other piece of property, but my memory of the incident is very clear.
]Beldin laid the oversized scroll Lunna had prepared for us on the
table and untied the ribbon that kept it rolled up. ‘I’m going to need
some light here,’ he announced.
Beltira held out his hand, palm-up, and concentrated for a
moment. A blazing ball of pure energy appeared there, and then it
rose to hang like a miniature sun over the table.
‘Show-off,’ father muttered at him.
‘I told you to shut up,’ Beldin reminded him. Then his ugly face
contorted in thought. We all felt and heard the surge as he released
his Will.
Six blank scrolls appeared on the table, three on either side of the
original Darine. Then my dwarfed uncle began to unroll the Darine
Codex with his eyes fixed on the script. The blank scrolls, now no
longer blank, unrolled in unison as he passed his eyes down the
long, seamless parchment Fleet-foot had sent to us.
‘Now that’s something that’s never occurred to me,’ Beltira said
admiringly. ‘When did you come up with the idea?’
‘Just now,’ Beldin admitted. ‘Hold that light up a little higher,
would you, please?’
Father’s expression was growing sulkier by the minute.
‘What’s your problem?’ Beldin demanded.
‘You’re cheating.’
‘Of course I am. We all cheat. It’s what we do. Are you only just
now realizing that?’
Father spluttered at that point.
‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed.
‘What’s the matter, Pol?’ Belkira asked me.
‘I’m living with a group of white-haired little boys, uncle. When
are you old men ever going to grow up?’
They all looked slightly injured by that particular suggestion. Men
always do, I’ve noticed.
Beldin continued to unroll the original codex while the twins
rapidly compared the copies to it line by line. ‘Any mistakes yet?’
the dwarf asked.
‘Not a one,’ Beltira replied.
‘Maybe I’ve got it right then.’
‘How much longer are you going to be at that?’ father demanded.
‘As long as it takes. Give him something to eat, Pol. Get him out
of my hair.’
Father stamped away, muttering to himself.
Actually, it took Beldin no more than an hour, since he wasn’t
actually reading the text he was copying. He explained the process
to us later that evening. All he was really doing was transferring
the image of the original to those blank scrolls. ‘Well,’ he said at last,
‘that’s that. Now we can all snuggle up to the silly thing.’
‘Which one’s the original?’ father demanded, looking at the seven
scrolls lined upon the table.
‘What difference does it make?’ Beldin growled.
‘I want my original copy.’
And then I laughed at them, even as I checked the ham we were
having for dinner.
‘It’s not funny, Pol,’ father reprimanded me.
‘I found it fairly amusing. Now, why don’t you all go wash up?
Supper’s almost ready.’
After we’d eaten, we each took up our own copy of Bormik’s
ravings and retired to various chairs scattered about father’s tower
to be alone with the word of the Gods – or with the word of that
unseen Purpose that controlled the lives of every living thing on
the face of the earth.
I took my copy to my favorite oversized chair beside the fireplace
in the kitchen area and untied the ribbon that kept it rolled up.
There was a brief note from Luana inside. ‘Lady Polgara,’ Bormik’s
daughter began. ‘Thus I’ve kept my part of our bargain. I feel I
must thank you once more for your gift to me. I’m living in central
Algaria now, and would you believe that I actually have a
suitor? He’s older, of course, but he’s a good, solid man who’s very
kind to me. I thought that I’d never marry, but Belar’s seen fit
to provide me a chance for happiness. I can’t begin to thank you
enough.’
It hadn’t been Belar who’d rewarded Luana, of course. Over
the years I’ve noticed again and again that the Purpose that
created everything that is, that was, or ever will be has a sense of
obligation, and it always rewards service. I don’t have to look any
further than the faces of my own children and my husband to see
mine.
The handwriting on Luana’s note was identical to the script in
which our copies of the Darine Codex were cast, a clear indication
that she’d meticulously copied off the document her scribes had
produced. It hadn’t really been necessary, of course, but Luana
appeared to take her obligations very seriously.
The Darine Codex, despite its occasional soarings, is really a rather
pedestrian document, since it seems almost driven by a need to
keep track of time. I know why now, but when I first read through
it, it was tedious going. I thought that the tediousness was no more
than a reflection of Bormik’s deranged mentality, but I now know
that such was not the case.
Uncle Beldin ploughed his way through the Darine in about six
months, and then one evening in midwinter he trudged through the
snow to father’s tower. ‘I’m starting to get restless,’ he announced. ‘I
think I’ll go back to Mallorea and see if I can catch Urvon off guard
long enough to disembowel him just a little bit.’
‘How can you disembowel somebody just a little bit?’ father asked
with an amused expression.
‘I thought I’d take him up to the top of a cliff, rip him open, wrap
a loop of his guts around a tree stump and then kick him off the
edge.’
‘Uncle. please!’ I objected in revulsion.
‘It’s something in the nature of a scientific experiment, Pol,’ he
explained with a hideous grin. ‘I want to find out if his guts break
when he comes to the end or if he bounces instead.’
‘That will do, uncle!’
He was still laughing that wicked laugh of his as he went down
the stairs.
‘He’s an evil man.’ I told my father.
‘Fun, though,’ father added.
The twins had watched Beldin’s mode of copying the Darine
Codex very closely and had duplicated the procedure with the
uncompleted Mrin. I think it was that incompleteness that made us
all pay only passing attention to the Mrin – that and the fact that it
was largely incomprehensible.
‘It’s all jumbled together,’ father complained to the twins and me
one snowy evening after we’d eaten supper and were sitting by the
fire in his tower. ‘That idiot in Braca has absolutely no concept of
time. He starts out talking about things that happened before the
cracking of the world and in the next breath he’s rambling on about
what’s going to happen so far in the future that it makes my mind
reel. I can’t for the life of me separate one set of EVENTS from
another.’
‘I think that’s one of the symptoms of idiocy, brother,’ Beltira
told him. ‘There was an idiot in our village when Belkira and I were
just children, and he always seemed confused and frightened when
the sun went down and it started to get dark. He couldn’t seem to
remember that it happened every day.’
‘The Mrin mentions you fairly often though, Belgarath,’ Belkira
noted.
Father grunted sourly. ‘And usually not in a very complimentary
way, I’ve noticed. It says nice things about Pol, though.’
‘I’m more loveable than you are, father,’ I teased him.
‘Not when you talk that way, you aren’t.’
I’d browsed into various passages in the Mrin myself on occasion.
The term the Prophet used most frequently to identify father.was
‘ancient and beloved’, and there were references to ‘the daughter
of the ancient and beloved’ – me, I surmised, since the daughter
mentioned was supposed to do things that Beldaran was clearly
incapable of doing. The incoherent time-frame of the Prophecy made
it almost impossible to say just exactly when these things were going
to happen, but there was a sort of sense that they’d be widely
separated in time. I’d always rather taken it for granted that my
life-span was going to be abnormally long, but the Mrin brought a
more disturbing reality crashing in on me. Evidently I was going to
live for thousands of years, and when I looked -at the three old men
around me, I didn’t like that idea very much. ‘Venerable’ is a term
often applied to men of a certain age, and there’s a great deal of
respect attached to it. I’ve never heard anyone talking about a
venerable woman, however. The term attached to us is ‘crone’, and that
didn’t set too well with me. It was a little vain, perhaps, but the
notion of cronehood sent me immediately to my mirror. A very close
.examination of my reflection didn’t reveal any wrinkles, though
at least not yet.
The four of us spent about ten years – or maybe it was only nine
concentrating our full attention on the Darine Codex, and then
the Master sent father to Tolnedra to see to the business of linking