‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just move on? Go to Sulturn, maybe? – or Darine?’
‘Are you trying to get rid of me, Hattan?’
‘Of course not. We all love you, Pol, but we do have to put the safety of the children first.’
There’s an easier way to take care of it,’ I told him. ‘Since I’m so old now, I’ll just become a recluse and stay in the house. We old people do that fairly often, you know.’
‘I don’t want to imprison you, Pol.’
‘You aren’t, Hattan. Actually, I rather like the idea. It’ll give me a chance to catch up on my reading. I’ll still be right here in the event of an emergency, and I won’t have to endure all those endless hours of mindless gossiping.’
‘Oh, one other thing – before I forget,’ he added. ‘How does the idea of apprenticing Davon to a tanner strike you?’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I have to live in the same house with him, Hattan, and tanners as a group tend to be a little fragrant.’
‘Not if they bathe regularly – with good strong soap. Even a nobleman starts to get strong on the downwind side if he only takes one bath a year.’
‘Why a tanner? Why not a barrel-maker?’
‘It’s a logical extension of my own business, Pol. I’ve got access to an almost unlimited supply of cow-hides, and I can get them for pennies. If Davon learns how to tan those hides, he can sell the leather at a handsome profit.’
‘A little empire building there, Hattan?’ I teased. ‘You want to use the whole cow, don’t you? What do you plan to do with the hooves and horns?’
‘I could always build a glue factory, I suppose. Thanks for the idea, Pol. It hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘You’re serious!’
‘I’m just taking care of my family, Pol. I’m going to leave them a prosperous business when Belar calls me home.’
‘I think you’ve been in Sendaria too long, Hattan. Why don’t you take a year off and go back to Algaria – herd cows or breed horses or something?’
‘I’ve already looked into that, Pol. I’m currently negotiating for several hundred acres of good pasture land. I know Sendars very well by now. Algars like horses that run fast, but Sendars prefer more sensible animals. It’s a little hard to plow a field at a dead run.’
‘Are you certain that there’s not a strain of Tolnedran in your background, Hattan? Is profit the only thing you can think about?’
He shrugged. ‘Actually, I get bored, Pol. Once everything connected with a business venture gets to be a habit, I start looking around for new challenges. I can’t help it if they all end up making money. I know a tanner named Alnik who’s getting along in years and whose son isn’t really interested in the family business. I’ll talk with him, and once Davon’s learned the trade, we’ll buy Alnik out and set our boy up in business for himself. Trust me, Pol. This is all going to work out just fine.’
‘I thought our whole idea was to be inconspicuous, Hattan. I’d hardly call the richest family in southeastern Sendaria inconspicuous.’
‘I think you’re missing the point, Pol. The line you’re protecting will be inconspicuous, because they’ll seem to descend from me. After a few generations, nobody’ll even think to ask about the other side of their heritage. They’ll be a fixture – an institution – with ho apparent connection to the Isle of the Winds. You can’t get much more invisible than that, can you?’
Once again Hattan had startled me with his uncommon shrewdness. He’d reminded me that someone can be just as invisible by standing still as he can by running away and hiding. I learned a great deal about being ordinary from my Algarian friend. My own background had been anything but ordinary. I’d been ‘Polgara the Sorceress’ and ‘The Duchess of Erat’, and those positions had been very visible. Now I was going to learn how to be the great-aunt of the village tanner – even though Muros wasn’t exactly a village. Little by little, I’d fade into the background, and that suited our purposes perfectly. Once we’d polished this deception, no Murgo – or Grolim – could ever find us.
Davon was a good boy, so he didn’t object to his apprenticeship – at least not openly. By the time he was eighteen, he was a master tanner, and his employer’s establishment was producing the finest leather in all of Sendaria.
Our extended family had a feast on Erastide that year, and I officiated in the kitchen, naturally. After we’d all eaten more than was really good for us, Davon leaned back in his chair. ‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ he told the rest of us. ‘If we’re going to buy Alnik’s business, we’ll be producing most of the leather in this part of Sendaria. What if we were to hire some young cobblers who were just getting started? We could attach a work-shop to the tannery and manufacture shoes.’
‘You can’t really expect to make money that way, Davon,’ Geran objected. ‘Shoes have to be fitted to the feet of the one who’s going to wear them.’
‘I’ve done a little measuring, father,’ Davon disagreed. He laughed sheepishly. ‘People think I’m crazy because I always want to measure their feet I’m getting better at it, though. I can guess the length of a man’s foot down to a quarter of an inch now. Your feet are eight and a half inches long, by the way. Children’s feet – and women’s – are smaller, but there are only so many lengths of feet in all of Muros. Nobody’s got three-inch feet, and nobody’s got nineteen-inch ones. If our cobblers turn out shoes in all the more common lengths, we’ll find people who can wear them. I can almost guarantee that.’
‘Go ahead and smirk, Hattan,’ I said to my friend.
‘About what, Pol?’
‘You’ve succeeded in corrupting another generation, haven’t you?’
‘Would I do that, Pol?’ he asked innocently.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I think you would.’
Hattan and I pooled some of our money the following spring, we bought out Alnik the tanner, and then turned the tannery over to Davon, who immediately started manufacturing solid, sensible shoes that were very popular among farmers. People who wanted fancy shoes continued to have them made by traditional cobblers, but ordinary working people began to patronize the shop that was the end of a long line of processes. Raw hides went in one end of Davon’s tannery, and work shoes came out the other. The people of Muros were beginning to notice this family. Such Angaraks as passed through, however, paid almost no attention to it – unless they wanted to buy cows or shoes.