Guardians of the West

by David Eddings

Durnik nodded gravely. ‘Just a bit,’ he said.

  Hettar made a rueful face and then gave Errand a peculiar little wink. Errand and Hettar had always got on well together, probably because neither of them felt any pressing need to fill up the silence with random conversation.

  ‘I’ll be leaving you now,’ Brendig said. ‘It’s been a pleasant journey.’ He bowed to Polgara and nodded to Hettar. And then, with his detachment of troops jingling along behind him, he rode back toward Muros.

  ‘I’m going to have words with Fulrach about this,’ Belgarath said darkly to Hettar, ‘and with your father, too.’

  ‘It’s one of the prices of immortality, Belgarath,’ Hettar said blandly. ‘People tend to respect you—even when you’d rather they didn’t. Shall we go?’

  The mountains of eastern Sendaria were not so high as to make travel across them unpleasant. With the fierce-looking Algar clansmen riding both to the front and to the rear of the wagon, they traveled at an easy pace along the Great North Road through the deep green forests and beside tumbling mountain streams. At one point, when they had stopped to rest their horses, Durnik stepped down from the wagon and walked to the edge of the road to gaze speculatively at a deep pool at the foot of a small, churning waterfall.

  ‘Are we in any particular hurry?’ he asked Belgarath.

  ‘Not really. Why?’

  ‘I just thought that this might be a pleasant place to stop for our noon meal,’ the smith said artlessly.

  Belgarath looked around. ‘If you want, I suppose it’s all right.’

  ‘Good.’ With that same slightly absent look on his face, Durnik went to the wagon and took a coil of thin, waxed cord from one of the bags. He carefully tied a hook decorated with some brightly colored yarn to one end of the cord and began looking about for a slender, springy sapling. Five minutes later he was standing on a boulder that jutted out into the pool, making long casts into the turbulent water just at the foot of the falls.

  Errand drifted down to the edge of the stream to watch. Durnik was casting into the center of the main flow of the current so that the swiftly moving green water pulled his lure down deep into the pool.

  After about a half an hour, Polgara called to them. ‘Errand, Durnik, your lunch is ready.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Durnik replied absently. ‘In a moment.’

  Errand obediently went back up to the wagon, though his eyes yearned back toward the rushing water. Polgara gave him one brief, understanding look, then laid the meat and cheese she had sliced for him on a piece of bread so that he could carry his lunch back to the stream bank.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said simply.

  Durnik continued his fishing, his face still intent. Polgara came down to the water’s edge. ‘Durnik,’ she called. ‘Lunch.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the water. ‘I’m coming.’ He made another cast.

  Polgara sighed. ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘I suppose every man needs at least one vice.’

  After about another half-hour, Durnik looked baffled. He jumped from his boulder to the stream bank and stood scratching his head and staring in perplexity at the swirling water. ‘I know they’re in there,’ he said to Errand. ‘I can almost feel them.’

  ‘Here,’ Errand said, pointing down at the deep, slow-moving eddy near the bank.

  ‘I think they’d be farther out, Errand,’ Durnik replied doubtfully.

  ‘Here,’ Errand repeated, pointing again.

  Durnik shrugged. ‘If you say so,’ he said dubiously, flipping his lure out into the eddy. ‘I still think they’d be out in the main current, though.’

  And then his pole bent sharply into a tense, quivering bow. He caught four trout in rapid succession, thick, heavy-bodied trout with silvery, speckled sides and curved jaws filled with needlelike teeth.

  ‘Why did it take you so long to find the right spot?’ Belgarath asked later that afternoon when they were back on the highway.

  ‘You have to work that kind of pool methodically, Belgarath,’ Durnik explained. ‘You start at one side and work your way across, cast by cast.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s the only way to be really sure you’ve covered it all.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I was fairly sure where they were lying, though.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘It was just that I wanted to do it the right way. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Perfectly,’ Belgarath said gravely.

