Guardians of the West

by David Eddings

  Polgara spoke to him at some length when he arrived home, shivering and with ice beginning to form up on his clothing and in his hair. Polgara, he noticed, tended to overdramatize things—particularly when an opportunity presented itself for her to speak to someone about his shortcomings. She took one long look at him and immediately fetched a vile-tasting medicine, which she spooned into him liberally. Then she began to pull off his frozen clothing, commenting extensively as she did so. She had an excellent speaking voice and a fine command of language. Her intonations and inflections added whole volumes of meaning to her commentary. On the whole, however, Errand would have preferred a shorter, somewhat less exhaustive discussion of his most recent misadventure—particularly in view of the fact that Belgarath and Durnik were both trying without much success to conceal broad grins as Polgara spoke to him while simultaneously rubbing him down with a large, rough towel.

  ‘Well,’ Durnik observed, ‘at least he won’t need a bath this week.’

  Polgara stopped drying the boy and slowly turned to gaze at her husband. There was nothing really threatening in her expression, but her eyes were frosty. ‘You said something?’ she asked him.

  ‘Uh—no, dear,’ he hastily assured her. ‘Not really.’ He looked at Belgarath a bit uncomfortably, then he rose to his feet. ‘Perhaps I’d better bring in some more firewood,’ he said.

  One of Polgara’s eyebrows went up, and her gaze moved on to her father. ‘Well?’ she said.

  He blinked, his face a study in total innocence.

  Her expression did not change, but the silence became ominous, oppressive.

  ‘Why don’t I give you a hand, Durnik?’ the old man suggested finally, also getting up. Then the two of them went outside, leaving Errand alone with Polgara.

  She turned back to him. ‘You slid all the way down the hill,’ she asked quite calmly, ‘and clear across the meadow?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And then through the woods?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘And then off the bank and into the stream?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he admitted.

  ‘I don’t suppose it occurred to you to roll off the sled before it went over the edge and into the water?’

  Errand was not really a very talkative boy, but he felt that his position in this affair needed a bit of explanation. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I didn’t really think of rolling off—but I don’t think I would have, even if I had thought of it.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation for that.’

  He looked at her earnestly. ‘Everything had gone so splendidly up until then that—well, it just wouldn’t have seemed right to get off, just because a few things started to go wrong.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I see,’ she said at last, her expression grave. ‘Then it was in the nature of a moral decision—this riding the sled all the way into the stream?’

  ‘I suppose you might say that, yes.’

  She looked at him steadily for a moment and then slowly sank her face into her hands. ‘I’m not entirely certain that I have the strength to go through all of this again,’ she said in a tragic voice.

  ‘Through what?’ he asked, slightly alarmed.

  ‘Raising Garion was almost more than I could bear,’ she replied, ‘but not even he could have come up with a more illogical reason for doing something.’ Then she looked at him, laughed fondly, and put her arms about him. ‘Oh, Errand,’ she said, pulling him tightly to her, and everything was all right again.

  Chapter Two

  Belgarath the Sorcerer was a man with many flaws in his character. He had never been fond of physical labor and he was perhaps a bit too fond of dark brown ale. He was occasionally careless about the truth and had a certain grand indifference to some of the finer points of property ownership. The company of ladies of questionable reputation did not particularly offend his sensibilities, and his choice of language very frequently left much to be desired.

  Polgara the Sorceress was a woman of almost inhuman determination and she had spent several thousand years trying to reform her vagrant father, but without much notable success. She persevered, however, in the face of overwhelming odds. Down through the centuries she had fought a valiant rearguard action against his bad habits. She had regretfully surrendered on the points of indolence and shabbiness. She grudgingly gave ground on swearing and lying. She remained adamant, however, even despite repeated defeats, on the points of drunkenness, thievery, and wenching. She felt for some peculiar reason that it was her duty to fight on those issues to the very death.

