Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress

by David Eddings

  When I came down out of the mountains into the southern end of the Vale, I resumed my normal form, and the sound of the twins’ combined voices was roaring inside my head almost before my tail disappeared. ‘Don’t shout!’ I shouted back at them.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Beltira’s voice demanded.

  ‘In Tolnedra. You knew that.’

  ‘We’ve been trying to reach you for a week now.’

  ‘I had to cross the mountains, so I went wolf.’ That had always been one of the drawbacks involved in taking another form. It interfered with our peculiar method of communication. If the brother who was trying to reach you didn’t know that you’d changed, his thought was very likely to miss you entirely. ‘What’s the matter?’ I sent out the question.

  ‘Beldaran’s very ill. Polgara’s gone to the Isle to see what she can do.’ He paused. ‘You’d better get there in a hurry, Belgarath.’

  A cold knot of fear settled in my chest. ‘I’ll cut up across Ulgoland to Camaar,’ I told them. ‘Let Polgara know that I’m coming.’

  ‘We might need to reach you. Are you going wolf again?’

  ‘No. I’ll fly – a falcon, I think.’

  ‘You don’t fly very well, Belgarath.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time I learned. I’m changing right now.’

  My concern for Beldaran was so overpowering that I didn’t even think about the things that normally interfere with my flying, and after about half an hour I was cutting through the air like an arrow shot from a bow. I even experimented with translocation a time or two, but that didn’t work out very well – largely because I reverted to my own form in the process and found myself ten miles from where I’d started and trying to fly without benefit of wings. I gave up on that idea and did it the old-fashioned way.

  I was exhausted by the time I reached Camaar two days later, but I grimly pressed on across the Sea of the Winds.

  I’d made very good time, but I still got there too late. Beldaran had already died.

  Polgara was inconsolable, and Riva was almost in the same condition as I’d been after Poledra’s death. There was no point in trying to talk to either one of them, so I went looking for my grandson.

  I found him atop the highest tower of the citadel. It appeared that he’d cried himself out, and he was standing, puffy-eyed and somber, at the battlements. He was full-grown now, and he was very tall.

  ‘All right, Daran,’ I said to him harshly, ‘get away from there.’

  ‘Grandfather!’

  ‘I said to get away from there.’ I wasn’t going to take any chances with him. A sudden upsurge of despair could very well push him into doing something foolish. I’d have time for my own grief later on. Right now I had to concentrate on his.

  ‘What are we going to do, grandfather?’ he wept.

  ‘We’re going to go on, Daran. It’s what we always do. Now tell me what happened.’

  He pulled himself together. ‘Mother’s been catching cold every winter for years now. Aunt Pol told us that it’d weakened her lungs. This past winter, it was much worse. She started coughing up blood. That’s when father sent for Aunt Pol. There was nothing she could do, though. She tried everything, but mother was just too weak. Why weren’t you here, grandfather? You could have done something.’

  ‘I’m not a physician, Daran. Your aunt knows far more about that than I do. If she couldn’t save your mother, no one could have. Does your father have a prime minister? Somebody who takes care of things when he’s busy?’

  ‘You mean Brand? He’s the Rivan Warder. Father depends on him to handle administration.’

  ‘We’d better go talk with him. You’re going to have to take over here until your father recovers from this.’

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘You’re the crown prince, Daran, that’s why. It’s your responsibility. Your father’s incapacitated right now, and that drops everything into your lap.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very fair. I feel just as badly about this as father does.’

  ‘Not quite. At least you can still talk – and think. He can’t. I’ll help you through it, and Brand knows what has to be done.’

  ‘Father will get better, won’t he?’

  ‘We can hope so. It might take him a while, though. It took me twelve years after your grandmother died.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to pay any attention to me when I tell them to do something, grandfather. I don’t even have a full beard yet.’

  ‘You’re twenty years old, Daran. It’s time you grew up. Now, let’s go talk with Brand.’

