His blue eyes didn’t seem to be all that old, however.
“Got yourself in trouble, didn’t you?” he observed as he came trudging
through the driving snow.
“Didn’t you smell this storm coming?”
I shrugged.
“We thought we could outrun it.”
“Not much chance of that up in these mountains. Which way were you
bound?”
“Toward Drasnia.”
“You’ll never make it. You started out too late. I expect you’ll have
to winter up here.”
“That’s impossible,” Pol told him.
“I know these mountains, girl. This is just about as far as you’re
going to get until spring.” He squinted at us, then he sighed.
“I guess there’s no help for it. You’d better come with me.” He
didn’t sound too happy about it.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“I’m wintering in a cave about a mile from here. It’s not much of a
cave, but it’s better than this lean-to you’ve got here. I guess I can
put up with a little company for one winter. At least it’ll give me
somebody to talk to. My donkey listens pretty good, but he don’t
answer very often when I say something to him.”
I’m sure that Garion and Silk remember that old fellow. We ran across
him in those same mountains years later while we were on our way to
Cthol Mishrak.
He never did tell us what his name was. I’m sure that he’d had a name
at some time, but it’s entirely possible that he’d forgotten it. He
talked a great deal during that seemingly endless winter, but there was
very little in the way of information in what he said. I gathered that
he’d spent his life looking for gold up in these mountains, but I got
the impression that he didn’t really look that hard for it. He just
liked being in the mountains.
I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody who could see as much in a single
glance as that old man did. He’d realized almost as soon as he saw us
that Pol and I weren’t ordinary people, but if he had any opinions
about that, he kept them to himself.
I liked him, and I think Polgara did, too. She didn’t like the fact
that he kept his donkey and our horses in the cave with us, though.
They talked about that quite a bit that winter, as I recall.
As he’d predicted, the blizzards kept rolling in out of Morindland, and
the snowdrifts just kept growing. He and I hunted, of course, and I
grew more than a little tired of a steady diet of venison. Pol had
taken over the cooking, but even Pol began to run out of recipes before
winter was over.
I didn’t say anything about it, but despite Pol’s aversion to the
little beast, the old man’s donkey grew very fond of her, and he showed
his affection by butting at her with his head, usually when she wasn’t
expecting it. Maybe he thought it was funny to surprise her.
Then, after it seemed that the winter would last forever, our host went
to the mouth of the cave one morning and sniffed at the air.
“It’s just about over,” he told us.
“We’ll get a warm wind out of Drasnia before the day’s out, and it’ll
cut off all this snow before you know it. The river’ll run bank-full
for a few days, but it’ll be safe to travel by the end of the week.
I’ve enjoyed your company, you two, but it’s coming on time for us to
go our separate ways.”
“Which way will you go after the weather clears?” Pol asked him.
He scratched at his head.
“Haven’t decided yet,” he replied.
“South maybe, or maybe back up toward Morindland. Maybe I’ll just see
which way the wind’s blowing when the time comes to start out–or maybe
I’ll just let the donkey decide. It don’t really matter none to me–as
long as we stay in the mountains.”
His prediction about the change in the weather turned out to be very
accurate, and about at the end of that week, Pol and I said good-bye
and set out again. There were still snow banks back under the trees,
but the trails were mostly clear. We reached the Drasnian border in
about four days, and a week later we reached Boktor.
The pestilence I mentioned earlier had run its course in western
Drasnia, but among its victims were Rhodar’s father and Silk’s
mother.
The king died, but Silk’s mother didn’t. The disease had disfigured
her horribly, but it also had taken her sight, so she couldn’t look
into a mirror to see her ruined face. Silk and his father could;
neither of them ever mentioned it to her, though.
Pol and I stayed in Boktor to attend Rhodar’s coronation, and then I
bought a boat so that we could go on down the Mrin River and through
the fens. I don’t really like the fens, but the Great North Road had
too many travelers on it at this time of year for my comfort.
Winters can be miserable, but there are times when spring’s even
worse–particularly in the fens. It started raining on the day when
Pol and I set out from Boktor, and it rained steadily for at least a
week. I started to wonder if there might have been another eclipse to
disturb the weather patterns.
At one time or another, most of you probably have gone through the
fens, since you almost have to if you want to get to Boktor from the
west.
For those of you who haven’t, though, all you really need to know about
them is the fact that it’s all one vast marsh lying between the Mrin
and Aldur rivers. It’s filled with rushes, cattails, and stringy
willow trees that trail their limbs in the water. The two rivers that
feed it insure that the water’s not stagnant, but their currents are so
slow that it comes fairly close. The customary way to get a boat
through the fens is to pole it along.
Rowing doesn’t really work very well, since many of those channels are
too narrow to give oars much play. I don’t like poling boats, but in
the fens there isn’t much choice.
“I think we should have booked passage on some merchantman in Boktor,”
I said moodily one rainy morning.
“We could be halfway to Darine by now.”
“Well, it’s too late to turn back now, father,” Pol said.
“Just keep poling.”
We began to see fen lings–quite a few of them–and then, to my
absolute amazement, we came around a bend in the channel we were
following and there was a house!
Actually, it was more in the nature of a cottage built of weathered
logs and surmounted by a thatched roof. It stood in the middle of a
grove of sad-looking willows on a small island that rose in a gentle
slope out of the surrounding water.
As I poled the boat closer, one of the fen lings we’d noticed swam on
ahead, climbed up on the muddy bank of that little island, and loped
like an otter up to the door of the cottage, chittering urgently.
Then the door opened, and a woman stood there looking gravely out at us
through the drizzling rain.
“Welcome to the house of Vordai,” she said to my daughter and me, but
there wasn’t much welcome in her tone of voice.
“I’m a little surprised to see anyone living in a place like this,” I
called to her.
“There are reasons,” she replied.
“You might as well come inside–at least until the rain lets up.”
I’ve had more gracious invitations in my time, but something seemed to
come together in my head, and it told me that I was supposed to accept
this one, no matter how ungracious it was.
I poled our boat up to the island, and Pol and I stepped out on the
shore.
“So you’re Vordai,” Polgara said to the woman at the cottage door.
“And you would be Polgara,” the woman replied.
“I seem to be missing something here,” I told them.
“We know each other by reputation, father,” Pol told me.
“Vordai’s the one they call the Witch of the Fens. She’s an outcast,
and this is the only place in all of Drasnia that’s safe for her.”
“Probably because the firewood here is too wet to make burning people
at the stake practical,” the owner of the cottage added with a certain
bitterness.
“Come in out of the rain, both of you.” The Witch of the Fens was a
very old woman, but there were still traces of what must have been a
luminous beauty in her face–marred, I’ll admit, by the bitter twist to
her lips. Life hadn’t been good to Vordai the witch.
No one who’s spent any time in Drasnia hasn’t heard of the Witch of the
Fens, but I’d always assumed that the stories I’d heard were no more