  Since Belgarath put off his return to his tower in the Vale of Aldur until the following spring, Errand was able to witness at close hand those endless and unbelievably involuted skirmishes between father and daughter with which they filled the periodic quiet spaces in their lives. Polgara’s comments about the lazy old man’s lounging about in her kitchen, soaking up the heat from her fireplace and the well-chilled ale from her stores with almost equal facility, were pointed, and Belgarath’s smooth evasions revealed centuries of highly polished skill. Errand, however, saw past those waspish remarks and blandly flippant replies. The bonds between Belgarath and his daughter were so profound that they went far beyond what others might conceivably understand, and so, over the endless years, they had found it necessary to conceal their boundless love for each other behind this endless façade of contention. This is not to say that Polgara might not have preferred a more upstanding father, but she was not quite as disappointed in him as her observations sometimes indicated.

  They both knew why Belgarath sat out the winter in Poledra’s cottage with his daughter and her husband. Though not one word of the matter had ever passed between them, they knew that the memories the old man had of this house needed to be changed—not erased certainly, for no power on earth could erase Belgarath’s memories of his wife, but rather they needed to be altered slightly so that this thatched cottage might also remind the old man of happy hours spent here, as well as that bleak and terrible day when he had returned to find that his beloved Poledra had died.

  After the snow had been cut away by a week of warm spring rains and the sky had turned blue once again, Belgarath at last decided that it was time to take up his interrupted journey. ‘I don’t really have anything pressing,’ he admitted, ‘but I’d like to look in on Beldin and the twins, and it might be a good time to tidy up my tower. I’ve sort of let that slide over the past few hundred years.’

  ‘If you’d like, we could go along,’ Polgara offered. ‘After all, you did help with the cottage—not enthusiastically, perhaps, but you did help. It only seems right that we help you with cleaning your tower.’

  ‘Thanks all the same, Pol,’ he declined firmly, ‘but your idea of cleaning tends to be a bit too drastic for my taste. Things that might be important later on have a way of winding up on the dust heap when you clean. As long as there’s a clear space somewhere in the center, a room is clean enough for me.’

  ‘Oh, father,’ she said, laughing, ‘you never change.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he replied. He looked thoughtfully over at Errand, who was quietly eating his breakfast. ‘If it’s all right, though,’ he said, ‘I’ll take the boy with me.’

  She gave him a quick look.

  Belgarath shrugged. ‘He’s company and he might enjoy a change of scenery. Besides, you and Durnik haven’t really had a chance to be alone since your wedding day. Call it a belated present if you want.’

  She looked at him. ‘Thank you, father,’ she said simply, and her eyes were suddenly very warm and filled with affection.

  Belgarath looked away, almost as if her look embarrassed him. ‘Did you want your things? From the tower, I mean. You’ve left quite a few trunks and boxes there at one time or another over the years.’

  ‘Why, that’s very nice of you, father.’

  ‘I need the space they’re taking up,’ he said. Then he grinned at her.

  ‘You will watch the boy, wo
n’t you? I know your mind sometimes wanders when you start puttering around in your tower.’

  ‘He’ll be fine with me, Pol,’ the old man assured her.

  And so the following morning Belgarath mounted his horse, and Durnik boosted Errand up behind him. ‘I’ll bring him home in a few weeks,’ Belgarath said. ‘Or at least by midsummer.’ He leaned down, shook Durnik’s hand, and then turned his mount toward the south.

  The air was still cool, although the early spring sunshine was very bright. The scents of stirring growth were in the air, and Errand, riding easily behind Belgarath, could feel Aldur’s presence as they pressed deeper into the Vale. He felt it as a calm and gentle kind of awareness, and it was dominated by an overpowering desire to know. The presence of the God Aldur here in the Vale was not some vague spiritual permeation, but rather was quite sharp, on the very edge of being palpable.

  They moved on down into the Vale, riding at an easy pace through the tall, winter-browned grass. Broad trees dotted the open expanse, lifting their crowns to the sky, holding the tips of their branches, swollen with the urgency of budding leaves, up to receive the gentle kiss of sun-warmed air.

