Belgarath the Sorcerer (12 page)

‘One thinks that you are wrong. The smell is not that of deer. What one smells is the blood and meat of man.'

‘That is impossible,' I snorted. ‘The Hrulgin are not man-eaters. They live in peace with the Ulgos here in these mountains.'

‘One's nose is very good,' she told me pointedly. ‘One would not confuse the smell of man-blood and meat with the smell of a deer. These flesh-eating horses have been killing and eating men, and they are hunting again.'

‘Hunting? Hunting what?'

‘One thinks that they are hunting you.'

I sent out a probing thought. The minds of the Hrulgin aren't really very much like the minds of horses. Horses eat grass, and about the only time they're aggressive is during the breeding season. The Hrulgin
look
a great deal like horses - if you discount the claws and fangs - but they don't eat grass. I'd touched the minds of Hrulgin before at various times when I'd been traveling in the mountains of Ulgoland. I knew that they were hunters and fairly savage, but the peace of UL had always put restraints on them before. The minds I touched
this
time seemed to have shrugged off those restraints, though.

The wolf was right. The Hrulgin
were
hunting me.

I'd been hunted before. A young lion stalked me for two days once before I'd finally chased him off. There's no real
malice in the mind of a hunting animal. He's just looking for something to eat. What I encountered
this
time, however, was a cruel hatred, and much worse, to my way of looking at it, an absolute madness. These particular Hrulgin were much more interested in the killing than they were in the eating. I was in trouble here.

‘One suggests that you do something about your shape,' the she-wolf advised. She dropped to her haunches, her long, pink tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. In case you've never noticed, that's the way canines laugh.

‘What is so funny?' I demanded of her.

‘One finds the man-things amusing. The hunter puts all his thought on the thing he hunts. If it is a rabbit he hunts, he will not turn aside for a squirrel. These meat-eating horses are hunting a man - you. Change your shape, and they will ignore you.'

I was actually embarrassed. Why hadn't I thought of that? For all our sophistication, the instinctive reaction that seizes you when you realize that something wants to kill and eat you is sheer panic.

I formed the image in my mind, and slipped myself into the shape of the wolf. My companion seemed to be impressed. ‘Much better,' she said approvingly. ‘You are a handsome wolf. Your other shape is not so pleasing. Shall we go?'

We angled up from the stream-bed and stopped at the edge of the trees to watch the Hrulgin. The sudden disappearance of my scent confused them and it seemed also to infuriate them. The herd stallion reared, screaming his rage, and he shredded the bark of an unoffending tree with his claws while flecks of foam spattered out from his long, curved fangs. Several of the mares followed my scent down the gorge, then back, moving slowly and trying to sniff out the place where I'd turned aside and slipped away.

‘One suggests that we move along,' the she-wolf said. ‘The flesh-eating horses will think that
we
have killed and eaten the man-thing they were hunting. This will make
them angry with us. They may decide to stop hunting the man-thing and start hunting wolves.'

We stayed just back of the edge of the trees so that we could watch the baffled Hrulgin near the edge of the mountain stream in case they decided to start hunting wolves instead of men. After about a half-hour, we were far enough out in front of them that the chances that they could catch up with us were very slim.

The change in the Hrulgin had me completely baffled. The peace of UL had always been absolute before. What had driven the Hrulgin mad?

As it turned out, the Hrulgin weren't the only monsters that'd lost their wits.

 

My automatic use of the word ‘monster' there isn't an indication of prejudice. It's just a translation of an Ulgo word. The Ulgos even refer to the Dryads as monsters. Ce'Nedra was somewhat offended by that term, as I recall.

 

Anyway, I decided not to revert to my own form once we'd evaded the Hrulgin. Something very strange was going on here in Ulgoland. My companion and I reached that peculiarly shaped mountain upon which Prolgu stands, and we started up.

About half-way to the top, we encountered a pack of Algroths, and they were just as crazy as the Hrulgin had been. Algroths are not among my favorite creatures anyway. I'm not sure what the Gods were thinking of when they created them. A blend of ape, goat, and reptile seems a bit exotic to me. The Algroths were
also
hunting for people to kill and eat. Whether I liked him or not, I definitely needed to have words with the Gorim.

The only problem was the fact that Prolgu was totally deserted. There were some signs of a hasty departure, but the abandoning of the city had happened some time back, so my companion and I couldn't pick up any hint of a scent that might have told us which way the Ulgos had gone.
We came across some mossy human bones, however, and I didn't care for the implications of that. Was it possible that the Ulgos had all been killed? Had UL changed his mind and abandoned them?

I didn't really have time to sort it out. Evening had fallen over the empty city, and my companion and I were still sniffing around in the empty buildings when a sudden bellow shattered the silence, a bellow that was coming from the sky. I went to the doorway of the building we'd been searching and looked up.

The light wasn't really very good, but it was good enough for me to see that huge shape outlined against the evening sky.

It was the dragon, and her great wings were clawing at the sky and she was belching clouds of sooty fire with every bellow.

Notice that I speak of her in the singular and the feminine. This is no indication of any great perception on my part, since there was only one dragon in the entire world, and she was female. The two males the Gods had created had killed each other during the first mating season. I'd always felt rather sorry for her, but not this time. She, like the Hrulgin and the Algroths, was intent on killing things, but she was too stupid to be selective. She'd burn anything that moved.

Moreover, Torak had added a modification to the dragons when he and his brothers were creating them. They were totally immune to anything I might have been able to do to them with the Will and the Word.

‘One would be more content if you would do something about that,' the wolf told me.

‘I am thinking about it,' I replied.

‘Think faster. The bird is returning.'

