Young Davon was cut from the same cloth as his father, and his father was very much like my sister’s own son, Daran. Certain characteristics have always bred true in the Rivan line. For the most part, they’ve all had that same sandy blond hair, for one thing. Iron-grip’s black hair showed up only occasionally. Moreover, they’ve all been very serious, earnest little boys with a wide streak of good, solid common sense. Of course, that could be cultural rather than hereditary, since most of them have been born and raised in Sendaria.
The seasons turned and the years went by, and Davon grew like a well-watered weed. By the time he was twelve, he was quite nearly as tall as his father. I’ve never really liked Muros all that much, given the perpetual dust and the smell of the stockyards, but we were happy there.
Then, a few days after Davon’s twelfth birthday, Hattan stopped by, and he and I went into my library to have a long talk. ‘Do you remember that chat we had before Geran and Eldara were married, Pol?’ the tall Algar, whose scalp-lock was turning iron grey now, said to me.
‘Very well, Hattan. We’ve been following the course you laid out for us quite well, haven’t we?’
‘All except for the fact that you’re not visibly aging,’ he said. ‘Could you possibly use magic to make your hair turn grey? That should put a few years on you.’
I sighed. ‘Someday we’re going to have to have a talk about what you call magic, Hattan,’ I said.
‘Do you mean you can’t?’ He sounded startled.
‘Oh, I could,’ I told him, ‘but grey hair isn’t really grey, you know.’
‘It looks grey.’
‘Look a little closer, Hattan. Your scalp-lock looks grey because it’s a mixture of black and white hairs. I’d have to turn half of my hair white – strand by strand.’
‘That might take a while,’ he conceded.
‘Quite a while, actually. There are some chemicals I can cook out of certain common weeds that’ll color my hair. It won’t look quite the same as yours, but it should get me by. There are a few cosmetics I can use to make myself appear older, too.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just move on? Go to Sulturn, maybe? – or Darine?’
‘Are you trying to get rid of me, Hattan?’
‘Of course not. We all love you, Pol, but we do have to put the safety of the children first.’
There’s an easier way to take care of it,’ I told him. ‘Since I’m so old now, I’ll just become a recluse and stay in the house. We old people do that fairly often, you know.’
‘I don’t want to imprison you, Pol.’
‘You aren’t, Hattan. Actually, I rather like the idea. It’ll give me a chance to catch up on my reading. I’ll still be right here in the event of an emergency, and I won’t have to endure all those endless hours of mindless gossiping.’
‘Oh, one other thing – before I forget,’ he added. ‘How does the idea of apprenticing Davon to a tanner strike you?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I have to live in the same house with him, Hattan, and tanners as a group tend to be a little fragrant.’
‘Not if they bathe regularly – with good strong soap. Even a nobleman starts to get strong on the downwind side if he only takes one bath a year.’
‘Why a tanner? Why not a barrel-maker?’
‘It’s a logical extension of my own business, Pol. I’ve got access to an almost unlimited supply of cow-hides, and I can get them for pennies. If Davon learns how to tan those hides, he can sell the leather at a handsome profit.’
‘A little empire building there, Hattan?’ I teased. ‘You want to use the whole cow, don’t you? What do you plan to do with the hooves and horns?’
‘I could always build a glue factory, I suppose. Thanks for the idea, Pol. It hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘You’re serious!’
‘I’m just taking care of my family, Pol. I’m going to leave them a prosperous business when Belar calls me home.’
‘I think you’ve been in Sendaria too long, Hattan. Why don’t you take a year off and go back to Algaria – herd cows or breed horses or something?’
‘I’ve already looked into that, Pol. I’m currently negotiating for several hundred acres of good pasture land. I know Sendars very well by now. Algars like horses that run fast, but Sendars prefer more sensible animals. It’s a little hard to plow a field at a dead run.’
‘Are you certain that there’s not a strain of Tolnedran in your background, Hattan? Is profit the only thing you can think about?’