  ‘Well, boy?’ Belgarath said after they had ridden a league or more.

  ‘Where are the towers?’ Errand asked politely.

  ‘A bit farther. How did you know about the towers?’

  ‘You and Polgara spoke of them.’

  ‘Eavesdropping is a very bad habit, Errand.’

  ‘Was it a private conversation?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t eavesdropping, was it?’

  Belgarath turned sharply, looking over his shoulder at the boy riding behind him. ‘That’s a pretty fine distinction for somebody as young as you are. How did you arrive at it?’

  Errand shrugged. ‘It just came to me. Do they always graze here like that?’ He pointed at a dozen or so reddish-brown deer feeding calmly nearby.

  ‘They have done so ever since I can remember. There’s something about Aldur’s presence that keeps animals from molesting each other.’

  They passed a pair of graceful towers linked by a peculiar, almost airy bridge arching between them, and Belgarath told him that they belonged to Beltira and Belkira, the twin sorcerers whose minds were so closely linked that they inevitably completed each others’ sentences. A short while later they rode by a tower so delicately constructed of rose quartz that it seemed almost to float like a pink jewel in the lambent air. This tower, Belgarath told him, belonged to the hunchbacked Beldin, who had surrounded his own ugliness with a beauty so exquisite that it snatched one’s breath away.

  At last they reached Belgarath’s own squat, functional tower and dismounted. ‘Well,’ the old man said, ‘here we are. Let’s go up.’

  The room at the top of the tower was large, round, and incredibly cluttered. As he looked around at it, Belgarath’s eyes took on a defeated look. ‘This is going to take weeks,’ he muttered.

  A great many things in the room attracted Errand’s eye, but he knew that, in Belgarath’s present mood, the old man would not be inclined to show him or explain to him much of anything. He located the fireplace, found a tarnished brass scoop and a short-handled broom, and knelt in front of the cavernous, soot-darkened opening.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Belgarath asked.

  ‘Durnik says that the first thing you should do in a new place is get a spot ready for your fire.’

  ‘Oh, he does, does he?’

  ‘It’s not usually a very big chore, but it gets you started—and once you get started, the rest of the job doesn’t look so big. Durnik’s very wise about things like that. Do you have a pail or a dust bin of some kind?’

  ‘You’re going to insist on cleaning the fireplace?’

  ‘Well—if you don’t mind too much. It is pretty dirty, don’t you think?’

  Belgarath sighed. ‘Pol and Durnik have corrupted you already, boy,’ he said. ‘I tried to save you, but a bad influence like that always wins out in the end.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Errand agreed. ‘Where did you say that pail was?’

  By evening they had cleared a semicircular area around the fireplace, finding in the process a couple of couches, several chairs, and a sturdy table.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have anything to eat stored any-place?’ Errand said wistfully. His stomach told him that it was definitely moving on toward suppertime.

  Belgarath looked up from a parchment scroll he had just fished out from under one of the couches. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Oh yes. I’d almost forgotten. We’ll go visit the twins. They’re bound to have something on the fire.’

  ‘Do they know we’re coming?’

  Belgarath shrugged. ‘That doesn’t really matter, Errand. You must learn that that’s what friends and family are for—to be imposed upon. One of the cardinal rules, if you want to get through life without overexerting yourself, is that, when all else fails, fall back on friends and relations.’

  The twin sorcerers, Beltira and Belkira, were overjoyed to see them, and the ‘something on the fire’ turned out to be a savory stew that was at least as good as one that might have emerged from Polgara’s kitchen. When Errand commented on that, Belgarath looked amused. ‘Who do you think taught her how to cook?’ he asked.

  It was not until several days later, when the cleaning of Belgarath’s tower had progressed to the point where the floor was receiving its first scrubbing in a dozen or more centuries, that Beldin finally stopped by.

  ‘What are you doing, Belgarath?’ the filthy, misshapen hunchback demanded. Beldin was very short, dressed in battered rags, and he was gnarled like an old oak stump. His hair and beard were matted, and twigs and bits of straw clung to him in various places.

