Magician's Gambit

  "What are you going to do?" Garion asked her.

  "The Lady Polgara's going to be busy," the little girl said loftily, "so I'm going to make breakfast." She moved toward the fire with a businesslike bustling.

  The bacon was not too badly burned, but Ce'Nedra's attempt to toast slices of bread before the open fire turned out disastrously, and her porridge had lumps in it as solid as clods in a sun-baked field. Garion and the others, however, ate what she offered without comment, prudently avoiding the direct gaze she leveled at them, as if daring them to speak so much as one word of criticism.

  "I wonder how long they're going to be," Silk said after breakfast. "Gods, I think, have little notion of time," Barak replied sagely, stroking at his beard. "I don't expect them back until sometime this afternoon at the earliest."

  "It is a good time to check over the horses," Hettar decided. "Some of them have picked up a few burrs along the way, and I'd like to have a look at their hooves - just to be on the safe side."

  "I'll help you," Durnik offered, getting up.

  Hettar nodded, and the two went off to the place where the horses were picketed.

  "And I've got a nick or two in my sword edge," Barak remembered, fishing a piece of polishing stone out of his belt and laying his heavy blade across his lap.

  Mandorallen went to his tent and brought out his armor. He laid it out on the ground and began a minute inspection for dents and spots of rust.

  Silk rattled a pair of dice hopefully in one hand, looking inquiringly at Barak.

  "If it's all the same to you, I think I'd like to enjoy the company of my money for a while longer," the big man told him.

  "This whole place absolutely reeks of domesticity," Silk complained. Then he sighed, put away his dice, and went to fetch a needle and thread and a tunic he'd torn on a bush up in the mountains.

  Ce'Nedra had returned to her communion with the vast tree and was scampering among the branches, taking what Garion felt to be inordinate risks as she jumped from limb to limb with a catlike unconcern. After watching her for a few moments, he fell into a kind of reverie, thinking back to the awesome meeting that morning. He had met the Gods Issa and Mara already, but there was something special about Aldur. The affinity Belgarath and Aunt Pol showed so obviously for this God who had always remained aloof from men spoke loudly to Garion. The devotional activities of Sendaria, where he had been raised, were inclusive rather than exclusive. A good Sendar prayed impartially, and honored all the Gods - even Torak. Garion now, however, felt a special closeness and reverence for Aldur, and the adjustment in his theological thinking required a certain amount of thought.

  A twig dropped out of the tree onto his head, and he glanced up with annoyance.

  Ce'Nedra, grinning impishly, was directly over his head. "Boy," she said in her most superior and insulting tone, "the breakfast dishes are getting cold. The grease is going to be difficult to wash off if you let it harden."

  "I'm not your scullion," he told her.

  "Wash the dishes, Garion," she ordered him, nibbling at the tip of a lock of hair.

  "Wash them yourself."

  She glared down at him, biting rather savagely at the unoffending lock.

  "Why do you keep chewing on your hair like that?" he asked irritably.

  "What are you talking about?" she demanded, removing the lock from between her teeth.

  "Every time I look at you, you've got your hair stuck in your mouth."

  "I do not, " she retorted indignantly.

  "Are you going to wash the dishes?"

  "No."

  He squinted up at her. The short Dryad tunic she was wearing seemed to expose an unseemly amount of leg. "Why don't you go put on some clothes?" he suggested. "Some of us don't appreciate the way you run around half naked all the time."

  The fight got under way almost immediately after that.

  Finally Garion gave up his efforts to get in the last word and stamped away in disgust.

  "Garion!" she screamed after him. "Don't you dare go off and leave me with all these dirty dishes!"

  He ignored her and kept walking.

  After a short distance, he felt a familiar nuzzling at his elbow and he rather absently scratched the colt's ears. The small animal quivered with delight and rubbed against him affectionately. Then, unable to restrain himself any more, the colt galloped off into the meadow to pester a family of docilely feeding rabbits. Garion found himself smiling. The morning was just too beautiful to allow the squabble with the princess to spoil it.

