Belgarath the Sorcerer (19 page)

‘Bear-shoulders and those overgrown sons of his are out there,' I reported. ‘They've found a way to get to Mallorea, and they want me to go with them. It's a very bad time for me, Master. Poledra's due sometime in the next couple of months, and I really should be here. Cherek's very insistent, but I told him that they'd have to go without me.'

‘And?' My Master knew that there was more.

‘I had a visitation. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to go along.'

‘That is most rare, my son. The Purpose doth not often speak to us directly.'

‘I was afraid you'd look at it that way,' I admitted glumly. ‘Can't this be put off?'

‘Nay, my son. The TIME is part of the EVENT. Once missed, it will not return, and in the loss of this opportunity, we might well fail. This entails a great sacrifice for thee, my son - greater than thou canst ever know - but it must be made. We are compelled by Necessity, and Necessity will brook no opposition.'

‘Somebody's
got
to stay with Poledra, Master,' I protested.

‘Mayhap one of thy brothers will agree to stand in thy stead.
Thy
task, however, is clear. If the voice of Necessity hath told thee to go, thou must surely go.'

‘I don't like this, Master,' I complained.

‘That is not required, my son. Thou art required to
go
, not to like the going.'

He
was a lot of help. Grumbling under my breath, I went back outside and hurled my thought in the general direction of Tolnedra. ‘
I need you!
' I bellowed at Beldin.

‘
Don't scream!
' he shouted back. ‘
You made me spill a tankard of fine ale
.'

‘
Quit thinking about your belly and get back here
.'

‘
What's wrong
?'

‘
I have to leave, and somebody's got to look after Poledra
.'

‘
I'm not a midwife, Belgarath. Have the twins do it. They're the experts at this sort of thing
.'

‘
With sheep, you clot! Not with people! Get back here right now!
'

‘
Where are you going?
'

‘
To Mallorea. Cherek's sons have found a way to get there that doesn't involve sprouting feathers. We're going to Cthol Mishrak to take back the Orb
.'

‘
Are you crazy? If Torak catches you trying that, he'll roast you over a slow fire
.'

‘
I don't intend to let him catch me. Are you coming back or not
?'

‘
All right. Don't get excited; I'm coming
.'

‘
I'll be gone by the time you get here. No matter what she says or tries to do, don't let Poledra follow me. Keep her inside that tower. Chain her to the wall if you have to, but keep her at home
.'

‘
I'll take care of it. Give my best to Torak
.'

‘
Very funny, Beldin. Now get started
.'

As you might have noticed, I wasn't exactly in a good humor at that point. I went back to where I'd left the King of Aloria and his sons stamping their feet in the snow. ‘All right,' I told them, ‘this is what we're going to do. We're going to my tower, and you're
not
going to say anything at all about this insane notion of yours to my wife. I want her to believe that you're just passing through and stopped by to pay a courtesy call. I
don't
want her to know what we're up to until we're a long way away from here.'

‘I take it you've had a change of heart,' Cherek noted blandly.

‘Don't push your luck, Bear-shoulders,' I told him. ‘I've been overruled, and I'm not very happy about it.'

I can't be entirely sure how much Poledra really knew,
and to this day she won't tell me. She greeted the Alorns politely and told them that supper was already cooking. That was a fair indication that she knew
something
. Cherek and his boys and I hadn't been in sight of the tower when we'd held our little get-together. I've often wondered just exactly how far my wife's ‘talents' go. The fact that she'd lived for three hundred years - that I was willing to admit that I knew about - was a fair indication that she wasn't what you'd call ordinary. If she
did
have what we refer to as ‘talent,' she never exercised it while I was around. That was a part of our unspoken agreement, I suppose. I didn't ask certain questions, and she didn't surprise me by doing unusual things. Every marriage has its little secrets, I guess. If married people knew
everything
about each other, life would be terribly dull, I guess.

As I think I've indicated, Bear-shoulders was probably one of the world's worst liars. After he'd eaten enough roast pork to glut a regiment, he leaned back in his chair expansively. ‘We have business in Maragor,' he told my wife, ‘and we stopped by to see if your husband would be willing to show us the way.'
Maragor
? What possible interest could Alorns have in Maragor?

‘I see,' Poledra replied in a non-committal sort of way.

Now I was stuck with Cherek's lie, so I had to try to make the best of it. ‘It's not really very far, dear,' I told my wife. ‘It shouldn't take me more than a week or so to get them through the mountains to Mar Amon.'

‘Unless it snows again,' she added. ‘It must be very important if you're willing to go through those mountains in the winter time.'

