TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers
Published by arrangement with Ballantine Books,
a division of Random House, Inc.
Corgi edition published 1987
Corgi edition reissued 2012
Copyright © David Eddings 1987
David Eddings has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781407056890
ISBN 9780552168564
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book One:
PAWN OF PROPHECY
Book Two:
QUEEN OF SORCERY
Book Three:
MAGICIAN’S GAMBIT
Book Four:
CASTLE OF WIZARDRY
Book Five:
ENCHANTERS’ END GAME
Book One:
GUARDIANS OF THE WEST
Book Two:
KING OF THE MURGOS
Book Three:
DEMON LORD OF KARANDA
Book Four:
SORCERESS OF DARSHIVA
Book Five:
SEERESS OF KELL
It was late spring. The rains had come and passed, and the frost had gone out of the ground. Warmed by the soft touch of the sun, damp brown fields lay open to the sky, covered only by a faint green blush as the first tender shoots emerged from their winter’s sleep. Quite early one fine morning, when the air was still cool, but the sky gave promise of a golden day, the boy Errand, along with his family, left an inn lying in one of the quieter districts of the bustling port city of Camaar on the south coast of the kingdom of Sendaria. Errand had never had a family before, and the sense of belonging was new to him. Everything around him seemed colored, overshadowed almost, by the fact that he was now included in a small, tightly knit group of people bound together by love. The purpose of the journey upon which they set out that spring morning was at once simple and very profound. They were going home. Just as he had not had a family before, Errand had never had a home; and, though he had never seen the cottage in the Vale of Aldur which was their destination, he nonetheless yearned toward that place as if its every stone and tree and bush had been imprinted upon his memory and imagination since the day he was born.
A brief rain squall had swept in off the Sea of the Winds about midnight and then had passed as quickly as it had come, leaving the gray, cobbled streets and tall, tile-roofed buildings of Cammar washed clean to greet the morning sun. As they rolled slowly through the streets in the sturdy wagon which Durnik the smith, after much careful inspection, had bought two days earlier, Errand, riding burrowed amongst the bags of food and equipment which filled the wagon bed, could smell the faint, salt tang of the harbor and see the bluish morning cast in the shadows of the red-roofed buildings they passed. Durnik, of course, drove the wagon, his strong brown hands holding the reins in that competent way with which he did everything, transmitting somehow along those leather straps to the wagon team the comforting knowledge that he was completely in control and knew exactly what he was doing.
The stout, placid mare upon which Belgarath the Sorcerer rode, however, quite obviously did not share the comfortable security felt by the wagon horses. Belgarath, as he sometimes did, had stayed late in the taproom of the inn the previous night and he rode this morning slumped in the saddle, paying little or no heed to where he was going. The mare, also recently purchased, had not yet had the time to accustom herself to her new owner’s peculiarities, and his almost aggressive inattention made her nervous. She rolled her eyes often, as if trying to determine if this immobile lump mounted on her back really intended for her to go along with the wagon or not.
Belgarath’s daughter, known to the entire world as Polgara the Sorceress, viewed her father’s semicomatose progress through the streets of Camaar with a steady gaze, reserving her comments for later. She sat beside Durnik, her husband of only a few weeks, wearing a hooded cape and a plain gray woolen dress. She had put aside the blue velvet gowns and jewels and rich, fur-trimmed capes which she had customarily worn while they had been at Riva and had assumed this simpler mode of dress as if almost with relief. Polgara was not averse to wearing finery when the occasion demanded it; and when so dressed, she appeared more regal than any queen in all the world. She had, however, an exquisite sense of the appropriate and she had dressed herself in these plain garments almost with delight, since they were appropriate to something she had wanted to do for uncounted centuries.
Unlike his daughter, Belgarath dressed entirely for comfort. The fact that his boots were mismatched was neither an indication of poverty nor of carelessness. It stemmed rather from conscious choice, since the left boot of one pair was comfortable upon his left foot and its mate pinched his toes, whereas his right boot—from another pair—was most satisfactory, while its companion chafed his heel. It was much the same with the rest of his clothing. He was indifferent to the patches on the knees of his hose, unconcerned by the fact that he was one of the few men in the world who used a length of soft rope for a belt, and quite content to wear a tunic so wrinkled and gravy-spotted that persons of only moderate fastidiousness would not even have considered using it for a scrub-rag.
The great oaken gates of Camaar stood open, for the war that had raged on the plains of Mishrak ac Thull, hundreds of leagues to the east, was over. The vast armies that had been raised by the Princess Ce’Nedra to fight that war had returned to their homes, and there was peace once more in the Kingdoms of the West. Belgarion, King of Riva and Overlord of the West, sat upon the throne in the Hall of the Rivan King with the Orb of Aldur once again in its proper place above his throne. The maimed God of Angarak was dead, and his eons-old threat to the West was gone forever.
