"I think I am somewhat beyond three hundred years, Master."
"A suitable age, my son, and thou has persevered in thy studies.
Should I forget myself and call thee "boy" again, pray correct me. It is not seemly that the disciple of a God should be called "boy." " "I shall remember that, Master," I assured him, almost overcome with joy that he had finally called me his disciple.
"I was certain that I could depend on thee," he said with a faint smile.
"And what is the object of thy present study, my son?"
"I would seek to learn why the stars fall, Master."
"A proper study, my son."
"And thou, Master," I said.
"What is thy study--if I be not overbold to ask."
"Even as before, Belgarath," he replied, holding up that fatal round stone.
"It hath been placed in my care by UL himself, and it is therefore upon me to commune with it that I may know it--and its purpose."
"Can a stone have a purpose, Master--other than to be a stone?"
The piece of rock, now worn smooth, even polished, by my Master's patient hand, made me apprehensive for some reason. In one of those rare presentiments that I don't have very often, I sensed that a great deal of mischief would come about as a result of it.
"This particular jewel hath a great purpose, Belgarath, for through it the world and all who dwell herein shall be changed. If I can but perceive that purpose, I might make some preparations. That necessity lie th heavily upon my spirit." And then he lapsed once more into silence, idly turning the stone over and over in his hand as he gazed deep into its polished surface with troubled eyes.
I certainly wasn't going to intrude upon his contemplation of the thing, so I turned back to my study of the inconstant stars.
CHAPTER THREE
In time, others came to us, some accident, as I had come, and some by intent, seeking out my Master that they might learn from him. Such a one was Zedar.
I came upon him near our tower one golden day in autumn after I'd served my Master for five hundred years or so. This stranger had built a rude altar and was burning the carcass of a goat on it. That got us off on the wrong foot right at the outset. Even the wolves knew enough not to kill things in the Vale. The greasy smoke from his offering was fouling the air, and he was prostrated before his altar, chanting some outlandish prayer.
"What are you doing?" I demanded--quite abruptly, I'll admit, since his noise and the stink of his sacrifice distracted my mind from a problem I'd been considering for the past half century.
"Oh, puissant and all-knowing God," he said, groveling in the dirt, "I have come a thousand leagues to behold thy glory and to worship thee."
"Puissant? Quit trying to show off your education, man. Now get up and stop this caterwauling. I'm no more a God than you are."
"Art thou not the great God Aldur?"
"I'm his disciple, Belgarath. What is all this nonsense?" I pointed at his altar and his smoking goat.
"It is to please the God," he replied, rising and dusting off his clothes. I couldn't be sure, but he looked rather like a Tolnedran--or possibly an Arend. In either case, his babble about a thousand leagues was clearly a self-serving exaggeration. He gave me a servile, fawning sort of look.
"Tell me truly," he pleaded.
"Dost thou think he will find this poor offering of mine acceptable?"
I laughed.
"I can't think of a single thing you could have done that would offend him more."
The stranger looked stricken. He turned quickly and reached out as if he were going to grab up the animal with his bare hands to hide it.
"Don't be an idiot!" I snapped.
"You'll burn yourself!"
"It must be hidden," he said desperately.
"I would rather die than offend mighty Aldur."
"Just get out of the way," I told him.
"What?"
"Stand clear," I said, irritably waving him off, "unless you want to take a trip with your goat." Then I looked at his grotesque little altar, willed it to a spot five miles distant, and trans located it with a single word, leaving only a few tatters of confused smoke hanging in the air.
He collapsed on his face again.
"You're going to wear out your clothes if you keep doing that," I told him, "and my Master won't find it very amusing."
"I pray thee, mighty disciple of most high Aldur," he said, rising and dusting himself off again, "instruct me so that I offend not the God." He must have been an Arend. No Tolnedran could possibly mangle the language the way he did.
"Be truthful," I told him, "and don't try to impress him with false show and flowery speech. Believe me, friend, he can see straight into your heart, so there's no way you can deceive him. I'm not sure which God you worshiped before, but Aldur's like no other God in the whole world."
What an asinine thing that was to say. No two Gods are ever the same.
"And how may I become his disciple, as thou art?"
"First you become his pupil," I replied, "and that's not easy."
"What must I do to become his pupil?"
"You must become his servant." I said it a bit smugly, I'll admit. A few years with an axe and a broom would probably do this pompous ass some good.
"And then his pupil?" he pressed.
"In time," I replied, "if he so wills." It wasn't up to me to reveal the secret of the Will and the Word to him. He'd have to find that out for himself--the same as I had.
"And when may I meet the God?"
I was getting tired of him anyway, so I took him to the tower.
"Will the God Aldur wish to know my name?" he asked as we started across the meadow.
I shrugged.
