“I’m sure there’s an explanation for that.”
He looked at her earnestly. “Everything had gone so splendidly up until then that -well, it just wouldn’t have seemed right to get off just because a few things started to go wrong.”
There was a long pause. “I see,” she said at last, her expression grave. “Then it was in the nature of a moral decision -this riding the sled all the way into the stream?”
“I suppose you might say that, yes.”
She looked at him steadily for a moment and then slowly sank her face into her hands. “I’m not entirely certain that I have the strength to go through all of this again,” she said in a tragic voice.
“Through what?” he asked, slightly alarmed.
“Raising Garion was almost more than I could bear,” she replied, “but not evenhe could have come up with a more illogical reason for doing something.” Then she looked at him, laughed fondly, and put her arms. about him. “Oh, Errand,” she said, pulling him tightly to her, and everything was all right again.
CHAPTER TWO
Belgarath the Sorcerer was a man with many flaws in his character. He had never been fond of physical labor and he was perhaps a bittoo fond of dark brown ale. He was occasionally careless about the truth and had a certain grand indifference to some of the finer points of property ownership. The company of ladies of questionable reputation did not particularly offend his sensibilities, and his choice of language very frequently left much to be desired.
Polgara the Sorceress was a woman of almost inhuman determination and she had spent several thousand years trying to reform her vagrant father, but without much notable success. She persevered, however, in the face of overwhelming odds. Down through the centuries she had fought a valiant rearguard action against his bad habits. She had regretfully surrendered on the points of indolence and shabbiness. She grudgingly gave ground on swearing and lying.
She remained adamant, however, even despite repeated defeats, on the points of drunkenness, thievery, and wenching.
She felt for some peculiar reason that it was her duty to fight on those issues to the very death. Since Belgarath put off his return to his tower in the Vale of Aldur until the following spring, Errand was able to witness at close hand those endless and unbelievably involuted skirmishes between father and daughter with which they filled the periodic quiet spaces in their lives. Polgara’s comments about the lazy old man’s lounging about in her kitchen, soaking up the heat from her fireplace and the well-chilled ale from her stores with almost equal facility, were pointed, and Belgarath’s smooth evasions revealed centuries of highly polished skill. Errand, however, saw past those waspish remarks and blandly flippant replies. The bonds between Belgarath and his daughter were so profound that they went far beyond what others might conceivably understand, and so, over the endless years, they found it necessary to conceal their boundless love for each other behind this endless façade of contention. This is not to say that Polgara might not have preferred a more upstanding father, but she was not quite as disappointed in him as her observations sometimes indicated.
They both knew why Belgarath sat out the winter in Poledra’s cottage with his daughter and her husband. Though not one word of the matter had ever passed between them, they knew that the memories the old man had of this house needed to be changed -not erased certainly, for no power on earth could erase Belgarath’s memories of his wife, but rather they needed to be altered slightly so that this thatched cottage might also remind the old man of happy hours spent here, as well as that bleak and terrible day when he had returned to find that his beloved Poledra had died.
After the snow had been cut away by a week of warm spring rains and the sky had turned blue once again, Belgarath at last decided that it was time to take up his interrupted journey. “I don’t really have anything pressing,” he admitted, “but I’d like to look in on Beldin and the twins, and it might be a good time to tidy up my tower. I’ve sort of let that slide over the past few hundred years.”
“If you’d like, we could go along,” Polgara offered. “After all, youdid help with the cottage -not enthusiastically, perhaps, but you did help. It only seems right that we help you with cleaning your tower.”
“Thanks all the same, Pol,” he declined firmly, “but your idea of cleaning tends to be a bit too drastic for my taste. Things that might be important later on have a way of winding up on the dust heap when you clean. As long as there’s a clear space somewhere in the center, a room is clean enough for me.”
“Oh, father”‘ she said, laughing, “you never change.”
“Of course not,” he replied. He looked thoughtfully over at Errand, who was quietly eating his breakfast. “If it’s all right, though,” he said, “I’ll take the boy with me.”
She gave him a quick look.
Belgarath shrugged. “He’s company and he might enjoy a change of scenery. Besides, you and Durnik haven’t really had a chance to be alone since your wedding day. Call it a belated present if you want.”
She looked at him. “Thank you, father,” she said simply, and her eyes were suddenly very warm and filled with affection.
Belgarath looked away, almost as if her look embarrassed him. “Did you want your things? From the tower, I mean. You’ve left quite a few trunks and boxes there at one time or another over the years.”
“Why, that’s very nice of you, father.”
“I need the space they’re taking up,” he said. Then he grinned at her.
“Youwill watch the boy, won’t you? I know your mind sometimes wanders when you start puttering around in your tower.”
“He’ll be fine with me, Pol,” the old man assured her.
And so the following morning Belgarath mounted his horse, and Durnik boosted Errand up behind him. “I’ll bring him home in a few weeks,” Belgarath said. “Or at least by midsummer.” He leaned down, shook Durnik’s hand, and then turned his mount toward the south.
The air was still cool, although the early spring sunshine was very bright. The scents of stirring growth were in the air, and Errand, riding easily behind Belgarath, could feel Aldur’s presence as they pressed deeper into the Vale. He felt it as a calm and gentle kind of awareness, and it was dominated by an overpowering desire to know. The presence of the God Aldur here in the Vale was not some vague spiritual permeation, but rather was quite sharp, on the very edge of being palpable.
They moved on down into the Vale, riding at an easy pace through the tall, winter-browned grass. Broad trees dotted the open expanse, lifting their crowns to the sky, holding the tips of their branches, swollen with the urgency of budding leaves, up to receive the gentle kiss of sun-warmed air.
“Well, boy?” Belgarath said after they had ridden a league or more.
“Where are the towers?” Errand asked politely.
“A bit farther. How did you know about the towers?”
“You and Polgara spoke of them.”
“Eavesdropping is a very bad habit, Errand.”
“Was it a private conversation?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Then it wasn’t eavesdropping, was it?”
Belgarath turned sharply, looking over his shoulder at the boy riding behind him. “That’s a pretty fine distinction for somebody as young as you are. How did you arrive at it?”
Errand shrugged. “It just came to me. Do they always graze here like that?” He pointed at a dozen or so reddishbrown deer feeding calmly nearby.
“They have done so ever since I can remember. There’s something about Aldur’s presence that keeps animals from molesting each other.”
They passed a pair of graceful towers linked by a peculiar, almost airy bridge arching between them, and Belgarath told him that they belonged to Beltira and Belkira, the twin sorcerers whose minds were so closely linked that they inevitably completed each other’s sentences. A short while later they rode by a tower so delicately constructed of rose quartz that it seemed almost to float like a pink jewel in the lambent air. This tower, Belgarath told him, belonged to the hunchbacked Beldin, who had surrounded his own ugliness with a beauty so exquisite that it snatched one’s breath away.
At last they reached Belgarath’s own squat, functional tower and dismounted. “Well,” the old man said, “here we are. Let’s go up.”
The room at the top of the tower was large, round, and incredibly cluttered. As he looked around at it, Belgarath’s eyes took on a defeated look. “This is going to take weeks,” he muttered.
A great many things in the room attracted Errand’s eye, but he knew that, in Belgarath’s present mood, the old man would not be inclined to show him or explain to him much of anything. He located the fireplace, found a tarnished brass scoop and a short-handled broom, and knelt in front of the cavernous, soot-darkened opening.