"What purpose is that?"
"We don't know," Wolf answered. "We only know that it's the oldest living thing in the world. Maybe that's its purpose. Maybe it's here to demonstrate the continuity of life."
Ce'Nedra had removed her shoes and was climbing up into the thick branches, making little sounds of affection and delight.
"Is there by any chance a tradition linking Dryads with squirrels?" Silk asked.
Mister Wolf smiled. "If the rest of you can manage without us, Garion and I have something to attend to."
Aunt Pol looked questioningly at him.
"It's time for a little instruction, Pol," he explained.
"We can manage, father," she said. "Will you be back in time for supper?"
"Keep it warm for us. Coming, Garion?"
The two of them rode in silence through the green meadows with the golden afternoon sunlight making the entire Vale warm and lovely. Garion was baffled by Mister Wolf's curious change of mood. Always before, there had been a sort of impromptu quality about the old man. He seemed frequently to be making up his life as he went along, relying on chance, his wits, and his power, when necessary, to see him through. Here in the Vale, he seemed serene, undisturbed by the chaotic events taking place in the world outside.
About two miles from the tree stood another tower. It was rather squat and round and was built of rough stone. Arched windows near the top faced out in the directions of the four winds, but there seemed to be no door.
"You said you'd like to visit my tower," Wolf said, dismounting. "This is it."
"It isn't ruined like the others."
"I take care of it from time to time. Shall we go up?"
Garion slid down from his horse. "Where's the door?" he asked.
"Right there." Wolf pointed at a large stone in the rounded wall. Garion looked skeptical.
Mister Wolf stepped in front of the stone. "It's me," he said. "Open."
The surge Garion felt at the old man's word seemed commonplaceordinary - a household kind of surge that spoke of something that had been done so often that it was no longer a wonder. The rock turned obediently, revealing a sort of narrow, irregular doorway. Motioning for Garion to follow, Wolf squeezed through into the dim chamber beyond the door.
The tower, Garion saw, was not a hollow shell as he had expected, but rather was a solid pedestal, pierced only by a stairway winding upward.
"Come along," Wolf told him, starting up the worn stone steps. "Watch that one," he said about halfway up, pointing at one of the steps. "The stone is loose."
"Why don't you fix it?" Garion asked, stepping up over the loose stone.
"I've been meaning to, but I just haven't gotten around to it. It's been that way for a long time. I'm so used to it now that I never seem to think of fixing it when I'm here."
The chamber at the top of the tower was round and very cluttered. A thick coat of dust lay over everything. There were several tables in various parts of the room, covered with rolls and scraps of parchment, strange-looking implements and models, bits and pieces of rock and glass, and a couple of birds' nests; on one, a curious stick was so wound and twisted and coiled that Garion's eye could not exactly follow its convolutions. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, trying to trace it out. "What's this, Grandfather?" he asked.
"One of Polgara's toys," the old man said absently, staring around at the dusty chamber.
"What's it supposed to do?"
"It kept her quiet when she was a baby. It's only got one end. She spent five years trying to figure it out."
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. Someti
mes 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.
"The colt was dead, but you made him start to breathe. In order for you to do that, you had to be able to understand death."
"It was just a wall," Garion explained. "All I did was reach through it."
"There's more to it than that, I think. What you seem to be able to do is to visualize extremely difficult ideas in very simple terms. That's a rare gift, but there are some dangers involved in it that you should be aware of."
"Dangers? Such as what?"
"Don't oversimplify. If a man's dead, for example, he's usually dead for a very good reason - like a sword through the heart. If you bring him back, he'll only die immediately again anyway. As I said before, just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should. "
Garion sighed. "I'm afraid this is going to take a very long time, Grandfather," he said. "I have to learn how to keep myself under control; I have to learn what I can't do, so I don't kill myself trying to do something impossible; I have to learn what I can do and what I should do. I wish this had never happened to me."
"We all do sometimes," the old man told him. "The decision wasn't ours to make, though. I haven't always liked some of the things I've had to do, and neither has your Aunt; but what we're doing is more important than we are, so we do what's expected of us - like it or not."
"What if I just said, 'No. I won't do it'?"
"You could do that, I suppose, but you won't, will you?"
Garion sighed again. "No," he said, "I guess not."
The old sorcerer put his arm around the boy's shoulders. "I thought you might see things that way, Belgarion. You're bound to this the same way we all are."
