Читать книгу Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection - David Eddings - Страница 21

I knew little peace after that. I never knew when I turned around what might be staring at me – wolf or owl, bear or butterfly. She seemed to take great delight in startling me, but as time wore on more and more she appeared to me in the shape of an owl.

‘What is this thing about owls?’ I growled one day.

‘I like owls,’ she explained as if it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘During my first winter, when I was a young and foolish thing, I was chasing a rabbit, floundering around in the snow like a puppy, and a great white owl swooped down and snatched my rabbit almost out of my jaws. She carried it to a nearby tree and ate it, dropping the scraps to me. I thought at the time that it would be a fine thing to be an owl.’

‘Foolishness,’ I snorted.

‘Perhaps,’ she replied blandly, preening her tail feathers, ‘but it amuses me. It may be that one day a different shape will amuse me even more.’

Those of you who know my daughter will see how she came by her affinity for that particular shape. Neither Polgara nor my wife will tell me how they communicated with each other during those terrible years when I thought I’d lost Poledra forever, but they obviously did, and Poledra’s fondness for owls quite obviously rubbed off. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Things went along quietly in the Vale for the next several centuries. We’d set most of the things in motion that needed to be ready for us later, and now we were just marking time.

As I’d been almost sure that it would, Tol Nedrane had burned to the ground, and my badgering of that patriarch of the Honethite family finally paid off. One of his descendants, a minor public official at the time, had that affinity for masonry I’d so carefully bred into his family, and after he’d surveyed the ashes of the city, he persuaded the other city fathers that stone doesn’t burn quite as fast as logs and thatch. It’s heavier than wood, though, so before they could start erecting stone buildings, they had to fill in the marshy places on the island in the Nedrane. Over the shrill objections of the ferrymen, they built a couple of bridges, one to the south bank of the Nedrane and the other to the north one.

After they’d filled the swamps with rubble, they got down to business. To be quite honest about it, we didn’t care if the citizens of Tol Honeth lived in stone houses or in paper shacks. It was the work gangs that were important. They provided the basis for the legions, and we were going to need those legions later. Building stone is too heavy for one man to carry – unless he has the sort of advantages my brothers and I have. The standard work gang of ten men ultimately became the elemental squad. When they had to move larger stones, they’d combine into ten gangs of ten – the typical company. And when they had to install those huge foundation-blocks, they’d gather up a hundred gangs of ten – a legion, obviously. They had to learn how to cooperate with each other to get the job done, and they learned to take orders from their overseers. I’m sure you get the picture. My Honethite became the general foreman of the whole operation. I’m still sort of proud of him – even though he was a Honeth.

Tolnedra at that time was not nearly as civilized as it is now – if you can call Ce’Nedra civilized. There are always people in any society who’d rather take what they want from others than work for it, and Tolnedra was no exception. There were bands of marauding brigands out in the countryside, and when one of those bands attempted to cross the south bridge in order to loot Tol Nedrane, my stone-mason ordered his work gangs to drop their tools and take up their weapons. The rest, as they say, is history. My protégé immediately realized what he’d created, and the dream of empire was born.

After the Honethite stone-mason had extended his control of the surrounding countryside for about twenty leagues in all directions, he changed the name of his native city to Tol Honeth and dubbed himself ‘Ran Honeth I, Emperor of all Tolnedra’ – a slightly grandiose title for a man whose ‘empire’ was only about four hundred square leagues, I’ll grant you, but it was a start. I felt rather smug about the way it all turned out.

I didn’t have time to sit around congratulating myself, though, because it was about then that the Arendish civil wars broke out. I’d invested a lot of effort in Arendia, and I didn’t want those families I’d founded getting wiped out in the course of the festivities. The three major cities in Arendia, Vo Mimbre, Vo Wacune, and Vo Astur, had been established fairly early on, and each city, along with its surrounding territory, was ruled by a duke. I’m not certain that the idea of a single king would have occurred to the Arends if the example of the First Honethite Dynasty hadn’t existed to the south. It wasn’t until much later, however, that the Duke of Vo Astur formalized the internal conflict by proclaiming himself King of Arendia.

