She never was totally satisfied with my real form, and she seemed much
happier with me when I had four feet and a tail.
We found out what was holding up the Alorns almost before we reached
the lands of the Bear God. Would you believe that they were already
fighting–with each other?
Alorn society–such as it was in those days–was clannish, and the
bickering was over which Clan-Chief was going to take command of the
entire army. The other Gods had encountered similar problems and had
simply overruled the urges toward supremacy of the various factions and
selected one leader to run things. Belar, however, wouldn’t do that.
“I’m sure you can see my position, Belgarath,” he said to me when I
finally found him. He said it just a little defensively, I thought.
I took a very deep breath, suppressing my urge to scream at him.
“No, my Lord,” I said in as mild a tone as I could manage.
“Actually, I don’t.”
“If I select one Clan-Chief over the others, it might be construed as
favoritism, don’t you see? They’re simply going to have to settle it
for themselves.”
“The other races are already on the march, my Lord,” I reminded him as
patiently as I could.
“We’ll be along, Belgarath,” he assured me, “eventually.”
By then I knew Alorns well enough to realize that Belar’s “eventually”
would quite probably stretch out for several centuries.
The she-wolf at my side dropped to her haunches with her tongue lolling
out. Her laughter didn’t improve my temper very much, I’ll confess.
“Would you be open to a suggestion, my Lord?” I asked the Bear God in
a civil tone.
“Why, certainly, Belgarath,” he replied.
“To be honest with you, I’ve been racking my brains searching for a
solution to this problem. I’d hate to disappoint my brothers, and I
really don’t want to miss the war entirely.”
“It wouldn’t be the same without you, my Lord,” I assured him.
“Now, as for your problem. Why don’t you just call all your
Clan-Chiefs together and have them draw lots to decide which of them
will be the leader of the Alorns?”
“You mean just leave it all in the hands of pure chance?”
“It is a solution, my Lord, and if you and I both promise not to tamper
in any way, your Clan-Chiefs won’t have any cause for complaint, will
they? They’ll all have an equal chance at the position, and if you
order them to abide by the way the lot falls, it should put an end to
all this …” I choked back the word “foolishness.”
“My people do like to gamble,” he conceded.
“Did you know that we invented dice?”
“No,” I said blandly.
“I didn’t know that.” To my own certain knowledge, every other race
made exactly the same claim.
“Why don’t we summon your Clan-Chiefs, my Lord? You can explain the
contest–and the rules–to them, and we can get on with it. We
certainly wouldn’t want to keep Torak waiting, would we? He’ll miss
you terribly if you’re not there when the fighting starts.”
He grinned at me. As I’ve said before, Belar has his faults, but he
was a likable young God.
“Oh, by the way, my Lord,” I added, trying to make it sound like an
afterthought, “if it’s all right with you, I’ll march south with your
people.” Somebody had to keep an eye on the Alorns.
“Certainly, Belgarath,” he replied.
“Glad to have you.”
And so the Alorn Clan-Chiefs drew lots, and regardless of what Polgara
may think, I did not tamper with the outcome. In my view, one
Clan-Chief was almost the same as any other, and I really didn’t care
who won–just as long as somebody did. As luck had it, the Clan-Chief
who won was Chaggat, the ultimate great-grandfather of Cherek
Bear-shoulders, the greatest king the Alorns have ever had. Isn’t it
odd how those things turn out? I’ve since discovered that while I
didn’t tamper and neither did Belar, something else did. The talkative
friend Garion carries around in his head took a hand in the game. He
was the one who selected Cherek’s ancestor to be the first king of the
Alorns. But I’m getting ahead of myself–or had you noticed that?
Once the question of leadership had been settled, the Alorns started
moving in a surprisingly short time–although it’s not all that
surprising, if you stop and think about it. The Alorns of that era
were semi-nomadic in the first place, so they were always ready to move
on–largely, I think, because of their deep-seated aversion to
orderliness. Prehistoric Alorns kept messy camps, and they found the
idea of moving on to be far more appealing than the prospect of tidying
up.
Anyway, we marched south, passing through the now-deserted lands of the
Arends and the Tolnedrans. It was about midsummer when we reached the
country formerly occupied by the Nyissans. We began to exercise a
certain amount of caution at that point. We were getting fairly close
to the northern frontier of the Angaraks, and it wasn’t very long
before we began to encounter small, roving bands of the Children of
Torak.
Alorns have their faults–lots of them–but they are good in a fight.
It was there on the Angarak border that I first saw an Alorn
berserker.
He was a huge fellow with a bright red beard, as I recall. I’ve always
meant to find out if he might have been a distant ancestor of Barak,
Earl of Trellheim. He looked a lot like Barak, so there probably was
some connection. At any rate, he outran his fellows and fell
singlehandedly on a group of about a dozen Angaraks. I considered the
odds against him and started to look around for a suitable grave site.
As it turned out, however, it was the Angaraks who needed burying after
he finished with them. Shrieking with maniacal laughter and actually
frothing at the mouth, he annihilated the whole group. He even chased
down and butchered the two or three who tried to run away. The
children of the Bear God, of course, stood there and cheered.
Alorns!
The frothing at the mouth definitely disconcerted my companion, though.
It took me quite some time to persuade her that the red-bearded
berserker wasn’t really rabid. Wolves, quite naturally, try to avoid
rabid creatures, and my little friend was right on the verge of washing
her paws of the lot of us.
Our encounters with the Children of the Dragon God grew more frequent
as we drew nearer and nearer to the High Places of Korim, which at that
time was the center of Angarak power and population. We managed to
obliterate a fair number of walled Angarak towns on our way south, and
the reports filtering in from our flanks indicated that the other races
involved in our assault on Torak’s people were also destroying towns
and villages as we converged on Korim.
The engines devised by Belmakor and Beldin worked admirably, and our
customary practice when we came on one of those walled towns was to sit
back and lob boulders at the walls for a few days while my brothers and
I raked the place with tornadoes and filled the streets with illusory
monsters. Then, when the walls had been reduced to rubble and the
inhabitants to gibbering terror, we’d charge in and kill all the
people. I tried my best to convince Chaggat that it was really
uncivilized to slaughter all those Angaraks and that he ought to give
some consideration to taking prisoners. He gave me that blank,
uncomprehending stare that all Alorns seem born with and said,
“What for? What would I do with them?”
Unfortunately, the barbarians we accompanied took to Belsambar’s notion
of burning people alive enthusiastically. In their defense, I’ll admit
that they were the ones who actually had to do the fighting, and
somebody who’s on fire has trouble concentrating on the business at
hand.
Quite often Chaggat’s Alorns would batter down a wall and rush into a
town where all the inhabitants had already burned to death. That
always seemed to disappoint the Alorns.
In his defense, I must say that Torak finally did mount a
counterattack.
His Angaraks came swarming out of the mountains of Korim like a plague,
and we met them on all four sides. I don’t like war; I never have.
It’s the stupidest way imaginable to resolve problems. In this case,
however, we didn’t have much choice.
The outcome was ultimately a foregone conclusion. We outnumbered the
Angaraks by about five to one or better, and we annihilated them. Go
someplace else to look for the details of that slaughter. I don’t have
the stomach to repeat what I saw during those awful two weeks. In the
end, we drove them back into the mountains of Korim and began our
inexorable advance on Torak’s ultimate stronghold, that city-temple
that surmounted the highest peak. Our Master frequently exhorted his