Good Principles
A/N: I just really wanted to have a go at Durnik's POV. I mean, on the outside he's a controlled, sweet but proper sort of man. But the poor thing goes through so much in The Belgariad, I thought he deserved a bit of a first person treatment.
Rating: Completely innocent. G all the way.
Disclaimer: Yeah, so if they were mine, they would've had more page time.
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They say she's the most intelligent woman in the world. Certainly, I've never met anyone I'd consider smarter. But then lately I've been thinking over it. From the rather less exaggerated versions of Alorn legend, she should be around (Gods help me) three thousand years old. Maybe four, I don't know. Not that I accept that ridiculousness, of course not. But just for the sake of argument…
If you were going to live for an obscenely long time, what would you do? Sit about, making inane chatter with generations of barmen and drunks. Perhaps travel the world several hundred times. Have an unbelievable number of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on. Maybe write a diary, a diary kept in a gigantic room, lined with shelving by year, century, millennium. Just a thought.
All of which leads me to think that despite the fact that Mistress Pol has a very quick mind, it must have helped just a bit to have all those spare moments to swot up on a subject of your choice. Which is a pretty big advantage on her side.
Not that there are sides here. Don't get me wrong. We're extremely lucky right now to be looked after by Mistress Pol. In fact, we'd most likely be dead otherwise. I just meant for me personally.
And here I am again. I am so sick of these pointless little conversations that I have with myself, that I've been having since a good fifteen years ago when an incredibly angry woman stormed onto the farm, armed with a temper and a baby and followed by a goat, who now that I think about it, never actually died. Not that I should be surprised. Apparently I'm supposed to take all this magic and fantasy and sorcery the way I'd take shoeing a stock horse. With care and confidence.
Because that's been working well for me. Oh, I'm very confident. What do you mean my entire idea of reality has shattered around me? I hadn't noticed. But nasty moods aside, and I do apologize for this one, I have slowly been adjusting. I still adhere to my principle: just don't think about it. And especially, don't try to talk about it. Of course, I get thwarted every so often.
First there's Garion. He enjoys publicly voicing all his various fears, concerns, issues. And I care too much for the boy to distance myself from him. He needs a friend. Which brings me to Ce'Nedra, who delights in tormenting Garion with her trivialities and me with her 'questions'. But they're not really questions; more like the efforts of an adolescent to be invited into the circle of adulthood. Mistress Pol always manages to turn these back onto the child in some clever and competent way. I'm left floundering.
Obviously, there's Mister Wolf (who by now I should really be calling Belgarath) and his exhibitions. It's hard to ignore something that's right in front of you. And the bad guys. In whatever shape or form. Because they're rarely your run of the mill assassins.
But the worst one is Mistress Pol. At first it was just in the same way as Mister Wolf, the odd exhibition. But yesterday, after the children had cleared away the pots and gone with Silk for more water and firewood, she pulled me aside. I was reshaping and sharpening some blades for Silk and Barak and was off in my own space, a quiet, expansive nothingness, where I cease to worry for a time.
And then I looked up to see her sitting down beside me.
I will never forget the shock of anxiety that coursed through me. I had never before known that I was not good with proximity. Not before I'd met Mistress Pol.
"How's it going?" She asked quietly, watching as I continued my work. It has been uncommon to just talk to each other in the last few months and I was almost waiting for her to tell me that we were going to have to travel through the night or some such thing.
"Fine. Almost finished," I replied shortly.
"You never seem more relaxed than when you're working with metal, or fixing something."
"It's familiar. Comforting, I suppose." I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. I was practically waiting for a crisp announcement of our situation.
"It's something you understand, that you can master," she replied, as though adding rather than correcting. But she was right and I stopped then to look at her properly.
Her attention was directly on me, not in the multi-tasking way she usually spoke as she kept an eye on the children or the countryside. Her long hair was catching shimmers of light from the fire and fell about her shoulders easily. She had taken to tying it back, keeping it out of the way. The sudden change provoked a smile in me, mutinously.
"What?" She asked in response.
All I could do was shake my head, pretend I hadn't been smiling about her hair. There was nothing logical or sensible in smiling about a person's hair and it had disquieted me.
"I thought you might want to talk about things, while we have the time," she continued, although her deep and unnervingly knowing eyes seemed to have caught me at my folly.
"Oh? What things, Mistress Pol?"
"You've been thrown into an environment, into a world, that is foreign to you. Is that fair?"
"Yes, that's fair." Were we really about to have the yes, I'm a sorceress conversation I'd avoided for so long?
"It must be difficult to come to terms with some of the things you've seen and heard."
"I suppose everybody comes of age eventually," I murmured, quite in spite of myself.
"Durnik, that's unkind. This is not your fault," she retorted quickly, one hand coming to rest on my arm. I felt my eyes wandering toward her hand. I picked a spot in the dirt instead, and stared furiously at that.
"I had no idea of my own ignorance," I continued, trying not to sound too self-loathing. After all, she was right (again); it wasn't my fault.
"I was rather hoping we weren't going to have to do this," she sighed, squeezing my arm.
My eyes were fixed in the back of her pale, slender hand. Gods help me, this was not going well.
"Mistress Pol?"
"This self-flagellation. I've just been through 'why me?' with Garion. You have never been an ignorant man, Durnik, and there's no use pretending otherwise. Things have changed, but you haven't."
