DAVID AND LEIGH

EDDINGS

Belgarath the Sorcerer

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition 2006

Previous Voyager paperback edition 1996, reprinted 15 times

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1995

Copyright © David and Leigh Eddings 1995

David and Leigh Eddings assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007217090

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2015 ISBN: 9780007368006

Version: 2018-11-09

Map

Dedication

FOR OWEN

We have all been at this since April of 1982.

Your friendship, guidance and faith in us

has been greatly cherished.

One more to go!

LEIGH AND DAVID

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Dedication

Prologue

Part One: The Vale

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two: The Apostate

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Three: The Time of Woe

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Part Four: Polgara

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part Five: The Secret

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Part Six: Garion

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Prologue

It was well past midnight and very cold. The moon had risen, and her pale light made the frost crystals lying in the snow sparkle like carelessly strewn diamonds. In a peculiar way it seemed to Garion almost as if the snow-covered earth were reflecting the starry sky overhead.

‘I think they’re gone now,’ Durnik said, peering upward. His breath steamed in the icy, dead-calm air. ‘I can’t see that rainbow any more.’

‘Rainbow?’ Belgarath asked, sounding slightly amused.

‘You know what I mean. Each of them has a different-colored light. Aldur’s is blue, Issa’s is green, Chaldan’s is red, and the others all have different colors. Is there some significance to that?’

‘It’s probably a reflection of their different personalities,’ Belgarath replied. ‘I can’t be entirely positive, though. My Master and I never got around to discussing it.’ He stamped his feet in the snow. ‘Why don’t we go back?’ he suggested. ‘It’s really cold out here.’

They turned and started back down the hill toward the cottage, their feet crunching in the frozen snow. The farmstead at the foot of the hill looked warm and comforting. The thatched roof of the cottage was thick with snow, and the icicles hanging from the eaves glittered in the moonlight. The outbuildings Durnik had constructed were dark, but the windows of the cottage were all aglow with golden lamplight that spread softly out over the mounded snow in the dooryard. A column of blue woodsmoke rose straight and unwavering from the chimney, rising, it seemed, to the very stars.

It had probably not really been necessary for the three of them to accompany their guests to the top of the hill to witness their departure, but it was Durnik’s house, and Durnik was a Sendar. Sendars are meticulous about proprieties and courtesies.

‘Eriond’s changed,’ Garion noted as they neared the bottom of the hill. ‘He seems more certain of himself now.’

Belgarath shrugged. ‘He’s growing up. It happens to everybody – except to Belar, maybe. I don’t think we can ever expect Belar to grow up.’

‘Belgarath!’ Durnik sounded shocked. ‘That’s no way for a man to speak about his God!’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘What you just said about Belar. He’s the God of the Alorns, and you’re an Alorn, aren’t you?’

‘Whatever gave you that peculiar notion? I’m no more an Alorn than you are.’

‘I always thought you were. You’ve certainly spent enough time with them.’

‘That wasn’t my idea. My Master gave them to me about five thousand years ago. There were a number of times when I tried to give them back, but he wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Well, if you’re not an Alorn, what are you?’

‘I’m not really sure. It wasn’t all that important to me when I was young. I do know that I’m not an Alorn. I’m not crazy enough for that.’

‘Grandfather!’ Garion protested.

‘You don’t count, Garion. You’re only half Alorn.’

They reached the door of the cottage and carefully stamped the snow off their feet before entering. The cottage was Aunt Pol’s domain, and she had strong feelings about people who tracked snow across her spotless floors.

The interior of the cottage was warm and filled with golden lamplight that reflected from the polished surfaces of Aunt Pol’s copper-bottomed pots and kettles and pans hanging from hooks on either side of the arched fireplace. Durnik had built the table and chairs in the center of the room out of oak, and the golden color of the wood was enhanced by the lamplight.

The three of them immediately went to the fireplace to warm their hands and feet.

The door to the bedroom opened, and Poledra came out. ‘Well?’ she said, ‘did you see them off?’

‘Yes, dear,’ Belgarath replied. ‘They were going in a generally northeasterly direction the last time I looked.’

‘How’s Pol?’ Durnik asked.

‘Happy,’ Garion’s tawny-haired grandmother replied.

‘That’s not exactly what I meant. Is she still awake?’

Poledra nodded. ‘She’s lying in bed admiring her handiwork.’

‘Would it be all right if I looked in on her?’

‘Of course. Just don’t wake the babies.’

‘Make a note of that, Durnik,’ Belgarath advised. ‘Not waking those babies is likely to become your main purpose in life for the next several months.’

Durnik smiled briefly and went into the bedroom with Poledra.

‘You shouldn’t tease him that way, grandfather,’ Garion chided.

‘I wasn’t teasing, Garion. Sleep’s very rare in a house with twins. One of them always seems to be awake. Would you like something to drink? I think I can probably find Pol’s beer-barrel.’

‘She’ll pull out your beard if she catches you in her pantry.’

‘She isn’t going to catch me, Garion. She’s too busy being a mother right now.’ The old man crossed the room to the pantry and began rummaging around.

Garion pulled off his cloak, hung it on a wooden peg, and went back to the fireplace. His feet still felt cold. He looked up at the latticework of rafters overhead. It was easy to see that Durnik had crafted them. The smith’s meticulous attention to detail showed in everything he did. The rafters were exposed over this central room, but there was a loft over the bedroom, and a flight of stairs reaching up to it along the back wall.

‘Found it,’ Belgarath called triumphantly from the pantry. ‘She tried to hide it behind the flour barrel.’

Garion smiled. His grandfather could probably find a beer-cask in the dark at the bottom of a coal-mine.

The old man came out with three brimming tankards, set them down on the table, and moved a chair around until it faced the fireplace. Then he took one of the tankards, sat, and stretched his feet out toward the fire. ‘Pull up a chair, Garion,’ he invited. ‘We might as well be comfortable.’

Garion did that. ‘It’s been quite a night,’ he said.

‘That it has, boy,’ the old man replied. ‘That it has.’

‘Shouldn’t we say goodnight to Aunt Pol?’

‘Durnik’s with her. Let’s not disturb them. This is a special sort of time for married people.’

‘Yes,’ Garion agreed, remembering that night a few weeks ago when his daughter had been born.

‘Will you be going back to Riva soon?’

‘I probably should,’ Garion replied. ‘I think I’ll wait a few days, though – at least until Aunt Pol’s back on her feet again.’

‘Don’t wait too long,’ Belgarath advised with a sly grin. ‘Ce’Nedra’s sitting on the throne all by herself right now, you know.’

‘She’ll be all right. She knows what to do.’

‘Yes, but do you want her doing things on her own?’

‘Oh, I don’t think she’ll declare war on anybody while I’m gone.’

‘Maybe not, but with Ce’Nedra you never really know, do you?’

‘Quit making fun of my wife, grandfather.’

‘I’m not making fun of her. I love her dearly, but I do know her. All I’m saying is that she’s a little unpredictable.’ Then the old sorcerer sighed.

‘Is something the matter, grandfather?’

‘I was just chewing on some old regrets. I don’t think you and Durnik realize just how lucky you are. I wasn’t around when my twins were born. I was off on a business trip.’

Garion knew the story, of course. ‘You didn’t have any choice, grandfather,’ he said. ‘Aldur ordered you to go to Mallorea. It was time to recover the Orb from Torak, and you had to go along to help Cherek Bear-shoulders and his sons.’

‘Don’t try to be reasonable about it, Garion. The bald fact is that I abandoned my wife when she needed me the most. Things might have turned out very differently if I hadn’t.’

‘Are you still feeling guilty about that?’

‘Of course I am. I’ve been carrying that guilt around for three thousand years. You can hand out all the royal pardons you want, but it’s still there.’

‘Grandmother forgives you.’

‘Naturally she does. Your grandmother’s a wolf, and wolves don’t hold grudges. The whole point, though, is that she can forgive me, and you can forgive me, and you can get up a petition signed by everybody in the known world that forgives me, but I still won’t forgive myself. Why don’t we talk about something else?’

Durnik came back out of the bedroom. ‘She’s asleep,’ he said softly. Then he went to the fireplace and stacked more wood on the embers. ‘It’s a cold night out there,’ he noted. ‘Let’s keep this fire going.’

‘I should have thought of that,’ Garion apologized.

‘Are the babies still asleep?’ Belgarath asked the smith.

Durnik nodded.

‘Enjoy it while you can. They’re resting up.’

Durnik smiled. Then he too pulled a chair closer to the fire. ‘Do you remember what we were talking about earlier?’ he asked, reaching for the remaining tankard on the table.

‘We talked about a lot of things,’ Belgarath told him.

‘I mean the business of the same things happening over and over again. What happened tonight isn’t one of those, is it?’

‘Would it come as a surprise to you if I told you that Pol isn’t the first to give birth to twins?’

‘I know that, Belgarath, but this seems different somehow. I get the feeling that this isn’t something that’s happened before. This seems like something new to me. This has been a very special night. UL himself blessed it. Has that ever happened before?’

‘Not that I know of,’ the old sorcerer conceded. ‘Maybe this is something new. If it is, it’s going to make things a little strange for us.’

‘How’s that?’ Garion asked.

‘The nice thing about repetitions is that you sort of know what to expect. If everything did stop when the “accident” happened, and now it’s all moving again, we’ll be breaking into new territory.’

‘Won’t the prophecies give us some clues?’

Belgarath shook his head. ‘No. The last passage in the Mrin Codex reads, “And there shall come a great light, and in that light shall that which was broken be healed, and interrupted Purpose shall proceed again, as was from the beginning intended”. All the other prophecies end in more or less the same way. The Ashabine Oracles even use almost exactly the same words. Once that light reached Korim, we were on our own.’

‘Will there be a new set of prophecies now?’ Durnik asked.

‘Next time you see Eriond, why don’t you ask him? He’s the one in charge now.’ Belgarath sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll be involved in any new ones, though. We’ve done what we were supposed to do.’ He smiled just a bit wryly. ‘To be perfectly frank about it, I’m just as glad to pass it on. I’m getting a little old to be rushing out to save the world. It was an interesting career right at first, but it gets exhausting after the first six or eight times.’

‘That’d be quite a story,’ Durnik said.

‘What would?’

‘Everything you’ve been through – saving the world, fighting Demons, pushing the Gods around, things like that.’

‘Tedious, Durnik. Very, very tedious,’ Belgarath disagreed. ‘There were long periods when nothing was happening. You can’t make much of a story out of a lot of people just sitting around waiting.’

‘Oh, I’m sure there were enough lively parts to keep it interesting. Someday I’d really like to hear the whole thing – you know, how you met Aldur, what the world was like before Torak cracked it, how you and Cherek Bear-shoulders stole the Orb back – all of it.’

Belgarath laughed. ‘If I start telling that story, we’ll still be sitting here a year from now, and we won’t even be half-way through by then. We’ve all got better things to do.’

‘Do we really, grandfather?’ Garion asked. ‘You just said that our part of this is over. Wouldn’t this be a good time to sum it all up?’

‘What good would it do? You’ve got a kingdom to run, and Durnik’s got this farm to tend. You’ve both got more important things to do than sit around listening to me tell stories.’

‘Write it down, then.’ The notion suddenly caught fire in Garion’s mind. ‘You know, grandfather, the more I think about it, the more I think you ought to do just that. You’ve been here since the very beginning. You’re the only one who knows the whole story. You really should write it down, you know. Tell the world what really happened.’

Belgarath’s expression grew pained. ‘The world doesn’t care, Garion. All I’d do is offend a lot of people. They’ve got their own preconceptions, and they’re happy with them. I’m not going to spend the next fifty years scribbling on scraps of paper just so that people can travel to the Vale from the other side of the world to argue with me. Besides, I’m not a historian. I don’t mind telling stories, but writing them down doesn’t appeal to me. If I took on a project like that, my hand would fall off after a couple of years.’

‘Don’t be coy, grandfather. Durnik and I both know that you don’t have to do it by hand. You can think the words onto paper without ever picking up a pen.’

‘Forget it,’ Belgarath said shortly. ‘I’m not going to waste my time on something as ridiculous as that.’

‘You’re lazy, Belgarath,’ Durnik accused.

‘Are you only just noticing that? I thought you were more observant.’

‘You won’t do it then?’ Garion demanded.

‘Not unless somebody comes up with a better reason than you two have so far.’

The bedroom door opened, and Poledra came out into the kitchen. ‘Are you three going to talk all night?’ she demanded in a quiet voice. ‘If you are, go do it someplace else. If you wake the babies …’ she left it hanging ominously.

‘We were just thinking about going to bed, dear,’ Belgarath lied blandly.

‘Well, do it then. Don’t just sit there and talk about it.’

Belgarath stood up and stretched – perhaps just a bit theatrically. ‘She’s right, you know,’ he said to his two friends. ‘It’ll be daylight before long, and the twins have been resting up all night. If we’re going to get any sleep, we’d better do it now.’