The guards at the city gate paid scant attention to Errand’s family as they passed, and so they left Camaar and set out upon the broad, straight imperial highway that stretched east towards Muros and the snow-topped mountains that separated Sendaria from the lands of the horse clans of Algaria.
Flights of birds wheeled and darted in the luminous air as the wagon team and the patient mare plodded up the long hill outside Camaar. The birds sang and trilled almost as if in greeting and hovered strangely on stuttering wings above the wagon. Polgara raised her flawless face in the clear, bright light to listen.
‘What are they saying?’ Durnik asked.
She smiled gently. ‘They’re babbling,’ she replied in her rich voice. ‘Birds do that a great deal. In general they’re happy that it’s morning and that the sun is shining and that their nests have been built. Most of them want to talk about their eggs. Birds always want to talk about their eggs.’
‘And of course they’re glad to see you, aren’t they?’
‘I suppose they are.’
‘Someday do you suppose you could teach me to understand what they’re saying?’
She smiled at him. ‘If you wish. It’s not a very practical thing to know, however.’
‘It probably doesn’t hurt to know a few things that aren’t practical,’ he replied with an absolutely straight face.
‘Oh, my Durnik.’ She laughed, fondly putting her hand over his. ‘You’re an absolute joy, do you know that?’
Errand, riding just behind them among the bags and boxes and the tools Durnik had so carefully selected in Camaar, smiled, feeling that he was included in the deep, warm affection they shared. Errand was not used to affection. He had been raised, if that is the proper term, by Zedar the Apostate, a man who had looked much like Belgarath. Zedar had simply come across the little boy in a narrow alleyway in some forgotten city and had taken him along for a specific purpose. The boy had been fed and clothed, nothing more, and the only words his bleak-faced guardian had ever spoken to him were, ‘I have an errand for you, boy.’ Because those were the only words he had heard, the only word the child spoke when he had been found by these others was ‘Errand.’ And since they did not know what else to call him, that had become his name.
When they reached the top of the long hill, they paused for a few moments to allow the wagon horses to catch their breath. From his comfortable perch in the wagon, Errand looked out over the broad expanse of neatly walled fields lying pale green in the long, slanting rays of the morning sun. Then he turned and looked back toward Camaar with its red roofs and its sparkling blue-green harbor filled with the ships of a half-dozen kingdoms.
‘Are you warm enough?’ Polgara asked him.
Errand nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘thank you.’ The words were coming more easily to him now, though he still spoke but rarely.
Belgarath lounged in his saddle, absently rubbing at his short white beard. His eyes were slightly bleary, and he squinted as if the morning sunlight was painful to him. ‘I sort of like to start out a journey in the sunshine,’ he said. ‘It always seems to bode well for the rest of the trip.’ Then he grimaced. ‘I don’t know that it needs to be this bright, however.’
‘Are we feeling a bit delicate this morning, father?’ Polgara asked him archly.
He turned to regard his daughter, his face set. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and say it, Pol? I’m sure you won’t be happy until you do.’
‘Why, father,’ she said, her glorious eyes wide with feigned innocence, ‘what makes you think I was going to say anything?’
He grunted.
‘I’m sure you realize by now all by yourself that you drank a bit too much ale last night,’ she continued. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that, do you?’
‘I’m not really in the mood for any of this, Polgara,’ he told her shortly.
‘Oh, poor old dear,’ she said in mock commiseration. ‘Would you like to have me stir something up to make you feel better?’
‘Thank you, but no,’ he replied. ‘The aftertaste of your concoctions lingers for days. I think I prefer the headache.’
‘If a medicine doesn’t taste bad, it isn’t working,’ she told him. She pushed back the hood of the cape she wore. Her hair was long, very dark, and touched just over her left brow with a single lock of snowy white. ‘I did warn you, father,’ she said relentlessly.
‘Polgara,’ he said, wincing, ‘do you suppose we could skip the “I told you so’s?’
‘You heard me warn him, didn’t you, Durnik?’ Polgara asked her husband.
Durnik was obviously trying not to laugh.
The old man sighed, then reached inside his tunic and took out a small flagon. He uncorked it with his teeth and took a long drink.
‘Oh, father,’ Polgara said disgustedly, ‘didn’t you get enough last night?’
‘Not if this conversation is going to linger on this particular subject, no.’ He held out the flagon to his daughter’s husband. ‘Durnik?’ he offered.
‘Thanks all the same, Belgarath,’ Durnik replied, ‘but it’s a bit early for me.’
‘Pol?’ Belgarath said then, offering a drink to his daughter.
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘As you wish.’ Belgarath shrugged, recorking the bottle and tucking it away again. ‘Shall we move along then?’ he suggested. ‘It’s a very long way to the Vale of Aldur.’ And he nudged his horse into a walk.
