‘I won’t be long,’ he promised.
Aunt Pol was seated in the great hall with Belgarath and King Cho-Hag, while Queen Silar sat nearby, her fingers flickering through warp and woof on a large loom upon which she was weaving. The click of her shuttle was a peculiarly drowsy sort of sound.
‘Travel’s going to be difficult in midwinter,’ King Cho-Hag was saying. ‘It will be savage in the mountains of Ulgo.’
‘I think there’s a way we can avoid all that,’ Belgarath replied lazily. He was lounging deeply in a large chair. ‘We’ll go back to Prolgu the way we came, but I need to talk to Relg. Do you suppose you could send for him?’
Cho-Hag nodded and gestured to a serving man. He spoke briefly to him as Belgarath negligently hung one leg over the arm of his chair and settled in even deeper. The old man was wearing a soft, grey woolen tunic; although it was early, he held a tankard of ale.
‘Don’t you think you’re overdoing that a bit?’ Aunt Pol asked him, looking pointedly at the tankard.
‘I have to regain my strength, Pol,’ he explained innocently, ‘and strong ale restores the blood. You seem to forget that I’m still practically an invalid.’
‘I wonder how much of your invalidism’s coming out of Cho-Hag’s ale-barrel,’ she commented. ‘You looked terrible when you came down this morning.’
‘I’m feeling much better now, though.’ He smiled, taking another drink.
‘I’m sure you are. Yes, Garion?’
‘Adara wants me to go riding with her,’ Garion said. ‘I – that is, she – thought I should tell you where I was going.’
Queen Silar smiled gently at him. ‘You’ve stolen away my favorite lady in waiting, Garion,’ she told him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Garion quickly replied. ‘If you need her, we won’t go.’
‘I was only teasing you.’ The queen laughed. ‘Go ahead and enjoy your ride.’
Relg came into the hall just then, and not far behind him, Taiba. The Marag woman, once she had bathed and been given decent clothes to wear, had surprised them all. She was no longer the hopeless, dirty slave woman they had found in the caves beneath Rak Cthol. Her figure was full and her skin very pale. She moved with a kind of unconscious grace, and King Cho-Hag’s clansmen looked after her as she passed, their lips pursed speculatively. She seemed to know she was being watched, and, far from being offended by the fact, it seemed rather to please her and to increase her self-confidence. Her violet eyes glowed, and she smiled often now. She was, however, never very far from Relg. At first Garion had believed that she was deliberately placing herself where the Ulgo would have to look at her out of a perverse enjoyment of the discomfort it caused him, but now he was not so sure. She no longer even seemed to think about it, but followed Relg wherever he went, seldom speaking, but always there.
‘You sent for me, Belgarath?’ Relg asked. Some of the harshness had gone out of his voice, but his eyes still looked peculiarly haunted.
‘Ah, Relg,’ Belgarath said expansively. ‘There’s a good fellow. Come, sit down. Take a cup of ale.’
‘Water, thank you,’ Relg replied firmly.
‘As you wish.’ Belgarath shrugged. ‘I was wondering, do you by any chance know a route through the caves of Ulgo that reaches from Prolgu to the southern edge of the land of the Sendars?’
‘That’s a very long way,’ Relg told him.
‘Not nearly as long as it would be if we rode over the mountains,’ Belgarath pointed out. ‘There’s no snow in the caves, and no monsters. Is there such a way?’
‘There is,’ Relg admitted.
‘And would you be willing to guide us?’ the old man pressed.
‘If I must,’ Relg agreed with some reluctance.
‘I think you must, Relg,’ Belgarath told him.
Relg sighed. ‘I’d hoped that I could return home now that our journey’s almost over,’ he said regretfully.
Belgarath laughed. ‘Actually, our journey’s only just started, Relg. We have a long way to go yet.’
Taiba smiled a slow, pleased little smile at that.
Garion felt a small hand slip into his, and he smiled down at Errand, who had just come into the hall. ‘Is it all right, Aunt Pol?’ he asked. ‘If I go riding, I mean?’
