particularly.’ I said. ‘If you prove worthy, he will give you a name of his own choosing.’ Then I turned to the grey stone in the wall and commanded it to open, and then we went inside.
My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me. ‘Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?’ he asked.
‘He besought me, Master,’ I said. ‘I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay. Thy will must decide such things. If it be that he please thee not, I shall take him outside and bid him be no more and so put an end to him and his interruption.’
‘That is unkindly said, my son,’ Aldur said sternly. ‘The Will and the Word may not be used so.’*
‘Forgive me, Master,’ I said humbly.
‘Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath,’ my Master said. ‘If it should be that thou findest him apt, inform me.’
‘I will, Master,’ I promised.
‘What is thy study currently?’
‘I examine the reason for mountains, Master,’ I said.
‘Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that thou shalt find the study useful.’
‘As my Master commands,’ I said regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I was not much enthused about allowing it to escape me. But that was the end of my leisure.
I instructed the stranger as my Master had bade me. I set him impossible tasks and waited. To my mortification, within six months he learned the secret of the Will and the Word. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as a pupil.
And then came the others. Kira and Tira were twin shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered to us one day – and stayed. Makor came from so far away that I could not conceive how he had even heard of my Master, and Din from so near that I wondered that his whole tribe did not come with him. Sambar simply appeared one day and sat down upon the earth in front of the tower and waited until we accepted him.
And to me it fell to instruct each of them until he found the secret of the Will and the Word – which is not a secret, after all, but lies within every man. And in time each of them became my Master’s pupil, and he named them even as he had named me. Zedar became Belzedar, Kira and Tira became Beltira and Belkira. Makor and Din and Sambar became Belmakor and Beldin and Belsambar. To each of our names our Master joined the symbol of the Will and the Word, and we became his Disciples.*
And we built other towers so that our labors and our studies should not interfere with our Master’s work or each other’s.
At first I was jealous that my Master spent time with these others, but, since time was meaningless to us anyway and I knew that my Master’s love was infinite, so that his love for the others in no way diminished his love for me, I soon outgrew that particular childishness. And also, I grew to love the others as the bonds of our brotherhood grew. I could sense their minds as they worked, and I shared their joy at each new discovery they made. Because I was the first Disciple, they often came to me as to an older brother with those things they were embarrassed to lay before our Master, and I guided them as best I could.
Thus passed a period of perhaps a thousand years, and we were content. The world beyond our Vale changed and the people also, and no more pupils came to us. It was a question I always intended to pursue but never found the time to examine. Perhaps the other Gods grew jealous and forbade their people to seek us out, or perhaps it was that in their long passage through the endless generations, men somehow lost that tiny spark that is the source of the power of Will and Word and is the lodestone that draws their spirits inevitably to the spirit of Aldur. So it was that we were seven only and were unlike any other men on earth.
And through all this time of study and learning, our Master, Aldur, labored in infinite patience with that grey stone he had shown me on the night he had accepted me as his Disciple. Once I marveled to him that he should devote so much time to it, and he laughed.
‘Truly, my son,’ he said, ‘I labored once at least so long to create a flower which is now so common that none take note of it. It blooms beside every dusty path, and men pass it by without even looking at it. But I know it is there, and I joy in its perfection.’
As I look back, I think I would give my life, which has stretched over so many years, if my Master had never conceived the idea of that grey stone which has brought so much woe into this world.
The stone, which he called a jewel, was grey (as I have said) and quite round and perhaps the size of a man’s heart. My Master found it, I believe, in the bed of a stream. To me it appeared to be a very ordinary stone, but things are concealed from me that Aldur in his wisdom perceived quite easily. It may be that there was something in the stone which he alone could see, or it may be that this ordinary grey stone became what it became because of his efforts and his will and his spirit with which he infused it. Whatever it may have been, I wish with all my heart that he had never seen it, never stooped and touched it, never picked it up.
At any rate, one day, a very long time ago, it was finished, and our Master called us together so that he might show it to us.
‘Behold this Orb,’ he told us. ‘In it lies the fate of the world.’ And the grey stone, so ordinary a thing, but which had been polished by the touch of our Master’s hand for a thousand years and more, began to glow as if a tiny blue fire flickered deep within it.
And Belzedar, always quick, asked, ‘How, Great Master, can so small a thing be so important?’
And our Master smiled, and the Orb grew brighter. Flickering dimly within it I seemed to see images. ‘The past lies herein,’ our Master said, ‘and the present and the future also. This is but a small part of the virtue of this thing which I have made. With it may man – or the earth itself – be healed – or destroyed. Whatsoever one would do, even if it be beyond the power of the Will and the Word, with this may it come to pass.’
‘Truly a wondrous thing, Master,’ Belzedar said, and it seemed to me that his eyes glittered as he spoke, and his fingers seemed to twitch.
‘But, Master,’ I said, ‘thou hast said that the fate of the world lies within this Orb of thine. How may that be?’
‘It hath revealed the future unto me, my son,’ my Master said sadly. ‘The stone shall be the cause of much contention and great suffering and great destruction. Its power reaches from where it now sits to blow out the lives of men yet unborn as easily as thou wouldst snuff a candle.’
‘It is an evil thing then, Master,’ I said, and Belsambar and Belmakor agreed.
‘Destroy it, Master,’ Belsambar pleaded, ‘before it can bring this evil to the world.’
‘That may not be,’ our Master said.
‘Blessed is the wisdom of Aldur,’ Belzedar said. ‘With us to aid him, our Master may wield this wondrous jewel for good and not ill. Monstrous would it be to destroy so precious a thing.’*
‘Destroy it, Master,’ Belkira and Beltira said as in one voice, their minds as always linked into the same thought. ‘We beseech thee, unmake this evil thing which