‘Oh, it
is
, Lady Poledra,' Dras Bull-neck assured her. ‘Very, very important. It has to do with trade.'

Trade?
I know it sounds impossible, but Dras was an even worse liar than his father. The Marags have no sea-coast. How could Alorns even
get
to Maragor to trade with them? Not to mention the fact that Marags had absolutely no interest whatsoever in commerce - and they were cannibals
besides! What a dunce Cherek's oldest son was! I shuddered. This idiot was the crown prince of Aloria!

‘We've heard some rumors that the streams in Maragor are absolutely awash with gold,' Riva added. At least Riva had a
little
good sense. Poledra knew enough about Alorns to know that the word ‘gold' set their hearts on fire.

‘I'll try to mediate for you, Bear-shoulders,' I said, pulling a long face, ‘but I don't think you'll have very much luck with the Marags. They aren't interested enough in the gold even to bend over to pick it up, and I don't think you could offer them anything that'd make them willing to take the trouble.'

‘I think your trip will take longer than a week,' Poledra told me. ‘Be sure to take warm clothing.'

‘Of course,' I assured her.

‘Perhaps I should go with you.'

‘Absolutely not - not when you're this close.'

‘You worry too much about that.'

‘No. You stay here. I've sent for Beldin. He's coming back to stay with you.'

‘Not unless he bathes first, he won't.'

‘I'll remind him.'

‘When will you be leaving?'

I cast a spuriously inquiring look at Cherek. ‘Tomorrow morning?' I asked him.

He shrugged, overdoing it a bit. ‘Might as well,' he agreed. ‘The weather in those mountains isn't going to get any better. If we're going to have to wade through snow, we'd better get to wading.'

‘Stay under the trees,' Poledra advised. ‘The snow isn't as deep in thick woods.' If she
did
know, she was taking it very calmly.

‘We'd better get some sleep,' I said, standing up abruptly. I didn't need any
more
lies to try to talk my way around.

Poledra was very quiet in our bed that night. She clung to me fiercely, however, and along toward morning she said, ‘Be very careful. The young and I will be waiting
when you come back.' Then she said something she rarely ever said, probably because she felt it was unnecessary to say it. ‘I love you,' she told me. Then she kissed me, rolled over, and immediately went to sleep.

The Alorns and I left early the next morning, ostentatiously going off toward the south and Maragor. When we were about five miles south of my tower, however, we circled back, staying well out of sight, and proceeded on toward the northeast.

This all happened about three thousand years ago; long before the Algars and the Melcenes had begun their breeding experiments with domestic animals, so what passed for horses in those days were hardly more than ponies - which wouldn't have worked out very well for a group of seven-foot-tall Alorns. So we walked. That's to say
they
walked; I ran. After trying to keep up with them for a couple of days, I called a halt. ‘This isn't working,' I told them. ‘I'm going to do something, and I don't want you getting excited about it.'

‘What have you got in mind, Belgarath?' Dras rumbled at me a little nervously. I had quite a reputation in Aloria back then, and the Alorns had exaggerated notions about the kinds of things I could do.

‘If I'm going to have to run just to keep up, I'm going to run on all four feet.'

‘You don't
have
four feet,' he objected.

‘I'm going to fix that right now. After I do, I won't be able to talk to you - at least not in a language you'll understand - so if you've got any questions, ask them now.'

‘Our friend here is the most powerful sorcerer in the world,' Cherek Bear-shoulders told his sons sententiously. ‘There's absolutely nothing he can't do.' I think he really believed that.

‘No questions?' I asked, looking around at them. ‘All right then,' I said, ‘now it's your turn to try to keep up.' I formed the image in my mind and slipped myself into the familiar form of the wolf. I'd done it often enough before that it was almost automatic by now.

‘Belar!' Dras swore, jumping back from me.

Then I ran off a hundred yards toward the northeast, stopped, turned, and sat down on my haunches to wait for them. Even Alorns could understand the meaning of that.

 

The priest of Belar who wrote the early sections of the BOOK OF ALORN was quite obviously playing fast and loose with the truth when he described our journey. He was either drunk when he wrote it, or he didn't have the facts straight. Then again, he may have thought that what
really
happened was too prosaic for a writer of his vast talent. He declares that Dras, Algar, and Riva were waiting for us a thousand leagues to the north, which simply wasn't true. He then announces that my hair and beard were turned white by the frost of that bitter winter, which was also a lie. My hair and beard had turned white long before that - largely because of my association with the children of the Bear-God.

