Belgarath the Sorcerer (9 page)

The Alorns in that crude encampment in the woods were rowdy, undisciplined, and - by and large - drunk. They joked boisterously with their Master with absolutely no sense of decorum or dignity.

‘Well met, Belgarath,' Belar greeted me, though we'd never met before and I hadn't told any of those belligerent hunters my name. ‘How goes it with my beloved elder brother?'

‘Not well, my Lord,' I replied rather formally. Despite the tankard he held in one hand and the blonde he held in the other, he was still a God, so I thought it best to mind my manners. ‘Thy brother, Torak, came unto my Master and smote him and bore away a particular jewel which he coveted.'

‘
What
?' the young God roared, springing to his feet and spilling both tankard and blonde. ‘Torak hath the Orb?'

‘I greatly fear it is so, my Lord. My Master bids me entreat thee to come to him with all possible speed.'

‘I will, Belgarath,' Belar assured me, retrieving his tankard and the pouty-looking blonde. ‘I will make
preparations at once. Hath Torak used the Orb as yet?'

‘We think not, my Lord,' I replied. ‘My Master says we must make haste, ere thy brother Torak hath learned the full power of the jewel he hath stolen.'

‘Truly,' Belar agreed. He glanced at the young she-wolf sitting at my feet. ‘Greetings, little sister,' he said in flawless wolfish, ‘is it well with thee?' Belar had his faults, certainly, but you could never criticize his manners.

‘Most remarkable,' she said with some amazement. ‘It appears that I have fallen in with creatures of great importance.'

‘Thy companion and I must make haste,' he told her. ‘Otherwise I would make suitable arrangements for thy comfort. May I offer thee to eat?' You see what I mean about Belar's courtesy?

She glanced at the ox turning on a spit over an open fire. ‘That smells interesting,' she said.

‘Of course.' He took up a very long knife and carved off a generous portion for her. He handed it to her, being careful to snatch his fingers back out of the range of those gleaming fangs.

‘My thanks,' she said, tearing off a chunk and downing it in the blink of an eye. ‘This one' - she jerked her head at me - ‘was in so much hurry to reach this place that we scarce had time to catch a rabbit or two along the way.' She daintily gulped the rest of the meat down in two great bites. ‘Quite good,' she noted, ‘though one wonders why it was necessary to burn it.'

‘A custom, little sister,' he explained.

‘Oh, well, if it is a custom -' She carefully licked her whiskers clean.

‘I will return in a moment, Belgarath,' Belar said and moved away to speak with his Alorns.

‘That one is nice,' my companion told me pointedly.

‘He is a God,' I told her.

‘That means nothing to me,' she said indifferently. ‘Gods are the business of men. Wolves have little interest in such
things.' Then she looked at me critically. ‘One would be more content with you if you would keep your eyes where they belong,' she added.

‘One does not understand what you mean.'

‘I think you do. The females belong to the nice one. It is not proper for you to admire them so openly.' Regardless of
my
reservations about the matter, it was fairly obvious that
she
had made some decisions. I thought it might be best to head that off.

‘Perhaps you would wish to return to the place where we first met so that you may rejoin your pack?' I suggested delicately.

‘I will go along with you for a while longer,' she rejected my suggestion. ‘I was ever curious, and I see that you are familiar with things that are most remarkable.' She yawned, stretched, and curled up at my feet - being careful, I noticed, to place herself between me and those Alorn girls.

The return to the Vale where my Master waited took far less time than my journey to the land of the Bear-God had. Although time is normally a matter of indifference to them, when there's need for haste, the Gods can devour distance in ways that hadn't even occurred to me. We set out at what seemed no more than a leisurely stroll with Belar asking me questions about my Master and our lives in the Vale while the young she-wolf padded along sedately between us. After several hours of this, my impatience made me bold enough to get to the point. ‘My Lord,' I said, ‘forgive me, but at this rate, it'll take us almost a year to reach my Master's tower.'

‘Not nearly so long, Belgarath,' he disagreed pleasantly. ‘I believe it lies just beyond that next hilltop.'

