Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress: 2-Book Collection

It was two – or perhaps three – days after I left Gara when I encountered a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart. ‘Where be ye bound, boy?’ he asked me in what seemed to me at the time to be an outlandish dialect.

‘Oh,’ I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, ‘that way, I guess.’

‘You don’t seem very certain.’

I grinned at him. ‘I’m not,’ I admitted. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s on the other side of the next hill.’

He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a Tolnedran, and I’ve noticed that they’re all very literal-minded. ‘Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin,’ he told me.

‘Tol Malin?’

‘It’s a fair-sized town. The people who live there have a puffed-up opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn’t have bothered with that “Tol”, but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I’m going that way myself, and if you’re of a mind, you can ride along. Hop up, boy. It’s a long way to walk.’

I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of money. Trust the Tolnedrans to invent money. I found the whole idea fascinating. Here was something small enough to be portable and yet of enormous value. Someone who’s just stolen a chair or a table or a horse is fairly conspicuous. Money, on the other hand, can’t be identified as someone else’s property once it’s in your pocket.

Unfortunately, Tolnedrans are very possessive about their money, and it was in Tol Malin that I first heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ I left town rather quickly at that point.

I hope you realize that I wouldn’t be making such an issue of some of my boyhood habits except for the fact that my daughter can be very tiresome about my occasional relapses. I’d just like for people to see my side of it for a change. Given my circumstances, did I really have any choice?

Oddly enough, I encountered that same humorous old fellow again about five miles outside Tol Malin. ‘Well, boy,’ he greeted me. ‘I see that you’re still moving along westward.’

‘There was a little misunderstanding back in Tol Malin,’ I replied defensively. ‘I thought it might be best for me to leave.’

He laughed knowingly, and for some reason his laughter made my whole day seem brighter. He was a very ordinary-looking old fellow with white hair and beard, but his deep blue eyes seemed strangely out of place in his wrinkled face. They were very wise, but they didn’t seem to be the eyes of an old man. They also seemed to see right through all my excuses and lame explanations. ‘Well, hop up again, boy,’ he told me. ‘We still both seem to be going in the same direction.’

We traveled across the lands of the Tolnedrans for the next several weeks, moving steadily westward. This was before those people developed their obsession with straight, well-maintained roads, and what we followed were little more than wagon tracks that meandered along the course of least resistance across the meadows.

Like just about everybody else in the world in those days, the Tolnedrans were farmers. There were very few isolated farmsteads out in the countryside, because for the most part the people lived in villages, went out to work their fields each morning, and returned to the villages each night.

We passed one of those villages one morning about the middle of summer, and I saw those farmers trudging out to work. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d just build their houses out where their fields are?’ I asked the old man.

‘Probably so,’ he agreed, ‘but then they’d be peasants instead of townsmen. A Tolnedran would sooner die than have others think of him as a peasant.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I objected. ‘They spend all day every day grubbing in the dirt, and that means that they are peasants, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he replied calmly, ‘but they seem to think that if they live in a village, that makes them townsmen.’

‘Is that so important to them?’

‘Very important, boy. A Tolnedran always wants to keep a good opinion of himself.’

‘I think it’s stupid, myself.’

‘Many of the things people do are stupid. Keep your eyes and ears open the next time we go through one of these villages. If you pay attention, you’ll see what I’m talking about.’

I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out. We passed through several of those villages during the next couple of weeks, and I got to know the Tolnedrans. I didn’t care too much for them, but I got to know them. A Tolnedran spends just about every waking minute trying to determine his exact rank in his community, and the higher he perceives his rank to be, the more offensive he becomes. He treats his servant badly – not out of cruelty, but out of a deep-seated need to establish his superiority. He’ll spend hours in front of a mirror practicing a haughty, superior expression. Maybe that’s what set my teeth on edge. I don’t like having people look down their noses at me, and my status as a vagabond put me at the very bottom of the social ladder, so everybody looked down his nose at me.

‘The next pompous ass who sneers at me is going to get a punch in the mouth,’ I muttered darkly as we left one village as summer was winding down.

The old man shrugged. ‘Why bother?’

‘I don’t care for people who treat me like dirt.’

‘Do you really care what they think?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘Why waste your energy then? You’ve got to learn to laugh these things off, boy. Those self-important villagers are silly, aren’t they?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘Wouldn’t hitting one of them in the face make you just as silly – or even sillier? As long as you know who you are, does it really matter what other people think about you?’

‘Well, no, but – ’ I groped for some kind of explanation, but I didn’t find one. I finally laughed a bit sheepishly.

He patted my shoulder affectionately. ‘I thought you might see it that way – eventually.’

That may have been one of the more important lessons I’ve learned over the years. Privately laughing at silly people is much more satisfying in the long run than rolling around in the middle of a dusty street with them trying to knock out all of their teeth. If nothing else, it’s easier on your clothes.