He shrugged. ‘Actually, I get bored, Pol. Once everything connected with a business venture gets to be a habit, I start looking around for new challenges. I can’t help it if they all end up making money. I know a tanner named Alnik who’s getting along in years and whose son isn’t really interested in the family business. I’ll talk with him, and once Davon’s learned the trade, we’ll buy Alnik out and set our boy up in business for himself. Trust me, Pol. This is all going to work out just fine.’
‘I thought our whole idea was to be inconspicuous, Hattan. I’d hardly call the richest family in southeastern Sendaria inconspicuous.’
‘I think you’re missing the point, Pol. The line you’re protecting will be inconspicuous, because they’ll seem to descend from me. After a few generations, nobody’ll even think to ask about the other side of their heritage. They’ll be a fixture – an institution – with ho apparent connection to the Isle of the Winds. You can’t get much more invisible than that, can you?’
Once again Hattan had startled me with his uncommon shrewdness. He’d reminded me that someone can be just as invisible by standing still as he can by running away and hiding. I learned a great deal about being ordinary from my Algarian friend. My own background had been anything but ordinary. I’d been ‘Polgara the Sorceress’ and ‘The Duchess of Erat’, and those positions had been very visible. Now I was going to learn how to be the great-aunt of the village tanner – even though Muros wasn’t exactly a village. Little by little, I’d fade into the background, and that suited our purposes perfectly. Once we’d polished this deception, no Murgo – or Grolim – could ever find us.
Davon was a good boy, so he didn’t object to his apprenticeship – at least not openly. By the time he was eighteen, he was a master tanner, and his employer’s establishment was producing the finest leather in all of Sendaria.
Our extended family had a feast on Erastide that year, and I officiated in the kitchen, naturally. After we’d all eaten more than was really good for us, Davon leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ he told the rest of us. ‘If we’re going to buy Alnik’s business, we’ll be producing most of the leather in this part of Sendaria. What if we were to hire some young cobblers who were just getting started? We could attach a work-shop to the tannery and manufacture shoes.’
‘You can’t really expect to make money that way, Davon,’ Geran objected. ‘Shoes have to be fitted to the feet of the one who’s going to wear them.’
‘I’ve done a little measuring, father,’ Davon disagreed. He laughed sheepishly. ‘People think I’m crazy because I always want to measure their feet I’m getting better at it, though. I can guess the length of a man’s foot down to a quarter of an inch now. Your feet are eight and a half inches long, by the way. Children’s feet – and women’s – are smaller, but there are only so many lengths of feet in all of Muros. Nobody’s got three-inch feet, and nobody’s got nineteen-inch ones. If our cobblers turn out shoes in all the more common lengths, we’ll find people who can wear them. I can almost guarantee that.’
‘Go ahead and smirk, Hattan,’ I said to my friend.
‘About what, Pol?’
‘You’ve succeeded in corrupting another generation, haven’t you?’
‘Would I do that, Pol?’ he asked innocently.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I think you would.’
Hattan and I pooled some of our money the following spring, we bought out Alnik the tanner, and then tu
rned the tannery over to Davon, who immediately started manufacturing solid, sensible shoes that were very popular among farmers. People who wanted fancy shoes continued to have them made by traditional cobblers, but ordinary working people began to patronize the shop that was the end of a long line of processes. Raw hides went in one end of Davon’s tannery, and work shoes came out the other. The people of Muros were beginning to notice this family. Such Angaraks as passed through, however, paid almost no attention to it – unless they wanted to buy cows or shoes.
It was in the year 4039 that we finally got Davon married off. He was twenty-three at the time, and I’d started to worry just a bit. Marriage is something that shouldn’t be put off too long. Bachelorhood can be sort of habit forming after a while. Hattan, who was in his late fifties by then, told me that I worried too much about things like that. ‘We’re unusual people, Pol,’ he said to me just before the wedding. ‘If I were just another Algar, I’d be sitting on a horse near the River Aldur watching a herd of cows right now. I’d have an Algar wife and ten children, and we’d all be living in wagons. But I’m not just another Algar, so I’m married to Layna, and I’m living in Muros getting rich instead of keeping cows out of trouble on the plains of Algaria. I was older than Davon is right now when I married Layna. I needed some time to get my feet on the ground before I got married. Nobles and peasants marry early. Businessmen tend to wait.’
