"One wonders if you would care to wash before you eat," she suggested with a certain delicacy.
To be honest, I hadn't even thought about that.
She seemed to take my hesitation for agreement. She fetched me a pail of water, warm from the hearth, a cloth, a towel of sorts, and a cake of brown country soap.
"Out there," she told me, pointing at the door.
I went back outside, set the pail on a stand beside the door, and washed my hands and face. Almost as an afterthought, I pulled off my tunic and soaped down my upper torso, as well. I dried off with the towel, pulled my tunic back on, and went inside again.
She sniffed.
"Much better," she said approvingly. Then she pointed at the table.
"Sit," she told me.
"I will bring you food." She fetched an earthenware plate from a cupboard, padding silently barefooted over her well-scrubbed floor. Then she knelt on her hearth, ladled the plate full, and brought me a meal such as I had not seen in years.
Her easy familiarity seemed just a bit odd, but it somehow stepped over that awkwardness that I think we all feel when we first meet strangers.
After I'd eaten--more than I should have, probably--we talked, and I found this strange, tawny-haired woman to have the most uncommon good sense. This is to say that she agreed with most of my opinions.
Have you ever noticed that? We base our assessment of the intelligence of others almost entirely on how closely their thinking matches our own. I'm sure that there are people out there who violently disagree with me on most things, and I'm broad-minded enough to concede that they might possibly not be complete idiots, but I much prefer the company of people who agree with me.
You might want to think about that.
I enjoyed her company, and I found myself thinking up excuses not to leave. She was a remarkably handsome woman, and there was a fragrance about her that made my senses reel. She told me that her name was Poledra, and I liked the sound of it. I found that I liked almost everything about her.
"One wonders by what name you are called," she said after she had introduced herself.
"I'm Belgarath," I replied, "and I'm first disciple of the God Aldur."
"How remarkable," she noted, and then she laughed, touching my arm familiarly as if we'd known each other for years.
I lingered in her cottage for a few days, and then I regretfully told her that I had to go back to the Vale to report what I'd found out in the north to my Master.
"I will go along with you," she told me.
"From what you say, there are remarkable things to be seen in your Vale, and I was ever curious." Then she closed the door of her house and returned with me to the Vale.
Strangely, my Master was waiting for us, and he greeted Poledra courteously. I can never really be sure, but it seemed to me that some mysterious glance passed between them as if they knew each other and shared some secret that I was not aware of.
All right. I'm not stupid. Naturally I had some suspicions, but as time went by, they became less and less important, and I quite firmly put them out of my mind.
Poledra simply moved into my tower with me. We never actually discussed it; she just took up residence. That raised a few eyebrows among my brothers, to be sure, but I'll fight anyone who has the bad manners to suggest that there was anything improper about our living arrangements.
It put my willpower to the test, I'll admit, but I behaved myself. That always seemed to amuse Poledra for some reason.
I thought my way through our situation extensively that winter, and I finally came to a decision--a decision Poledra had obviously made a long time ago. She and I were married the following spring. My Master himself, burdened though he was, blessed our union.
There was joy in our marriage, and a kind of homey, familiar comfort.
I never once thought about those things that I had prudently decided not to think about, so they in no way clouded the horizon. But that, of course, is another story.
Don't rush me. We'll get to it--all in good time.
CHAPTER TEN
I'm sure you can understand that I -wanted peace in the world at that particular time. A newly married man has better things to do than to dash off to curb the belligerence of others. Unfortunately, it was no more than a couple of years after Poledra and I were married when the Alorn clan wars broke out. Aldur summoned the twins and me to his tower as soon as word of that particular idiocy reached us.
"Ye must go there," he told us in a tone that didn't encourage disagreement. Our Master seldom commanded us, so we paid rather close attention to him when he did.
"It is essential that the current royal house of Aloria remain in power. One will descend from that line who will be vital to our interests."
I wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of leaving Poledra behind, but I certainly wasn't going to take her into the middle of a war.
"Wilt thou look after my wife, Master?" I asked him. It was a foolish question, of course. Naturally he'd look after her, but I wanted him to understand my reluctance to go to Aloria and my reasons for it.
"She will be safe with me," he assured me.
Safe, perhaps, but not happy about being left behind. She argued with me about it at first, but I led her to believe that it was Aldur's command--which wasn't exactly a lie, was it?
"I won't be all that long," I promised her.
"Don't be," she replied.
"One would have you understand that one is discontented about this."
Anyway, the twins and I left the Vale and started north the first thing the next morning. When we reached the cottage where I'd met Poledra, the she-wolf was waiting for us. The twins were somewhat surprised, but I don't think I really was.
"Another of those errands?" she asked me.
"Yes," I replied flatly, "and one does not require company."
"Your requirements are none of my concern," she told me, her tone just as flat as mine.
"I will go along with you whether you like it or not."
"As you wish." I surrendered. I'd learned a long time ago just how useless it was to give her orders.
