ready to take on the Malloreon. Most of what we needed was
already in place. We had our main characters, our magic
thingamajig, and our cultures of the western kingdoms. Now we needed a
new ‘Bad-Guy’ (or Girl), and a new quest. (I’d also had enough of
adolescents by now, and I wanted to see if Garion and Ce’Nedra
could function as adults.) Oh, by the way, if anyone out there ever
calls those two ‘teenagers’, I’ll turn them into a toad. ‘Teenager’ is a
linguistic abomination devised by the advertising agencies and the
social worker industry to obscure an unpleasant reality. The proper
term is ‘adolescent’, and the only good thing about it is that
everybody gets over it – eventually. (Or most of them, anyway.)
We extended the geography in our new map, and then it was time
to correct the injustice we’d done to the Angaraks. Just because
Germany produced Hitler doesn’t alter the fact that Germany also
produced Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and Niebuhn No race or
nationality has a monopoly on either good or evil. Perfection in either
direction simply doesn’t exist in the real world, and it doesn’t exist
in our world either. On one occasion Belgarath simplified the whole
thing by discarding theology entirely and identifying the
contending parties as ‘them and us’. You can’t get much more to the point
than that. We humanized the Angaraks by humanizing Zakath and
by stressing the significance of Eriond. The Christ-like quality of
Eriond was quite deliberate. Torak was a mistake. Eriond was the
original ‘Intent of the Universe’. (Deep, huh?)
The tiresome History of the Angarak Kingdoms was handed off to
the scholars at the University of Melcene, who are just as stuffy and
wrong-headed as their counterparts at the University of Tol Honeth.
It worked for us in the Belgariad, so it was probably going to work
just as well in the Malloreon, (If it ain’t busted; don’t fix it), and it
worked again. Then we substituted The Mallorean Gospels for The
Holy Books in the Belgariad Preliminaries. The intent was the same.
our overall thesis was that there are two worlds running side by
side – the ordinary’ mundane world, and the theological magic
world. When they start to overlap, all hell breaks loose, and you’ve
got story. You’re neck-deep in story. Did you want to summarize the
twentieth century? Try that as a starting point.
To get ‘story’, we were obliged to become Manichees, mainta’m’mg
that good and evil are evenly matched. If God is all-powerful, why
are we so worried about the Devil? When the medieval Church
declared Manicheism to be a heresy, she squirmed a lot, but never
did answer that specific question. I won’t either.
We also added a note of Existentialism by forcing Cyradis, acting
for all of mankind, to make the final choice between good and evil. It
makes a good story but it probably shouldn’t be accepted as the
basis for a system of personal belief, since it might get you into a lot
of trouble. If the Pope doesn’t get on your case, the Archbishop of
Canterbury probably will.
The Malloreon Preliminaries conclude with King Anheg’s
personal diary, which sort of followed our outline for Book One of
the Malloreon. It gives us a condensed chronology, and that’s always
useful.
As with the Preliminaries to the Belgariad, these Malloreon
Prelims had quite a few dead-ends which we discarded during the
actual writing. One of the dangers of epic fantasy lies in its
proclivity to wander off into the bushes. We have what appears to be the
gabbiest of all possible fiction forms, but it requires iron discipline.
The writer absolutely must stick to the story-line and deviate only
when an idea or character will improve the overall product. I can’t
verify this, but I have heard that there was a medieval romance that
was twenty-five thousand pages long!! That’s an entire library all by
itself. I suspect that if you were to give a contemporary fantasist free
rein, he might take a shot at that just to get his name in the Guinness
Book of Records.
All right, push bravely on. We’ll talk again later.
A CURSORY HISTORY OF THE
ANCARAK KINGDOMS
Prepared by the History Department
of the University of Melcene
Tradition, though not always reliable, places the ancestral home
of the Angaraks in the southern latitudes somewhere off the south
coast of present-day Dalasia. In that prehistoric era, when Angarak
and Alorn lived in peace, the favored races of mankind inhabited
contiguous areas in a pleasant, fertile basin which was forever
submerged by the cataclysmic event known as ‘The Cracking of the
World’. It is not the purpose of this work to dwell upon the
theological implications of that event, but rather to examine the course of
the history of the Angaraks in the centuries which followed.