I stared at him, not believing that a God could be so simple, but when we crested the hill, there lay the Vale spread before us with my Master's tower in the center.

‘Most remarkable,' the wolf murmured, dropping to her haunches and staring down into the Vale with her bright yellow eyes. I had to agree with her about that.

My brothers had returned by now, and they were waiting at the foot of our Master's tower as we approached. The other Gods were already with my Master, and Belar hastened into the tower to join them.

When my brothers saw my companion, they were startled. ‘Belgarath,' Belzedar objected, ‘is it wise to bring such a one here? Wolves are not the most trustworthy of creatures, you know.'

The she-wolf bared her fangs at him for that. How in the world could she possibly have understood what he'd said?

‘What is her name?' the gentle Beltira asked me.

‘Wolves don't need names, brother,' I replied. ‘They know who they are without such appendages. Names are a human conceit, I think.'

Belzedar shook his head and moved away from the wolf.

‘Is she quite tame?' Belsambar asked me. Taming things was a passion with Belsambar; I think he knew half the rabbits and deer in the Vale by their first names, and the birds used to perch on him the way they would have if he'd been a tree.

‘She isn't tame at all, Belsambar,' I told him. ‘We met by chance while I was going north, and she decided to tag along.'

‘Most remarkable,' the wolf said to me. ‘Are they always so full of questions?'

‘How did you know they were asking questions?'

‘You, too? You are as bad as they are.' That was a maddening habit of hers. If she considered a question unimportant, she simply wouldn't answer it.

‘It's the nature of man to ask questions,' I said a bit defensively.

‘Curious creatures,' she sniffed, shaking her head. She could also be a mistress of ambiguity.

‘What a wonder,' Belkira marveled. ‘You've learned to converse with the beasts. I pray you, dear brother, instruct me in this art.'

‘I wouldn't exactly call it an art, Belkira. I took the form
of a wolf on my journey to the north. The language of wolves came with the form and remained even after I changed back. It's no great thing.'

‘I think you might be wrong there, old chap,' Belmakor said with a thoughtful expression. ‘Learning foreign languages is a very tedious process, you know. I've been meaning to learn Ulgo for several years now, but I haven't gotten around to it. If I were to take the form of an Ulgo for a day or so, it might save me months of study.'

‘You're lazy, Belmakor,' Beldin told him bluntly. ‘Besides, it wouldn't work.'

‘And why not?'

‘Because an Ulgo's still a man. Belgarath's wolf doesn't form words the way we do because she doesn't think the way we do.'

‘I don't think the way an Ulgo does either,' Belmakor objected. ‘I think it
would
work.'

‘You're wrong, it wouldn't.'

That particular argument persisted off and on for about a hundred years. The notion of trying it and finding out one way or the other never occurred to either of them. Now that I think of it, though, it probably did. Neither of them was so stupid that he wouldn't have thought of it. But they both enjoyed arguing so much that they didn't want to spoil the fun by settling the issue once and for all.

The wolf curled up and went to sleep while the rest of us waited for the decision of our Master and his brothers about the wayward Torak. When the other Gods came down from the tower, their faces were somber, and they left without speaking to us.

Then Aldur summoned us, and we went upstairs. ‘There will be war,' our Master told us sadly. ‘Torak must not be permitted to gain full mastery of the Orb. They are of two different purposes and must not be joined, lest the fabric of creation be rent asunder. My brothers have gone to gather their people. Mara and Issa will circle to the east through the lands of the Dals that they might come at Torak
from the south of Korim. Nedra and Chaldan will encircle him from the west, and Belar will come at him from the north. We will lay waste his Angaraks until he returns the Orb. Though it rends my heart, it must be so. I will set tasks for each of ye that ye must accomplish in mine absence.'

‘Absence, Master?' Belzedar asked.

‘I must go even unto Prolgu to consult with UL. The Destinies which drive us all are known, though imperfectly, to him. He will provide guidance for us, that we do not o'erstep certain limits in our war upon our brother.'

The wolf, quite unnoticed, had gone to him and laid her head in his lap. As he spoke to us, he absently - or so I thought at the time - stroked her with an oddly affectionate hand. I knew it was improbable, but I got the strong impression that they somehow already knew each other.