Her faith in me was touching, but it didn't help very much. I quickly ran over the dragon's characteristics in my mind. She was invulnerable, she was stupid, and she was lonely. Those last two clicked together in my mind. I loped
to the edge of the city, focused my will on a thicket a few miles south of the mountain, and set fire to it.

The dragon screeched and swooped off toward my fire, belching out her own flames as she went.

‘One wonders why you did that.'

‘Fire is a part of the mating ritual of her kind.'

‘How remarkable. Most birds mate in the spring.'

‘She is not exactly a bird. One thinks that we should leave these mountains immediately. There are strange things taking place here that one does not understand, and we have errands to attend to in the lowlands.'

She sighed. ‘It is always errands with you, isn't it?'

‘It is the nature of the man-things,' I told her.

‘But you are not a man-thing right now.'

I couldn't dispute her logic, but we left anyway, and we reached Arendia two days later.

The tasks my Master had set for me involved certain Arends and some Tolnedrans. At the time, I didn't understand why the Master was so interested in weddings. I understand now, of course. Certain people needed to be born, and I was out there laying ground work for all I was worth.

I'd rather thought that the presence of my companion might complicate things, but as it turned out, she was an advantage, since you definitely get noticed when you walk into an Arendish village or a Tolnedran town with a full-grown wolf at your side, and her presence
did
tend to make people listen to me.

Arranging marriages in those days wasn't really all that difficult. The Arends - and to a somewhat lesser degree the Tolnedrans - had patriarchal notions, and children were supposed to obey their fathers in important matters. Thus, I was seldom obliged to try to convince the happy couple that they ought to get married. I talked with their fathers instead. I had a certain celebrity in those days. The war was still fresh in everybody's mind, and my brothers and I
had
played fairly major roles in that conflict. Moreover, I soon
found that the priesthood in both Arendia and Tolnedra could be very helpful. After I'd been through the whole business a couple of times, I began to develop a pattern. When the wolf and I went into a town, we'd immediately go to the temple of either Chaldan or Nedra. I'd identify myself and ask the local priests to introduce me to the fathers in question.

It didn't
always
go smoothly, of course. Every so often I'd come across stubborn men who for one reason or another didn't care for my choice of spouses for their children. If worse came to worst, though, I could always give them a little demonstration of what I could do about things that irritated me. That was usually enough to bring them around to my way of thinking.

‘One wonders why all of this is necessary,' my companion said to me as we were leaving one Arendish village after I'd finally persuaded a particularly difficult man that his daughter's happiness - and his own health - depended on the girl's marriage to the young fellow we'd selected for her.

‘They will produce young ones,' I tried to explain.

‘What an amazing thing,' she responded dryly. A wolf can fill the simplest statement with all sorts of ironic implications. ‘Is that not the usual purpose of mating?'

‘
Our
purpose is to produce
specific
young ones.'

‘Why? One puppy is much like another, is it not? Character is developed in the rearing, not in the blood-line.'

We argued about that off and on for centuries, and I strongly suspect her of arguing largely because she knew that it irritated me. Technically, I was the leader of our odd little pack, but she wasn't going to let me get above myself.

Arendia was a mournful sort of place in those days. The melancholy institution of serfdom had been well-established among the Arends even before the war with the Angaraks, and they brought it with them when they migrated to the west. I've never understood why anyone would submit to being a serf in the first place, but I suppose
the Arendish character might have had something to do with it. Arends go to war with each other on the slightest pretext, and an ordinary farmer needs
someone
around to protect him from belligerent neighbors.

The lands the Arends had occupied in the central part of the continent had been open, and the fields had long been under cultivation. Their new home was a tangled forest, so they had to clear away the trees before they could plant anything. This was the work that fell to the serfs. The wolf and I soon became accustomed to seeing naked people chopping at trees. ‘One wonders why they take off their fur to do this,' she said to me on one occasion. There's no word in wolfish for ‘clothing,' so she had to improvise.

‘It is because they only have one of the things they cover their bodies with. They put them aside while they are hitting the trees because they do not want them to be wounded while they work.' I decided not to go into the question of the poverty of the serfs nor of the expense of a new canvas smock. The discussion was complicated enough already. How do you explain the concept of ownership to a creature that has no need for possessions of any kind?

‘This covering and uncovering of their bodies that the man-things do is foolishness,' she declared. ‘Why do they do it?'

‘For warmth when it is cold.'

‘But they also do it when it is not cold. Why?'

‘For modesty, I suppose.'

‘What is modesty?'

I sighed. I wasn't making much headway here. ‘It is just a custom among the man-things,' I told her.

‘Oh. If it is a custom, it is all right.' Wolves have an enormous respect for customs. Then she immediately thought of something else. She was
always
thinking of something else. ‘If it is the custom among man-things to cover their bodies sometimes but not others, it is not much of a custom, is it?'

I gave up. ‘No,' I said. ‘Probably not.'

She dropped to her haunches in the middle of the forest path we were following with her tongue lolling out in wolfish laughter.

‘Do you
mind
?' I demanded.

‘One is merely amused by the inconsistencies of the man-side of your thought,' she replied. ‘If you would take your
true
form, your thought would run more smoothly.' She was
still
convinced that I was really a wolf and that my frequent change of form was no more than a personal idiosyncrasy.

In the forests of Arendia, we frequently encountered the almost ubiquitous bands of outlaws. Not
all
of the serfs docilely accepted their condition. I don't like having people point arrows at me, so after the first time or two, I went wolf as soon as we were out of sight of the village we'd just left. Even the stupidest runaway serf isn't going to argue with a couple of full-grown wolves. That's one of the things that's always been a trial to me. People are
forever
interfering with me when I've got something to attend to. Why can't they just leave me alone?