Polgara the Sorceress (75 page)

After the wedding there was the ceremonial wedding supper – the traditional lavish feast which insures the attendance of just about everybody in the neighborhood. After he’d eaten his fill – and then some – Gelane’s grey-haired employer drew me aside for some serious discussion. I always rather liked Osrig. He was a Sendar to his fingertips, the kind of man who made me proud of the part I’d played in creating Sendaria. He was sober, practical, and eminently sensible. He paid his taxes, didn’t cheat his customers, and abstained from some of the more colorful aspects of language so admired by Chereks and Drasnians. He was a solidly-built man in his mid-fifties, and he was probably the one who really raised Gelane. Sometimes that task
does
fall on the shoulders of a young man’s first employer.

‘Well, Mistress Pol,’ he said to me with a slight smile, ‘we seem to have gotten our boy married off.’

I looked across the crowded room filled with chattering guests at our bride and groom, who seemed oblivious of everything going on around them. ‘Why, I do believe you’re right, Master Osrig,’ I replied.

‘I just had an idea you might want to consider, Mistress Pol.’

‘Oh?’

‘Why don’t we go ahead and give him a wedding present?’

‘What did you have in mind, Master Osrig?’

‘You didn’t come right out and say it, Mistress Pol, but when we first spoke about my taking Gelane on as my apprentice, you sort of suggested that if things worked out, you might consider buying my shop and the business.’

‘I wasn’t exactly suggesting, Master Osrig. As I remember, I was fairly specific about it.’

‘Why, so you were. Anyway, Gelane’s quick, and he makes good barrels. Here lately, I’ve been giving him some instruction in getting along with customers, negotiating
prices, and chasing down the ones who are slow to pay – you know, the business side of the craft.’

‘Oh, yes, Osrig, I know all about dealing with customers.’

‘Gelane does that very well, too. I’ve been watching him, and I’d say that he’s ready. It seems to me that his wedding today gives us the perfect opportunity to change his status in the business world as well. He’s a married man now, and that’s fairly important to businessmen. Bachelors can be unreliable, but married men are solid and dependable. I know my customers, and that sort of thing is very important to them. To cut all this short, why don’t we go ahead and complete our arrangements this very day? I like Gelane, and I’ll make you a good price. I’ll stay around for a few months to guide him along, and then I’ll start to slowly fade back out of sight.’

‘You’re very generous, Master Osrig. If we can agree on this, we’ll make this day one that Gelane will never forget.’

He coughed, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘I
have
got a slightly ulterior motive, Mistress Pol,’ he confessed.

‘Oh?’

‘As a part of our arrangement, I want it clearly understood that I won’t open the shop any more. It’ll be his now, and it’ll be
his
job to open for business every morning.’

‘I’m not sure I understand, Master Osrig.’

‘I’m ashamed to admit it, Mistress Pol, but I absolutely
hate
getting up early in the morning. If we can agree on all the other details, I want it firmly established that I won’t be coming in to work until noon. I’ve hated getting up early for forty years now. When you buy my shop, you’ll be setting me free, Pol. I’ll still wake up just about dawn out of habit, but then I’ll be able to roll over and go back to sleep again.’

‘Why don’t we go ahead and set you free, Osrig? We can draw up the papers right now, and then I’ll go get your money for you. We should have it all taken care of in just a few days.’

‘I’ll accept your note for the time being, Pol. Then we can give Gelane the keys to his business this very afternoon, and when the sun comes knocking on my door tomorrow morning, I’ll tell him that I’m not taking orders from him
anymore.’ He chuckled. ‘I’m even going to make a special point of staying up late tonight, just to make going back to sleep that much more delicious.’

And so it was that Gelane became a husband and a shop-owner on the very same day. Osrig stayed up late that night, and Gelane didn’t sleep very much, either. It was for entirely different reasons, however.

