“Oh,” Garion said, “just have your men put them over there.” He pointed toward a corner of the antechamber they had just entered. “I’ll find out what the ladies want done with them later.”
Greldik grunted. “Good.” Then he rubbed his hands together. “Now, about that drink- ”
Garion did not have the faintest idea what his wife and her cousin and Polgara were up to. Most of the time, their conversations broke off as soon as he entered the room. To his astonishment, the four bales of loam and the two casks of what seemed to be water were stacked rather untidily in one corner of the royal bedroom. Ce’Nedra adamantly refused to explain, but the look she gave him when he asked why they needed to be so close to the royal bed was not only mysterious, but actually faintly naughty.
It was perhaps a week or two after Xera’s arrival that a sudden break in the weather brought the sun out, and the temperature soared up to almost freezing. Shortly before noon, Garion was in conference with the Drasnian ambassador when a wide-eyed servant hesitantly entered the royal study. “Please, your Majesty,” the poor man stammered. “Please forgive me for interrupting, but Lady Polgara told me to bring you to her at once. I tried to tell her that we don’t bother you when you’re busy, but she -well, she sort of insisted.”
“You’d better go see what she wants, your Majesty,” the Drasnian ambassador suggested. “If the Lady Polgara had just summonedme, I’d be running toward her door already.”
“You don’t really have to be afraid of her, Margrave,” Garion told him. “She wouldn’t actually hurt you.”
“That’s a chance I’d prefer not to take, your Majesty. We can talk about the matter we were discussing some other time.”
Frowning slightly, Garion went down the hall to the door of Aunt Pol’s apartment. He tapped gently and then went in.
“Ah, there you are,” she said crisply. “I was about to send another servant after you.” She wore a fur-lined cloak with a deep hood pulled up until it framed her face. Ce’Nedra and Xera, similarly garbed, were standing just behind her.
“I want you to go find Durnik,” she said. “He’s probably fishing. Find him and bring him back to the Citadel. Get a shovel and a pick from someplace and then bring Durnik and the tools to that little garden just outside your apartment window.”
He stared at her.
She made a kind of flipping motion with one hand.
“Quickly, quickly, Garion,” she said. “The day is wearing on.”
“Yes, Aunt Pol,” he said without even thinking. He turned and went back out, half-running. He was nearly to the end of the hallway before he remembered that he was the king here, and that peopleprobably shouldn’t order him around like that.
Durnik, of course, responded immediately to his wife’s summons -well,almost immediately. Hedid make one last cast before carefully coiling up his fishing line and following Garion back to the Citadel. When the two of them entered the small private garden adjoining the royal apartment, Aunt Pol, Ce’Nedra, and Xera were already there, standing beneath the intertwined oak trees.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Aunt Pol said in a businesslike fashion. “I’d like to have the area around these tree trunks opened up to a depth of about two feet.”
“Uh -Aunt Pol,” Garion interposed, “the ground is sort of frozen. Digging is going to be a little difficult.”
“That’s what the pick is for, dear,” she said patiently.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to wait until the ground thaws?”
“Probably, but it needs to be done now. Dig, Garion.”
“I’ve got gardeners, Aunt Pol. We could send for a couple of them.” He eyed the pick and shovel uncomfortably.
“It’s probably better if we keep it in the family, dear. You can start digging right here.” She pointed.
Garion sighed and took up the pick.
What followed made no sense at all. Garion and Durnik picked and spaded at the frozen ground until late afternoon, opening up the area Aunt Pol had indicated. Then they dumped the four bales of loam into the hole they had prepared, tamped down the loose earth, and watered the dark soil liberally with the water from the two casks. After that, Aunt Pol instructed them to cover everything back up again with snow.
“Did you understand any of that?” Garion asked Durnik as the two of them returned their tools to the gardener’s shed in the courtyard near the stables.
“No,” Durnik admitted, “but I’m sure she knows what she’s doing.” He glanced at the evening sky and then sighed. “It’s probably a little late to go back to that pool,” he said regretfully.
Aunt Pol and the two girls visited the garden daily, but Garion could never discover exactly what they were doing, and the following week his attention was diverted by the sudden appearance of his grandfather, Belgarath the Sorcerer. The young king was sitting in his study with Errand as the boy described in some detail the training of the horse Garion had given him a few years back when the door banged unceremoniously open and Belgarath, travel-stained and with a face like a thundercloud, strode in.
“Grandfather!” Garion exclaimed, starting to his feet. “What are- ”
“Shut up and sit down!” Belgarath shouted at him.
“What?”
“Do as I tell you. We are going to have a talk, Garion -that is,I’m going to talk, andyou’re going to listen.” He paused as if to get control of what appeared to be a towering anger. “Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” he demanded at last.
“Me? What are we talking about, Grandfather?” Garion asked.
“We’re talking about your little display of pyrotechnics on the plains of Mimbre,” Belgarath replied icily. “That impromptu thunderstorm of yours.”
“Grandfather.” Garion explained as mildly as possible, “they were right on the brink of war. All Arendia would probably have gotten involved. You’ve said yourself that we didn’t want that to happen. I had to stop them.”
“We aren’t talking about your motives, Garion. We’re talking about your methods. What possessed you to use a thunderstorm?”
“It seemed like the best way to get their attention.”
“You couldn’t think of anything else?”
“They were already charging, Grandfather. I didn’t have a lot of time to consider alternatives.”
“Haven’t I told you again and again that we don’t tamper with the weather?”
“Well -it was sort of an emergency.”
“If you thoughtthat was an emergency, you should have seen the blizzard you touched off in the Vale with your foolishness -and the hurricanes it spawned in the Sea of the East- not to mention the droughts and tornadoes you kicked up all over the world. Don’t you have any sense of responsibility at all?”
“I didn’t know it was going to do that.” Garion was aghast.
“Boy, it’s your business to know!” Belgarath suddenly roared at him, his face mottled with rage. “It’s taken Beldin and me six months of constant travel and the Gods only know how much effort to quiet things down. Do you realize that with that one thoughtless storm of yours you came very close to changing the weather patterns of the entire globe? And that change would have been a universal disaster!”
“One tiny little storm?”
“Yes, one tiny little storm,” Belgarath said scathingly. “Your one tiny little storm in the right place at the right time came very close to altering the weather for the next several eons -all over the world- you blockhead!”
“Grandfather,” Garion protested.
“Do you know what the term ice age means?”
Garion shook his head, his face blank.
“It’s a time when the average temperature drops -just a bit. In the extreme north, that means that the snow doesn’t melt in the summer. It keeps piling up, year after year. It forms glaciers, and the glaciers start to move farther and farther south. In just a few centuries, that little display of yours could have had a wall of ice two hundred feet high moving down across the moors of Drasnia. You’d have buried Boktor and Val Alorn under solid ice, you idiot. Is that what you wanted?”
“Of course not. Grandfather, I honestly didn’t know. I wouldn’t have started it if I’d known.”
“That would have been a great comfort to the millions of people you very nearly entombed in ice,” Belgarath retorted with a vast sarcasm. “Don’tever do that again! Don’t eventhink about putting your hands on something until you’re absolutely certain you know everything there is to know about it. Even then, it’s best not to gamble.”
“But -but- you and Aunt Pol called down the rainstorm in the Wood of the Dryads,” Garion pointed out defensively.
“We knew what we were doing,” Belgarath almost screamed. “There was no danger there.” With an enormous effort, the old man got control of himself. “Don’tever touch the weather again, Garion -not until you’ve had at least a thousand years of study.”