But one of the more sober men standing just behind him had gone very pale. ‘Your Majesty!’ he said to his king in strangled tones, ‘that’s Polgara the Sorceress!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Alreg snapped. “There’s no such person!’
‘Look at her, your Majesty! Look at that white streak in her hair! That’s Polgara, daughter of Holy Belgarath! She can turn you into a toad if she feels like it!’
‘I don’t believe in any of that nonsense,’ Alreg scoffed.
‘I think you’re about to have a religious conversion, Alreg,’ I told him.
That ‘turn him into a toad’ business had been floating around for eons, you know, and most of the time it’s been nothing more than a tired old joke. What would be the point of doing something like that? This time, however, the notion had been planted at just the right moment. I was going to have to do something to Alreg to get his attention, and, although the sober Cherek noble who’d recognized me had probably just thrown the expression out at random, it had planted the idea, and the more I thought about it, the more the notion appealed to me. For once, an absolute absurdity would serve my purpose as well or better than anything else.
I wanted to make the entire process visible, so this time I did it in a slightly different way. Rather than simply injecting Alreg into the image of a toad, I altered his features one by one. It occurred to me that I didn’t really need the whole toad – just its head and feet. I could leave the rest of Alreg intact.
Alreg’s head slowly began to change shape, flattening out until it had a reptilian cast. His eyes were now at the top of his head, and they began to bulge upward. Since his eyes were already bulging anyway, that part wasn’t too hard. Then I dissolved his beard and extended the corners of his mouth.
‘No!’ It came out of that lipless mouth in kind of a squeaky croak. I’d decided that it might be useful if he could still talk. Then I altered his hands and feet into the flipper-like appendages of the amphibian. I slightly modified his hips, shoulders, knees, and elbows, and with shrill, pathetic croaks, the King of Cherek sank down into that frog-like crouch on the seat of his throne. Then I added the warts.
I hadn’t altered Alreg’s size, nor tampered in any way with his clothing, so there was a man-sized toad in a mail-shirt and with a sword belted at its thick waist crouched bug-eyed on the royal throne, croaking in a shrill kind of panic.
The entire process had taken several minutes, and since Alreg’s throne stood upon a dais, it had been visible to every Cherek, drunk or sober, in the entire hall.
I sensed one of the bearded Chereks behind me reaching for his sword. When he grasped what he thought was his sword-hilt, though, he wrapped his hand firmly about the head and neck of a large, angry snake instead. ‘Don’t do that any more,’. I told him, without bothering to look around. ‘You’d better tell your retainers here to behave themselves, Alreg,’ I suggested to the enthroned toad. That’s unless you have replacements handy. My father doesn’t want me to kill people, but I think I can get around that. I’ll just bury them without bothering to kill them first. They’ll probably die of natural causes – after a while – so father won’t have any cause for complaint, now will he?’
‘All right!’ the warty creature on the throne of Cherek squealed. ‘I’ll do anything you say! Please, Polgara! Please! Change me back!’
‘Are you sure, Alreg?’ I asked pleasantly. ‘You look rather imposing this way. Think of how proud it’ll make all your warriors to tell the entire world that they’re ruled by a toad. Besides, you’ve got all these lazy, bearded louts lounging around drinking beer. You could put them all to work catching flies for you to eat. Wouldn’t a nice fat fly taste delicious about now?’
I think his mind started to slip about then, because the squalling intensified and he bounded off his throne and began to hop around in circles.
I changed him back to his own form with a single thought, but he was evidently not aware of it because he continued to hop and squeal. His warriors all shrank back from him with looks of panic and revulsion on their faces.
‘Oh, do get up, Alreg!’ I told him. ‘You look positively ridiculous doing that.’
He stood up, trembling violently, and stumbled back to his throne. He fell into it, staring at me in sheer terror.
‘Now, then,’ I said sternly, ‘Sendaria’s under my protection, so get your people out of there and bring them back here where they belong.’
‘We’re following Belar’s commands, Polgara,’ he protested.
‘No, Alreg, you’re not. Actually, you’re following the orders of the Bear-Cult. If you want to jump to the tune of a group of feeble-minded religious fanatics, that’s up to you, but get out of Sendaria. You can’t even begin to imagine just how nasty things are going to get if you don’t.’
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ a thin, bearded Cherek, his eyes aflame with the burning light of religion, declared fervently, ‘but I’m not going to take orders from a mere woman!’
‘In point of fact, old boy, I’m not a mere anything.’
‘I am an armed Cherek!’ he almost screamed. ‘I fear nothing!’
I made a small gesture, and his gleaming mail-shirt and his half-drawn sword rather quickly stopped gleaming and became dull red instead. Then they began to crumble, showering down onto the floor in a cascade of powdery rust. ‘Don’t you find that sort of disarming?’ I suggested. ‘Now that you’re no longer an armed Cherek, aren’t you just the teensiest bit afraid?’ Then I grew tired of all their foolishness. ‘ENOUGH!’ I thundered. ‘Get out of Sendaria, Alreg, or I’ll tow the Cherek peninsula out to sea and sink it. Then you can try being the king of the fish for a while. Now call your people home!’
It wasn’t the most diplomatic way to bring the Chereks into line, but the smug chauvinism of Alreg’s court had irritated me. ‘Mere Woman’ indeed! Just the sound of it still makes my blood boil!
There was one beneficial side effect to my little visit to Val Alorn, incidentally. After enduring a few months of hysterical protests from discontented Bear-Cultists, Alreg moved decisively to suppress the cult once again. I’ve noticed that the Bear-Cult has to be put down every fifty years or so in the Alorn kingdoms.
In the century or so that followed, I receded further and further back into the pages of dusty old history books, and I seldom had occasion to visit my manor house on Lake Erat. The last of my caretakers there died, and I saw no reason to replace him. I still loved the house, though, and the notion of having it casually looted and burned didn’t sit well with me, so early one spring I crossed the Sendarian Mountains to take steps to protect it I wandered through the dusty rooms immersed in nostalgic melancholy. So much had happened here that had been central to my life. The ghosts of Killane and Ontrose seemed to accompany me down every dusty corridor, and the echoes of long ago conversations seemed to still reverberate through almost every room I entered. Erat had gone back to being Sendaria, and my duchy had shrunk down to this single lonely house.