Later, after the three of them had climbed up into the loft and rolled themselves into blankets on the pallets Durnik kept stored up there, Garion lay looking down at the slowly waning firelight and the flickering shadows in the room below. He thought of Ce’Nedra and his own children, of course, but then he let his mind drift back over the events of this most special of nights. Aunt Pol had always been at the very center of his life, and with the birth of her twins, her life was now fulfilled.

Near to sleep, the Rivan King found his thoughts going back over the conversation he had just had with Durnik and his grandfather. He was honest enough with himself to admit that his desire to read Belgarath’s history of the world was not entirely academic. The old sorcerer was a very strange and complex man, and his story promised to provide insights into his character that could come from no other source. He’d have to be pushed, of course. Belgarath was an expert at avoiding work of any kind. Garion, however, thought he knew of a way to pry the story out of his grandfather. He smiled to himself as the fire burned lower and lower in the room below. He knew he could find out how it all began.

And then, because it was really quite late, Garion fell asleep, and, perhaps because of all the familiar things in Aunt Pol’s kitchen down below, he dreamed of Faldor’s farm, where his story had begun.

PART ONE
The Vale

Chapter 1

The problem with any idea is the fact that the more it gets bandied about, the more feasible it seems to become. What starts out as idle speculation – something mildly entertaining to while away a few hours before going to bed – can become, once others are drawn into it, a kind of obligation. Why can’t people understand that just because I’m willing to talk about something, it doesn’t automatically follow that I’m actually willing to do it?

As a case in point, this all started with Durnik’s rather inane remark about wanting to hear the whole story. You know how Durnik is, forever taking things apart to see what makes them work. I can forgive him in this case, however. Pol had just presented him with twins, and new fathers tend to be a bit irrational. Garion, on the other hand, should have had sense enough to leave it alone. I curse the day when I encouraged that boy to be curious about first causes. He can be so tedious about some things. If he’d have just let it drop, I wouldn’t be saddled with this awful chore.

But no. The two of them went on and on about it for day after day as if the fate of the world depended on it. I tried to get around them with a few vague promises – nothing specific, mind you – and fervently hoped that they’d forget about the whole silly business.

Then Garion did something so unscrupulous, so underhanded, that it shocked me to the very core. He told Polgara about the stupid idea, and when he got back to Riva, he told Ce’Nedra. That would have been bad enough, but would you believe that he actually encouraged those two to bring Poledra into it?

I’ll admit right here that it was my own fault. My only excuse is that I was a little tired that night. I’d inadvertently let something slip that I’ve kept buried in my heart for three eons. Poledra had been with child, and I’d gone off and left her to fend for herself. I’ve carried the guilt over that for almost half of my life. It’s like a knife twisting inside me. Garion knew that, and he coldly, deliberately, used it to force me to take on this ridiculous project. He knows that under these circumstances, I simply cannot refuse anything my wife asks of me.

Poledra, of course, didn’t put any pressure on me. She didn’t have to. All she had to do was suggest that she’d rather like to have me go along with the idea. Under the circumstances, I didn’t have any choice. I hope that the Rivan King is happy about what he’s done to me.

This is most certainly a mistake. Wisdom tells me that it would be far better to leave things as they are, with event and cause alike half-buried in the dust of forgotten years. If it were up to me, I’d leave it that way. The truth is going to upset a lot of people.

Few will understand and fewer still accept what I am about to set forth, but as my grandson and son-in-law so pointedly insisted, if I don’t tell the story, somebody else will; and, since I alone know the beginning and middle and end of it, it falls to me to commit to perishable parchment, with ink that begins to fade before it even dries, some ephemeral account of what really happened – and why.

Thus, let me begin this story as all stories are begun, at the beginning.

I was born in the village of Gara, which no longer exists. It lay, if I remember it correctly, on a pleasant green bank beside a small river that sparkled in the summer sun as if its surface were covered with jewels – and I’d trade all the jewels I’ve ever owned or seen to sit again beside that unnamed river.

Our village was not rich, but in those days none were. The world was at peace, and our Gods walked among us and smiled upon us. We had enough to eat and huts to shelter us from the weather. I don’t recall who our God was, nor his attributes, nor his totem. I was very young at the time, and it was, after all, long ago.

I played with the other children in the warm, dusty streets, ran through the long grass and the wildflowers in the meadows, and paddled in that sparkling river which was drowned by the Sea of the East so many years ago that they are beyond counting.

My mother died when I was quite young. I remember that I cried about it for a long time, though I must honestly admit that I can no longer even remember her face. I remember the gentleness of her hands and the warm smell of fresh-baked bread that came from her garments, but I can’t remember her face. Isn’t that odd?

The people of Gara took over my upbringing at that point. I never knew my father, and I have no recollection of having any living relatives in that place. The villagers saw to it that I was fed, gave me cast-off clothing, and let me sleep in their cow-sheds. They called me Garath, which meant ‘of the town of Gara’ in our particular dialect. It may or may not have been my real name. I can no longer remember what name my mother had given me, not that it really matters, I suppose. Garath was a serviceable enough name for an orphan, and I didn’t loom very large in the social structure of the village.

Our village lay somewhere near where the ancestral homelands of the Tolnedrans, the Nyissans and the Marags joined. I think we were all of the same race, but I can’t really be sure. I can only remember one temple – if you can call it that – which would seem to indicate that we all worshiped the same God and were thus of the same race. I was indifferent to religion at that time, so I can’t recall if the temple had been raised to Nedra or Mara or Issa. The lands of the Arends lay somewhat to the north, so it’s even possible that our rickety little church had been built to honor Chaldan. I’m certain that we didn’t worship Torak or Belar. I think I’d have remembered had it been either of those two.

Even as a child I was expected to earn my keep; the villagers weren’t very keen about maintaining me in idle luxury. They put me to work as a cow-herd, but I wasn’t very good at it, if you must know the truth. Our cows were scrubby and quite docile, so not too many of them strayed off while they were in my care, and those that did usually returned for milking in the evening. All in all, though, being a cow-herd was a good vocation for a boy who wasn’t all that enthusiastic about honest work.

My only possessions in those days were the clothes on my back, but I soon learned how to fill in the gaps. Locks had not yet been invented, so it wasn’t too difficult for me to explore the huts of my neighbors when they were out working in the fields. Mostly I stole food, although a few small objects did find their way into my pockets from time to time. Unfortunately, I was the natural suspect when things turned up missing. Orphans were not held in very high regard at that particular time. At any rate, my reputation deteriorated as the years went by, and the other children were instructed to avoid me. My neighbors viewed me as lazy and generally unreliable, and they also called me a liar and a thief – often right to my face! I won’t bother to deny the charges, but it’s not really very nice to come right out and say it like that, is it? They watched me closely, and they pointedly told me to stay out of town except at night. I largely ignored those petty restrictions and actually began to enjoy the business of creeping about in search of food or whatever else might fall to hand. I began to think of myself as a very clever fellow.

I guess I was about thirteen or so when I began to notice girls. That really made my neighbors nervous. I had a certain rakish celebrity in the village, and young people of an impressionable age find that sort of thing irresistibly attractive. As I said, I began to notice girls, and the girls noticed me right back. One thing led to another, and on a cloudy spring morning one of the village elders caught me in his hay-barn with his youngest daughter. Let me hasten to assure you that nothing was really going on. Oh, a few harmless kisses, perhaps, but nothing any more serious. The girl’s father, however, immediately thought the worst of me and gave me the thrashing of my life.

I finally managed to escape from him and ran out of the village. I waded across the river and climbed the hill on the far side to sulk. The air was cool and dry, and the clouds raced overhead in the fresh young wind. I sat there for a very long time considering my situation. I concluded that I had just about exhausted the possibilities of Gara. My neighbors, with some justification, I’ll admit, looked at me with hard-eyed suspicion most of the time, and the incident in the hay-barn was likely to be blown all out of proportion. A certain cold logic advised me that it wouldn’t be too long before I’d be pointedly asked to leave.

Well, I certainly wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction. I looked down at the tiny cluster of dun-colored huts beside a small river that didn’t sparkle beneath the scudding clouds of spring. And then I turned and looked to the west at a vast grassland and white-topped mountains beyond and clouds roiling titanic in the grey sky, and I felt a sudden overwhelming compulsion to go. There was more to the world than the village of Gara, and I suddenly wanted very much to go look at it. There was nothing really keeping me, and the father of my little playmate would probably be lying in wait for me – with cudgel – every time I turned around. I made up my mind at that point.

I visited the village one last time – shortly after midnight. I certainly didn’t intend to leave empty-handed. A storage shed provided me with as much food as I could conveniently carry, and, since it’s not prudent to travel unarmed, I also took a fairly large knife. I’d fashioned a sling a year or so previously, and the tedious hours spent watching over other people’s cows had given me plenty of time for practice. I wonder whatever happened to that sling.

I looked around the shed and decided that I had everything I really needed, and so I crept quietly down that dusty street, waded across the river again, and went from that place forever.

When I think back on it, I realize that I owe that heavy-handed villager an enormous debt of gratitude. Had he not come into that barn when he did, I might never have climbed that hill on such a day to gaze to the west, and I might very well have lived out my life in Gara and died there. Isn’t it odd how the little things can change a man’s entire life?

The lands of the Tolnedrans lay to the west, and by morning I was well within their borders. I had no real destination in mind, just that odd compulsion to travel westward. I passed a few villages, but saw no real reason to stop.

It was two – or perhaps three – days after I left Gara when I encountered a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart. ‘Where be ye bound, boy?’ he asked me in what seemed to me at the time to be an outlandish dialect.

‘Oh,’ I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, ‘that way, I guess.’

‘You don’t seem very certain.’

I grinned at him. ‘I’m not,’ I admitted. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s on the other side of the next hill.’

He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a Tolnedran, and I’ve noticed that they’re all very literal-minded. ‘Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin,’ he told me.

‘Tol Malin?’

‘It’s a fair-sized town. The people who live there have a puffed-up opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn’t have bothered with that “Tol”, but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I’m going that way myself, and if you’re of a mind, you can ride along. Hop up, boy. It’s a long way to walk.’

I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of money. Trust the Tolnedrans to invent money. I found the whole idea fascinating. Here was something small enough to be portable and yet of enormous value. Someone who’s just stolen a chair or a table or a horse is fairly conspicuous. Money, on the other hand, can’t be identified as someone else’s property once it’s in your pocket.

Unfortunately, Tolnedrans are very possessive about their money, and it was in Tol Malin that I first heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ I left town rather quickly at that point.

I hope you realize that I wouldn’t be making such an issue of some of my boyhood habits except for the fact that my daughter can be very tiresome about my occasional relapses. I’d just like for people to see my side of it for a change. Given my circumstances, did I really have any choice?

Oddly enough, I encountered that same humorous old fellow again about five miles outside Tol Malin. ‘Well, boy,’ he greeted me. ‘I see that you’re still moving along westward.’

‘There was a little misunderstanding back in Tol Malin,’ I replied defensively. ‘I thought it might be best for me to leave.’

He laughed knowingly, and for some reason his laughter made my whole day seem brighter. He was a very ordinary-looking old fellow with white hair and beard, but his deep blue eyes seemed strangely out of place in his wrinkled face. They were very wise, but they didn’t seem to be the eyes of an old man. They also seemed to see right through all my excuses and lame explanations. ‘Well, hop up again, boy,’ he told me. ‘We still both seem to be going in the same direction.’

We traveled across the lands of the Tolnedrans for the next several weeks, moving steadily westward. This was before those people developed their obsession with straight, well-maintained roads, and what we followed were little more than wagon tracks that meandered along the course of least resistance across the meadows.

Like just about everybody else in the world in those days, the Tolnedrans were farmers. There were very few isolated farmsteads out in the countryside, because for the most part the people lived in villages, went out to work their fields each morning, and returned to the villages each night.

We passed one of those villages one morning about the middle of summer, and I saw those farmers trudging out to work. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d just build their houses out where their fields are?’ I asked the old man.

‘Probably so,’ he agreed, ‘but then they’d be peasants instead of townsmen. A Tolnedran would sooner die than have others think of him as a peasant.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I objected. ‘They spend all day every day grubbing in the dirt, and that means that they are peasants, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he replied calmly, ‘but they seem to think that if they live in a village, that makes them townsmen.’

‘Is that so important to them?’

‘Very important, boy. A Tolnedran always wants to keep a good opinion of himself.’

‘I think it’s stupid, myself.’

‘Many of the things people do are stupid. Keep your eyes and ears open the next time we go through one of these villages. If you pay attention, you’ll see what I’m talking about.’