Our Master was a long time at Prolgu, but we had more than enough to keep us occupied, and I'm certain the peoples of the other Gods were just as busy. With the possible exception of the Alorns and the Arends, war was an alien concept to most of the rest of mankind, and even those belligerent people were not very good at the kind of organization necessary to build an army. By and large, the world had been peaceful, and such fights as occasionally broke out tended to involve just a few men pounding on each other with assorted weapons which weren't really very sophisticated. Fatalities occurred, of course, but I like to think they were accidental most of the time.

This time was obviously going to be different. Whole races were going to be thrown at each other, and nothing had prepared us for that. We relied rather heavily on Belsambar's knowledge of the Angaraks in the early stages of our planning. That elevated opinion of themselves which Torak had instilled in his people had made them aloof and secretive, and strangers or members of other races were not welcome in their cities. To emphasize that, Angaraks had traditionally walled in their towns. It was not so much that they anticipated war - although Torak himself probably did - but rather that they seemed to feel the need for some visible sign that they were separate from and superior to the rest of mankind.

Beldin sat scowling at the floor after Belsambar had described the wall surrounding the city where he'd been born over a thousand years before. ‘Maybe they've discontinued the practice,' he growled.

‘They hadn't when I went down to have a look at them
five centuries ago,' Belzedar told him. ‘If anything, the walls around their cities were higher - and thicker.'

Beltira shrugged. ‘What one man can build, another man can tear down.'

‘Not when it's raining spears and boulders and boiling oil, he can't,' Beldin disagreed. ‘I think we can count on the Angaraks to pull back behind those walls when we go after them. They breed like rabbits, but they're still going to be outnumbered, so they won't want to meet us in open country. They'll go into their cities, close the gates, and make us come to them. That's an excellent way for us to get a lot of people killed. We've got to come up with some way to tear those walls down without throwing half of mankind at them.'

‘We could do it ourselves,' Belkira suggested. ‘As I recall,
you
translocated a half-acre or so of rocks when you helped Belgarath build his tower.'

‘Those were
loose
rocks, brother,' Beldin told him sourly, ‘and it was all I could do to walk the next day. Belsambar says that the Angaraks stick their walls together with mortar. We'd have to take them apart stone by stone.'

‘And they'd be rebuilding them as fast we tore them down,' Belmakor added. He looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling of Belsambar's tower where we'd gathered. Then, naturally, considering the fact that it was Belmakor, he reverted to logic. ‘First off, Beldin's right. We can't just swarm their cities under. The casualties would be unacceptable.' He looked around at the rest of us. ‘Do we agree on that?'

We all nodded.

‘Splendid,' he said dryly. ‘Secondly, if we try to take down their walls with the Will and the Word, we'll exhaust ourselves and we won't really accomplish all that much.'

‘What does that leave us?' Belzedar asked him crossly. I'd picked up a few hints from the others that Belzedar and Belmakor had argued extensively when they'd reached the lands of the Tolnedrans. Belzedar, as second disciple, had
assumed that
he
was in charge. Belmakor, borrowing
my
authority, had contested that, and Beldin had backed him. Belzedar was mightily offended, I guess, and he seemed to be looking for some way to get back at Belmakor for what he felt to be his humiliation. ‘We can't strike at Torak directly, you realize,' he went on. ‘The only way we can hurt him enough to force him to give back the Orb is to hurt his people, and we won't be able to hurt them if they're hiding behind those walls.'

‘The situation would seem to call for something mechanical then, wouldn't you say, old chap?' Belmakor responded in his most urbanely off-hand tone.

‘Mechanical?' Belzedar looked baffled.

‘Something that doesn't bleed, old boy. Something that can reach out from beyond the range of the Angarak spears and knock down those walls.'

‘There isn't any such thing,' Belzedar scoffed.

‘Not yet, old chap, not yet, but I rather think Beldin and I can come up with something that'll turn the trick.'