And so we were four when we reached the southern border of Aloria and began looking for Belar. I think he was avoiding us, though, because we weren't able to find him. He could have stopped the clan wars at any time, of course, but Belar had a stubborn streak in him that was at least a mile wide. He absolutely would not take sides when his Alorns started bickering with each other. Even-handedness is probably a good trait in a God, but this was ridiculous. We finally gave up our search for him and went on to the mouth of the river that bears our Master's name and looked out across what has come to be known as the Gulf of Cherek. We saw ships out there, but they didn't look all that seaworthy to me. A flat-bottomed scow with a squared-off front end isn't my idea of a corsair that skims the waves. The twins and I talked it over and decided to change form and fly across rather than hail one of those leaky tubs.
"One notes that you still have not learned to fly well," the snowy owl ghosting along at my side observed.
"I get by," I told her, clawing at the air with my wings.
"But not well." She always had to get in the last word, so I didn't bother trying to answer, but concentrated instead on keeping my tail feathers out of the water.
After what seemed an interminable flight, we reached the crude seaport that stood on the site of what's now Val Alorn and went looking for King Chaggat's direct descendant. King Uvar Bent-beak. We found him splitting wood in the stump-dotted clearing outside his log house. Ran Vordue IV, the then-current Emperor of Tolnedra, lived in a palace. Uvar Bent-beak ruled an empire at least a dozen times the size of Tolnedra, but he lived in a log shack with a leaky roof, and I don't think it ever occurred to him to order one of his thralls to chop his firewood for him. Thralldom never really worked in Aloria, since Alorns don't make good slaves. The institution was never actually abolished. It just fell into disuse. Anyway, Uvar was stripped to the waist, sweating l
ike a pig, and chopping for all he was worth.
"Hail, Belgarath," he greeted me, sinking his axe into his chopping block and mopping the sweat off his bearded face. I always kept in touch with the Alorn kings, so he knew me on sight.
"Hail, Bent-beak," I replied.
"What's going on up here?"
"I'm cutting wood," he told me, his face very serious.
"Yes," I said,
"I noticed that almost immediately, but that wasn't what I was talking about. We heard that you've got a war on your hands."
Uvar had little pig-like eyes, and he squinted at me around that huge broken nose of his.
"Oh," he said, "that. It's not much of a war really. I can deal with it."
"Uvar," I told him as patiently as I could, "if you plan to deal with it, don't you think it's time you got started? It's been going on for a year and a half now."
"I've been sort of busy, Belgarath," he said defensively.
"I had to patch my roof, and winter's coming on, so I have to lay in a store of firewood."
Can you believe that this man was a direct ancestor of King Anheg?
To hide my exasperation with him, I introduced the twins.
"Why don't we all go inside?" Uvar suggested.
"I've got a barrel of fairly good ale, and I'm a little tired of splitting wood anyway."
The twins, with an identical gesture, concealed the grins that came to their faces, and we went into Uvar's "palace," a cluttered shack with a dirt floor and the crudest furniture you can imagine.
"What started this war, Uvar?" I asked the King of Aloria after we had all pulled chairs up to his wobbly table and sampled his ale.
"Religion, Belgarath," he replied.
"Isn't that what starts every war?"
"Not always, but we can talk about that some other time. How could religion start a war in Aloria? You people are all fully committed to Belar."
"Some are a little more committed than others," he said, making a sour face.
"Belar's idea of going after the Angaraks is all very well, I suppose, but we can't get at them because there's an ocean in the way.
There's a priest in a place off to the east somewhere who's just a little thick-witted." This? Coming from Uvar? I shudder to think of how stupid that priest must have been for Uvar to notice!
"Anyway," the king went on, "this priest has gathered up an army of sorts, and he wants to invade the kingdoms of the South."
"Why?"
Uvar shrugged.
"Because they're there, I suppose. If they weren't there, he wouldn't want to invade them, would he?"
I suppressed an urge to grab him and shake him.
"Have they done anything to offend him?" I asked.
"Not that I know of. You see, Belar's been away for a while. He gets homesick for the old days sometimes, so he takes some girls, a group of warriors, several barrels of beer, and goes off to set up a camp in the woods. He's been gone for a couple of years now. Anyway, this priest has decided that the southern kingdoms ought to join us when we go to make war on the Angaraks and that it'd probably be more convenient if we all worshiped the same God. He came to me with his crazy idea, and I ordered him to forget about it. He didn't, though, and he's been out preaching to the other clans. He's managed to persuade about half of them to join him, but the other half is still loyal to me. They're fighting each other off there a ways." He made a vague gesture toward the east.
"I
don't think the clans that went over to him are so interested in religion as they are in the chance to loot the southern kingdoms. The really religious ones have formed what they call the Bear-cult. I think it's got something to do with Belar--except that Belar doesn't know anything about it." He drained off his tankard and went into the pantry for more ale.
"He's not going to move until he finishes cutting firewood," Belkira said quietly.
