idea of apprenticing Davon to a tanner strike you?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I have to live in the same house with him,
Hattan, and tanners as a group tend to be a little fragrant.’
‘Not if they, bathe regularly – with good strong soap. Even a
nobleman starts to get strong on the downwind side if he only takes
one bath a year.
‘Why a tanner? Why not a barrel-maker?’
,It’s a logical extension of my own business, Pol. I’ve got access
to an almost unlimited supply of cow-hides, and I can get them for
pennies. If Davon learns how to tan those hides, he can sell the
leather at a handsome profit.’
‘A little empire building there, Hattan?’ I teased. ‘You want to
use the whole cow, don’t you? What do you plan to do with the
hooves and horns?’
,I could always build a glue factory, I suppose. Thanks for the
idea, Pol. It hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘You’re serious!’
I’m just taking care of my family, Pol. I’m going to leave them a
prosperous business when Belar calls me home.’
‘I think you’ve been in Sendaria too long, Hattan. Why don’t you
take a year off and go back to Algaria – herd cows or breed horses
or something?’
‘I’ve already looked into that, Pol. I’m currently negotiating for
several hundred acres of good pasture land. I know Sendars very
well by now. Algars like horses that run fast. but Sendars prefer
more sensible animals. It’s a little hard to plow a field at a dead
run.’
‘Are you certain that there’s not a strain of Tolnedran in your
background, Hattan? Is profit the only thing you can think about?’
He shrugged. ‘Actually, I get bored, Pol. Once everything
connected with a business venture gets to be a habit, I start looking around
for new challenges. I can’t help it if they all end up making money.
I know a tanner named Alnik who’s getting along in years and
whose son isn’t really interested in the family business. I’ll talk with
him, and once Davon’s learned the trade, we’ll buy Alnik out and
set our boy up in business for himself. Trust me, Pol. This is all
going to work out just fine.’
‘I thought our whole idea was to be inconspicuous, Hattan. I’d
hardly call the richest family in southeastern Sendaria
inconspicuous.’
‘I think you’re missing the point, Pol. The line you’re protecting
will be inconspicuous, because they’ll seem to descend from me. After
a few generations, nobody’ll even think to ask about the other side
of their heritage. They’ll be a fixture – an institution – with no
apparent connection to the Isle of the Winds. You can’t get much
more invisible than that, can you?’
Once again Hattan had startled me with his uncommon
shrewdness. He’d reminded me that someone can be just as invisible by
~standing still as he can by running away and hiding. I learned a
great deal about being ordinary from my Algarian friend. My own
background had been anything but ordinary. I’d been ‘Polgara the
Sorceress’ and ‘The Duchess of Erat’, and those positions had been
very visible. Now I was going to learn how to be the great-aunt of
the village tanner – even though Muros wasn’t exactly a village.
Little by little, I’d fade into the background, and that suited our
purposes perfectly. Once we’d polished this deception, no Murgo
or Grolim – could ever find us.
Davon was a good boy, so he didn’t object to his apprenticeship
at least not openly. By the time he was eighteen, he was a master
tanner, and his employer’s establishment was producing the finest
leather in all of Sendaria.
Our extended family had a feast on Erastide that year, and I
officiated in the kitchen, naturally. After we’d all eaten more than
was really good for us, Davon leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve been
thinking about something,’ he told the rest of us. ‘If we’re going to
buy Ainik’s business, we’ll be producing most of the leather in this
part of Sendaria. What if we were to hire some young cobblers who
were just getting started? We could attach a work-shop to the
tannery and manufacture shoes.’
‘You can’t really expect to make money that way, Davon,’ Geran
objected. ‘Shoes have to be fitted to the feet of the one who’s going
to wear them.’
‘I’ve done a little measuring, father,’ Davon disagreed. He laughed
sheepishly. ‘People think I’m crazy because I always want to
measure their feet. I’m getting better at it, though. I can guess the
length of a man’s foot down to a quarter of an inch now. Your feet
are eight and a half inches long, by the way. Children’s feet – and
women’s – are smaller, but there are only so many lengths of feet
in all of Muros. Nobody’s got three-inch feet, and nobody’s got
nineteen-inch ones. If our cobblers turn out shoes in all the more
common lengths, we’ll find people who can wear them. I can almost
guarantee that.’
‘Go ahead and smirk, Hattan,’ I said to my friend.
‘About what, Pol?’
‘You’ve succeeded in corrupting another generation, haven’t you?
,Would I do that, Pol?’ he asked innocently.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I think you would.’
Hattan and.I pooled some of our money the following spring, we
bought out Alnik the tanner, and then turned the tannery over to
Davon, who immediately started manufacturing solid, sensible
shoes that were very popular among farmers. People who wanted
fancy shoes continued to have them made by traditional cobblers,
but ordinary working people began to patronize the shop that was
the end of a long line of processes. Raw hides went in one end of
Davon’s tannery, and work shoes came out the other. The people
of Muros were beginning to notice this family. Such Angaraks as
passed through, however, paid almost no attention to it – unless
they wanted to buy cows or shoes.
It was in the year 4039 that we finally got Davon married off. He
was twenty-three at the time, and I’d started to worry just a bit.
Marriage is something that shouldn’t be put off too long.
Bachelorhood can be sort of habit forming after a while. Hattan, who was
in his late fifties by then, told me that I worried too much about
things like that. ‘We’re unusual people, Pol,’ he said to me just
before the wedding. ‘If I were just another Algar, I’d be sitting on
a horse near the River Aldur watching a herd of cows right now.
I’d have an Algar wife and ten children, and we’d all be living in
wagons. But I’m not just another Algar, so I’m married to Layna,
and I’m living in Muros getting rich instead of keeping cows out of
trouble on the plains of Algaria. I was older than Davon is right
now when I married Layna. I needed some time to get my feet on
the ground before I got married. Nobles and peasants marry early.
Businessmen tend to wait.’
Davon’s bride-to-be was a very pretty blonde girl named Ainana.
She had a bright, sunny personality, and she was a joy to be around.
Eldara and I considered her rather carefully and decided that she’d
be acceptable. Young men always think that they’re the ones who
make these decisions, but they tend to overlook certain realities in
these matters. The influence of the women of the house is very strong
in the business of choosing suitable wives.
No. I Won’t pursue that. Women know about it already, and men
don’t really need to know.
The wedding of Davon and Ainana was the social event of the
season that fall. Our family was quite prominent in Muros by now,
and we had no real reason to keep the affair unostentatious as we
had when Geran had come in out of nowhere to marry Eldara.
Weddings are major events in the lives of the merchant class, so
they tend to make them lavish.
After the wedding, Davon and Ainana took up residence in a new
wing of my house. Things were a little crowded to suit my tastes,
but we all got along quite well, so there was a minimum of friction.
Hattan, my dear, dear friend, lived long enough to see his
greatgrandson, Alten, born in 4041, and then one blustery spring morning
out in the stockyards, Hattan was gored by a large belligerent Algar
bull. Cows are such silly animals most of the time that we tend to
forget that they always go about fully armed. Hattan died almost
immediately, so there wasn’t anything I could really have done, but
that didn’t prevent me from blaming myself. It sometimes seems
that I’ve spent half of my life sunk to the eyebrows in
self-recrimination. That’s one of the major drawbacks of the study and
practice of healing. Healers are always shocked and outraged when