Beldaran and I had been born in midwinter, and uncle Beldin had moved us to his own tower not long afterward, and it was in that tower that we spent our childhood. It was about midsummer of our first year when father finally returned to the Vale. Beldaran and I were only about six months old at the time, but we both recognized him immediately. Mother’s thought had placed his image in our minds before we were ever born. The memory of mother’s anger was still very strong in my mind when Beldin lifted me from my cradle and handed me to the vagabond who’d sired me. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him, to be honest about it, but that prejudice may have been the result of mother’s bitterness about the way he’d deserted her. Then he laid his hand on my head in some ancient ritual of benediction, and the rest of my mind suddenly came awake as his thought came flooding in on me. I could feel the power coming from his hand, and I seized it eagerly. This was why I’d been separated from Beldaran! At last I realized the significance of that separation. She was to be the vessel of love; I was to be the vessel of power!
The mind is limitless in certain ways, and so my father was probably unaware of just how much I took from him in that single instant when his hand touched my head. I’m fairly sure that he still doesn’t fully understand just exactly what passed from him to me in that instant What I took from him in no way diminished him, but it increased me a hundred-fold.
Then he took up Beldaran, and my fury also increased a hundred-fold. How dared this traitor touch my sister? Father and I were not getting off to a good start.
And then came the time of his madness. I was still not familiar enough with human speech to fully understand what uncle Beldin told him that drove him to that madness, but mother’s thought assured me that he’d survive it – eventually.
Looking back now, I realize that it was absolutely essential for mother and father to be separated. I didn’t understand at the time, but mother’s thought had taught me that acceptance is more important than understanding.
During the time of my father’s insanity, my uncles frequently took my sister to visit him, and that didn’t improve my opinion of him. He became in my eyes a usurper, a vile man out to steal Beldaran’s affection away from me. Jealousy isn’t a particularly attractive emotion, even though it’s very natural in children, so I won’t dwell here on exactly how I felt each time my uncles took Beldaran away from me to visit that frothing madman chained to his bed in that tower of his. I remember, though, that I protested vociferously – at the top of my lungs – whenever they took Beldaran away.
And that was when Beldin introduced me to ‘the puzzle’. I’ve always thought of it as that. In a peculiar sort of way ‘the puzzle’ almost came to take on a life of its own for me. I can’t be entirely certain how Beldin managed it, but ‘the puzzle’ was a gnarled and twisted root of some low-growing shrub – heather, perhaps – and each time I took it up to study it, it seemed to change. I could quite clearly see one end of it, but I could never find the other. I think that ‘the puzzle’ helped to shape my conception of the world and of life itself. We know where one end is – the beginning – but we can never quite see the other. It provided me with endless hours of entertainment, though, and that gave uncle Beldin a chance to get some rest.
I was studying ‘the puzzle’ when father came to uncle Beldin’s tower to say his goodbyes. Beldaran and I were perhaps a year and a half old – or maybe a little younger – when he came to the tower and kissed Beldaran. I felt that usual surge of jealousy, but I kept my eyes firmly fixed on ‘the puzzle’, hoping he’d go away.
And then he picked me up, tearing my attention away from what I was working on. I tried to get away from him, but he was stronger than I was. I was hardly more than a baby, after all, although I felt much older. ‘Stop that,’ he told me, and his tone seemed irritable. ‘You may not care much for the idea, Pol, but I’m your father, and you’re stuck with me.’ And then he kissed me, which he’d never done before. For a moment – only a moment – I felt his pain, and my heart softened toward him.
‘No,’ mother’s thought came to me, ‘not yet.’ At the time, I thought it was because she was still very angry with him and that I was to be the vessel of her anger. I know now I was mistaken. Wolves simply don’t waste time being angry. My father’s remorse and sorrow had not yet run their course, and the Master still had many tasks for him. Until he had expiated what he felt to be his guilt, he’d be incapable of those tasks. My misunderstanding of mother’s meaning led me to do something I probably shouldn’t have done. I struck out at him with ‘the puzzle’.
‘Spirited, isn’t she?’ he murmured to uncle Beldin. Then he put me down, gave me a little pat on the bottom, which I scarcely felt, and told me to mind my manners.
I certainly wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of thinking that his chastisement in any way had made me change my opinion of him, so I turned, still holding ‘the puzzle’ like a club, and glared at him.
‘Be well, Polgara,’ he told me in the gentlest way imaginable. ‘Now go play.’
He probably still doesn’t realize it, but I almost loved him in that single instant – almost, but not quite. The love came later, and it took years.
It was not long after that that he turned and left the Vale, and I didn’t see him again for quite a number of years.
Chapter 2
Nothing that ever happens is so unimportant that it doesn’t change things, and father’s intrusion into our lives could hardly be called unimportant. This time the change was in my sister Beldaran, and I didn’t like it. Until my father returned from his excursion to Mallorea, Beldaran was almost exclusively mine. Father’s return altered that. Now her thoughts, which had previously been devoted to me, became divided. She thought often of that beer-soaked old rogue, and I resented it bitterly.
Beldaran, even when we were hardly more than babies, was obsessed with tidiness, and my aggressive indifference to my appearance upset her greatly.
‘Can’t you at least comb your hair, Pol?’ she demanded one evening, speaking in ‘twin’, a private language that had grown quite naturally between us almost from the time we were in the cradle.
‘What for? It’s just a waste of time.’
‘You look awful.’
‘Who cares what I look like?’