“Not quite so grim,” she whispered. “Smile just a little – and nod occasionally. It’s the thing to do.”
“If you say so,” he replied. “I really don’t know too much about this sort of thing.”
“You’ll be just fine,” she assured him.
Smiling and nodding to the spectators, the royal couple passed through the Hall to the chair that had been placed near the front for the princess. Garion held the chair for her, then bowed and mounted the dais to his throne. As always happened, the Orb of Aldur began to glow as soon as he sat down. This time, however, it seemed to have a faint pink cast to it.
The official betrothal ceremony began with a rolling invocation delivered in a thunderous voice by the High Priest of Belar. Grodeg took full advantage of the dramatics of the situation.
“Tiresome old windbag, isn’t he?” Belgarath murmured from his accustomed place at the right of the throne.
“What were you and Ce’Nedra doing in there?” Aunt Pol asked Garion.
“Nothing,” Garion replied, blushing furiously.
“Really? And it took you all that time? How extraordinary.”
Grodeg had begun reading the first clauses of the betrothal agreement. To Garion they sounded like pure gibberish. At various points Grodeg stopped his reading to look sternly at Garion.
“Does His Majesty, Belgarion of Riva, agree to this?” he demanded each time.
“I do,” Garion replied.
“Does Her Highness Ce’Nedra of the Tolnedran Empire agree to this?” Grodeg asked the princess.
Ce’Nedra responded in a clear voice, “I do.”
“How are you two getting along?” Belgarath asked, ignoring the droning voice of the clergyman.
“Who knows?” Garion answered helplessly. “I can’t tell from one minute to the next what she’s going to do.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Aunt Pol told him.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider explaining that.”
“No, dear,” she replied with a smile as mysterious as Ce’Nedra’s had been.
“I didn’t really think so,” he grumbled.
Garion thought about Ce’Nedra’s rather open invitation to muss her during the interminable reading of the document which was firmly nailing down the remainder of his life, and the more he thought about it, the more he found the notion of a bit of polite mussing attractive. He rather hoped that the princess would linger after the ceremony and that they might go someplace private to discuss it. Following Grodeg’s pompous benediction, however, Ce’Nedra was immediately surrounded by all the younger girls in the court and swept away for some private celebration of their own. From all the giggling and wicked little glances cast in his direction, he concluded that the conversation at their little get-together was going to be very frank, probably naughty, and that the less he knew about it the better.
As Silk and Barak had predicted, the High Priest of Belar tried several times to speak to Garion privately. Each time, however, Garion put on a great show of ingenuousness and sent immediately for Belgarath. Grodeg left the island with his entire retinue the following day. To add a final insult to the whole matter, Garion insisted that he and Belgarath accompany the fuming ecclesiast to his ship to see him off – and to be certain that no Bear-cultist might inadvertently be left behind.
“Whose idea was all of this?” Belgarath inquired as he and Garion climbed the steps back to the Citadel.
“Silk and I worked it out,” Garion replied smugly.
“I might have known.”
“I thought things went quite well,” Garion congratulated himself.
“You’ve made yourself a dangerous enemy, you know.”
“We can handle him.”
“You’re getting to be very free with that ‘we,’ Garion,” Belgarath said disapprovingly.
“We’re all in this together, aren’t we, Grandfather?”
Belgarath looked at him helplessly for a moment and then began to laugh.
In the days that followed Grodeg’s departure, however, there was little occasion for laughter. Once the official ceremonies were over, the Alorn Kings, King Fulrach, and various advisers and generals got down to business. Their subject was war.
“The most recent reports I have from Cthol Murgos indicate that Taur Urgas is preparing to move the southern Murgos up from Rak Hagga as soon as the weather breaks on the eastern coast,” King Rhodar advised them.
“And the Nadraks?” King Anheg asked.
“They appear to be mobilizing, but there’s always a question about the Nadraks. They play their own game, so it takes a lot of Grolims to whip them into line. The Thulls just obey orders.”
“The Thulls don’t really concern anyone,” Brand observed. “The key to the whole situation is how many Malloreans are going to be able to take the field against us.”
“There’s a staging area for them being set up at Thull Zelik,” Rhodar reported, “but they’re also waiting for the weather to break in the Sea of the East.”
King Anheg frowned thoughtfully. “Malloreans are bad sailors,” he mused. “They won’t move until summer, and they’ll hug the north coast all the way to Thull Zelik. We need to get a fleet into the Sea of the East as soon as possible. If we can sink enough of their ships and drown enough of their soldiers, we might be able to keep them out of the war entirely. I think we should strike in force into Gar og Nadrak. Once we get into the forests, my men can build ships. We’ll sail down the River Cordu and out into the Sea of the East.”
“Thy plan hath merit, your Majesty,” Mandorallen approved, studying the large map hanging on the wall. “The Nadraks are fewest in number and farthest removed from the hordes of southern Cthol Murgos.”
King Rhodar shook his head stubbornly. “I know you want to get to the sea as quickly as possible, Anheg,” he objected, “but you’re committing me to a campaign in the Nadrak forest. I need open country to maneuver in. If we strike at the Thulls, we can cut directly across to the upper reaches of the River Mardu, and you can sail on down to the sea that way.”
“There aren’t that many trees in Mishrak ac Thull,” Anheg protested.
“Why build ships out of green lumber if you don’t have to?” Rhodar asked. “Why not sail up the Aldur and then portage across?”
“You want my men to portage ships up the eastern escarpment? Rhodar, be serious.”
“We have engineers, Anheg. They can devise ways to lift your ships to the top of the escarpment.”
Garion did not want to intrude his inexperience on the conference, but the question came out before he had time to think about it. “Have we decided where the final battle’s going to be?” he asked.
“Which final battle was that, Garion?” Rhodar asked politely.
“When we meet them head-on – like Vo Mimbre.”
“There won’t be a Vo Mimbre in this war,” Anheg told him. “Not if we can help it.”
“Vo Mimbre was a mistake, Garion,” Belgarath said quietly. “We all knew it, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it.”
“We won, didn’t we?”
“That was pure luck, and you can’t plan a campaign on the hope that you might get lucky. Nobody wanted the battle at Vo Mimbre – we didn’t, and Kal Torak didn’t, but nobody had any choice in the matter. We had to commit to battle before the second Angarak column arrived in the West. Kal Torak had been holding the southern Murgos and eastern Malloreans in reserve near Rak Hagga, and they started to march when he turned west from the siege of the Stronghold. If they’d been able to join forces with Kal Torak, there wouldn’t have been enough men in all the West to meet them, so we had to fight. Vo Mimbre was the least objectionable battlefield.”
“Why didn’t Kal Torak just wait until they arrived?” Garion asked.
“You can’t stop an army in unfriendly territory, King Belgarion,” Colonel Brendig explained. “You have to keep moving, or the local populace destroys all the food and starts coming out at night to cut up your people. You can lose half your army that way.”
“Kal Torak didn’t want the meeting at Vo Mimbre any more than we did,” Belgarath went on. “The column from Rak Hagga got caught in a spring blizzard in the mountains and bogged down for weeks. They finally had to turn back, and Torak was forced to fight at Vo Mimbre without any advantage of numbers, and nobody in his right mind goes into battle that way.”
“Thy force should be larger by a quarter than thine adversary’s,” Mandorallen agreed, “else the outcome must be in doubt.”
“By a third,” Barak corrected in a rumbling voice. “By half if you can arrange it.”
“Then all we’re going to do is spread out all over the eastern half of the continent and fight a whole series of little battles?” Garion demanded incredulously. “That could take years – decades. It could go on for a century.”