  I’ll admit that it was brutal, but somebody here on the Isle had to be able to function. Riva quite obviously couldn’t. The Orb absolutely had to be protected, and if word of Riva’s state got back to Ctuchik – well, I didn’t want to think about that.

  Brand was one of those solid, dependable men that the world needs more of, and he understood the situation almost immediately. He was unusually perceptive for an Alorn, so he was able to see not only what I told him, but also the things I couldn’t tell him in front of Daran. There was a distinct possibility that Iron-grip would never really recover, and Daran would have to serve as regent. We were going to have to bury my grandson in details to the point that his grief wouldn’t incapacitate him as well. I left the two of them talking and went to Polgara’s quarters.

  I knocked on her door. ‘It’s me, Pol. Open up.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Open the door, Polgara. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Get away from me, father.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s your door, Pol. If you don’t open it right now, you’ll have to have it replaced.’

  Her face was ravaged when she opened the door. ‘What is it, father?’

  ‘You haven’t got time for this, Polgara. You can cry yourself out later. Right now I need you. Riva can’t even think, so I’ve made Daran regent. Somebody’s going to have to look after him, and I’ve got something that absolutely has to be done.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Not you too, Pol. Why does everybody keep saying that to me? You’re elected because you’re the only one who can handle it. You’re going to stay here and help Daran in every way you can. Don’t let him sink into melancholia the way his father has. The Angaraks have eyes everywhere, and if there’s any sign of weakness here, you can expect a visit from Ctuchik. Now, pull yourself together. Blow your nose and fix your face. Daran’s talking with the Rivan Warder right now. I’ll take you to where they are, and then I have to leave.’

  ‘You’re not even going to stay for the funeral?’

  ‘I’ve got the funeral in my heart, Pol, the same as you have. No amount of ceremony’s going to make it go away. Now go fix your face. You look awful.’

  I’m sorry Pol, but I had to do it that way. I had to force both you and Daran back from the abyss of despair, and piling responsibilities on you was the only way I could think of to do it.

  I left my daughter and my grandson deep in a discussion with Brand, and made some pretense of leaving the Isle. I didn’t, however. I went up into the mountains behind Riva’s city instead and found a quiet place.

  Then I crumpled and wept like a broken-hearted child.

  Iron-grip never fully recovered from the loss of his wife. Of course, he was nearing sixty when Beldaran left us, so it was almost time for Daran to take over anyway. It gave me an excuse to compel Pol to stay on the Isle – and to keep her busy. Keeping busy is very important during a time of bereavement. If I’d had something vital to attend to at the time of Poledra’s death, things might have turned out quite differently.

  I suppose I realized that – dimly – when I returned to the Vale, so I buried myself in my study of the Mrin Codex. I went through it from one end to the other looking for some clue that might have warned me about what was going to happen to Beldaran. Fortunately, I didn’t find anything. If I had, I’m sure my guilt would have overpowered me.

  About six or seven years had passe
d when Daran’s messenger arrived in the Vale to tell me that Riva Iron-grip had died. Bear-shoulders had died the previous winter, and Bull-neck and Fleet-foot were both very old men now. One of the disadvantages of a long life-span is the fact that you lose a lot of friends along the way. Sometimes I feel that my life has been one long funeral.

  Polgara returned to the Vale a year or so later, and she had a couple of trunks full of medical books with her. There probably wasn’t anything in those books that could have helped Beldaran, but I think Pol wanted to make sure. I’m not certain what she’d have done if she’d found some cure that she hadn’t known about, but she was as lucky as I’d been.

  Things went on quietly in the Vale for about fifty years. Daran got married, had a son, and grew old, while Pol and I continued our studies. Our shared sense of loss brought us closer together. As I delved deeper into the Mrin Codex, my sense of what lay ahead of us grew more troubled, but so far as I could determine, we had everything in place that needed to be there, so we were ready.

  Beldin returned from Mallorea near the end of the twenty-first century, and he reported that very little was going on there. ‘So far as I can tell, nothing’s going to happen until Torak comes out of his seclusion at Ashaba.’