Just before the wagon rolled down on the far side of the hill, Errand looked back toward Camaar and saw a detachment of mounted men coming out through the gate. Glints and flashes of reflected sunlight said quite clearly that at least some of the garments the men wore were made of polished steel. Errand considered mentioning the fact, but decided not to. He settled back again and looked up at the deep blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. Errand liked mornings. In the morning a day was always full of promise. The disappointments usually did not start until later.
The soldiers who had ridden out of Camaar caught up with them before they had gone another mile. The commander of the detachment was a sober-faced Sendarian officer with only one arm. As his troops fell in behind the wagon, he rode up alongside. ‘Your Grace,’ he greeted Polgara formally with a stiff little bow from his saddle.
‘General Brendig,’ she replied with a brief nod of acknowledgement. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Soldiers are almost always up early, your Grace.’
‘Brendig,’ Belgarath said rather irritably, ‘is this some kind of coincidence, or are you following us on purpose?’
‘Sendaria is a very orderly kingdom, Ancient One,’ Brendig answered blandly. ‘We try to arrange things so that coincidences don’t happen.’
‘I thought so,’ Belgarath said sourly. ‘What’s Fulrach up to now?’
‘His Majesty merely felt that an escort might be appropriate.’
‘I know the way, Brendig. I’ve made the trip a few times before, after all.’
‘I’m sure of it, Ancient Belgarath,’ Brendig agreed politely. ‘The escort has to do with friendship and respect.’
‘I take it then that you’re going to insist?’
‘Orders are orders, Ancient One.’
‘Could we skip the “Ancient”?’ Belgarath asked plaintively.
‘My father’s feeling his years this morning, General.’ Polgara smiled, ‘All seven thousand of them.’
Brendig almost smiled. ‘Of course, your Grace.’
‘Just why are we being so formal this morning, my Lord Brendig?’ she asked him. ‘I’m sure we know each other well enough to skip all that nonsense.’
Brendig looked at her quizzically. ‘You remember when we first met?’ he asked.
‘As I recall, that was when you were arresting us, wasn’t it?’ Durnik asked with a slight grin.
‘Well —’ Brendig coughed uncomfortably. ‘—not exactly, Goodman Durnik. I was really just conveying his Majesty’s invitation to you to visit him at the palace. At any rate, Lady Polgara—your esteemed wife—was posing as the Duchess of Erat, you may remember.’
Durnik nodded. ‘I believe she was, yes.’
‘I had occasion recently to look into some old books of heraldry and I discovered something rather remarkable. Were you aware, Goodman Durnik, that your wife really is the Duchess of Erat?’
Durnik blinked. ‘Pol?’ he said incredulously.
Polgara shrugged. ‘I’d almost forgotten,’ she said. ‘It was a very long time ago.’
‘Your title, nonetheless, is still valid, your Grace,’ Brendig assured her. ‘Every landholder in the District of Erat pays a small tithe each year into an account that’s being held in Sendar for you.’
‘How tiresome,’ she said.
‘Wait a minute, Pol,’ Belgarath said sharply, his eyes suddenly very alert. ‘Brendig, just how big is this account of my daughter’s—in round figures?’
‘Several million, as I understand it,’ Brendig replied.
‘Well,’ Belgarath said, his eyes going wide. ‘Well, well, well.’
Polgara gave him a level gaze. ‘What have you got in your mind, father?’ she asked him pointedly.
‘It’s just that I’m pleased for you, Pol,’ he said expansively. ‘Any father would be happy to know that his child has done so well.’ He turned back to Brendig. ‘Tell me, General, just who’s managing my daughter’s fortune?’
‘It’s supervised by the crown, Belgarath,’ Brendig replied.
“That’s an awful burden to lay on poor Fulrach,” Belgarath said thoughtfully, ‘considering all his other responsibilities. Perhaps I ought to—’
‘Never mind, Old Wolf,’ Polgara said firmly.
‘I just thought—’
‘Yes, father. I know what you thought. The money’s fine right where it is.’
Belgarath sighed. ‘I’ve never been rich before,’ he said wistfully.
‘Then you won’t really miss it, will you?’
‘You’re a hard woman, Polgara—to leave your poor old father sunk in deprivation like this.’
‘You’ve lived without money or possessions for thousands of years, father. Somehow I’m almost positive that you’ll survive.’
‘How did you get to be the Duchess of Erat?’ Durnik asked his wife.
‘I did the Duke of Vo Wacune a favor,’ she replied. ‘It was something that no one else could do. He was very grateful.’
Durnik looked stunned. ‘But Vo Wacune was destroyed thousands of years ago,’ he protested.
‘Yes. I know.’
‘I think. I’m going to have trouble getting used to all this.’
‘You knew that I wasn’t like other women,’ she said.
‘Yes, but—’
‘Does it really matter to you how old I am? Does it change anything?’
‘No,’ he said immediately, ‘not a thing.’
‘Then don’t worry about it.’
