Belgarath the Sorcerer (65 page)

I'm not really positive that Mergon believed me, but Eldrig and the other Alorns were feeling muscular, so he
behaved
as if he believed. He really didn't have anything to lose, after all. If I were lying to him, there'd never be a Rivan King to marry one of those precious imperial princesses, nor would anyone ever become Overlord of the West, so he went along with us, largely to pacify the Alorns, I believe.

Podiss, however, was another matter. Nyissans tend to be a little touchy about the fact that their kingdom is the only one ruled by a woman, and any kind of disparagement of Salmissra, real or imagined, raises screams of outrage. To put it rather bluntly, however, Nyissa doesn't loom very large in the family of nations. It's a swampy backwater with a small population and aside from the slave-trade, it doesn't have much in the way of commerce. When it
became more and more obvious that the accords weren't even going to mention Nyissa, Podiss lost his temper. ‘And what of my queen, Eternal Salmissra?' he demanded. ‘What voice will
she
have in this ordering of the world?'

‘Not a very loud one,' Eldrig said, ‘at least not if I can help it, she won't. She won't have to do anything except sign the document, Podiss - that and keep her nose out of matters that don't concern her.' Eldrig wasn't exactly what you'd call the soul of diplomacy.

‘I'll have no further part in this,' Podiss said, rising to his feet. ‘And I won't insult my queen by carrying this absurdity to her. Write down anything you wish, gentlemen, but Salmissra won't sign it.'

This was the point in his account of the conference where Davoul the Lame lost his head entirely. His epic blandly asserts that Polgara sprang to her feet, turned Podiss into a snake, changed herself into an owl, and carried him off into the sky. I think it was the fact that Davoul suddenly realized that he'd gone for ten whole pages without any magic that pushed him over the edge. Polgara
did
do something to Podiss, but it didn't involve anything like that. It was probably a lot worse, but nobody else at the conference saw it. She simply went to where Podiss was standing and did much the same thing to him as she'd done to Eldallan in the Asturian forest. I haven't any idea at all of what she showed him - he didn't scream at all - but whatever it was made him pale and very cooperative.

It
also
persuaded Mergon to keep his objections to himself from then on.

It took us another day or so to finish the Accords of Vo Mimbre, and another day for a Mimbrate scribe to cast them into ‘high style.' Since the Mimbrates were our hosts, it was only polite to let them produce the final version. When that was all finished, the Gorim took up his copy, rose to his feet and read to us. ‘These then are the Accords which we have reached here at Vo Mimbre. The nations of the west will prepare themselves for the return of the Rivan
King, for in the day of his return shall Torak awaken and come again upon us, and none but the Rivan King may overcome him and save us from his foul enslavement. And whatsoever the Rivan King commands, that shall we do. And he shall have an Imperial Princess of Tolnedra to wife and shall have Empire and Dominion in the West. And whosoever breaketh these accords, will we do war upon him and scatter his people and pull down his cities and lay waste his lands. We pledge it here in honor of Brand, who hath overthrown Torak and bound him in sleep until the One comes who might destroy him. So be it.'

Eldrig leaned back in his chair. ‘Well,' he said, ‘now that's taken care of, I guess we can all go home.'

‘Not quite yet, your Majesty,' Wildantor disagreed. ‘There's still a royal wedding in the works.'

‘I'd almost forgotten about that,' Eldrig said. ‘Are those two still screaming at each other?'

‘No,' Pol told him. ‘The screaming stopped a few days ago. The last time I listened at the door, there was a lot of giggling going on. Evidently Mayaserana's a bit ticklish.'

‘I wonder what they can be doing,' the Gorim said mildly.

‘We can probably start our armies marching toward home,' Rhodar put in. ‘Ordinary soldiers aren't really very interested in royal weddings, and I'd like to have my pikemen at the Drasnian border before the end of summer.'

‘I can have my war-boats take them to Kotu, if you'd like,' Eldrig offered.

‘Thanks all the same, Eldrig, but Drasnians aren't very good sailors. I'm fairly sure that my pikemen would rather walk.'

Then Brand sent for Korodullin and Mayaserana. They were both blushing when they were escorted into his presence. ‘Have you two more or less settled your differences?' he asked them.

‘We really should apologize, Lord Brand,' Mayaserana said in a tone of sweet reasonableness and a rosy blush. ‘We both behaved very badly when you made that suggestion.'

‘Oh, that's all right, Mayaserana,' Brand forgave her. ‘I take it you've had a change of heart.'

‘The sweet light of reason hath opened our eyes, Lord Brand,' Korodullin assured him, also blushing, ‘and our duty to Arendia hath touched our hearts and caused our animosity to fade. Though we still have our differences, we are both willing to set them aside for the sake of our homeland.'

