Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection. David Eddings
I am going back to Mallorea,’ Beldin said. ‘I still want to find out who Torak’s third disciple is, and I’d like to keep an eye on Belzedar – if I can keep up with him. Every time I turn around, he’s given me the slip.’ He looked at me. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Right now I’m going home – before my friend here sinks her fangs into my leg and drags me there.’
‘I meant it more generally, Belgarath.’
‘I’m not entirely sure. I think I’ll stay around here for a while – until the Master thinks of something else for me to do.’
‘Well,’ the wolf said to me, ‘are you coming home or not?’
‘Yes, dear,’ I sighed, rolling my eyes upward.
It was lonely in the Vale after Belsambar left us. Beldin and Belzedar were off in Mallorea, and Belmakor was down in Maragor, entertaining Marag women, I’m sure. That left only the twins and me to stay with our Master. There was a sort of unspoken agreement among us that the twins would always stay close to Aldur. That particular custom had started right after Torak stole our Master’s Orb. I moved around quite a bit during the next several centuries, however. There were still marriages to arrange – and an occasional murder.
Does that shock you? It shouldn’t. I’ve never made any pretense at being a saint, and there were people out there in the world who were inconvenient. I didn’t tell the Master what I was doing – but he didn’t ask, either. I’m not going to waste my time – or yours – coming up with lame excuses. I was driven by Necessity, so I did what was necessary.
The years rolled on. I would have passed my three thousandth birthday without even noticing it if my companion hadn’t brought it to my attention. For some reason she always remembered my birthday, and that was very odd. Wolves watch the seasons, not the years, but she never once forgot that day that no longer had any real meaning for me.
I stumbled rather bleary-eyed from my bed that morning. The twins and I had been celebrating something or other the night before. She sat watching me with that silly tongue of hers lolling out. Being laughed at is not a good way to start out the day. ‘You smell bad,’ she noted.
‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘I’m not feeling well this morning.’
‘Remarkable. You felt very well last night.’
‘That was then. This is now.’
‘One is curious to know why you do this to yourself. You know that you will be unwell in the morning.’
‘It is a custom.’ I’d found over the years that shrugging things off as ‘a custom’ was the best approach with her.
‘Oh. I see. Well, if it is a custom, I suppose it is all right. You are older today, you know.’
‘I feel much, much older today.’
‘You were whelped on this day a long time ago.’
‘Is it my birthday again? Already? Where does the time go?’
‘Behind us – or in front. It depends on which way you are looking,’ Can you believe the complexity of that thought coming from a wolf?
‘You have been with me for quite some time now,’ ‘What is time to a wolf? One day is much like another, is it not?’
‘As I recall it, we first met on the grasslands to the north before the world was broken.’
‘It was about then, yes.’
I made a few quick mental calculations. ‘A thousand or so of my birthdays have passed since then.’
‘So?’
‘Do wolves normally live so long?’
‘You are a wolf – sometimes – and you have lived this long.’
‘That is different. You are a very unusual wolf.’
‘Thank you. One had thought that you might not have noticed that.’
This is really amazing. I cannot believe that a wolf could live so long.’
‘Wolves live as long as they choose to live,’ she sniffed. ‘One would be more content with you if you would do something about your smell,’ she added.
You see, Polgara, you weren’t the first to make that observation.
It was several years later when I had occasion to change my form for some reason which I’ve long since forgotten. I can’t even remember what form I took, but I do remember that it was early summer, and the sun was streaming golden through the open window of my tower, bathing all the clutter of half-forgotten experiments and the heaps of books and scrolls piled against the walls in the pellucid light of that particular season. I’d thought that the wolf was asleep when I did it, but I probably should have known better. Nothing I did ever slipped past her.
She sat up with those golden eyes of hers glowing in the sunlight. ‘So that is how you do it,’ she said to me. ‘What a simple thing.’
And she promptly turned herself into a snowy white owl.
I knew little peace after that. I never knew when I turned around what might be staring at me – wolf or owl, bear or butterfly. She seemed to take great delight in startling me, but as time wore on more and more she appeared to me in the shape of an owl.
‘What is this thing about owls?’ I growled one day.
‘I like owls,’ she explained as if it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘During my first winter, when I was a young and foolish thing, I was chasing a rabbit, floundering around in the snow like a puppy, and a great white owl swooped down and snatched my rabbit almost out of my jaws. She carried it to a nearby tree and ate it, dropping the scraps to me. I thought at the time that it would be a fine thing to be an owl.’
‘Foolishness,’ I snorted.
‘Perhaps,’ she replied blandly, preening her tail feathers, ‘but it amuses me. It may be that one day a different shape will amuse me even more.’
Those of you who know my daughter will see how she came by her affinity for that particular shape. Neither Polgara nor my wife will tell me how they communicated with each other during those terrible years when I thought I’d lost Poledra forever, but they obviously did, and Poledra’s fondness for owls quite obviously rubbed off. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Things went along quietly in the Vale for the next several centuries. We’d set most of the things in motion that needed to be ready for us later, and now we were just marking time.
As I’d been almost sure that it would, Tol Nedrane had burned to the ground, and my badgering of that patriarch of the Honethite family finally paid off. One of his descendants, a minor public official at the time, had that affinity for masonry I’d so carefully bred into his family, and after he’d surveyed the ashes of the city, he persuaded the other city fathers that stone doesn’t burn quite as fast as logs and thatch. It’s heavier than wood, though, so before they could start erecting stone buildings, they had to fill in the marshy places on the island in the Nedrane. Over the shrill objections of the ferrymen, they built a couple of bridges, one to the south bank of the Nedrane and the other to the north one.
After they’d filled the swamps with rubble, they got down to business. To be quite honest about it, we didn’t care if the citizens of Tol Honeth lived in stone houses or in paper shacks. It was the work gangs that were important. They provided the basis for the legions, and we were going to need those legions later. Building stone is too heavy for one man to carry – unless he has the sort of advantages my brothers and I have. The standard work gang of ten men ultimately became the elemental