above ourselves.’ Belmakor quickly sketched in a fairy castle that took my breath away – all light and delicacy with flying buttresses that soared out like wings, and towers as slender as toothpicks.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Beldin accused. ‘You couldn’t house butterflies in that piece of gingerbread.’
‘Just a start, brother mine,’ Belmakor said gaily. ‘We’ll modify it down to reality as we go along. You have to do that with dreams.’
And that started an argument that lasted for about six months and ultimately drew us all into it. Our own towers were, for the most part, strictly utilitarian. Although it pains me to admit it, Beldin’s description of my tower was probably fairly accurate. It did look somewhat like a petrified tree-stump when I stepped back to look at it. It kept me out of the weather, though, and it got me up high enough so that I could see the horizon and look at the stars. What else is a tower supposed to do?
It was at that point that we discovered that Belsambar had the soul of an artist. The last place in the world you would look for beauty would be in the mind of an Angarak. With surprising heat, given his retiring nature, he argued with Belmakor long and loud, insisting on his variations as opposed to the somewhat pedestrian notions of the Melcenes. Melcenes are builders, and they think in terms of stone and mortar and what your material will actually let you get away with. Angaraks think of the impossible, and then try to come up with ways to make it work.
‘Why are you doing this, Belsambar?’ Beldin once asked our normally self-effacing brother. ‘It’s only a buttress, and you’ve been arguing about it for weeks now.’
‘It’s the curve of it, Beldin,’ Belsambar explained, more fervently than I’d ever heard him say anything else. ‘It’s like this.’ And he created the illusion of the two opposing towers in the air in front of them for comparison. I’ve never known anyone else who could so fully build illusions as Belsambar. I think it’s an Angarak trait; their whole world is built on an illusion.
Belmakor took one look and threw his hands in the air. ‘I bow to superior talent,’ he surrendered. ‘It’s beautiful, Belsambar. Now, how do we make it work? There’s not enough support.’
‘I’ll support it, if necessary.’ It was Belzedar, of all people! ‘I’ll hold up our brother’s tower until the end of days, if need be.’ What a soul that man had!
‘You still didn’t answer my question – any of you!’ Beldin rasped. ‘Why are you all taking so much trouble with all of this?’
‘It is because thy brothers love thee, my son,’ Aldur, who had been standing in the shadows unobserved, told him gently. ‘Canst thou not accept their love?’
Beldin’s ugly face suddenly contorted grotesquely, and he broke down and wept.
‘And that is thy first lesson, my son,’ Aldur told him. ‘Thou wilt warily give love, all concealed beneath this gruff exterior of thine, but thou must also learn to accept love.’
It all got a bit sentimental after that.
And so we all joined together in the building of Beldin’s tower. It didn’t really take us all that long. I hope Durnik takes note of that. It’s not really immoral to use our gift on mundane things, Sendarian ethics notwithstanding.
I missed having my grotesque little friend around in my own tower, but I’ll admit that I slept better. I wasn’t exaggerating in the least in my description of his snoring.
Life settled down in the Vale after that. We continued our studies of the world around us and expanded our applications of our peculiar talent. I think it was one of the twins who discovered that it was possible for us to communicate with each other by thought alone. It would have been one – or both – of the twins, since they’d been sharing their thoughts since the day they were born. I do know that it was Beldin who discovered the trick of assuming the forms of other creatures. The main reason I can be so certain is that he startled several years’ growth out of me the first time he did it. A large hawk with a bright band of blue feathers across its tail came soaring in, settled on my window ledge, and blurred into Beldin. ‘How about that?’ he demanded. ‘It works after all.’
I was drinking from a tankard at the time, and I dropped it and went into an extended fit of choking while he pounded me on the back.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I demanded after I got my breath.
He shrugged. ‘I was studying birds,’ he explained. ‘I thought it might be useful to look at the world from their perspective for a while. Flying’s not as easy as it looks. I almost killed myself when I threw myself out of the tower window.’
‘You idiot!’
‘I managed to get my wings working before I hit the ground. It’s sort of like swimming. You never know if you can do it until you try.’
‘What’s it like? Flying, I mean?’
‘I couldn’t even begin to describe it, Belgarath,’ he replied with a look of wonder on his ugly face. ‘You should try it. I wouldn’t recommend jumping out of any windows, though. Sometimes you’re a little careless with details, and if you don’t get the tail feathers right, you’ll break your beak.’
Beldin’s discovery came at a fortuitous time. It wasn’t very long afterward that our Master sent us out from the Vale to see what the rest of mankind had been up to. As closely as I can pinpoint it, it seems to have been about fifteen hundred years since that snowy night when I first met him.
Anyway, flying is a much faster way to travel than walking. Beldin coached us all, and we were soon flapping around the Vale like a flock of migrating ducks. I’ll admit right at the outset that I don’t fly very well. Polgara’s made an issue of that from time to time. I think she holds it in reserve for occasions when she doesn’t have anything else to carp about. Anyway, after Beldin taught us how to fly, we scattered to the winds and went out to see what people were up to. With the exception of the Ulgos, there wasn’t really anybody to the west of us, and I didn’t get along too well with their new Gorim. The original one and I had been close friends, but the latest one seemed just a bit taken with himself.
So I flew east instead and dropped in on the Tolnedrans. They’d built a number of cities since the last time I’d seen them. Some of those cities were actually quite large, though their habit of using logs for constructing walls and thatch for roofs made me just a little wary of entering those freestanding firetraps. As you might expect, the Tolnedran fascination with money hadn’t diminished in the fifteen hundred years since I’d last seen them. If anything, they’d grown even more acquisitive, and they seemed to spend a great deal of time building roads. What is this thing with Tolnedrans and roads? They were generally peaceful, however, since war’s bad for business, so I flew on to visit the Marags.
The Marags were a strange people – as I’m sure Relg has discovered by now. Perhaps their peculiarities are the result of the fact that there are many more women in their society than there are men. Their God, Mara, takes what is in my view an unwholesome interest in fertility and reproduction. Their society is matriarchal, which is unusual – although the Nyissans tend in that direction as well.
Despite its peculiarities, Marag culture was functional, and they had not yet begun the practice of ritual cannibalism that their neighbors found so repugnant and which ultimately led to their near-extinction. They were a generous people