I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out. We passed through several of those villages during the next couple of weeks, and I got to know the Tolnedrans. I didn’t care too much for them, but I got to know them. A Tolnedran spends just about every waking minute trying to determine his exact rank in his community, and the higher he perceives his rank to be, the more offensive he becomes. He treats his servant badly – not out of cruelty, but out of a deep-seated need to establish his superiority. He’ll spend hours in front of a mirror practicing a haughty, superior expression. Maybe that’s what set my teeth on edge. I don’t like having people look down their noses at me, and my status as a vagabond put me at the very bottom of the social ladder, so everybody looked down his nose at me.

‘The next pompous ass who sneers at me is going to get a punch in the mouth,’ I muttered darkly as we left one village as summer was winding down.

The old man shrugged. ‘Why bother?’

‘I don’t care for people who treat me like dirt.’

‘Do you really care what they think?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘Why waste your energy then? You’ve got to learn to laugh these things off, boy. Those self-important villagers are silly, aren’t they?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘Wouldn’t hitting one of them in the face make you just as silly – or even sillier? As long as you know who you are, does it really matter what other people think about you?’

‘Well, no, but – ’ I groped for some kind of explanation, but I didn’t find one. I finally laughed a bit sheepishly.

He patted my shoulder affectionately. ‘I thought you might see it that way – eventually.’

That may have been one of the more important lessons I’ve learned over the years. Privately laughing at silly people is much more satisfying in the long run than rolling around in the middle of a dusty street with them trying to knock out all of their teeth. If nothing else, it’s easier on your clothes.

The old man didn’t really seem to have a destination. He had a cart, but he wasn’t carrying anything important in it – just a few half-full sacks of grain for his stumpy horse, a keg of water, a bit of food and several shabby old blankets which he seemed happy to share with me. The better we grew acquainted, the more I grew to like him. He seemed to see his way straight to the core of things, and he usually found something to laugh about in what he saw. In time, I began to laugh, too, and I realized that he was the closest thing to a friend I’d ever had.

He passed the time by telling me about the people who lived on that broad plain. I got the impression that he spent a great deal of his time traveling. Despite his humorous way of talking – or maybe because of it – I found his perceptions about the various races to be quite acute. I’ve spent thousands of years with those people, and I’ve never once found those first impressions he gave me to be wrong. He told me that the Alorns were rowdies, the Tolnedrans materialistic, and the Arends not quite bright. The Marags were emotional, flighty, and generous to a fault. The Nyissans were sluggish and devious, and the Angaraks obsessed with religion. He had nothing but pity for the Morindim and the Karands, and, given his earthy nature, a peculiar kind of respect for the mystical Dals. I felt a peculiar wrench and a sense of profound loss when, on another one of those cool, cloudy days, he reined in his horse and said, ‘This is as far as I’m going, boy. Hop on down.’

It was the abruptness more than anything that upset me. ‘Which way are you heading?’ I asked him.

‘What difference does it make, boy? You’re going west, and I’m not. We’ll come across each other again, but for right now we’re going our separate ways. You’ve got more to see, and I’ve already seen what lies in that direction. We can talk about it the next time we meet. I hope you find what you’re looking for, but for right now, hop down.’

I felt more than a little injured by this rather cavalier dismissal, so I wasn’t really very gracious as I gathered up my belongings, got out of his cart, and struck off toward the west. I didn’t look back, so I couldn’t really say which direction he took. By the time I did throw a quick glance over my shoulder, he was out of sight.

He had given me a general idea of the geography ahead of me, and I knew that it was late enough in the summer to make the notion of exploring the mountains at this point a very bad idea. The old man had told me that there was a vast forest ahead of me, a forest lying on either side of a river which, unlike other rivers, ran from south to north. From his description I knew that the land ahead was sparsely settled, so I’d be obliged to fend for myself rather than rely on pilferage to sustain me. But I was young and confident of my skill with my sling, so I was fairly sure that I could get by.

As it turned out, however, I wasn’t obliged to forage for food that winter. Right on the verge of the forest, I found a large encampment of strange old people who lived in tents rather than huts. They spoke a language I didn’t understand, but they made me welcome with gestures and weepy smiles.

Theirs was perhaps the most peculiar community I’ve ever encountered, and believe me, I’ve seen a lot of communities. Their skin was strangely colorless, which I assumed to be a characteristic of their race, but the truly odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a soul among them who was a day under seventy.

They made much of me, and most of them wept the first time they saw me. They would sit by the hour and just look at me, which I found disconcerting, to say the very least. They fed me and pampered me and provided me with what might be called luxurious quarters – if a tent could ever be described as luxurious. The tent had been empty, and I discovered that there were many empty tents in their encampment. Within a month or two I was able to find out why. Scarcely a week went by when at least one of them didn’t die. As I said, they were all very old. Have you any idea of how depressing it is to live in a place where there’s a perpetual funeral going on?

Winter was coming on, however, and I had a place to sleep and a fire to keep me warm, and the old people kept me well-fed, so I decided that I could stand a little depression. I made up my mind, though, that I’d be gone with the first hint of spring.

I made no particular effort to learn their language that winter, and picked up only a few words. The most continually repeated among them were ‘Gorim’ and ‘UL,’ which seemed to be names of some sort, and were almost always spoken in tones of profoundest regret.

In addition to feeding me, the old people provided me with clothing; my own hadn’t been very good in the first place, and had become badly worn during the course of my journey. This involved no great sacrifice on their part, since a community in which there are two or three funerals every few weeks is bound to have spare clothes lying about.

When the snow melted and the frost began to seep out of the ground, I quietly began to make preparations to leave. I stole food – a little at a time to avoid suspicion – and hid it in my tent. I filched a rather nice wool cloak from the tent of one of the recently deceased and picked up a few other useful items here and there. I scouted the surrounding area carefully and found a place where I could ford the large river just to the west of the encampment. Then, with my escape route firmly in mind, I settled down to wait for the last of winter to pass.

As is usual in the early spring, we had a couple of weeks of fairly steady rain, so I still waited, although my impatience to be gone was becoming almost unbearable. During the course of that winter, that peculiar compulsion that had nagged at me since I’d left Gara had subtly altered. Now I seemed to be drawn southward instead of to the west.

The rains finally let up, and the spring sun seemed warm enough to make traveling pleasant, and so one evening I gathered up the fruits of my pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I’d fashioned during the long winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless anticipation as the sounds in the camp of the old people gradually subsided. Then, when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the edge of the woods.

The moon was full that night, and the stars seemed very bright. I crept through the shadowy woods, waded the river, and emerged on the other side filled with a sense of enormous exhilaration. I was free!

I followed the river southward for the better part of that night, putting as much distance as I possibly could between me and the old people – enough certainly so that their creaky old limbs would not permit them to follow.

The forest seemed incredibly old. The trees were huge, and the forest floor, all overspread by that leafy green canopy, was devoid of the usual underbrush, carpeted instead with lush green moss. It seemed to me an enchanted forest, and once I was certain there would be no pursuit, I found that I wasn’t really in any great hurry, so I strolled – sauntered if you will – southward with no real sense of urgency, aside from that now-gentle compulsion to go someplace, and I hadn’t really the faintest idea of where.

And then, the land opened up. What had been forest became a kind of vale, a grassy basin dotted here and there with delightful groves of trees verged with thickets of lush berry-bushes, centering around deep, cold springs of water so clear that I could look down through ten feet of it at trout, which, all unafraid, looked up curiously at me as I knelt to drink.

And deer, as placid and docile as sheep, grazed in the lush green meadows and watched with large and gentle eyes as I passed.

All bemused, I wandered, more content than I had ever been. The distant voice of prudence told me that my store of food wouldn’t last forever, but it didn’t really seem to diminish – perhaps because I glutted myself on berries and other strange fruits.

I lingered long in that magic vale, and in time I came to its very center, where there grew a tree so vast that my mind reeled at the immensity of it.

I make no pretense at being a horticulturist, but I’ve been nine times around the world, and so far as I’ve seen, there’s no other tree like it anywhere. And, in what was probably a mistake, I went to the tree and laid my hands upon its rough bark. I’ve always wondered what might have happened if I had not.

The peace that came over me was indescribable. My somewhat prosaic daughter will probably dismiss my bemusement as natural laziness, but she’ll be wrong about that. I have no idea of how long I sat in rapt communion with that ancient tree. I know that I must have been somehow nourished and sustained as hours, days, even months drifted by unnoticed, but I have no memory of ever eating or sleeping.

And then, overnight, it turned cold and began to snow. Winter, like death, had been creeping up behind me all the while.

I’d formulated a rather vague intention to return to the camp of the old people for another winter of pampering if nothing better turned up, but it was obvious that I’d lingered too long in the mesmerizing shade of that silly tree.

And the snow piled so deep that I could barely flounder my way through it. And my food was gone, and my shoes wore out, and I lost my knife, and it suddenly turned very, very cold. I’m not making any accusations here, but it seemed to me that this was all just a little excessive.

In the end, soaked to the skin and with ice forming in my hair, I huddled behind a pile of rock that seemed to reach up into the very heart of the snowstorm that swirled around me, and I tried to prepare myself for death. I thought of the village of Gara, and of the grassy fields around it, and of our sparkling river, and of my mother, and – because I was still really very young – I cried.

‘Why weepest thou, boy?’ The voice was very gentle. The snow was so thick that I couldn’t see who spoke, but the tone made me angry for some reason. Didn’t I have reason to cry?

‘Because I’m cold and I’m hungry,’ I replied, ‘and because I’m dying and I don’t want to.’

‘Why art thou dying? Art thou injured?’

‘I’m lost,’ I said a bit tartly, ‘and it’s snowing and I have no place to go.’ Was he blind?

‘Is this reason enough amongst thy kind to die?’

‘Isn’t it enough?’

‘And how long dost thou expect this dying of thine to persist?’ The voice seemed only mildly curious.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied through a sudden wave of self-pity. ‘I’ve never done it before.’

The wind howled and the snow swirled more thickly around me.

‘Boy,’ the voice said finally, ‘come here to me.’

‘Where are you? I can’t see you.’

‘Walk around the tower to thy left. Knowest thou thy left hand from thy right?’

He didn’t have to be so insulting! I stumbled angrily to my half-frozen feet, blinded by the driving snow.

‘Well, boy? Art thou coming?’

I moved around what I thought was only a pile of rocks.

‘Thou shalt come to a smooth grey stone,’ the voice said. ‘It is somewhat taller than thy head and as broad as thine arms may reach.’

‘All right,’ I said through chattering teeth when I reached the rock he’d described, ‘now what?’

‘Tell it to open.’

‘What?’

‘Speak unto the stone,’ the voice said patiently, ignoring the fact that I was congealing in the gale. ‘Command it to open.’

‘Command? Me?’

‘Thou art a man. It is but a rock.’

‘What do I say?’

‘Tell it to open.’

‘I think this is silly, but I’ll try it.’ I faced the rock. ‘Open,’ I commanded half-heartedly.

‘Surely thou canst do better than that.’

‘Open!’ I thundered.

And the rock slid aside.

‘Come in, boy,’ the voice said. ‘Stand not in the weather like some befuddled calf. It is quite cold.’ Had he only just now noticed that?

I went inside what appeared to be some kind of vestibule with nothing in it but a stone staircase winding upward. Oddly, it wasn’t dark, though I couldn’t see exactly where the light came from.

‘Close the door, boy.’

‘How?’

‘How didst thou open it?’

I turned to face that gaping opening, and, quite proud of myself, I commanded, ‘Close!’ And, at the sound of my voice, the rock slid shut with a grinding sound that chilled my blood even more than the fierce storm outside. I was trapped! My momentary panic passed as I suddenly realized that I was dry for the first time in days. There wasn’t even a puddle around my feet! Something strange was going on here.

‘Come up, boy,’ the voice commanded.

What choice did I have? I mounted the stone steps worn with countless centuries of footfalls and spiraled my way up and up, only a little bit afraid. The tower was very high, and the climbing took me a long time.

At the top was a chamber filled with wonders. I looked at things such as I’d never seen before. I was still young and not, at the time, above thoughts of theft. Larceny seethed in my grubby little soul. I’m sure that Polgara will find that particular admission entertaining.

Near a fire – which burned, I observed, without fuel of any kind – sat a man, who seemed most incredibly ancient, but somehow familiar, though I couldn’t seem to place him. His beard was long and full and as white as the snow which had so nearly killed me – but his eyes were eternally young. I think it might have been the eyes that seemed so familiar to me. ‘Well, boy,’ he said, ‘hast thou decided not to die?’

‘Not if it isn’t necessary,’ I said bravely, still cataloguing the wonders of the chamber.

‘Dost thou require anything?’ he asked. ‘I am unfamiliar with thy kind.’

‘A little food, perhaps,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t eaten in two days. And a warm place to sleep, if you wouldn’t mind.’ I thought it might not be a bad idea to stay on the good side of this strange old man, so I hurried on. ‘I won’t be much trouble, Master, and I can make myself useful in payment.’ It was an artful little speech. I’d learned during my months with the Tolnedrans how to make myself agreeable to people in a position to do me favors.

