Polgara the Sorceress

by David Eddings

  ‘All right, Pol. Don’t be too long now.’

  I hurried on down to the far end of Annath to the somewhat blocky cottage Geran had built for him and his bride. Geran was a conscientious builder who wanted the things he constructed to last, so there were hints of ‘fortress’ about his cottage. I knocked at the stout door.

  Ildera, blonde and lovely, opened it. ‘Aunt Pol,’ she greeted me. I glanced around quickly to make sure she was alone. ‘Is there something the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘We’ve got a problem, Ildera,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Alara’s mind has slipped.’

  ‘Dear Gods!’

  ‘If s not dangerous – yet: She’s not raving or anything, but she’s erased the memory of Darral’s death from her mind. This afternoon she told me that she was expecting him home for supper.’

  ‘Oh, Aunt Pol!’ Ildera’s eyes had gone wide. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘We lie to her, Ildera. I conjured up a story about a business trip on the spur of the moment – just to get her past suppertime – and now we’re stuck with it, I’m afraid. Tell Geran about it when he comes home. We’ll all have to tell Alara the same story. I said that Darral caught a ride with some wagoners and that he’s going to Erat to drum up some more business. I came here to make sure that we’d all be telling her the same story.’

  ‘We’re going to have to tell her the truth eventually, Aunt Pol.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that, Ildera. Darral’s business trip might have to be protracted.’

  ‘Can’t you – ?’ Ildera made a vaguely mysterious gesture intended to suggest sorcery. The knowledge that I was ‘talented’ had been a part of Ildera’s indoctrination in our little family, and as is usually the case, she grossly overestimated the kinds of things I could do with that talent.

  ‘I don’t think so, Ildera. The mind’s a very complicated piece of machinery. If you fix one part of it, you might damage another part beyond repair. I love Alara too much to start experimenting on her. There are some combinations of herbs that’ll keep her calm and happy. I’ll rely on those until I can come up with a safe alternative.’

  ‘Whatever you think best, Aunt Pol.’ Ildera laughed a bit ruefully. ‘The Gods know that I wouldn’t be very good at it. I can’t even dig a splinter out of my own finger.’ Then her expression grew serious. ‘You do realize that this means that we’ll have to isolate her from the rest of the village, don’t you? One wrong word could destroy her sanity for good.’

  ‘I’ll work on that,’ I promised her. Tell Geran about this, and tell him that I’ll take care of it. I don’t want him sticking his nose into it. That wrong word you mentioned could come from him just as easily as from some village gossip.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll cause you any problems there, Aunt Pol. He’s so busy examining every inch of the south face of the quarry for the flaw that caused that rock-slide that he can’t even think about anything else.’

  ‘As long as it keeps him out of the way. Oh, my father sent word that he’ll be visiting us again soon. If he stops here before he comes on up to our house, tell him about Alara’s condition and how we’re dealing with it. Warn him that I’ll rip out his beard if he interferes.’

  ‘Aunt Poll’

  ‘Well, part of it, anyway. I’d better get on back home. One of us is going to have to stay with Alara almost constantly from now on.’

  Father arrived two days later, but I didn’t want to talk with him in front of Alara. ‘Get out of here, father!’ I ordered. ‘I’m busy. Go talk with Geran and Ildera. They’ll tell you what’s happening.’ I pointed at the door. ‘Out!’ I commanded.

  Father, of course, totally misunderstood. He assumed that my outburst was the result of my ongoing grief, and he was wrong. I had something much more important to deal with.

  Later that day I sent for Ildera, and she sat with her mother-in-law while I took father out to the edge of the forest so that we could talk.

  ‘She’s completely insane?’ Father sighed when I told him about Alara’s condition.

  ‘I didn’t say that, Old Wolf. All I said was that she’s blocked out the fact that she’s a widow.’

  ‘That sounds fairly insane to me, Pol.’

  ‘You really don’t know what you’re talking about, father. Insanity’s rarely total. Alara’s illness is limited to one fact. Aside from that, she’s perfectly all right.’

  ‘Your definition of “all right” is worlds apart from mine, Pol. How long do you plan to let this go on?’

