I was not going to leave my friend even for the annual meeting of
the Arendish Council.
It was about midnight on a blustery autumn night when Rana
shook me awake. ‘Himself wants t’ see y’, yer Grace,’ she said, ‘an’
I’m after thinkin’ y’d better hurry right along, don’t y’ know.’
I hastily pulled on my robe and followed her through the empty
halls to the sick-room.
‘Ah, there y’ are, Lady-O,’ the dying man said in a weak voice.
‘Go along w’ Y’ now, Rana. There’s somethin’ T.’I be after wantin’
t’ tell our Lady that y’ don’t need t’ hear.’
His youngest sister kissed him gently and then sadly left the room.
‘Now, don’t y’ be buttin’ in on me, Lady-O,’ Killane admonished
me. ‘There’s somethin’ I’m after wantin’ t’ get off me chest ‘ an’ I
want t’ spit it out before I pull th’ dirt over me fer th’ long sleep.
You an’ me, we’ve come a long way t’gether, an’ we ain’t never
beaten about th’ bush when we had somethin’ t’ say, so I’ll come
right out wi’ it. It might not seem proper, but I’m goin’ t’ say this
anyway. I love y’, Polgara, an’ I’ve loved y’ since th’ first time I set
eyes on’ y’. There. I’ve said it, an’ now I can sleep.’
I kissed the dear man gently on the forehead. ‘And I love you
too, Killane,’ I said, and he somehow seemed to hear me.
‘Ah, an’ aren’t y’ th’ darlin’ girl t’ say so?’ he murmured.
I sat at the bedside of my dear friend holding his hand, and I
continued to hold it for quite some time after he’d died. Then, with
tears of gentle regret streaming down my cheeks I folded his hands
on his chest and pulled the sheet up over his peaceful face.
We buried him in a small grove of trees near the top of the
meadow the next day, and the wind, seeming almost to share our
sorrow, sighed in the evergreen trees on the hillside above us.
*CHAPTER20
Killane was gone, but he’d left me a rich legacy. We hadn’t really
planned it that way, but his extended family, almost without my
knowing it, had become my hereditary retainers as generation
followed generation in my service. There was a comfortable continuity
about that. They all knew me, since I’d personally delivered most
of them when their mothers had gone into labor. Mine had been
the first hands that had ever touched them, and that automatically
brought us closer. They knew me, and they’d been raised and trained
from childhood to enter my service.
The benefits of the arrangement worked both ways, since continuity’s
very important to someone in my peculiar situation. As
Killane himself might have put it, ‘If yer after plannin’ t’ live ferever,
yer bound t’ git lonesome once in a while, don’t y’ know.’ My
hereditary retainers, both in my house in Vo Wacune and in my
country estate on Lake Erat, filled in that enormous gap that the
mortality of loved ones always brings into our lives.
Most of my original vassals had also died by the time that the
century wound down toward the year 2400, and their successors
had somehow learned better manners. The threat of what was wryly
called ‘Nerasin’s complaint’ in most of Arendia hovered over their
heads, and even though they might disagree with some of my social
innovations, they were prudent enough to keep their objections to
themselves. The fact that their former serfs were no longer bound
to the land in de facto slavery encouraged them to be polite to their
Workers as well – particularly after a fair number of cruel, arrogant
landholders discovered that they had no workers when harvest time
rolled around and they were obliged to stand helplessly watching
while their crops rotted in the fields. I like to think that I might
have played some small part in establishing that polite civility which
is so characteristic of the archetypal Sendar. Experimenting with
societies is a very engrossing pastime, wouldn’t you say?
What I did in my duchy was quite deliberate, but what happened
in Vo Wacune was almost an accident. I spent a great deal of my
time there at the palace, since my position almost demanded that I
immerse myself in politics. Politics, however, is a male
preoccupation, and there were days when I wanted to be with women.
Occasionally, I’d invite certain selected young ladies to my town
house so that we could discuss matters that men simply wouldn’t
understand. As I’d observed earlier, Arendish ladies were – on the
surface at least – a giddy, seemingly brainless group, interested only
in fashions, gossip, and snagging suitable husbands. There were,
however, Arendish ladies who had something between their ears
besides fluff. Asrana had been a perfect example of that peculiarity.
I winnowed my way through the court of the Duke of Wacune and
skimmed off the best and brightest young ladies and, by carefully
manipulating the seemingly random conversations in my library or
my rose garden, I began to educate them. It’s always a delight to
watch the awakening of a mind, and after a while the random
discussions at my house turned away from current fashions and
empty gossip to more serious matters. My informal ‘ladies academy’
produced quite a few women who had a significant impact on
Wacite political and social life. Women instinctively know how to gently
guide and direct their husbands, and my little school subtly modified
some things I heartily disapproved of.
We’d gather in my rose garden or on the terrace in the evenings
as the stars came out. We’d eat chilled fruit my kitchen boy brought
us, and we’d listen as the nightingales sang as if their hearts were
breaking. And, since I’d gathered most of the more beautiful and
interesting young women at court, the young men would come to
the street outside my house and serenade us from just beyond the
walls in clear tenor voices that dripped with longing. There are
worse ways to spend an evening.
The twenty-fifth century was a time of relative peace in Arendia.
There were occasional little brush-fires, of course, usually involving
long-standing feuds between neighboring barons, but the Arendish
dukes, applying sweet reason and the threat of overwhelming force,
were able to smother the flames with only minimal help from me.
I did make one suggestion, though, that seemed to be very effective.
A vassal is obliged to provide his lord with warriors whenever the
lord calls for them. The dukes found that peace would break out
almost immediately when feuding barons were neatly stripped of
all able-bodied men by the calling in of that obligation.
The world was moving on beyond the borders of Arendia. The
raids along the Tolnedran coast by Cherek pirates continued through
the twenty-fifth century, long after the reason behind them had been
forgotten. No one even remembered Maragor, but the Chereks, those
most elemental Alorns, continued to sack and burn Tolnedran
coastal cities while piously explaining their barbarism by saying
that they were simply following Belar’s orders. All that ended rather
abruptly with the ascension of the first Borune dynasty to the
iniperial throne in Tol Honeth in the year 2537. Ran Borune I was
far more competent than had been his predecessors of the second
Vorduvian dynasty. He rousted his slothful legions out of their
comfortable garrison in Tol Honeth and put them to work building
the highway that runs from the mouth of the Nedrane River north
to Tol Vordue. The construction put legion encampments all along
the coast within easy reach of the traditional Cherek targets, and
the Cherek freebooters began to encounter much stiffer resistance
when they came ashore. It was about that point that the Chereks
decided that they’d fulfilled their religious obligations and that it
was time to go find someplace else to play.
Since Ran Borune was the first of his family to occupy the imperial
throne, his palace still crawled with left-over Vorduvians whose
characters covered the spectrum from the near side of rascalism to
the far boundaries of outright criminality. The Vorduvians had been
much impressed with Ctuchik’s elaborate scheme early in the
twenty-fourth century. The ongoing Arendish civil wars had given
the Vorduvians all sorts of opportunities to make obscene profits
largely in the arms trade. What was known in Arendia as ‘Polgara’s
Peace’ dried up their markets, and my name was routinely cursed
from Tol Vordue to Tol Horb and Tol Honeth. The Borunes were a
southern family, so they were not in a geographical position to be
much involved in the arms trade in Arendia, so Ran Borune saw
no real reason to fall in with some of the more exotic solutions to
the problem suggested by the Vorduvians, the Horbites, and the
Honethites.
It must have been in about 2560, after the Chereks had decided
that raiding the Tolnedran coast wasn’t fun anymore, that a cabal