Then I crumpled and wept like a broken-hearted child.
Iron-grip never fully recovered from the loss of his wife. Of course, he was nearing sixty when Beldaran left us, so it was almost time for Daran to take over anyway. It gave me an excuse to compel Pol to stay on the Isle - and to keep her busy. Keeping busy is very important during a time of bereavement. If I’d had something vital to attend to at the time of Poledra’s death, things might have turned out quite differently.
I suppose I realized that - dimly - when I returned to the Vale, so I buried myself in my study of the Mrin Codex. I went through it from one end to the other looking for some clue that might have warned me about what was going to happen to Beldaran. Fortunately, I didn’t find anything. If I had, I’m sure my guilt would have overpowered me.
About six or seven years had passed when Daran’s messenger arrived in the Vale to tell me that Riva Iron-grip had died. Bear-shoulders had died the previous winter, and Bull-neck and Fleet-foot were both very old men now. One of the disadvantages of a long life-span is the fact that you lose a lot of friends along the way. Sometimes I feel that my life has been one long funeral.
Polgara returned to the Vale a year or so later, and she had a couple of trunks full of medical books with her. There probably wasn’t anything in those books that could have helped Beldaran, but I think Pol wanted to make sure. I’m not certain what she’d have done if she’d found some cure that she hadn’t known about, but she was as lucky as I’d been.
Things went on quietly in the Vale for about fifty years. Daran got married, had a son, and grew old, while Pol and I continued our studies. Our shared sense of loss brought us closer together. As I delved deeper into the Mrin Codex, my sense of what lay ahead of us grew more troubled, but so far as I could determine, we had everything in place that needed to be there, so we were ready.
Beldin returned from Mallorea near the end of the twenty-first century, and he reported that very little was going on there. ‘So far as I can tell, nothing’s going to happen until Torak comes out of his seclusion at Ashaba.’
‘It’s pretty much the same here,’ I replied. ‘The Tolnedrans have found out about the gold in Maragor, and they’ve built a city at a place called Tol Rane on the Marag border. They’ve been trying to lure the Marags into trade, but they aren’t having much luck. Is Zedar still at Ashaba?’
He nodded. ‘I guess Burnt-face yearns for his company.’
‘I can’t imagine why.’
We quite deliberately didn’t talk about Beldaran or about the other friends who’d passed on. We’d all been rather intimately involved with the family of Cherek Bear-shoulders, and we felt the sense of their loss more keenly than we had when other, perhaps more casual acquaintances died.
The rudimentary trade between Drasnia and Gar og Nadrak came to an abrupt halt when the Nadraks began to mount attacks on towns and villages in eastern Drasnia. Bull-neck’s son, Khadar, took steps, and the Nadraks retreated back into their forests.
Then in 2115, the Tolnedrans, frustrated by the Marag indifference to trade, took action. If I’d been paying attention, I might have been able to intervene, but I had my mind on other things. The merchant princes of Tol Honeth started by instigating a nation-wide rumor campaign about the Marag practice of ritual cannibalism, and the stories grew wilder and wilder with each retelling. Nobody really likes the idea of cannibalism, but the upsurge of indignation in Tolnedra was largely spurious, I suspect. If there hadn’t been all that gold in the streams of Maragor, I don’t think the Tolnedrans would have gotten so excited about Marag eating-habits.
Unfortunately, Ran Vordue IV had only occupied the throne for about a year when this all came to a head, and his lack of experience contributed significantly to what finally happened. The carefully whipped-up hysteria finally crowded Ran Vordue into a corner, and he made the fatal mistake of declaring war on the Marags.
The Tolnedran invasion of Maragor was one of the darker chapters in human history. The legions which swept across the border were not bent on conquest but upon the extermination of the Marag race, and they quite nearly succeeded. The slaughter was ghastly, and in the end it was only that characteristic greed that infects all Tolnedrans that prevented the total extinction of the Marags. Toward the end of the campaign, the legion commanders began taking prisoners - primarily women - and they sold them to the Nyissan slavers who, like vultures, habitually hover around the fringes of almost any battlefield.
