Polgara the Sorceress (66 page)

It went on and on and on, tedious repetitions of the same ghastly little play. After a day or so, I’d seen enough, but father lingered. He seems to revel in that sort of thing for some reason.

On the third evening we flew some distance out to the flank of the invading army, and after we’d settled to earth I rather tartly told my blood-thirsty parent that I’d seen enough.

‘I suppose you’re right, Pol,’ he said almost regretfully. ‘We’d probably better get on back to the Isle of the Winds to let the Alorns know what’s afoot.’ Then he laughed. ‘You know, I think we all underestimated Algar Fleet-foot. This country of his is a stroke of pure genius. He deliberately turned his people into nomads so that there wouldn’t be any towns. The whole of Algaria’s nothing but a vast emptiness with grass growing on it. The Algars don’t have towns to defend, so they can give up huge pieces of their country without a second thought. They know that after the Angaraks have moved on, they can return. The only place of any significance in the whole silly kingdom is the Stronghold, and that’s not even a city. It’s nothing but bait.’

‘I always rather liked Algar,’ I admitted. ‘Under different circumstances, I might have set my cap for him. He could have made a very interesting husband.’

‘Polgara!’
Father actually sounded shocked, and I laughed about that for quite some time – long enough, anyway, to make him grouchy. I
love
to do that to him.

The weather went to pieces again that night, and father and I left Algaria the next morning in a drizzling rain. We crossed the Sendarian mountains and arrived at Riva on the Isle of the Winds two days later.

The Alorn Kings were most concerned about the second Angarak army commanded by Urvon. I guess that you can’t really enjoy a war if you have to keep looking back over your shoulder for unexpected enemies. The Alorns were also a bit upset when father suggested that we pick up our headquarters and move it to Tol Honeth. Alorns can be such children sometimes. They had this splendid war going on, and they selfishly didn’t want to share it.

I now knew Brand well enough to speak candidly with
him. ‘Aren’t we being just a little blasé about this, my friend?’ I suggested. ‘You’re going to meet a God in single combat, and you’re shrugging it off as if it were some meaningless little chore – like fixing a fence or chopping wood for the evening fire.’

‘There’s not much point in getting excited about it, Pol,’ he said in his deep, soft voice. ‘It’s going to happen whether I like it or not. I can’t hide and I can’t run away, so why should I lose any sleep over it?’

‘For my sake, couldn’t you
simulate
worrying about it?’

His face creased into an expression of anticipated terror that was absolutely grotesque. ‘How’s this?’ he asked me.

I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I give up,’ I said. Brand didn’t
look
very much like Kamion had, but there were some distinct similarities in their behavior, and some even greater similarities in their relationship with me.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘My jaws are starting to lock up, so I don’t think I can hold this expression for long.’

‘Your wife’s name is Aren, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘I think she and I’d better get acquainted. You and I are going to be spending quite a bit of time together for several years, so I’d like to make sure she doesn’t break out in a bad case of jealousy.’

‘Aren’s a sensible woman. She knows I wouldn’t do anything improper.’

‘Brand,’ I said quite firmly, ‘I’m sure you’re a good administrator and a fearsome warrior, but you don’t know very much about women.’

‘I’ve been married to Aren for almost twenty years, Pol,’ he objected.

“That has absolutely nothing to do with it, Brand. She won’t be nearly as attractive if she suddenly turns bright green, and you won’t be nearly as robust if she starts feeding you boiled hay for the next twenty years.’

‘She wouldn’t do that – would she?’

‘Let’s play it safe, Brand.’ I thought about it. ‘When you introduce me to Aren, introduce me as “Ancient Polgara”. Let’s make an issue of my age.’

‘Be serious, Pol. You’re not old.’

‘Darlin’ boy,’ I said, fondly patting his cheek. ‘In actuality, though, I just turned two thousand, eight hundred and sixty seven. Feel free to flaunt that number in Aren’s face. No woman in her right mind is jealous of an old crone.’

‘Anybody who calls you that will answer to me, Pol,’ he said fiercely.

‘We’re getting along better and better, Brand.’ I smiled at him. ‘This is just a subterfuge to pull Aren’s teeth before she bites you.’

‘I think you’re exaggerating the danger, Pol, but I’ll be guided by you in this matter.’

