Polgara the Sorceress (7 page)

I forget exactly what they were talking about – Ctuchik, maybe, or perhaps it was Zedar – but uncle Beldin rather casually asked my father, ‘What do
you
think, Belgarath? You’re first disciple, after all, so you know the Master’s mind better than we do.’

Father grunted sourly. ‘And if it turns out that I’m wrong, you’ll throw it in my teeth, won’t you?’

‘Naturally.’ Beldin grinned at him. ‘That’s one of the joys of being a subordinate, isn’t it?’

‘I hate you,’ Father said.

‘No you don’t, Belgarath,’ Beldin said, his grin growing even broader. ‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard
that
particular exchange between those two. They always seem to think it’s hilarious for some reason.

The following morning I went on down to my Tree to ponder this peculiar behavior on the part of my uncles. Evidently father had done some fairly spectacular things in the dim past.
My
feelings about him were uncomplimentary, to say the very least. In my eyes he was lazy, more than a bit silly, and highly unreliable. I dimly began to realize that my father is a very complex being. On the one hand, he’s a liar, a thief, a lecher, and a drunkard. On the other, however, he’s Aldur’s first disciple, and he can quite possibly stop the sun in its orbit if he wants to. I’d been
deliberately seeing only his foolish side because of my jealousy. Now I had to come to grips with the other side of him, and I deeply resented the shattering of my illusions about him.

I began to watch him more closely after I returned home that day, hoping that I could find some hints about his duality – and even more fervently hoping that I could not. Losing the basis for one’s prejudices is always very painful. All I really saw, though, was a rather seedy-looking old man intently studying a parchment scroll.

‘Don’t do that, Polgara,’ he said, not even bothering to look up from his scroll.

‘Do what?’

‘Stare at me like that.’

‘How did you know I was staring?’

‘I could feel it, Pol. Now stop.’

That shook my certainty about him more than I cared to admit. Evidently Beldin and the twins were right. There were a number of very unusual things about my father. I decided I’d better have a talk with mother about this.

‘
He’s a wolf, Pol
,’ mother told me, ‘
and wolves play. You take life far too seriously, and his playing irritates you. He can be very serious when it’s necessary, but when it’s not, he plays. It’s the way of wolves
.’

‘
But he demeans himself so much with all that foolishness
.’

‘
Doesn’t your particular foolishness demean you? You’re far too somber, Pol. Learn how to smile and to have some fun once in a while
.’

‘
Life is serious, mother
.’

‘
I know, but it’s also supposed to be fun. Learn how to enjoy life from your father, Polgara. There’ll be plenty of time to weep, but you have to laugh as well
.’

Mother’s tolerance troubled me a great deal, and I found her observations about
my
nature even more troubling.

I’ve had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I’ve discovered that as a group these awkward half-children take themselves far too seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose it’s a form of play-acting. The adolescent
knows
that the child is lurking just under the surface, but he’d
sooner die than let it out, and I was no different. I was so intent on being ‘grown-up’ that I simply couldn’t relax and enjoy life.

Most people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold.

Enough. I’m not going to turn this into a treatise on the ins and outs of human development. Until a person learns to laugh at himself, though, his life will be a tragedy – at least that’s the way
he’ll
see it.

The seasons continued their stately march, and the little lecture mother had delivered to me lessened my
interior
antagonism toward father. I
did
maintain my exterior facade, however. I certainly didn’t want the old fool to start thinking I’d gone soft on him.

And then, shortly after my sister and I turned sixteen, the Master paid my father a call and gave him some rather specific instructions. One of us – either Beldaran or myself – was to become the wife of Iron-grip and hence the Rivan Queen. Father, with rather uncharacteristic wisdom, chose to keep the visit to himself. Although I certainly had no particular interest in marrying at that stage of my life, my enthusiasm for competition might have led me into all sorts of foolishness.

