The owner of the tower sat beside the fire. His hair and beard were white, and he wore a blue, loose-fitting robe.
“Come over to the fire and dry your feet, boy,” he said in his gentle voice.
“Thank you,” Errand replied.
“How is Polgara?”
“Very well,” Errand said, “And happy. She likes being married, I think.” He lifted one foot and held it close to the fire.
“Don’t burn your shoes.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Would you like some breakfast?”
“That would be nice. Belgarath forgets things like that sometimes.”
“On the table there.”
Errand looked at the table and saw a steaming bowl of porridge that had not been there before.
“Thank you,” he said politely, going to the table and pulling up a chair.
“Was there something special you wanted to talk about?”
“Not really,” Errand replied, picking up a spoon and starting on the porridge. “I just thought I should come by. The Valeis yours, after all.”
“Polgara’s been teaching you manners, I see.”
Errand smiled. “And other things, too.”
“Are you happy with her, Errand?” the owner of the tower asked.
“Yes, Aldur, I really am,” Errand replied and continued to eat his porridge.
CHAPTER THREE
As the summer progressed, Errand found himself rather naturally more and more in the company of Durnik. The smith, he soon discovered, was an extraordinarily patient man who did things the old way, not so much because of some moral bias against what Belgarath called “the alternative we have available to us,” but rather because he took a deep satisfaction in working with his hands. This was not to say that Durnik did not occasionally take short cuts. Errand noticed a certain pattern to the smith’s evasions. Durnik absolutely would not cheat on any project involving making something for Polgara or for their home. No matter how laborious or tedious those projects might be, Durnik completed them with his hands and his muscles.
Certain outside activities, however, were not quite so closely tied up with Durnik’s sense of ethics. Two hundred yards of rail fence, for example, appeared rather quickly one morning. The fence needed to be there; there was no question of that, since a nearby herd of Algar cattle had to be diverted from plodding with bovine stubbornness across Polgara’s garden on their way to water. As a matter of fact, the fence actually began to appear instantly just in front of the startled cows. They regarded the first fifty feet or so in bafflement then, after considering the problem for several minutes, they moved to go around the obstruction. Another fifty feet of fence appeared in their path. In time, the cows grew surly about the whole thing and even tried running, perhaps thinking in their sluggish way that they might be able to outrace this phantom fence builder. Durnik, however, sat planted on a stump, his eyes intent and his face determined, extending his fence section by section in front of the increasingly irritable cows.
One dark brown bull, finally goaded into a fury of frustration, lowered his head, pawed the earth a few times, and charged the fence with a great bellow. Durnik made a peculiar twisting gesture with one hand, and the bull was suddenly chargingaway from the fence, turned around somehow in midstride without even knowing it. He ran for several hundred yards before it occurred to him that his horns had not yet encountered anything substantial. He slowed and raised his head in astonishment. He looked dubiously back over his shoulder at the fence, then turned around and gave it another try. Once again Durnik turned him, and once again he charged ferociously off in the wrong direction. The third time he tried it, he charged over the top of the hill and disappeared on the other side. He did not come back.
Durnik looked gravely at Errand and then he winked. Polgara came out of the cottage, drying her hands on her apron, and noted the fence which had somehow constructed itself while she had been washing the breakfast dishes. She gave her husband a quizzical look, and Durnik seemed a bit abashed at having been caught using sorcery rather than an axe.
“Very nice fence, dear,” she said encouragingly to him.
“We kind of needed one there,” he said apologetically. “Those cows -well, I had to do it in a hurry.”
“Durnik,” she said gently, “there’s nothing morally reprehensible about using your talent for this sort of thing and youshould practice every so often.” She looked at the zig-zag pattern of the interlocking rail fence, and then her expression became concentrated. One after another, each of the junctures of the rails was suddenly bound tightly together with stout rosebushes in full bloom. “There,” she said contentedly, patted her husband’s shoulder, and went back inside.
“She’s a remarkable woman, do you know that?” Durnik said to Errand.
“Yes,” Errand agreed.
Polgara was notalways pleased with her husband’s ventures into this new field, however. On one occasion toward the hot, dusty end of summer when the vegetables in her garden were beginning to wilt, Polgara devoted the bulk of one morning to locating a small, black rain cloud over the mountains in Ulgoland and gently herding its sodden puffiness toward the Vale of Aldur and, more specifically, toward her thirsty garden.
Errand was playing along the fence when the cloud came in low over the hill to the west and then stopped directly over the cottage and the waiting garden. Durnik glanced up from the harness he was mending, saw the blond-haired boy at play and the ominous black cloud directly over his head, and rather negligently pulled in his will. He made a small flipping gesture with one hand. “Shoo,” he said to the cloud.
The cloud gave a peculiar sort of twitch, almost like a hiccup, then slowly flowed on eastward. When it was several hundred yards beyond Polgara’s parched garden, it began to rain -a nice, steady, soaking downpour that very satisfactorily watered several acres of empty grassland.
Durnik was not at all prepared for his wife’s reaction. The door to the cottage banged open, and Polgara emerged with her eyes flashing. She gave the happily raining cloud a hard stare, and the soggy-looking thing gave another of those peculiar hiccups and actually managed to look guilty.
Then Polgara turned and looked directly at her husband, her eyes a bit wild. “Did you do that?” she demanded, pointing at the cloud.
“Why -yes,” he replied. “I suppose I did, Pol.”
“Whydid you do that?”
“Errand was out there playing,” Durnik said, still concentrating most of his attention on the harness. “I didn’t think you’d want him to get wet.”
Polgara looked at the cloud wasting all of its rain on grass so deeply rooted that it could have easily survived a ten-month drought. Then she looked at her garden and its drooping turnip tops and pathetic beans. She clenched her teeth tightly together to keep in certain words and phrases which she knew might shock her strait-laced and proper husband.
She raised her face to the sky and lifted her arms in supplication. “Why me?” she demanded in a loud, tragic voice. “Why me?”
“Why, dear,” Durnik said mildly, “whatever is wrong?”
Polgara told him what was wrong -at some length.
Durnik spent the next week putting in an irrigation system leading from the upper end of their valley to Polgara’s garden, and she forgave him for his mistake almost as soon as he had finished it.
The winter came late that year, and autumn lingered in the Vale. The twins, Beltira and Belkira, came by just before the snows set in and told them that, after several weeks of discussion, both Belgarath and Beldin had left the Vale, and that each of them had gone away with that serious expression on his face that meant that there was trouble somewhere.
Errand missed Belgarath’s company that winter. To be sure, the old sorcerer had, more often than not, managed to get him in trouble with Polgara, but Errand felt somehow that he shouldn’t really be expected to devoteevery waking moment to staying out of trouble. When the snow came, he took up sledding again. After she had watched him come flying down the hill and across the meadow a few times, Polgara prudently asked Durnik to erect a barrier at the stream bank to prevent a recurrence of the previous winter’s mishap. It was while the smith was erecting a woven wattle fence to keep Errand on dry land that he happened to glance down into the water. Because the often muddy little rills that emptied into their stream were all locked in ice now, the water was low and as clear as crystal. Durnik could very clearly see the long, narrow shapes hovering like shadows in the current above the beds of gravel that formed the bottom.
“What a curious thing,” he murmured, his eyes taking on that peculiarly abstracted look. “I’ve never noticed them there before.”