I'd like to set the record straight at this point. All manner of people have tried to take credit for the invention of siege-engines. The Alorns claim it; the Arends claim it; and the Malloreans certainly claim it; but let's give credit where credit is due. It was my brothers, Belmakor and Beldin, who built the first ones.

This is not to say that
all
of their machines worked the way they were supposed to. Their first catapult flew all to pieces the first time they tried to shoot it, and their mobile battering-ram was an absolute disaster, since they couldn't come up with a way to steer it. It tended to wander away from its intended target and mindlessly bang on unoffending trees - but I digress.

It was at that point in the discussion that our mystical brother, Belsambar, suggested something so horrible that we were all taken aback. ‘Belmakor,' he said in that self-effacing tone of his, ‘do you think you can really devise something that would throw things long distances?'

‘Of course, old boy,' Belmakor replied confidently.

‘Why should we throw things at the walls, then? We have no quarrel with the walls. Our quarrel's with Torak. I'm an Angarak, and I know the mind of Torak better than any of the rest of you. He encourages his Grolims to sacrifice people because it's a sign that they love him more than they love their fellow man. The more the victim on the altar suffers, the greater he views it as a demonstration of love for him. It's the specific,
individualized
pain of the sacrificial victim that satisfies him. We can hurt him best if we make the pain general.'

‘Exactly what did you have in mind, brother?' Belmakor asked him with a puzzled look.

‘Fire,' Belsambar told him with dreadful simplicity. ‘Pitch burns, and so does naphtha. Why should we waste our time and the lives of our soldiers attacking walls? Use your excellent engines to loft liquid fire over the walls and into the cities. Trapped by their own walls, the Angaraks will be burned alive, and there won't be any need for us even to enter their cities, will there?'

‘
Belsambar
!' Beltira gasped. ‘That's horrible!'

‘Yes,' Belsambar admitted, ‘but as I said, I know the mind of Torak. He fears fire. The Gods can see the future, and Torak sees fire in his. Nothing we could do would cause him more pain. And isn't that our purpose?'

In the light of what happened later, Belsambar was totally correct, though
how
he knew is beyond explanation. Torak
did
fear fire - and with very good reason.

Although Belsambar's suggestion was eminently practical, we all tried to avoid it. Belmakor and Beldin went into an absolute frenzy of creativity, and the twins no less so.
They
experimented with weather. They spun hurricanes and tornadoes out of clear blue skies, hoping thereby to blow down the Angarak cities and towns. I concentrated my efforts on assorted illusions. I'd fill the streets of the walled cities of Angarak with unimaginable horrors. I'd
drive them out from behind their walls before their mystical kinsman could roast them alive.

Belzedar worked at least as hard as the rest of us. He seemed obsessed with the Orb, and his labor on means to reclaim it was filled with a kind of desperate frenzy. Through it all, Belsambar sat, patiently waiting. He seemed to know that once the fighting started, we'd return to his hideous solution.

In addition to our own labors, we frequently traveled to the lands of our allies to see what progress they were making. Always before, the various cultures had been rather loose-knit, with no single individual ruling any of the five proto-nations. The war with Torak changed all that. Military organization is of necessity pyramidal, and the concept of one leader commanding an entire race carried over into the various societies after the war was over. In a way, I suppose you could give Torak credit - or blame - for the idea of kings.

I suppose that
I'm
the one who was ultimately responsible for the royal house of the Alorns. By general consensus, my brothers and I had continued to serve as liaisons between the various races, and we more or less automatically assumed responsibility for the people of whichever God we had personally invited to that conference in the Vale after Torak stole the Orb. I think that my entire life has been shaped by the fact that I had the misfortune to be saddled with the Alorns.

Our preparations for war took several years. The assorted histories of the period tend to gloss over that fact. There were border clashes with the Angaraks, of course, but no really significant battles. Finally the Gods decided that their people were ready - if anybody in those days could actually be called ready for war. The war against the Angaraks was like no other war in human history in that our deployment involved a general migration of the various races. The Gods were so intimately involved with their people in those days that the notion of leaving the women and children and old
people behind while the men went off to fight simply didn't occur to them.

