orders from Burnt-face yet.”
“What’s Ctuchik’s problem?”
“He doesn’t like Urvon.”
“Who does? I don’t think even Torak likes him very much. But Urvon’s
following orders, and Torak’s likely to rip Ctuchik’s heart out of his
skinny chest if he interferes.”
“You weren’t listening, Belgarath,” my stumpy brother told me.
“I
didn’t say it was Ctuchik who was blocking Urvon. It’s the Murgos–and
somewhat more specifically, the Murgo Grolims.”
“What’s the difference? Ctuchik rules Cthol Murgos, doesn’t he?”
“That he does, brother, but he’s sort of looking the other way at the
moment. Let’s see if I can explain it. If Urvon reaches Arendia with
his army, Torak’s very likely to promote him to Most Favored Disciple,
or whatever you want to call it. Ctuchik doesn’t want that to happen,
but he doesn’t dare interfere–at least not overtly. That doesn’t keep
him from slipping around behind the scenes, though. He’s spent
centuries instilling an obsession with racial purity in the collective
Murgo mind, and Malloreans aren’t pure Angaraks. The average
Mallorean’s part Angarak, part Karand, part Melcene, with maybe a pinch
of Dal thrown in for good measure. Murgos look on Malloreans as
mongrels, and they don’t hesitate to say so.”
“Yes, I know all about that, but Murgos take their orders from the
Grolims, and no Grolim alive is likely to do anything to offend
Torak.”
“You don’t really know that much about Grolims, I see. Grolim politics
are very involuted. No matter what Torak might think, there’s a great
schism in the Angarak religion, and it’s based on the hatred that
exists between Ctuchik and Urvon. Ctuchik dropped a few hints to his
Grolims after Urvon landed in Hagga, and his priests have been
spreading wild stories all over southern Cthol Murgos about drunken
Mallorean soldiers breaking into Murgo houses and raping Murgo women.
That’s the sort of thing almost guaranteed to make a Murgo go up in
flames. Ctuchik’s official position is that he’ll help Urvon’s army in
any way he can, but his Grolims are out there spreading atrocity
stories for all they’re worth. Murgo generals are very polite to
Mallorean officers in the daytime–but every night disorganized mobs of
common soldiers come out of their barracks and butcher every Mallorean
they can lay their hands on. Ctuchik piously sits in Rak Cthol going
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and pretends that he can’t do anything about it, and
all Urvon can do is squat in Rak Hagga wringing his hands while Murgo
lynch mobs decimate his army. I ‘know it’s an unnatural thing to
suggest, but in this particular situation, Ctuchik might turn out to be
our most valuable ally.”
“That’ll all come to an end once Torak gives Urvon his marching orders,
won’t it?”
“I doubt it. Ctuchik’s probably going to obediently order his southern
Murgos to join Urvon’s army, but all that’ll do is give the Murgos an
opportunity to get in close to the Malloreans–with knives. The trek
across southern Cthol Murgos is likely to be very interesting, and
Urvon’ll be lucky if he’s got a regiment left by the time he reaches
the southern Tolnedran border.”
“What an absolutely beautiful notion.”
“I thought you might like it.”
“Why don’t I take you to the palace and introduce you to the Tolnedran
generals so you can fill them in on this? Oh, incidentally, Pol and I
haven’t made an issue of who we really are. I’ll just tell them that
you’re a Drasnian spy and let it go at that. Let’s not upset the
generals just yet.”
He shrugged.
“If that’s the way you want it,” he agreed.
The officer commanding the Tolnedran general staff was named Cerran,
and he was a member of the Anadile family in southern Tolnedra.
The Anadiles had never had sufficient land or power to aspire to the
Imperial Throne, so they usually joined the army. They had
traditionally been closely allied with the Borunes, so when the Borunes
were on the throne, you would normally find an Anadile general in
command of the military. General Cerran was a thoroughgoing
professional in his early fifties. He was a Tolnedran, so he wasn’t as
tall as the Alorns, but he was a blocky sort of man with broad
shoulders and large hands. He and Brand got along together very
well.