‘Master?’ he said, and laughed, a sound so cheerful that it made me almost want to dance. Where had I heard that laugh before? ‘I am not thy Master, boy,’ he said. Then he laughed again, and my heart sang with the splendor of his mirth. ‘Let us see to this thing of food. What dost thou require?’

‘A little bread perhaps – not too stale, if it’s all right.’

‘Bread? Only bread? Surely, boy, thy stomach is fit for more than bread. If thou wouldst make thyself useful – as thou hast promised – we must nourish thee properly. Consider, boy. Think of all the things thou hast eaten in thy life. What in all the world would most surely satisfy this vast hunger of thine?’

I couldn’t even say it. Before my eyes swam the visions of smoking roasts, of fat geese swimming in their own gravy, of heaps of fresh-baked bread and rich, golden butter, of pastries in thick cream, of cheese, and dark brown ale, of fruits and nuts and salt to savor it all. The vision was so real that it even seemed that I could smell it.

And he who sat by the glowing fire that burned, it seemed, air alone, laughed again, and again my heart sang. ‘Turn, boy,’ he said, ‘and eat thy fill.’

And I turned, and there on a table, which I had not even seen before, lay everything I had imagined. No wonder I could smell it! A hungry boy doesn’t ask where the food comes from – he eats. And so I ate. I ate until my stomach groaned. And through the sound of my eating I could hear the laughter of the aged one beside his fire, and my heart leapt within me at each strangely familiar chuckle.

And when I’d finished and sat drowsing over my plate, he spoke again. ‘Wilt thou sleep now, boy?’

‘A corner, Master,’ I said. ‘A little out-of-the-way place by the fire, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

He pointed. ‘Sleep there, boy,’ he said, and all at once I saw a bed which I had no more seen than I had the table – a great bed with huge pillows and comforters of softest down. And I smiled my thanks and crept into the bed, and, because I was young and very tired, I fell asleep almost at once without even stopping to think about how very strange all of this had been.

But in my sleep I knew that he who had brought me in out of the storm and fed me and cared for me was watching through the long, snowy night, and I slept even more securely in the comforting warmth of his care.

Chapter 2

And that began my servitude. At first the tasks my Master set me to were simple ones – ‘sweep the floor,’ ‘fetch some firewood,’ ‘wash the windows’ – that sort of thing. I suppose I should have been suspicious about many of them. I could have sworn that there hadn’t been a speck of dust anywhere when I first mounted to his tower room, and, as I think I mentioned earlier, the fire burning in his fireplace didn’t seem to need fuel. It was almost as if he were somehow making work for me to do.

He was a good master, though. For one thing, he didn’t command in the way I’d heard the Tolnedrans command their servants, but rather made suggestions. ‘Thinkest thou not that the floor hath become dirty again, boy?’ Or, ‘Might it not be prudent to lay in some store of firewood?’ My chores were in no way beyond my strength or abilities, and the weather outside was sufficiently unpleasant to persuade me that what little was expected of me was a small price to pay in exchange for food and shelter. I did resolve, however, that when spring came and he began to look farther afield for things for me to do, I might want to reconsider our arrangement. There isn’t really very much to do when winter keeps one housebound, but warmer weather brings with it the opportunity for heavier and more tedious tasks. If things turned too unpleasant, I could always pick up and leave.

There was something peculiar about that notion, though. The compulsion which had come over me at Gara seemed gone now. I don’t know that I really thought about it in any specific way. I just seemed to notice that it was gone and shrugged it off. Maybe I just thought I’d outgrown it. It seems to me that I shrugged off a great deal that first winter.

I paid very little attention, for example, to the fact that my Master seemed to have no visible means of support. He didn’t keep cattle or sheep or even chickens, and there were no sheds or outbuildings in the vicinity of his tower. I couldn’t even find his storeroom. I knew there had to be one somewhere, because the meals he prepared were always on the table when I grew hungry. Oddly, the fact that I never once saw him cooking didn’t seem particularly strange to me. Not even the fact that I never once saw him eat anything seemed strange. It was almost as if my natural curiosity – and believe me, I can be very curious – had been somehow put to sleep.

I had absolutely no idea of what he did during that long winter. It seemed to me that he spent a great deal of time just looking at a plain round rock. He didn’t speak very often, but I talked enough for both of us. I’ve always been fond of the sound of my own voice – or had you noticed that?

My continual chatter must have driven him to distraction, because one evening he rather pointedly asked me why I didn’t go read something.

I knew about reading, of course. Nobody in Gara had known how, but I’d seen Tolnedrans doing it – or pretending to. It seemed a little silly to me at the time. Why take the trouble to write a letter to somebody who lives two houses over? If it’s important, just step over and tell him about it. ‘I don’t know how to read, Master,’ I confessed.

He actually seemed startled by that. ‘Is this truly the case, boy?’ he asked me. ‘I had thought that the skill was instinctive amongst thy kind.’

I wished that he’d quit talking about ‘my kind’ as if I were a member of some obscure species of rodent or insect.

‘Fetch down that book, boy,’ he instructed, pointing at a high shelf.

I looked up in some amazement. There seemed to be several dozen bound volumes on that shelf. I’d cleaned and dusted and polished the room from floor to ceiling a dozen times or more, and I’d have taken an oath that the shelf hadn’t been there the last time I looked. I covered my confusion by asking, ‘Which one, Master?’ Notice that I’d even begun to pick up some semblance of good manners?

‘Whichever one falls most easily to hand,’ he replied indifferently.

I selected a book at random and took it to him.

‘Seat thyself, boy,’ he told me. ‘I shall give thee instruction.’

I knew nothing whatsoever about reading, so it didn’t seem particularly odd to me that under his gentle tutelage I was a competent reader within the space of an hour. Either I was an extremely gifted student – which seems highly unlikely – or he was the greatest teacher who ever lived.

From that hour on I became a voracious reader. I devoured his bookshelf from one end to another. Then, somewhat regretfully, I went back to the first book again, only to discover that I’d never seen it before. I read and read and read, and every page was new to me. I read my way through that bookshelf a dozen times over, and it was always fresh and new. That reading opened the world of the mind to me, and I found it much to my liking.

My new-found obsession gave my Master some peace, at least, and he seemed to look approvingly at me as I sat late into those long, snowy, winter nights reading texts in languages I could not have spoken, but which I nonetheless clearly understood when they seemed to leap out at me from off the page. I also noticed – dimly, for, as I think I’ve already mentioned, my curiosity seemed somehow to have been blunted – that when I was reading, my Master tended to have no chores for me, at least not at first. The conflict between reading and chores came later. And so we passed the winter in that world of the mind, and with few exceptions, I’ve probably never been so happy.

I’m sure it was the books that kept me there the following spring and summer. As I’d suspected they might, the onset of warm days and nights stirred my Master’s creativity. He found all manner of things for me to do outside – mostly unpleasant and involving a great deal of effort and sweat. I do not enjoy cutting down trees, for example – particularly not with an axe. I broke that axe-handle eight times that summer – quite deliberately, I’ll admit – and it miraculously healed itself overnight. I hated that cursed, indestructible axe!

But strangely enough, it wasn’t the sweating and grunting I resented, but the time I wasted whacking at unyielding trees which I could more profitably have spent trying to read my way through that inexhaustible bookshelf. Every page opened new wonders for me, and I groaned audibly each time my Master suggested that it was time for me and my axe to go out and entertain each other again.

And, almost before I had turned around twice, winter came again. I had better luck with my broom than I had with my axe. After all, you can only pile so much dust in a corner before you start becoming obvious about it, and my Master was never obvious. I continued to read my way again and again along the bookshelf and was probably made better by it, although my Master, guided by some obscure, sadistic instinct, always seemed to know exactly when an interruption would be most unwelcome. He inevitably selected that precise moment to suggest sweeping or washing dishes or fetching firewood.

Sometimes he would stop what he was doing to watch my labors, a bemused expression on his face. Then he would sigh and return to the things he did which I did not understand.

The seasons turned, marching in their stately, ordered progression as I labored with my books and with the endless and increasingly difficult tasks my Master set me. I grew bad-tempered and sullen, but never once did I even think about running away.

Then, perhaps three – or more likely it was five – years after I had come to the tower to begin my servitude, I was struggling one early winter day to move a large rock which my Master had stepped around since my first summer with him, but which he now found inconvenient for some reason. The rock, as I say, was quite large, and it was white, and it was very, very heavy. It would not move, though I heaved and pushed and strained until I thought my limbs would crack. Finally, in a fury, I concentrated my strength and all my will upon the boulder and grunted one single word. ‘Move!’ I said.

And it moved! Not grudgingly with its huge inert weight sullenly resisting my strength, but quite easily, as if the touch of one finger would be sufficient to send it bounding across the vale.

‘Well, boy,’ my Master said, startling me by his nearness, ‘I had wondered how long it might be ere this day arrived.’

‘Master,’ I said, very confused, ‘what happened? How did the great rock move so easily?’

‘It moved at thy command, boy. Thou art a man, and it is only a rock.’ Where had I heard that before?

‘May other things be done so, Master?’ I asked, thinking of all the hours I’d wasted on meaningless tasks.

‘All things may be done so, boy. Put but thy Will to that which thou wouldst accomplish and speak the Word. It shall come to pass even as thou wouldst have it. Much have I marveled, boy, at thine insistence upon doing all things with thy back instead of thy will. I had begun to fear for thee, thinking that perhaps thou wert defective.’

Suddenly, all the things I had ignored or shrugged off or been too incurious even to worry about fell into place. My Master had indeed been creating things for me to do, hoping that I would eventually learn this secret. I walked over to the rock and laid my hands on it again. ‘Move,’ I commanded, bringing my Will to bear on it, and the rock moved as easily as before.

‘Does it make thee more comfortable touching the rock when thou wouldst move it, boy?’ my Master asked, a note of curiosity in his voice.

The question stunned me. I hadn’t even considered that possibility. I looked at the rock. ‘Move,’ I said tentatively.

‘Thou must command, boy, not entreat.’

‘Move!’ I roared, and the rock heaved and rolled off with nothing but my Will and the Word to make it do so.

‘Much better, boy. Perhaps there is hope for thee yet.’

Then I remembered something. Notice how quickly I pick up on these things? I’d been moving the rock which formed the door to the tower with only my voice for some five years now. ‘You knew all along that I could do this, didn’t you, Master? There isn’t really all that much difference between this rock and the one that closes the tower door, is there?’

He smiled gently. ‘Most perceptive, boy,’ he complimented me. I was getting a little tired of that ‘boy.’

‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’ I asked accusingly.

‘I had need to know if thou wouldst discover it for thyself, boy.’

‘And all these chores and tasks you’ve put me through for all these years were nothing more than an excuse to force me to discover it, weren’t they?’

‘Of course,’ he replied in an off-hand sort of way. ‘What is thy name, boy?’

‘Garath,’ I told him, and suddenly realized that he’d never asked me before.

‘An unseemly name, boy. Far too abrupt and commonplace for one of thy talent. I shall call thee Belgarath.’

‘As it please thee, Master.’ I’d never ‘thee’d’ or ‘thou’d’ him before, and I held my breath for fear that he might be displeased, but he showed no sign that he had noticed. Then, made bold by my success, I went further. ‘And how may I call thee, Master?’ I asked.

‘I am called Aldur,’ he replied, smiling.

I’d heard the name before, of course, so I immediately fell on my face before him.

‘Art thou ill, Belgarath?’

‘Oh, great and most powerful God,’ I said, trembling, ‘forgive mine ignorance. I should have known thee at once.’

‘Don’t do that!’ he said irritably. ‘I require no obeisance. I am not my brother, Torak. Rise to thy feet, Belgarath. Stand up, boy. Thine action is unseemly.’

I scrambled up fearfully and clenched myself for the sudden shock of lightning. Gods, as all men knew, could destroy at their whim those who displeased them. That was a quaint notion of the time. I’ve met a few Gods since then, and I know better now. In many respects, they’re even more circumscribed than we are.

‘And what dost thou propose to do with thy life now, Belgarath?’ he asked. That was my Master for you. He always asked questions that stretched out endlessly before me.

‘I would stay and serve thee, Master,’ I said, as humbly as I could.

‘I require no service,’ he said. ‘These past few years have been for thy benefit. In truth, Belgarath, what canst thou do for me?’

That was a deflating sort of thing to say – true, probably, but deflating all the same. ‘May I not stay and worship thee, Master?’ I pleaded. At that time I’d never met a God before, so I was uncertain about the proprieties. All I knew was that I would die if he sent me away.

He shrugged. You can cut a man’s heart out with a shrug, did you know that? ‘I do not require thy worship either, Belgarath,’ he said indifferently.

‘May I not stay, Master?’ I pleaded with actual tears standing in my eyes. He was breaking my heart! – quite deliberately, of course. ‘I would be thy disciple and learn from thee.’