The informal civil war was trouble enough, though. I’d established families in each of the three duchies, and my major concern at the time was keeping them from encountering each other on the battlefield. If Mandorallen’s ancestor had killed Lelldorin’s, for example, I’d never have been able to make peace between the two of them.

To add to the confusion in Arendia, herds of Hrulgin and packs of Algroths periodically made forays into eastern Arendia to look for something – somebody – to eat. The Ulgos were down in the caves, so the favorite food of those monsters was in short supply in their home range.

I saw this at first hand once when I was supposedly guiding the Baron of Vo Mandor, Mandorallen’s ancestor, toward a battlefield. I didn’t want him to reach that field, so I was taking him the long way around. We were near the Ulgo frontier, when the Algroths attacked.

Mandorin, the baron, was a Mimbrate to the core, and he and his vassals were totally encased in armor, which protected them from the venomous claws of the Algroths.

Mandorin shouted the alarm to his vassals, clapped down his visor, set his lance, and charged.

Some traits breed very true.

Algroths’ courage is a reflection of the pack, not the individual, so when Mandorin and his cohorts began killing Algroths, the courage of the pack diminished. Finally, they ran back into the forest.

Mandorin was grinning broadly when he raised his visor. ‘A frolicsome encounter, Ancient Belgarath,’ he said gaily. ‘Their lack of spirit, however, hath deprived us of much entertainment.’

Arends!

‘You’d better pass along word of this incident, Mandorin,’ I told him. ‘Let everybody in Arendia know that the monsters of Ulgoland are coming down into this forest.’

‘I shall advise all of Mimbre,’ he promised. ‘The safety of the Wacites and Asturians doth not concern me.’

‘They’re your countrymen, Mandorin. That in itself should oblige you to warn them.’

‘They are mine enemies,’ he said stubbornly.

‘They’re still human. Decency alone should spur you to warn them, and you are a decent man.’

That got his attention. His face was troubled for a moment or so, but he finally came around. ‘It shall be as you say, Ancient One,’ he promised. Tt shall not truly be necessary, however.’

‘Oh?’

‘Once we have concluded our business with the Asturians, I shall myself, with some few companions, mount an expedition into the mountains of Ulgo. Methinks it will be no great chore to exterminate these troublesome creatures.’

Mandorallen himself would not have said it any differently.

It was about fifteen hundred years after the cracking of the world when Beldin came back from Mallorea to fill us in on Torak and his Angaraks. Belmakor left his entertainments in Maragor to join us, but there was still no sign of Belzedar.

We gathered in the Master’s tower and took our usual chairs. The fact that Belzedar’s chair was empty bothered us all, I think.

‘It was absolute chaos in Mallorea for a while,’ Beldin reported. ‘The Grolims from Mal Yaska were selecting their sacrificial victims almost exclusively from the officer corps of the army, and the Generals were arresting and executing every Grolim they could lay their hands on, charging them with all sorts of specious crimes. Finally Torak got wind of it, and he put a stop to it.’

‘Pity,’ Belmakor murmured. ‘What did he do?’

‘He summoned the military high command and the Grolim hierarchy to Cthol Mishrak and delivered an ultimatum. He told them that if they didn’t stop their secret little war, they could all just jolly well pick up and move to Cthol Mishrak where he could keep an eye on them. That got their immediate attention. They could live in at least semi-autonomy in Mal Zeth and Mal Yaska, and the climate in those two cities isn’t all that bad. Cthol Mishrak’s like a suburb of Hell. It’s on the southern edge of an arctic swamp, and it’s so far north that the days are only about two hours long in the winter time – if you can call what comes after dawn up there “day”. Torak’s put a perpetual cloud-bank over the place, so it never really gets light. “Cthol Mishrak” means “the City of Endless Night”, and that comes fairly close to describing it. The sun never touches the ground, so the only thing that grows around there is fungus.’

Beltira shuddered. ‘Why would he do that?’ he asked, his expression baffled.

Beldin shrugged. ‘Who knows why Torak does anything? He’s crazy. Maybe he’s trying to hide his face. I think that what finally brought the generals and the Grolims to heel, though, was the fact that the disciple Ctuchik runs things in Cthol Mishrak. I’ve met Urvon, and he can chill the blood of a snake just by looking at it. Ctuchik’s reputed to be even worse.’

