the word ‘dawdling’ or the expression ‘poking along’ during our
conversations in those three days.
Then we set out again, but it was obviously not getting us
anywhere. The snow on level ground was about four feet deep, and
the drifts were much deeper. ‘There’s no help for it, father,’ I said
finally. ‘We’re going to have to change form and fly out of here.’
His refusal surprised me just a bit, and his excuse, ‘There might
be Grolims around,’ was really very flimsy. If we went falcon, we
could be over Drasnia long before any Grolim got to within five
miles of our present location. We plodded on through the snow,
and we must have covered almost an entire mile before that first
blizzard’s second cousin swept in, forcing us to put up another rude
shelter.
The wind howled all night, and about the middle of the next
morning, we heard someone hail our makeshift little hut. ‘Hello,
the camp,’ a voice called to us. ‘I’m coming in. Don’t get excited.’
He was old. My father’s old, but father seems to ignore it. This
fur-garbed fellow in some peculiar way seemed to have outgrown
it. His hair and beard were of that rare silvery-white, almost
luminous color, and his eyes were of a deep blue. I got the strange feeling
that he saw everything. His face almost nestled in the deep fur of
his collar, and his lushly-furred hat was nearly rakish. ‘Looks like
you two got yourselves in trouble, didn’t you?’ he suggested
humorously as he trudged up to our shelter.
‘We thought we could outrun it,’ father replied with some
resignation.
‘Not much chance of that. These mountains are the natural home
of snow. This is where it lives. Which way were you bound?’
‘Drasnia,’ father said.
‘I’d say you got a late start – too late. You won’t make Drasnia
this winter.’ He sighed. ‘Well, there’s no help for it, I guess. You’d
better winter with me. I’ve got a cave about a mile from here. Gather
up your belongings and bring your horses. I guess I can put up
with some company for one winter.’
Father accepted the invitation a bit too quickly. ‘We don’t really
have much choice, Pol,’ he muttered to me as we packed our things
in bundles to tie to our saddles.
I decided not make an issue of it, but we did in fact have a choice
– the same choice we’d had since we left Yar Nadrak. Either my
father was choosing to ignore it, or he was being encouraged to
forget it. I spent the winter trying to figure out which.
The old fellow never did tell us what his name was. For all I
could tell, he’d forgotten it. He told us that he’d spent his life up
in these mountains looking for gold, but he didn’t seem particularly
obsessed by it. He just liked the mountains.
His cave was really fairly comfortable. It was quite large, and he
kept it neat and orderly. When we entered through the narrow
opening, he stirred up his fire and then showed us where to put
our horses. His donkey was there, and after a little while, the donkey
and our horses became friends. The donkey, however, seemed more
like a dog than a beast of burden. The old gold-hunter allowed
or encouraged – him to roam at will through the cave. That caused
me a number of problems that winter. The donkey was a curious
little beast, and he was forever getting in my way. He absolutely
had to see what I was doing. I think he liked me, because he was
continually nuzzling me or gently butting me with his head. He
loved to have his ears rubbed. I rather liked him, but I didn’t like
being awakened every morning by his snuffling at my neck. What
bothered me the most, however, was his stubborn insistence on
watching me while I bathed. I knew it was absurd, but his watching
always made me blush for some reason.
Father and the old man spent the winter talking without really
saying anything. They obviously liked each other, though they really
didn’t have much in common. After a while, I began to get a strong
odor of tampering here. I don’t think it was anything particularly
earth-shaking, but for some obscure reason father and I were supposed
to spend some time with this old fellow. The thing that struck
me the most about him was the fact that there was quite probably
nobody in the entire world more free than this solitary old man in
the mountains.
Every now and then when my life has become hectic, I’ll think
back to that snowy winter, and a great peace seems to descend on
me. Maybe that was the reason for our stay. It has helped me retain
my sanity any number of times.
Spring finally came to the mountains, and father and I resumed
our journey. ‘Did that make any sense to you, father?’ I asked when
we were a few miles up the trail.
‘What was that, Pol?’ he asked, his face aglow with pleasant
incomprehension.
I gave up. Quite obviously he hadn’t the faintest idea of what I
was talking about. ‘Never mind,’ I sighed.
We reached Boktor about a week later. and the city still had a
frightened, wary air about it. A pestilence had swept the country
the preceding summer – one of those virulent diseases that strikes
without warning, kills off about a third of the population, and then
disappears as quickly as it had come. Had I not been so intent on
returning to Annath, I might have investigated the disease in hopes
of finding some remedy. The majority of humanity is carried off by
one disease, or another, and as a physician I find that offensive.
Philosophically, however, I’m forced to admit its practicality. In
the light of human fertility, there almost has to be some means of
controlling the population; and in the long run, disease is more
humane than war or starvation.
My, isn’t that gloomy?
Anyway, this particular plague had carried off large numbers of
Drasnians, and among them had been the king. Father and I stayed
long enough to attend the coronation of Crown Prince Rhodar. I
questioned the chubby king-to-be rather obliquely and was pleased
to discover that he had, in fact, been visited by a scruffy-looking
young Nadrak named Yarblek.
After Rhodar’s coronation, father made an independent decision
that I really didn’t like. He sold our horses and bought a rowboat.
‘We’ll go on down through the fens,’ he said in that irritatingly
imperial tone he sometimes assumes.
‘We’ll do
what?’I think my tone might have conveyed my feelings about that
decision. ‘There are a lot of people traveling the Great North Road
this time of year, Pol,’ he explained defensively, ‘and there might
be some unfriendly eyes concealed in that crowd.’ He still refused
to even consider that most logical alternative. Even though it was
spring and the waterfowl were migrating, the sky wasn’t really all
that crowded.
And so he poled us down into that reeking swamp. The
mosquitoes were very happy to see us, I’m sure, and they also butted
their heads against us in greeting. My disposition turned sour after
the first mile.
The mosquitoes weren’t the only creatures inhabiting the swamps,
though. The turtles watched us glide by with dull-eyed reptilian
indifference, but the fenlings, those small aquatic animals distantly
related to otters, frolicked and played around our boat, and their
squeaky chittering was almost like giggling. Evidently, the fenlings
found the idea of humans stupid enough to deliberately come into
the fens vastly amusing.
It was raining when father poled us around a bend in the
slowmoving, meandering stream we were following through the reeds,
and we caught sight of the neat, thatch-roofed cottage that was the
home of Vordai, the witch of the fens.
Stories about Vordai had been surfacing in all manner of places
for about three centuries, wild exaggerations as it turned out.
Witches deal with spirits – and with the weather, of course. We
don’t do things like that. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say
that witches deal with specifics, and we deal with generalities. That’s
an oversimplification, of course, but isn’t almost everything?
The fenlings had alerted Vordai to our approach, and she was
waiting in her doorway as father drove the nose of our boat up
onto the muddy shore of her tree-covered little island. Her greeting
wasn’t exactly cordial. ‘You might as well come inside,’ she said
without much emotion – ‘at least until the rain lets up.’
Father and I got out of our boat and went up the path to her
door. ‘So you’re Vordai,’ I said to the aged but still beautiful woman
in the doorway.
‘And you would be Polgara,’ she replied.
‘You two know each other?’ Father sounded surprised.