Mara and Issa took their Marags and Nyissans and started their trek southeasterly into the lands of the Dals, even as the Tolnedrans and Arends began their swing toward the west. The Alorns, however, didn't move. It was perhaps the only time I ever saw my Master truly vexed about anything. He instructed me with uncharacteristic bluntness to go north and find out what was holding them up.

So I went north again, and, as always by now, I didn't go alone. I don't know that we'd ever actually discussed it, but the young she-wolf had sort of expropriated me. Since she was along, I once again chose the shape of a wolf for the journey. She approved of that, I suppose. She was never totally satisfied with my real form, and she seemed much happier with me when I had four feet and a tail.

We found out what was holding up the Alorns almost before we reached the lands of the Bear-God. Would you believe that they were
already
fighting -
with each other?

Alorn society - such as it was in those days - was clannish, and the bickering was over which clan-chief was going to take command of the entire army. The other Gods had encountered similar problems and had simply overruled the urges toward supremacy of the various factions and selected one leader to run things. Belar, however, wouldn't do that. ‘I'm sure you can see my position, Belgarath,' he said to me, when I finally found him. He said it just a little defensively, I thought.

I took a very deep breath, suppressing my urge to scream at him. ‘No, my Lord,' I said in as mild a tone as I could manage. ‘Actually, I don't.'

‘If I select
one
clan-chief over the others, it might be construed as favoritism, don't you see? They're simply going to have to settle it for themselves.'

‘The other races are already on the march, my Lord,' I reminded him as patiently as I could.

‘We'll be along, Belgarath,' he assured me, ‘eventually.'

By then I knew Alorns well enough to realize that Belar's ‘eventually' would quite probably stretch out for several centuries.

The she-wolf at my side dropped to her haunches with her tongue lolling out. Her laughter didn't improve my temper very much, I'll confess.

‘Would you be open to a suggestion, my Lord?' I asked the Bear-God in a civil tone.

‘Why, certainly, Belgarath,' he replied. ‘To be honest with you, I've been racking my brains searching for a solution to this problem. I'd hate to disappoint my brothers, and I really don't want to miss the war entirely.'

‘It wouldn't be the same without you, my Lord,' I assured him. ‘Now, as for your problem. Why don't you just call all your clan-chiefs together and have them draw lots to decide which of them will be the leader of the Alorns?'

‘You mean just leave it all in the hands of pure chance?'

‘It
is
a solution, my Lord, and if you and I both promise not to tamper in any way, your clan-chiefs won't have any cause for complaint, will they? They'll all have an equal chance at the position, and if you order them to abide by the way the lot falls, it should put an end to all this …' I choked back the word ‘foolishness.'

‘My people
do
like to gamble,' he conceded. ‘Did you know that
we
invented dice?'

‘No,' I said blandly. ‘I didn't know that.' To my own certain knowledge, every other race made exactly the same claim. ‘Why don't we summon your clan-chiefs, my Lord? You can explain the contest - and the rules - to them, and we can get on with it. We certainly wouldn't want to keep Torak waiting, would we? He'll miss you terribly if you're not there when the fighting starts.'

He grinned at me. As I've said before, Belar has his faults, but he
was
a likeable young God. ‘Oh, by the way, my Lord,' I added, trying to make it sound like an afterthought,
‘if it's all right with you, I'll march south with your people.'
Somebody
had to keep an eye on the Alorns.

‘Certainly, Belgarath,' he replied. ‘Glad to have you.'

And so the Alorn clan-chiefs drew lots, and regardless of what Polgara may think, I did
not
tamper with the outcome. In my view, one clan-chief was almost the same as any other, and I really didn't
care
who won - just as long as
somebody
did. As luck had it, the clan-chief who won was Chaggat, the ultimate great-grandfather of Cherek Bear-shoulders, the greatest king the Alorns have ever had. Isn't it odd how those things turn out? I've since discovered that while
I
didn't tamper and neither did Belar, something else
did
. The talkative friend Garion carries around in his head took a hand in the game.
He
was the one who selected Cherek's ancestor to be the first King of the Alorns. But I'm getting ahead of myself - or had you noticed that?