What could I possibly say to that? Of course I hadn't changed; she'd changed.
"Durnik, do you remember the time I asked you to watch Garion for me while I reset that boy Oldeg's legs?"
That caught me off guard and I found my thoughts drifting back. Oldeg was a farmhand back at Faldor's, but he'd been trampled in an accident harvesting. Garion would only have been four or five. Mistress Pol had suddenly appeared in the field with the tiny child firmly in tow and taken charge. While the mangled teenager had been lifted back to her rooms, the infant's soft little hand had crept into mine.
"Keep him out of trouble for a bit, would you?" Was exactly what she asked. I have no idea why I still remember the moment, except that she had not even cast a glance about. She'd come straight to me, her face firmly stating business but her eyes pleading.
I hate that I don't forget these things.
All I said was: "Yes. It was his own fault."
"Boys that young should be tending goats and carrots, not oxen and machinery," Mistress Pol replied.
"Actually I've heard that carrots can cause tremendous difficulty to the unpracticed hand," I said wryly.
I was surprised to hear her laugh.
"What did you do with Garion?"
"I took him back to the smithy. As I recall, I wanted to get my work done so I could start repairs on the harvester that Oldeg crashed."
"And what did Garion do?"
I bit my lip, vaguely registering that I was still staring most helplessly at her hand. It didn't matter; she would already have noticed. I do get terribly embarrassed but I've long since given in to professing disinformation.
"He played with some horseshoes that I'd laid out for him. They were all different sizes. He tried to put them in order and made patterns in the dirt. I'm afraid he was none too clean by the time I delivered him back."
"You put a four year old boy in a smithy?"
I paused. "Ah, yes?"
"And got along with your work?"
"Yes." I must admit that at that point I was only just beginning to see where we were going.
"So what's changed? Durnik, no matter what I throw at you, you have an ability to put it in place in your life as it is. You make pragmatic decisions based on a need to get on with things. So I'm figuring that you're having problems with the logic of this now."
"Oh?" I suddenly thought; at least someone has it figured out.
"Am I wrong?"
I finally met her eyes again. She was looking slightly annoyed. Annoyed at having to talk to me as though I were Garion's age.
"If there's a logic to what you do I haven't found it."
"Does it help to know that it's logical to me?"
"Not really."
"Why not?"
Bloody yes, I'm a sorceress conversation. There was no rational way to approach it. How to explain that I couldn't see how sorcery worked, that I couldn't fathom immortality, that I couldn't believe that Mistress Pol was any older than myself.
So I did the only thing I could. I shrugged pointlessly.
She looked less annoyed then.
"Good, then stop trying to work it out. Just let it be. It doesn't change anything."
"You're not the person I met fifteen years ago," I muttered. Immediately after that I rediscovered my beloved spot of dirt.
"For that matter, you're not the person I met fifteen years ago either," Mistress Pol retorted abruptly.
A moment later Mister Wolf walked over to retrieve Mistress Pol and they wandered off together, arm in arm. She'd squeezed my arm again in goodbye. It was an open ended, unsatisfactory sort of conversation, resulting in nothing but the reversal of all my good principles. Not only had I thought about it, I'd talked about it too.
I'm pretty sure Mistress Pol wasn't entirely pleased with the direction of our little chat either. She's been busy trying to keep us all sane lately and I think I was more challenging than I ought to have been. This bitterness is somehow imperturbable. It wreaks havoc wherever it goes. Leaving me as the scapegoat.
And, naturally, I am now utterly incapable of doing anything but think about the conversation, about the hand on my arm, about the impossibility of everything.
A nice simple farm with a nice simple smithy please.
So I'm doing the least simple thing possible. There's some logic for you.
I've ridden up next to Mistress Pol and I'm reining in beside her. Ce'Nedra has slipped ahead in furthering one of her endless plots of conniving with Mister Wolf, so we are left alone.
She glances over at me, smiles. She still looks a little frosty. Mistress Pol has never been any good at letting go of her annoyances. She always harbours grudges, not that I've ever had to suffer under any of them.
"Good morning, Mistress Pol," I begin aimlessly, unsure of what I'm doing and acutely aware that I'd be digging my own hole if I was on ground level.
She raises an eyebrow in question.
"I wanted to apologize, Mistress Pol. I wasn't thinking last night and I realize that you were only trying to help."
She reins her horse back and we fall behind the group. I notice Silk's watchful gaze fix on us momentarily before tactfully skitting off, hawklike.
"There's no need to apologize, Durnik," she replies easily, and I know that she isn't cross with me, not any more.
"No, I have been ungrateful. I have been given the chance to be part of something far greater than me and I let myself get caught up in personal problems."
She smiles again, this time brilliantly, and I know that I am staring again.
"I'm flattered," she tells me softly, her eyes meeting mine. It's painful, impossible to escape, and for a good few moments I know that she sees past all my petty inhibitions to my greatest fear. That I really don't know, and never could know, her at all. And that is tremendously personal.
Finally she releases my eyes, nodding toward the group.
"Come on, Durnik, they're leaving us behind."
And we nudge our horses forward, the wind catching at us, the sun on our shoulders, in her hair.
It makes me smile.
All done! Please tell me what you think, even if it was the biggest waste of your spare time in your life. Who knows, you may incense me enough to make me write more often…