Despite his youth, Gelane gained a certain celebrity that day. Good fortune had positively rained down on him all at once, and that’s a very rare occurrence. It was rare enough, at any rate, to arouse a great deal of envy among the other apprentices in Seline, and there was a fair amount of spiteful gossip among them on the fairly frequent occasions when they slipped away from work for those quick visits to the local taverns. Nobody pays much attention to the idle backbiting of assorted mediocre apprentices, but even the more substantial merchants and craftsman noticed what had happened. I heard one burger put it rather succinctly. ‘The lucky dog married a beautiful girl
and
became the owner of his own business all on the same day. I’m going to keep my eye on that one. He’s a comer, mark my words.’

Looking back, I think I might have been wiser to have deferred the transfer of the barrel-works to Gelane for a year or so. I’m sure Osrig would have agreed to such a delay had I given him my word that from that day forward Gelane
would
open the shop every morning. Maybe the chance to get everything all accomplished in one day seemed just to good to pass up. Sometimes my sense of economy gets ahead of me.

Gelane’s celebrity wore off, of course, and after a year or so he was merely ‘Gelane the cooper’ instead of ‘that lucky dog’. People bought barrels from him because he made good barrels, but other than that, no particular fame attached itself to him.

That brief time when he was ‘special’, however, reawakened Gelane’s sense of his own importance, and that’s very dangerous for someone whose major goal is supposed to be staying out of sight.

In retrospect, I’m sure that Brand’s attempt to cleanse the
world of Angaraks hadn’t succeeded nearly as well as he’d hoped it would. There weren’t any Murgo ‘merchants’ sitting in nearly every tavern in the west, but the Murgos weren’t the only Angaraks on our side of the Sea of the East. Chamdar had access to the Dagashi, and they’re a lot less visible than Murgos.

Anyway, after a year or so, Master Osrig had quietly faded out of our lives and Gelane converted the loft over his shop into living quarters. That’s when Aravina suffered a recurrence of that deep, incapacitating melancholia; and I was forced to devote all my attention to her. After the initial crisis had passed, I noticed that our usually sunny Enalla was showing some signs of discontentment. ‘What
is
your problem, Enalla?’ I asked her pointedly one morning after Gelane had gone downstairs to open the shop for business.

‘I don’t think Gelane loves me any more, Aunt Pol,’ she replied disconsolately.

‘Don’t be absurd. He adores you.’

‘Why does he find excuses to go out every night then? If he isn’t “looking into a new place to buy oak boards to use for barrel staves” –
after
all the lumber yards have closed, he’s “trying to find a fellow who hasn’t paid his bill”. He’s so obvious sometimes. Do you know what I think, Aunt Pol? I think some tavern wench – or worse – has taken his eye. He doesn’t even seem interested in –’ she suddenly blushed. ‘Well, you know –
that.’

I knew exactly what she meant by ‘that’. ‘I’ll look into it, Enalla. How long’s this been going on?’

‘Almost two months now. You and I were both very concerned about mother Aravina, and something happened to Gelane while neither of us was watching.’ She paused. ‘Do we always have to do that, Aunt Pol? – keep an eye on them every minute of the day or night, I mean?’

‘Usually, yes.’

‘Don’t they ever grow up?’

‘Some do. Some don’t. My father hasn’t managed it yet, and he’s much, much older than Gelane. Does our boy go out every single night?’

‘He has been lately.’

‘Good. I’ll follow him tonight then. Let’s find out where he’s going and who’s become the center of his attention.’

‘He’ll see you if you try to follow him, Aunt Pol.’

‘He might, but he won’t know that it’s me. I’ll give Aravina something to make her sleep this evening. You can watch over her while I go find out what Gelane’s up to.’

As it turned out, what Gelane was ‘up to’ took me totally by surprise. I’d been periodically in contact with my father, so I knew that uncle Beldin had found the cave where Zedar was hiding his comatose Master, and I also knew that father was in Tolnedra, hot on the heels of a man who called himself ‘Asharak the Murgo’.

I’m sure that name rings a few bells. It turned out to be Chamdar’s favorite pseudonym.