The whole business was sickening, but I suppose we owe those barbaric generals a vote of thanks. If they hadn’t sold their captives the way they did, Taiba would not have been born, and that would have been a catastrophe. The ‘Mother of the Race that Died’, as she’s called in the Mrin Codex, absolutely had to be there when the time came or all of our careful preparations would have gone out the window.
Once the legions had wiped out the Marags, the Tolnedran gold-hunters rushed into Maragor like a breaking wave. Mara, however, had his own ideas about that. I’ve never really understood Mara, but I understood his reaction to what the Tolnedrans had done to his people very well, and I whole-heartedly approved, even though it took us to the brink of another war between the Gods. To put it quite simply, Maragor became a haunted place. The spirit of Mara wailed in insupportable grief, and horrors beyond imagination appeared before the eyes of the horde of gold-hunters who swept into the basin where Maragor had been. Most of them went mad. The majority of them killed themselves, and the few who managed to stumble back to Tolnedra had to be confined in mad-houses for the rest of their lives.
The spirit of Nedra was not pleased by the atrocious behavior of his children, and he spoke very firmly with Ran Vordue about it. That accounts for the founding of the monastery at Mar Terrin. I was rather pleased about Mar Terrin, since the greedy merchants who’d started the whole thing were, to a man, among the first monks who were sent there to comfort the ghosts of the slaughtered Marags. Forcing a Tolnedran to take a vow of poverty is probably just about the worst thing you can do to him.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. Belar and Mara had always been close, and the actions of the children of Nedra offended Belar mightily. That was what was behind the Cherek raids along the Tolnedran coast. The war-boats swept out of the Great Western Sea like packs of coursing hounds, and the coastal cities of the empire were sacked and burned with tiresome regularity. The Chereks, obviously acting on instructions from Belar, paid particular attention to Tol Vordue, the ancestral home of the Vorduvian family. Ran Vordue IV could only wring his hands in anguish as his native city was ravaged by repeated Cherek attacks.
Ultimately, my Master had to step in and mediate a peace settlement between Belar and Nedra. Torak was still our main concern, and he was quite enough to worry about without other family squabbles cropping up to confuse the issue.
Chapter 30
After the destruction of Maragor and after the ensuing punitive raids along the Tolnedran coast by Cherek berserkers had died down a bit, an uneasy peace settled over the western kingdoms - except for Arendia, of course. That tedious war went on and on, in some measure perhaps because the Arends couldn’t think of any way to stop it. An endless series of atrocities and counter-atrocities had turned hatred into a religion in Arendia, and the natives were all very devout.
Pol and I spent the next few centuries in the Vale, quietly pursuing our studies. My daughter accepted without comment the fact that she wasn’t going to age. The peculiar thing about the whole business in her case was the fact that she really didn’t. Beldin and the twins and I had all achieved the appearance of a certain maturity. We picked up wrinkles and grey hair and a distinguished look. Pol didn’t. She’d passed her three hundredth birthday, and she still looked much the same as she had at twenty-five. Her eyes were wiser, but that’s about as far as it went. I guess a sorcerer is supposed to look distinguished and wise, and that implies wrinkles and grey hair. A woman with grey hair and wrinkles is called a crone, and I don’t think Pol would have liked that very much. Maybe we all wound up looking the way we thought we ought to look. My brothers and I thought we should look wise and venerable. Pol didn’t mind the wise part, but ‘venerable’ wasn’t in her vocabulary.
I think I might want to investigate that someday. The notion that we somehow create ourselves is intriguing.
Anyway, I think it was early in the twenty-fourth century when Polgara began going out on her own. I tried to put my foot down the first time, but she rather bluntly told me to mind my own business. ‘The Master told me to take care of this, father. As I recall, your name didn’t even come up during the conversation.’
I found that remark totally uncalled for.
I waited for a half a day after she’d ridden out of the Vale on her Algar horse, and then I followed her. I hadn’t been instructed not to, and I was still her father. I knew that she had enormous talent, but still -
I had to be very careful, of course. With the exception of her mother, Polgara knows me better than anybody else in the world ever has, and I rather think she could sense my presence from ten leagues away. I expanded my repertoire enormously as I followed her north along the eastern border of Ulgoland. I think I altered my form on an average of once every hour. I even went so far as to take the form of a fieldmouse one evening as I watched her set up camp. A hunting owl quite nearly ended my career that time.