and revulsion on their faces.
‘Oh, do get up, Alreg!’ I told him. ‘You look positively ridiculous
doing that.’
He stood up, trembling violently, and stumbled back to his throne.
He fell into it, staring at me in sheer terror.
‘Now, then,’ I said sternly, ‘Sendaria’s under my protection, so
get your people out of there and bring them back here where they
belong.’
‘We’re following Belar’s commands, Polgara,’ he protested.
‘No, Alreg, you’re not. Actually, you’re following the orders of
the Bear-Cult. If you want to jump to the tune of a group of
feebleminded religious fanatics, that’s up to you, but get out of Sendaria.
You can’t even begin to imagine just how nasty things are going to
get if you don’t.’
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ a thin, bearded Cherek, his
eyes aflame with the burning light of religion, declared fervently,
‘but I’m not going to take orders from a mere woman!’
‘In point of fact, old boy, I’m not a mere anything.’
‘I am an armed Cherek!’ he almost screamed. ‘I fear nothing!’
I made a small gesture, and his gleaming mail-shirt and his
halfdrawn sword rather quickly stopped gleaming and became dull red
instead. Then they began to crumble, showering down onto the floor
in a cascade of powdery rust. ‘Don’t you find that sort of disarming?’
I suggested. ‘Now that you’re no longer an armed Cherek, aren’t
you just the teensiest bit afraid?’ Then I grew tired of all their
foolishness. ‘ENOUGH!’ I thundered. ‘Get out of Sendaria, Alreg,
or I’ll tow the Cherek peninsula out to sea and sink it. Then you
can try being the king of the fish for a while. Now call your people
home!’
It wasn’t the most diplomatic way to bring the Chereks into line,
but the smug chauvinism of Alreg’s court had irritated me. ‘Mere
Woman’ indeed! Just the sound of it still makes my blood boil!
There was one beneficial side effect to my little visit to Val alorn,
incidentally. After enduring a few months of hysterical protests from
discontented Bear-Cultists, Aireg moved decisively to suppress the
cult once again. I’ve noticed that the Bear-Cult has to be put down
every fifty years or so in the Alorn kingdoms.
In the century or so that followed, I receded further and further
back into the pages of dusty old history books, and I seldom had
occasion to visit my manor house on Lake Erat. The last of my
caretakers there died, and I saw no reason to replace him. I still
loved the house, though, and the notion of having it casually looted
and burned didn’t sit well with me, so early one spring I crossed
the Sendarian Mountains to take steps to protect it. I wandered
through the dusty rooms immersed in nostalgic melancholy. SO
much had happened here that had been central to my life. The
ghosts of Killane and Ontrose seemed to accompany me down every
dusty corridor, and the echoes of long ago conversations seemed to
still reverberate through almost every room I entered. Erat had gone
back to being Sendaria, and my duchy had shrunk down to this
single lonely house.
I considered several options, but the solution was really quite
simple, and it came to me one glorious spring evening as I stood
on the terrace of the south wing looking out at the lake and at the
veritable jungle of my untended rose-garden. What better way to
conceal and protect my house than to bury it in roses?
I set to work the following morning ‘encouraging’ my rose-bushes
to expand and encroach on the fair meadow that stretched on down
to the lake. When I was done, they were no longer bushes, but trees,
and they were so tightly interlaced that they’d become a thorny,
impenetrable barrier that would keep my beloved house forever
inviolate.
it was with a great deal of self-satisfaction that I returned to
mother’s cottage and my continuing studies. Now that I’d preserved
the past, I could turn my attention to the future.
It’s an article of my family’s faith that the future lies hidden in
the Darine and Mrin Codices, and studying the collected ravings of
a senile old Alorn warrior and a profoundly retarded idiot who’d
had to be chained up for his own protection can be very frustrating.
I kept coming across veiled references to my father and me, and
that was probably what kept me from throwing my hands up in
disgust and taking up ornithology or horticulture instead. I
gradually came to grasp the idea that there was another world
superimposed on our mundane, day to day reality, and in that other world
tiny events had enormous significance. A chance meeting between
two tradesmen on the streets of Tol Honeth or an encounter between
a pair of gold-hunters in the mountains of Car og Nadrak could be
far more important than a clash of armies. Increasingly, I came to
understand that those ‘incidents’ were EVENTS – those very brief
confrontations between the two entirely different prophecies, only
one of which would ultimately determine the fate of not merely this
World, but of the entire universe as well.
The study of something of that magnitude so totally engrossed
me that I began to ignore time, and more often than not I couldn’t
have told you what century it was, much less what year.
I do know – largely because I checked some Tolnedran history
books later – that in the year 3761 the last emperor of the second
Borune Dynasty chose his successor rather than leaving the choice
uP to the infinitely corruptible Council of Advisors. That childless
Borune emperor, Ran Borune XII, was obviously a man of great
foresight, because his decision brought the Horbite family to the
imperial throne, and the Horbites – at least at that particular time
– proved to be extraordinarily gifted. In many respects, the Horbites
had largely been an appendage of the Honeths, in much the same
way that the Anadiles are an extension of the Borunes. The first of
that line, Ran Horb I, immersed himself in the Borune hobby of
building highways to link Tolnedran commerce to the rest of the
world. It was his son, Ran Horb II, however, who took that hobby
to the point of obsession. Almost overnight, you couldn’t look anywhere
in the west without seeing Tolnedran construction crews
carving out new highways. The Tolnedran diplomatic corps
dropped everything else and concentrated on ‘treaties of mutual
cooperation for the good of all’, thus creating the fiction that Tolnedra
was just being neighborly, when in fact the highways were quite
nearly for the sole use of Tolnedran merchants.
When word of all the road construction taking place in my former
domain reached me at mother’s cottage, I decided that I’d better set
my studies aside and go to Tol Honeth to have a word with Ran
Horb II to find out just exactly what his intentions were.
For once, I decided not to just pop in on the emperor, but chose
instead to rely on the good offices of the Drasnian ambassador.
Despite their faults – and they do have faults – the avaricious
Drasnians
are well respected by the Tolnedrans. I had to introduce myself
to Prince Khanar, the nephew of King Rhalan of Drasnia, since I’d
been more or less in seclusion for the past eight centuries. Khanar
was no Dras Bull-neck by any stretch of the imagination. He was a
small, wiry man with a quick mind and a perverted sense of humor.
I was fully prepared to give him a quick demonstration of my
‘talent’, but oddly, that wasn’t necessary. He accepted me at my
word and took me across town to the palace compound. After we’d
waited for an hour or so, we were escorted into the large, cluttered
office of his Imperial Majesty, Ran Horb II. The emperor was a stout,
businesslike fellow with receding hair and a preoccupied expression.
‘Ah, Prince Khanar,’ he said to my small companion, so good to
see you again. What’s afoot in Boktor?’
‘All the usual chicanery, your Majesty,’ Khanar shrugged. ‘Lying,
cheating, stealing – nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary.’
‘Does your uncle know how you speak of his kingdom when
you’re in the presence of strangers, Khanar?’
‘Probably, your Majesty. He has spies everywhere, you know.’
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to the lady?’
I was getting to that, your Majesty. I have the distinct honor to
present the Lady Polgara, Duchess of Erat and the daughter of Holy
Belgarath.’
Ran Horb looked at me skeptically. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘just for
the sake of argument, I’ll accept that – tentatively, of course. I’ll
hold off on asking for proof until later. To what do I owe the
honor
of this visit, your Grace?’
‘You’re a very civilized man, your Majesty,’ I noted. ‘Most of the
time I have to perform a few little tricks before people will listen to