  ‘Just a little cleaning,’ Belgarath replied, looking almost embarrassed.

  ‘What for?’ Beldin asked. ‘It’s just going to get dirty again.’ He looked at a number of very old bones lying along the curved wall. ‘What you really ought to do is render down your floor for soup stock.’

  ‘Did you come by to visit or just to be disagreeable?’

  ‘I saw the smoke from your chimney. I wanted to see if anybody was here or if all this litter had just taken fire spontaneously.’

  Errand knew that Belgarath and Beldin were genuinely fond of each other and that this banter between them was one of their favorite forms of entertainment. He continued with the work he was doing even as he listened.

  ‘Would you like some ale?’ Belgarath asked.

  ‘Not if you brewed it,’ Beldin replied ungraciously. ‘You’d think that a man who drinks as much as you do would have learned how to make decent ale by now.’

  ‘That last batch wasn’t so bad,’ Belgarath protested.

  ‘I’ve run across stump water that tasted better.’

  ‘Quit worrying. I borrowed this keg from the twins.’

  ‘Did they know you were borrowing it?’

  ‘What difference does that make? We all share everything anyway.’

  One of Beldin’s shaggy eyebrows raised. ‘They share their food and drink, and you share your appetite and thirst. I suppose that works out.’

  ‘Of course it does.’ Belgarath turned with a slightly pained look. ‘Errand,’ he said, ‘do you have to do that?’

  Errand looked up from the flagstones he was industriously scrubbing. ‘Does it bother you?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it bothers me. Don’t you know that it’s terribly impolite to keep working like that when I’m resting?’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that. How long do you expect that you’ll be resting?’

  ‘Just put the brush down, Errand,’ Belgarath told him. ‘That patch of floor has been dirty for a dozen centuries at least. Another day or so isn’t going to matter all that much.’

  ‘He’s a great deal like Belgarion was, isn’t he?’ Beldin said, sprawling in one of the chairs near the fire.

  ‘It probably has something
to do with Polgara’s influence,’ Belgarath agreed, drawing two tankards of ale from the keg. ‘She leaves marks on every boy she meets. I try to moderate the effects of her prejudices as much as possible, though.’ He looked gravely at Errand. ‘I think this one is smarter than Garion was, but he doesn’t seem to have Garion’s sense of adventure—and he’s just a bit too well behaved.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to work on that.’

  Belgarath settled himself into another chair and pushed his feet out toward the fire. ‘What have you been up to?’ he asked the hunchback. ‘I haven’t seen you since Garion’s wedding.’

  ‘I thought that somebody ought to keep an eye on the Angaraks,’ Beldin replied, scratching vigorously at one armpit.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘That’s an irritating habit you’ve picked up somewhere. What are the Angaraks doing?’

  ‘The Murgos are still all in little pieces about the death of Taur Urgas.’ Beldin laughed. ‘He was completely mad, but he kept them unified—until Cho-Hag ran his sabre through him. His son Urgit isn’t much of a king. He’s barely able to get their attention. The western Grolims can’t even function any more. Ctuchik’s dead, and Torak’s dead, and about all the Grolims can do now is stare at the walls and count their fingers. My guess is that Murgo society is right on the verge of collapsing entirely.’

  ‘Good. Getting rid of the Murgos has been one of my main goals in life.’

  ‘I wouldn’t start gloating just yet,’ Beldin said sourly. ‘After word reached ’Zakath that Belgarion had killed Torak, he threw off all pretenses about the fiction of Angarak unity and marched his Malloreans on Rak Goska. He didn’t leave much of it standing.’

  Belgarath shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a very attractive city anyway.’

  ‘It’s a lot less attractive now. ’Zakath seems to think that crucifixions and impalings are educational. He decorated what was left of the walls of Rak Goska with object lessons. Every time he goes any place in Cthol Murgos, he leaves a trail of occupied crosses and stakes behind him.’