‘The desire to learn does thee credit,’ he said, ‘but it will not be easy, Belgarath.’

‘I am quick to learn, Master,’ I boasted, glossing over the fact that it had taken me five years to learn his first lesson. ‘I shall make thee proud of me,’ I actually meant that.

And then he laughed, and my heart soared, even as it had when that old vagabond in the rickety cart had laughed. I had a few suspicions at that point. ‘Very well, then, Belgarath,’ he relented. ‘I shall accept thee as my pupil.’

‘And thy disciple also, Master?’

‘That we will see in the fullness of time, Belgarath.’

And then, because I was still very young and much impressed with my recent accomplishment, I turned to a winter-dried bush and spoke to it fervently. ‘Bloom,’ I said, and the bush quite suddenly produced a single flower. It wasn’t much of a flower, I’ll admit, but it was the best that I could do at the time. I was still fairly new at this. I plucked it and offered it to him. ‘For thee, Master,’ I said, ‘because I love thee.’ I don’t believe I’d ever used the word ‘love’ before, and it’s become the center of my whole life. Isn’t it odd how we make these simple little discoveries?

And he took my crooked little flower and held it between his hands. ‘I thank thee, my son,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever called me that. ‘And this flower shall be thy first lesson. I would have thee examine it most carefully and tell me all that thou canst perceive of it. Set aside thine axe and thy broom, Belgarath. This flower is now thy task.’

And that task took me twenty years, as I recall. Each time I came to my Master with the flower that never wilted nor faded – how I grew to hate that flower! – and told him what I’d learned, he would say, ‘Is that all, my son?’ And, crushed, I’d go back to my study of that silly little flower.

In time my distaste for it grew less. The more I studied it, the better I came to know it, and I eventually grew fond of it.

Then one day my Master suggested that I might learn more about it if I burned it and studied its ashes. I indignantly refused.

‘And why not, my son?’ he asked me.

‘Because it is dear to me, Master,’ I said in a tone probably more firm than I’d intended.

‘Dear?’ he asked.

‘I love the flower, Master! I will not destroy it!’

‘Thou art stubborn, Belgarath,’ he noted. ‘Did it truly take thee twenty years to admit thine affection for this small, gentle thing?’

And that was the true meaning of my first lesson. I still have that little flower somewhere, and although I can’t put my hands on it immediately, I think of it often and with great affection.

It was not long after that when my Master suggested that we journey to a place he called Prolgu, since he wanted to consult with someone there. I agreed to accompany him, of course, but to be quite honest about it, I didn’t really want to be away from my studies for that long. It was spring, however, and that’s always a good season for traveling. Prolgu is in the mountains, and if nothing else, the scenery was spectacular.

It took us quite some time to reach the place – my Master never hurried – and I saw creatures along the way that I’d never imagined existed. My Master identified them for me, and there was a peculiar note of pain in his voice as he pointed out unicorns, Hrulgin, Algroths and even an Eldrak.

‘What troubles thee, Master?’ I asked him one evening as we sat by our fire. ‘Are the creatures we have encountered distasteful to thee?’

‘They are a constant rebuke to me and my brothers, Belgarath,’ he replied sadly. ‘When the earth was all new, we dwelt with each other in a cave deep in these mountains, laboring to bring forth the beasts of the fields, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea. It seemeth me I have told thee of that time, have I not?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, Master,’ I replied. ‘It was before there was such a thing as man.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Man was our last creation. At any rate, some of the creatures we brought forth were unseemly, and we consulted and decided to unmake them, but UL forbade it.’

‘UL?’ The name startled me. I’d heard it quite often in the encampment of the old people the winter before I went to serve my Master.

‘Thou hast heard of him, I see.’ There was no real point in my trying to hide anything from my Master. ‘UL, as I told thee,’ he continued, ‘forbade the unmaking of things, and this greatly offended several of us. Torak in particular was put much out of countenance. Prohibitions or restraints of any kind do not sit well with my brother Torak. It was at his urging, methinks, that we sent such unseemly creatures to UL, telling them that he would be their God. I do sorely repent our spitefulness, for what UL did, he did out of a Necessity which we did not at the time perceive.’

‘It is UL with whom thou wouldst consult at Prolgu, is it not, Master?’ I asked shrewdly. You see? I’m not totally without some degree of perception.

My Master nodded. ‘A certain thing hath come to pass,’ he told me sadly. ‘We had hoped that it might not, but it is another of those Necessities to which men and Gods alike must bow,’ He sighed. ‘Seek thy bed, Belgarath,’ he told me then. ‘We still have far to go ere we reach Prolgu, and I have noted that without sleep, thou art a surly companion.’

‘A weakness of mine, Master,’ I admitted, spreading my blankets on the ground. My Master, of course, required sleep no more than he required food.

In time we reached Prolgu, which is a strange place on the top of a mountain which looks oddly artificial. We had no more than started up its side when we were greeted by a very old man and by someone who was quite obviously not a man. That was the first time I met UL, and the overpowering sense of his presence quite nearly bowled me over. ‘Aldur,’ he said to my Master, ‘well-met.’

‘Father,’ my Master replied, politely inclining his head. The Gods, I’ve noted, have an enormous sense of propriety. Then my Master reached inside his robe and took out that ordinary, round grey rock he’d spent the last couple of decades studying. ‘Our hopes notwithstanding,’ he announced, holding the rock out for UL to see, ‘it hath arrived.’

UL nodded gravely. ‘I had thought I sensed its presence. Wilt thou accept the burden of it?’

My Master sighed. ‘If I must,’ he said.

‘Thou art brave, Aldur,’ UL said, ‘and wiser far than thy brothers. That which commands us all hath brought it to thy hand for a purpose. Let us go apart and consider our course.’

I learned that day that there was something very strange about that ordinary-looking stone.

The old man who had accompanied UL was named Gorim, and he and I got along well. He was a gentle, kindly old fellow whose features were the same as those of the old people I’d met some years before. We went up into the city, and he took me to his house. We waited there while my Master – and his – spoke together for quite some time. To pass the long hours, he told me the story of how he had come to enter the service of UL. It seemed that his people were Dals, the ones who had somehow been left out when the Gods were selecting the various races of man to serve them. Despite my peculiar situation, I’ve never been a particularly religious man, so I had a bit of difficulty grasping the concept of the spiritual pain the Dals suffered as outcasts. The Dals, of course, traditionally live to the south of the cluster of mountains known only as Korim, but it appeared that quite early in their history, they divided themselves into various groups to go in search of a God. Some went to the north to become Morindim and Karands; some went to the east to become Melcenes; some stayed south of Korim and continued to be Dals; but Gorim’s people, Ulgos, he called them, came west.

Eventually, after the Ulgos had wandered around in the wilderness for generations, Gorim was born, and when he reached manhood, he volunteered to go alone in search of UL. That was long before I was born, of course. Anyway, after many years he finally found UL. He took the good news back to his people, but not too many of them believed him. People are like that sometimes. Finally he grew disgusted with them and told them to follow him or stay where they were, and he didn’t much care which. Some followed, and some didn’t. As he told me of this, he grew pensive. ‘I have oft-times wondered whatever happened to those who stayed behind,’ he said sadly.

‘I can clear that up for you, my friend,’ I advised him. ‘I happened across them some twenty-five or so years ago. They had a large camp quite a ways north of my Master’s Vale. I spent a winter with them and then moved on. I doubt that you’d find any of them still alive, though. They were all very old when I saw them.’

He gave me a stricken look, and then he bowed his head and wept.

‘What’s wrong, Gorim?’ I exclaimed, somewhat alarmed.

‘I had hoped that UL might relent and set aside my curse on them,’ he replied brokenly.

‘Curse?’

‘That they would wither and perish and be no more. Their women were made barren by my curse.’

‘It was still working when I was there,’ I told him. ‘There wasn’t a single child in the entire camp. I wondered why they made such a fuss over me. I guess they hadn’t seen a child in a long, long time. I couldn’t get any details from them, because I couldn’t understand their language.’

‘They spoke the old tongue,’ he told me sadly, ‘even as do my people here in Prolgu.’

‘How is it that you speak my language then?’ I asked him.

‘It is my place as leader to speak for my people when we encounter other races,’ he explained.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That stands to reason, I guess.’

My Master and I returned to the Vale not long after that, and I took up other studies. Time seemed meaningless in the Vale, and I devoted years of study to the most commonplace of things. I examined trees and birds, fish and beasts, insects and vermin. I spent forty-five years on the study of grass alone. In time it occurred to me that I wasn’t aging as other men did. I’d seen enough old people to know that aging is a part of being human, but for some reason I seemed to be breaking the rules.

‘Master,’ I said one night high in the tower as we both labored with our studies, ‘why is it that I do not grow old?’

‘Wouldst thou grow old, my son?’ he asked me. ‘I have never seen much advantage in it, myself.’

‘I don’t really miss it all that much, Master,’ I admitted, ‘but isn’t it customary?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said, but not mandatory. Thou hast much yet to learn, and one or ten or even a hundred lifetimes would not be enough. How old art thou, my son?’

‘I think I am somewhat beyond three hundred years, Master.’

‘A suitable age, my son, and thou hast persevered in thy studies. Should I forget myself and call thee “boy” again, pray correct me. It is not seemly that the disciple of a God should be called “boy”.’

‘I shall remember that, Master,’ I assured him, almost overcome with joy that he had finally called me his disciple.

‘I was certain that I could depend on thee,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘And what is the object of thy present study, my son?’

‘I would seek to learn why the stars fall, Master.’

‘A proper study, my son.’

‘And thou, Master,’ I asked, ‘what is thy study – if I be not overbold to ask.’

‘Even as before, Belgarath,’ he replied, holding up that fatal round stone. ‘It hath been placed in my care by UL himself, and it is therefore upon me to commune with it that I may know it – and its purpose.’

‘Can a stone have a purpose, Master – other than to be a stone?’ The piece of rock, now worn smooth, even polished, by my Master’s patient hand made me apprehensive for some reason. In one of those rare presentiments that I don’t have very often, I sensed that a great deal of mischief would come about as a result of it.

‘This particular jewel hath a great purpose, Belgarath, for through it the world and all who dwell herein shall be changed. If I can but perceive that purpose, I might make some preparations. That necessity lieth heavily upon my spirit.’ And then he lapsed once more into silence, idly turning the stone over and over in his hand as he gazed deep into its polished surface with troubled eyes.

I certainly wasn’t going to intrude upon his contemplation of the thing, so I turned back to my study of the inconstant stars.

Chapter 3

In time, others came to us, some seemingly by accident, as I had come, and some by intent, seeking out my Master that they might learn from him. Such a one was Zedar.

I came upon him near our tower one golden day in autumn after I’d served my Master for five hundred years or so. This stranger had built a rude altar and was burning the carcass of a goat on it. That got us off on the wrong foot right at the outset. Even the wolves knew enough not to kill things in the Vale. The greasy smoke from his offering was fouling the air, and he was prostrated before his altar, chanting some outlandish prayer.

‘What are you doing?’ I demanded – quite abruptly, I’ll admit, since his noise and the stink of his sacrifice distracted my mind from a problem I’d been considering for the past half-century.

‘Oh, puissant and all-knowing God,’ he said, groveling in the dirt, ‘I have come a thousand leagues to behold thy glory and to worship thee.’

‘Puissant? Quit trying to show off your education, man. Now get up and stop this caterwauling. I’m no more a God than you are.’

‘Art thou not the great God Aldur?’

‘I’m his disciple, Belgarath. What is all this nonsense?’ I pointed at his altar and his smoking goat.

‘It is to please the God,’ he replied, rising and dusting off his clothes. I couldn’t be sure, but he looked rather like a Tolnedran – or possibly an Arend. In either case, his babble about a thousand leagues was clearly a self-serving exaggeration. He gave me a servile, fawning sort of look. ‘Tell me truly,’ he pleaded, ‘dost thou think he will find this poor offering of mine acceptable?’

I laughed. ‘I can’t think of a single thing you could have done that would offend him more.’

The stranger looked stricken. He turned quickly and reached out as if he were going to grab up the animal with his bare hands to hide it.

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ I snapped. ‘You’ll burn yourself!’

‘It must be hidden,’ he said desperately. ‘I would rather die than offend mighty Aldur.’

‘Just get out of the way,’ I told him.

‘What?’

‘Stand clear,’ I said, irritably waving him off, ‘unless you want to take a trip with your goat.’ Then I looked at his grotesque little altar, willed it to a spot five miles distant, and translocated it with a single word, leaving only a few tatters of confused smoke hanging in the air.

He collapsed on his face again.

‘You’re going to wear out your clothes if you keep doing that,’ I told him, ‘and my Master won’t find it very amusing.’