‘Have you found out who the third disciple is yet?’ I asked.

Beldin shook his head. ‘Nobody’s willing to talk about him. I get the impression that he’s not an Angarak.’

‘That is very unlike my brother,’ Aldur mused. ‘Torak doth hold the other races of man in the profoundest of contempt.’

‘I could be wrong, Master,’ Beldin admitted, ‘but the Angaraks themselves seem to believe that he’s not one of them. Anyway, the threat of being required to return to Cthol Mishrak brought out the peaceful side of Urvon’s nature, and Urvon rules in Mal Yaska. He started making peace overtures to the generals almost immediately.’

‘Does Urvon really have that much autonomy?’ Belkira asked.

‘Up to a point, yes. Torak concentrates on the Orb and leaves the administrative details to his disciples. Ctuchik’s absolute master in Cthol Mishrak, and Urvon sits on a throne in Mal Yaska. He adores being adored. The only other power center in Angarak Mallorea is Mal Zeth. Logic suggests that Torak’s third disciple is there – probably working behind the scenes. Anyway, once Urvon and the generals declared peace on each other, Torak told them to behave themselves and sent them home. They hammered out the details later. The Grolims have absolute sway in Mal Yaska, and the generals in Mal Zeth. All the other towns and districts are ruled jointly. Neither side likes it very much, but they don’t have much choice.’

‘Is that the way things stand right now?’ Belkira asked.

‘It’s moved on a bit from there. Once the generals got the Grolims out of their hair, they were free to turn their attention to the Karands.’

‘Ugly brutes,’ Belmakor observed. ‘The first time I saw one, I couldn’t believe he was human.’

‘They’ve been sort of humanized now,’ Beldin told him. ‘The Angaraks started having trouble with the Karands almost as soon as they came up out of the Dalasian Mountains. The Karands have a sort of loose confederation of seven kingdoms in the northeast quadrant of the continent. Torak’s new ocean did some radical things to the climate up there. They’d been in the middle of an ice age in Karanda – lots of snow, glaciers, and all that, but all the steam that came boiling out of the crack in the world melted it off almost overnight. There used to be a little stream called the Magan that meandered down out of the Karandese Mountains in a generally southeasterly direction until it emptied out into the ocean down in Gandahar. When the glaciers melted all at once, it stopped being so gentle. It gouged a huge trench three quarters of the way across the continent. That sent the Karands off in search of high ground. Unfortunately, the high ground they located just happened to be in lands claimed by the Angaraks.’

‘I wouldn’t call it all that unfortunate,’ Belmakor said. ‘If the Angaraks are busy with the Karands, they won’t come pestering us.’

‘The unfortunate part came later,’ Beldin told him. ‘As long as the generals were squabbling with the Grolims, they didn’t have time to deal with the Karands. Once Torak settled that particular problem, the generals moved their army up to the borders of the Karandese Kingdom of Pallia, and then they invaded. The Karands were no match for them, and they crushed Pallia in about a month. The Grolims started sharpening their gutting knives, but the generals wanted to leave Pallia intact – paying tribute, of course. They suggested that the Karands in Pallia be converted to the worship of Torak. That made the Grolims crazy. The notion of Angarak superiority may have originated with Torak, but the Grolims picked it up and ran with it. So far as they were concerned, the other races of mankind were good only as slaves or sacrifices. Anyway, to keep it short, Torak thought it over and eventually sided with the military. Their solution gives him more worshipers, for one thing, and it’ll give him a much bigger army just in case Belar ever finds a way to lead his Alorns onto the Mallorean continent. Alorns seem to make Torak nervous, for some reason.’

‘You know,’ Belmakor said, ‘they have the same effect on me. Maybe it has something to do with their tendency to go berserk at the slightest provocation.’

‘Torak took the whole idea one step further,’ Beldin went on. ‘He wasn’t satisfied with just Pallia. He ordered the Grolims to go out and convert all of Karanda. “I will have them all”, he told the Grolims. “Any man who liveth in all of boundless Mallorea shall bow down to me, and if any of ye shirk in this stern responsibility, ye shall feel my displeasure most keenly”. That got the Grolims’ attention, and they went out to convert the heathens.’