  ‘It’s pretty much the same here,’ I replied. ‘The Tolned-rans have found out about the gold in Maragor, and they’ve built a city at a place called Tol Rane on the Marag border. They’ve been trying to lure the Marags into trade, but they aren’t having much luck. Is Zedar still at Ashaba?’

  He nodded. ‘I guess Burnt-face yearns for his company.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why.’

  We quite deliberately didn’t talk about Beldaran or about the other friends who’d passed on. We’d all been rather intimately involved with the family of Cherek Bear-shoulders, and we felt the sense of their loss more keenly than we had when other, perhaps more casual acquaintances died.

  The rudimentary trade between Drasnia and Gar og Nadrak came to an abrupt halt when the Nadraks began to mount attacks on towns and villages in eastern Drasnia. Bull-neck’s son, Khadar, took steps, and the Nadraks retreated back into their forests.

  Then in 2115, the Tolnedrans, frustrated by the Marag indifference to trade, took action. If I’d been paying attention, I might have been able to intervene, but I had my mind on other things. The merchant princes of Tol Honeth started by instigating a nation-wide rumor campaign about the Marag practice of ritual cannibalism, and the stories grew wilder and wilder with each retelling. Nobody really likes the idea of cannibalism, but the upsurge of indignation in Tolnedra was largely spurious, I suspect. If there hadn’t been all that gold in the streams of Maragor, I don’t think the Tolnedrans would have gotten so excited about Marag eating-habits.

  Unfortunately, Ran Vordue IV had only occupied the throne for about a year when this all came to a head, and his lack of experience contributed significantly to what finally happened. The carefully whipped-up hysteria finally crowded Ran Vordue into a corner, and he made the fatal mistake of declaring war on the Marags.

  The Tolnedran invasion of Maragor was one of the darker chapters in human history. The legions which swept across the border were not bent on conquest but upon the extermination of the Marag race, and they quite nearly succeeded. The slaughter was ghastly, and in the end it was only that characteristic greed that infects all Tolnedrans that prevented the total extinction of the Marags. Toward the end of the campaign, the legion commanders began taking prisoners – primarily women – and they sold them to the Nyissan slavers who, like vultures, habitually hover around the fringes of almost any battlefield.

  The whole business was sickening, but I suppose we owe those barbaric generals a vote of thanks. If they hadn’t sold their captives the way they did, Taiba would not have been born, and that would have been a catastrophe. The ‘Mother of the Race that Died’, as she’s called in the Mrin Codex, absolutely had to be there when the time came or all of our careful preparations would have gone out the window.

  Once the legions had wiped out the Marags, the Tolnedran gold-hunters rushed into Maragor like a breaking wave. Mara, however, had his own ideas about that. I’ve never really understood Mara, but I understood his reaction to what the Tolnedrans had done to his people very well, and I whole-heartedly approved, even though it took us to the brink of another war between the Gods. To put it quite simply, Maragor became a haunted place. The spirit of Mara wailed in insupportable grief, and horrors beyond imagination appeared before the eyes of the horde of gold-hunters who swept into the basin where Maragor had been. Most of them went mad. The majority of them killed themselves, and the few who managed to stumble back to Tolnedra had to be confined in mad-houses for the rest of their lives.

  The spirit of Nedra was not pleased by the atrocious behavior of his children, and he spoke very firmly with Ran Vordue about it. That accounts for the founding of the monastery at Mar Terrin. I was rather pleased about Mar Terrin, since the greedy merchants who’d started the whole thing were, to a man, among the first monks who were sent there to comfort the ghosts of the slaughtered Marags. Forcing a Tolnedran to take a vow of poverty is probably just about the worst thing you can do to him.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Belar and Mara had always been close, and the actions of the children of Nedra offended Belar mightily. That was what was behind the Cherek raids along the Tolnedran coast. The war-boats swept out of the Great Western Sea like packs of coursing hounds, and the coastal cities of the empire were sacked and burned with tiresome regularity. The Chereks, obviously acting on instructions from Belar, paid particular attention to Tol Vordue, the ancestral home of the Vorduvian family. Ran Vordue IV could only wring his hands in anguish as his native city was ravaged by repeated Cherek attacks.