‘I pray thee, mighty disciple of most high Aldur,’ he said, rising and dusting himself off again, ‘instruct me so that I offend not the God.’ He must have been an Arend. No Tolnedran could possibly mangle the language the way he did.

‘Be truthful,’ I told him, ‘and don’t try to impress him with false show and flowery speech. Believe me, friend, he can see right straight into your heart, so there’s no way you can deceive him. I’m not sure which God you worshiped before, but Aldur’s like no other God in the whole world.’ What an asinine thing that was to say. No two Gods are ever the same.

‘And how may I become his disciple, as thou art?’

‘First you become his pupil,’ I replied, ‘and that’s not easy.’

‘What must I do to become his pupil?’

‘You must become his servant.’ I said it a bit smugly, I’ll admit. A few years with an axe and a broom would probably do this pompous ass some good.

‘And then his pupil?’ he pressed.

‘In time,’ I replied, ‘if he so wills.’ It wasn’t up to me to reveal the secret of the Will and the Word to him. He’d have to find that out for himself – the same as I had.

‘And when may I meet the God?’

I was getting tired of him anyway, so I took him to the tower.

‘Will the God Aldur wish to know my name?’ he asked as we started across the meadow.

I shrugged. ‘Not particularly. If you’re lucky enough to prove worthy, he’ll give you a name of his own choosing.’ When we reached the tower, I commanded the grey stone in the wall to open, and we went inside and on up the stairs.

My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me. ‘Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?’ he asked me.

‘He besought me, Master,’ I replied. ‘I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay.’ I could mangle language as well as Zedar could, I guess. ‘Thy will must decide such things,’ I continued. ‘If it turns out that he doesn’t please thee, I’ll take him outside and turn him into a carrot, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘That was unkindly said, Belgarath,’ Aldur chided.

‘Forgive me, Master,’ I said humbly.

‘Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath. Should it come to pass that he be apt, inform me.’

I groaned inwardly, cursing my careless tongue. My casual offer to vegetabilize the stranger had saddled me with him. But Aldur was my Lord, so I said, ‘I will, Master.’

‘What is thy current study, my son?’

‘I examine the reason for mountains, Master.’

‘Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that the study shall make thee more kindly disposed toward thy fellow-creatures.’

I knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn’t argue. I sighed. ‘As my Master commands,’ I submitted regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I didn’t want it to escape me. But then I remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the Vale, so I swallowed my resentment – at least right there in front of him.

I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though. I put that poor man through absolute hell, I’m ashamed to admit. I degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he’d run away.

But he didn’t. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that sometimes made me want to scream. Didn’t the man have any spirit at all? To make matters even worse – to my profoundest mortification – he learned the secret of the Will and the Word within six months. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.

In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language, he wasn’t such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really wasn’t.

The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.

And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day – and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had the same thoughts at the same time and even finished each other’s sentences. Despite the fact that they’re Alorns, Belkira and Beltira are the gentlest men I’ve ever known. I’m quite fond of them, actually.

Makor was the next to arrive, and he came to us from so far away that I couldn’t understand how he had ever heard of my Master. Unlike the rest of us, who’d been fairly shabby when we’d arrived, Makor came strolling down the Vale dressed in a silk mantle, somewhat like the garb currently in fashion in Tol Honeth. He was a witty, urbane, well-educated man, and I took to him immediately.

Our Master questioned him briefly and decided that he was acceptable – with all the usual provisos.

‘But, Master,’ Belzedar objected vehemently, ‘he cannot become one of our fellowship. He is a Dal – one of the Godless ones.’

‘Melcene, actually, old boy,’ Makor corrected him in that ultra-civilized manner of his that always drove Belzedar absolutely wild. Now do you see why I was so fond of Makor?

‘What’s the difference?’ Belzedar demanded bluntly.

‘All the difference in the world, old chap,’ Makor replied, examining his fingernails. ‘We Melcenes separated from the Dals so long ago that we’re no more like them than Alorns are like Marags. It’s not really up to you, however. I was summoned, the same as the rest of you were, and that’s an end on it.’

I remembered the odd compulsion that had dragged me out of Gara, and I looked sharply at my Master. Would you believe that he actually managed to look slightly embarrassed?

Belzedar spluttered for a while, but, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he muffled his objections.

The next to join us was Sambar, an Angarak. Sambar – or Belsambar as he later became – was not his real name, of course. Angarak names are so universally ugly that my Master did him a favor when he renamed him. I felt a great deal of sympathy for the boy – he was only about fifteen when he joined us. I’ve never seen anyone so abject. He simply came to the tower, seated himself on the earth, and waited for either acceptance or death. Beltira and Belkira fed him, of course. They were shepherds, after all, and shepherds won’t let anything go hungry. After a week or so, when it became obvious that he absolutely would not enter the tower, our Master went down to him. Now that was something I’d never seen Aldur do before. He spoke with the lad at some length in a hideous language – old Angarak, I’ve since discovered – and turned him over to Beltira and Belkira for tutelage. If anyone ever needed gentle handling, it was Belsambar.

In time, the twins taught him to speak a normal language that didn’t involve so much spitting and snarling, and we learned his history. My distaste for Torak dates from that point in time. It may not have been entirely Torak’s fault, however. I’ve learned over the years that the views of any priesthood are not necessarily the views of the Gods they serve. I’ll give Torak the benefit of the doubt in this case – the practice of human sacrifice might have been no more than a perversion of his Grolim priests. But he did nothing to put a stop to it, and that’s unforgivable.

To cut all this windy moralizing short, Belsambar’s parents – both of them – had been sacrificed, and Belsambar had been required to watch as a demonstration of his faith. It didn’t really work out that way, though. Grolims can be so stupid sometimes. Anyway, at the tender age of nine, Belsambar became an atheist, rejecting not only Torak and his stinking Grolims, but all Gods.

That was when our Master summoned him. In his particular case, the summoning must have been a bit more spectacular than the vague urge that turned my face toward the Vale. Belsambar was clearly in a state of religious ecstasy when he reached us. Of course he was an Angarak, and they’re always a little strange in matters of religion.

It was Belmakor who first raised the notion of building our own towers. He was a Melcene, after all, and they’re obsessed with building things. I’ll admit that our Master’s tower was starting to get a bit crowded, though.

The construction of those towers took us several decades, as I recall. It was actually more in the nature of a hobby than it was a matter of any urgency. We did use what you might call our advantages in the construction, of course, but squaring off rocks is a tedious business, even if you don’t have to use a chisel. We did manage to clear away a lot of rock, though, and building material got progressively scarcer as the years rolled by.

I think it was late summer one year when I decided that it was time to finish up my tower so that I wouldn’t have it hanging over my head nagging at me. Besides, Belmakor’s tower was almost finished, and I was first disciple, after all. I didn’t think it would really be proper for me to let him outstrip me. We sometimes do things for the most childish of reasons, don’t we?

Since my brothers and I had virtually denuded the Vale of rocks, I went up to the edge of the forest lying to the north in search of building materials. I was poking around among the trees looking for a stream-bed or an outcropping of stone when I suddenly felt a baleful stare boring into the back of my neck. That’s an uncomfortable feeling that’s always irritated me for some reason. ‘You might as well come out,’ I said. ‘I know you’re there.’

‘Don’t try anything,’ an awful voice growled at me from a nearby thicket. ‘I’ll rip you to pieces if you do.’

Now that’s what I call an unpromising start. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I replied. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

That evoked the ugliest laugh I’ve ever heard. ‘You?’ the voice said scornfully, ‘You? Hurt me?’ And then the bushes parted and the most hideous creature I’ve ever seen emerged. He was grotesquely deformed with a huge hump on his back, gnarled, dwarfed legs, and long, twisted arms. This combination made it possible – even convenient – for him to go on all fours like a gorilla. His face was monumentally ugly, his hair and beard were matted, he was unbelievably filthy, and he was partially dressed in a ratty-looking fur of some kind. ‘Enjoying the view?’ he demanded harshly. ‘You’re not so pretty yourself, you know.’

‘You startled me, that’s all,’ I replied, trying to be civil.

‘Have you seen an old man in a rickety, broken-down cart around here anywhere?’ the creature demanded. ‘He told me he’d meet me here.’

I stared at him in absolute astonishment.

‘You’d better close your mouth,’ he advised me in that raspy growl. ‘You’ll catch flies if you don’t.’

All sorts of things clicked into place. ‘This old man you’re looking for,’ I said. ‘Did he have a humorous way of talking?’

‘That’s him,’ the dwarf said. ‘Have you seen him?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied with a broad grin. ‘I’ve known him for longer than you could possibly imagine. Come along, my ugly little friend. I’ll take you to him.’

‘Don’t be too quick to throw the word “friend” around,’ he growled. ‘I don’t have any friends, and I like it that way.’

‘You’ll get over that in a few hundred years,’ I replied, still grinning at the little monster.

‘You don’t sound quite right in the head to me.’

‘You’ll get used to that, too. Come along. I’ll introduce you to your Master.’

‘I don’t have a master.’

‘I wouldn’t make any large wagers on that.’

And that was our introduction to Din. My brothers thought at first that I’d come across a tame ape. Din rather quickly disabused them of that notion. He had by far the foulest mouth I’ve ever come across, even when he was not trying to be insulting, and I honestly believe he could swear for a day and a half without once repeating himself. He was even ungracious to our Master. His very first words to him were, ‘What did you do with that stupid cart of yours? I tried to follow the tracks, but they just disappeared on me.’

Aldur, with that inhuman patience of his, simply smiled. Would you believe that he actually liked the foul-mouthed little monster? ‘Is that what took thee so long?’ he asked mildly.

‘Of course that’s what took me so long!’ Din exploded. ‘You didn’t leave me a trail to follow! I had to reason out your location!’ Din had turned losing his temper into an art-form. The slightest thing could set him off. ‘Well?’ he said then, ‘now what?’

‘We must see to thine education.’

‘What does somebody like me need with an education? I already know what I need to know.’

Aldur gave him a long, steady look, and even Din couldn’t face that for long. Then our Master looked around at the rest of us. He obviously dismissed Beltira and Belkira out of hand. They hadn’t the proper temperament to deal with our newest recruit. Belzedar was in a state verging on inarticulate rage. Belzedar may have had his faults, but he wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect for our Master. Belmakor was too fastidious. Din was filthy, and he smelled like an open sewer. Belsambar, for obvious reasons, was totally out of the question. Guess who that left.

I wearily raised my hand. ‘Don’t trouble thyself, Master,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘Why, Belgarath,’ he said, ‘how gracious of thee to volunteer thy service.’

I chose not to answer that.

‘Ah, Belgarath?’ Belmakor said tentatively.

‘What?’

‘Could you possibly wash him off before you bring him inside again?’

Despite my show of reluctance, I wasn’t quite as displeased with the arrangement as I pretended to be. I still wanted to finish my tower, and this powerful dwarf seemed well-suited to the task of carrying rocks. If things worked out the way I thought they might, I wouldn’t have to strain my creativity in the slightest to find things for my ugly little servant to do.

I took him outside and showed him my half-finished tower. ‘You understand the situation here?’ I asked him.

‘I’m supposed to do what you tell me to do.’

‘Exactly.’ This was going to work out just fine. ‘Now, let’s go back to the edge of the woods. I’ve got a little chore for you.’

It took us quite some time to return to the woods. When we got there, I pointed at a dry stream-bed filled with nice round rocks of a suitable size. ‘See those rocks?’ I asked him.

‘Naturally I can see them, you dolt! I’m not blind!’

‘I’m so happy for you. I’d like for you to pile them all beside my tower – neatly, of course.’ I sat down under a shady tree. ‘Be a good fellow and see to it, would you?’ I was actually enjoying this.

He glowered at me for a moment and then turned to glare at the rocky stream-bed.

Then, one by one, the rocks began to vanish! I could actually feel him doing it! Would you believe it? Din already knew the secret! It was the first case of spontaneous sorcery I’d ever seen. ‘Now what?’ he demanded.

‘How did you learn to do that?’ I demanded incredulously.

He shrugged. ‘Picked it up somewhere,’ he replied. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you can’t?’

‘Of course I can, but – ’ I got hold of myself at that point. ‘Are you sure you translocated them to the right spot?’

‘You wanted them piled up beside your tower, didn’t you? Go look, if you want. I know where they are. Was there anything else you wanted me to do here?’

‘Let’s go back,’ I told him shortly.

It took me a while to regain my composure. We were about half-way back before I could trust myself to start asking questions. ‘Where are you from?’ It was banal, but it was a place to start.

‘Originally, you mean? That’s sort of hard to say. I move around a lot. I’m not very welcome in most places. I’m used to it, though. It’s been going on since the day I was born.’

‘Oh?’

‘I gather that my mother’s people had a fairly simple way to rid themselves of defectives. As soon as they laid eyes on me, they took me out in the woods and left me there to starve – or to provide some wolf with a light snack. My mother was a sentimentalist, though, so she used to sneak out of the village to feed me.’