They moved in easy stages across southern Sendaria, stopping each night at the solid, comfortable hostels operated by the Tolnedran legionnaires who patrolled and maintained the imperial highway and arriving in Muros on the afternoon of the third day after their departure from Camaar. Vast cattle herds from Algaria were already filling the acre upon acre of pens lying to the east of the city, and the cloud of dust raised by their milling hooves blotted out the sky. Muros was not a comfortable town during the season of the cattle drives. It was hot, dirty, and noisy. Belgarath suggested that they pass it up and stop for the night in the mountains where the air would be less dust-clogged and the neighbors less rowdy.
‘Are you planning to accompany us all the way to the Vale?’ he asked General Brendig after they had passed the cattle pens and were moving along the Great North Road toward the mountains.
‘Ah—no, actually, Belgarath,’ Brendig replied, peering ahead at a band of Algar horsemen approaching along the highway. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ll be turning back about now.’
The leader of the Algar riders was a tall, hawk-faced man in leather clothing, with a raven-black scalplock flowing behind him. When he reached the wagon, he reined in his horse. ‘General Brendig,’ he said in a quiet voice, nodding to the Sendarian officer.
‘My Lord Hettar,’ Brendig replied pleasantly.
‘What are you doing here, Hettar?’ Belgarath demanded.
Hettar’s eyes went very wide. ‘I just brought a cattle herd across the mountains, Belgarath,’ he said innocently. ‘I’ll be going back now and I thought you might like some company.’
‘How strange that you just happen to be here at this particular time.’
‘Isn’t it, though?’ Hettar looked at Brendig and winked.
‘Are we playing games?’ Belgarath asked the pair of them. ‘I don’t need supervision and I definitely don’t need a military escort every place I go. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.’
‘We all know that, Belgarath,’ Hetter said placatingly. He looked at the wagon. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Polgara,’ he said pleasantly. Then he gave Durnik a rather sly look. ‘Married life agrees with you, my friend,’ he added. ‘I think you’ve put on a few pounds.’
‘I’d say that your wife has been adding a few extra spoonfuls to your plate as well.’ Durnik grinned at his friend.
‘Is it starting to show?’ Hettar asked.
Durnik nodded gravely. ‘Just a bit,’ he said.
Hettar made a rueful face and then gave Errand a peculiar little wink. Errand and Hettar had always got on well together, probably because neither of them felt any pressing need to fill up the silence with random conversation.
‘I’ll be leaving you now,’ Brendig said. ‘It’s been a pleasant journey.’ He bowed to Polgara and nodded to Hettar. And then, with his detachment of troops jingling along behind him, he rode back toward Muros.
‘I’m going to have words with Fulrach about this,’ Belgarath said darkly to Hettar, ‘and with your father, too.’
‘It’s one of the prices of immortality, Belgarath,’ Hettar said blandly. ‘People tend to respect you—even when you’d rather they didn’t. Shall we go?’
The mountains of eastern Sendaria were not so high as to make travel across them unpleasant. With the fierce-looking Algar clansmen riding both to the front and to the rear of the wagon, they traveled at an easy pace along the Great North Road through the deep green forests and beside tumbling mountain streams. At one point, when they had stopped to rest their horses, Durnik stepped down from the wagon and walked to the edge of the road to gaze speculatively at a deep pool at the foot of a small, churning waterfall.
‘Are we in any particular hurry?’ he asked Belgarath.
‘Not really. Why?’
‘I just thought that this might be a pleasant place to stop for our noon meal,’ the smith said artlessly.
Belgarath looked around. ‘If you want, I suppose it’s all right.’
‘Good.’ With that same slightly absent look on his face, Durnik went to the wagon and took a coil of thin, waxed cord from one of the bags. He carefully tied a hook decorated with some brightly colored yarn to one end of the cord and began looking about for a slender, springy sapling. Five minutes later he was standing on a boulder that jutted out into the pool, making long casts into the turbulent water just at the foot of the falls.
Errand drifted down to the edge of the stream to watch. Durnik was casting into the center of the main flow of the current so that the swiftly moving green water pulled his lure down deep into the pool.
After about a half an hour, Polgara called to them. ‘Errand, Durnik, your lunch is ready.’
‘Yes, dear,’ Durnik replied absently. ‘In a moment.’
Errand obediently went back up to the wagon, though his eyes yearned back toward the rushing water. Polgara gave him one brief, understanding look, then laid the meat and cheese she had sliced for him on a piece of bread so that he could carry his lunch back to the stream bank.
‘Thank you,’ he said simply.
Durnik continued his fishing, his face still intent. Polgara came down to the water’s edge. ‘Durnik,’ she called. ‘Lunch.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the water. ‘I’m coming.’ He made another cast.
Polgara sighed. ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘I suppose every man needs at least one vice.’
After about another half-hour, Durnik looked baffled. He jumped from his boulder to the stream bank and stood scratching his head and staring in perplexity at the swirling water. ‘I know they’re in there,’ he said to Errand. ‘I can almost feel them.’