  ‘As long as it takes, father. I won’t destroy Alara just to satisfy some picky little concept of reality. She’s a bit lonesome for her husband, but that’s as far as her misery goes. I’ll keep her happy for the rest of her life, if I have to.’

  He shrugged. ‘You’re the expert, Pol.’

  ‘I’m glad you noticed that. What are you up to at the moment?’

  ‘I’m marking time, Pol, just like everybody else. The whole universe is holding its breath waiting for Ildera to start to bulge.’

  “That’s a crude way to put it.’

  ‘I’m a crude sort of fellow.’

  ‘You know, I’ve noticed that myself.’

  After father went back to the Vale, Ildera and I let it be generally known in Annath that Alara was ‘under the weather’ and needed absolute peace and quiet – ‘her recent bereavement, you understand’. The ladies of Annath all nodded sagely, pretending to understand, and so there weren’t any visitors to our house on the north end of town. We made sure that Alara never left the house unaccompanied, and Geran’s new wife demonstrated a surprising agility at changing the subject whenever someone encountered her and her mother-in-law in the village streets. She could cut off the word ‘condolences’ almost before it left anyone’s lips. Protecting Alara’s tenuous grip on sanity became our major occupation, and we grew better and better at it. Ildera, however, had another job to see to, and I occasionally fretted about her failure to get on with it. She continued to aid me in caring for Alara, and her waistline stayed trim and girlish.

  In 5351, Javelin paid father a visit in the Vale to report that Asharak the Murgo had vanished, despite the best efforts of Drasnian intelligence to keep him under surveillance. As it turned out, of course, Asharak had evaded those who’d been assigned the job of following him at least once already. He’d come to the vicinity of Annath not too long after the wedding of Geran and Ildera to tamper with the geology of the south face of the stone quarry.

  Father immediately went to Tol Honeth and virtually disassembled the city trying to find traces of Chamdar, and when that failed, he expanded his search to the rest of Tolnedra. That futile search kept him very busy for the next couple of years.

  Meanwhile, back in Annath, Ildera and I took turns keeping watch over Alara, calling on Geran to fill in for us when we were both exhausted. The ‘tonic’ Alara took twice a day kept her just a little vague about the passage of time, and my recently found skill at implanting some memories and erasing others made it all the easier for us to control her perception of time. That was the key to keeping Alara tranquil. As long as she didn’t know how long Darral’s ‘business trip’ was really taking, she stayed happy. I even went so far as to ‘dusty-up’ the house a few times – usually while she was asleep or down at the other end of town visiting Ildera – so that we could spend a week cleaning house. We cleaned house four times during the autumn of 5353, but Alara only remembered the last time. House-cleaning is tedious and repetitious anyway, so the memory of having done it isn’t the sort of memory one clings to very hard.

  I’m sure that there are some self-righteous people who’ll read this and be outraged by my ongoing deception of Alara. These are the sort of people who secretly delight in causing pain ‘for her own good’. It wouldn’t really pay people like that to take me to task for my way of dealing with Alara’s insanity. I might just decide that it’d be good for them if their heads were on backward.

  An
other Erastide came and went, and Annath, as usual, was cut off from the rest of the world by the heavy winter snows. Our little family celebration of the holiday was subdued. By now, the villagers all knew that Alara was ‘a little strange’, and they good-heartedly respected our need to keep her more or less in seclusion. They weren’t indifferent, though, and any time Ildera or I were out and about, they’d ask how our Alara was doing. The best we could give them was, ‘about the same’, and they’d sigh and nod mournfully. Villagers the world over can be nosey, but their curiosity grows out of a genuine concern for their neighbors.

  It was obvious to me by now that Alara would never really get better. Her condition was permanent There wasn’t any cure, but my combination of herbs and ‘tampering’ kept her moderately serene and sometimes even a little happy. Under the circumstances, it was the best I could manage.

  Then, when the spring thaw of 5354 was melting off the snow and the local streams were all running bank full, Ildera came up the muddy street of Annath early one morning with a radiant smile on her face. ‘I think I’m pregnant, Aunt Pol,’ she announced.

  ‘It’s about time,’ I noted.

