My brother left from the headland just south of the harbor at Riva, spiraling upward on lazy wings. Pol and I, however, left by more conventional means. Bear-shoulders took us to the Sendarian coast in that dangerously narrow war-boat of his. Even though I’d helped to design them, I don’t like Cherek war-boats. There’s no denying that they’re fast, but it always feels to me whenever I board one that it’s right on the verge of capsizing. I’m sure Silk understands that, but Barak never will.
Pol and I took our time returning to the Vale. There was no real hurry, after all. In a curious sort of way, Beldaran’s marriage made peace between Polgara and me. We didn’t talk about it, we just closed ranks to fill in the gap that had suddenly appeared in our lives. Pol still made those clever remarks, but a lot of the bite had gone out of them.
It was midsummer by the time we got home, and we spent the first week or so giving the twins a full description of the wedding and of Pol’s conquests. I’m sure they noticed the change in her appearance, but they chose not to make an issue of it.
Then we settled back in. It was after dinner one evening when Polgara raised something I’d been cudgeling my brains to find a way to bring up myself. As I remember, we were doing the dishes at the time. I don’t particularly like to dry dishes, since they’ll dry themselves if you just leave them alone, but Polgara seems to feel a kind of closeness in the business, and if it made her happy, I wasn’t going to disturb the uneasy peace between us by objecting.
She handed me the last dripping plate, dried her hands, and said, ‘I guess it’s time for me to start my education, father. The Master’s been harping on that for quite some time now.’
I almost dropped the plate. ‘Aldur talks to you, too?’ I asked her as calmly as I could.
She gave me a quizzical look. ‘Of course.’ Then the look became offensively pitying. ‘Oh, come now, father. Are you trying to say that you didn’t know?’
I know now that I shouldn’t have been so surprised, but I’d been raised in a society in which women were hardly more than servants. Poledra had been an entirely different matter, of course, but for some reason the implications of what Polgara had just told me were profoundly shocking. The fact that Aldur had come to her in the same way that he came to me was an indication of a certain status, and I simply wasn’t ready to accept the idea of a female disciple. I guess that sometimes I’m just a little too old-fashioned.
Fortunately, I had sense enough to keep those opinions to myself. I carefully finished drying the plate, put it on the shelf, and hung up the dishtowel.
‘Where’s the best place to begin?’ she asked me.
‘The same place I did, I suppose. Try not to be offended, Pol, but you’re going to have to learn how to read.’
‘Can’t you just tell me what I need to know?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know everything you’ll need to learn. Let’s go sit down, Pol, and I’ll try to explain it.’ I led her over to that part of the tower that I devoted to study. I’d never even considered building interior walls in the tower, so it was really just one big room with certain areas devoted to certain activities. We sat down at a large table littered with books and scrolls and obscure pieces of machinery. ‘In the first place,’ I began, ‘we’re all different.’
‘What an amazing thing. How is it that I never noticed that?’
‘I’m serious, Pol. This thing we call “talent” shows up in different ways in each of us. Beldin can do things I wouldn’t even attempt, and the others also have certain specialties. I can give you the basics, but then you’ll be on your own. Your talent’s going to develop along lines that’ll be dictated by the way your mind works. People babble about “sorcery”, but most of what they say is pure nonsense. All it is - all it can be - is thought, and each of us thinks differently. That’s what I meant when I said you’re on your own.’
‘Why do I need to read, then? If I’m so unique, what can your books tell me that’ll be of any use?’
‘It’s a short-cut, Pol. No matter how long you live, you’re not going to have time to rethink every thought that’s ever occurred to everyone who’s ever lived. That’s why we read - to save time.’
‘How will I know which thoughts are right and which ones aren’t?’
‘You won’t - at least not at first. You’ll get better at recognizing fallacies as you go along.’
‘But that’ll only be my opinion.’
‘That’s sort of the way it works, yes.’
‘What if I’m wrong?’
‘That’s the chance you have to take.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘There aren’t any absolutes, Pol. Life would be simpler if there were, but it doesn’t work that way.’
