watching me with that silly tongue of hers lolling out. Being laughed
at is not a good way to start out the day.
“You smell bad,” she noted.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“I’m not feeling well this morning.”
“Remarkable. You felt very well last night.”
“That was then. This is now.”
“One is curious to know why you do this to yourself. You know that you
will be unwell in the morning.”
“It is a custom.” I had found over the years that shrugging things off
as “a custom” was the best approach with her.
“Oh. I see. Well, if it is a custom, I suppose it is all right. You
are older today, you know.”
“I feel much, much older today.”
“You were whelped on this day a long time ago.”
“Is it my birthday again? Already? Where does the time go?”
“Behind us–or in front. It depends on which way you are looking.”
Can you believe the complexity of that thought coming from a wolf?
“You have been with me for quite some time now.”
“What is time to a wolf? One day is much like another, is it not?”
“As I recall it, we first met on the grasslands to the north before the
world was broken.”
“It was about then, yes.”
I made a few quick mental calculations.
“A thousand or so of my birthdays have passed since then.”
“So?”
“Do wolves normally live so long?”
“You are a wolf–sometimes–and you have lived this long.”
“That is different. You are a very unusual wolf.”
“Thank you. One had thought that you might not have noticed that.”
“This is really amazing. I cannot believe that a wolf would live so
long.”
“Wolves live as long as they choose to live.” She sniffed.
“One would be more content with you if you would do something about
your smell,”
she added.
You see, Polgara, you weren’t the first to make that observation.
It was several years later when I had occasion to change my form for
some reason that I’ve long since forgotten. I can’t even remember what
form I took, but I do remember that it was early summer, and the sun
was streaming golden through the open window of my tower, bathing all
the clutter of half-forgotten experiments and the heaps of books and
scrolls piled against the walls in the pellucid light of that
particular season. I’d thought that the wolf was asleep when I did it,
but I probably should have known better. Nothing I did ever slipped
past her.
She sat up with those golden eyes of hers glowing in the sunlight.
“So that’s how you do it,” she said to me.
“What a simple thing.”
And she promptly turned herself into a snowy white owl.
CHAPTER NINE
I knew little peace after that. I never knew when I turned around what
might be staring at me–wolf or owl, bear or butterfly. She seemed to
take great delight in startling me, but as time wore on more and more
she appeared to me in the shape of an owl.
“What is this thing about owls?” I growled one day.
“I like owls,” she explained, as if it were the simplest thing in the
world.
“During my first winter, when I was a young and foolish thing, I was
chasing a rabbit, floundering around in the snow like a puppy, and a
great white owl swooped down and snatched my rabbit almost out of my
jaws. She carried it to a nearby tree and ate it, dropping the scraps
to me.
I thought at the time that it would be a fine thing to be an owl.”
“Foolishness.” I snorted.
“Perhaps,” she replied blandly, preening her tail feathers, “but it
amuses me. It may be that one day a different shape will amuse me even
more.”
Those of you who know my daughter will see how she came by her affinity
for that particular shape. Neither Polgara nor my wife will tell me
how they communicated with each other during those terrible years when
I thought I’d lost Poledra forever, but they obviously did, and
Poledra’s fondness for owls quite obviously rubbed off. But I’m
getting ahead of myself here.
Things went along quietly in the Vale for the next several centuries.
We’d set most of the things in motion that needed to be ready for us
later, and now we were just marking time.
As I’d been almost sure that it would, Tol Nedrane had burned to the
ground, and my badgering of that patriarch of the Honethite family
finally paid off. One of his descendants, a minor public official at
the time, had that affinity for masonry I’d so carefully bred into his
family, and after he’d surveyed the ashes of the city, he persuaded the
other city fathers that stone doesn’t burn quite as fast as logs and
thatch. It’s heavier than wood, though, so before they could start
erecting stone buildings, they had to fill in the marshy places on the
island in the Nedrane. Over the shrill objections of the ferrymen,
they built a couple of bridges, one to the south bank of the Nedrane
and the other to the north one.
After they’d filled the swamps with rubble, they got down to business.
To be quite honest about it, we didn’t care if the citizens of Tol
Honeth lived in stone houses or in paper shacks. It was the work gangs
that were important. They provided the basis for the legions, and we
were going to need those legions later. Building stone is too heavy
for one man to carry –unless he has the sort of advantages my brothers
and I have. The standard work gang of ten men ultimately became the
elemental squad.
When they had to move larger stones, they’d combine into ten gangs of
ten–the typical company. And when they had to install those huge
foundation blocks, they’d gather up a hundred gangs of ten–a legion,
obviously.
They had to learn how to cooperate with each other to get the job done,
and they learned to take orders from their overseers. I’m sure you get
the picture. My Honethite became the general foreman of the whole
operation. I’m still sort of proud of him–even though he was a
Honeth. Tol nedra at that time was not nearly as civilized as it is
now–if you can call Ce’Nedra civilized. There are always people in
any society who’d rather take what they want from others instead of
working for it, and Tolnedra was no exception. There were bands of
marauding brigands out in the countryside, and when one of those bands
attempted to cross the south bridge in order to loot Tol Nedrane, my
stonemason ordered his work gangs to drop their tools and take up their
weapons. The rest, as they say, is history. My protege immediately
realized what he’d created, and the dream of empire was born.
After the Honethite stonemason had extended his control of the
surrounding countryside for about twenty leagues in all directions, he
changed the name of his native city to Tol Honeth and dubbed himself
Ran Honeth I, Emperor of all Tolnedra–a slightly grandiose title for a
man whose “empire” was only about four hundred square leagues, I’ll
grant you, but it was a start. I felt rather smug about the way it all
turned out.
I didn’t have time to sit around congratulating myself, though, because
it was about then that the Arendish civil wars broke out. I’d invested
a lot of effort in Arendia, and I didn’t want those families I’d
founded getting wiped out in the course of the festivities. The three
major cities in Arendia, Vo Mimbre, Vo Wacune, and Vo Astur, had been
established fairly early on, and each city, along with its surrounding
territory, was ruled by a duke. I’m not certain that the idea of a
single king would have occurred to the Arends if the example of the
First Honethite Dynasty hadn’t existed to the South. It wasn’t until
much later, however, that the duke of Vo Astur formalized the internal
conflict by proclaiming himself king of Arendia.
The informal civil war was trouble enough, though. I’d established
families in each of the three duchies, and my major concern at the time
was keeping them from encountering each other on the battlefield. If
Mandorallen’s ancestor had killed Leildorin’s, for example, I’d never
have been able to make peace between the two of them.
To add to the confusion in Arendia, herds of Hrulgin and packs of
Algroths periodically made forays into eastern Arendia to look for
something–somebody–to eat. The Ulgos were down in the caves, so the
favorite food of those monsters was in short supply in their home
range.
I saw this at firsthand once when I was supposedly guiding the baron of
Vo Mandor, Mandorallen’s ancestor, toward a battlefield. I didn’t want
him to reach that field, so I was taking him the long way around. We