Davon’s bride-to-be was a very pretty blonde girl named Alnana. She had a bright, sunny personality, and she was a joy to be around. Eldara and I considered her rather carefully and decided that she’d be acceptable. Young men always think that they’re the ones who make these decisions, but they tend to overlook certain realities in these matters. The influence of the women of the house is very strong in the business of choosing suitable wives.
No. I won’t pursue that. Women know about it already, and men don’t really need to know.
The wedding of Davon and Alnana was the social event of the season that fall. Our family was quite prominent in Muros by now, and we had no real reason to keep the affair unostentatious as we had when Geran had come in out of nowhere to marry Eldara. Weddings are major events in the lives of the merchant class, so they tend to make them lavish.
After the wedding, Davon and Alnana took up residence in a new wing of my house. Things were a little crowded to suit my tastes, but we all got along quite well, so there was a minimum of friction.
Hattan, my dear, dear friend, lived long enough to see his great-grandson, Alten, born in 4041, and then one blustery spring morning out in the stockyards, Hattan was gored by a large belligerent Algar bull: Cows are such silly animals most of the time that we tend to forget that they always go about fully armed. Hattan died almost immediately, so there wasn’t anything I could really have done, but that didn’t prevent me from blaming myself. It sometimes seems that I’ve spent half of my life sunk to the eyebrows in self-recrimination. That’s one of the major drawbacks of the study and practice of healing. Healers are always shocked and outraged when they discover something else that they can’t heal. No one has yet come up with a way to heal death, however, so a physician has to learn to accept his losses and move on.
Layna was totally devastated, of course, and she didn’t long survive her husband. Once again natural mortality was thinning the ranks of those I loved the most.
I consoled myself – as I’ve done so many times – by devoting a great amount of time to my new nephew. By the time he was six years old there was no question whatsoever that he was a member of the little family to which I was devoting my life. When the three of them, Geran, Davon, and Alten, were together, we could all see the almost mirror-image resemblances. Davon and Alten would never have to waste time wondering what they’d look like when they grew older. All they had to do was look at Geran.
Geran’s sandy-colored hair began to be touched with grey at the temples after he turned fifty. It actually made him look rather distinguished. It was in 4051 when the grave sensibility greying hair seems to bestow upon even the silliest of men brought Geran and me to the closest thing I think we ever had to an argument. ‘I’ve been asked to stand for election to the town council, Aunt Pol,’ he told me one summer evening when we were alone together in my garden. ‘I’ve been giving it some fairly serious consideration.’
‘Are you out of your mind, Geran?’ I asked sharply.
‘I could do a lot better job than some of the incumbents,’ he said defensively. ‘Most of them are just using their offices to line their own pockets.’
‘That’s not your concern, Geran.’
‘I live here too, Aunt Pol. The well-being of the city’s as much my concern as it is everybody else’s.’
‘Who raised this idiotic notion?’
The Earl of Muros, himself.’ He said it with a certain pride.
‘Use your head, Geran!’ I told him. ‘You can’t do something that’d attract so much attention to you.’
‘People don’t really pay all that much attention to the members of the council, Aunt Pol.’
‘You’re talking about the local people. Outsiders – including Murgos – pay a lot of attention to the people in power. All we’d need would be to have some Murgo asking around about your origins. When he found out that you came here in 4012 – just ten years after King Gorek’s assassination – and that I’d come here with you, everything would fly out the window.’
‘You worry too much,’ he scoffed.