‘This is troubling,’ Aldur said. ‘So long as my brother had only his Angaraks, we could easily match his numbers. His decision to accept other races alters our circumstances.’

‘He’s not having all that much success, Master,’ Beldin advised him. ‘He succeeded in converting the Karands, largely because his army’s superior to those howling barbarians, but when the generals got to the borders of the Melcene Empire, they ran head-on into elephant cavalry. It was very messy, I’m told. The generals pulled back and swept down into Dalasia instead.’ He looked at Belmakor. ‘I thought you said that the Dals had cities down there.’

‘They used to – at least they did the last time I was there.’

‘Well, there aren’t any there now – except for Kell, of course. When the Angaraks moved in, there wasn’t anything there but farming villages with mud and wattle huts.’

‘Why would they do that?’ Belmakor asked in bafflement. ‘They had beautiful cities. Tol Honeth looks like a slum by comparison.’

‘They had reasons,’ Aldur assured him. ‘The destruction of their cities was a subterfuge to keep the Angaraks from realizing how sophisticated they really are.’

‘They didn’t look all that sophisticated to me,’ Beldin said. ‘They still plow their fields with sticks, and they’ve got almost as much spirit as sheep.’

‘Also a subterfuge, my son.’

‘The Angaraks didn’t have any trouble converting them, Master. The idea of having a God after all these eons – even a God like Torak – brought them in by the thousands. Was that a pretense, too?’

Aldur nodded. ‘The Dals will go to any lengths to conceal their real tasks from the unlearned.’

‘Did the generals ever try to go back into the Melcene Empire?’ Belmakor asked.

‘Not after that first time, no,’ Beldin replied. ‘Once you’ve seen a few battalions trampled by elephants, you start to get the picture. There’s a bit of trade between the Angaraks and Melcenes, but that’s about as far as their contacts go.’

‘You said you’d met Urvon,’ Belkira said. ‘Was that in Cthol Mishrak or Mal Yaska?’

‘Mal Yaska. I stay clear of Cthol Mishrak because of the Chandim.’

‘Who are the Chandim?’ I asked him.

‘They used to be Grolims. Now they’re dogs – as big as horses. Some people call them “The Hounds of Torak”. They patrol the area around Cthol Mishrak, sniffing out intruders. They’d have probably picked me out rather quickly. I was on the outskirts of Mal Yaska, and I happened to see a Grolim coming in from the east. I cut his throat, stole his robe, and slipped into the city. I was snooping around in the temple when Urvon surprised me. He knew right off that I wasn’t a Grolim – recognizin’ me unspeakable talent almost immediately, don’t y’ know.’ For some unaccountable reason he lapsed into a brogue that was common among Wacite serfs in northern Arendia. Maybe he did it because he knew it would irritate me, and Beldin never misses an opportunity to tweak my nose.

Never mind. It’d take far too long to explain.

‘I was a bit startled by the man’s appearance,’ my dwarfed brother continued. ‘He’s one of those splotchy people you see now and then. Angaraks are an olive-skinned race – sort of like Tolnedrans are – but Urvon’s got big patches of dead-white skin all over him. He looks like a piebald horse. He blustered at me a bit, threatening to call the guards, but I could almost smell the fear on him. Our training is much more extensive than the training Torak gave his disciples, and Urvon knew that I outweighed him – metaphorically speaking, of course. I didn’t like him very much, so I overwhelmed him with my charm – and with the fact that I picked him up bodily and slammed him against the wall a few times. Then, while he was trying to get his breath, I told him that if he made a sound or even so much as moved, I’d yank out his guts with a white-hot hook. Then, to make my point, I showed him the hook.’

‘Where did you get a hook?’ Beltira asked.

‘Right here.’ Beldin held out his gnarled hand, snapped his fingers, and a glowing hook appeared in his fist. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ He shook his fingers and the hook disappeared. ‘Urvon evidently believed me – although it’s a bit hard to say for sure, since he fainted right there on the spot. I gave some thought to hanging him from the rafters on my hook, but I decided that I was there to observe, not to desecrate temples, so I left him sprawled on the floor and went back out into the countryside where the air was cleaner. Grolim temples have a peculiar stink about them.’ He paused and scratched vigorously at one armpit. ‘I think I’d better stay out of Mallorea for a while. Urvon’s got my description posted on every tree. The size of the reward he’s offering is flattering, but I guess I’ll let things cool down a bit before I go back.’