  After they had passed through the mountains, they turned south, riding through the vast grasslands of the Algarian plain where herds of cattle and horses grazed in that huge green sea of grass that rippled and swayed under the steady easterly breeze. Although Hettar strongly urged them to stop by the Stronghold of the Algar clans, Polgara declined. ‘Tell Cho-Hag and Silar that we may visit later,’ she said, ‘but we really should get to the Vale. It’s probably going to take most of the summer to make my mother’s house habitable again.’

  Hettar nodded gravely and then waved a brief salute as he and his clansmen turned eastward and rode off across the rolling grasslands toward the mountainlike Stronghold of his father, Cho-Hag, Chief of the Clan-Chiefs of Algaria.

  The cottage that had belonged to Polgara’s mother lay in a valley among the rolling hills marking the northern edge of the Vale of Aldur. A sparkling stream flowed through the sheltered hollow, and there were woods, birch inter-mixed with cedar, stretching along the valley floor. The cottage was constructed of fieldstone, gray, russet, and earthy-brown, all neatly fitted together. It was a broad, low building, considerably larger than the word ‘cottage’ suggested. It had not been occupied for well over three thousand years, and the thatching and the doors and window frames had long since surrendered to the elements, leaving the shell of the house standing, bramble-filled and unroofed to the sky. There was, nonetheless, a peculiar sense of waiting about it, as if Poledra, the woman who had lived here, had instilled in the very stones the knowledge that one day her daughter would return.

  They arrived in the middle of a golden afternoon, and Errand, lulled by a creaking wheel, had drifted into a doze. When the wagon stopped, Polgara shook him gently awake. ‘Errand,’ she said, ‘we’re here.’ He opened his eyes and looked for the first time at the place he would forever call home. He saw the weathered shell of the cottage nestled in the tall green grass. He saw the woods beyond, with the white trunks of the birch trees standing out among the dark green cedars, and he saw the stream. The place had enormous possibilities. He realized that at once. The stream, of course, was perfect for sailing toy boats, for skipping stones, and, in the event of failing inspiration, for falling into. Several of the trees appeared to have been specifically designed for climbing, and one huge, white old birch overhanging the stream promised the exhilarating combination of climbing a tree and falling into the water, all at one time.

  The land upon which their wagon had stopped was a long hill sloping gently down toward the cottage. It was the kind of a hill down which a boy could run on a day when the sky was a deep blue dotted with dandelion-puff clouds racing in the breeze. The knee-high grass would be lush in the sun, and the turf damply firm underfoot; the rush of sweet-smelling air as one ran down that long slope would be intoxicating.

  And then he felt quite keenly a sense of deep sorrow, a sorrow which had endured unchanged for century upon century, and he turned to look at Belgarath’s weathered face and the single tear coursing down the old man’s furrowed cheek, to disappear in his close-cropped white beard.

  In spite of Belgarath’s sorrow for his lost wife, Errand looked out at this small, green valley with its trees and its stream and its lush meadow with a deep and abiding contentment. He smiled and said, ‘Home,’ trying the word and liking the sound of it.

  Polgara looked gravely into his face. Her eyes were very large and luminous, and their color changed with her mood, ranging from a light blue so pale as to be virtually gray to a deep lavender. ‘Yes, Errand
,’ she replied in her vibrant voice. ‘Home.’ Then she put her arms about him to hold him softly, and there was in that gentle embrace all the yearning toward this place which had filled her down through the weary centuries that she and her father had labored at their endless task.

  Durnik the smith looked thoughtfully at the hollow spread out below in the warm sunshine, considering, planning, arranging, and rearranging things in his mind. ‘It’s going to take a while to get everything the way we want it, Pol,’ he said to his bride.

  ‘We have all the time in the world, Durnik,’ Polgara replied with a gentle smile.

  ‘I’ll help you unload the wagon and set up your tents,’ Belgarath said, scratching absently at his beard. ‘Then tomorrow I suppose I ought to go on down into the Vale—have a talk with Beldin and the twins, look in on my tower—that sort of thing.’

  Polgara gave him a long, steady look. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry to leave, father,’ she told him. ‘You talked with Beldin just last month at Riva and on any number of occasions you’ve gone for decades without visiting your tower. I’ve noticed that every time there’s work to be done, you suddenly have pressing business someplace else.’

