Polgara the Sorceress (86 page)

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.

Another 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 town, 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.

Winter came early that year. The first heavy snowfall swept across the mountains before the aspen trees had even finished shedding their leaves, and that combination always makes for a very cluttered forest. When a thick, wet snow piles up on unshed leaves, its weight breaks branches, and it’s very difficult to wade your way through the resulting brush-pile. After Alara had escaped me a few times, I gave
some thought to throwing caution to the winds and conducting my searches for her from the air. I firmly set that idea aside, however. There was no point in announcing my location to Chamdar just to keep my feet dry.

I’m sure the irony of that didn’t escape you. In essence, I was trying to hide from somebody who already knew exactly where I was. Chamdar was playing me like a lute. Every time I think of it, my blood starts to boil. If I knew how to do it, I’d resurrect him so that Garion could set fire to him again.

Then about sunset on Erastide eve, Ildera went into false labor. I’m certain now that Chamdar arranged that as well. A village lady brought Geran’s urgent summons to me, and I quickly looked in on Alara. She appeared to be sound asleep, so I carefully reached into her dozing mind and reinforced that sleep. Then I gathered up my instruments and went on down to the other end of town to deliver the newest member of my family.

Ildera’s false labor continued for several hours, and then her contractions and labor pains diminished.

‘What’s wrong, Aunt Pol?’ Geran demanded, his voice a little shrill.

‘Nothing’s wrong, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘This happens all the time. Ildera’s just not quite ready yet, that’s all.’

‘You mean she’s
practicing?’

I’d never heard it put quite that way before, and it struck me as enormously funny.

Geran was a bit offended by my laughter, however.

‘She’s just fine, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘This is what midwives call “false labor”. It happens so often that there’s even a name for it. The real thing will come along in the next day or so. She’ll sleep now, and you might as well do the same thing. Nothing’s going to happen for a while.’

Then I closed up my bag and trudged back up through the snow to my own house.

And Alara wasn’t there when I returned.

I should have realized at that point that Chamdar had
broken my grip on Alara’s mind.
Nobody
wakes up after I tell him to sleep until I’m ready for him to wake up.