  There was, it seemed, something rather special about the Vale. The world around grew cold with the approach of winter and was buffeted by storms and dangers, but here it seemed as if the hand of Aldur stretched protectively above them, filling this special place with warmth and peace and a kind of eternal and magical serenity. Garion, at this trying point in his life, needed all the warmth and peace he could get. There were things that had to be worked out, and he needed a time, however brief, without storms and dangers to deal with them.

  He was halfway to Belgarath's tower before he realized that it had been there that he had been going all along. The tall grass was wet with dew, and his boots were soon soaked, but even that did not spoil the day.

  He walked around the tower several times, gazing up at it. Although he found the stone that marked the door quite easily, he decided not to open it. It would not be proper to go uninvited into the old man's tower; and beyond that, he was not entirely certain that the door would respond to any voice but Belgarath's.

  He stopped quite suddenly at that last thought and started searching back, trying to find the exact instant when he had ceased to think of his grandfather as Mister Wolf and had finally accepted the fact that he was Belgarath. The changeover seemed significant - a kind of turning point.

  Still lost in thought, he turned then and walked across the meadow toward the large, white rock the old man had pointed out to him from the tower window. Absently he put one hand on it and pushed. The rock didn't budge.

  Garion set both hands on it and pushed again, but the rock remained motionless. He stepped back and considered it. It wasn't really a vast boulder. It was rounded and white and not quite as high as his waist heavy, certainly, but it should not be so inflexibly solid. He bent over to look at the bottom, and then he understood. The underside of the rock was flat. It would never roll. The only way to move it would be to lift one side and tip it over. He walked around the rock, looking at it from every angle. He judged that it was marginally movable. If he exerted every ounce of his strength, he might be able to lift it. He sat down and looked at it, thinking hard. As he sometimes did, he talked to himself, trying to lay out the problem.

  "The first thing to do is to try to move it," he concluded. "It doesn't really look totally impossible. Then, if that doesn't work, we'll try it the other way."

  He stood up, stepped purposefully to the rock, wormed his fingers under the edge of it and heaved. Nothing happened.

  "Have to try a little harder," he told himself. He spread his feet and set himself. He began to lift again, straining, the cords standing out in his neck. For the space of about ten heartbeats he tried as hard as he could to lift the stubborn rock - not to roll it over; he'd given that up after the first instant - but simply to make it budge, to acknowledge his existence. Though the ground was not particularly soft there, his feet actually sank a fraction of an inch or so as he strained against the rock's weight.

  His head was swimming, and little dots seemed to swirl in front of his eyes as he released the rock and collapsed, gasping, against it. He lay against the cold, gritty surface for several minutes, recovering.

  "All right," he said finally, "now we know that that won't work." He stepped back and sat down.

  Each time he'd done something with his mind before, it had been on impulse, a response to some crisis. He had never sat down and deliberately worked himself up to it. He discovered almost at once that the entire set of circumstances was completely
different. The whole world seemed suddenly filled with distractions. Birds sang. A breeze brushed his face. An ant crawled across his hand. Each time he began to bring his will to bear, something pulled his attention away.

  There was a certain feeling to it, he knew that, a tightness in the back of his head and a sort of pushing out with his forehead. He closed his eyes, and that seemed to help. It was coming. It was slow, but he felt the will begin to build in him. Remembering something, he reached inside his tunic and put the mark on his palm against the amulet. The force within him, amplified by that touch, built to a great roaring crescendo. He kept his eyes closed and stood up. Then he opened his eyes and looked hard at the stubborn white rock. "You will move," he muttered. He kept his right hand on the amulet and held out his left hand, palm up.

  "Now!" he said sharply and slowly began to raise his left hand in a lifting motion. The force within him surged, and the roaring sound inside his head became deafening.