‘Here,’ Errand said, pointing down at the deep, slow-moving eddy near the bank.
‘I think they’d be farther out, Errand,’ Durnik replied doubtfully.
‘Here,’ Errand repeated, pointing again.
Durnik shrugged. ‘If you say so,’ he said dubiously, flipping his lure out into the eddy. ‘I still think they’d be out in the main current, though.’
And then his pole bent sharply into a tense, quivering bow. He caught four trout in rapid succession, thick, heavy-bodied trout with silvery, speckled sides and curved jaws filled with needlelike teeth.
‘Why did it take you so long to find the right spot?’ Belgarath asked later that afternoon when they were back on the highway.
‘You have to work that kind of pool methodically, Belgarath,’ Durnik explained. ‘You start at one side and work your way across, cast by cast.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s the only way to be really sure you’ve covered it all.’
‘Of course.’
‘I was fairly sure where they were lying, though.’
‘Naturally.’
‘It was just that I wanted to do it the right way. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Perfectly,’ Belgarath said gravely.
After they had passed through the mountains, they turned south, riding through the vast grasslands of the Algarian plain where herds of cattle and horses grazed in that huge green sea of grass that rippled and swayed under the steady easterly breeze. Although Hettar strongly urged them to stop by the Stronghold of the Algar clans, Polgara declined. ‘Tell Cho-Hag and Silar that we may visit later,’ she said, ‘but we really should get to the Vale. It’s probably going to take most of the summer to make my mother’s house habitable again.’
Hettar nodded gravely and then waved a brief salute as he and his clansmen turned eastward and rode off across the rolling grasslands toward the mountainlike Stronghold of his father, Cho-Hag, Chief of the Clan-Chiefs of Algaria.
The cottage that had belonged to Polgara’s mother lay in a valley among the rolling hills marking the northern edge of the Vale of Aldur. A sparkling stream flowed through the sheltered hollow, and there were woods, birch inter-mixed with cedar, stretching along the valley floor. The cottage was constructed of fieldstone, gray, russet, and earthy-brown, all neatly fitted together. It was a broad, low building, considerably larger than the word ‘cottage’ suggested. It had not been occupied for well over three thousand years, and the thatching and the doors and window frames had long since surrendered to the elements, leaving the shell of the house standing, bramble-filled and unroofed to the sky. There was, nonetheless, a peculiar sense of waiting about it, as if Poledra, the woman who had lived here, had instilled in the very stones the knowledge that one day her daughter would return.
They arrived in the middle of a golden afternoon, and Errand, lulled by a creaking wheel, had drifted into a doze. When the wagon stopped, Polgara shook him gently awake. ‘Errand,’ she said, ‘we’re here.’ He opened his eyes and looked for the first time at the place he would forever call home. He saw the weathered shell of the cottage nestled in the tall green grass. He saw the woods beyond, with the white trunks of the birch trees standing out among the dark green cedars, and he saw the stream. The place had enormous possibilities. He realized that at once. The stream, of course, was perfect for sailing toy boats, for skipping stones, and, in the event of failing inspiration, for falling into. Several of the trees appeared to have been specifically designed for climbing, and one huge, white old birch overhanging the stream promised the exhilarating combination of climbing a tree and falling into the water, all at one time.
The land upon which their wagon had stopped was a long hill sloping gently down toward the cottage. It was the kind of a hill down which a boy could run on a day when the sky was a deep blue dotted with dandelion-puff clouds racing in the breeze. The knee-high grass would be lush in the sun, and the turf damply firm underfoot; the rush of sweet-smelling air as one ran down that long slope would be intoxicating.
And then he felt quite keenly a sense of deep sorrow, a sorrow which had endured unchanged for century upon century, and he turned to look at Belgarath’s weathered face and the single tear coursing down the old man’s furrowed cheek, to disappear in his close-cropped white beard.
In spite of Belgarath’s sorrow for his lost wife, Errand looked out at this small, green valley with its trees and its stream and its lush meadow with a deep and abiding contentment. He smiled and said, ‘Home,’ trying the word and liking the sound of it.
Polgara looked gravely into his face. Her eyes were very large and luminous, and their color changed with her mood, ranging from a light blue so pale as to be virtually gray to a deep lavender. ‘Yes, Errand,’ she replied in her vibrant voice. ‘Home.’ Then she put her arms about him to hold him softly, and there was in that gentle embrace all the yearning toward this place which had filled her down through the weary centuries that she and her father had labored at their endless task.
Durnik the smith looked thoughtfully at the hollow spread out below in the warm sunshine, considering, planning, arranging, and rearranging things in his mind. ‘It’s going to take a while to get everything the way we want it, Pol,’ he said to his bride.
‘We have all the time in the world, Durnik,’ Polgara replied with a gentle smile.
