“Did you ever see her again?” Garion wanted to know.
Belgarath nodded. “She saw to that – though I didn’t know it at the time. I was running an errand for my Master somewhere to the north of the Vale and I came across a small, neatly thatched cottage in a grove of trees by a small river. A woman named Poledra lived in the cottage – a woman with tawny hair and curiously golden eyes. We grew to know each other, and eventually we were married. She was Polgara’s mother – and Beldaran’s.”
“You were saying that you met the wolf again,” Garion reminded him.
“You don’t listen too well, Garion,” the old man said, looking directly at his grandson. There was a deep and ancient injury in his eyes – a hurt so great that Garion knew it would be there for as long as the old man lived.
“You don’t mean-?”
“It took me a while to accept it myself, actually. Poledra was very patient and very determined. When she found out that I couldn’t accept her as a mate in the form of a wolf, she simply found a different shape. She got what she wanted in the end.” He sighed.
“Aunt Pol’s mother was a wolf?” Garion was stunned.
“No, Garion,” Belgarath replied calmly, “she was a woman – a very lovely woman. The change of shape is absolute.”
“But – but she started out as a wolf.”
“So?”
“But ” The whole notion was somehow shocking.
“Don’t let your prejudices run away with you,” Belgarath told him. Garion struggled with the idea. It seemed monstrous somehow. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s unnatural, no matter what you say.”
“Garion,” the old man reminded him with a pained look, “just about everything we do is unnatural. Moving rocks with your mind isn’t the most natural thing in the world, if you stop and think about it.”
“But this is different,” Garion protested. “Grandfather, you married a wolf – and the wolf had children. How could you do that?”
Belgarath sighed and shook his head. “You’re a very stubborn boy, Garion,” he observed. “It seems that you’re never going to understand until you’ve been through the experience. Let’s go over behind that hill, and I’ll show you how it’s done. There’s no point in upsetting the rest of the caravan.”
“Mind if I come along?” Silk asked, his nose twitching with curiosity.
“Might not be a bad idea,” Belgarath agreed. “You can hold the horses. Horses tend to panic in the presence of wolves.”
They rode away from the caravan track under the leaden sky and circled around behind a low, heath-covered hill. “This should do,” Belgarath decided, reining in and dismounting in a shallow swale just behind the hill. The swale was covered with new grass, green with spring.
“The whole trick is to create the image of the animal in your mind,” Belgarath explained, “down to the last detail. Then you direct your will inward – upon yourself – and then change, fitting yourself into the image.”
Garion frowned, not understanding.
“It’s going to take too long if I have to explain it in words,” Belgarath said. “Here – watch – and watch with your mind as well as your eyes.”
Unbidden, the shape of the great gray wolf he had seen on occasion before came into Garion’s mind. He could clearly see the gray – shot muzzle and the silver ruff: Then he felt the surge and heard the hollow roaring sound in his mind. For an instant, the image of the wolf curiously mingled with an image of Belgarath himself – as if the two were trying to both occupy the same space. Then Belgarath was gone and only the wolf remained.
Silk whistled, then took a firmer grip on the reins of their startled horses.
Belgarath changed back again to an ordinary – looking old man in a rust-brown tunic and gray, hooded cloak. “Do you understand?” he asked Garion.
“I think so,” Garion replied, a bit dubiously.
“Try it. I’ll lead you through it one step at a time.” Garion started to put a wolf together in his mind.
“Don’t forget the toenails,” Belgarath told him. “They may not look like much, but they’re very important.”
Garion put the toenails in. “Tail’s too short.”
Garion fixed that.
“That’s about right. Now fit yourself into it.”
Garion put his will to it. “Change,” he said.
It seemed almost as if his body had grown somehow fluid, shifting, altering, flowing into the image of the wolf that he had in his mind. When the surge was gone, he sat on his haunches panting. He felt very strange.
“Stand up and let’s have a look at you,” Belgarath told him. Garion rose and stood on all four paws. His tail felt extremely peculiar.
“You made the hind legs a bit too long,” Belgarath noted critically. Garion started to object that it was the first time he’d ever done it, but his voice came out in a peculiar series of whines and yelps.
“Stop that,” Belgarath growled. “You sound like a puppy. Change back.”
Garion did that.
“Where do your clothes go?” Silk asked curiously.
“They’re with us,” Belgarath replied, “but at the same time they’re not. It’s kind of hard to explain, actually. Beldin tried to work out exactly where the clothes were once. He seems to think he’s got the answer, but I never understood the whole theory. Beldin’s quite a bit more intelligent than I am, and his explanations are sometimes a bit exotic. At any rate, when we return to our original shape, our clothing is always just as it was.”
“Even Garion’s sword?” Silk asked. “And the Orb?”
The old man nodded.
“Isn’t it sort of dangerous having it floating around out there – unattached, so to speak?”
“It isn’t really unattached. It’s still there – but at the same time it’s not.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Silk conceded dubiously.
“Try it again, Garion,” Belgarath suggested.
Garion switched back and forth several times until his wolfshape satisfied his grandfather.
“Stay with the horses,” the old man told Silk. “We’ll be back in a little bit.” He flickered and shimmered into the great gray wolf. “Let’s run for a bit,” he said to Garion. The meaning of what he said was conveyed directly from his mind to Garion’s, aided only slightly by expressions and positions of his head and ears and a few brief barking sounds. Garion suddenly understood why the bond of the pack was so strong in wolves. Quite literally, they inhabited each others’ minds. What one saw, they all saw; and what one felt, they all felt.
“Where do we run to?” Garion asked, not really surprised at how easily the speech of wolves came to him.
“No place in particular. I just need to stretch out a few kinks.” And the gray wolf bounded away with astonishing speed.
The tail was a definite problem at first. Garion kept forgetting that it was there, and its swishing back and forth kept jerking him off balance. By the time he got the hang of it, the old wolf was far out ahead of him on the gray-green moors. After a while, however, Garion found himself literally flying across the ground. His paws scarcely seemed to touch the earth as he bunched and stretched his body in great bounds. He marvelled at the economy of the running gait of the wolf. He ran not with his legs alone, but with his entire body. He became quite certain that, if need be, he could run for days without tiring.
The rolling moors were different somehow. What had seemed as desolate and empty as the dead sky overhead was suddenly teeming with life. There were mice and burrowing squirrels; in scrubby brown thickets, rabbits, petrified with fright, watched him as he loped by with his toenails digging into the springy turf. Silently he exulted in the strength and freedom of his new body. He was the lord of the plain, and all creatures gave way to him.
And then he was not alone. Another wolf ran beside him – a strangely insubstantial-looking wolf that seemed to have a bluish, flickering light playing about her.
“And how far will you run?” she asked him in the manner of wolves.
“We can stop if you’d like,” Garion replied politely, dropping back into a lope and then a trot.
“It’s easier to talk if one isn’t running,” she agreed. She stopped and dropped to her haunches.
Garion also stopped. “You’re Poledra, aren’t you?” He asked it very directly, not yet accustomed to the subtleties of the language of wolves.
“Wolves have no need of names,” she sniffed. “He used to worry about that, too.”
It was not exactly like the voice that had been in his mind since his childhood. He didn’t actually hear her, but instead he seemed to know exactly what she wanted to say to him. “Grandfather, you mean?”