Anyway, Chamdar was supposedly sprinkling most of Tolnedra with blood-red coins in his efforts to locate ‘a dark-haired lady with a white streak in her hair’. Chamdar wasn’t slow, by any means, and he’d neatly filched a page from father’s book. Before the Angarak invasion, father’d spent centuries leading Chamdar a merry chase around Sendaria, and now Chamdar returned the favor by doing exactly the same thing to father in Tolnedra.

Father’s response was absolutely brilliant. It didn’t work, but it was brilliant all the same. The ‘new hair style’ that suddenly erupted in Tolnedra, Arendia, and Sendaria would have driven Chamdar to distraction, I sure. He’d spent centuries looking for me, and now he’d be coming across me every time he turned a corner in every town from Tol Borune to Darine. The only problem with that was that as it turned out, Chamdar already knew exactly where I was.

After supper that evening, Gelane mumbled a highly unconvincing story about an elusive debtor. Then he went downstairs, fetched something out of a cupboard that supposedly contained only some tools, and then left the shop. Once he was out in the street with a canvas bag over his shoulder, he looked around furtively for any signs of
pursuit, but he didn’t look up at the rooftops, so he didn’t see the brown-spotted owl watching him intently.

I’m certain that had Silk been there, he’d have groaned at just how inept Gelane was in his efforts to be inconspicuous. Tiptoing isn’t really the best way to escape notice. At any rate, he finally reached the edge of town where it bordered on Lake Seline, and he followed the lakeshore to a fairly extensive grove of trees lying about a mile to the east of town. It was a dark, moonless night, and Gelane was virtually invisible as he crept though the undergrowth. I was up among the branches of the trees above him, and it wasn’t long until I began catching fleeting glimpses of the ruddy glow of a fire just a ways off. The fire was obviously Gel-ane’s destination, so I drifted on ahead to have a look.

It was not exactly a bonfire, but it came close. It was big enough at any rate to illuminate a fair-sized clearing and the dozen or more men gathered there. I’d seen that sort of gathering before, and I started biting off a number of colorful phrases with my beak.

The fellow who seemed to be in charge of the little group had black hair, a dense black beard, and he wore the robe of a priest of Belar. It was fairly obvious that the other men were all of Alorn descent, since they were not only tall and blond, but they were also all wearing bearskin tunics. Somehow the Bear-Cult had found its way to Sendaria.

Then Gelane entered the clearing, and he wasn’t carrying the canvas bag anymore, but he
was
wearing what had been inside. The heir to the Rivan throne was wearing a bearskin tunic.

That’s when I started pillaging extinct languages for swear-words. How
could
Gelane have been so stupid?

The eyes of the black-haired priest of Belar came alight as Gelane, shaggy but regal, entered the clearing. ‘All hail!’ the ecclesiast declaimed, gesturing toward my nephew. ‘All hail the Rivan King, Godslayer and overlord of the west! Hail him who will lead us against the infidels of the south – against Arendia, against Tolnedra, against snake-infested Nyissa! There shall he covert the heathens of the south with his mighty sword to the worship of the one true God, Belar of Aloria!’

I considered what I’d just seen and heard as I flew back to Seline, leaving Gelane to bask in the adoration of his worshipers. Rational Bear-Cultists – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – had always maintained the superficial fiction that their hunger to ‘convert’ the southern kingdoms grew out of a desire to unify the armies which would move against the Angaraks. Belar, of course, had never said anything about a conversion of his allies prior to any war. Stealing the worshipers of his brother Gods would have been the worst form of bad manners. Belar has his faults, but discourtesy isn’t one of them. The notion of conversion had been added by radical clergymen with their eyes far more firmly fixed on the treasure-houses of Tol Honeth than upon heaven. The black-bearded priest back at the campfire was obviously a revisionist of the first order. Very few in the west knew that Torak wasn’t really dead, and his apparent demise had neatly removed the cult’s reason for existence. The pious pronouncement that the goal of the cult was the destruction of Torak rather than the looting of southern treasuries had evaporated at Vo Mimbre. The priest of the newly-formed cult of Gelane was fast on his feet, I’ll give him that much.