‘I’ll help you unload the wagon and set up your tents,’ Belgarath said, scratching absently at his beard. ‘Then tomorrow I suppose I ought to go on down into the Vale—have a talk with Beldin and the twins, look in on my tower—that sort of thing.’
Polgara gave him a long, steady look. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to leave, father,’ she told him. ‘You talked with Beldin just last month at Riva and on any number of occasions you’ve gone for decades without visiting your tower. I’ve noticed that every time there’s work to be done, you suddenly have pressing business someplace else.’
Belgarath’s face assumed an expression of injured innocence. ‘Why, Polgara—’ he started to protest.
‘That won’t work either, father,’ she told him crisply. ‘A few weeks—or a month or two—of helping Durnik isn’t going to injure you permanently. Or did you plan to leave us abandoned to the winter snows?’
Belgarath looked with some distaste at the shell of the house standing at the foot of the hill, with the hours of toil it was going to take to make it livable stamped all over it. ‘Why, of course, Pol,’ he said somewhat too quickly. ‘I’d be happy to stay and lend a hand.’
‘I knew we could depend on you, father,’ she said sweetly.
Belgarath looked critically at Durnik, trying to assess the strength of the smith’s convictions. ‘I hope you weren’t intending to do everything by hand,’ he said tentatively. ‘What I mean is—well, we do have certain alternatives available to us, you know.’
Durnik looked a little uncomfortable, his plain, honest face touched with the faintest hint of a disapproving expression. ‘I—uh—I really don’t know, Belgarath,’ he said dubiously. ‘I don’t believe that I’d really feel right about that. If I do it by hand, then I’ll know that it’s been done properly. I’m not all that comfortable with this other way of doing things yet. Somehow it seems like cheating—if you get what I mean.’
Belgarath sighed. ‘Somehow I was afraid you might look at it that way.’ He shook his head and squared his shoulders. ‘All right, let’s go on down there and get started.’
It took about a month to dig the accumulated debris of three eons out of the corners of the house, to reframe the doors and windows and to re-beam and thatch the roof. It would have taken twice as long had Belgarath not cheated outrageously each time Durnik’s back was turned. All manner of tedious tasks somehow performed themselves whenever the smith was not around. Once, for example, Durnik took out the wagon to bring in more timbers; as soon as he was out of sight, Belgarath tossed aside the adze with which he had been laboriously squaring off a beam, looked gravely at Errand, and reached inside his jerkin for the earthenware jar of ale he had filched from Polgara’s stores. He took a long drink and then he directed the force of his will at the stubborn beam and released it with a single muttered word. An absolute blizzard of white wood chips went flying in all directions. When the beam was neatly squared, the old man looked at Errand with a self-satisfied smirk and winked impishly. With a perfectly straight face, Errand winked back.
The boy had seen sorcery performed before. Zedar the Apostate had been a sorcerer, and so had Ctuchik. Indeed, throughout almost his entire life the boy had been in the care of people with that peculiar gift. Not one of the others, however, had that air of casual competence, that verve, with which Belgarath performed his art. The old man’s offhand way of making the impossible seem so easy that it was hardly worth mentioning was the mark of the true virtuoso. Errand knew how it was done, of course. No one can possibly spend that much time with assorted sorcerers without picking up the theory, at least. The ease with which Belgarath made things happen almost tempted him to try it himself; but whenever he considered the idea, he realized that there wasn’t really anything he wanted to do that badly.
The things the boy learned from Durnik, while more commonplace, were nonetheless very nearly as profound. Errand saw almost immediately that there was virtually nothing the smith could not do with his hands. He was familiar with almost every known tool. He could work in wood and stone as readily as in iron and brass. He could build a house or a chair or a bed with equal facility. As Errand watched closely, he picked up the hundreds of little tricks and knacks that separated the craftsman from the bumbling amateur.
Polgara dealt with all domestic matters. The tents in which they slept while the cottage was being readied were as neatly kept as any house. The bedding was aired daily, meals were prepared, and laundry was hung out to dry. On one occasion Belgarath, who had come to beg or steal more ale, looked critically at his daughter, who was humming contentedly to herself as she cut up some recently cooked-down soap. ‘Pol,’ he said acidly, ‘you’re the most powerful woman in the world. You’ve got more titles than you can count, and there’s not a king in the world who doesn’t bow to you automatically. Can you tell me exactly why you find it necessary to make soap that way? It’s hard, hot work, and the smell is awful.’
She looked calmly at her father. ‘I’ve spent thousands of years being the most powerful woman in the world, Old Wolf,’ she replied. ‘Kings have been bowing to me for centuries, and I’ve lost track of all the titles. This is, however, the very first time I’ve ever been married. You and I were always too busy for that. I’ve wanted to be married, though, and I’ve spent my whole life practicing. I know everything a good wife needs to know and I can do everything a good wife needs to do. Please don’t criticize me, father, and please don’t interfere. I’ve never been so happy in my life.’
