fact that he never missed an opportunity to keep his mouth shut was an indication of that. I suspect that if he’d been Cherek’s first son, it might not have been necessary to break up Aloria. This is not intended to throw rocks at Dras Bull-neck. Dras was unquestionably one of the bravest men I’ve ever known, but he was just a bit on the impetuous side. Maybe his sheer physical size had something to do with that.
Fleet-foot’s breeding program was beginning to produce larger horses and more and more of his people were mounted now. He’d also begun to cross-breed the rather scrubby Alorn cattle with the wild cows of the plain to produce animals of a significant size which were at least marginally tractable.
The Algars were fairly good neighbors – which is to say that they didn’t pester us. Fleet-foot periodically sent messengers to the Vale to bring us news, but otherwise his people left us alone.
It was about two years after Beldaran’s wedding – late spring I think it was – when Algar himself came down into the Vale with his cousin Anrak. ‘Good news, Belgarath,’ Anrak called up to my tower. ‘You’re going to become a grandfather.’
‘It’s about time,’ I called down. ‘Come on up, both of you.’ I went to the head of the stairs and told the door to open to admit them.
Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress Page 36