of it. ‘It’s not really very far, dear,’ I told my wife. ‘It shouldn’t take me more than a week or so to get them through the mountains to Mar Amon.’
‘Unless it snows again,’ she added. ‘It must be very important if you’re willing to go through those mountains in the winter time.’
‘Oh, it is, Lady Poledra,’ Dras Bull-neck assured her. ‘Very, very important. It has to do with trade.’
Trade? I know it sounds impossible, but Dras was an even worse liar than his father. The Marags have no sea-coast. How could Alorns even get to Maragor to trade with them? Not to mention the fact that Marags had absolutely no interest whatsoever in commerce – and they were cannibals besides! What a dunce Cherek’s oldest son was! I shuddered. This idiot was the crown prince of Aloria!
‘We’ve heard some rumors that the streams in Maragor are absolutely awash with gold,’ Riva added. At least Riva had a little good sense. Poledra knew enough about Alorns to know that the word ‘gold’ set their hearts on fire.
‘I’ll try to mediate for you, Bear-shoulders,’ I said, pulling a long face, ‘but I don’t think you’ll have very much luck with the Marags. They aren’t interested enough in the gold even to bend over to pick it up, and I don’t think you could offer them anything that’d make them willing to take the trouble.’
‘I think your trip will take longer than a week,’ Poledra told me. ‘Be sure to take warm clothing.’
‘Of course,’ I assured her.
‘Perhaps I should go with you.’
‘Absolutely not – not when you’re this close.’
‘You worry too much about that.’
‘No. You stay here. I’ve sent for Beldin. He’s coming back to stay with you.’
‘Not unless he bathes first, he won’t.’
‘I’ll remind him.’
‘When will you be leaving?’
I cast a spuriously inquiring look at Cherek. ‘Tomorrow morning?’ I asked him.
He shrugged, overdoing it a bit. ‘Might as well,’ he agreed. ‘The weather in those mountains isn’t going to get any better. If we’re going to have to wade through snow, we’d better get to wading.’
‘Stay under the trees,’ Poledra advised. ‘The snow isn’t as deep in thick woods.’ If she did know, she was taking it very calmly.
‘We’d better get some sleep,’ I said, standing up abruptly. I didn’t need any more lies to try to talk my way around.
Poledra was very quiet in our bed that night. She clung to me fiercely, however, and along toward morning she said, ‘Be very careful. The young and I will be waiting when you come back.’ Then she said something she rarely ever said, probably because she felt it was unnecessary to say it. ‘I love you,’ she told me. Then she kissed me, rolled over, and immediately went to sleep.
The Alorns and I left early the next morning, ostentatiously going off toward the south and Maragor. When we were about five miles south of my tower, however, we circled back, staying well out of sight, and proceeded on toward the northeast.
This all happened about three thousand years ago; long before the Algars and the Melcenes had begun their breeding experiments with domestic animals, so what passed for horses in those days were hardly more than ponies – which wouldn’t have worked out very well for a group of seven-foot-tall Alorns. So we walked. That’s to say they walked; I ran. After trying to keep up with them for a couple of days, I called a halt. ‘This isn’t working,’ I told them. ‘I’m going to do something, and I don’t want you getting excited about it.’
‘What have you got in mind, Belgarath?’ Dras rumbled at me a little nervously. I had quite a reputation in Aloria back then, and the Alorns had exaggerated notions about the kinds of things I could do.
‘If I’m going to have to run just to keep up, I’m going to run on all four feet.’
‘You don’t have four feet,’ he objected.
‘I’m going to fix that right now. After I do, I won’t be able to talk to you – at least not in a language you’ll understand – so if you’ve got any questions, ask them now.’
‘Our friend here is the most powerful sorcerer in the world,’ Cherek Bear-shoulders told his sons sententiously. ‘There’s absolutely nothing he can’t do.’ I think he really believed that.
‘No questions?’ I asked, looking around at them. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘now it’s your turn to try to keep up.’ I formed the image in my mind and slipped myself into the familiar form of the wolf. I’d done it often enough before that it was almost automatic by now.
‘Belar!’ Dras swore, jumping back from me.
Then I ran off a hundred yards toward the northeast, stopped, turned, and sat down on my haunches to wait for them. Even Alorns could understand the meaning of that.
The priest of Belar who wrote the early sections of the BOOK OF ALORN was quite obviously playing fast and loose with the truth when he described our journey. He was either drunk when he wrote it, or he didn’t have the facts straight. Then again, he may have thought that what really happened was too prosaic for a writer of his vast talent. He declares that Dras, Algar, and Riva were waiting for us a thousand leagues to the north, which simply wasn’t true. He then announces that my hair and beard were turned white by the frost of that bitter winter, which was also a lie. My hair and beard had turned white long before that – largely because of my association with the children of the Bear-God.
I was still not too happy about this trip, and I placed the blame for it squarely on the shoulders of my traveling-companions. I ran those four to the verge of exhaustion day after day. I’d resume my own form every evening, and I usually had enough time to get a fire going and supper started before they came wheezing and staggering into camp. ‘We’re in a hurry,’ I’d remind them somewhat maliciously. We’ve got a long way to go to reach this bridge of yours, and we want to get there before the ice starts to break up, don’t we?’
We continued in a northeasterly direction across the snow-covered plains of what’s now Algaria until we hit the eastern escarpment. I had no intention of climbing that mile-high cliff, so I turned slightly and led my puffing companions due north onto the moors of present-day eastern Drasnia. Then we cut across the mountains to that vast emptiness where the Morindim live.
My spiteful efforts to run Cherek and his sons into the ground every day accomplished two things. We reached Morindland in less than a month, and my Alorn friends were in peak condition when we got there. You try running as fast as you can all day every day for a month and see what it does to you. Assuming that you don’t collapse and die in the first day or so, you’ll be in very good shape before the month is out. If there was any fat left on my friends by the time we’d reached Morindland, it was under their fingernails. As it turned out, that was very useful.
When