‘Of course, dear,’ she replied. ‘Just be careful. Don’t try to show off for Adara. I don’t want you falling off a horse and breaking anything.’
Errand let go of Garion’s hand and walked over to where Relg stood. The knots on the pouch that Durnik had so carefully sealed with lead were undone again, and the little boy took the Orb out and offered it to Relg. ‘Errand?’ he said.
‘Why don’t you take it, Relg?’ Taiba asked the startled man. ‘No one in the world questions your purity.’
Relg stepped back and shook his head. ‘The Orb is the holy object of another religion,’ he declared. ‘It is from Aldur, not UL, so it wouldn’t be proper for me to touch it.’
Taiba smiled knowingly, her violet eyes intent on the zealot’s face.
‘Errand,’ Aunt Pol said, ‘come here.’
Obediently he went to her. She took hold of the pouch at his belt and held it open. ‘Put it away,’ she told him.
Errand sighed and deposited the Orb in the pouch.
‘How does he manage to keep getting this open?’ she said half to herself as she examined the strings of the pouch.
Garion and Adara rode out from the Stronghold into the rolling hills to the west. The sky was a deep blue, and the sunlight was very bright. Although the morning was crisp, it was not nearly as cold as it had been for the past week or so. The grass beneath their horses’ hooves was brown and lifeless, lying dormant under the winter sky. They rode together without speaking for an hour or so, and finally they stopped and dismounted on the sunny south side of a hill where there was shelter from the stiff breeze. They sat together looking out at the featureless miles of the Algarian plain.
‘How much can actually be done with sorcery, Garion?’ she asked after a long silence.
He shrugged. ‘It depends on who’s doing it. Some people are very powerful; others can hardly do anything at all.’
‘Could you—’ She hesitated. ‘Could you make this bush bloom?’ She went on quickly, and he knew that was not the question she had originally intended to ask. ‘Right now, I mean, in the middle of wintertime,’ she added.
Garion looked at the dry, scrubby bit of gorse, putting the sequence of what he’d have to do together. ‘I suppose I could,’ he replied, ‘but if I did that in the wrong season, the bush wouldn’t have any defense against the cold, and it would die.’
‘It’s only a bush, Garion.’
‘Why kill it?’
She avoided his eyes. ‘Could you make something happen for me, Garion?’ she asked. ‘Some small thing. I need something to believe in very much just now.’
‘I can try, I guess.’ He did not understand her suddenly somber mood. ‘How about something like this?’ He picked up a twig and turned it over in his hands, looking carefully at it. Then he wrapped several strands of dry grass around it and studied it again until he had what he wanted to do firmly in his mind. When he released his will on it, he did not do it all at once, so the change was gradual. Adara’s eyes widened as the sorry-looking clump of twig and dry grass was transmuted before her.
It really wasn’t much of a flower. It was a kind of pale lavender color, and it was distinctly lopsided. It was quite small, and its petals were not very firmly attached. Its fragrance, however, was sweet with all the promise of summer. Garion felt very strange as he wordlessly handed the flower to his cousin. The sound of it had not been that rushing noise he’d always associated with sorcery, but rather was very much like the bell-tone he’d heard in the glowing cave when he’d given life to the colt. And when he had begun to focus his will, he had not drawn anything from his surroundings. It had all come from within him, and there had been a deep and peculiar joy in it.
‘It’s lovely,’
Adara said, holding the little flower gently in her cupped hands and inhaling its fragrance. Her dark hair fell across her cheek, hiding her face from him. Then she lifted her chin, and Garion saw that her eyes were filled with tears. ‘It seems to help,’ she said, ‘for a little while, anyway.’
‘What’s wrong, Adara?’
She did not answer, but looked out across the dun-brown plain. ‘Who’s Ce’Nedra?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I’ve heard the others mention her.’
‘Ce’Nedra? She’s an Imperial Princess – the daughter of Ran Borune of Tolnedra.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Very small – she’s part Dryad – and she has red hair and green eyes and a bad temper. She’s a spoiled little brat, and she doesn’t like me very much.’