  Belgarath’s face assumed an expression of injured innocence. ‘Why, Polgara—’ he started to protest.

  ‘That won’t work either, father,’ she told him crisply. ‘A few weeks—or a month or two—of helping Durnik isn’t going to injure you permanently. Or did you plan to leave us abandoned to the winter snows?’

  Belgarath looked with some distaste at the shell of the house standing at the foot of the hill, with the hours of toil it was going to take to make it livable stamped all over it. ‘Why, of course, Pol,’ he said somewhat too quickly. ‘I’d be happy to stay and lend a hand.’

  ‘I knew we could depend on you, father,’ she said sweetly.

  Belgarath looked critically at Durnik, trying to assess the strength of the smith’s convictions. ‘I hope you weren’t intending to do everything by hand,’ he said tentatively. ‘What I mean is—well, we do have certain alternatives available to us, you know.’

  Durnik looked a little uncomfortable, his plain, honest face touched with the faintest hint of a disapproving expression. ‘I—uh—I really don’t know, Belgarath,’ he said dubiously. ‘I don’t believe that I’d really feel right about that. If I do it by hand, then I’ll know that it’s been done properly. I’m not all that comfortable with this other way of doing things yet. Somehow it seems like cheating—if you get what I mean.’

  Belgarath sighed. ‘Somehow I was afraid you might look at it that way.’ He shook his head and squared his shoulders. ‘All right, let’s go on down there and get started.’

  It took about a month to dig the accumulated debris of three eons out of the corners of the house, to reframe the doors and windows and to re-beam and thatch the roof. It would have taken twice as long had Belgarath not cheated outrageously each time Durnik’s back was turned. All manner of tedious tasks somehow performed themselves whenever the smith was not around. Once, for example, Durnik took out the wagon to bring in more timbers; as soon as he was out of sight, Belgarath tossed aside the adze with which he had been laboriously squaring off a beam, looked gravely at Errand, and reached inside his jerkin for the earthenware jar of ale he had filched from Polgara’s stores. He took a long drink and then he directed the force of his will at the stubborn beam and released it with a single muttered word. An absolute blizzard of white wood chips went flying in all directions. When the beam was neatly squared, the old man looked at Errand with a self-satisfied smirk and winked impishly. With a perfectly straight face, Errand winked back.

  The boy had seen sorcery performed before. Zedar the Apostate had been a sorcerer, and so had Ctuchik. Indeed, throughout almost his entire life the boy had been in the care of people with that peculiar gift. Not one of the others, however, had that air of casual competence, that verve, with which Belgarath performed his art. The old man’s offhand way of making the impossible seem so easy that it was hardly worth mentioning was the mark of the true virtuoso. Errand knew how it was done, of course. No one can possibly spend that much time with assorted sorcerers without picking up the theory, at least. The ease with which Belgarath made things happen almost tempted him to try it himself; but whenever he considered the idea, he realized that there wasn’t really anything he wanted to do that badly.

  The things the boy learned from Durnik, while more commonplace, were nonetheless very nearly as profound. Errand saw almost immediately that there was virtually nothing the smith could not do with his hands. He was familiar with almost every known tool. He could work in wood and stone as readily as in iron and brass. He could build a house or a chair or a bed with equal facility. As Errand watched closely, he picked up the hundreds of little tricks and knacks that separated the craftsman from the bumbling amateur.

  Polgara dealt with all domestic matters. The tents in which they slept while the cottage was being readied were as neatly kept as any house. The bedding was aired daily, meals were prepared, and laundry was hung out to dry. On one occasion Belgarath, who had come to beg or steal more ale, looked critically at his daughter, who was humming contentedly to herself as she cut up some recently cooked-down soap. ‘Pol,’ he said acidly, ‘you’re the most powerful woman in the world. You’ve got more titles than you can count, and there’s not a king in the world who doesn’t bow to you automatically. Can you tell me exactly why you find it necessary to make soap that way? It’s hard, hot work, and the smell is awful.’