‘Good thinking,’ Belmakor murmured, and then he collapsed in helpless laughter.

My life changed rather profoundly a few weeks later. I was bent over my work-table when my companion swooped in through the window she’d finally convinced me to leave open for her, perched sedately on her favorite chair, and shimmered back into her proper wolf-shape. ‘I think I will go away for a while,’ she announced.

‘Oh?’ I said cautiously.

She stared at me, her golden eyes unblinking. ‘I think I would like to look at the world again.’

‘I see.’

‘The world has changed much, I think.’

‘It is possible.’

‘I might come back some day.’

‘I would hope so.’

‘Good bye, then,’ she said, blurred into the form of an owl again, and with a single thrust of her great wings she was gone.

Her presence during those long years had been a trial to me sometimes, but I found that I missed her very much. I often turned to show her something, only to realize that she was no longer with me. I always felt strangely empty and sad when that happened. She’d been a part of my life for so long that it had seemed that she’d always be there.

Then, about a dozen years later, my Master summoned me and instructed me to go to the far north to look in on the Morindim. Their practice of raising demons had always concerned him, and he very definitely didn’t want them to get too proficient at it.

The Morindim were – still are, I guess – far more primitive than their cousins, the Karands. They both worship demons, but the Karands have evolved to the point where they’re able to live in at least a semblance of a normal life. The Morindim can’t – or won’t. The clans and tribes of Karanda smooth over their differences for the common good, largely because the chieftains have more power than the magicians. The reverse is true among the Morindim, and each magician is a sublime egomaniac who views the very existence of other magicians as a personal insult. The Morindim live in nomadic, primitive tribalism, and the magicians keep their lives circumscribed by rituals and mystic visions. To put it bluntly, a Morind lives in more or less perpetual terror.

I journeyed through Aloria to the north range of mountains in what is now Gar og Nadrak. Belsambar had filled us all in on the customs of those savages after his long ago survey of the area, so I knew more or less how to make myself look like a Morind. Since I wanted to discover what I could about their practice of raising demons, I decided that the most efficient way to do it was to apprentice myself to one of the magicians.

I paused long enough at the verge of their vast, marshy plain to disguise myself, darkening my skin and decorating it with imitation tattoos. Then, after I’d garbed myself in furs and ornamented myself with feathers, I went looking for a magician.

I’d been careful to include quest-markings – the white fur headband and the red-painted spear with feathers dangling from it – as a part of my disguise, since the Morindim usually consider it unlucky to interfere with a quester. On one or two occasions, though, I had to fall back on my own particular form of magic to persuade the curious – or the belligerent – to leave me alone.

I happened across a likely teacher after about a week in those barren wastes. A quester is usually an aspiring magician anyway, and a burly fellow wearing a skull-surmounted headdress accosted me while I was crossing one of the innumerable streams that wander through that waste. ‘You wear the marks of a quester,’ he said in a challenging sort of way as the two of us stood hip-deep in the middle of an icy stream.

‘Yes,’ I replied in a resigned sort of way. ‘I didn’t ask for it. It just sort of came over me.’ Humility and reluctance are becoming traits in the young, I suppose.

‘Tell me of your vision.’

I rather quickly evaluated this big-shouldered, hairy, and somewhat odorous magician. There wasn’t really all that much to evaluate. ‘All in a dream,’ I said, ‘I saw the King of Hell squatting on the coals of infernity, and he spoke to me and told me to go forth across the length and breadth of Morindicum and to seek out that which has always been hidden. This is my quest.’ It was pure gibberish, of course, but I think the word ‘infernity’ – which I made up on the spur of the moment – got his attention.

I’ve always had this way with words.

‘Should you survive this quest of yours, I will accept you as my apprentice – and my slave.’

I’ve had better offers, but I decided not to negotiate. I was here to learn, not to correct bad manners.

‘You seem reluctant,’ he observed.

‘I’m not the wisest of men, Master,’ I confessed, ‘and I have little skill with magic. I would be more happy if this burden had been placed on another.’