"Not particularly. If you're lucky enough to prove worthy, he'll give you a name of his own choosing." When we reached the tower, I commanded the grey stone in the wall to open, and we went inside and on up the stairs.
My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me.
"Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?" he asked me.
"He besought me, Master," I replied.
"I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay." I could mangle language as well as Zedar could, I guess.
"Thy will must decide such things," I continued.
"If it turns out that he doesn't please thee, I'll take him outside and turn him into a carrot, and that'll be the end of it."
"That was unkindly said, Belgarath," Aldur chided.
"Forgive me, Master," I said humbly.
"Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath. Should it come to pass that he be apt, inform me."
I groaned inwardly, cursing my careless tongue. My casual offer to vegetablize the stranger had saddled me with him. But Aldur was my Lord, so I said,
"I will, Master."
"What is thy current study, my son?"
"I examine the reason for mountains. Master."
"Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that the study shall make thee more kindly disposed toward thy fellow creatures."
I knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn't argue. I sighed.
"As my Master commands," I submitted regretfully. I'd almost found the secret of mountains, and I didn't want it to escape me. But then I remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the Vale, so I swallowed my resentment--at least right there in front of him.
I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though.
I put that poor man through absolute hell, I'm ashamed to admit. I degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he'd run away.
But he didn't. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that sometimes made me want to scream. Didn't the man have any spirit at all? To make matters even worse--to my profoundest mortification--he learned the secret of the Will and the Word wi
thin six months. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.
In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language, he wasn't such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really wasn't.
The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.
And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day --and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had the same thoughts at the same time and even finished each other's sentences.
Despite the fact that they're Alorns, Belkira and Beltira are the gentlest men I've ever known. I'm quite fond of them, actually.
Makor was the next to arrive, and he came to us from so far away that I couldn't understand how he had ever heard of my Master. Unlike the rest of us, who'd been fairly shabby when we'd arrived, Makor came strolling down the Vale dressed in a silk mantle, somewhat like the garb currently in fashion in Tol Honeth. He was a witty, urbane, well-educated man, and I took to him immediately.
Our Master questioned him briefly and decided that he was acceptable--with all the usual provisos.
"But, Master," Belzedar objected vehemently, "he cannot become one of our fellowship. He is a Dal--one of the Godless ones."
"Melcene, actually, old boy," Makor corrected him in that ultra-civilized manner of his that always drove Belzedar absolutely wild. Now do you see why I was so fond of Makor?
"What's the difference?" Belzedar demanded bluntly.
"All the difference in the world, old chap," Makor replied, examining his fingernails.
"We Melcenes separated from the Dals so long ago that we're no more like them than Alorns are like Marags. It's not really up to you, however. I was summoned, the same as the rest of you were, and that's an end on it."
I remembered the odd compulsion that had dragged me out of Gara, and I looked sharply at my Master. Would you believe that he actually managed to look slightly embarrassed?
Belzedar spluttered for a while, but, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he muffled his objections.
The next to join us was Sambar, an Angarak. Sambar--or Belsambar as he later became--was not his real name, of course. Angarak names are so universally ugly that my Master did him a favor when he renamed him.
I felt a great deal of sympathy for the boy--he was only about fifteen when he joined us. I have never seen anyone so abject. He simply came to the tower, seated himself on the earth, and waited for either acceptance or death. Beltira and Belkira fed him, of course. They were shepherds, after all, and shepherds won't let anything go hungry. After a week or so, when it became obvious that he absolutely would not enter the tower, our Master went down to him. Now that was something I had never seen Aldur do before. He spoke with the lad at some length in a hideous language--old Angarak, I've since discovered--and turned him over to Beltira and Belkira for tutelage. If anyone ever needed gentle handling, it was Belsambar.
In time, the twins taught him to speak a normal language that didn't involve so much spitting and snarling, and we learned his history. My distaste for Torak dates from that point in time. It may not have been entirely Torak's fault, however. I've learned over the years that the views of any priesthood are not necessarily the views of the Gods they serve. I'll give Torak the benefit of the doubt in this case--the practice of human sacrifice might have been no more than a perversion of his Grolim priests.
But he did nothing to put a stop to it, and that's unforgivable.
To cut all this windy moralizing short, Belsambar's parents--both of them--had been sacrificed, and Belsambar had been required to watch as a demonstration of his faith. It didn't really work out that way, though.
Grolims can be so stupid sometimes. Anyway, at the tender age of nine, Belsambar became an atheist, rejecting not only Torak and his stinking Grolims, but all Gods.
That was when our Master summoned him. In his particular case, the summoning must have been a bit more spectacular than the vague urge that had turned my face toward the Vale. Belsambar was clearly in a state of religious ecstasy when he reached us. Of course he was an Angarak, and they're always a little strange in matters of religion.
