I cast a spuriously inquiring look at Cherek.
“Tomorrow morning?” I asked him.
He shrugged, overdoing it a bit.
“Might as well,” he agreed.
“The weather in those mountains isn’t going to get any better. If
we’re going to have to wade through snow, we’d better get to wading.”
“Stay under the trees,” Poledra advised.
“The snow isn’t as deep in thick woods.” If she did know, she was
taking it very calmly.
“We’d better get some sleep,” I said, standing up abruptly. I didn’t
need any more lies to try to talk my way around.
Poledra was very quiet in our bed that night. She clung to me
fiercely, however, and along toward morning she said,
“Be very careful. The young and I will be waiting when you come back.”
Then she said something she rarely ever said, probably because she felt
it was unnecessary to say it.
“I
love you,” she told me. Then she kissed me, rolled over, and
immediately went to sleep.
The Alorns and I left early the next morning, ostentatiously going off
toward the south and Maragor. When we were about five miles south of
my tower, however, we circled back, staying well out of sight, and
proceeded on toward the northeast.
CHAPTER TWELVE
This all happened about three thousand years ago, long before the
Algars and the Melcenes had begun their breeding experiments with
domestic animals, so what passed for horses in those days were hardly
more than ponies–which wouldn’t have worked out very well for a group
of seven-foot-tall Alorns. So we walked. That’s to say they walked, I
ran. After trying to keep up with them for a couple of days, I called
a halt.
“This isn’t working,” I told them.
“I’m going to do something, and I don’t want you getting excited about
it.”
“What have you got in mind, Belgarath?” Dras rumbled at me a little
nervously. I had quite a reputation in Aloria back then, and the
Alorns had exaggerated notions about the kinds of things I could do.
“If I’m going to have to run just to keep up, I’m going to run on all
four feet.”
“You don’t have four feet,” he objected.
“I’m going to fix that right now. After I do, I won’t be able to talk
to you–at least not in a language you’ll understand–so if you’ve got
any questions, ask them now.”
“Our friend here is the most powerful sorcerer in the world,” Cherek
told his sons sententiously.
“There’s absolutely nothing he can’t do.” I think he really believed
that.
“No questions?” I asked, looking around at them.
“All right then,” I said, “now it’s your turn to try to keep up.” I
formed the image in my mind and slipped myself into the familiar form
of the wolf. I’d done it often enough before that it was almost
automatic by now.
“Belar!” Dras swore, jumping back from me.
Then I ran off a hundred yards toward the northeast, stopped, turned,
and sat down on my haunches to wait for them. Even Alorns could
understand the meaning of that.
The priest of Belar who wrote the early sections of the Book of Alorn
was quite obviously playing fast and loose with the truth when he
described our journey. He was either drunk when he wrote it, or he
didn’t have the facts straight. Then again, he may have thought that
what really happened was too prosaic for a writer of his vast talent.
He declares that Dras, Algar, and Riva were waiting for us a thousand
leagues to the north, which simply wasn’t true. He then announces that
my hair and beard were turned white by the frost of that bitter winter,
which was also a lie. My hair and beard had turned white long before
that–largely because of my association with the children of the
Bear-God.
I still wasn’t too happy about this trip, and I placed the blame for it
squarely on the shoulders of my traveling companions. I ran those four
to the verge of exhaustion day after day. I’d resume my own form every
evening, and I usually had enough time to get a fire going and supper
started before they came wheezing and staggering into camp.
“We’re in a hurry,” I’d remind them somewhat maliciously.
“We’ve got a long way to go to reach this bridge of yours, and we want
to get there before the ice starts to break up, don’t we?”
We continued in a northeasterly direction across the snow-covered
plains of what’s now Algaria until we hit the eastern escarpment. I
had no intention of climbing that mile-high cliff, so I turned slightly
and led my puffing companions due north onto the moors of present-day
eastern Drasnia. Then we cut across the mountains to that vast
emptiness where the Morindim live.
My spiteful efforts to run Cherek and his sons into the ground every
day accomplished two things. We reached Morindland in less than a
month, and my Alorn friends were in peak condition when we got there.
You try running as fast as you can all day every day for a month and
see what it does to you. Assuming that you don’t collapse and die in
the first day or so, you’ll be in very good shape before the month is
out. If there was any fat left on my friends by the time we’d reached
Morindland, it was under their fingernails. As it turned out, that was
very useful.
When we came down out of the north range of mountains that marks the
southern boundaries of Morindland, I resumed my own form and called a
halt. It was the dead of winter, and the vast arctic plain where the
Morindim lived was covered with snow and darkness. The long northern
night had set in, although as luck had it, we had reached Morindland
early enough in the lunar month that a half-moon hung low over the
southern horizon, providing sufficient light to make travel
possible-unpleasant, but possible.
“I don’t know that we need to go out there,” I told my fur-clad
friends, gesturing at the frozen plain.
“There’s not much point in holding extended conversations with every
band of Morindim we come across, is there?”
“Not really,” Cherek agreed, making a face.
“I don’t care that much for the Morindim. They spend weeks talking
about their dreams, and we don’t really have time for that.”
“When Algar and I were coming back from the land bridge, we stuck to
these foothills,” Riva told us.
“The Morindim don’t like hills, so we didn’t see very many of them.”
“That’s probably the best way to do it,” I agreed.
“I could deal with an occasional band of them if I had to, but it’d
just be a waste of time. Do you know how to make curse-markers? And
dream-markers?”
Iron-grip nodded gravely.
“A combination of those two would sort of make them keep their
distance, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t understand,” Dras rumbled with a puzzled look.
“You would if you’d come out of the taverns in Val Alorn once in a
while,” Algar suggested to him.
“I’m the eldest,” Bull-neck replied a bit defensively.
“I have responsibilities.”
“Of course you do,” Riva said sardonically.
“Let’s see if I can explain it. The Morindim live in a different kind
of world–and I’m not just talking about all this snow. Dreams are
more important to them than the real world, and curses are very
significant. Belgarath just suggested that we carry a dream-marker to
let the Morindim know that we’re obeying a command that came to us in a
dream. We’ll also carry a curse-marker that’ll tell them that anybody
who interferes with us will have to deal with our demon.”
“There’s no such thing as a demon,” Dras scoffed.
“Don’t get your mind set in stone on that, Dras,” I warned him.
“Have you ever seen one?”
“I’ve raised them, Dras. Aldur sent me up here to learn what I could
about these people. I apprenticed myself to one of their magicians and
learned all the tricks. Riva’s got it fairly close. If we carry
dream-markers and curse-markers, the Morindim will avoid us.”
“Pestilence-markers?” Algar suggested. Algar never used more words
than he absolutely had to. I’ve never fully understood what he was
saving them for.
I considered it.
“No,” I decided.
“Sometimes the Morindim feel that the best way to deal with pestilence
is to stand off and shoot the infected people full of arrows.”
“Inconvenient,” Algar murmured.
“We won’t encounter very many Morindim this far south anyway,” I told
them, “and the markers should make them keep their distance.”
As it turned out, I was wrong on that score. Riva and I fashioned the
markers, and we set out toward the east, staying well up in the
foothills.
We hadn’t traveled for more than two days–nights, actually, since that
was when the moon was out–when suddenly there were Morindim all around
us. The markers kept them away, but it was only a matter of time until