‘An’ aren’t y’ the dearest boy-o in th’ whole wide world t’ say so?’

‘I’m sorry, Pol, but I don’t understand why you’re speaking so oddly.’

‘It’s a long story, Brand – a
very
long story. Someday when we have lots of time, I’ll tell it to you.’

After father and I’d bullied the Alorn kings into moving their headquarters to Tol Honeth, he and I went to the Stronghold to have a look at the defenses.

There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me when we reached the Stronghold. My recent meetings with Gods had filled me with the sense of Destiny and Purpose that implies order. It does not, however, take pure accident into account. Garel, heir to Iron-grip’s throne, had ridden out with some Algar friends to scout the surrounding grasslands for advance parties of the approaching invaders. Garel’s horse had stumbled, and Garel had been thrown from his saddle. Everyone who rides a horse falls off now and then. It’s embarrassing, but usually nothing more. This time, however, Garel landed wrong, and the fall broke his neck, killing him instantly.

His wife, Aravina, was nearly mad with grief, and her mother-in-law, Adana, seemed to be at her wits’ end trying to deal with that. My approach was somewhat simpler. I drugged Aravina into near insensibility and kept her that way. My primary concern – as always – was the little boy, Gelane. I’ve had a lot of practice comforting little boys over the centuries, so I knew what had to be done. Someday, perhaps, I’ll discover a way to deal with my own sorrow.

Torak’s army was approaching the Stronghold, however, so I didn’t really have the leisure to grieve. Gelane was almost six years old now, but that really isn’t very old. The current situation, however, dictated a break in tradition. I sat Gelane down and told him just exactly who he really was.

The childhood and early adolescence of an orphaned heir has always been the most dangerous time in my ongoing task. I’d taken an oath to defend and protect the Rivan line, and a five- or six-year-old boy whose father has died is the sole receptacle of that blood-line. Little girls are sensible. Their period of irrationality comes later. Little boys, on the other hand, become irrational almost as soon as they learn to walk. Garion, for example, took up rafting on a pond at Faldor’s farm without bothering to learn how to swim first. If I sometimes seem a bit hysterical, you can probably lay the blame for that condition on about fourteen centuries of trying to keep little boys from killing themselves. It was in the hope of impressing Gelane with the importance of being at least a little bit careful that I told him of his heritage, stressing the fact that if he managed to get himself killed, the line would die with him. He seemed to understand, but with little boys, you never really know.

Then came that rainy evening when mother’s voice pulled my attention from the passages of the Mrin Codex that seemed to concentrate on the current situation.
‘Polgara,’
she said in an oddly gentle tone,
‘it’s time. Come up to the northern battlements. I’ll meet you there.’

I laid the scroll aside and left my room deep inside the thick walls of the Stronghold to climb the seemingly endless stairs up to the parapet atop the mountainous structure.

It was drizzling rain, and there was just enough wind blowing to make things decidedly unpleasant up there. Mother, garbed in that plain brown peasant dress, stood at the battlements looking out into the rainy night. She was actually there, and I wasn’t as yet that accustomed to her real presence.

‘I’m here, mother,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she replied, her golden eyes a mystery. ‘Just relax,
Pol. UL told me exactly what to do, so follow my lead as we do this.’

‘Of course.’ I was apprehensive, nonetheless.

‘It won’t hurt, Pol,’ she said, smiling faintly.

‘I know, but doing something for the first time always makes me just a little nervous.’

‘Look upon it as an adventure, Pol. Now, then, first we make the image of the owl, and the details have to match rather closely – down to the last feather, actually.’

It took us quite a while that first time. We were both familiar with the generic owl, but we had to reconcile a number of minute differences to form the image of an individual bird.

‘What do you think?’ mother asked after we’d dealt with several inconsistencies.

‘It looks owlish enough to me.’

‘I rather thought so myself. Now then, we have to do this simultaneously, so don’t hurry. The actual merger’s going to start before we enter the image. It begins in the instant we become fluid, or so UL tells me, and the merger’s almost complete
before
we go into the bird-shape.’

‘I think I see why, yes.’