It was Belmakor who first raised the notion of building our own towers.
He was a Melcene, after all, and they're obsessed with building things. I'll admit that our Master's tower was starting to get a bit crowded, though.
The construction of those towers took us several decades, as I recall.
It was actually more in the nature of a hobby than it was a matter of any urgency. We did use what you might call our advantages in the construction, of course, but squaring off rocks is a tedious business, even if you don't have to use a chisel. We did manage to clear away a lot of rock, though, and building material got progressively scarcer as the years rolled by.
I think it was late summer one year when I decided that it was time to finish up my tower so that I wouldn't have it hanging over my head nagging at me. Besides, Belmakor's tower was almost finished, and I was first disciple, after all. I didn't think it would really be proper for me to let him outstrip me. We sometimes do things for the most childish of reasons, don't we?
Since my brothers and I had virtually denuded the Vale of rocks, I went up to the edge of the forest lying to the north in search of building materials. I was poking around among the trees looking for a stream-bed or an outcropping of stone when I suddenly felt a baleful stare boring into the back of my neck. That's an uncomfortable feeling that's always irritated me for some reason.
"You might as well come out," I said.
"I know you're there."
"Don't try anything," an awful voice growled at me from a nearby thicket.
"I'll rip you to pieces if you do."
Now that's what I call an unpromising start.
"Don't be an idiot," I replied.
"I'm not going to hurt you."
That evoked the ugliest laugh I've ever heard.
"You?" the voice said scornfully.
"You? Hurt we?" And then the bushes parted and the most hideous creature I've ever seen emerged. He was grotesquely deformed, with a huge hump on his back; gnarled, dwarfed legs; and long, twisted arms. This combination made it possible--even convenient--for him to go on all fours like a gorilla. His face was monumentally ugly, his hair and beard were matted, he was unbelievably filthy, and he was partially dressed in a ratty-looking fur of some kind.
"Enjoying the view?" he demanded harshly.
"You're not so pretty yourself, you know."
"You startled me, that's all," I replied, trying to be civil.
"Have you seen an old man in a rickety, broken-down cart around here anywhere?" the creature demanded.
"He told me he'd meet me here."
I stared at him in absolute astonishment.
"You'd better close your mouth," he advised me in that raspy growl.
"You'll catch flies if you don't."
All sorts of things clicked into place.
"This old man you're looking for," I said.
"Did he have a humorous way of talking?"
"That's him," the dwarf said.
"Have you seen him?"
"Oh, yes," I replied with a broad grin.
"I've known him for longer than you could possibly imagine. Come along, my ugly little friend. I'll take you to him."
"Don't be too quick to throw the word "friend" around," he growled.
"I don't have any friends, and I like it that way."
"You'll get over that in a few hundred years," I replied, still grinning at the little monster.
"You don't sound quite r
ight in the head to me."
"You'll get used to that, too. Come along. I'll introduce you to your Master."
"I don't have a master."
"I wouldn't make any large wagers on that."
And that was our introduction to Din. My brothers thought at first that I'd come across a tame ape. Din rather quickly disabused them of that notion. He had by far the foulest mouth I've ever come across, even when he wasn't trying to be insulting, and I honestly believe he could swear for a day and a half without once repeating himself. He was even ungracious to our Master. His very first words to him were
"What did you do with that stupid cart of yours? I tried to follow the tracks, but they just disappeared on me."
Aldur, with that inhuman patience of his, simply smiled. Would you believe that he actually liked the foul-mouthed little monster?
"Is that what took thee so long?" he asked mildly.
"Of course that's what took me so long!" Din exploded.
"You didn't leave me a trail to follow! I had to reason out your location!" Din had turned losing his temper into an art form. The slightest thing could set him off.
"Well?" he said then.
"Now what?"
"We must see to thine education."
"What does somebody like me need with an education? I already know what I need to know."
Aldur gave him a long, steady look, and even Din couldn't face that for long. Then our Master looked around at the rest of us. He obviously dismissed Beltira and Belkira out of hand. They hadn't the proper temperament to deal with our newest recruit. Belzedar was in a state verging on inarticulate rage. Belzedar may have had his faults, but he wouldn't tolerate any disrespect for our Master. Belmakor was too fastidious. Din was filthy, and he smelled like an open sewer. Belsambar, for obvious reasons, was totally out of question. Guess who that left.
I wearily raised my hand.
"Don't trouble thyself, Master," I said.
"I'll take care of it."
"Why, Belgarath," he said, "how gracious of thee to volunteer thy service."
I chose not to answer that.
"Ah, Belgarath?" Belmakor said tentatively.
"What?"
"Could you possibly wash him off before you bring him inside again?"
Rivan Codex Series Page 5