I nodded glumly.
"Why don't you two see what you can do to speed that up?" I suggested.
"Isn't that cheating?" Beltira asked me.
"Maybe, but we've got to get him moving before winter settles in."
They nodded and went back outside again.
Uvar was a little startled by how much his woodpile had grown when he and I went back outside again.
"Well," he said, "now that that's been taken care of, I guess maybe I'd better go do something about that war."
The twins and I cheated outrageously in the next several months, and we soon had the breakaway clans on the run. There was a fairly large battle on the eastern plains of what is now Gar og Nadrak. Uvar might have been a little slow of thought, but he was tactician enough to know the advantage of taking and holding the high ground and concealing the full extent of his forces from his enemies. We quietly occupied a hill during the middle of the night. Uvar's troops littered the hillside with sharpened stakes until the hillside looked like a hedgehog, and his reserves hunkered down on the back side of the hill.
The breakaway clans and Bear-cultists who had camped on the plain woke up the next morning to find Uvar staring down their throats. Since they were Alorns, they attacked.
Most people fail to understand the purpose of sharpened stakes.
They aren't there to skewer your opponent. They're there to slow him down enough to give you a clean shot at him. Uvar's bowmen got lots of practice that morning. Then, when the rebels were about halfway up the hill, Uvar blew a cow's-horn trumpet, and his reserves swept out in two great wings from behind the hill to savage the enemy's rear.
It worked out fairly well. The clansmen and the cultists didn't really have any options, so they kept charging up the hill, slashing at the stakes with their swords and axes. The founder of the Bear-cult, a big fellow with bad eyesight, came hacking his way up toward us. I think the poor devil had gone berserk, actually. He was frothing at the mouth by the time he got through all the stakes, anyway.
Uvar was waiting for him. As it turned out, the months the King of Aloria had spent splitting wood paid off. Without so much as changing expression, Bent-beak lifted his axe and split the rebellious priest of Belar from the top of his head to his navel with one huge blow. Resistance more or less collapsed at that point, and the Bear-cult went into hiding, while the rebellious clans suddenly became very fond of their king and renewed their vows of fealty.
Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people.
The she-wolfs observations were chilling.
"One wonders what they plan to do with the meat," she said. That raised the hackles on the back of my neck, but I rather dimly perceived a way to end wars forever. If the victorious army had to eat the fallen, war would become much less attractive. I'd gone wolf enough to know that meat is flavored by the diet of the eatee, and stale beer isn't the best condiment in the world.
Uvar was clearly in control now, so the twins, the wolf, and I went back to the Vale. The wolf, of course, left us when we reached Poledra's cottage, and my wife was in my tower when I got there, looking for all the world as if she'd been there all along.
Belmakor had returned during our absence, but he'd locked himself in his tower, refusing to respond when we urged him to come out. The Master told us that our Melcene brother had gone into a deep depression for some reason, and we knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't appreciate any attempts to cheer him up. I've always been somewhat suspicious about Belmakor's depression. If I could ever confirm those suspicions, I'd go back to where Belzedar is right now and put him someplace a lot more uncomfortable.
This was a painful episode, so I'm going to cut it short. After several years of melancholy brooding about the seeming hopelessness of our endless tasks, Belmakor gave up and decided to follow Belsambar into obliteration.
I think it was only the presence of Poledra that kept me from going mad. My brothers were drop
ping around me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Aldur summoned Belzedar and Beldin back to the Vale, of course.
Beldin had been down in Nyissa keeping an eye on the Serpent People, and we all assumed that Belzedar had still been in Mallorea, although it didn't take him long to arrive. He seemed peculiarly reluctant to join us in our sorrow, and I've always thought less of him because of his attitude.
Belzedar had changed over the years. He still refused to give us any details about his scheme to retrieve the Orb--not that we really had much opportunity to talk with him, because he was quite obviously avoiding us. He had a strangely haunted look on his face that I didn't think had anything to do with our common grief. It seemed too personal somehow.
After about a week, he asked Aldur for permission to leave, and then he went back to Mallorea.
"One notes that your brother is troubled," Poledra said to me after he'd gone.
"It seems that he's trying to follow two paths at once. His mind is divided, and he doesn't know which of the paths is the true one."
"Belzedar's always been a little strange," I agreed.
"One would suggest that you shouldn't trust him too much. He's not telling you everything."
"He's not telling me anything," I retorted.
"He hasn't been completely open with us since Torak stole the Master's Orb. To be honest with you, love, I've never been so fond of him that I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that he wants to avoid us."
"Say that again," she told me with a warm smile.
"Say what again?"
"Love. It's a nice word, and you don't say it very often."
"You know how I feel about you, dear."
"One likes to be told."
"Anything that makes you happy, love." I will never understand women.
Beldin and I spoke together at some length about Belzedar's growing aloofness, but we ultimately concluded that there wasn't very much we could do about it.
Then Beldin raised another issue that was of more immediate concern.
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