My father quite candidly admits that he was sorely tempted to get rid of me by the simple expedient of marrying me off to poor Riva. The Purpose – Destiny, if you wish – which guides us all prevented that, however. Beldaran had been preparing for her marriage to Iron-grip since before she was born. Quite obviously, I hadn’t been.

I resented my rejection, though. Isn’t that idiotic? I’d been involved in a competition for a prize I didn’t want, but when I lost the competition, I felt the sting of losing quite profoundly. I didn’t even speak to my father for several weeks, and I was even terribly snippy with my sister.

Then Anrak came down into the Vale to fetch us. With the exception of an occasional Ulgo and a few messengers
from King Algar, Anrak was perhaps the first outsider I’d ever met and certainly the first whoever showed any interest in me. I rather liked him, actually. Of course he
did
propose marriage to me, and a girl always has a soft spot in her heart for the young man who asks her for the first time. Anrak was an Alorn, with all that implies. He was big, burly, and bearded, and there was good-humored simplicity about him that I rather liked. I
didn’t
like the way he always reeked of beer, however.

I was busy sulking in my Tree when he arrived, so we didn’t even have time to get acquainted before he proposed. He came swaggering down the Vale one beautiful morning in early spring. My birds alerted me to his approach, so he didn’t really surprise me when he came in under the branches of my Tree.

‘Hello, up there,’ he called to me.

I looked down from my perch at him. ‘What do you want?’ It wasn’t really a very gracious greeting.

‘I’m Anrak – Riva’s cousin – and I came here to escort your sister to the Isle so Riva can marry her.’

That immediately put him in the camp of the enemy. ‘Go away,’ I told him bluntly.

There’s something I need to ask you first.’

‘What?’

‘Well, like I said, I’m Riva’s cousin, and he and I usually do things together. We got drunk together for the first time, and visited a brothel together for the first time, and even both killed our first man in the same battle, so as you can see, we’re fairly close.’

‘So?’

‘Well, Riva’s going to marry your sister, and I thought it might be sort of nice if I got married, too. What do you say?’

‘Are you proposing marriage to me?’

‘I thought I said that. This is the first time I’ve ever proposed to anybody, so I probably didn’t do a very good job. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re insane. We don’t even know each other.’

‘There’ll be plenty of time for us to get to know each other after the ceremony. Well, yes or no?’

You couldn’t fault Anrak’s directness. Here was a man who got right down to the point. I laughed at him, and he looked just a bit injured by that. ‘What’s so funny?’ he demanded in a hurt tone of voice.

‘You are. Do you actually think I’d marry a complete stranger? One who looks like a rat hiding in a clump of bushes?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’ve got hair growing all over your face.’

‘That’s my beard. All Alorns wear beards.’

‘Could that possibly be because Alorns haven’t invented the razor yet? Tell me, Anrak, have your people come up with the idea of the wheel yet? Have you discovered fire, by any chance?’

‘You don’t have to be insulting. Just say yes or no.’

‘All right.
No
! Was there any part of that you didn’t understand?’ Then I warmed to my subject. The whole notion is absurd,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know you, and I don’t like you. I don’t know your cousin, and I don’t like him either. As a matter of fact, I don’t like your entire stinking race. All the misery in my life’s been caused by Alorns. Did you
really
think I’d actually marry one? You’d better get away from me, Anrak, because if you don’t, I’ll turn you into a toad.’

‘You don’t have to get nasty. You’re no prize yourself, you know.’

I won’t repeat what I said to him then – this document might just fall into the hands of children. I spoke at some length about his parents, his extended family, his race, his ancestors and probable descendants. I drew rather heavily on uncle Beldin’s vocabulary in the process, and Anrak frequently looked startled at the extent of my command of the more colorful side of language.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if that’s the way you feel about it, there’s not much point in our continuing this conversation, is there?’ And then he rather huffily turned and strode back up the Vale, muttering to himself.

Poor Anrak. I was feeling a towering resentment over the fact that some unknown Alorn was going to take my sister away from me, and so he had the privilege of
receiving the full weight of my displeasure. Moreover, mother’d strongly advised me to steer clear of any lasting entanglements at this stage of my life. Adolescent girls have glandular problems that sometimes lead them to make serious mistakes.