‘But you could change that, couldn’t you?’ Adara laughed and wiped at the tears.
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘All you’d have to do is—’ She made a vague kind of gesture.
‘Oh.’ He caught her meaning. ‘No, we can’t do very much with other people’s thoughts and feelings. What I mean is – well, there’s nothing to get hold of. I wouldn’t even know where to start.’
Adara looked at him for a moment, then she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, alarmed.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s not important.’
‘It is important. Why are you crying?’
‘I’d hoped – when I first heard that you were a sorcerer – and then when you made this flower, I thought you could do anything. I thought that maybe you might be able to do something for me.’
‘I’ll do anything you ask, Adara. You know that.’
‘But you can’t, Garion. You just said so yourself.’
‘What was it that you wanted me to do?’
‘I thought that perhaps you might be able to make somebody fall in love with me. Isn’t that a foolish idea?’
‘Who?’
She looked at him with a quiet dignity, her eyes still full of tears. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it? You can’t do anything about it, and neither can I. It was just a foolish notion, and I know better now. Why don’t we just forget that I ever said anything?’ She rose to her feet. ‘Let’s go back now. It’s not nearly as nice a day as I’d thought, and I’m starting to get cold.’
They remounted and rode in silence back toward the looming walls of the Stronghold. They did not speak any more. Adara did not wish to talk, and Garion did not know what to say.
Behind them, forgotten, lay the flower he had created. Protected by the slope and faintly warmed by the winter sun, the flower that had never existed before swelled with silent, vegetative ecstasy and bore its fruit. A tiny seed pod at its heart opened, scattering infinitesimal seeds that sifted down to the frozen earth through the stalks of winter grass, and there they lay, awaiting spring.
Chapter Eight
The Ulgo girls had pale skin, white-blond hair and huge, dark eyes. Princess Ce’Nedra sat in the midst of them like a single red rose in a garden of lilies. They watched her every move with a sort of gentle astonishment as if overwhelmed by this vibrant little stranger who had quite suddenly become the center of their lives. It was not merely her coloring, though that was astonishing enough. Ulgos by nature were a serious, reserved people, seldom given to laughter or outward displays of emotion. Ce’Nedra, however, lived as always on the extreme outside of her skin. They watched, enthralled, the flicker and play of mood and emotion across her exquisite little face. They blushed and giggled nervously at her outrageous and often wicked little jokes. She drew them into confidences, and each of the dozen or so who had become her constant companions had at one time or another opened her heart to the little princess.
There were bad days, of course, days when Ce’Nedra was out of sorts, impatient, willful, and when she drove the gentle-eyed Ulgo girls from her with savage vituperation, sending them fleeing in tears from her unexplained tantrums. Later, though they all resolved after such stormy outbursts never to go near her again, they would hesitantly return to find her smiling and laughing as if nothing at all had happened.
It was a difficult time for the princess. She had not fully realized the implications of her unhesitating acquiescence to the command of UL when he had told her to remain behind in the caves while the others journeyed to Rak Cthol. For her entire life, Ce’Nedra had been at the center of events, but here she was, shunted into the background, forced to endure the tedious passage of hours spent doing nothing but waiting. She was not emotionally constructed for waiting, and the outbursts that scattered her companions like startled doves were at least in part generated by her enforced inactivity.
The wild swings of her moods were particularly trying for the Gorim. The frail, ancient holy man had lived for centuries a life of quiet contemplation, and Ce’Nedra had exploded into the middle of that quiet like a comet. Though sometimes tried to the very limits of his patience, he endured the fits of bad temper, the storms of weeping, the unexplained outbursts – and just as patiently her sudden exuberant displays of affection when she would throw her arms about his neck and cover his startled face with kisses.