‘It is yours to bear, however,’ he roared at me. ‘Behold the gift which is mine to give.’ He quickly sizzled out a design on the top of the water with a burning forefinger, evidently not observing that the swift current of the stream carried it off before he’d even finished his drawing.

He raised a Demon Lord, one of the Disciples of the King of Hell. Now that I think back on it, I believe it was Mordja. I met Mordja many years later, and he did look a bit familiar to me. ‘What is this thou hast done?’ Mordja demanded in that awful voice of his.

‘I have summoned thee to obey me,’ my prospective tutor declared, ignoring the fact that his protective design was a half-mile downstream by now.

Mordja – if it was Mordja – laughed. ‘Behold the face of the water, fool,’ he said. ‘There is no longer protection for thee. And, therefore – ’ He reached out one huge, scaly hand, picked up my prospective ‘master’, and bit off his head. ‘A bit thin,’ he observed, crushing the skull and brains with those awful teeth. He negligently tossed away the still-quivering carcass and turned those baleful eyes on me.

I left rather hurriedly at that point.

I eventually found a less demonstrative magician who was willing to take me on. He was very old, which was an advantage, since the apprentice to a magician is required to become his ‘master’s’ slave for life. He lived alone in a dome-shaped tent made of musk-ox hides on a gravel bar beside one of those streams. His tent was surrounded by a kitchen midden, since he had the habit of throwing his garbage out the front door of his tent rather than burying it. The bar was backed by a thicket of stunted bushes that were enveloped by clouds of mosquitoes in the summertime.

He mumbled a lot and didn’t make much sense, but I gathered that his clan had been exterminated in one of those wars that are always breaking out amongst the Morindim.

My contempt for ‘magic’ as opposed to what we do dates from that period in my life. Magic involves a lot of meaningless mumbo-jumbo, cheap carnival tricks, and symbols drawn on the ground. None of that is really necessary, of course, but the Morindim believe that it is, and their belief makes it so.

My smelly old ‘master’ started me out on imps – nasty little things about knee-high. When I’d gotten that down pat, I moved up to fiends, and then up again to afreets. After a half-dozen years or so, he finally decided that I was ready to try my hand on a full-grown demon. In a rather chillingly off-hand manner, he advised me that I probably wouldn’t survive my first attempt. After what had happened to my first ‘master,’ I had a pretty good idea of what he was talking about.

I went through all the nonsensical ritual and raised a demon. He wasn’t a very big demon, but he was as much as I wanted to try to cope with. The whole secret to raising demons is to confine them in a shape of your imagining rather than their natural form. As long as you keep them locked into your conception of them, they have to obey you. If they manage to break loose and return to their real form, you’re in trouble.

I rather strongly advise you not to try it.

Anyway, I managed to keep my medium-sized demon under control so that he couldn’t turn on me. I made him perform a few simple tricks – turning water into blood, setting fire to a rock, withering an acre or so of grass – you know the sort of tricks I’m talking about – and then, because I was getting very tired of hunting food, I sent him out with instructions to bring back a couple of musk-oxen. He scampered off, howling and growling, and came back a half-hour or so later with enough meat to feed my ‘master’ and me for a month. Then I sent him back to Hell.

I did thank him, though, which I think confused him more than just a little.

The old magician was very impressed, but he fell ill not long afterward. I nursed him through his last illness as best I could and gave him a decent burial after he died. I decided at that point that I’d found out as much as we needed to know about the Morindim, and so I discarded my disguise and went back home again.

On my way back to the Vale I came across a fair-sized, neatly thatched cottage in a grove of giant trees near a small river. It was just on the northern edge of the Vale, and I’d passed that way many times over the years. I’ll take an oath that the house had never been there before. Moreover, to my own certain knowledge, there was not another human habitation within five hundred leagues, except for our towers in the Vale itself. I wondered who might have built a cottage in such a lonely place, so I went to the door to investigate these hardy pioneers.

There was only one occupant, though, a woman who seemed young, and yet perhaps not quite so young. Her hair was tawny and her eyes a curious golden color. Oddly, she didn’t wear any shoes, and I noticed that she had pretty feet.