‘I was almost certain you'd see it that way,' Polgara said with a faint smile.

Mayaserana blushed again. ‘And when would you like to have us married, Lord Brand?' she asked.

‘Oh, I don't know,' Brand replied. ‘Have either of you got anything urgent to take care of tomorrow?'

‘What's wrong with today?' she countered. Patience, it appeared, wasn't Mayaserana's strong suit, and she had things on her mind.

‘I think we could arrange that,' Brand told her. ‘Somebody go get a priest of Chaldan.'

‘There might be a problem there, Lord Brand,' Wildantor said dubiously. ‘Our priests are just as partisan as the rest of us. The priest might refuse to perform the ceremony.'

‘Not for very long, my friend,' Mandor disagreed, ‘not if he values his continued good health.'

‘You'd actually hit a priest?' Wildantor asked.

‘My duty to Arendia would compel it of me,' Mandor said, ‘though it would of course, rend mine heart.'

‘Oh, of course. Let's go find one, shall we? And you can explain things to him while we're dragging him back here.'

And so Korodullin and Mayaserana were married, and Arendia was technically united. There was still a certain amount of bickering between Mimbrates and Asturians, of course, but the open battles more or less came to an end.

After the wedding, the kings of the west dispersed. We'd all been away from home for a long time, after all. Pol and I rode north with Brand as far as the Great Arendish Fair, and then we said our goodbyes and took the road leading
toward the Ulgo border. ‘Will you be taking Gelane back to Aldurford?' I asked her after we'd gone several miles.

‘No, father. I don't think that'd be a good idea. A lot of Algar soldiers saw the two of us at Vo Mimbre, and some of them came from Aldurford. Someone might make the connection. I think we'd better start fresh somewhere.'

‘Where did you have in mind?'

‘I think I'll go back to Sendaria. After Vo Mimbre, there aren't going to be any Grolims around to worry about.'

‘That's your decision, Pol. Gelane's
your
responsibility, so whatever you decide is all right with me.'

‘Oh,
thank
you, father!' she said it with a certain amount of sarcasm. ‘Oh, one other thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘Stay out of my hair, old wolf, and this time I mean it.'

‘Whatever you say, Polgara.' I didn't really mean it, of course, but I said it anyway. It was easier than arguing with her.

There's a peculiar dichotomy in the nature of almost anyone who calls himself a historian. They all piously assure us that they're telling us the real truth about what really happened, but if you turn any competent historian over and look at his damp underside, you'll find a story-teller, and you can believe me when I tell you that no story-teller's ever going to tell a story without a few embellishments. Add to that the fact that we've all got assorted political and theological preconceptions that are going to color what we write, and you'll begin to realize that no history of any event is entirely reliable - not even this one. What I've just told you about the Battle of Vo Mimbre is more or less true, but I'll leave the business of separating the truth from the fiction up to you. It'll sharpen your mind.

 

When you get right down to the bottom of the matter, the accords we reached at Vo Mimbre were more important than the battle itself. The war with the Angaraks was the climax of a particular set of events, and the word ‘climax' means ‘end.' The Accords of Vo Mimbre set up a new set of events, so in a certain sense they could be called a beginning.

The formalized summary of the accords which the Gorim read to us as our conference came to a close was just that - a summary. The meat of the thing lay in the specific articles, and we didn't let the creative Mimbrate scribes who prepared our summary anywhere near those. Over the years, I've seen too many absurdities enacted into law or appearing in royal proclamations because some half-asleep scribe missed a line - or transposed a couple of words -
for me to take chances. Those accords were
very
important. The articles we'd hammered out covered such things as how the Rivan King would issue his call to arms, how the various kingdoms were supposed to respond, and other logistical details. I'll concede that the presence of Brand, who'd just struck down Kal Torak and shaken the world by that act, made slipping a few things in much easier for me. Those things absolutely
had
to be included, but trying to explain exactly
why
would have taken years, I expect.

It was Polgara who dictated the specifics of the little ceremony that's become a ritual for the past five hundred years, and I use the word ‘dictated' advisedly here, since my imperious daughter refused to hear of any amendments or revisions. Mergon, the Tolnedran ambassador, almost had apoplexy by the time she was finished, and I'm not entirely certain that Ran Borune didn't. ‘This is the way it's going to be from now on,' she declared, and that's not really the best way to introduce a subject at a peace conference. ‘From this day forward, each princess of Imperial Tolnedra shall present herself in her wedding gown in the Hall of the Rivan King on her sixteenth birthday. She'll wait there for three days. If the Rivan King comes to claim her during those three days, they'll be wed. If he doesn't, she'll be free to return to Tolnedra, and her father can choose another husband for her.'