‘Somebody has to. Too many things match up for a Murgo to just shrug them all off as coincidence – your age, your appearance, my presence, and the fact that I don’t get old. He’d have suspicions, and he’d take them to Ctuchik. Ctuchik doesn’t worry about niceties, Geran. If he has the faintest suspicion that you’re the survivor of that massacre at Riva, he’ll have you and your entire family butchered. Is getting elected to some silly office that important to you?’
‘I can afford to hire guards. I can protect my family.’
‘Why don’t you just paint a sign saying ‘King of Riva’ and hang it around your neck? Guards, Geran? Why not hire trumpeters to blow fanfares, too?’
‘I could do so much for the city and its people, Aunt Pol.’
‘I’m sure you could, but Muros isn’t your concern. Riva’s the town you’re interested in. Someday, one of your descendants is going to sit on the throne there. Concern yourself with that, not with street repair and garbage disposal in a dusty town on the Sendarian plain.’
‘All right, Aunt Pol,’ he said, clearly irritated. ‘Don’t beat me over the head with it. I’ll give my apologies to Oldrik and tell him that I’m too busy right now to make speeches about corrupt officials.’
‘Oldrik?’
‘The Earl of Muros. He and I are rather close friends, actually. He asks my advice on certain things now and then.’
‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed.
‘I can’t live under a rock, Aunt Pol,’ he said plaintively. ‘The town of Muros has been good to me. I should do something to pay them back.’
‘Build them a public park or open a hospital for the poor. Don’t get involved in their politics.’
He sighed. ‘Whatever you say, Aunt Pol,’ he surrendered.
Despite my intervention that kept him out of office, Geran was becoming much too prominent in Muros for my comfort. I began to get an uneasy feeling that sooner or later one of Ctuchik’s agents might just decide to have a look into the background of this ‘first citizen’, and so I began making some plans.
As it turned out, that wasn’t premature. It was, in fact, just a little late.
Young Alten continued to grow, and by the time he was twelve, he was almost as tall as his father. Every so often, one of the heirs I’ve nurtured reverts to type, perhaps to remind me that the blood of Bear-shoulders still runs in their veins. Alten was going through one of those gangly stages all adolescent males have to endure. Sometimes it almost seemed that I could see him grow. He was about fourteen, I think, wh
en he came home one afternoon with a puzzled look on his face. ‘Are we important people, Aunt Pol?’ he asked me.
‘Your grandfather seemed to think so a few years back,’ I replied. ‘He wanted to stand for election to the town council.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I talked him out of it. Why this sudden interest in fame, Alten? You’re an apprentice cobbler. You’ll become famous if you make good shoes.’
‘The cobbler I’m apprenticed to broke his favorite needle this morning,’ he explained. ‘He sent me out to buy him a new one. I was in the central market and there was this foreigner there asking questions about us.’
‘What kind of foreigner?’ I asked quickly. I was suddenly very alert.
‘I’m not really sure, Aunt Pol. He wasn’t a Tolnedran or a Drasnian. I’m sure of that.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He was a big man with swarthy skin – darker than a Tolnedran or an Arend – and he had funny-shaped eyes.’
‘Scars on his cheeks?’ I pressed, my heart sinking.
‘Now that you mention it, I think he did. He was wearing a black robe that looked sort of rusty. Anyway, he was really curious about us. He wanted to know when grandfather came here to Muros, and he really wanted to know about you. He described you very well, and I can’t imagine when it was he ever saw you, since you almost never go out of the house.’
‘Someone told him about me, Alten. Go back to the tannery and get your father and then go find your grandfather. He may be out in the cattle pens somewhere. Tell them both that this is very urgent. We all have to get together and talk. Oh, one other thing. Stay away from the foreigner with the scarred face.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, already moving toward the door.
I knew that there were going to be objections – rather violent ones – so I did something I hadn’t really been obliged to do for quite a long time. I didn’t try to reason with my growing family; I issued commands. ‘There’s a Murgo in town,’ I told them when they’d all assembled. ‘He’s been asking questions about us. We’ll have to leave town immediately.’
Polgara the Sorceress Page 55