offended her.
“Are you calling me stupid?” she demanded in that rich voice of hers,
and things went rapidly downhill from there. To this day I don’t know
why it made her so angry.
Anyway, I went to bed in a foul temper, and I slept fitfully.
“Belgarath, my son,” I knew the voice, of course.
“Yes, Master?”
“I would have thine house joined with the house of the guardian of the
Orb.”
“Is it a Necessity, Master?”
“Yea, my beloved disciple. This, however, is the gravest task I have
ever called upon thee to perform. From the joining of thine house with
the house of the Rivan King shall descend the ultimate Child of
Light.
Choose, therefore, which of thy daughters thou shalt give to the Rivan
King to be his wife, for in the joining of the two houses shall a line
invincible be forged that shall join my Will with the Will of my
brother, Belar, and Torak himself may not prevail against us.”
I was tempted. Lord knows I was tempted, but I already knew who was
going to be Riva’s wife. He’d described her to me in great detail on
that day when we’d forged his sword, and she did not have dark hair.
Beldaran was ecstatic when I told her of my decision.
“A king?” she exclaimed.
“Well, technically, I guess. I don’t know that Riva thinks of himself
that way, though. He’s not very interested in ceremony or show.”
“What does he look like?”
I shrugged.
“Tall, dark hair, blue eyes.” I went over to the washstand and filled
the basin with water.
“Here,” I said to her.
“I’ll show you.” And I put the image of Riva’s face on the surface of
the water.
“He’s gorgeous?” she squealed. Then her eyes narrowed slightly.
“Does he have to wear that beard?”
“He’s an Alorn, Beldaran. Most Alorn men wear beards.”
“Maybe I can talk to him about that.”
Polgara’s reaction was a bit peculiar.
“Why did you choose Beldaran?” she asked.
“Actually I didn’t,” I replied.
“Riva did–or he had the choice made for him. He’s been dreaming about
her ever since he landed on the Isle of the Winds. It was probably
Belar who put Beldaran’s face in Riva’s dreams. Belar’s partial to
blonde girls.”
“This is ridiculous, father. You’re going to marry my sister off to a
complete stranger.”
“They’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”
“How old is this Alorn?”
“Oh, I don’t know–probably in his late thirties.”
“You’re going to marry Beldaran to an old man?”
“I’d hardly call thirty-five or forty old, Pol.”
“Naturally you wouldn’t, since you’re thirty-five or forty thousand
yourself.”
“No. Four, actually.”
“What?”
“I’m four thousand, Pol, not forty thousand. Don’t make it any worse
than it already is.”
“When is this absurdity going to take place?”
“We have to go to the Isle of the Winds first. It shouldn’t be too
long after that. Alorns don’t believe in long engagements.”
She stormed out of the tower muttering curses.
“I’d sort of hoped she’d be happy for me.” Beldaran sighed.
“She’ll come around, dear.” I tried to sound hopeful about it, but I
had some fairly serious doubts. Once Polgara got something in her
mind, it was very hard to get her to turn around.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Things might have gone a little better if we’d been able to start out
immediately, but it was still winter, and I had no intention of
dragging my daughters out in bad weather. Beldaran put the time to
good use sewing on her wedding gown. Polgara, however, took up
residence in the tree again, and she steadfastly refused even to talk
to us.
It was about a month after I’d made the decision when Riva’s cousin
Anrak showed up in the Vale with another Alorn.
“Ho, Belgarath!” the boisterous Anrak greeted me.
“Why are you still here?”
“Because it’s still winter.”
“Oh, it’s not all that bad. Riva’s getting impatient to meet the girl
he’s going to marry.”
“How did he find out about it?”
“He had another one of those dreams.”
“Oh. Who’s your friend?”
“His name’s Gelheim. He’s a sort of an artist. Riva wants a picture
of his bride.”
“He knows what she looks like. He’s been dreaming about her for the
last fifteen years.”
Anrak shrugged.
“He just wants to be sure you’ve picked the right one, I guess.”