The so-called ‘Cracking of the World’ appears in fact to have been
a splitting of the crust of the primeval proto-continent, and its effects
were immediately disastrous. The plasmic magma upon which the
great land-mass floated immediately began to extrude itself into that
vast split and to force the now-separated continental plates apart.
When the waters of the southern ocean rushed into the resulting gap
and inundated the rising magma, a continuous violent explosion
ripped from one end of the vast fault to the other, forcing the plates
even farther apart and setting off a tremendous, rolling earthquake
which soon encompassed the entire globe.
*This is probably a geological impossibility’ Volcanoes do erupt under the oceans of this
world, and that does not produce thermonuclear detonations.
Entire mountain ranges
quite literally crumbled into rubble, and colossal tidal waves raced
across the oceans of the world, forever altering coastlines a half a
planet away. The Sea of the East grew daily wider as the elemental
violence at its floor rudely shouldered the two continental plates
farther and farther apart. The explosive separation of the continents
appears to have continued for decades until it gradually subsided
and the two great landmasses stabilized in more or less their present
location. The world which emerged from this catastrophe was almost
totally unlike the world which had previously existed.
During this vast upheaval, the Angaraks retreated northeasterly
before the steadily encroaching sea, and they ultimately sought the
safety of the higher ground of the Dalasian Mountains in West
Central Mallorea. Once the movement of the continental plates had
subsided, however, the Angaraks found that the unstable weather
generated by the newly-formed Sea of the East made the Dalasian
Mountains too inhospitable a place for permanent residence, and
they migrated north into the reaches of what is now called Ancient
Mallorea.
NOTE: When speaking of this era, some confusion is possible. Modern
Mallorea encompasses the entire continent, whereas Ancient Mallorea
was limited to the northwestern segment of the land mass and was
bordered on the south by Dalasia and on the east by Karanda. It is in
part the purpose of this study to trace the expansion of the Angaraks
which ultimately led to their domination of all of Mallorea.
During the troubled times which accompanied the migration, the
presence of Torak, Dragon God of Angarak, was scarcely felt.
Although he had previously dominated every facet of Angarak life,
the mutilation inflicted upon him by CTHRAG-YASKA (which men
in the west call the Orb of Aldur) caused hhnhim such unbearable
suffering that he was no longer able to function in his traditional
capacity as ‘Kal’, King and God. The Grolim priesthood,
demoralized by the sudden incapacity of Torak, was unable to fill the
vacuum, and the leadership of Angarak fell by default into the
hands of the military commanders. Thus it was that the emerging
nation of the Angarak people was administered from the military
headquarters at Mal Zeth. By the time that the Grolims recovered,
they discovered that the military had established de facto rule of all
of Angarak. Shaking off their shock-induced paralysis, the Grolims
set up an opposing center of power at Mal Yaska at the southern tip
of the Karandese Mountains. Had matters remained so, inevitably
there would have been a confrontation between the military and the
priesthood, which in all probability would have destroyed angarak
in the convulsions of civil war.
. It was at this point, however, that Torak roused himself
sufficiently to reassert his authority’ During the period of his illness
(perhaps a century or so) pthe military had become dominant in
‘Angarak society, and much to the chagrin of the Grolim priesthood,
..the awakening God made no effort to re-establish their ascendancy.
Instead of establishing himself at either Mal Zeth or at the
ecclesiastical capital at Mal Yaska, however, Torak marched northwest to
establish the holy city at Cthol Mishrak on the northern edge of the
,District of Camat. It should be pointed out here that the religious
,writings of the period do not reveal the entire story. The Book of Torak
states that the Dragon God took his people to Cthol Mishrak and