‘Father, I need you.’
I sent the thought out even as I was changing back
into
my own form in the street outside the barrel-works.

‘What’s the matter?’
his thought came back.

‘We’ve got a problem. You’d better get here as soon as you can.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll tell you when you get here. Somebody might be eavesdropping. Wear a different face.’
It was a logical precaution, but my real purpose had been to spur my indolent father into moving instead of talking. My life would be so much
easier if father’d just do what he’s told to do instead of wasting time arguing with me.

It was just getting light when I felt him as he altered his form on the outskirts of Seline. Gelane, who’d crept back into the house long after midnight, was still asleep, so I took a broom and went outside. I was sweeping off the steps when a bald-headed fat man came up the street. I naturally knew who he was. Sometimes my father’s so enthralled by appearances that he forgets how unimportant they really are. People are who they
are.
How they look has very little to do with it. ‘Where have you been?’ I demanded. I’ll admit that my tone was a little waspish. Then I led him into the shaving-littered shop and showed him Gelane’s bearskin tunic.

‘How long’s this been going on?’ he demanded, speaking quietly in the dim light of the barrel-works.

‘I’m not positive, father. Gelane’s been evasive for about the last six months, and he’s been going out every night. Enalla thinks he’s being unfaithful.’

‘His wife?’

I nodded and put the tunic back into the cupboard. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I suggested. ‘We need to talk.’

We went on down the street a ways, and I filled him in on recent events. Then I endured his scolding for allowing this to happen, and we finally got around to what we were going to do about it.

My father’s extended – and extended and extended – ‘History of the World’ will tell those of you patient enough to plow through it that he followed Gelane the following evening and witnessed the ceremonial adulation of the local cult when my errant nephew reached the bonfire in the woods. Then, once he’d gotten his emotions under control, the Old Wolf called me, suggesting that I join him. I thought that was nice of him.

A lot of things fell into place when father identified the bearded priest as Chamdar. There are ways father could have conjured up Chamdar’s image for me, but for some reason, neither of us had thought of using one of them. We never did really find out how Chamdar’d tracked me down, but I can make a fairly educated guess. Somewhere in some
tavern an idle wayfarer had mentioned ‘that lucky dog’, and there’d been a Dagashi present. Then Chamdar had come to Seline to have a look for himself – ah, well, it was too late to start looking for that ‘cave in the mountains’ now. Clearly, Ctuchik’s underling had leeched Gelane’s identity from the young man’s thoughts – as well as Gelane’s yearning for celebrity – and the rest had been easy. The local chapter of the Bear-Cult was clearly specious, but the members weren’t intelligent enough to recognize rampant revisionism when they saw it. Gelane received the recognition – and adulation – he so yearned for, and Chamdar got his hands on a Rivan King.

We absolutely
had
to sever that connection. I knew of a way to do that, and it was far less drastic than father’s notion of erasing Gelane’s mind would have been. There were dangers involved in making Chamdar’s rambling thoughts audible. If he were to become aware of what I was doing, he quite probably would have killed Gelane on the spot – or at least tried to. To prevent that, I had to overlay his awareness with a kind of reflective reverie. His mind had to wander sufficiently to dull his alertness. It wasn’t easy, which is why I chose to do it myself rather than just hand it over to father. My father tends in the direction of blunt force when he does something. Subtlety’s never been one of his strong points.

Aside from the more obvious physical differences, that may be the one thing that most distinguishes men from women. We think differently, and so we do things differently. Many people – men mostly – get very upset by these differences, but can you imagine how boring life would be if we all thought and acted in exactly the same way? Actually, gentlemen, it’s much more fun this way.