It was at that point that Mergon began to splutter, but Pol overrode his objections, and the Alorn Kings backed her to the hilt, threatening invasions, the burning of cities, the scattering of the Tolnedran population, and other extravagances. I made a point of going to Tol Honeth a year or so later to apologize to Ran Borune for her behavior. The presence of the legions at Vo Mimbre had turned the tide of battle, and Polgara's ultimatum had a faint odor of ingratitude about it. I know that she was following instructions, but her cavalier attitude almost suggested that Tolnedra was a defeated enemy.

When the conference ended, Pol and I rode north, and it
was late summer by the time we reached the border of Ulgoland. We were met there by a fairly large detachment of leather-clad Algars. Cho-Ram had sent an honor-guard to escort us through the Ulgo mountains. I didn't want to insult him by refusing, so we plodded on across those mountains with his Algars rather than doing it the other way - which would have been much faster, of course. There wasn't anything pressing that needed to be done, though, and it was the courteous thing to do.

When we came down out of the mountains of Ulgoland onto the plains of Algaria, Pol and I separated. She went on to the Stronghold with the Algars, and I rode on south to the Vale. I had it in my mind that some fairly serious loafing might be in order. I'd been on the go for a quarter-century, and I felt that I owed myself a vacation.

Beldin had other ideas, though. ‘What are your feelings about a little trip to Mallorea?' he asked me when I got home.

‘Profoundly unenthusiastic, if you want the truth. What's in Mallorea that's so important?'

‘The Ashabine Oracles, I hope. I thought that you and I could go to Ashaba and ransack Torak's house there. He might just have left a copy of the Oracles lying around, and those prophecies could be very useful, don't you think? Zedar, Urvon, and Ctuchik aren't going to let this slide, Belgarath. We bloodied their noses quite thoroughly at Vo Mimbre, and they'll almost certainly try to get back at us. If we can get our hands on a copy of the Oracles, it might give us a few clues about what to expect from them.'

‘You can burglarize a house without any help from me, brother,' I told him. ‘I don't feel any great yearnings to visit a deserted castle in the Karandese Mountains.'

‘You're lazy, Belgarath.'

‘Has it taken you this long to realize that?'

‘Let me put it to you another way,' he said. ‘I need you.'

‘What for?'

‘Because I can't read Old Angarak, you ninny!'

‘How do you know that the Oracles are written in Old Angarak?'

‘I don't, but it's the language that'd come most naturally to Torak, especially since he was probably in a sort of delirium when the voice came to him. If the Oracles
are
written in Old Angarak, I wouldn't be able to recognize them if they were out in plain sight.'

‘I could teach you how to read the language, Beldin.'

‘And by then, Urvon will have gotten to Ashaba first. If we're going, we'd better go now.'

I sighed. It looked as if I was going to have to postpone my vacation.

‘Did I just hear the sound of a change of heart?' he asked.

‘Don't push it, Beldin. I
am
going to sleep for a couple of days first, though.'

‘You old people do that a lot, don't you?'

‘Just go away for a while, brother. You're keeping me up past my bedtime.'

Actually, I only slept for about twelve hours. The possibility that there might be a copy of the Oracles hidden somewhere at Ashaba intrigued me enough so that I got up, fixed myself some breakfast, and then went on over to Beldin's tower. ‘Let's get started,' I told him.

He was wise enough not to make any clever remarks. We went to the window of his tower, pulled on our feathers, and left. We flew in a generally northeasterly direction and soon crossed the Eastern Escarpment to Mishrak ac Thull. Thulldom had been devastated by the war, but that hadn't been our idea. Kal Torak's Malloreans had enlisted the Thulls by the simple expedient of destroying all their towns and villages and burning their crops. This left the Thulls with no alternatives. They had to join the army or starve. The women, children, and aged were left to fend for themselves in a land with no houses and nothing to eat. My opinion of Torak hadn't been very high in the first place, and it went down precipitously when I saw the plight of the Thulls.

When we reached the coast, Beldin veered north. Hawks and falcons have a great deal of stamina, but not so much so that we were willing to try crossing the expanse of the Sea of the East in one jump. Gar og Nadrak wasn't
quite
as devastated as Thulldom, but conditions there were also fairly miserable.

We winged our way north along the coast of Morindland and crossed over to Mallorea, following the string of islands that formed the land-bridge. Then Beldin led the way across the Barrens to the Karandese Mountains and then on south to Ashaba.

Ashaba's not a town in the ordinary sense of the word. It's really nothing more than a very large castle with a number of Karandese villages in the surrounding forest. The villages were there to support the Grolims who'd lived in the palace. Torak himself probably didn't have to eat, but Grolims get hungry once in a while, I guess, and the ground around the castle, like the ground at Cthol Mishrak, was dead and unproductive. Even the soil rejected Torak.

