Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection. David Eddings
it?’
I gave up and sat down in a chair. ‘Go ahead, Pol,’ I told her. ‘Enjoy yourself.’
I’m sure she did. She’d spent years polishing some of those cutting remarks, and she delivered them with a certain flair. Leaving the girls in Beldin’s custody may have been a mistake, because Polgara at least had been a very apt pupil. Some of the names she called me were truly hair-raising. Oddly, Beldaran didn’t seem to be the slightest bit offended by her sister’s choice of language. I’m sure she knew what the words meant, but they didn’t seem to bother her. For all I knew, she may have shared Pol’s views, but she forgave me. Polgara obviously didn’t.
I sat there looking out the window at the sunset while my daughter continued her diatribe. After an hour or so, she started to repeat herself. There are only so many insults in any language. She did lapse into Ulgo once or twice, but her accent wasn’t very good. I corrected her, of course. Correcting the children is a father’s first responsibility. Pol didn’t take correction very graciously.
Finally I stood up. ‘This isn’t really getting us anywhere,’ I told her. ‘I think I’ll go home now. As soon as I get things straightened up in the tower, you girls can move in with me.’
‘You’re not serious!’
‘Oh, yes I am, Pol. Start packing. Like it or not we are going to be a family.’ I smiled at her. ‘Sleep well, Polgara.’ Then I left.
I could still hear her screaming when I got to my tower.
The girls moved in the following week. Beldaran was an obedient child, and she accepted my decision without question. That, of course, forced Pol to obey as well, since she loved her sister so much that she couldn’t bear to be separated from her. We didn’t see very much of her, but at least her things were in my tower.
She spent most of her time for the rest of that summer in the branches of the tree in the center of the Vale. At first I assumed that eventually hunger would bring her down out of the tree and back to my tower, but I’d overlooked the twins’ habit of feeding things. They saw to it that Polgara didn’t go hungry.
I decided to wait her out. If nothing else, winter would bring her inside. Beldaran, however, started moping. That must have been a very difficult time for my blonde daughter. She loved us both, and our dislike for each other obviously caused her a great deal of distress. She begged me to try to make peace with her sister. I knew it was a mistake, but I couldn’t refuse Beldaran anything she asked of me, so I sighed and went down the Vale to give it one more try.
It was a warm, sunny morning in late summer, and it seemed to me that there were an unusual number of birds flying around as I walked through the tall grass toward the tree.
There were even more of them about when I got there. The air around the tree was alive with them – and it wasn’t just one variety. There were robins and bluebirds and sparrows and finches and larks, and the sound of all that chirping and singing was almost deafening.
Polgara was lounging in the fork of a huge branch about twenty feet up with birds all around her, and she watched my approach with cold, unfriendly eyes. ‘What is it, father?’ She demanded when I reached the foot of the tree.
‘Don’t you think this has gone on long enough?’ I asked her.
‘This what?’
‘You’re being childish, Pol.’
‘I’m entitled to be childish. I’m only thirteen. We’ll have a lot more fun when I grow up.’
‘You’re breaking Beldaran’s heart with this foolishness, you know. She misses you very much.’
‘She’s stronger than she looks. She can endure almost as much as I can.’ She absently shooed a warbling lark off her shoulder. The birds around her were singing their hearts out in a kind of ecstatic adoration.
I decided to try another tack. ‘You’re missing a splendid opportunity, Pol,’ I told her.
‘Oh?’
‘I’m sure you’ve spent the summer composing new speeches. You can’t very well try them out on me when you’re perched on a limb sharpening your beak.’
‘We’ll get to that later, father. Right now the sight of you makes me nauseous. Give me a few dozen years to get used to you.’ She smiled at me, a smile with all the warmth of an iceberg. ‘Then we’ll talk. I have many, many things to say to you. Now go away.’
To this day I don’t know how she did it. I didn’t hear or feel a thing, but the sounds those thousands of birds were making suddenly became angry, threatening, and they descended on me like a cloud, stabbing at me with their beaks and flogging me with their wings. I tried to beat them off with my hands, but you can’t really drive off that many birds. About all the song-birds could do was peck at me and pull out tufts of my hair and beard, but the hawks were a whole different matter. I left in a hurry with Pol-gara’s mocking laughter following me.
I was more than a little grumpy when I reached Beldin’s tower. ‘How far has she gone?’ I demanded of him.
‘How far has who gone with what?’
‘Polgara. Just how much is she capable of?’
‘How should I know? She’s a female, Belgarath. They don’t think the way we do, so they do things differently. What did she do to you?’
‘She turned every bird in the Vale loose on me.’
‘You do look a bit mussed. What did you do to irritate her so much?’
‘I went down to the tree and told her to come home.’
‘I take it she refused the invitation?’
‘And then some. How long has she been doing this sort of thing?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – a couple of years, I guess. That’d be consistent.’
‘I didn’t follow that.’
He gave me a surprised look. ‘Do you mean you don’t know? Haven’t you ever been the least bit curious about the nature of our gift?’
‘I had other things on my mind.’
He rolled his eyes upward. ‘Have you ever seen a child who could do the sort of things we do?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you mention it –’
‘How’ve you managed to live this long with your head turned off? The talent doesn’t show up until we reach a certain age. Usually girls pick it up a little sooner than boys.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s related to puberty, you dunce!’
‘What’s puberty got to do with it?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe the gift is glandular.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense, Beldin. What have glands got to do with the Will and the Word?’
‘Maybe it’s a built-in safety precaution. A gifted two-year old might be a little dangerous. The gift has to be controlled, and that implies a certain maturity. You should be glad that it works that way. Polgara’s not very fond of you, and if she’d had the gift when she was a toddler, she might have turned you into a toad.’
I started to swear.
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘I’m going to have to get her down out of that tree. She’s going to need training.’
‘Leave her alone. She’s not going to hurt herself. The twins and I explained the limitations to her. She isn’t experimenting. About all she does is talk to birds.’
‘Yes. I noticed that.’
‘You might think about rolling around in the creek