“Belgarath,” a deep voice echoed from beneath the slowly tilting stone, “Yad ho, groja UL. ”
“Yad ho, groja UL. dad mar ishum, ” Belgarath responded formally. “Peed mo, Belgarath. Mar ishum Ulgo, ” the unseen speaker said.
“What was that?” Garion asked in perplexity.
“He invited us into the caves,” the old man said. “Shall we go down now?”
Chapter Sixteen
IT TOOK ALL Of Hettar’s force of persuasion to start the horses moving down the steeply inclined passageway that led into the dimness of the caves of Ulgo. Their eyes rolled nervously as they took step after braced step down the slanting corridor, and they all flinched noticeably as the grinding stone boomed shut behind them. The colt walked so close to Garion that they frequently bumped against each other, and Garion could feel the little animal’s trembling with every step.
At the end of the corridor two figures stood, each with his face veiled in a kind of filmy cloth. They were short men, shorter even than Silk, but their shoulders seemed bulky beneath their dark robes. Just beyond them an irregularly shaped chamber opened out, faintly lighted by a dim, reddish glow.
Belgarath moved toward the two, and they bowed respectfully to him as he approached. He spoke with them briefly, and they bowed again, pointing toward another corridor opening on the far side of the chamber. Garion nervously looked around for the source of the faint red light, but it seemed lost in the strange, pointed rocks hanging from the ceiling.
“We go this way,” Belgarath quietly told them, crossing the chamber toward the corridor the two veiled men had indicated to him.
“Why are their faces covered?” Durnik whispered.
“To protect their eyes from the light when they opened the portal.”
“But it was almost dark inside that building up there,” Durnik objected.
“Not to an Ulgo,” the old man replied.
“Don’t any of them speak our language?”
“A few-not very many. They don’t have much contact with outsiders. We’d better hurry. The Gorim is waiting for us.”
The corridor they entered ran for a short distance and then opened abruptly into a cavern so vast that Garion could not even see the other side of it in the faint light that seemed to pervade the caves.
“How extensive are these caverns, Belgarath?” Mandorallen asked, somewhat awed by the immensity of the place.
“No one knows for sure. The Ulgos have been exploring the caves since they came down here, and they’re still finding new ones.”
The passageway they had followed from the portal chamber had emerged high up in the wall of the cavern near the vaulted roof, and a broad ledge sloped downward from the opening, running along the sheer wall. Garion glanced once over the edge. The cavern floor was lost in the gloom far below. He shuddered and stayed close to the wall after that.
As they descended, they found that the huge cavern was not silent. From what seemed infinitely far away there was the cadenced sound of chanting by a chorus of deep male voices, the words blurred and confused by the echoes reverberating from the stone walls and seeming to die off, endlessly repeated. Then, as the last echoes of the chant faded, the chorus began to sing, their song strangely disharmonic and in a mournful, minor key. In a peculiar fashion, the disharmony of the first phrases echoing back joined the succeeding phrases and merged with them, moving inexorably toward a final harmonic resolution so profound that Garion felt his entire being moved by it. The echoes merged as the chorus ended its song, and the caves of Ulgo sang on alone, repeating that final chord over and over.
“I’ve never heard anything like that,” Ce’Nedra whispered softly to Aunt Pol.
“Few people have,” Polgara replied, “though the sound lingers in some of these galleries for days.”
“What were they singing?”
“A hymn to UL. It’s repeated every hour, and the echoes keep it alive. These caves have been singing that same hymn for five thousand years now.”
There were other sounds as well, the scrape of metal against metal, snatches of conversation in the guttural language of the Ulgos, and an endless chipping sound, coming, it seemed, from a dozen places.
“There must be a lot of them down there,” Barak observed, peering over the edge.
“Not necessarily,” Belgarath told him. “Sound lingers in these caves, and the echoes keep coming back over and over again.”
“Where does the light come from?” Durnik asked, looking puzzled. “I don’t see any torches.”
“The Ulgos grind two different kinds of rock to powder,” Belgarath replied. “When you mix them, they give off a glow.”
“It’s pretty dim light,” Durnik observed, looking down toward the floor of the cavern.
“Ulgos don’t need all that much light.”
It took them almost half an hour to reach the cavern floor. The walls around the bottom were pierced at regular intervals with the openings of corridors and galleries radiating out into the solid rock of the mountain. As they passed, Garion glanced down one of the galleries. It was very long and dimly lighted with openings along its walls and a few Ulgos moving from place to place far down toward the other end.
In the center of the cavern lay a large, silent lake, and they skirted the edge of it as Belgarath moved confidently, seeming to know precisely where he was going. Somewhere from far out on the dim lake, Garion heard a faint splash, a fish perhaps or the sound of a dislodged pebble from far above falling into the water. The echo of the singing they had heard when they entered the cavern still lingered, curiously loud in some places and very faint in others.
Two Ulgos waited for them near the entrance to one of the galleries. They bowed and spoke briefly to Belgarath. Like the men who had met them in the portal chamber, both were short and heavy-shouldered. Their hair was very pale and their eyes large and almost black.
“We’ll leave the horses here,” Belgarath said. “We have to go down some stairs. These men will care for them.”
The colt, still trembling, had to be told several times to stay with his mother, but he finally seemed to understand. Then Garion hurried to catch up to the others, who had already entered the mouth of one of the galleries.
There were doors in the walls of the gallery they followed, doors opening into small cubicles, some of them obviously workshops of one kind or another and others just as obviously arranged for domestic use. The Ulgos inside the cubicles continued at their tasks, paying no attention to the party passing in the gallery. Some of the pale-haired people were working with metal, some with stone, a few with wood or cloth. An Ulgo woman was nursing a small baby.
Behind them in the cavern they had first entered, the sound of the chanting began again. They passed a cubicle where seven Ulgos, seated in a circle, were reciting something in unison.
“They spend a great deal of time in religious observances,” Belgarath remarked as they passed the cubicle. “Religion’s the central fact of Ulgo life.”
“Sounds dull,” Barak grunted.
At the end of the gallery a flight of steep, worn stairs descended sharply, and they went down, their hands on the wall to steady themselves.
“It would be easy to get turned around down here,” Silk observed. “I’ve lost track of which direction we’re going.”
“Down,” Hettar told him.
“Thanks,” Silk replied dryly.
At the bottom of the stairs they entered another cavern, once again high up in the wall, but this time the cavern was spanned by a slender bridge, arching across to the other side. “We cross that,” Belgarath told them and led them out onto the bridge that arched through the half light to the other side.
Garion glanced down once and saw a myriad of gleaming openings dotting the cavern walls far below. The openings did not appear to have any systematic arrangement, but rather seemed scattered randomly. “There must be a lot of people living here,” he said to his grandfather.
The old man nodded. “It’s the home cave of one of the major Ulgo tribes,” he replied.
The first disharmonic phrases of the ancient hymn to UL drifted up to them as they neared the other end of the bridge. “I wish they’d find another tune,” Barak muttered sourly. “That one’s starting to get on my nerves.”
“I’ll mention that to the first Ulgo I meet,” Silk told him lightly. “I’m sure they’ll be only too glad to change songs for you.”
“Very funny,” Barak said.
“It probably hasn’t occurred to them that their song isn’t universally admired.”
“Do you mind?” Barak asked acidly.
“They’ve only been singing it for five thousand years now.”
“That’ll do, Silk,” Aunt Pol told the little man.
“Anything you say, great lady,” Silk answered mockingly.