  Ultimately, my Master had to step in and mediate a peace settlement between Belar and Nedra. Torak was still our main concern, and he was quite enough to worry about without other family squabbles cropping up to confuse the issue.

  Chapter 30

  After the destruction of Maragor and after the ensuing punitive raids along the Tolnedran coast by Cherek berserkers had died down a bit, an uneasy peace settled over the western kingdoms – except for Arendia, of course. That tedious war went on and on, in some measure perhaps because the Arends couldn’t think of any way to stop it. An endless series of atrocities and counter-atrocities had turned hatred into a religion in Arendia, and the natives were all very devout.

  Pol and I spent the next few centuries in the Vale, quietly pursuing our studies. My daughter accepted without comment the fact that she wasn’t going to age. The peculiar thing about the whole business in her case was the fact that she really didn’t. Beldin and the twins and I had all achieved the appearance of a certain maturity. We picked up wrinkles and grey hair and a distinguished look. Pol didn’t. She’d passed her three hundredth birthday, and she still looked much the same as she had at twenty-five. Her eyes were wiser, but that’s about as far as it went. I guess a sorcerer is supposed to look distinguished and wise, and that implies wrinkles and grey hair. A woman with grey hair and wrinkles is called a crone, and I don’t think Pol would have liked that very much. Maybe we all wound up looking the way we thought we ought to look. My brothers and I thought we should look wise and venerable. Pol didn’t mind the wise part, but ‘venerable’ wasn’t in her vocabulary.

  I think I might want to investigate that someday. The notion that we somehow create ourselves is intriguing.

  Anyway, I think it was early in the twenty-fourth century when Polgara began going out on her own. I tried to put my foot down the first time, but she rather bluntly told me to mind my own business. ‘The Master told me to take care of this, father. As I recall, your name didn’t even come up during the conversation.’

  I found that remark totally uncalled for.

  I waited for a half a day after she’d ridden out of the Vale on her Algar horse, and then I followed her. I hadn’t been instructed not to, an
d I was still her father. I knew that she had enormous talent, but still –

  I had to be very careful, of course. With the exception of her mother, Polgara knows me better than anybody else in the world ever has, and I rather think she could sense my presence from ten leagues away. I expanded my repertoire enormously as I followed her north along the eastern border of Ulgoland. I think I altered my form on an average of once every hour. I even went so far as to take the form of a fieldmouse one evening as I watched her set up camp. A hunting owl quite nearly ended my career that time.

  My daughter gave no sign that she knew I was following her, but with Polgara, you never really know. She crossed the mountains to Muros, where she turned south toward Arendia. That made me nervous.

  As I’d more or less expected, she was accosted by Wacites on the road to Vo Wacune. Arends are usually very polite to ladies, but this particular group appeared to have left its manners at home. They questioned her rather rudely and told her that unless she could produce some kind of safe-conduct, they’d have to take her into custody.

  You would not believe how smoothly she handled that. She was right in the middle of delivering a blistering remonstrance, and between one outraged word and the next, she simply put them all to sleep. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it if she hadn’t made that tell-tale little gesture with one hand. I’ve talked with her about that several times, but she still feels the Word that releases her Will is not quite enough. She always seems to want to add a gesture.

  The Wacites went to sleep instantly, without bothering to close their eyes. She even put their horses to sleep. Then she rode off, humming softly to herself. After she’d gone a couple of miles, she gathered her Will again, said, ‘Wake up,’ and waved her hand once more.

  The Wacites were not aware of the fact that they’d just taken a nap, so it appeared to them that she’d simply vanished. Sorcery or magic, or whatever you want to call it, makes Arends nervous, so they chose not to follow her – not that they’d have known which way she’d gone anyway.