I’m not really all that competent with the Drasnian secret language,
but I managed to advise Pol and Rhodar that Beldin was posing as a
member of Drasnian intelligence, and Rhodar greeted him warmly and
introduced him as “one of our most valuable agents.” Then Beldin
repeated what he’d told me earlier.
“How long would you say it’ll take Urvon to march across southern Cthol
Murgos, Master Beldin?” General Cerran asked after my brother had
finished his account.
Beldin shrugged.
“Half a year at least. He’ll have to stop every so often to put down
riots, I expect.”
“That tells us one of the things we’ve needed to know, then. Your
friend and his daughter told us that this Kal Torak of Mallorea has to
be in Arendia on a certain date. As I understand it, it has something
to do with the Angarak religion.”
“I suppose you could put it that way, yes. So what?”
“We don’t know what that date is, but Kal Torak does. He’ll want Urvon
in place when that date approaches, so as soon as Urvon starts
marching, we’ll know that we’ve got just about a year until we’ve got
to be ready to meet the Angaraks somewhere in Arendia.”
“That’s a little imprecise, Cerran,” Ran Borune objected.
“It’s a lot more specific than anything we’ve been able to come up with
so far, your Majesty,” Cerran replied.
“King Cho-Ram assures us that his Stronghold’s impregnable, so Kal
Torak’s going to get more and more frustrated as the time for him to be
in Arendia approaches. Eventually he’ll be forced to break off his
siege and march west. Angaraks take their religious obligations very
seriously.” Cerran rose from his chair and went to the large map
hanging on the wall of the war room.
“An army the size of Kal Torak’s won’t move very fast,” he noted,
“particularly not once it gets up into the mountains of Ulgoland. It’s
a hundred and fifty leagues from the Stronghold to central Arendia. At
ten miles a day, it’ll take him forty-five days. Give him another
fifteen days to regroup, and we’re talking about two months. Our first
signal will come when Urvon marches.
The second will be Kal Torak’s abandonment of the siege of the
Stronghold. That’s all we really need, isn’t it? The Murgos may or
may not try to stop Urvon’s Malloreans, but we definitely will. I
rather think that General Urvon’s going to be late getting to Arendia.
Kal Torak’s a foreigner, so he doesn’t know all that much about the
legions. I fully intend to educate him. I’ll stop Urvon dead in his
tracks at Tolnedra’s southern border.”
Now you see why Pol and I insisted that we coordinate our planning with
the Tolnedran generals.
Once we knew that we’d have plenty of warning, we turned our attention
to the campaign in Arendia. General Cerran’s staff had carefully
prepared plans for the defense of just about every location in the
country. I’d spoken privately with Brand about that. Very few battles
have ever been won from defensive positions. The methodical
Tolnedrans, however, had compared Torak’s numbers with ours and
concluded that our taking the offensive without the legions to help us
was absolutely out of the question, and the legions were going to be
busy somewhere else.
The Tolnedran generals didn’t know why the Alorn kings all deferred to
Brand, but they weren’t stupid. They recognized respect when they saw
it, and after a few months of those ongoing strategy sessions, they
also recognized Brand’s tactical genius. Tolnedrans don’t normally
have much use for Alorns, but in Brand they could see an altogether
different sort of man. His genius lay in his ability to assess the
strengths and weaknesses of the various elements that were to be a part
of the army that was going to face Kal Torak when the final battle took
place.
Our decision not to tell the Tolnedran generals that we were basing a
number of our decisions on the ravings of a madman was probably
sound.
The least hint of mysticism in an associate makes a Tolnedran
nervous.
There were times when we had to talk very fast, of course. We knew
that certain things were going to happen, but we couldn’t tell the
Tolnedrans how we knew. Rhodar took care of most of that for us. The
skills of the Drasnian Intelligence Service were already legendary, and
after a couple of years, the generals had come to believe that there
were Drasnian agents hidden in just about every element of the Angarak
armies. Every time the inevitable
“How do you know that?” came up, Rhodar would look sly, take out a