‘Now I’ve got you, old man.’ She said it with a certain disputational fervor. Polgara loves a good argument. ‘There are things we know for certain.’
‘Oh? Name one.’
‘The sun’s going to come up tomorrow morning.’
‘Why?’
‘It always has.’
‘Does that really mean that it always will?’
A faint look of consternation crossed her face. ‘It will, won’t it?’
‘Probably, but we can’t be absolutely certain. Once you’ve decided that something’s absolutely true, you’ve closed your mind on it, and a closed mind doesn’t go anywhere. Question everything, Pol. That’s what education’s all about.’
‘This might take longer than I thought.’
‘Probably so, yes. Shall we get started?’
Pol needs reasons for the things she does. Once she understood why reading was so important, she learned how in a surprisingly short time, and she got better at it as she went along. Perhaps it was something to do with her eyes. I can probably read faster than most because I can grasp the meaning of an entire line at a single glance. Pol picks up whole paragraphs in the same way. If you ever have occasion to watch my daughter reading, don’t be deceived by the way she seems to be idly leafing through a book. She isn’t. She’s reading every single word. She went through my entire library in slightly more than a year. Then she went after Beldin’s - which was a bit more challenging, since Beldin’s library at that time was probably the most extensive in the known world.
Unfortunately, Polgara argues with books - out loud. I was engaged in my own studies at the time, and it’s very hard to concentrate when a steady stream of ‘Nonsense!’ ‘Idiocy!’ and even ‘Balderdash!’ is echoing off the rafters.
‘Read to yourself!’ I shouted at her one evening.
‘But, father dear,’ she said sweetly, ‘you directed me to this book, so you must believe what it says. I’m just trying to open your mind to the possibility of an alternative opinion.’
We argued about philosophy, theology and natural science. We haggled about logic and law. We screamed at each other about ethics and comparative morality. I don’t know when I’ve ever had so much fun. She crowded me at every turn. When I tried to pull in the wisdom of ages to defend my position, she neatly punctured all my windy pomposity with needle-sharp logic. In theory, I was educating her, but I learned almost as much as she did in the process.
Every so often, the twins came by to complain. Pol and I are vocal people, and we tend to get louder and louder as an argument progresses. The twins didn’t really live all that far away, so they got to listen to our discussions - although they’d have preferred not to.
I was enormously pleased with her mind, but I was somewhat less pleased with the wide streak of vanity that was emerging in her. Polgara tends to be an extremist. She’d spent her young girlhood being militantly indifferent to her appearance. Now she went completely off the scale in the opposite direction. She absolutely had to bathe at least once a day - even in the winter time. I’ve always been of the opinion that bathing in the winter is bad for your health, but Pol scoffed at that notion and immersed herself up to the eyebrows in warm, soapy water at every opportunity. More to the point, though, she also suggested that I should bathe more frequently. I think she had some sort of mental calendar ticking away inside her head, and she could tell me - and frequently did - exactly how long it had been since my last bath. We used to have long talks about that.
So far as I was concerned, if she wanted to bathe five times a day, that was up to her. But she also insisted on washing her hair each time! Pol has a full head of hair, and our tower seemed to be filled with a perpetual miasma. Damp hair is not one of my favorite fragrances. It wasn’t so bad in the summer time when I could open the windows to air the place out, but in the winter I just had to live with it.
I think the last straw was when she moved Beldaran’s standing mirror into a position where she could watch herself reading. All right, Polgara had grown up to be at least as pretty as Beldaran, but really -
She did things to her eyebrows that looked terribly painful to me.
I know as a matter of fact that they were painful, since I woke up one morning with her leaning placidly over me plucking out mine - hair by hair. Then, still not content, she started on my ears. Neatness is nice, I guess, but I drew the line there. The hair in a man’s ears is there for a reason. It keeps out bugs, and it insulates the brain from the chill of winter. Polgara’s mother had never objected to the fact that I had furry ears. Of course, Poledra looked at the world differently.