“Where’s Polgara?” Silk asked, looking around as he helped Velvet down from her horse.
“Where else?” Belgarath pointed toward the kitchen. “Getting her out of there may be even harder than dragging Durnik out of the smithy.”
Velvet looked around with a slightly dreamy expression on her face. The drug Sadi had given her the previous night had not yet entirely worn off, and Garion surmised that Polgara was keeping her under rigid control. “Very nice,” she said, leaning involuntarily toward Silk. “Sort of homey.”
Silk’s expression was wary, like that of a man about ready to bolt.
They ate well again that evening, sitting around a long table in the beamed kitchen with the golden light of wax candles filling the room and winking back from the polished copper bottoms of kettles hung on the wall. The room was snug and warm, even though the storm which had been building up all afternoon raged outside, filling the night with thunder and wind and driving rain.
Garion felt oddly at peace, a peace he had not known for more than a year now, and he accepted this time of renewal gratefully, knowing that it would strengthen him in the climactic months ahead.
“Oh, my goodness!” Sadi exclaimed. After he had finished eating, the eunuch had taken his red case to the far end of the kitchen and had been trying to coax Zith from her little home with a saucer of fresh, warm milk.
“What is it, Sadi?” Velvet said, seeming to shake off the effects of the drug and Polgara’s insistence that she remain calm.
“Zith had a little surprise for us,” Sadi replied in a de-lighted tone. “Several little surprises, in fact.”
Velvet went curiously to his side. “Oh,” she said with a little catch in her voice, “aren’t they adorable?”
“What is it?” Polgara asked.
“Our dear little Zith is a mother,” Velvet said.
The rest of them rose and went to the other end of the room to look at the new arrivals. Like their mother, they were all bright green with the characteristic red stripe running from nose to tail. There were five of them, and they were no larger than angleworms. They all had their chins on the edge of the saucer and they were lapping up warm milk with their forked little tongues, purring all the while.
Zith hovered over them protectively, somehow managing to look demure.
“That would explain why she’s been so bad-tempered lately,” Sadi said. “Why didn’t you tell me, Zith? I could leave helped you with the delivery.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to be a midwife to a snake,” Silk said. “Besides, I thought reptiles laid eggs.”
“Most of them do,” Sadi admitted. “Some kinds are live-bearers, though. Zith happens to be one of those kinds.”
“And here I thought she was just getting fat,” Velvet said, “and all the time she was pregnant.”
Durnik was frowning. “Something doesn’t quite fit here,” he said. “Isn’t Nyissa the only place where her species is found?”
“Yes,” Sadi said, “and they’re very rare even in Nyissa.”
“Then how …” Durnik flushed slightly. “What I’m getting at is, how did this happen? We’ve been away from Nyissa for a long time. Where did she meet the father?”
Sadi blinked. “That’s true, isn’t it? This is impossible. Zith, what have you been up to?”
The little green snake ignored him.
“It’s really not such a mystery, Sadi,” Eriond told him, smiling slightly. “Don’t you remember what Cyradis said to Zith at Ashaba?”
“Something about something being delayed. I didn’t really pay that much attention. We were in the middle of something fairly distracting at the moment, if I remember right.”
“She said, ‘Be tranquil, little sister, for the purpose of all thy days is now accomplished, and that which was delayed may now come to pass.’ This is what she was talking about. This is what was delayed.”
“You know,” Beldin said to Belgarath, “I think he’s right. This isn’t the first time the prophecy’s tampered with things in order to get the job done. That business about the ‘purpose of all her days’ simply means that Zith was born for one thing—to bite Harakan. Once she’d done that, things went back to normal again.” Then the hunchback looked at Eriond. “How is it that you remembered exactly what she said? We were all fairly excited there in Urvon’s throne room.”
“I always try to remember what people say,” Eriond replied. “It may not always make sense at the time they say it, but sooner or later it always seems to fit together.”