Why don’t we just let it go at that?

I had absolutely no intention of going to the Isle of the Winds to witness this obscene ceremony. If Beldaran wanted to marry this Alorn butcher, she was going to have to do it without my blessing – or my presence.

When they were ready to leave, however, my sister came down to my Tree and ‘persuaded’ me to change my mind. Despite that sweet exterior that deceived everyone else, my sister Beldaran could be absolutely ruthless when she wanted something. She knew me better than anyone else in the world did – or could – so she knew exactly where all my soft spots were. To begin with, she spoke to me exclusively in ‘twin’, a language I’d almost forgotten. There were subtleties in ‘twin’ – mostly of Beldaran’s devising – that no linguist, even the most gifted, could ever unravel, and most of them stressed her dominant position. Beldaran was accustomed to giving me orders, and I was accustomed to obeying. Her ‘persuasion’ in this situation was, to put it honestly, brutal. She reminded me of every time in our lives when we’d been particularly close, and she cast those reminders in a past tense peculiar to our private tongue that would more or less translate into ‘never again’, or ‘over and done with’. She had me in tears within five minutes and in utter anguish within ten. ‘Stop!’ I cried out finally, unable to bear the implicit threat of a permanent severing of all contact any longer.

‘You’ll come with me then?’ she asked, reverting to ordinary speech.

‘Yes! Yes! Yes! But please stop!’

‘I’m so happy about your decision, Pol,’ she said, embracing me warmly. Then she actually apologized for what she’d just done to me. Why not? She’d just won, so she could afford to be graceful about the whole thing.

I was beaten, and I knew it. I wasn’t even particularly surprised to discover when Beldaran and I returned to father’s tower that she’d already packed for me. She’d known all along just how things would turn out.

We set out the next morning. It took us several weeks to reach Muros, since we traveled on foot.

Beldaran and I were both uneasy in Muros, since we’d never really been around that many people before. Although I’ve changed my position a great deal since then, at first I found Sendars to be a noisy people, and they seemed to me to have a positive obsession with buying and selling that was almost laughable.

Anrak left us at Muros to go on ahead to advise Riva that we were coming. We hired a carriage, and the four of us, father, uncle Beldin, Beldaran and I rode the rest of the way to Camaar. Frankly, I’d have rather walked. The stubby ponies drawing the carriage didn’t really move very fast, and the wheels of the carriage seemed to find every single rock and rut in the road. Riding in carriages didn’t really become pleasant until some clever fellow came up with a way to install springs in them.

Camaar was even more crowded with people than Muros had been. We took some rooms in a Sendarian inn and settled down to wait for Riva’s arrival. I found it rather disconcerting to see buildings every time I looked out the window. Sendars appeared to have a kind of revulsion to open spaces. They always seem to want to ‘civilize’ everything.

The innkeeper’s wife, a plump, motherly little woman, seemed bent on ‘civilizing’ me as well. She kept offering me the use of the bath-house, for one thing. She rather delicately suggested that I didn’t smell very sweet.

I shrugged off her suggestions. ‘It’s a waste of time,’ I told her. ‘I’ll only get dirty again. The next time it rains, I’ll go outside. That should take the smell and the worst of the dirt off me.’

She also offered me a comb and a brush – which I also refused. I wasn’t going to let the Alorn who’d stolen my sister away from me get some idea that I was taking any pains to make myself presentable for
his
sake.

The nosey innkeeper’s wife then went so far as to suggest a visit to a dressmaker.
I
wasn’t particularly impressed by the fact that we’d shortly be entertaining a king, but
she
was.

‘What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?’ I asked her pugnaciously.

‘Different occasions require different clothing, dear,’ she replied.

‘Foolishness,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a new smock when this one wears out.’

I think she gave up at that point. I’m sure she thought I was incorrigibly ‘woodsy’, one of those unfortunates who’ve never received the benefits of civilization.