Father accepted the invitation a bit too quickly. ‘We don’t really have much choice, Pol,’ he muttered to me as we packed our things in bundles to tie to our saddles.
I decided not make an issue of it, but we did in fact have a choice – the same choice we’d had since we left Yar Nadrak. Either my father was choosing to ignore it, or he was being encouraged to forget it. I spent the winter trying to figure out which.
The old fellow never did tell us what his name was. For all I could tell, he’d forgotten it. He told us that he’d spent his life up in these mountains looking for gold, but he didn’t seem particularly obsessed by it. He just liked the mountains.
His cave was really fairly comfortable. It was quite large, and he kept it neat and orderly. When we entered through the narrow opening, he stirred up his fire and then showed us where to put our horses. His donkey was there, and after a little while, the donkey and our horses became friends. The donkey, however, seemed more like a dog than a beast of burden. The old gold-hunter allowed – or encouraged – him to roam at will through the cave. That caused me a number of problems that winter. The donkey was a curious little beast, and he was forever getting in my way. He absolutely had to see what I was doing. I think he liked me, because he was continually nuzzling me or gently butting me with his head. He loved to have his ears rubbed. I rather liked him, but I didn’t like being awakened every morning by his snuffling at my neck. What bothered me the most, however, was his stubborn insistence on watching me while I bathed. I knew it was absurd, but his watching always made me blush for some reason.
Father and the old man spent the winter talking without really saying anything. They obviously liked each other, though they really didn’t have much in common. After a while, I began to get a strong odor of tampering here. I don’t think it was anything particularly earth-shaking, but for some obscure reason father and I were supposed to spend some time with this old fellow. The thing that struck me the most about him was the fact that there was quite probably nobody in the entire world more free than this solitary old man in the mountains.
Every now and then when my life has become hectic, I’ll think back to that snowy winter, and a great peace seems to descend on me. Maybe that was the reason for our stay. It has helped me retain my sanity any number of times.
Spring finally came to the mountains, and father and I resumed our journey. ‘Did that make any sense to you, father?’ I asked when we were a few miles up the trail.
‘What was that, Pol?’ he asked, his face aglow with pleasant incomprehension.
I gave up. Quite obviously he hadn’t the faintest idea of what I was talking about. ‘Never mind,’ I sighed.
We reached Boktor about a week later, and the city still had a frightened, wary air about it. A pestilence had swept the country the preceding summer – one of those virulent diseases that strikes without warning, kills off about a third of the population, and then disappears as quickly as it had come. Had I not been so intent on returning to Annath, I might have investigated the disease in hopes of finding some remedy. The majority of humanity is carried off by one disease or another, and as a physician I find that offensive. Philosophically, however, I’m forced to admit its practicality. In the light of human fertility, there almost has to be some means of controlling the population; and in the long run, disease is more humane than war or starvation.
My, isn’t that gloomy?
Anyway, this particular plague had carried off large numbers of Drasnians, and among them had been the king. Father and I stayed long enough to attend the coronation of Crown Prince Rhodar. I questioned the chubby king-to-be rather obliquely and was pleased to discover that he had, in fact, been visited by a scruffy-looking young Nadrak named Yarblek.
After Rhodar’s coronation, father made an independent decision that I really didn’t like. He sold our horses and bought a rowboat. ‘We’ll go on down through the fens,’ he said in that irritatingly imperial tone he sometimes assumes.
‘We’ll do what?’
I think my tone might have conveyed my feelings about that decision. ‘There are a lot of people traveling the Great North Road this time of year, Pol,’ he explained defensively, ‘and there might be some unfriendly eyes concealed in that crowd.’ He still refused to even consider that most logical alternative. Even though it was spring and the waterfowl were migrating, the sky wasn’t really all that crowded.
And so he poled us down into that reeking swamp. The mosquitoes were very happy to see us, I’m sure, and they also butted their heads against us in greeting. My disposition turned sour after the first mile.
The mosquitoes weren’t the only creatures inhabiting the swamps, though. The turtles watched us glide by with dull-eyed reptilian indifference, but the fenlings, those small aquatic animals distantly related to otters, frolicked and played around our boat, and their squeaky chittering was almost like giggling. Evidently, the fenlings found the idea of humans stupid enough to deliberately come into the fens vastly amusing.
It was raining when father poled us around a bend in the slow-moving, meandering stream we were following through the reeds, and we caught sight of the neat, thatch roofed cottage that was the home of Vordai, the witch of the fens.
Stories about Vordai had been surfacing in all manner of places for about three centuries, wild exaggerations as it turned out. Witches deal with spirits – and with the weather, of course. We don’t do things like that. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that witches deal with specifics, and we deal with generalities. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but isn’t almost everything?
The fenlings had alerted Vordai to our approach, and she was waiting in her doorway as father drove the nose of our boat up on to the muddy shore of her tree-covered little island. Her greeting wasn’t exactly cordial. ‘You might as well come inside,’ she said without much emotion – ‘at least until the rain lets up.’
Father and I got out of our boat and went up the path to her door. ‘So you’re Vordai,’ I said to the aged but still beautiful woman in the doorway.
‘And you would be Polgara,’ she replied.
‘You two know each other?’ Father sounded surprised.
‘By reputation, Old Wolf,’ I told him. ‘Vordai here is the one they call “the witch of the fens”. She’s been outcast, and this is the only place in Drasnia where she’s really safe.’