‘Making soap?’
‘That’s part of it, yes.’
‘It’s such a waste of time,’ he said. He gestured negligently, and a cake of soap that had not been there before joined the ones she had already made.
‘Father!’ she said, stamping her foot. ‘You stop that this minute!’
He picked up two cakes of soap, one his and one hers. ‘Can you really tell me the difference between them, Pol?’
‘Mine was made with love; yours is just a trick.’
‘It’s still going to get clothes just as clean.’
‘Not mine, it won’t,’ she said, taking the cake of soap out of his hand. She held it up, balanced neatly on her palm. Then she blew on it with a slight puff, and it instantly vanished.
‘That’s a little silly, Pol,’ he told her.
‘Being silly at times runs in my family, I think,’ she replied calmly. ‘Just go back to your own work, father, and leave me to mine.’
‘You’re almost as bad as Durnik is,’ he accused her.
She nodded with a contented smile. ‘I know. That’s probably why I married him.’
‘Come along, Errand,’ Belgarath said to the boy as he turned to leave. ‘This sort of thing might be contagious, and I wouldn’t want you to catch it.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘One other thing, father. Stay out of my stores. If you want a jar of ale, ask me.’
Assuming a lofty expression, Belgarath strode away without answering. As soon as they were around the corner, however, Errand pulled a brown jar from inside his tunic and wordlessly gave it to the old man.
‘Excellent, my boy.’ Belgarath grinned. ‘You see how easy it is, once you get the hang of it?’
Throughout that summer and well into the long, golden autumn which followed it, the four of them worked to make the cottage habitable and weathertight for the winter. Errand did what he could to help, though more often than not his help consisted primarily of providing company while keeping out from underfoot.
When the snows came, the entire world seemed somehow to change. More than ever before, the isolated cottage became a warm, safe haven. The central room, where they took their meals and where they all sat in the long evenings, faced a huge stone fireplace that provided both warmth and light. Errand, whose time was spent out of doors on all but the most bitterly cold days, was usually drowsy during those golden, firelit hours between supper and bedtime and he often lay on a fur rug before the fire and gazed into the dancing flames until his eyes slowly closed. And later he waked in the cool darkness of his own room with warm, down-filled coverlets tucked up under his chin and he knew that Polgara had quietly carried him in and put him to bed. And he sighed happily and went back to sleep.
Durnik made him a sled, of course, and the long hill which ran down into the valley was perfect for sledding. The snow was not deep enough to make the runners of the sled bog down, and Errand was able to coast amazing distances across the meadow at the bottom of the hill because of the terrific momentum built up as he slid down the slope.
The absolute cap of the entire sledding season came late one bitingly cold afternoon, just after the sun had dropped into a bank of purple clouds on the western horizon and the sky had turned to a pale, icy turquoise. Errand trudged up the hill through the frozen snow, pulling his sled behind him. When he reached the top, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The thatched cottage below nestled in the surrounding snowbanks with the light from its windows golden and the column of pale blue smoke rising from its chimney as straight as an arrow into the dead calm air.
Errand smiled, lay down on his sled, and pushed off. The combination of circumstances was perfect for sledding. There was not even a breeze to impede his rapid descent, and he gathered astounding speed on his way down the hill. He flew across the meadow and in among the trees. The white-barked birches and dark, shadowy cedars flashed by as he sped through the woods. He might have gone even farther had the stream not been in his way. And even that conclusion to the ride was fairly exciting, since the bank of the stream was several feet high and Errand and his sled sailed out over the dark water in a long, graceful arc which ended abruptly in a spectacular, icy splash.
Polgara spoke to him at some length when he arrived home, shivering and with ice beginning to form up on his clothing and in his hair. Polgara, he noticed, tended to overdramatize things—particularly when an opportunity presented itself for her to speak to someone about his shortcomings. She took one long look at him and immediately fetched a vile-tasting medicine, which she spooned into him liberally. Then she began to pull off his frozen clothing, commenting extensively as she did so. She had an excellent speaking voice and a fine command of language. Her intonations and inflections added whole volumes of meaning to her commentary. On the whole, however, Errand would have preferred a shorter, somewhat less exhaustive discussion of his most recent misadventure—particularly in view of the fact that Belgarath and Durnik were both trying without much success to conceal broad grins as Polgara spoke to him while simultaneously rubbing him down with a large, rough towel.
‘Well,’ Durnik observed, ‘at least he won’t need a bath this week.’
Polgara stopped drying the boy and slowly turned to gaze at her husband. There was nothing really threatening in her expression, but her eyes were frosty. ‘You said something?’ she asked him.
‘Uh—no, dear,’ he hastily assured her. ‘Not really.’ He looked at Belgarath a bit uncomfortably, then he rose to his feet. ‘Perhaps I’d better bring in some more firewood,’ he said.