On those days when Ce’Nedra’s mood was congenial, she gathered her companions among the columns on the shore of the Gorim’s island to talk, laugh, and play the little games she had invented, and the dim silent cavern was filled with the babble and laughter of adolescent girls. When her mood was pensive, she and the Gorim sometimes took short walks to view the strange splendors of this subterranean world of cave and gallery and cavern beneath the abandoned city of Prolgu. To the unpracticed eye, it might have appeared that the princess was so involved in her own emotional pyrotechnics that she was oblivious to anything around her, but such was not the case. Her complex little mind was quite capable of observing, analyzing, and questioning, even in the very midst of an outburst. To the Gorim’s surprise, he found her mind quick and retentive. When he told her the stories of his people, she questioned him closely, moving always to the meaning that lay behind the stories.
The princess made many discoveries during those talks. She discovered that the core of Ulgo life was religion, and that the moral and theme of all their stories was the duty of absolute submission to the will of UL. A Tolnedran might quibble or even try to strike bargains with his God. Nedra expected it, and seemed to enjoy the play of offer and counteroffer as much as did his people. The Ulgo mind, however, was incapable of such casual familiarity. ‘We were nothing,’ the Gorim explained. ‘Less than nothing. We had no place and no God, but wandered outcast in the world until UL consented to become our God. Some of the zealots have even gone so far as to suggest that if one single Ulgo displeases our God, he will withdraw himself from us. I don’t pretend to know the mind of UL entirely, but I don’t think he’s quite that unreasonable. Still, he didn’t really want to be our God in the first place, so it’s best probably not to offend him.’
‘He loves you,’ Ce’Nedra pointed out quickly. ‘Anyone could see that in his face when he came to us that time.’
The Gorim looked doubtful. ‘I hope I haven’t disappointed him too much.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ the princess said airily. ‘Of course he loves you. Everyone in the whole world loves you.’ Impulsively, as if to prove her point, she kissed his pale cheek fondly.
The Gorim smiled at her. ‘Dear child,’ he observed, ‘your own heart is so open that you automatically assume that everyone loves those whom you love. It’s not always that way, I’m afraid. There are a good number of people in our caves who aren’t all that fond of me.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Just because you argue with someone doesn’t mean that you don’t love him. I love my father very much, but we fight all the time. We enjoy fighting with each other.’ Ce’Nedra knew that she was safe using such terms as ‘silly’ and ‘nonsense’ with the Gorim. She had by now so utterly charmed him that she was quite sure she could ge
t away with almost anything.
Although it might have been difficult to persuade anyone around her that such was the case, there had been a few distinct but subtle changes in Ce’Nedra’s behavior. Impulsive though she might seem to these serious, reserved people, she now gave at least a moment’s thought – however brief – before acting or speaking. She had on occasion embarrassed herself here in the caves, and embarrassment was the one thing Ce’Nedra absolutely could not bear. Gradually, imperceptibly, she learned the value of marginal self-control, and sometimes she almost appeared ladylike.
She had also had time to consider the problem of Garion. His absence during the long weeks had been particularly and inexplicably painful for her. It was as if she had misplaced something – something very valuable – and its loss left an aching kind of vacancy. Her emotions had always been such a jumble that she had never fully come to grips with them. Usually they changed so rapidly that she never had time to examine one before another took its place. This yearning sense of something missing, however, had persisted for so long that she finally had to face it.
It could not be love. That was impossible. Love for a peasant scullion – no matter how nice he was – was quite out of the question! She was, after all, an Imperial Princess, and her duty was crystal clear. If there had been even the faintest suspicion in her mind that her feelings had moved beyond casual friendship, she would have an absolute obligation to break off any further contact. Ce’Nedra did not want to send Garion away and never see him again. The very thought of doing so made her lip tremble. So, quite obviously, what she felt was not – could not – be love. She felt much better once she had worked that out. The possibility had been worrying her, but now that logic had proved beyond all doubt that she was safe, she was able to relax. It was a great comfort to have logic on her side.
That left only the waiting, the seemingly endless, unendurable waiting for her friends. Where were they? When were they coming back? What were they doing out there that could take so long? The longer she waited, the more frequently her newfound self-control deserted her, and her pale-skinned companions learned to watch apprehensively for those minute danger signs that announced imminent eruption.
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