 

I was still not too happy about this trip, and I placed the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of my traveling-companions. I ran those four to the verge of exhaustion day after day. I'd resume my own form every evening, and I usually had enough time to get a fire going and supper started before they came wheezing and staggering into camp. ‘We're in a hurry,' I'd remind them somewhat maliciously. ‘We've got a long way to go to reach this bridge of yours, and we want to get there before the ice starts to break up, don't we?'

We continued in a northeasterly direction across the snow-covered plains of what's now Algaria until we hit the eastern escarpment. I had no intention of climbing that mile-high cliff, so I turned slightly and led my puffing companions due north onto the moors of present-day eastern Drasnia. Then we cut across the mountains to that vast emptiness where the Morindim live.

My spiteful efforts to run Cherek and his sons into the ground every day accomplished two things. We reached
Morindland in less than a month, and my Alorn friends were in peak condition when we got there.
You
try running as fast as you can all day every day for a month and see what it does to
you
. Assuming that you don't collapse and die in the first day or so, you'll be in very good shape before the month is out. If there was any fat left on my friends by the time we'd reached Morindland, it was under their fingernails. As it turned out, that was very useful.

When we came down out of the north range of mountains that marks the southern boundaries of Morindland, I resumed my own form and called a halt. It was the dead of winter, and the vast arctic plain where the Morindim lived was covered with snow and darkness. The long northern night had set in, although as luck had it, we'd reached Morindland early enough in the lunar month that a half-moon hung low over the southern horizon, providing sufficient light to make travel possible - unpleasant, but possible. ‘I don't know that we need to go out there,' I told my fur-clad friends, gesturing at the frozen plain. ‘There's not much point in holding extended conversations with every band of Morindim we come across, is there?'

‘Not really,' Cherek agreed, making a face. ‘I don't care that much for the Morindim. They spend weeks talking about their dreams, and we don't really have time for that.'

‘When Algar and I were coming back from the land bridge, we stuck to these foothills,' Riva told us. ‘The Morindim don't like hills, so we didn't see very many of them.'

‘That's probably the best way to do it,' I agreed. ‘I could deal with an occasional band of them if I had to, but it'd just be a waste of time. Do you know how to make curse-markers? And dream-markers?'

Iron-grip nodded gravely. ‘A combination of those two
would
sort of make them keep their distance, wouldn't it?'

‘I don't understand,' Dras rumbled with a puzzled look.

‘You would if you'd come out of the taverns in Val Alorn once in a while,' Algar suggested to him.

‘I'm the eldest,' Bull-neck replied a bit defensively. ‘I have responsibilities.'

‘Of
course
you do,' Riva said sardonically. ‘Let's see if I can explain it. The Morindim live in a different kind of world - and I'm not just talking about all this snow. Dreams are more important to them than the real world, and curses are very significant. Belgarath just suggested that we carry a dream-marker to let the Morindim know that we're obeying a command that came to us in a dream. We'll also carry a curse-marker that'll tell them that anybody who interferes with us will have to deal with our demon.'

‘There's no such thing as a demon,' Dras scoffed.

‘Don't get your mind set in stone on that, Dras,' I warned him.

‘Have you ever seen one?'

‘I've
raised
them, Dras. Aldur sent me up here to learn what I could about these people. I apprenticed myself to one of their magicians and learned all the tricks. Riva's got it fairly close. If we carry dream-markers and curse-markers, the Morindim will avoid us.'

‘Pestilence-markers?' Algar suggested. Algar never used more words than he absolutely had to. I've never fully understood what he was saving them for.

I considered it. ‘No,' I decided. ‘Sometimes the Morindim feel that the best way to deal with pestilence is to stand off and shoot the infected people full of arrows.'

‘Inconvenient,' Algar murmured.

‘We won't encounter very many Morindim this far south anyway,' I told them, ‘and the markers should make them keep their distance.'

As it turned out, I was wrong on that score. Riva and I fashioned the markers, and we set out toward the east, staying well up in the foothills. We hadn't traveled for more than two days - nights, actually, since that was when the moon was out - when suddenly there were Morindim all around us. The markers kept them away, but it was only a
matter of time until some magician would come along to take up the challenge.

I didn't sleep very much during the course of our journey along those foothills. The north range is riddled with caves, and I'd hide the Alorns in one of them and then go out to scout around. I very nearly froze my paws off. Lord! it was cold up there!

It wasn't too long until I started coming across counter-markers. For every curse, there's a counter-curse, and the presence of those counter-markers told me louder than words that magicians were starting to converge on us. This was puzzling, because Morind magicians are all insanely jealous of each other and they almost never cooperate. Since the magicians control all aspects of the lives of their assorted clans, a gathering such as we were seeing was a virtual impossibility.

