Polgara the Sorceress

Father and I left the Isle of the Winds by ship, and we were deposited on a rainy beach on the north side of the Hook of Arendia to begin our search for the elusive Asturians.

After the Mimbrates had destroyed Vo Astur, the Asturian nobility had taken to the woods to engage in centuries of guerrilla warfare. In the Asturian view of the world, shooting a lone Mimbrate traveler in the back with an arrow constituted a major victory to be celebrated around the campfires for weeks on end. The Mimbrates, quite naturally, disapproved of that practice, and so armored knights made periodic sweeps through the forest to locate and destroy those bands of enthusiasts. The Asturians grew quite adept at concealing their encampments, so father and I spent a delightful week and a half searching for the elusive Duke of Asturia, Eldallan. The almost perpetual rain seething down among the trees added whole new dimensions to the word ‘uncomfortable’.

Unless driven by hunger, predators normally sit out rain-storms in some sheltered place, but there was one wolf and one owl in that soggy forest who were obliged to move around almost constantly.

Have you any idea at all of just how bad a wet wolf smells when he gets near a campfire? Just the thought of father’s fragrance during our search turns my stomach.

As luck had it, a brief break in the weather dissipated the perpetual mist hanging in the forest, and I flew on up above the treetops and saw the smoke rising from a dozen or so campfires some distance off to the east. When we investigated, we found the encampment we’d been searching for.

Given their highly developed sense of romanticism, the costume of choice among the young Asturian ‘patriots’ consisted of green or brown tunics and hose and rakish caps decorated with long feathers. The Mimbrates had designated them as outlaws, and they were playing the part for all they were worth. Literature has its place, I suppose, but the ballads composed by third-rate poets extolling the exploits of this or that outlaw out to rob rich Mimbrates and to distribute the booty to the poor Asturian peasants set the imaginations of generations of brainless Asturian nobles afire, and they postured and posed in their green clothing and spent hours practicing with their bows, riddling whole battalions of straw dummies dressed in rusty Mimbrate armor with yard-long arrows.

All right, I’m prejudiced against Asturians. So what?

Duke Eldallan and his cohorts were less than cooperative when father and I entered their extensive encampment. We were not exactly taken prisoner, but there were a lot of arrows pointed in our general direction as we approached the rustic ‘throne’ where Eldallan sat with his eight-year-old daughter, Mayaserana, on his knee.

The Duke of Asturia was a thin man in his early thirties with long, carefully-combed blond hair. He wore forest green, his longbow was handy, and he obviously had a high opinion of himself. He received father’s introduction of us with a look of scepticism. My father’s customary shabby appearance obviously didn’t match the picture of ‘a mighty wizard’ as laid down in assorted Arendish epics. He might not have believed father, but a short while later he definitely believed me.

He shrugged off the news of the destruction of Drasnia as ‘an Alorn problem’, and made much of his near-religious obligation to exterminate the Mimbrates. I finally grew tired of his posturing and stepped in. ‘Why don’t you let me talk with him, father?’ I said. ‘I know Arends a little better than you do.’

‘Gladly,’ the Old Wolf grunted.

‘Please forgive my father, your Grace,’ I said to Eldallan. ‘Diplomacy’s not one of his strong points.’

Then Eldallan made the mistake of mentioning my former association with the Wacite Arends as if it had been some kind of major moral failing. I decided that since he wanted to be nasty about this, I’d give him more nasty than he was equipped to accept.

‘Very well, your Grace,’ I said rather coldly, ‘I’ll show you what the Angaraks did to Drasnia, and then I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you’d like to have the same thing happen here.’

‘Illusions!’ he snorted.

‘No, your Grace. Not illusions, but reality. I speak as the Duchess of Erat, and no true gentlemen would question the word of a noblewoman – or have I erred in assuming that there are gentlemen in Asturia?’

He bridled at that. ‘Are you questioning my honor?’

‘Aren’t you questioning mine?’

I don’t think he’d expected that. He choked on it a bit, and then he gave in. ‘Very well, your Grace,’ he said. ‘If you give me your word of honor that what you propose to show me really happened, I’ll have no choice but to accept it.’

‘Your Grace is too kind.’ I gently probed at his mind and found there an unreasoning terror of the notion of being burned alive. That gave me all that I needed.

I set a series of disconnected images before him and compelled him to watch them unfold with the force of my Will. There was enough generalized butchery in those images to keep him from guessing that I was concentrating my efforts on the one thing he feared the most. The seas of blood and the incidental dismemberments were in the nature of punctuation to the lovingly recreated scenes of screaming Drasnians trapped inside burning buildings or being bodily hurled into great bonfires by laughing Angaraks. I added the customary shrieks of agony and doused him with the sickening odor of burning flesh;

Eldallan began to scream and writhe in his chair, but I still went on and on until I was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t argue with us any more. I might have held him there longer, but the presence of his little daughter, Mayaserana, forced me to relent. Mayaserana was a beautiful little girl with dark hair and huge eyes, and her involuntary little screams and sobs as her father twisted and groaned tore at my heart.

‘What did you do to my father, bad Lady?’ she demanded in an accusing voice when I released Eldallan.

‘He’ll be fine in just a little bit, dear,’ I assured her. ‘He just had a nightmare, that’s all.’

‘But it’s daytime – and he isn’t even asleep.’

I took her in my arms. ‘That happens sometimes, Mayaserana,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be all right.’

After the Duke of Asturia had recovered, father proposed a truce between Asturia and Mimbre,’ – a temporary truce, you understand, just during the present emergency. Of course, if you just happen to find peace with the Mimbrates entertaining, you and Aldorigen might want to consider extending it.’