  She looked just a little hurt, but then I laughed and threw my arms about her. ‘I’m only teasing, Ildera,’ I told her, holding her very close. ‘I’m so happy for you.’

  ‘I’m sort of pleased about it myself,’ she said. ‘Now, what should I do to put a stop to all the throwing up every morning?’

  ‘Eat something, dear.’

  ‘You said what?’

  ‘Put something to eat on the table beside the bed before you go to sleep. When you wake up in the morning, eat it before you get out of bed.’

  ‘Would that work?’

  ‘It always has. Trust me, Ildera. This is one aspect of medicine that I’m very good at. I’ve had lots of practice.’ I looked appraisingly at her tummy. ‘You don’t show yet.’

  She made a rueful little face. ‘There goes my girlish figure, I guess. None of my dresses are going to fit, though.’

  ‘I’ll sew you up some nice smocks, Ildera.’

  ‘Should we tell Alara?’ she asked, glancing at her mother-in-law’s bedroom door.

  ‘Let me think about that a bit first.’ Then I laid my hand on her still-girlish belly and sent a gently probing thought into her. ‘Three weeks,’ I said.

  Three weeks what? Please, Aunt Pol, don’t be cryptic.’

  ‘You’ve been pregnant for three weeks.’

  ‘Oh. It must have been that last blizzard then.’

  ‘I didn’t exactly follow that, dear.’

  ‘Well it was snowing very hard outside, and there wasn’t really anything else to do that afternoon.’ She gave me an arch little smile. ‘Should I go on, Aunt Pol?’ she asked me.

  This time, I was the one who blushed. ‘No, Ildera,’ I said. ‘I sort of get the picture.’

  ‘I thought that maybe you might be curious – from a professional point of view. Are you absolutely sure you don’t want all the details, Aunt Pol?’

  ‘Ildera! You stop that immediately!’ My face was actually flaming by now.

  Her laughter was silvery. ‘Got you that time, didn’t I, Aunt Pol?’ she said. What an adorable girl she was! I absolutely loved her.

  That night I sent my thought out to the twins down in the Vale. ‘Have you any idea at all of where my father is?’ asked them.

  ‘He was in Tolnedra the last time we talked with him, Pol,’ Belkira replied. ‘He’s moving around a lot, so he’s a little hard to keep track of.’

  ‘I need to get a message to him,’ I told them. “There are some unfriendly ears out there, though, so I don’t want to get too specific.’

  ‘If it’s urgent, we’ll come up there, and then you can go looking for him,’ Beltira offered.

  ‘No, it’s not that urgent – not yet, anyway. It’s just that something’s going on here that takes a certain fairly predictable amount of time.’ I thought that was nice and cryptic. ‘Have you found anything new and exciting in the Mrin lately?’

  ‘Nothing recently,’ Belkira replied. ‘Everything seems to be frozen.’

  ‘It’s springtime now, Uncle,’ I told him. ‘Have you ever noticed how spring always seems to thaw things out?’ I was fairly sure that the twins would catch the meaning I’d hidden in that seemingly casual observation.

  ‘Why yes,’ Beltira agreed, ‘now that you mention it, we’ve noticed the same thing ourselves. How far along is spring where you are?’

  ‘About three weeks, uncle. The snow’s starting to melt, and the wildflowers should come peeping through before too long.’

  I was fairly sure that if some Grolim happened to be listening, he’d be just fascinated by my weather report.

  ‘I’ve always rather liked wildflowers,’ Belkira added.

  ‘I’m fond of them myself. If you hear from my father, give him my regards, would you?’

  ‘Of course, Pol’

  I was rather smug about the way I’d managed to tell them about Ildera’s condition without actually coming right out and saying anything about it As it turned out, however, I seem to have underestimated Chamdar by more than a little.

  In the years following what happened at Annath, father, my uncles and I have pieced together Chamdar’s movements during the fourth decade of the fifty-fourth century. Father in particular became almost obsessed with the project and he was the one who finally verified Chamdar’s involvement in what happened to Darral. He happened across a talkative old fellow in one of those rowdy taverns in Muros who, after some prodding, dredged up an incident out of a nearly dormant memory. He recalled that a Murgo matching Chamdar’s description had been asking for directions to Annath in 5349 – ‘On accounta that wuz th’ same year my old ox, Butter, died. Calt him Butter ‘cuz he wuz alluz buttin’ his head aginst me.’