And I thought my childhood had been hard.

‘She stopped coming a year or so after I’d learned to walk, though,’ he added in a deliberately harsh tone. ‘Died, I suppose – or they caught her sneaking out and killed her. I was on my own after that.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘Does it really matter?’ There was a distant pain in his eyes, however. ‘There are all sorts of things to eat in a forest – if you’re not too particular. Vultures and ravens manage fairly well. I learned to watch for them. I found out early on that anyplace you see a vulture, there’s probably something to eat. You get used to the smell after a while.’

‘You’re an animal!’ I exclaimed.

‘We’re all animals, Belgarath.’ It was the first time he’d used my name. ‘I’m better at it than most, because I’ve had more practice. Now, do you suppose we could talk about something else?’

Chapter 4

And now we were seven, and I think we all knew that for the time being there wouldn’t be any more of us. The others came later. We were an oddly assorted group, I’ll grant you, but the fact that we lived in separate towers helped to keep down the frictions to some degree.

The addition of Beldin to our fellowship was not as disruptive as I’d first imagined it might be. This is not to say that our ugly little brother mellowed very much, but rather that we grew accustomed to his irascible nature as the years rolled by. I invited him to stay in my tower with me during what I suppose you could call his novitiate – that period when he was Aldur’s pupil before he achieved full status. I discovered during those years that there was a mind lurking behind those bestial features, and what a mind it was! With the possible exception of Belmakor, Beldin was clearly the most intelligent of us all. The two of them argued for years about points of logic and philosophy so obscure that the rest of us hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were talking about, and they both enjoyed those arguments enormously.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to persuade Beldin that an occasional bath probably wouldn’t be harmful to his health, and that if he bathed, the fastidious Belmakor might be willing to come close enough to him that they wouldn’t have to shout during their discussions. As my daughter’s so fond of pointing out, I’m not an absolute fanatic about bathing, but Beldin sometimes carries his indifference to extremes.

During the years that we lived and studied together, I came to know Beldin and eventually at least to partially understand him. Mankind was still in its infancy in that age, and the virtue of compassion hadn’t really caught on as yet. Humor, if you want to call it that, was still quite primitive and brutal. People found any sort of anomaly funny, and Beldin was about as anomalous as you can get. Rural folk would greet his entry into their villages with howls of laughter, and after they’d laughed their fill, they would normally stone him out of town. It’s not really very hard to understand his foul temper, is it? His own people tried to kill him the moment he was born, and he’d spent his whole life being chased out of every community he tried to enter. I’m really rather surprised that he didn’t turn homicidal. I probably would have.

He’d lived with me for a couple hundred years, and then on one rainy spring day, he raised a subject I probably should have known would come up eventually. He was staring moodily out the window at the slashing rain, and he finally growled, ‘I think I’ll build my own tower.’

‘Oh?’ I replied, laying aside my book. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’

‘I need more room, and we’re starting to get on each other’s nerves.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that.’

‘Belgarath, you don’t even notice the seasons. When you’re face-down in one of your books, I could probably set fire to your toes, and you wouldn’t notice. Besides, you snore.’

‘I snore? You sound like a passing thunderstorm every night, all night.’

‘It keeps you from getting lonesome.’ He looked pensively out the window again. ‘There’s another reason, too, of course.’

‘Oh?’

He looked directly at me, his eyes strangely wistful. ‘In my whole life, I’ve never really had a place of my own. I’ve slept in the woods, in ditches, and under haystacks, and the warm, friendly nature of my fellow-man has kept me pretty much constantly on the move. I think that just once, I’d like to have a place that nobody can throw me out of.’

What could I possibly say to that? ‘You want some help?’ I offered.

‘Not if my tower’s going to turn into something that looks like this one,’ he growled.

‘What’s wrong with this tower?’

‘Belgarath, be honest. This tower of yours looks like an ossified tree-stump. You have absolutely no sense of beauty whatsoever.’

This? Coming from Beldin?

‘I think I’ll go talk with Belmakor. He’s a Melcene, and they’re natural builders. Have you ever seen one of their cities?’

‘I’ve never had occasion to go into the east.’

‘Naturally not. You can’t pull yourself out of your books long enough to go anyplace. Well? Are you coming along, or not?’

How could I turn down so gracious an invitation? I pulled on my cloak, and we went out into the rain. Beldin, of course, didn’t bother with cloaks. He was absolutely indifferent to the weather.

When we reached Belmakor’s somewhat overly ornate tower, my stumpy little friend bellowed up, ‘Belmakor! I need to talk with you!’

Our civilized brother came to the window. ‘What is it, old boy?’ he called down to us.

‘I’ve decided to build my own tower. I want you to design it for me. Open your stupid door.’

‘Have you bathed lately?’

‘Just last month. Don’t worry, I won’t stink up your tower.’

Belmakor sighed. ‘Oh, very well,’ he gave in. His eyes went slightly distant, and the latch on his heavy iron-bound door clicked. The rest of us had taken our cue from our Master and used rocks to close the entrances to our towers, but Belmakor felt the need for a proper door. Beldin and I went in and mounted the stairs.

‘Have you and Belgarath had a falling out?’ Belmakor asked curiously.

‘Is that any business of yours?’ Beldin snapped.

‘Not really. Just wondering.’

‘He wants a place of his own,’ I explained. ‘We’re starting to get under each other’s feet.’

Belmakor was very shrewd. He got my point immediately. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asked the dwarf.

‘Beauty,’ Beldin said bluntly. ‘I may not be able to share it, but at least I’ll be able to look at it.’

Belmakor’s eyes filled with sudden tears. He always was the most emotional of us.

‘Oh, stop that!’ Beldin told him. ‘Sometimes you’re so gushy you make me want to spew. I want grace. I want proportion, I want something that soars. I’m tired of living in the mud.’

‘Can you manage that?’ I asked our brother.

Belmakor went to his writing desk, gathered his papers, and inserted them in the book he’d been studying. Then he put the book upon a top shelf, spun a large sheet of paper and one of those inexhaustible quill pens he was so fond of out of air itself, and sat down. ‘How big?’ he asked Beldin.

‘I think we’d better keep it a little lower than the Master’s, don’t you?’

‘Wise move. Let’s not get above ourselves.’ Belmakor quickly sketched in a fairy castle that took my breath away – all light and delicacy with flying buttresses that soared out like wings, and towers as slender as toothpicks.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Beldin accused. ‘You couldn’t house butterflies in that piece of gingerbread.’

‘Just a start, brother mine,’ Belmakor said gaily. ‘We’ll modify it down to reality as we go along. You have to do that with dreams.’

And that started an argument that lasted for about six months and ultimately drew us all into it. Our own towers were, for the most part, strictly utilitarian. Although it pains me to admit it, Beldin’s description of my tower was probably fairly accurate. It did look somewhat like a petrified tree-stump when I stepped back to look at it. It kept me out of the weather, though, and it got me up high enough so that I could see the horizon and look at the stars. What else is a tower supposed to do?

It was at that point that we discovered that Belsambar had the soul of an artist. The last place in the world you would look for beauty would be in the mind of an Angarak. With surprising heat, given his retiring nature, he argued with Belmakor long and loud, insisting on his variations as opposed to the somewhat pedestrian notions of the Melcenes. Melcenes are builders, and they think in terms of stone and mortar and what your material will actually let you get away with. Angaraks think of the impossible, and then try to come up with ways to make it work.

‘Why are you doing this, Belsambar?’ Beldin once asked our normally self-effacing brother. ‘It’s only a buttress, and you’ve been arguing about it for weeks now.’

‘It’s the curve of it, Beldin,’ Belsambar explained, more fervently than I’d ever heard him say anything else. ‘It’s like this.’ And he created the illusion of the two opposing towers in the air in front of them for comparison. I’ve never known anyone else who could so fully build illusions as Belsambar. I think it’s an Angarak trait; their whole world is built on an illusion.

Belmakor took one look and threw his hands in the air. ‘I bow to superior talent,’ he surrendered. ‘It’s beautiful, Belsambar. Now, how do we make it work? There’s not enough support.’

‘I’ll support it, if necessary.’ It was Belzedar, of all people! ‘I’ll hold up our brother’s tower until the end of days, if need be.’ What a soul that man had!

‘You still didn’t answer my question – any of you!’ Beldin rasped. ‘Why are you all taking so much trouble with all of this?’

‘It is because thy brothers love thee, my son,’ Aldur, who had been standing in the shadows unobserved, told him gently. ‘Canst thou not accept their love?’

Beldin’s ugly face suddenly contorted grotesquely, and he broke down and wept.

‘And that is thy first lesson, my son,’ Aldur told him. ‘Thou wilt warily give love, all concealed beneath this gruff exterior of thine, but thou must also learn to accept love.’

It all got a bit sentimental after that.

And so we all joined together in the building of Beldin’s tower. It didn’t really take us all that long. I hope Durnik takes note of that. It’s not really immoral to use our gift on mundane things, Sendarian ethics notwithstanding.

I missed having my grotesque little friend around in my own tower, but I’ll admit that I slept better. I wasn’t exaggerating in the least in my description of his snoring.

Life settled down in the Vale after that. We continued our studies of the world around us and expanded our applications of our peculiar talent. I think it was one of the twins who discovered that it was possible for us to communicate with each other by thought alone. It would have been one – or both – of the twins, since they’d been sharing their thoughts since the day they were born. I do know that it was Beldin who discovered the trick of assuming the forms of other creatures. The main reason I can be so certain is that he startled several years’ growth out of me the first time he did it. A large hawk with a bright band of blue feathers across its tail came soaring in, settled on my window ledge, and blurred into Beldin. ‘How about that?’ he demanded. ‘It works after all.’

I was drinking from a tankard at the time, and I dropped it and went into an extended fit of choking while he pounded me on the back.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I demanded after I got my breath.

He shrugged. ‘I was studying birds,’ he explained. ‘I thought it might be useful to look at the world from their perspective for a while. Flying’s not as easy as it looks. I almost killed myself when I threw myself out of the tower window.’

‘You idiot!’

‘I managed to get my wings working before I hit the ground. It’s sort of like swimming. You never know if you can do it until you try.’

‘What’s it like? Flying, I mean?’

‘I couldn’t even begin to describe it, Belgarath,’ he replied with a look of wonder on his ugly face. ‘You should try it. I wouldn’t recommend jumping out of any windows, though. Sometimes you’re a little careless with details, and if you don’t get the tail feathers right, you’ll break your beak.’

Beldin’s discovery came at a fortuitous time. It wasn’t very long afterward that our Master sent us out from the Vale to see what the rest of mankind had been up to. As closely as I can pinpoint it, it seems to have been about fifteen hundred years since that snowy night when I first met him.

Anyway, flying is a much faster way to travel than walking. Beldin coached us all, and we were soon flapping around the Vale like a flock of migrating ducks. I’ll admit right at the outset that I don’t fly very well. Polgara’s made an issue of that from time to time. I think she holds it in reserve for occasions when she doesn’t have anything else to carp about. Anyway, after Beldin taught us how to fly, we scattered to the winds and went out to see what people were up to. With the exception of the Ulgos, there wasn’t really anybody to the west of us, and I didn’t get along too well with their new Gorim. The original one and I had been close friends, but the latest one seemed just a bit taken with himself.

So I flew east instead and dropped in on the Tolnedrans. They’d built a number of cities since the last time I’d seen them. Some of those cities were actually quite large, though their habit of using logs for constructing walls and thatch for roofs made me just a little wary of entering those freestanding firetraps. As you might expect, the Tolnedran fascination with money hadn’t diminished in the fifteen hundred years since I’d last seen them. If anything, they’d grown even more acquisitive, and they seemed to spend a great deal of time building roads. What is this thing with Tolnedrans and roads? They were generally peaceful, however, since war’s bad for business, so I flew on to visit the Marags.

The Marags were a strange people – as I’m sure Relg has discovered by now. Perhaps their peculiarities are the result of the fact that there are many more women in their society than there are men. Their God, Mara, takes what is in my view an unwholesome interest in fertility and reproduction. Their society is matriarchal, which is unusual – although the Nyissans tend in that direction as well.

Despite its peculiarities, Marag culture was functional, and they had not yet begun the practice of ritual cannibalism that their neighbors found so repugnant and which ultimately led to their near-extinction. They were a generous people – the women particularly, and I got along quite well with them. I don’t know that I need to go into too much detail. This book will almost certainly fall into Polgara’s hands eventually, and she has strong opinions about some things which aren’t really all that important.

After several years, we all returned to the Vale and gathered once more in our Master’s tower to report on what we had seen.