Anyway, Gelane was making a fairly windy speech about how important he was when Chamdar’s now-audible ruminations brought my boastful nephew up short. The announcement, ‘Ctuchik will reward me if I kill this dolt’, definitely got Gelane’s attention – as well as the attention of the other Cultists. Father advised me later that two of
the shaggily-dressed fanatics were very upset by what Chamdar revealed. Evidently Chamdar had prudently decided to bring a pair of bodyguards along.

The rambling of Ctuchik’s less than loyal underling went on and on – long enough at any rate for Gelane to regain his senses and realize just how much his swollen ego had been used to dupe him. When Chamdar’s day-dream reached its culmination and in his mind’s eye he was being exalted to first disciple-hood, Gelane gave him a quick demonstration of unrestrained Alornishness by punching him square in the face.

Chamdar reeled and fell, and his now-scrambled wits lost all control of his puppet, my nephew. With the evaporation of Chamdar’s hold on him, the full force of Gelane’s own foolishness struck him very nearly as hard as he’d just struck Chamdar. That wasn’t a good time for extended soul-searching, since Chamdar’s pair of disguised bodyguards whipped out some very ugly knives to rush to their employer’s defense. Fortunately, the other Cultists took the defense of Gelane to be a religious obligation, and their piety along those lines was commendable, to say the very least.

After Chamdar had fled and his bodyguards had been swarmed under, Gelane got hold of himself. ‘We’ve been tricked!’ he exclaimed. That was no priest of Belar!’

‘What shall we do, Godslayer?’ one hulking Alorn demanded. ‘Should we chase him down and kill him?’

‘Don’t ever call me that again!’ Gelane commanded. ‘I’m not the Godslayer! I’ve dishonored my name!’ He ripped off his bear-skin and violently hurled it into the fire. “The Bear-Cult is a lie and a deception!’

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ the first Alorn declared, ‘but I’m going to go find that priest and rip him up the middle!’ And they all dashed out to flounder around in the bushes.

That was very slick, Pol,’ father complimented me after he’d discarded his feathers. ‘Where did you learn how to do that?’

‘In Vo Wacune,’ I replied. ‘I had to force a confession out of an Asturian spy, and I didn’t much care for the conventional ways to do that. It’s fairly simple, actually.
Someday when we’ve got some time, I’ll show you how to do it.’ I cocked my head to listen to the Alorns crashing through the brush. ‘Let’s wait until Gelane’s playmates go home before we collar him and drag him back to the barrel-works. I don’t know that we need to let the other Cultists know that we’ve been around.’

‘Truly,’ he agreed.

The heretic Cult members floundered around in the undergrowth for quite some time, but by then Chamdar was probably half-way to Camaar. ‘What do we do now, your Majesty?’ one of them asked Gelane as they trooped back to the fire.

‘Let’s just forget about that “your Majesty” business,’ Gelane told him. ‘That was nothing but a Grolim trick. I think we should all swear to keep this whole thing secret. Our neighbors are Sendars, so we’ll look like idiots if we start talking about the Bear-Cult as if it really meant something.’

The all agreed readily. Nobody really likes to look foolish. They swore on their mother’s graves, their swords – though they didn’t actually have swords – and their somewhat questionable honor that no word of their temporary amusement would ever pass their lips. Then Gelane sent them all home.

When he was alone, Gelane started to weep, and that’s when father and I came out of the woods.

‘Not too smooth there, was it, Gelane?’ father said dryly. ‘It’s very noble to believe that everybody always speaks the truth, but didn’t it occur to you that it might be just a trifle on the gullible side?’

Gelane didn’t seem surprised to see us. In spite of his display of poor judgement, he was still a fairly clever young man. ‘Who really was that fellow who called himself a priest, grandfather?’

‘His name’s Chamdar, and you’ve already guessed that he’s a Grolim. Was your head turned off, Gelane? Couldn’t you tell by the color of his skin and the shape of his eyes that he’s an Angarak?’

‘That wouldn’t make any difference here, father,’ I explained. ‘This is Sendaria, and I spent several centuries
erasing any outward awareness of racial differences.’

