The story had been greatly embellished, of course. Any time there's a miracle involved, you can trust a priest to get creative. Since their enhancement of the bare bones of the story elevated me to near Godhood, I decided not to correct them. A reputation of that kind can be useful now and then. The white robe the priests had given me to replace the dirty rags I'd been wearing gave me a dramatic appearance, and I cut myself a long staff to fill out the characterization. I didn't plan to stay in Vo Wacune, and if I wanted the cooperation of the priesthood in the various towns I'd pass through, I was going to have to dress the part of a mighty sorcerer. It was pure charlatanism, of course, but it avoided arguments and long explanations.
I spent a month or so in the temple of Chaldan in Vo Wacune, and then I hiked to Vo Astur to see what the Asturians were up to--no good, as it turned out, but this was Arendia, after all. The Asturians held the balance of power during the long, mournful years of the Arendish civil wars, and they'd change sides at the drop of a hat.
Frankly, the Arendish civil wars bored me. I wasn't interested in the spurious grievances the Arends were constantly inventing to justify atrocities they were going to commit anyway. I went to Asturia because Asturia had a seacoast and Wacune didn't. The last thing I'd done before I left Cherek and his sons had been to break the Kingdom of Aloria all to pieces, and I was moderately curious about how it was working out.
Vo Astur was situated on the south bank of the Astur River, and Alorn ships frequently sailed upriver to call there. I stopped by the temple, and the priests directed me to several river-front taverns where I might reasonably expect to find Alorn sailors. I wasn't happy about the prospect of testing my willpower in a tavern, but there was no help for it.
If you want to talk to an Alorn, you're going to have to go where the beer is.
As luck had it, I came across a burly Alorn sea captain in the second tavern I visited. His name was Haknar, and he'd sailed down to Arendia from Val Alorn. I introduced myself, and the white robe and staff helped to convince him that I was telling the truth. He offered to buy me a tankard or six of Arendish ale, but I politely declined. I didn't want to get started on that again.
"How are the boats working out?" I asked him.
"Ships," he corrected. Sailors always make that distinction.
"They're fast," he conceded, "but you have to pay close attention to what you're doing when the wind comes up. King Cherek told me that you designed them."
"I had a little help," I replied modestly.
"Aldur gave me the basic plan. How is Cherek?"
"A little mournful, really. I think he misses his sons."
"It couldn't be helped. We had to protect the Orb. How are the boys doing in their new kingdoms?"
"They're getting by, I guess. I think you rushed them, Belgarath.
They were a little young when you sent them off into the wilderness like that. Dras calls his kingdom Drasnia, and he's starting to build a city at a place he calls Boktor. I think he misses Val Alorn. Algar calls his kingdom Algaria, and he isn't building cities. He's got his people rounding up horses and cattle instead."
I nodded. Algar probably wouldn't have been interested in cities.
"What's Riva doing?" I asked.
"He's definitely building a city. The word "fort" would probably come closer, though. Have you ever been to the Isle of the Winds?"
"Once," I said.
"Then you know where the beach is. That valley that runs down out of the mountains sort of stair-steps its way down to the beach. Riva had his people build stone walls across the front of each step. Now he's got them building their houses up against the backs of those walls. If somebody tried to attack the place, he'd have to fight his way over a dozen of those walls. That could get very expensive. I stopped by the Isle on my way here. They're making good progress."
"Has Riva started building his Citadel yet?"
"He's got it laid out, but he wants to get his houses built first. You know how Riva is. He's awfully young, but he does look out for his people."
"He'll make a good king, then."
"Probably so. His subjects are a little worried, though. They really want him to get married, but he keeps putting them off. He seems to have somebody special in mind."
"He does. He dreamed about her once."
"You can't marry a dream, Belgarath. The Rivan throne has to have an heir, and that's something a man can't do all by himself."
"He's still young, Haknar. Sooner or later some girl's going to take his eye. If it starts to look like it's going to be a problem, I'll go to the Isle and have a talk with him. Is Cherek still calling what's left of his kingdom Aloria?"
"No. Aloria's gone now. That took a lot of the heart out of Bear-shoulders. He hasn't even gotten around to putting a name to that peninsula you left him. The rest of us just call it ""Cherek" and let it go at that.
That's whenever he lets us come home. We spend a lot of time at sea patrolling the Sea of the Winds. Cherek's very free with titles of nobility, but there's a large fishhook attached to them. I was about half drunk when he made me Baron Haknar. It wasn't until I sobered up that I realized that I'd volunteered to spend three months out of every year for the rest of my life sailing around in circles up in the Sea of the Winds. It's really unpleasant up there, Belgarath--particularly in the winter. I get ice a half-foot thick on my sails every night. My deck-hands talk about the
"Haknar jig." That's when the morning breeze shakes the ice off the sails and drops it down on the deck. My sailors have to dance out of the way or get brained. Are you sure I can't offer you something to drink?"
"Thanks all the same, Haknar, but I think I'd better be moving on.
Vo Astur depresses me. You can't get an Asturian to talk about anything but politics."
"Politics?" Haknar laughed.
