“Not really. Just wondering.”
“He wants a place of his own,” I explained.
“We’re starting to get under each other’s feet.”
Belmakor was very shrewd. He got my point immediately.
“What did you have in mind?” he asked the dwarf.
“Beauty,” Beldin said bluntly.
“I may not be able to share it, but at least I’ll be able to look at
it.”
Belmakor’s eyes filled with sudden tears. He always was the most
emotional of us.
“Oh, stop that!” Beldin told him.
“Sometimes you’re so gushy you make me want to spew. I want grace. I
want proportion, I want something that soars. I’m tired of living in
the mud.”
“Can you manage that?” I asked our brother.
Belmakor went to his writing desk, gathered his papers, and inserted
them in the book he’d been studying. Then he put the book up on a top
shelf, spun a large sheet of paper and one of those inexhaustible quill
pens he was so fond of out of air itself, and sat down.
“How big?” he asked Beldin.
“I think we’d better keep it a little lower than the Master’s, don’t
you?”
“Wise move. Let’s not get above ourselves.” Belmakor quickly sketched
in a fairy castle that took my breath away–all light and delicacy with
flying buttresses that soared out like wings and towers as slender as
toothpicks.
“Are you trying to be funny?” Beldin accused.
“You couldn’t house butterflies in that piece of gingerbread.”
“Just a start, brother mine,” Belmakor said gaily.
“We’ll modify it down to reality as we go along. You have to do that
with dreams.”
And that started an argument that lasted for about six months and
ultimately drew us all into it. Our own towers were, for the most
part, strictly utilitarian. Although it pains me to admit it, Beldin’s
description of my tower was probably fairly accurate. It did look
somewhat like a petrified tree stump when I stepped back to look at it.
It kept me out of the weather, though, and it got me up high enough so
that I could see the horizon and look at the stars. What else is a
tower supposed to do?
It was at that point that we discovered that Belsambar had the soul of
an artist. The last place in the world you would look for beauty would
be in the mind of an Angarak. With surprising heat, given his retiring
nature, he argued with Belmakor long and loud, insisting on his
variations as opposed to the somewhat pedestrian notions of the
Melcenes. Melcenes are builders, and they think in terms of stone and
mortar and what your material actually will let you get away with.
Angaraks think of the impossible and then try to come up with ways to
make it work.
“Why are you doing this, Belsambar?” Beldin once asked our normally
self-effacing brother.
“It’s only a buttress, and you’ve been arguing about it for weeks
now.”
“It’s the curve of it, Beldin,” Belsambar explained, more fervently
than I’d ever heard him say anything else.
“It’s like this.” And he created the illusion of the two opposing
towers in the air in front of them for comparison. I’ve never known
anyone else who could so fully build illusions as Belsambar. I think
it’s an Angarak trait; their whole world is built on an illusion.
Belmakor took one look and threw his hands in the air.
“I bow to superior talent,” he surrendered.
“It’s beautiful, Belsambar. Now, how do we make it work? There’s not
enough support.”
“I’ll support it, if necessary.” It was Belzedar, of all people!
“I’ll hold up our brother’s tower until the end of days, if need be.”
What a soul that man had!
“You still didn’t answer my question–any of you!” Beldin rasped.
“Why are you all taking so much trouble with all of this?”
“It is because thy brothers love thee, my son,” Aldur, who had been
standing in the shadows unobserved, told him gently.
“Canst thou not accept their love?”
Beldin’s ugly face suddenly contorted grotesquely, and he broke down
and wept.
“And that is thy first lesson, my son,” Aldur told him.
“Thou wilt warily give love, all concealed beneath this gruff exterior
of thine, but thou must also learn to accept love.”
It all got a bit sentimental after that.
And so we all joined together in the building of Beldin’s tower. It
didn’t really take us all that long. I hope Durnik takes note that
it’s not really immoral to use our gift on mundane things, Sendarian
ethics notwithstanding.
I missed having my grotesque little friend around in my own tower, but
I’ll admit that I slept better. I wasn’t exaggerating in the least in
my description of his snoring.
Life settled down in the Vale after that. We continued our studies of
the world around us and expanded our applications of our peculiar
talent.
I think it was one of the twins who discovered that it was possible for
us to communicate with each other by thought alone. It would have been
one-or both–of the twins, since they had been sharing their thoughts
since the day they were born. I do know that it was Beldin who
discovered the trick of assuming the forms of other creatures. The
main reason I can be so certain is that he startled several years’
growth out of me the first time he did it. A large hawk with a bright
band of blue feathers across its tail came soaring in, settled on my
window ledge, and blurred into Beldin.
“How about that?” he demanded.
“It works after all.”
I was drinking from a tankard at the time, and I dropped it and went
into an extended fit of choking while he pounded me on the back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded after I got my breath.
He shrugged.
“I was studying birds,” he explained.
“I thought it might be useful to look at the world from their
perspective for a while.
Flying’s not as easy as it looks. I almost killed myself when I threw
myself out of the tower window.”
“You idiot!”
“I MANAGED to get my wings working before I hit the ground. It’s sort
of like swimming. You never know if you can do it until you try.”
“What’s it like? Flying, I mean?”
“I couldn’t even begin to describe it, Belgarath,” he replied with a
look of wonder on his ugly face.
“You should try it. I wouldn’t recommend jumping out of any windows,
though. Sometimes you’re a little careless with details, and if you
don’t get the tail feathers right, you’ll break your beak.”
Beldin’s discovery came at a fortuitous time. It wasn’t very long
afterward that our Master sent us out from the Vale to see what the
rest of mankind had been up to. As closely as I can pinpoint it, it
seems to have been about fifteen hundred years since that snowy night
when I first met him.
Anyway, flying is a much faster way to travel than walking. Beldin
coached us all, and we were soon flapping around the Vale like a flock
of migrating ducks. I’ll admit right at the outset that I don’t fly
very well.
Polgara’s made an issue of that from time to time. I think she holds
it in reserve for occasions when she doesn’t have anything else to carp
about.
Anyway, after Beldin taught us how to fly, we scattered to the winds
and went out to see what people were up to. With the exception of the
Ulgos, there wasn’t really anybody to the west of us, and I didn’t get
along too well with their new Gorim. The original one and I had been
close friends, but the latest one seemed just a bit taken with
himself.
So I flew east instead and dropped in on the Tolnedrans. They had
built a number of cities since the last time I had seen them. Some of
those cities were actually quite large, though their habit of using
logs for constructing walls and thatch for roofs made me just a little
wary of entering those free-standing firetraps. As you might expect,
the Tolnedran fascination with money hadn’t diminished in the fifteen
hundred years since I’d last seen them. If anything, they’d grown even
more acquisitive, and they seemed to spend a great deal of time
building roads. What is this thing with Tolnedrans and roads? They
were generally peaceful, however, since war’s bad for business, so I
flew on to visit the Marags.
The Marags were a strange people–as I’m sure our friend Reig has
discovered by now. Perhaps their peculiarities are the result of the
fact that there are many more women in their society than there are
men.
Their God, Mara, takes what is in my view an unwholesome interest in
fertility and reproduction. Their society is matriarchal, which is
unusual-although the Nyissans tend in that direction as well.