“This is a strange boy, Belgarath,” Beldin said.
“We’ve noticed that on occasion.”
“Is it really possible?” Sadi asked the old sorcerer. “That sort of intervention, I mean?”
“That’s the wrong question to ask my grandfather.” Garion laughed. “He doesn’t believe that anything’s impossible.”
Silk was standing a safe distance away from Zith and her new brood. His eyebrow was raised slightly. “Congratulations, Zith,” he said finally to the little green mother. Then be looked sternly at the others. “This is all very nice, I suppose,” he added, “but if anybody calls them little nippers, I’ll just scream.”
They had bathed and gone to bed, but Ce’Nedra was restless, and she tossed and turned. Suddenly she sat up. “I wonder if that milk’s still warm,” she murmured. She tossed back the blanket and padded on little bare feet to the door. “Do you want some, too?” she asked Garion.
“No, thanks all the same, dear.”
“It would help you sleep.”
“I’m not the one who’s having trouble sleeping.”
She stuck her tongue out at him and went out into the hallway.
When she returned a few moments later with her glass of milk, she was stifling a naughty little giggle.
“What’s so funny?” he asked her.
“I saw Silk.”
“So?”
“He didn’t see me, but I saw him. He was going into a bedroom.”
“He can go in and out of his bedroom if he wants to.”
She giggled again and hopped into bed. “That’s the point, Garion,” she said. “It wasn’t his bedroom.”
“Oh.” Garion coughed in embarrassment. “Drink your milk.”
“I listened at the door for a moment,” she said. “Don’t you want to hear what they were saying?”
“Not particularly, no.”
She told him anyway.
The rain had passed on through, although there were still rumbles of thunder far to the west, and jagged sheets of lightning raked the western horizon. Garion awoke suddenly and sat upright in bed. There was a different kind of rumble outside, and it was occasionally accompanied by a shrill bellowing noise. He slipped softly out of bed and went out onto the balcony that encircled the farmyard. A long line of torches was slowly moving out there in the darkness, perhaps a half mile to the west. Garion peered out through the tag end of the storm, then began to form up the image of the wolf in his mind. This was definitely something that needed to be investigated.
The torches moved at a peculiarly slow pace; as Garion loped closer to them, he noticed that they seemed much higher than they would have been if the torchbearers were mounted on horses. The slow rumbling sound and the peculiar bellowing continued. Then he stopped beside a bramble thicket and sat down on his haunches to watch and listen. A long line of huge grey beasts was plodding through the night in a northeasterly direction. Garion had seen the image, at least, of an elephant on the Isle of Verkat in Cthol Murgos when his Aunt Pol had routed the mad hermit in the forest. An image of an elephant is one thing, however, but the reality is quite something else. They were enormous, far larger than any animal Garion had ever seen, and there was a kind of ponderous implacability about their steady pace. Their foreheads and flanks were covered with skirts of chain mail, and Garion shuddered inwardly at the thought of such vast weight, though the elephants moved as if the mail were as insubstantial as cobwebs. Their sail-like ears swayed as they walked, and their pendulous trunks drooped down before them. Occasionally, one of them would curl his trunk up, touching it to his forehead, and give vent to a shattering trumpet sound.
Men in crude body armor were mounted on the huge, plodding beasts. One, bearing a torch, sat cross-legged atop each huge neck. Those riding behind were armed with javelins, slings, and short-limbed bows. At the head of the column, riding astride the neck of a beast fully a yard taller than the ones in his wake, was a man wearing the black robe of a Grolim.
Garion rose and slunk closer, his careful paws making no sound in the rain-wet grass. Although he was certain that the elephants could easily catch his scent, he reasoned that beasts so large would pay little attention to a predator who posed no real threat to them. In the presence of such immensity, he felt small, even flealike. He did not particularly like the feeling. His own bulk approached two hundred pounds, but an elephant’s weight was measured in tons, not in pounds.