One of Polgara’s eyebrows went up, and her gaze moved on to her father. ‘Well?’ she said.
He blinked, his face a study in total innocence.
Her expression did not change, but the silence became ominous, oppressive.
‘Why don’t I give you a hand, Durnik?’ the old man suggested finally, also getting up. Then the two of them went outside, leaving Errand alone with Polgara.
She turned back to him. ‘You slid all the way down the hill,’ she asked quite calmly, ‘and clear across the meadow?’
He nodded.
‘And then through the woods?’
He nodded again.
‘And then off the bank and into the stream?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he admitted.
‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you to roll off the sled before it went over the edge and into the water?’
Errand was not really a very talkative boy, but he felt that his position in this affair needed a bit of explanation. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I didn’t really think of rolling off—but I don’t think I would have, even if I had thought of it.’
‘I’m sure there’s an explanation for that.’
He looked at her earnestly. ‘Everything had gone so splendidly up until then that—well, it just wouldn’t have seemed right to get off, just because a few things started to go wrong.’
There was a long pause. ‘I see,’ she said at last, her expression grave. ‘Then it was in the nature of a moral decision—this riding the sled all the way into the stream?’
‘I suppose you might say that, yes.’
She looked at him steadily for a moment and then slowly sank her face into her hands. ‘I’m not entirely certain that I have the strength to go through all of this again,’ she said in a tragic voice.
‘Through what?’ he asked, slightly alarmed.
‘Raising Garion was almost more than I could bear,’ she replied, ‘but not even he could have come up with a more illogical reason for doing something.’ Then she looked at him, laughed fondly, and put her arms about him. ‘Oh, Errand,’ she said, pulling him tightly to her, and everything was all right again.
Belgarath the Sorcerer was a man with many flaws in his character. He had never been fond of physical labor and he was perhaps a bit too fond of dark brown ale. He was occasionally careless about the truth and had a certain grand indifference to some of the finer points of property ownership. The company of ladies of questionable reputation did not particularly offend his sensibilities, and his choice of language very frequently left much to be desired.
Polgara the Sorceress was a woman of almost inhuman determination and she had spent several thousand years trying to reform her vagrant father, but without much notable success. She persevered, however, in the face of overwhelming odds. Down through the centuries she had fought a valiant rearguard action against his bad habits. She had regretfully surrendered on the points of indolence and shabbiness. She grudgingly gave ground on swearing and lying. She remained adamant, however, even despite repeated defeats, on the points of drunkenness, thievery, and wenching. She felt for some peculiar reason that it was her duty to fight on those issues to the very death.
Since Belgarath put off his return to his tower in the Vale of Aldur until the following spring, Errand was able to witness at close hand those endless and unbelievably involuted skirmishes between father and daughter with which they filled the periodic quiet spaces in their lives. Polgara’s comments about the lazy old man’s lounging about in her kitchen, soaking up the heat from her fireplace and the well-chilled ale from her stores with almost equal facility, were pointed, and Belgarath’s smooth evasions revealed centuries of highly polished skill. Errand, however, saw past those waspish remarks and blandly flippant replies. The bonds between Belgarath and his daughter were so profound that they went far beyond what others might conceivably understand, and so, over the endless years, they had found it necessary to conceal their boundless love for each other behind this endless façade of contention. This is not to say that Polgara might not have preferred a more upstanding father, but she was not quite as disappointed in him as her observations sometimes indicated.
They both knew why Belgarath sat out the winter in Poledra’s cottage with his daughter and her husband. Though not one word of the matter had ever passed between them, they knew that the memories the old man had of this house needed to be changed—not erased certainly, for no power on earth could erase Belgarath’s memories of his wife, but rather they needed to be altered slightly so that this thatched cottage might also remind the old man of happy hours spent here, as well as that bleak and terrible day when he had returned to find that his beloved Poledra had died.
After the snow had been cut away by a week of warm spring rains and the sky had turned blue once again, Belgarath at last decided that it was time to take up his interrupted journey. ‘I don’t really have anything pressing,’ he admitted, ‘but I’d like to look in on Beldin and the twins, and it might be a good time to tidy up my tower. I’ve sort of let that slide over the past few hundred years.’
‘If you’d like, we could go along,’ Polgara offered. ‘After all, you did help with the cottage—not enthusiastically, perhaps, but you did help. It only seems right that we help you with cleaning your tower.’
‘Thanks all the same, Pol,’ he declined firmly, ‘but your idea of cleaning tends to be a bit too drastic for my taste. Things that might be important later on have a way of winding up on the dust heap when you clean. As long as there’s a clear space somewhere in the center, a room is clean enough for me.’
‘Oh, father,’ she said, laughing, ‘you never change.’
‘Of course not,’ he replied. He looked thoughtfully over at Errand, who was quietly eating his breakfast. ‘If it’s all right, though,’ he said, ‘I’ll take the boy with me.’
She gave him a quick look.