“It’s too late,” he said. “I’m already a monster. Didn’t you see what I did back there?”
“All this self pity is very tedious, Belgarion, ” her voice told him. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. ” She stood up. “Do try to grow up a little, dear,” she said aloud. “It’s very hard to instruct someone who’s so self absorbed that he won’t listen.”
“I’ll never do it again,” he told her defiantly.
“Oh yes, you will, Belgarion. You’ll learn and you’ll practice and you’ll develop the discipline this requires. If you don’t want to do it willingly, then we’ll have to do it the other way. Think about it, dear, and make up your mind – but don’t take too long. It’s too important to be put off. “She reached out and gently touched his cheek; then she turned and walked away.
“She’s right, you know, ” the voice in his mind told him.
“You stay out of this, ” Garion said.
In the days that followed, he avoided Aunt Pol as much as possible, but he could not avoid her eyes. Wherever he went on the narrow ship, he knew that she was watching him, her eyes calm, speculative.
Then, at breakfast on the third day out, she looked at his face rather closely as if noticing something for the first time. “Garion,” she said, “you’re starting to look shaggy. Why don’t you shave?”
Garion blushed furiously and put his fingers to his chin. There were definitely whiskers there – downy, soft, more like fuzz than bristles, but whiskers all the same.
“Thou art truly approaching manhood, young Garion,” Mandorallen assured him rather approvingly.
“The decision doesn’t have to be made immediately, Polgara,” Barak said, stroking his own luxuriant red beard. “Let the whiskers grow for a while. If they don’t turn out well, he can always shave them off later.”
“I think your neutrality in the matter is suspect, Barak,” Hettar remarked. “Don’t most Chereks wear beards?”
“No razor’s ever touched my face,” Barak admitted. “But I just don’t think it’s the sort of thing to rush into. It’s very hard to stick whiskers back on if you decide later that you wanted to keep them after all.”
“I think they’re kind of funny,” Ce’Nedra said. Before Garion could stop her, she reached out two tiny fingers and tugged the soft down on his chin. He winced and blushed again.
“They come off,” Aunt Pol ordered firmly.
Wordlessly, Durnik went below decks. When he came back, he carried a basin, a chunk of brown-colored soap, a towel, and a fragment of mirror. “It isn’t really hard, Garion,” he said, putting the things on the table in front of the young man. Then he took a neatly folded razor out of a case at his belt. “You just have to be careful not to cut yourself, that’s all. The whole secret is not to rush.”
“Pay close attention when you’re near your nose,” Hettar advised. “A man looks very strange without a nose.”
The shaving proceeded with a great deal of advice, and on the whole it did not turn out too badly. Most of the bleeding stopped after a few minutes, and, aside from the fact that his face felt as if it had been peeled, Garion was quite satisfied with the results.
“Much better,” Aunt Pol said.
“He’ll catch cold in his face now,” Barak predicted.
“Will you stop that?” she told him.
The coast of Nyissa slid by on their left, a blank wall of tangled vegetation, festooned with creepers and long tatters of moss. Occasional eddies in the breeze brought the foul reek of the swamps out to the ship. Garion and Ce’Nedra stood together in the prow of the ship, looking toward the jungle.
“What are those?” Garion asked, pointing at some large things with legs slithering around on a mud bank along a stream that emptied into the sea.
“Crocodiles,” Ce’Nedra answered.
“What’s a crocodile?”
“A big lizard,” she said.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Very dangerous. They eat people. Haven’t you ever read about them?”
“I can’t read,” Garion admitted without thinking.
“What?”
“I can’t read,” Garion repeated. “Nobody ever taught me how.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“It’s not my fault,” he said defensively.
She looked at him thoughtfully. She had seemed almost half afraid of him since the meeting with Chamdar, and her insecurity had probably been increased by the fact that, on the whole, she had not treated him very well. Her first assumption that he was only a servant boy had gotten their whole relationship off on the wrong foot, but she was far too proud to admit that initial mistake. Garion could almost hear the little wheels clicking around in her head. “Would you like to have me teach you how?” she offered. It was probably the closest thing he’d ever get to an apology from her.
“Would it take very long?”
“That depends on how clever you are.”
“When do you think we could start?”
She frowned. “I’ve got a couple of books, but we’ll need something to write on.”
“I don’t know that I need to learn how to write,” he said. “Reading ‘ought to be enough for right now.”
She laughed. “They’re the same thing, you goose.”
“I didn’t know that,” Garion said, flushing slightly. “I thought ” He floundered with the whole idea. “I guess I never really thought about it,” he concluded lamely. “What sort of thing do we need to write on?”
“Parchment’s the best,” she said, “and a charcoal stick to write with – so we can rub it off and write on the parchment again.”
“I’ll go talk to Durnik,” he decided. “He’ll be able to think of something.”
Durnik suggested sailcloth and a charred stick. Within an hour Garion and Ce’Nedra were sitting in a sheltered spot in the bow of the ship their heads close together over a square of canvas nailed to a plank. Garion glanced up once and saw Aunt Pol not far away. She was watching the two of them with an indecipherable expression. Then he lowered his eyes again to the strangely compelling symbols on the canvas.
His instruction went on for the next several days. Since his fingers were naturally nimble, he quickly picked up the trick of forming the letter.
“No, no,” Ce’Nedra said one afternoon, “you’ve spelled it wrong, used the wrong letters. Your name’s Garion, not Belgarion.”
He felt a sudden chill and looked down at the canvas square. The name was spelled out quite clearly – “Belgarion.”
He looked up quickly. Aunt Pol was standing where she usually stood, her eyes on him as always.
“Stay out of my mind!” He snapped the thought at her.
“Study hard, dear, ” her voice urged him silently. “Learning of any kind is useful, and you have a great deal to learn. The sooner you get the habit, the better. ” Then she smiled, turned and walked away.
The next day, Greldik’s ship reached the mouths of the River of the Serpent in central Nyissa, and his men struck the sail and set their oars into the locks along the sides of the ship in preparation for the long pull upriver to Sthiss Tor.
Chapter Twenty-four
THERE WAS NO AIR. It seemed as if the world had suddenly been turned into a vast, reeking pool of stagnant water. The River of the Serpent had a hundred mouths, each creeping sluggishly through the jellied muck of the delta as if reluctant to join the boisterous waves of the sea. The reeds which grew in that vast swamp reached a height of twenty feet and were as thick as woven fabric. There was a tantalizing sound of a breeze brushing the tops of the reeds, but down among them, all thought or memory of breeze was lost. There was no air. The delta steamed and stank beneath a sun that did not burn so much as boil. Each breath seemed to be half water. Insects rose in clouds from the reeds and settled in mindless gluttony on every inch of exposed skin, biting, feeding on blood.
They were a day and a half among the reeds before they reached the first trees, low, scarcely more than bushes. The main river channel began to take shape as they moved slowly on into the Nyissan heartland. The sailors sweated and swore at their oars, and the ship moved slowly against the current, almost as if she struggled against a tide of thick oil that clung to her like some loathsome glue.
The trees grew taller, then immense. Great, gnarled roots twisted up out of the ooze along the banks like grotesquely misshapen legs, and trunks vast as castles reached up into the steaming sky. Ropey vines undulated down from the limbs overhead, moving, seeming to writhe with a kind of vegetable will of their own in the breathless air. Shaggy tatters of grayish moss descended in hundred-foot-long streamers from the trees, and the river wound spitefully in great coils that made their journey ten times as long as it needed to be.