‘This won’t be easy for you, Pol. I’ve been inside your mind often enough to be very familiar with you, but you’ll be encountering things you haven’t experienced before. I wasn’t born human, so there’s a lot of wolf left in me. I have a few instincts you probably won’t like.’

I smiled faintly. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘All right, then. Let’s begin.’

I can’t really describe it, so I won’t even try. There’s a moment during the process of changing form that I hadn’t really paid much attention to. It’s that very brief instant when your entire being is in transition from your own form to that other one. Mother’s use of the term ‘fluid’ is really quite precise. In a sense, you’re melting down so that you can flow from one form to the other. It was at that point that mother and I merged, and it was our combined awareness that flowed into our owl.

Mother’s suggestion that I might find her a bit strange was a serious understatement, but I think she overlooked
the fact that even though I’d never adopted the form of a wolf, I was, nonetheless, hereditarily part wolf myself at the deepest levels of my being.

I rather suspect that merging was easier for me than it’d been for mother. I still remembered that time before Beldaran and I’d been born, so close proximity – even union – was not totally alien to me. On second thoughts, though, mother had probably been born as one of a litter, so she’d been through that herself.

An idle thought came to me even as mother and I flowed into the owl, and the answer, naturally, was right there. I
did,
as a matter of fact, have aunts and uncles I’d never known, and now I
did
know them – and love them – even as mother had when they were all playful puppies.

We preened our feathers almost absently as we grew accustomed to our union, and then, our thoughts unified, we rose on snowy wings into the rain-swept darkness.

We flew out toward the north, and we soon saw the smouldering campfires of the Angarak army which had settled for the night not three leagues from the Stronghold. We continued on to the center of that huge encampment, and there we spied the iron pavilion of the Dragon-God. Silently we settled on the ornamental battlements. Of course, everything about the pavilion was ornamental. The whole thing was no more than a decoration stacked atop a very large wagon. Torak’s ego was even more grotesquely expanded than we’d imagined.

We peered around with our large, golden eyes, and we spied an embrasured window near the top of one of the towers, and we found that detail not only amusing but convenient. A few wing beats lifted us to that embrasure, and our clawed feet caught its lower edge. Then we wormed our way inside, enclosing ourselves as we did so – enclosing so completely that we were turned all inward. It was that inward turning, of course, that made us invisible and permitted no stray thought to escape to warn Torak of our presence.

‘I am ill at ease, Zedar.’ The voice was hollow, echoing, and we immediately saw why. Torak lounged on his iron throne almost in a posture of repose, but his maimed face
was still enclosed in that polished steel mask. The mask that hid his maiming had become a part of him.

‘It is always thus before a battle, Master,’ Zedar replied. ‘I share thy disquiet.’

‘Can the reports we have received of the nature of this Algar fortress indeed be true?’ Torak asked in his harsh, hollow voice.

‘The Alorns are a stupid people, Master,’ Zedar sneered. ‘Set any empty, meaningless task before them and they will mindlessly pursue it for generations. Like ants, the Algars have been piling rocks atop that absurd heap of stone for eons now.’

‘It is an inconvenience, nothing more, Zedar. I will brush it aside and continue on toward my goal. Aldur’s Orb
will
be mine again, and with it yet another prize.’

‘Oh?’

‘Long have I considered this, Zedar, and now is my mind set upon a goal. I
will
have lordship and dominion over all this world and a jewel will ornament my crown.’

‘Aldur’s Orb, Master?’ Zedar guessed.

‘Cthrag Yaska – my brother’s Orb – is no ornament, Zedar. It is but a means to an end. Truly I tell thee, Zedar, I do hate that accursed jewel for what it hath done unto me. The jewel of which I spake is more fair. I will be the king of all the world, and it is fitting that a king should have a queen. Already have I chosen she who shall share my throne.’ Then he laughed a hideous laugh. ‘She is not fond of me, but, truly, I shall much enjoy bending her to my will. She
will
obey me – nay, even worship me.’

‘And who is this fortunate woman who will be thy queen, Master?’

‘Think, Zedar. Truly, it was thine own clever deception of my brother’s handmaiden, Salmissra, which set me upon my present course.’ He sighed. ‘My brothers have cast me out, so now must I father a new race of Gods to assist me in my domination of the world. Who of all the women of this world is fit to share my throne – and my bed?’