Garion pulled his eyes off the fascinatingly compelling piece of wood. “That’s a cruel sort of thing to do to a child.”
“I had to do something,” Wolf answered. “She had a penetrating voice as a child. Beldaran was a quiet, happy little girl, but your Aunt never seemed satisfied.”
“Beldaran?”
“Your Aunt’s twin sister.” The old man’s voice trailed off, and he looked sadly out of one of the windows for a few moments. Finally he sighed and turned back to the round room. “I suppose I ought to clean this up a bit,” he said, looking around at the dust and litter.
“Let me help,” Garion offered.
“Just be careful not to break anything,” the old man warned. “Some of those things took me centuries to make.” He began moving around the chamber, picking things up and setting them down again, blowing now and then on them to clear away a bit of the dust. His efforts didn’t really seem to be getting anywhere.
Finally he stopped, staring at a low, rough-looking chair with the rail along its back, scarred and gashed as if it had been continually grasped by strong claws. He sighed again.
“What’s wrong?” Garion asked.
“Poledra’s chair,” Wolf said. “-My wife. She used to perch there and watch me – sometimes for years on end.”
“Perch?”
“She was fond of the shape of the owl.”
“Oh.” Garion had somehow never thought of the old man as ever having been married, although he obviously had to have been at some time, since Aunt Pol and her twin sister were his daughters. The shadowy wife’s affinity for owls, however, explained Aunt Pol’s own preference for that shape. The two women, Poledra and Beldaran, were involved rather intimately in his own background, he realized, but quite irrationally he resented them. They had shared a part of the lives of his Aunt and his grandfather that he would never – could never know.
The old man moved a parchment and picked up a peculiar-looking device with a sighting glass in one end of it. “I thought I’d lost you,” he told the device, touching it with a familiar fondness. “You’ve been under that parchment all this time.”
“What is it?” Garion asked him.
“A thing I made when I was trying to discover the reason for mountains.”
“The reason?”
“Everything has a reason.” Wolf raised the instrument. “You see, what you do is-” He broke off and laid the device back on the table. “It’s much too complicated to explain. I’m not even sure if I remember exactly how to use it myself. I haven’t touched it since before Belzedar came to the Vale. When he arrived, I had to lay my studies aside to train him.” He looked around at the dust and clutter. “This is useless,” he said. “The dust will just come back anyway.”
“Were you alone here before Belzedar came?”
“My Master was here. That’s his tower over there.” Wolf pointed through the north window at a tall, slender stone structure about a mile away.
“Was he really here?” Garion asked. “I mean, not just his spirit?”
“No. He was really here. That was before the Gods departed.”
“Did you live here always?”
“No. I came like a thief, looking for something to steal – well, that’s not actually true, I suppose. I was about your age when I came here, and I was dying at the time.”
“Dying?” Garion was startled.
“Freezing to death. I’d left the village I was born in the year before after my mother died – and spent my first winter in the camp of the Godless Ones. They were very old by then.”
“Godless Ones?”
“Ulgos – or rather the ones who decided not to follow Gorim to Prolgu. They stopped having children after that, so they were happy to take me in. I couldn’t understand their language at the time, and all their pampering got on my nerves, so I ran away in the spring. I was on my way back the next fall, but I got caught in an early snowstorm not far from here. I lay down against the side of my Master’s tower to die – I didn’t know it was a tower at first. With all the snow swirling around, it just looked like a pile of rock. As I recall, I was feeling rather sorry for myself at the time.”
“I can imagine.” Garion shivered at the thought of being alone and dying.
“I was sniveling a bit, and the sound disturbed my Master. He let me in – probably more to quiet me than for any other reason. As soon as I got inside, I started looking for things to steal.”
“But he made you a sorcerer instead.”
“No. He made me a servant – a slave. I worked for him for five years before I even found out who he was. Sometimes I think I hated him, but I had to do what he told me to – I didn’t really know why. The last straw came when he told me to move a big rock out of his way. I tried with all my strength, but I couldn’t budge it. Finally I got angry enough to move it with my mind instead of my back. That’s what he’d been waiting for, of course. After that we got along better. He changed my name from Garath to Belgarath, and he made me his pupil.”
“And his disciple?”
“That took a little longer. I had a lot to learn. I was examining the reason that certain stars fell at the time he first called me his discipleand he was working on a round, gray stone he’d picked up by the riverbank.”
“Did you ever discover the reason – that stars fall, I mean?”
“Yes. It’s not all that complicated. It has to do with balance. The world needs a certain weight to keep it turning. When it starts to slow down, a few nearby stars fall. Their weight makes up the difference.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Neither did I – not for quite some time.”
“The stone you mentioned. Was it-”
“The Orb,” Wolf confirmed. “Just an ordinary rock until my Master touched it. Anyway, I learned the secret of the Will and the Word which isn’t really that much of a secret, after all. It’s there in all of us or did I say that before?”
“1 think so.”
“Probably so. I tend to repeat myself.” The old man picked up a roll of parchment and glanced at it, then laid it aside again. “So much that I started and haven’t finished.” He sighed.
“Grandfather?”
“Yes, Garion?”
“This – thing of ours – how much can you actually do with it?”
“That depends on your mind, Garion. The complexity of it lies in the complexity of the mind that puts it to use. Quite obviously, it can’t do something that can’t be imagined by the mind that focuses it. That was the purpose of our studies – to expand our minds so that we could use the power more fully.”
“Everybody’s mind is different, though.” Garion was struggling toward an idea.
” Yes.”
“Wouldn’t that mean that – this thing-” He shied away from the word “power.” “What I mean is, is it different? Sometimes you do things, and other times you have Aunt Pol do them.”
Wolf nodded. “It’s different in each one of us. There are certain things we can all do. We can all move things, for example.”
“Aunt Pol called it trans-” Garion hesitated, not remembering the word.
“Translocation,” Wolf supplied. “Moving something from one place to another. It’s the simplest thing you can do – usually the thing you do first – and it makes the most noise.”
“That’s what she told me.” Garion remembered the slave he had jerked from the river at Sthiss Tor-the slave who had died.
“Polgara can do things that I can’t,” Wolf continued. “Not because she’s any stronger than I am, but because she thinks differently than I do. We’re not sure how much you can do yet, because we don’t know exactly how your mind works. You seem to be able to do certain things quite easily that I wouldn’t even attempt. Maybe it’s because you don’t realize how difficult they are.”
“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”
The old man looked at him. “Perhaps you don’t, at that. Remember the crazy monk who tried to attack you in that village in northern Tolnedra just after we left Arendia?”
Garion nodded.
“You cured his madness. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that in the instant you cured him, you had to understand fully the nature of his insanity. That’s an extremely difficult thing, and you did it without even thinking about it. And then, of course, there was the colt.”
Garion glanced down through the window at the little horse friskily running through the field surrounding the tower.