  At some point in his shady past my father had developed the knack of winnowing not only thoughts, but also images, out of other men’s minds, and so when the somewhat tipsy old fellow remembered the incident, father was able to recognize Chamdar from his informant’s rather blurred recollection. Chamdar had passed through Muros in 5349, and he had been looking for Annath just before Darral had been killed. I wouldn’t want to have to pursue our case against Chamdar in a court of law, but it had never been our intention to take him before a magistrate. We had quicker, more certain ways to obtain justice.

  Anyway, after I’d confirmed Ildera’s pregnancy, we talked things over with Geran, and we decided not to try to keep it a secret from Alara. As it turned out, the news that she was about to become a grandmother made Alara very happy, and if things had turned out differently, it might even have restored her to sanity.

  It was quiet in Annath that spring and summer. The menfolk went to work in the quarry every morning, and the women cooked, cleaned, washed clothes, and gossiped. Ildera bloomed – slowly of course – and she frequently gave vent to the pregnant woman’s universal complaint, ‘Why does this have to take so long?’ All in all, it was a fairly normal pregnancy.

  I thought things over frequently during the late spring and early summer, and I decided that after the baby was bom, our family should probably move again. We’d been in Annath for twenty years now, and even though Annath was isolated, I felt that it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to remain there much longer. I ran through my mental catalogue of all the towns and villages in Sendaria, crossing out all the places where I’d previously lived, since local folklore will cling to incidents that took place generations ago. I definitely didn’t want to run across someone who might be able to dredge certain memories out of the long gone past. All it takes sometimes is for some idler to say to his friends, ‘Have you noticed how much she looks like that lady they say lived over on Shadylane about three hundred years ago?’ and my secret’s out. Ultimately, I settled on the town of Wala, some miles to the south of the main road between Muros and Camaar. I hadn’t lived in southern Sendaria for centuries, and Wala was a fairly new tow
n, founded less than two hundred years ago.

  To avoid any possible discovery, the twins and I relied rather heavily on the members of Ildera’s clan to carry messages back and forth to each other. When there are unfriendly ears about, it’s not a good idea to shout – figuratively speaking – back and forth. It was late summer when a horsehide clad Algar brought me a letter from them advising me that they’d finally located my father. Actually, I believe it was Mandorallen who tracked him down and gave him the message that ‘a certain kinswoman of thine is with child’. Mandorallen’s the perfect one to carry a message like that, since he wouldn’t even think of trying to puzzle out what it meant.

  Father immediately returned to the Vale, but – wisely, I thought – decided not to come to Annath. We didn’t know where Chamdar was, and father didn’t want to lead him right to me and my family. Instead, father went off to central Sendaria and started thrashing around in order to attract Chamdar’s attention.

  It was late autumn when Alara’s condition took a turn for the worse. All during the spring and summer, she’d been so caught up in the progress of Ildera’s pregnancy that she’d seemed at times almost normal. Then as the leaves began to turn, she quite suddenly developed a fixation that Darral was lost somewhere in the surrounding mountains. I know now who it was who’d implanted that fixation, but at the time it totally baffled me. I simply couldn’t let her out of my sight for a moment. The minute I turned my back, she was gone. I frequently – after hours of searching – found her wandering aimlessly in the surrounding forest, plaintively calling out her husband’s name. Those pitiful cries tore at my heart, and I couldn’t bring myself to scold her.

  In retrospect, I’ll concede that Chamdar was no ordinary Grolim. He was extraordinarily skilled at concealing himself. I never once caught any sense of his presence nor any hint of what he was doing to Alara’s mind. Moreover, he knew me far better than I was prepared to admit. He knew, for example, that all it took to send me off into the surrounding forest was Alara’s absence. Most Grolims wouldn’t have had any conception of my love for the members of my family, since love’s an alien concept to the Grolims. Chamdar not only understood it, but he also used it to skillfully pull me out of Annath at the critical moment.