The old man didn’t really seem to have a destination. He had a cart, but he wasn’t carrying anything important in it – just a few half-full sacks of grain for his stumpy horse, a keg of water, a bit of food and several shabby old blankets which he seemed happy to share with me. The better we grew acquainted, the more I grew to like him. He seemed to see his way straight to the core of things, and he usually found something to laugh about in what he saw. In time, I began to laugh, too, and I realized that he was the closest thing to a friend I’d ever had.

He passed the time by telling me about the people who lived on that broad plain. I got the impression that he spent a great deal of his time traveling. Despite his humorous way of talking – or maybe because of it – I found his perceptions about the various races to be quite acute. I’ve spent thousands of years with those people, and I’ve never once found those first impressions he gave me to be wrong. He told me that the Alorns were rowdies, the Tolnedrans materialistic, and the Arends not quite bright. The Marags were emotional, flighty, and generous to a fault. The Nyissans were sluggish and devious, and the Angaraks obsessed with religion. He had nothing but pity for the Morindim and the Karands, and, given his earthy nature, a peculiar kind of respect for the mystical Dals. I felt a peculiar wrench and a sense of profound loss when, on another one of those cool, cloudy days, he reined in his horse and said, ‘This is as far as I’m going, boy. Hop on down.’

It was the abruptness more than anything that upset me. ‘Which way are you heading?’ I asked him.

‘What difference does it make, boy? You’re going west, and I’m not. We’ll come across each other again, but for right now we’re going our separate ways. You’ve got more to see, and I’ve already seen what lies in that direction. We can talk about it the next time we meet. I hope you find what you’re looking for, but for right now, hop down.’

I felt more than a little injured by this rather cavalier dismissal, so I wasn’t really very gracious as I gathered up my belongings, got out of his cart, and struck off toward the west. I didn’t look back, so I couldn’t really say which direction he took. By the time I did throw a quick glance over my shoulder, he was out of sight.

He had given me a general idea of the geography ahead of me, and I knew that it was late enough in the summer to make the notion of exploring the mountains at this point a very bad idea. The old man had told me that there was a vast forest ahead of me, a forest lying on either side of a river which, unlike other rivers, ran from south to north. From his description I knew that the land ahead was sparsely settled, so I’d be obliged to fend for myself rather than rely on pilferage to sustain me. But I was young and confident of my skill with my sling, so I was fairly sure that I could get by.

As it turned out, however, I wasn’t obliged to forage for food that winter. Right on the verge of the forest, I found a large encampment of strange old people who lived in tents rather than huts. They spoke a language I didn’t understand, but they made me welcome with gestures and weepy smiles.

Theirs was perhaps the most peculiar community I’ve ever encountered, and believe me, I’ve seen a lot of communities. Their skin was strangely colorless, which I assumed to be a characteristic of their race, but the truly odd thing was that there didn’t seem to be a soul among them who was a day under seventy.

They made much of me, and most of them wept the first time they saw me. They would sit by the hour and just look at me, which I found disconcerting, to say the very least. They fed me and pampered me and provided me with what might be called luxurious quarters – if a tent could ever be described as luxurious. The tent had been empty, and I discovered that there were many empty tents in their encampment. Within a month or two I was able to find out why. Scarcely a week went by when at least one of them didn’t die. As I said, they were all very old. Have you any idea of how depressing it is to live in a place where there’s a perpetual funeral going on?

Winter was coming on, however, and I had a place to sleep and a fire to keep me warm, and the old people kept me well-fed, so I decided that I could stand a little depression. I made up my mind, though, that I’d be gone with the first hint of spring.

I made no particular effort to learn their language that winter, and picked up only a few words. The most continually repeated among them were ‘Gorim’ and ‘UL,’ which seemed to be names of some sort, and were almost always spoken in tones of profoundest regret.

In addition to feeding me, the old people provided me with clothing; my own hadn’t been very good in the first place, and had become badly worn during the course of my journey. This involved no great sacrifice on their part, since a community in which there are two or three funerals every few weeks is bound to have spare clothes lying about.

When the snow melted and the frost began to seep out of the ground, I quietly began to make preparations to leave. I stole food – a little at a time to avoid suspicion – and hid it in my tent. I filched a rather nice wool cloak from the tent of one of the recently deceased and picked up a few other useful items here and there. I scouted the surrounding area carefully and found a place where I could ford the large river just to the west of the encampment. Then, with my escape route firmly in mind, I settled down to wait for the last of winter to pass.

As is usual in the early spring, we had a couple of weeks of fairly steady rain, so I still waited, although my impatience to be gone was becoming almost unbearable. During the course of that winter, that peculiar compulsion that had nagged at me since I’d left Gara had subtly altered. Now I seemed to be drawn southward instead of to the west.

The rains finally let up, and the spring sun seemed warm enough to make traveling pleasant, and so one evening I gathered up the fruits of my pilferage, stowed them in the rude pack I’d fashioned during the long winter evenings, and sat in my tent listening in almost breathless anticipation as the sounds in the camp of the old people gradually subsided. Then, when all was quiet, I crept out of my temporary home and made for the edge of the woods.