  She looked calmly at her father. ‘I’ve spent thousands of years being the most powerful woman in the world, Old Wolf,’ she replied. ‘Kings have been bowing to me for centuries, and I’ve lost track of all the titles. This is, however, the very first time I’ve ever been married. You and I were always too busy for that. I’ve wanted to be married, though, and I’ve spent my whole life practicing. I know everything a good wife needs to know and I can do everything a good wife needs to do. Please don’t criticize me, father, and please don’t interfere. I’ve never been so happy in my life.’

  ‘Making soap?’

  ‘That’s part of it, yes.’

  ‘It’s such a waste of time,’ he said. He gestured negligently, and a cake of soap that had not been there before joined the ones she had already made.

  ‘Father!’ she said, stamping her foot. ‘You stop that this minute!’

  He picked up two cakes of soap, one his and one hers. ‘Can you really tell me the difference between them, Pol?’

  ‘Mine was made with love; yours is just a trick.’

  ‘It’s still going to get clothes just as clean.’

  ‘Not mine, it won’t,’ she said, taking the cake of soap out of his hand. She held it up, balanced neatly on her palm. Then she blew on it with a slight puff, and it instantly vanished.

  ‘That’s a little silly, Pol,’ he told her.

  ‘Being silly at times runs in my family, I think,’ she replied calmly. ‘Just go back to your own work, father, and leave me to mine.’

  ‘You’re almost as bad as Durnik is,’ he accused her.

  She nodded with a contented smile. ‘I know. That’s probably why I married him.’

  ‘Come along, Errand,’ Belgarath said to the boy as he turned to leave. ‘This sort of thing might be contagious, and I wouldn’t want you to catch it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘One other thing, father. Stay out of my stores. If you want a jar of ale, ask me.’

  Assuming a lofty expression, Belgarath strode away without answering. As soon as they were around the corner, however, Errand pulled a brown jar from inside his tunic and wordlessly gave it to the old man.

  ‘Excellent, my boy.’ Belgarath grinned. ‘You see how easy it is, once you get the hang of it?’

  Throughout that summer and well into the long, golden autumn which followed it, the four of them worked to make the cottage habitable and weathertight for the winter. Errand did what he could to help, t
hough more often than not his help consisted primarily of providing company while keeping out from underfoot.

  When the snows came, the entire world seemed somehow to change. More than ever before, the isolated cottage became a warm, safe haven. The central room, where they took their meals and where they all sat in the long evenings, faced a huge stone fireplace that provided both warmth and light. Errand, whose time was spent out of doors on all but the most bitterly cold days, was usually drowsy during those golden, firelit hours between supper and bedtime and he often lay on a fur rug before the fire and gazed into the dancing flames until his eyes slowly closed. And later he waked in the cool darkness of his own room with warm, down-filled coverlets tucked up under his chin and he knew that Polgara had quietly carried him in and put him to bed. And he sighed happily and went back to sleep.

  Durnik made him a sled, of course, and the long hill which ran down into the valley was perfect for sledding. The snow was not deep enough to make the runners of the sled bog down, and Errand was able to coast amazing distances across the meadow at the bottom of the hill because of the terrific momentum built up as he slid down the slope.

  The absolute cap of the entire sledding season came late one bitingly cold afternoon, just after the sun had dropped into a bank of purple clouds on the western horizon and the sky had turned to a pale, icy turquoise. Errand trudged up the hill through the frozen snow, pulling his sled behind him. When he reached the top, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The thatched cottage below nestled in the surrounding snowbanks with the light from its windows golden and the column of pale blue smoke rising from its chimney as straight as an arrow into the dead calm air.

  Errand smiled, lay down on his sled, and pushed off. The combination of circumstances was perfect for sledding. There was not even a breeze to impede his rapid descent, and he gathered astounding speed on his way down the hill. He flew across the meadow and in among the trees. The white-barked birches and dark, shadowy cedars flashed by as he sped through the woods. He might have gone even farther had the stream not been in his way. And even that conclusion to the ride was fairly exciting, since the bank of the stream was several feet high and Errand and his sled sailed out over the dark water in a long, graceful arc which ended abruptly in a spectacular, icy splash.