  Slowly the edge of the rock came up out of the grass. Worms and burrowing grubs who had lived out their lives in the safe, comfortable darkness under the rock flinched as the morning sunlight hit them. Ponderously, the rock raised, obeying Garion's inexorably lifting hand. It teetered for a second on its edge, then toppled slowly over.

  The exhaustion he had felt after trying to lift the rock with his back was nothing compared to the bone-deep weariness that swept over him after he let the clenching of his will relax. He folded his arms on the grass and let his head sink down on them.

  After a moment or two, that peculiar fact began to dawn on him. He was still standing, but his arms were folded comfortably in front of him on the grass. He jerked his head up and looked around in confusion. He had moved the rock, certainly. That much was obvious, since the rock now lay on its rounded top with its damp underside turned up. Something else had also happened, however. Though he had not touched the rock, its weight had nonetheless been upon him as he had lifted it, and the force he had directed at it had not all gone at the rock.

  With dismay, Garion realized that he had sunk up to his armpits in the firm soil of the meadow.

  "Now what do I do?" he asked himself helplessly. He shuddered away from the idea of once again mustering his will to pull himself out of the ground. He was too exhausted even to consider it. He tried to wriggle, thinking that he might be able to loosen the earth around him and work his way up an inch at a time, but he could not so much as budge.

  "Look what you've done," he accused the rock. The rock ignored him.

  A thought occurred to him. "Are you in there?" he asked that awareness that seemed always to have been with him.

  The silence in his mind was profound. "Help!" he shouted.

  A bird, attracted by the exposed worms and bugs that had been under the rock, cocked one eye at him and then went back to its breakfast. Garion heard a light step behind him and craned around, trying to see. The colt was staring at him in amazement. Hesitantly, the small horse thrust out his nose and nuzzled Garion's face.

  "Good horse," Garion said, relieved not to be alone, at least. An idea came to him. "You're going to have to go get Hettar," he told the colt. The colt pranced about and nuzzled his face again.

  "Stop that," Garion commanded. "This is serious." Cautiously, he tried to push his mind into the colt's thoughts. He tried a dozen different ways until he finally struck the right combination by sheer accident. The colt's mind flitted from here to there without purpose or pattern. It was a baby's mind, vacant of thought, receiving only sense impressions. Garion caught flickering images of green grass and running and clouds in the sky and warm milk. He also felt the sense of wonder in the little mind, and the abiding love the colt had for him.

  Slowly, painfully, Garion began constructing a picture of Hettar in the colt's wandering thoughts. It seemed to take forever.

  "Hettar," Garion said over and over. "Go get Hettar. Tell him that I'm in trouble."

  The colt scampered around and came back to stick his soft nose in Garion's ear.

  "Please pay attention," Garion cried. "Please!"

  Finally, after what seemed hours, the colt seemed to understand. He went several paces away, then came back to nuzzle Garion again. "Go-get-Hettar," Garion ordered, stressing each word.

  The colt pawed at the ground, then turned and galloped away - going in the wrong direction. Garion started to swear. For almost a year now he had been exposed to some of the more colorful parts of Barak's vocabulary. After he had repeated all the phrases he remembered six or eight times, he began to extemporize.

  A flickering thought came back to him from the now-vanished colt. The little beast was chasing butterflies. Garion pounded the ground with his fists, wanting to howl with frustration.

  The sun rose higher, and it started to get hot.

  It was early afternoon when Hettar and Silk, following the prancing little colt, found him.

  "How in the world did you manage to do that?" Silk asked curiously.

  "I don't want to talk about it," Garion muttered, somewhere between relief and total embarrassment.

  "He probably can do many things that we can't," Hettar observed, climbing down from his horse and untying Durnik's shovel from his saddle. "The thing I can't understand, though, is why he'd want to do it.

  "I'm positive he had a good reason for it," Silk assured him. "Do you think we should ask him?"

  "It's probably very complicated," Silk replied. "I'm sure simple men like you and me wouldn't be able to understand it."

  "Do you suppose he's finished with whatever it is he's doing?"

  "We could ask him, I suppose."