The house at Ashaba was black basalt, naturally. It was Torak's favorite color - or lack of it. It stood on the east side of a sterile plateau that seemed incapable of sustaining any kind of vegetation except for leprous grey lichens and dead white toadstools, and it was backed up against a lowering cliff.

The place was immense, and it was surmounted with ugly, graceless towers and spires that stabbed up toward the scudding clouds roiling overhead. It was walled in, naturally. It was an Angarak building, and Angaraks put walls around everything - even pig-pens. Our simplest course would have been to come to roost inside the wall, but Beldin veered off and settled to earth just outside the main gate. I swooped in and dropped to the ground beside him even as he was shimmering back into his own form.

I also changed back. ‘What's the problem?' I asked him.

‘Let's probe around a bit before we go blundering in. Torak may have left a few surprises behind.'

‘I guess that makes sense.'

Beldin concentrated, his ugly face twisting with the effort. ‘There's nobody home,' he said after a moment.

‘Any sign of Hounds?'

‘Look for yourself. I'm going to poke around and see if there are any traps lurking inside.'

I sensed nothing at all. There weren't even any rats inside. So far as I could tell, there weren't even any bugs.

‘Anything?' Beldin asked.

‘Nothing at all. Did you find anything?'

‘No. The place is safe.' He squinted at the gate, and I felt his Will building. Then he released it, and the huge iron gate burst inward with a thunderous detonation.

‘What did you do that for?' I demanded.

‘Just me quaint way o' leavin' me callin' card, don't y' know,' he replied in that tired old Wacite brogue he was so fond of. ‘Old Burnt-face might come back someday, an' I'd like fer him t' know that we stopped by.'

‘I think you're getting senile.'

‘Well,
you're
the expert on that. Let's go inside.'

We went through the shattered gate, crossed the courtyard, and warily approached a huge, nail-studded black door surmounted by the inevitable polished steel mask. Evidently Torak had felt that any house he lived in was by definition a temple.

‘Be my guest,' Beldin offered, pointing at the door.

‘Don't be ridiculous.' I took hold of the massive iron door-handle, twisted it, and opened the door.

The house of Torak had an entryway that was about the size of a grand ballroom, and there was a majestic staircase just opposite the door.

‘Should we start down here?' Beldin asked me.

‘No, let's go up to the top and work our way down. You
would
recognize Old Angarak script if you saw it, wouldn't you?'

‘I think so. It looks kind of spidery, doesn't it?'

‘More or less. We'll split up. Look into any book you find
in a language you can read, and gather up any in Old Angarak script. I'll sort through them later.'

The place was vast - more for show, I think, than out of any real need for that much room. Many of the chambers on the upper floors didn't even have furniture in them. It still took us weeks to thoroughly investigate the house, though, since it was at least as big as Anheg's palace at Val Alorn.

At first, Beldin grew very excited each time he found a book or scroll written in Old Angarak, but most of them turned out to be nothing more than copies of the
Book of Torak
. Most of the people at Ashaba had been Grolims, and every Grolim in the world owns a copy of the holy book of the Angaraks. After the first few times he came running down a hallway waving one of those books in the air, I sat him down and patiently gave him some instruction in the Old Angarak alphabet. After that he was able to recognize copies of
The Book of Torak
and to discard them.

We finally found Torak's library on the second floor of the castle, and it was there that we spent so much time. There
might
be more books at the University of Tol Honeth or the one in Melcene, but not very many.

A pair of ordinary scholars would have taken decades to examine all those books, but Beldin and I have certain advantages. We can identify the content of a book without too great an exertion.

Finally, after we'd worked our way through the last shelf, way back in one of the corners, Beldin hurled a book across the room and swore for about a quarter of an hour. ‘This is ridiculous!' He roared. ‘There
has
to be a copy here!'

‘There might be,' I agreed, ‘but I don't think we're going to find it. Zedar was the one who ultimately wound up taking down Torak's ravings, and Zedar's a master at hiding things. For all we know, the Oracles are concealed inside some other book - or inside dozens of other books, a page here and a page there. There could be a complete copy someplace, but I don't think it'll be right out in the
open. It might even be hidden under the floor or in the wall of some room we've already searched. I don't think we're going to have any luck, brother. We can check out the ground floor if you want, but I think we're just wasting our time. If there
does
happen to be a copy here and Zedar's the one who hid it, we aren't going to find it. He knows you and me well enough to have thought up a way to counteract anything we might come up with to locate it.'

‘I guess you're right, Belgarath,' he admitted glumly. ‘Let's rip the ground floor apart and then go home. This place stinks, and I need some fresh air.'