She stood in the doorway as I approached – almost as if she’d been expecting me. I introduced myself, advising her that we were neighbors – which didn’t seem to impress her very much. I shrugged, thinking that she was probably one of those people who preferred to be alone. I was on the verge of bidding her good bye when she invited me in for supper. It’s the oddest thing. I hadn’t been particularly hungry when I’d approached the cottage, but no sooner did she mention food than I found myself suddenly ravenous.

The inside of her cottage was neat and cheery, with all those little touches that immediately identify a house in which a woman lives as opposed to the cluttered shacks where men reside. It was quite a bit larger than the word ‘cottage’ implies, and even though it was none of my business, I wondered why she needed so much room.

She had curtains at her windows – naturally – and earthenware jars filled with wildflowers on her window-sills and on the center of her glowing oak table. A fire burned merrily on her hearth, and a large kettle bubbled and hiccuped over it. Wondrous smells came from that kettle and from the loaves of freshly baked bread on the hearth.

‘One wonders if you would care to wash before you eat,’ she suggested with a certain delicacy.

To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about that.

She seemed to take my hesitation for agreement. She fetched me a pail of water, warm from the hearth, a cloth, a towel of sorts, and a cake of brown country soap. ‘Out there,’ she told me, pointing at the door.

I went back outside, set the pail on a stand beside the door, and washed my hands and face. Almost as an afterthought, I pulled off my tunic and soaped down my upper torso as well. I dried off with the towel, pulled my tunic back on, and went inside again.

She sniffed. ‘Much better,’ she said approvingly. Then she pointed at the table. ‘Sit,’ she told me. ‘I will bring you food.’ She fetched an earthenware plate from a cupboard, padding silently barefooted over her well-scrubbed floor. Then she knelt on her hearth, ladled the plate full, and brought me a meal such as I had not seen in years.

Her easy familiarity seemed just a bit odd, but it somehow stepped over that awkwardness that I think we all feel when we first meet strangers.

After I’d eaten – more than I should have, probably – we talked, and I found this strange, tawny-haired woman to have the most uncommon good sense. This is to say that she agreed with most of my opinions.

Have you ever noticed that? We base our assessment of the intelligence of others almost entirely on how closely their thinking matches our own. I’m sure that there are people out there who violently disagree with me on most things, and I’m broad-minded enough to concede that they might possibly not be complete idiots, but I much prefer the company of people who agree with me.

You might want to think about that.

I enjoyed her company, and I found myself thinking up excuses not to leave. She was a remarkably handsome woman, and there was a fragrance about her that made my senses reel. She told me that her name was Poledra, and I liked the sound of it. I found that I liked almost everything about her. ‘One wonders by what name you are called,’ she said after she’d introduced herself.

‘I’m Belgarath,’ I replied, ‘and I’m first disciple of the God Aldur.’

‘How remarkable,’ she noted, and then she laughed, touching my arm familiarly as if we’d known each other for years.

I lingered in her cottage for a few days, and then I regretfully told her that I had to go back to the Vale to report what I’d found out in the north to my Master.

‘I will go along with you,’ she told me. ‘From what you say, there are remarkable things to be seen in your Vale, and I was ever curious.’ Then she closed the door of her house and returned with me to the Vale.

Strangely, my Master was waiting for us, and he greeted Poledra courteously. I can never really be sure, but it seemed to me that some mysterious glance passed between them as if they knew each other and shared some secret that I was not aware of.

All right. I’m not stupid. Naturally I had some suspicions, but as time went by, they became less and less important, and I quite firmly put them out of my mind.

Poledra simply moved into my tower with me. We never actually discussed it; she just took up residence. That raised a few eyebrows among my brothers, to be sure, but I’ll fight anyone who has the bad manners to suggest that there was anything improper about our living arrangements. It put my will-power to the test, I’ll admit, but I behaved myself. That always seemed to amuse Poledra for some reason.

I thought my way through our situation extensively that winter, and I finally came to a decision – a decision Poledra had obviously made a long time ago. She and I were married the following spring. My Master himself, burdened though he was, blessed our union.

There was joy in our marriage, and a kind of homey, familiar comfort. I never once thought about those things which I had prudently decided not to think about, so they in no way clouded the horizon. But that, of course, is another story.

Don’t rush me. We’ll get to it – all in good time.