  "I wouldn't want to disturb him," Hettar said. "It could be very important."

  "It almost has to be," Silk agreed.

  "Will you please get me out of here?" Garion begged.

  "Are you sure you're finished?" Silk asked politely. "We can wait if you're not done yet."

  "Please, " Garion asked, almost in tears.

  Chapter Twelve

  "WHY DID YOU try to lift it?" Belgarath asked Garion the next morning after he and Aunt Pol had returned and Silk and Hettar had solemnly informed them of the predicament in which they had found the young man the afternoon before.

  "It seemed like the best way to tip it over," Garion answered. "You know, kind of get hold of it from underneath and then roll it-sort of."

  "Why didn't you just push against it - close to the top? It would have rolled over if you'd done it that way."

  "I didn't think of it."

  "Don't you realize that soft earth won't accept that kind of pressure?" Aunt Pol asked.

  "I do now," Garion replied. "But wouldn't pushing on it have just moved me backward?"

  "You have to brace yourself," Belgarath explained. "That's part of the whole trick. As much of your will goes to holding yourself immobile as it does to pushing against the object you're trying to move. Otherwise all you do is just shove yourself away."

  "I didn't know that," Garion admitted. "It's the first time I've ever tried to do anything unless it was an emergency . . . Will you stop that?" he demanded crossly of Ce'Nedra, who had collapsed into gales of laughter as soon as Silk had finished telling them about Garion's blunder.

  She laughed even harder.

  "I think you're going to have to explain a few things to him, father," Aunt Pol said. "He doesn't seem to have even the most rudimentary idea about the way forces react against each other." She looked at Garion critically. "It's lucky you didn't decide to throw it," she told him. "You might have flung yourself halfway back to Maragor."

  "I really don't think it's all that funny," Garion told his friends, who were all grinning openly at him. "This isn't as easy as it looks, you know." He realized that he had just made a fool of himself and he was not sure if he were more embarrassed or hurt by their amusement.

  "Come with me, boy," Belgarath said firmly. "It looks as if we're going to have to start at the very beginning."

  "It's not my fault I didn't know
," Garion protested. "You should have told me."

  "I didn't know you were planning to start experimenting so soon," the old man replied. "Most of us have sense enough to wait for guidance before we start rearranging local geography."

  "Well, at least I did manage to move it," Garion said defensively as he followed the old man across the meadow toward the tower.

  "Splendid. Did you put it back the way you found it?"

  "Why? What difference does it make?"

  "We don't move things here in the Vale. Everything that's here is here for a reason, and they're all supposed to be exactly where they are."

  "I didn't know," Garion apologized.

  "You do now. Let's go put it back where it belongs." They trudged along in silence.

  "Grandfather?" Garion said finally.

  "Yes?"

  "When I moved the rock, it seemed that I was getting the strength to do it from all around me. It seemed just to flow in from everyplace. Does that mean anything?"

  "That's the way it works," Belgarath explained. "When we do something, we take the power to do it from our surroundings. When you burned Chamdar, for example, you drew the heat from all around you - from the air, from the ground, and from everyone who was in the area. You drew a little heat from everything to build the fire. When you tipped the rock over, you took the force to do it from everything nearby."

  "I thought it all came from inside."

  "Only when you create things," the old man replied. "That force has to come from within us. For anything else, we borrow. We gather up a little power from here and there and put it all together and then turn it loose all at one spot. Nobody's big enough to carry around the kind of force it would take to do even the simplest sort of thing."

  "Then that's what happens when somebody tries to unmake something," Garion said intuitively. "He pulls in all the force, but then he can't let it go, and it just " He spread his hands and jerked them suddenly apart.

  Belgarath looked narrowly at him. "You've got a strange sort of mind, boy. You understand the difficult things quite easily, but you can't seem to get hold of the simple ones. There's the rock." He shook his head. "That will never do. Put it back where it belongs, and try not to make so much noise this time. That racket you raised yesterday echoed all over the Vale."