“I don’t think Belar and Aldur would have let me make a mistake, do
you?”
“You never know. Sometimes the Gods are a little strange. Have you
got anything to drink?”
“I’ll introduce you to the twins. They make fairly good beer. They’re
Alorns, so they know how it’s done.”
Beldaran and Anrak hit it off immediately, but Polgara was a different
matter. It started out innocently enough one morning when Anrak came
by just after breakfast.
“I thought you had two daughters,” Riva’s cousin said to me.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Polgara’s a little unhappy with me right now; she’s living in a
tree.”
“It doesn’t sound to me as if she’s quite right in the head. Does she
look like her sister?”
“Not too much, no.”
“I thought they were twins.”
“That doesn’t always mean that they look alike.”
“Where’s this tree of hers?”
“Down in the center of the Vale.”
“I think I’ll go down and have a look at her. If Riva’s going to get
married, maybe I should, too.”
Beldaran giggled.
“What’s so funny, Pretty?” he asked her. It was his favorite nickname
for her.
“I don’t think my sister’s the marrying kind, Anrak. You can suggest
it to her, if you’d like, but leave yourself plenty of running room
when you do.”
“Oh, she can’t be that bad.”
Beldaran concealed a smirk and give him directions to the tree.
His eyes still looked a bit startled when he came back to the tower.
“Unfriendly, isn’t she?” he noted mildly.
“Is she always that dirty?”
“My sister doesn’t believe in bathing,” Beldaran replied.
“She doesn’t particularly believe in good manners, either. I could
probably clean her up, but that mouth of hers might cause some
problems.
I’m not even sure what some of those words mean.”
“What did you say to her to set her off?” Beldaran asked him.
“I was honest,” Anrak replied with a shrug.
“I told her that Riva and I usually did things together, and that as
long as he was going to get married, I might as well, too–and since
she wasn’t attached . . .” He scratched at his beard.
“That’s about as far as I got, actually.” He looked slightly
injured.
“I’m not used to having people laugh at me. It was a perfectly
honorable suggestion. It wasn’t as if I’d made an improper proposal.”
He went across the room to look into Beldaran’s mirror.
“Is there something the matter with my beard?” he asked.
“It looks all right to me.”
“Polgara’s not particularly partial to beards, Anrak,” I explained.
“She didn’t have to be so insulting though, did she? Do I really look
like a rat hiding in a clump of bushes?”
“Polgara exaggerates sometimes,” Beldaran told him.
“She takes a little getting used to.”
“I don’t think it’d work out,” he decided.
“I’m not trying to insult you, Belgarath, but you left a lot of the
bark on that one when you were raising her. If I decide that I really
want to get married, I think I’ll choose a nice Alorn girl. Sorcerese
girls are a little too complicated for me.”
“Sorcerese?”
“Isn’t that what your race is called?”
“It’s a profession, Anrak, not a race.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Gelheim drew several pictures of Beldaran, and then he left.
“Tell Riva that we’ll be along in the spring,” Anrak told him.
Gelheim nodded, then started out through the dreary tag end of winter.
He was almost as close-mouthed as Algar was.
Anrak spent much of his time at the twins’ tower, but he came by one
day to tell me about Riva’s progress on the hall he was building at the
upper end of the city.
“Actually, it’s a little showy for my taste,” he said somewhat
critically.
“Not that it’s got all that many frills or anything, but it’s awfully
big. I didn’t think Riva was that full of himself.”
“He’s following instructions,” I explained.
“The Hall of the Rivan King is there to protect the Orb, not the people
who live inside. We definitely don’t want Torak to get his hands on it
again.”
“There isn’t much danger of that, Belgarath. He’d have to get past
Dras and Algar first, and Bear-shoulders has a fleet of war boats
patrolling the Sea of the Winds. One-eye might start out with a big
army, but there wouldn’t be very many of them left by the time they
reached the Isle.”
“It doesn’t hurt to take a few extra precautions.”
The weather finally broke about a month later, and we started making