The moon, of course, ignored us and continued her inevitable course, waxing fuller and fuller every night until she reached that monthly fulfillment of hers. Cherek and his sons couldn't understand why the moon kept coming up even though the sun didn't. I tried to explain it to them, but when I got to the part about the
real
orbit of the moon and the
apparent
orbit of the sun, I lost them. Finally I just told them, ‘They follow different paths,' and let it go at that. All they really had to know was that the moon would be in the arctic sky for about two weeks out of every month during the winter. Anything more would have just confused them. To be honest about it, I'd have been just as happy if the sun's baby sister had dropped below the horizon before her pregnancy started to show. Once she became full, it was as bright as day up there. A full moon over a snow-covered landscape
really
puts out a lot of light, and that was terribly inconvenient. I suppose that was what the Morindim had been waiting for.

I'd hidden Cherek and the boys in a cave just before moon-set as usual, and then I went out to scout around.
No more than a mile to the east of the cave, I saw Morindim - thousands of them.

I dropped to my haunches and started to swear - no mean trick for a wolf. The unnatural gathering of what appeared to be every clan in Morindland had completely blocked us off. We were in deep trouble.

When I finished swearing, I turned, loped back to the cave where the Alorns were sleeping, and resumed my own form. ‘You'd better wake up,' I told them.

‘What's the matter?' Cherek asked, throwing off his fur robe.

‘All of Morindim is stretched across our path no more than a mile from here.'

‘They don't
do
that,' Riva protested. ‘The clans
never
gather together in the same place.'

‘Evidently the rules have changed.'

‘What are we going to do?' Dras demanded.

‘Could we slip around them?' Cherek asked.

‘Not hardly,' I told him. ‘They're stretched out for miles.'

‘What are we going to do?' Dras said again. Dras tended to repeat himself when he got excited.

‘I'm working on it.' I started thinking very fast. One thing was certain. Somebody was tampering with the Morindim. Riva was right; the clans
never
cooperated with each other. Someone had found a way to change that, and I didn't think it was a Morind who'd done it. I cudgeled my brain, but I couldn't come up with any way to get out of this. Each of the clans had a magician, and each magician had a pet demon. When the moon rose again, I was very likely to be up to my ears in creatures who normally lived in Hell. I was definitely going to need some help.

I have no idea of where the notion came from -

 

Let me correct that. Now that I think about it, I
do
know where it came from.

 

- Are you in there? - I asked silently.

-
Of course
. -

-
I've got a problem here
. -

-
Yes, probably so
. -

-
What do I do?
-

-
I'm not permitted to tell you
. -

-
That didn't seem to bother you back in the Vale
. -

-
That was different. Think, Belgarath. You know the Morindim, and you know how hard it is to control one of their demons. The magician has to concentrate very hard to keep his demon from turning on him. What does that suggest to you?
-

-
I do something to break their concentration?
-

-
Is that a question? If it is, I'm not allowed to answer
. -

-
All right, it's not a question. What do you think of the idea? - just speculatively? Do your rules allow you to tell me if an idea is a bad one?
-

-
Just speculatively? I think that's allowed
. -

-
It'll make things a little awkward, but I think we can work around it
. -

I suggested any number of possible solutions, and that silent voice inside my head rejected them one after another. I started to grow more and more exotic at that point. To my horror, that bodiless voice seemed to think that my most outrageous and dangerous notion had some possibilities. You should always try to curb your creativity in situations like that.

‘Are you
mad
?' Riva exclaimed when I told the Alorns what I had in mind.

‘Let's all hope not,' I told him. ‘There isn't any other way out, I'm afraid. I'm going to have to do it this way - unless we want to turn around and go home, and I don't think that's permitted.'

‘When are you going to do this?' Cherek asked me.

‘Just as soon as the moon comes up again.
I
want to pick the time. I don't want some tattooed magician out there picking it for me.'

‘Why wait?' Dras demanded. ‘Why not do it now?'

‘Because I'll need light to draw the symbols in the snow.
I
definitely
don't want to leave anything out. Try to get some sleep. It might be quite a while before we get the chance again.' Then I went back outside to keep watch.

It was a nervous night - day, actually, since your days and nights get turned around during the arctic winter. When I'd suggested the plan to that voice of Necessity that seemed to have taken up residence inside my head for a time, I'd been grasping at straws, since I wasn't really sure I could pull it off. Worrying isn't a good way to spend any extended period of time.

When I judged that the moon was about ready to come up, I went back into the cave and woke up my friends. ‘I don't want you standing too close to me,' I advised them. ‘There's no point in all of us getting killed.'