With a certain delicacy, our Master had sent Belsambar north to see what the Morindim and the Karands were doing. It really wouldn’t have been a good idea to send Belsambar back into the lands of the Angaraks. He had very strong feelings about the Grolim priesthood, and our journeys were supposed to be fact-finding missions. We weren’t out there to right wrongs or to impose our own notions of justice. In retrospect, though, we could have probably saved the world a great deal of pain and suffering if we’d simply turned Belsambar loose on the Grolims. It probably would have caused bad blood between Torak and our Master, though, and that came soon enough anyway.

It was Belzedar who went down to the north side of Korim to observe the Angaraks. Isn’t it funny how things turn out? What he saw in those mountains troubled him very much. Torak always had an exaggerated notion of his significance in the overall scheme of things, and he encouraged his Angaraks to become excessive in their worship. They’d raised a temple to him in the High Places of Korim where the Grolim priesthood ecstatically butchered their fellow Angaraks by the hundreds while Torak looked on approvingly.

The religious practices of the various races of man were really none of our business, but Belzedar found cause for alarm in the beliefs of the Angaraks. Torak made no secret of the fact that he considered himself several cuts above his brothers, and he was evidently encouraging his people to feel the same way about themselves. ‘It’s just a matter of time, I’m afraid,’ Belzedar concluded somberly. ‘Sooner or later, they’re going to try to impose their notion of their own superiority on the rest of mankind, and that won’t work. If someone doesn’t persuade Torak to stop filling the heads of the Angaraks with that obscene sense of superiority, there’s very likely to be war in the south.’

Then Belsambar told us that the Morindim and the Karands had become demon-worshipers, but that they posed no real threat to the rest of mankind, since the demons devoted themselves almost exclusively to eating the magicians who raised them.

Beldin reported that the Arends had grown even more stupid – if that’s possible – and that they all lived in a more or less perpetual state of war.

Belmakor had passed through the lands of the Nyissans on his way to Melcena, and he reported that the snake-people were still fearfully primitive. No one’s ever accused the Nyissans of being energetic, but you’d think they might have at least started building houses by now. The Melcenes, of course, did build houses – probably more than they really needed – but it kept them out of mischief. On his way back, he passed through Kell, and he told us that the Dals were much involved in arcane studies – astrology, necromancy, and the like. The Dals spend so much of their time trying to look into the future that they tend to lose sight of the present. I hate mystics! The only good part of it was that they were so fuzzy-headed that they didn’t pose a threat to anybody else.

The Alorns, of course, were an entirely different matter. They’re a noisy, belligerent people who’ll fight at the drop of a hat. Beltira and Belkira looked in on their fellow Alorns. Fortunately for the sake of world peace, the Alorns, like the Arends, spent most of their time fighting each other rather than doing war on other races, but the twins strongly suggested that we keep an eye on them. I’ve been doing just that for the past five thousand years. It was probably that more than anything else that turned my hair white. Alorns can get into more trouble by accident than other people can on purpose – always excepting the Arends, of course. Arends are perpetually a catastrophe waiting to explode.

Our Master considered our reports carefully and concluded that the world outside the Vale was generally peaceful and that only the Angaraks were likely to cause trouble. He told us that he’d have a word with his brother Torak about that particular problem, pointing out to him that if any kind of general war broke out, the Gods themselves would inevitably be drawn in, and that would be disastrous. ‘Methinks I can make him see reason,’ Aldur told us. Reason? Torak? Sometimes my Master’s optimism got the better of him.

As I recall, he had been absently fondling that strange grey stone of his as we made our reports. He’d had the thing for so long that I don’t think he even realized that it was in his hand. Over the years since he’d spoken with UL about it, I don’t think he’d once put it down, and it somehow almost became a part of him.

It was naturally Belzedar who noticed it. I wonder how everything might have turned out if he hadn’t. ‘What is that strange jewel, Master?’ he asked. Better far that his tongue had fallen out before he asked that fatal question.

‘This Orb?’ Aldur replied, holding it up for all of us to see. ‘In it lies the fate of the world.’ It was then for the first time that I noticed that the stone seemed to have a faint blue flicker deep inside of it. It was, as I think I’ve mentioned before, polished by a thousand years or more of our Master’s touch, and it was now, as Belzedar had so astutely noticed, more a jewel than a piece of plain, country rock.

‘How can so small an object be so important, Master?’ Belzedar asked. That’s another question I wish he’d never thought of. If he’d just been able to let it drop, none of what’s happened would have happened, and he wouldn’t be in his present situation. Despite all of our training, there are some questions better left unanswered.

Unfortunately, our Master had a habit of answering questions, and so things came out that might better have been left buried. If they had, I might not currently be carrying a load of guilt which I’m not really strong enough to bear. I’d rather carry a mountain than carry what I did to Belzedar. Garion might understand that, but I’m fairly sure none of the rest of my savage family would. Regrets? Yes, of course I have regrets. I’ve got regrets stacked up behind me at least as far as from here to the moon. But we don’t die from regret, do we? We might squirm a little, but we don’t die.

And our Master smiled at my brother Belzedar, and the Orb grew brighter. I seemed to see images flickering dimly within it. ‘Herein lies the past,’ our Master told us, ‘and the present, and the future, also. This is but a small part of the virtue of the Orb. With it may man – or earth herself – be healed or destroyed. Whatsoever man or God would do, though it be beyond even the power of the Will and the Word, with this Orb may it come to pass.’

‘Truly a wondrous thing, Master,’ Belzedar said, looking a bit puzzled, ‘but still I fail to understand. The jewel is fair, certainly, but in fine it is yet but a stone.’

‘The Orb hath revealed the future unto me, my son,’ our Master replied sadly. ‘It shall be the cause of much contention and great suffering and vast destruction. Its power reaches from where it now lies to blow out the lives of men yet unborn as easily as thou wouldst snuff out a candle.’

‘It’s an evil thing then, Master,’ I said, and Belsambar and Belmakor agreed.

‘Destroy it, Master,’ Belsambar pleaded, ‘before it can bring its evil into the world.’

‘That may not be,’ our Master replied.

‘Blessed be the wisdom of Aldur,’ Belzedar said, his eyes glittering strangely. ‘With us to aid him, our Master may wield this wondrous jewel for good instead of ill. It would be monstrous to destroy so precious a thing.’ Now that I look back at everything that’s happened, I suppose I shouldn’t really blame Belzedar for his unholy interest in the Orb. It was a part of something that absolutely had to happen. I shouldn’t blame him for it – but I do.

‘I tell ye, my sons,’ our Master continued, ‘I would not destroy the Orb even were it possible. Ye have all just returned from looking at the world in its childhood and at man in his infancy. All living things must grow or they will die. Through this jewel shall the world be changed and man shall achieve that state for which he was made. The Orb is not of itself evil. Evil is a thing which lieth only in the hearts and minds of men – and of Gods also.’ And then our Master fell silent, and he sighed, and we went away and left him in his sad communion with the Orb.

We saw little of our Master in the centuries which followed. Alone in his tower he continued his study of the Orb, and he learned much from it, I think. We were all saddened by his absence, and our work had little joy in it.

I think it was about twenty centuries after I came to serve my Master when a stranger came into the Vale. He was beautiful as no being I have ever seen, and he walked as if his foot spurned the earth.

As was customary, we went out to greet him.

‘I would speak with thy Master Aldur,’ he told us, and we knew that we were in the presence of a God.

As the eldest, I stepped forward. ‘I shall tell my Master you have come,’ I said politely. I wasn’t certain which God he was, but something about this over-pretty stranger didn’t sit very well with me.

‘That is not needful, Belgarath,’ he told me in a tone that irritated me even more than his manner. ‘My brother knows I am here. Convey me to his tower.’

I turned and led the way without trusting myself to answer.

When we reached the tower, the stranger looked me full in the face. ‘A bit of advice for thee, Belgarath,’ he said, ‘by way of thanks for thy service. Seek not to rise above thyself. It is not thy place to approve or to disapprove of me. For thy sake, I hope that when next we meet, thou wilt remember this instruction and behave in a more seemly manner.’ His eyes seemed to bore directly into me, and his voice chilled me.

But, because I was still who I was and not even the two thousand years and more I had lived in the Vale had entirely put the wild, rebellious boy in me to sleep, I answered him somewhat tartly. ‘Thank you for the advice,’ I told him. ‘Will you require anything else?’ It wasn’t up to me to tell him where the door was or how to open it. I waited, watching hopefully for some hint of confusion.

‘Thou art pert, Belgarath,’ he observed. ‘Perhaps one day I shall give myself leisure to instruct thee in proper behavior and customary respect.’

‘I’m always eager to learn,’ I replied. As you can see, Torak and I got off on the wrong foot almost immediately. You’ll notice that I’d deduced his identity by now.

He turned and gestured, and the stone door of the tower opened. Then he went inside.

We never knew exactly what passed between our Master and his brother. They spoke together for hours, then a summer storm broke above our heads, so we were forced to take shelter and thus missed Torak’s departure.

When the storm had cleared, our Master called us to him, and we went up into his tower. He sat at the table where he had labored so long over the Orb. There was a great sadness in his face, and my heart wept to see it. There was also a reddened mark on his cheek that I didn’t understand.

But Belzedar saw what I hadn’t almost at once. ‘Master!’ he said with a note of panic in his voice, ‘where is the jewel? Where is the Orb of power?’ I wish I’d paid closer attention to the sound of his voice. I might have been able to avert a lot of things if I had.

‘Torak, my brother, hath taken it away with him,’ our Master replied, and his voice had almost the sound of weeping in it.

‘Quickly!’ Belzedar exclaimed. ‘We must pursue him and reclaim the Orb before he escapes us! We are many, and he is but one!’

‘He is a God, my son,’ Aldur said. ‘Numbers mean nothing to him.’

‘But, Master,’ Belzedar said desperately, ‘we must reclaim the Orb! It must be returned to us!’ And I still didn’t realize what was going on in Belzedar’s mind. My brains must have been asleep.

‘How did thy brother obtain thine Orb from thee, Master?’ Beltira asked.

‘Torak conceived a desire for the jewel,’ Aldur said, ‘and he besought me that I should give it to him. When I would not, he smote me and took the Orb and ran.’

That did it! Though the jewel was wondrous, it was still only a stone. The fact that Torak had struck my Master, however, brought flames into my brain. I threw off my cloak, bent my will into the air before me, and forged a sword with a single word. I seized the sword and leapt to the window.

‘No!’ my Master said, and the word stopped me as if a wall had been placed before me.

‘Open!’ I commanded, slashing at that unseen wall with the sword I’d just made.

‘No!’ my Master said again, and the wall wouldn’t let me through.

‘He hath struck thee, Master!’ I raged. ‘For that I will kill him though he be ten times a God!’

‘No. Torak would crush thee as easily as thou wouldst crush an insect which annoyed thee. I love thee much, mine eldest son, and I would not lose thee so.’

‘There must be war, Master,’ Belmakor said. That should give you some idea of how seriously we took the matter. The word ‘war’ was the last I’d have ever expected to hear coming from the ultra-civilized Belmakor. ‘The blow and the theft must not go unpunished. We will forge weapons, and Belgarath shall lead us. We will make war on this thief who calls himself a God.’

‘My son,’ Aldur said with a kind of gentle sorrow, ‘there will be war enough to glut thee of it before thy life ends. Gladly would I have given the Orb to Torak, save that the Orb itself hath told me that one day it would destroy him. I would have spared him had I been able, but his lust for the jewel was too great, and he would not listen.’ He sighed and then straightened. ‘There will be war, Belmakor. It is unavoidable now. My brother hath the Orb in his possession, and with its power can he do great mischief. We must reclaim it or alter it before Torak can subdue it and bend it to his will.’

‘Alter?’ Belzedar said, aghast. ‘Surely, Master, surely thou wouldst not weaken this precious thing!’ It seemed that was all he could think about, and I still didn’t understand.

‘It may not be weakened, Belzedar,’ Aldur replied, ‘but will retain its power even unto the end of days. The purpose of our war shall be to press Torak into haste, that he will attempt to use it in a way that it will not be used.’

Belzedar stared at him. He evidently had thought that the Orb was a passive object. He hadn’t counted on the fact that it had its own ideas about things.

‘The world is inconstant, Belzedar,’ our Master explained, ‘but good and evil are immutable and unchanging. The Orb is an object of good and not merely some bauble or toy. It hath understanding not such as thine, but understanding nonetheless. And it hath a will. Beware of it, for its will is the will of a stone. It is, as I say, a thing of good. If it be raised to do evil, it will strike down whoever would so use it – be he man or be he God.’ Aldur obviously saw what I did not, and this was his way to try to warn Belzedar. I don’t think it worked, though.

Our Master sighed, then he rose to his feet. ‘We must make haste,’ he told us. ‘Go ye, my disciples. Go ye even unto mine other brothers and tell them that I bid them come to me. I am the eldest, and they will come out of respect, if not love. The war we propose will not be ours alone. I do fear me that all of mankind shall be caught up in it. Go, therefore, and summon my brothers that we may consider what must be done.’