"The only thing I've ever heard an Asturian talk about is who he's going to go to war with next week."
"That's what passes for politics here in Asturia," I told him, rising to my feet.
"Give my best to Cherek the next time you see him. Tell him that I'm still keeping an eye on things."
"I'm sure that'll make him sleep better at night. Are you coming to Val Alorn for the wedding?"
"What wedding?"
"Cherek's. His wife died while he was off in Mallorea. Since you stole all his sons, he's going to need a new heir. His bride-to-be is a real beauty --about fifteen or so. She's pretty, but she's not really very bright. If you say "good morning" to her, it takes her ten minutes to think up an answer."
I felt a sudden wrench. I wasn't the only one who'd lost a wife.
"Give him my apologies," I told Haknar shortly.
"I don't think I'll be able to make it. I'd better be going now. Thanks for the information."
"Glad to be of help, Belgarath." Then he turned and bellowed,
"Innkeeper!
More ale!"
I went back out into the street and walked slowly back toward the temple of Chaldan, being careful not to think about Cherek's bereavement.
I had my own, and that filled my mind. I didn't really want to dwell on it, since there was nobody around to chain me to a bed.
I'd received a few tentative invitations to visit the duke in his palace, but I'd put them off with assorted vague excuses. I hadn't visited the Duke of Vo Wacune, and I definitely didn't want to show any favoritism.
Given my probably undeserved celebrity, I decided not to have anything to do with any of those three contending dukes. I had no desire to get involved in the Arendish civil wars--not even by implication.
That might have been a mistake. I probably could have saved Arendia several eons of suffering if I'd just called those three imbeciles together and rammed a peace treaty down their throats. Considering the nature of Arends, however, they'd more than likely have violated the treaty before the ink was dry.
Anyway, I'd found out what I needed to know in Vo Astur, and the invitations from the Ducal Palace were becoming m
ore and more insistent, so I thanked the priests for their hospitality and left town before daybreak the following morning. I've been leaving town before daybreak for longer than I care to think about.
I was almost certain that the Duke of Vo Astur would take my departure as a personal affront, so when I was a mile or so south of town, I went back into the woods a ways and took the form of the wolf.
Yes, it was painful. I wasn't even certain that I could bring myself to do it, but it was time to find out. I'd been doing a number of things lately that pushed at the edges of my pain. I was not going to live out my life as an emotional cripple. Poledra wouldn't have wanted that, and if I went mad, so what? One more mad wolf in the Arendish forest wouldn't have made that much difference.
My assessment of the duke of Vo Astur turned out to be quite accurate. I was ghosting southward along the edge of the woods about an hour later when a group of armed horsemen came pounding along that twisting road. The Asturian duke really wanted me to pay him a visit. I drifted back in under the trees, dropped to my haunches, and watched the duke's men ride by. Arends were a much shorter people in those days than they are now, so they didn't look too ridiculous on those stunted horses.
I traveled down through the forest and ultimately reached the plains of Mimbre. Unlike the Wacites and the Asturians, the Mimbrates had cleared away the woods of their domain almost completely. Mimbrate horses were larger than those of their northern cousins, and the nobles of that southern duchy already had begun to develop the armor that characterizes them today. A mounted knight needs open ground to work on, so the trees had to go. The open farmland that resulted was rather peripheral to Mimbrate thinking.
When we think of the Arendish civil wars, we normally think of the three contending duchies, but that wasn't the full extent of it. Lesser nobles also had their little entertainments, and there was hardly a district in all of Mimbre that didn't have its own ongoing feuds. I'd resumed my own form, although I'll admit that I gave some serious consideration to living out the rest of my life as a wolf, and I was going south toward Vo Mimbre when I came across one of those feuds in full flower.
Unfortunately, the dimwitted Arends absolutely loved the idea of siege engines. Arends have a formal turn of mind, and the prospect of a decades-long standoff appeals to them enormously. The besiegers could set up camp around the walls of a fortress and mindlessly throw boulders at the walls for years, while the besieged could spend those same years happily piling rocks against the inside of those walls. Stalemates get boring after a while, though, and every so often, somebody felt the need to commit a few atrocities to offend his opponent.
In this particular case, the besieging baron decided to round up all the local serfs and behead them in plain view of the defender's castle.
That's when I took a hand in the game. As it happened, I was standing on a hilltop, and I posed dramatically there with my staff outstretched.
"Stop!" I roared, enhancing my voice to such an extent that they probably heard me in Nyissa. The baron and his knights wheeled to gawk; the knight who was preparing to chop off a serfs head paused momentarily, and then he raised his sword again.
He dropped it the next instant, however. It's a little hard to hold onto a sword when the hilt turns white-hot in your hands. He danced around, howling and blowing on his burned fingers.
I descended the hill and confronted the murderous Mimbrate baron.
"You will not perpetrate this outrage!" I told him.
"What I do is none of thy concern, old man," he replied, but he didn't really sound very sure of himself.
"I'm making it my concern! If you even attempt to harm these people, I'll tear out your heart!"
"Kill this old fool," the baron told one of his knights.
