Perhaps if I hadn’t been away during the final stages of the courtship, I might have been able to head things off, but now it was too late. It had reached the point where the bride and groom were secondary. The personal animosity between Alara and Olane had spread, and the local Sendars and the clansmen from Algaria were unspoken antagonists.
‘All right, gentlemen,’ I said to father and Darral one evening, ‘we’ve got a problem. I’ll keep Alara and Olane from each other’s throats, but you two are going to have to keep order in the streets – and in the local tavern. I don’t want any bloodshed before the ceremony. If these idiots want to beat each other into a large communal pulp, it’s your job to make sure that they do it after the wedding.’
‘I could talk with Knapp, the tavern owner,’ Darral said dubiously. ‘Maybe I could persuade him to close for renovations or something. He might agree. A general brawl would probably wreck his place of business.’
Father shook his head. ‘They’re bad-tempered enough already,’ he said. ‘Closing the tavern would just make it worse.’
‘Close the border, maybe?’ Darral was reaching for straws there. ‘Grettan might agree to that. Or maybe we could stampede their cows. That might keep the Algars busy for a while.’
‘I don’t really care how you do it, gentlemen,’ I told them, ‘but keep the peace. That’s an order, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Geran and Ildera seemed oblivious to the undeclared war between their mothers. They’d reached that happy stage of mindless obliviousness to everything going on around them that’s the usual prelude to a happy marriage. I’d seen it before, of course. That afternoon in Camaar sort of leaps to mind. It always does, since that was the day I lost my sister. Geran and Ildera didn’t go quite as far as Beldaran and Riva had gone, but they came close.
The antagonism between Alara and Olane didn’t find its outlet in open violence, but rather in competition. They tried to outdo each other in every single detail of the upcoming occasion. They bickered with false smiles frozen in place on their faces about which of them was going to provide the flowers. I headed that off by announcing that I’d take care of it, ‘since you ladies have so many other things to attend to. Besides, I can do it much less expensively than either of you can.’ I even fell back on thrift to fend off an incipient clash of arms.
Then Olane smugly showed off Ildera’s wedding gown, and Alara began to chew on her own liver over that. She tore Annath apart and finally found an out of date and ill fitting doublet for Geran to wear at the ceremony. The doublet was of a faded purple, and it really didn’t, look all that nice, but she crammed her reluctant son into it and then paraded him in front of Olane with a spiteful little smile on her face. I assessed the impact of the dress and the doublet and silently ruled that clash to be a draw. Draws didn’t set too well with the competitors, though. The wedding supper, jointly prepared, was a clear win for Olane. She did have access to unlimited beef, after all. Alara took the one about the officiating priest, however. Olane’s champion was the clan’s priest of Belar, but Alara’s was the local Sendarian priest. Sendars are ecumenical to a fault, so Alara’s priest could invoke the blessing of all seven Gods. I kept my mouth shut about UL, fearing that Alara might postpone the wedding until she could make contact with the Gorim of Ulgo. Alara and Olane bickered back and forth, their faces both locked in those icy smiles that absolutely reeked of false politeness and were meant to conceal their real feelings but didn’t even come close to succeeding. Spurious reasoning about the two priests flowed back and forth until we were all knee-deep in logical fallacies. ‘Both of them!’ I decided finally, just to put an end to it.
‘I didn’t quite follow that, Pol,’ Alara said sweetly.
‘Both priests will officiate.’
‘But–’
‘No buts. Both priests, ladies, and that’s the end of this.’ I had to do that fairly often during that undeclared war.
When the wedding day finally arrived, I was exhausted. If I could just survive this one day, I was definitely going to give myself a vacation. I felt that if I heard, ‘But, Olane, dear–’ or ‘But, Alara, sweetie–’ one more time, I’d just scream.
The ceremony, since there were two priests in contention, dragged on for two hours, and the wedding guests, who were really looking forward to the post-ceremonial festivities, grew restive.
Ildera was stunningly beautiful, and Geran so handsome that the village girls of Annath were almost audibly gnashing their teeth over the fact that they’d let him get away.
I largely ignored the wedding sermons, but I did choke just a bit when the Sendarian priest invoked the blessing of Torak on the marriage. This was most definitely the wrong wedding for that.
Then the ceremony was finally over, and Geran and Ildera were man and wife. They endured the wedding supper, obviously impatient to go to the neat stone cottage Geran and his father had built at the south end of Annath’s single street. They definitely had plans for the evening. Father, Darral, and Grettan kept the peace during the supper, but that was about as far as the pacification went. We all trooped down that long street, accompanying the happy couple home, and then I went back to Darral’s house and fell into bed. I was absolutely exhausted.
The citizens of Annath and the Algar clansmen were all very civilized, of course, so the fights didn’t start until after the sun went down.
Chapter 40
I spoke with father the next morning, and he entertained me with a humorous description of the post-wedding festivities. I always take father’s accounts of such events with a large grain of salt, since father has a deep-seated need for artful embellishment.
‘Broke the priest’s jaw?’ I exclaimed at one point.
‘As neatly as you’d snap a twig,’ father smirked. ‘Caught him right on the point of the chin with his fist. Of course, the priest wasn’t expecting it. Over in Algaria, people don’t hit the priests of Belar. He won’t be giving any of those long-winded sermons of his for a while – at least not until his jaw heals. Then, just after that, Knapp the tavern keeper was trying to get everybody to take the fight outside, and some rascal bonked him on top of the head with a stool.’
‘Bonked?’
‘That’s the sound it made, Pol – “Bonk!” Just like that. Knapp went down like a poled ox, and the revelers continued to break up his tavern.’