The strange thrill he always felt at the sound of his other, secret name ran through Garion. "Why do you all insist on calling me that?" he asked.
"Belgarion?" Wolf said mildly. "Think, boy. Think what it means. I haven't been talking to you and telling you stories all these years just because I like the sound of my own voice."
Garion turned it over carefully in his mind. "You were Garath," he mused thoughtfully, "but the God Aldur changed your name to Belgarath. Zedar was Zedar first and then Belzedar - and then he went back to being Zedar again."
"And in my old tribe, Polgara would have just been Gara. Pol is like Bel. The only difference is that she's a woman. Her name comes from mine - because she's my daughter. Your name comes from mine, too."
"Garion-Garath," the boy said. "Belgarath-Belgarion. It all fits together, doesn't it?"
"Naturally," the old man replied. "I'm glad you noticed it."
Garion grinned at him. Then a thought occurred. "But I'm not really Belgarion yet, am I?"
"Not entirely. You still have a way to go."
"I suppose I'd better get started then." Garion said it with a certain ruefulness. "Since I don't really have any choice."
"Somehow I knew that eventually you'd come around," Mister Wolf said.
"Don't you sometimes wish that I was just Garion again, and you were the old storyteller coming to visit Faldor's farm - with Aunt Pol making supper in the kitchen as she did in the old days - and we were hiding under a haystack with a bottle I'd stolen for you?" Garion felt the homesickness welling up in him.
"Sometimes, Garion, sometimes," Wolf admitted, his eyes far away.
"We won't ever be able to go back there again, will we?"
"Not the same way, no."
"I'll be Belgarion, and you'll be Belgarath. We won't even be the same people any more."
"Everything changes, Garion," Belgarath told him.
"Show me the rock," Garion said suddenly.
"Which rock?"
"The one Aldur made you move - the day you first discovered the power."
"Oh," Belgarath said, "that rock. It's right over there - the white one. The one the colt's sharpening his hooves on."
"It's a very big rock."
"I'm glad you appreciate that," Belgarath replied modestly. "I thought so myself."
"Do you suppose I could move it?"
"You never know until you try, Garion," Belgarath told him.
Chapter Eleven
THE NEXT MORNING when Garion awoke, he knew immediately that he was not alone.
"Where have you been?" he asked silently.
"I've been watching, "
the other consciousness in his mind said. "I see that you've finally come around. "
"What choice did I have?"
"None. You'd better get up. Aldur's coming. "
Garion quickly rolled out of his blankets. "Here? Are you sure?" The voice in his mind didn't answer.
Garion put on a clean tunic and hose and wiped off his half boots with a certain amount of care. Then he went out of the tent he shared with Silk and Durnik.
The sun was just coming up over the high mountains to the east, and the line between sunlight and shadow moved with a stately ponderousness across the dewy grass of the Vale. Aunt Pol and Belgarath stood near the small fire where a pot was just beginning to bubble. They were talking quietly, and Garion joined them.
"You're up early," Aunt Pol said. She reached out and smoothed his hair.
"I was awake," he replied. He looked around, wondering from which direction Aldur would come.
"Your grandfather tells me that the two of you had a long talk yesterday."
Garion nodded. "I understand a few things a little better now. I'm sorry I've been so difficult."
She drew him to her and put her arms around him. "It's all right, dear. You had some hard decisions to make."
"You're not angry with me, then?"
"Of course not, dear."
The others had begun to get up, coming out of their tents, yawning and stretching and rumpled-looking.
"What do we do today?" Silk asked, coming to the fire and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
"We wait," Belgarath told him. "My Master said he'd meet us here."
"I'm curious to see him. I've never met a God before."
"Thy curiosity, me thinks, will soon be satisfied, Prince Kheldar," Mandorallen said. "Look there."
Coming across the meadow not far from the great tree beneath which they had pitched their tents, a figure in a blue robe was approaching. A soft nimbus of blue light surrounded the figure, and the immediate sense of presence made it instantly clear that what approached was not a man. Garion was not prepared for the impact of that presence. His meeting with the Spirit of Issa in Queen Salmissra's throne room had been clouded by the narcotic effects of the things the Serpent Queen had forced him to drink. Similarly, half his mind had slept during the confrontation with Mara in the ruins of Mar Amon. But now, fully awake in the first light of morning, he found himself in the presence of a God.
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