‘Brotherhood’s a very nice thing, Pol,’ he said, ‘but if somebody who happens to be green is out to kill you, color blindness isn’t really a very useful trait. Let’s go back to town. We’ve got packing to do.’

‘Where are we going, grandfather?’ Gelane asked him.

‘I haven’t decided yet. We
do
have to get out of Sendaria, though.’

My heart sank. I knew what that meant.

‘Why don’t you buy yourself some new clothes, father?’ I asked him as we entered the city.

‘These
are
new, Pol.’

‘Oh? Which garbage heap did you find them on?’

‘Look a little closer, Pol,’ he replied. ‘I paid a Tol Honeth tailor a lot of money for these. The patches and frayed cuffs are just for show. The clothes are very well-made and they’ll last me for centuries.’

‘Couldn’t you afford shoes that matched?’

‘I didn’t want them to match. I want to look like an out-at-the-heels vagabond.’

‘I think you’ve succeeded far beyond your wildest dreams. It’s a costume, then?’

‘Of course it is. People don’t pay much attention to wandering tramps. When I wear these, I can go through a town or village and nobody’ll remember that I’ve been there after a day or two.’

‘Don’t you
ever
come off stage?’

‘I’m more interesting this way.’ He tossed that off with his usual flamboyance. ‘My real character’s rather boring. I could be a duke if you’d prefer, your Grace.’

‘Spare me.’

‘Why did you call her that, grandfather?’ Gelane asked. ‘ “Your Grace,” I mean?’

‘Secrets again, Pol?’ father sighed. ‘You and your secrets.’ Then he looked appraisingly at Gelane, obviously remembering the young man’s self-adulatory speech at the bonfire. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said with orotund formality, ‘may I present her Grace, the Duchess of Erat?’

Gelane blinked and then stared at me. ‘You’re
not
!’ he exclaimed.

‘Well, I was, dear. That was a long time ago, though.’

‘You’re the most famous person in Sendarian history!’

‘It’s nice to be noticed.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? My manners were terrible, Aunt Pol. You should have told me.’

‘So you could bow and scrape to me in public? You’ve got a long way to go, Gelane. We don’t
want
to be special, remember? That’s why you’re a cooper instead of a magistrate or a country squire.’ I saw an opening there, so I jumped on it. ‘There are two sides to nobility, Gelane. Most people only see the fine houses, the fancy clothes, and all the bowing and scraping by lesser nobles. The other side’s more important, though, and much simpler. Duty, Gelane, duty. Keep that in front of your eyes every waking moment. You are – or could be – the Rivan King. That’d involve some very complicated duties, but the way things stand right now, your only duty is to the line of succession. You perform that duty by staying alive, and there are a large number of people in the world who want to kill you before you have a son.’

‘I guess I lost sight of that, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. ‘When that Chamdar fellow called me the Rivan King, it went to my head. I thought I was important.’

‘You
are
important, Gelane,’ I told him very firmly. ‘You and your wife are probably the most important people in the world right now. That means that you’ve got the heaviest burden of duty in the world, and it can all be boiled down to one word. “Hide.” Wherever you go, hide. Stay out of sight. The best way to do that is to be ordinary.’

‘You’d better listen to her, Gelane,’ father said. ‘Oh, and one word of advice from a professional – and I
am,
you know, – a professional, I mean. Don’t let that “I’ve got a secret” look start getting the best of you. Pretend to be stupid, if you have to.’ Then the old fraud gave me a sly look. ‘Would you like to have me give him some acting lessons, Pol?’

‘Now that you mention it, I think you should, father.’

The look of consternation that crossed his face was the high point of my entire evening.

Father came up with all sorts of lame justifications for
what was probably his spur-of-the-moment decision to move us all to Cherek. That’s another indication of the difference between men and women. A man always feels the need to justify his decisions with logic, and logic, in a formal sense, usually has nothing to do with an important decision. Our minds are far too complex to make choices that way. Women know that, but men appear to have skipped school on the day the subject was discussed.