The knight dutifully reached for his sword, but I gathered my Will, leveled my staff, and said,
"Swine."
The knight immediately turned into a pig.
"Sorcery!" the baron gasped.
"Precisely. Now pack up your people and go home--and turn those serfs loose."
"My cause is just," he asserted.
"Your methods aren't. Now get out of my sight, or you'll grow a snout and a curly tail right where you stand."
"The practice of sorcery is forbidden in the realm of the Duke of Vo Mimbre," he told me--as if that made any difference.
"Oh, really? How are you going to stop me?" I pointed my staff at a nearby tree stump and exploded it into splinters.
"You're pressing your luck, my Lord Baron. That could just as easily have been you. I told you to get out of my sight. Now do it before I lose my temper."
"Thou wilt regret this, Sorcerer."
"Not as much as you will if you don't start moving right now." I gestured at the knight I'd just converted into ambulatory bacon, and he returned to his own form. His eyes were bulging with horror. He took one look at me and fled screaming.
The stubborn baron started to say something, but he evidently changed his mind. He ordered his men to mount up and then sullenly led them off toward the south.
"You can go back to your homes," I told the serfs. Then I went back up to my hilltop to watch and to make sure that the baron didn't try to circle back on me.
I suppose I could have done it differently. There hadn't really been any need for that direct confrontation. I could have driven the baron and his knights off without ever revealing myself, but I'd lost my temper. I get into trouble that way fairly often.
Anyway, two days later I began to see lurid descriptions of a "foul sorcerer" nailed to almost every tree I passed. The descriptions of me were fairly accurate, but the reward offered for my capture was insultingly small.
I decided at that point to go directly on to Tolnedra. I was certain that I could deal with any repercussions resulting from my display of bad temper, but why bother? Arendia was starting to bore me anyway, and I've been chased out of a lot of places in my time, so one more wasn't going to make that much difference.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I crossed the River Arend, the traditional border between Arendia and Tolnedra, early one morning in late spring. The north bank of the river was patrolled by Mimbrate knights, of course, but that wasn't really any problem. I do have certain advantages, after all.
I paused for a time in the Forest of Vordue to give some thought to my situation. When my Master had roused me from my drunken stupor back in Camaar, he hadn't really given me any instructions, so I was more or less on my own. There wasn't anyplace I really had to go, and no particular urgency about getting there. I still felt my responsibilities, however. I suppose I was what you might call a disciple emeritus, a vagabond sorcerer wandering around poking my nose into things that were probably none of my business. If I happened to come across anything significant, I could pass it on to my brothers back in the Vale. Aside from that, I was free to wander wherever I chose. My grief hadn't really diminished, but I was learning to live with it and to keep it rather tightly controlled. The years in Camaar had taught me the futility of trying to hide from it.
And so, filled with a kind of suppressed melancholy, I set off toward Tol Honeth. As long as I was here anyway, I thought I might as well find out what the empire was up to.
There was a certain amount of political maneuvering going on in the Grand Duchy of Vordue as I passed through on my way south. The Honeths were in power again, and the Vordue family always took that as a personal affront. There were abundant signs that the Second Honethite Dynasty was in its twilight. That's a peculiar thing about dynasties in any of the world's kingdoms. The founder of a dynasty is usually vigorous and gifted, but as the centuries roll by, his successors become progressively less so. The fact that they almost invariably marry their cousins might have something to do with it. Controlled inbreeding might work out all right with horses and dogs and cattle, but when it comes to humans, keeping it in the family's not a good idea. Bad traits will breed true the same as good ones will, and stupidity seems to float to the surface a
lot faster than courage or brilliance.
At any rate, the Honethite Emperors had been going downhill for the past century or so, and the Vorduvians were slavering with anticipation, feeling that their turn on the throne was just around the corner.
It was early summer when I reached Tol Honeth. Since it was their native city, the Honethite Emperors had devoted much of their time-and most of the imperial treasury--to improving the capital. Any time the Honeths are in power in Tolnedra, an investment in marble quarries will yield handsome returns.
I crossed the north bridge to the city and paused at the gate to answer the perfunctory questions of the legionnaires standing guard there. Their armor was very impressive, but they weren't. I made a mental note of the fact that the legions seemed to be getting badly out of condition. Somebody was going to have to do something about that.
The streets were crowded. The streets of Tol Honeth always are.
Everybody in Tolnedra who thinks he's important gravitates to the capital.
Proximity to the seat of power is very important to certain kinds of people.
In a roundabout sort of way I was a religious personage, so, as I had in Arendia, I went looking for a church. The main temple of Nedra had been moved since I'd last been in Tol Honeth, so I had to ask directions. I knew better than to ask any of the richly dressed merchant princes passing by with perfumed handkerchiefs held to their noses and haughty expressions on their faces. Instead, I found an honest man replacing broken cobblestones.
"Tell me, friend," I said to him, "which way should I go to reach the Temple of Nedra?"
"It's over on the south side of the Imperial Palace," he replied.
"Go on down to the end of this street and turn left." He paused and squinted at me.
Rivan Codex Series Page 29