Enchanters' End Game

  ‘Doesn’t look at all like a weasel, does he?’ Belgarath asked Garion.

  Silk gave him a disgusted look, but said nothing.

  They went downstairs, led their horses out of the stables attached to the inn, and mounted. Silk’s expression remained sour as they rode out of Yar Gurak. When they reached the top of a hill to the north of town, he slid off his horse, picked up a rock, and threw it rather savagely at the buildings clustered below.

  ‘Make you feel better?’ Belgarath asked curiously.

  Silk remounted with a disdainful sniff and led the way down the other side of the hill.

  Chapter Two

  They rode for the next few days through a wilderness of stone and stunted trees. The sun grew warmer each day, and the sky overhead was intensely blue as they pressed deeper and deeper into the snowcapped mountains. There were trails of sorts up here, winding, vagrant tracks meandering between the dazzling white peaks and across the high, pale green meadows where wildflowers nodded in the mountain breeze. The air was spiced with the resinous odor of evergreens, and now and then they saw deer grazing or stopping to watch them with large, startled eyes as they passed.

  Belgarath moved confidently in a generally eastward course and he appeared to be alert and watchful. There were no signs of the half-doze in which he customarily rode on more clearly defined roads, and he seemed somehow younger up here in the mountains.

  They encountered other travelers – leather-clad Nadraks for the most part – although they did see a party of Drasnians laboring up a steep slope and, once, a long way off, what appeared to be a Tolnedran. Their exchanges with these others were brief and wary. The mountains of Gar og Nadrak were at best sketchily policed, and it was necessary for every man who entered them to provide for his own security.

  The sole exception to this suspicious taciturnity was a garrulous old gold hunter mounted on a donkey, who appeared out of the blue-tinged shadows under the trees one morning. His tangled hair was white, and his clothing was mismatched, appearing to consist mostly of castoffs he had found beside this trail or that. His tanned, wrinkled face was weathered like a well-cured old hide, and his blue eyes twinkled merrily. He joined them without any greeting or hint of uncertainty as to his welcome and began talking immediately as if taking up a conversation again that had only recently been interrupted.

  There was a sort of comic turn to his voice and manner that Garion found immediately engaging.

  ‘Must be ten years or more since I’ve followed this path,’ he began, jouncing along on his donkey as he fell in beside Garion. ‘I don’t come down into this part of the mountains very much any more. The streambeds down here have all been worked over a hundred times at least. Which way are you bound?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ Garion replied cautiously. ‘I’ve never been up here before, so I’m just following along.’

  ‘You’d find better gravel if you struck out to the north,’ the man on the donkey advised, ‘up near Morindland. Of course, you’ve got to be careful up there, but, like they say, no risk, no profit.’ He squinted curiously at Garion. ‘You’re not a Nadrak, are you?’

  ‘Sendar,’ Garion responded shortly.

  ‘Never been to Sendaria,’ the old gold hunter mused. ‘Never been anyplace really – except up here.’ He looked around at the white-topped peaks and deep green forests with a sort of abiding love. ‘Never really wanted to go anyplace else. I’ve picked these mountains over from end to end for seventy years now and never made much at it – except for the pleasure of being here. Found a river bar one time, though, that had so much red gold in it that it looked like it was bleeding. Winter caught me up there, and I almost froze to death trying to come out.’

  ‘Did you go back the next spring?’ Garion couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Meant to, but I did a lot of drinking that winter – I had gold enough. Anyway, the drink sort of addled my brains. When I set out the following year, I took along a few kegs for company. That’s always a mistake. The drink takes you harder when you get up into the mountains, and you don’t always pay attention to things the way you should.’ He leaned back in his donkey saddle, scratching reflectively at his stomach. ‘I went out onto the plains north of the mountains – up in Morindland. Seems that I thought at the time that the going might be easier out on flat ground. Well, to make it short, I ran across a band of Morindim and they took me prisoner. I’d been up to my ears in an ale keg for a day or so, and I was far gone when they took me. Lucky, I guess. Morindim are superstitious, and they thought I was possessed. That’s probably all that saved my life. They kept me for five or six years, trying to puzzle out the meaning behind my ravings – once I got sober and saw the situation, I took quite a bit of care to do a lot of raving. Eventually they got tired of it and weren’t so careful about watching me, so I escaped. By then I’d sort of forgotten exactly where that river was. I look for it now and then when I’m up that way.’ His speech seemed rambling, but his old blue eyes were very penetrating. ‘That’s a big sword you’re carrying, boy. Who do you plan to kill with it?’

  The question came so fast that Garion did not even have time to be startled.

  ‘Funny thing about that sword of yours,’ the shabby old man added shrewdly. ‘It seems to be going out of its way to make itself inconspicuous.’ Then he turned to Belgarath, who was looking at him with a level gaze. ‘You haven’t hardly changed at all,’ he noted.

  ‘And you still talk too much,’ Belgarath replied.

  ‘I get hungry for talk every few years,’ the old man on the donkey admitted. ‘Is your daughter well?’

  Belgarath nodded.

  ‘Fine-looking woman, your daughter – bad-tempered, though.’

  ‘That hasn’t changed noticeably.’

  ‘Didn’t imagine it had.’ The old gold hunter chuckled, then hesitated for a moment. ‘If you don’t mind some advice, be careful in case you plan to go down into the low country,’ he said seriously. ‘It looks like things might be coming to a boil down there. A lot of strangers in red tunics are roaming about, and there’s been smoke coming up from old altars that haven’t been used for years. The Grolims are out again, and their knives are all new-sharpened. The Nadraks who come up here keep looking back over their shoulders.’ He paused, looking directly at Belgarath. ‘There’ve been some other signs, too,’ he added. ‘The animals are all jumpy – like just before a big storm – and sometimes at night, if you listen close, there’s something like thunder way off in the distance – like maybe from as far off as Mallorea. The whole world seems to be uneasy. I’ve got a hunch that something pretty big’s about to happen – maybe the sort of thing you’d be involved in. The point is that they know you’re out here. I wouldn’t count too much on being able to slip through without somebody noticing you.’ He shrugged then, as if washing his hands of the matter. ‘I just thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Belgarath replied.

  ‘Didn’t cost me anything to say it.’ The old man shrugged again. ‘I think I’ll go that way.’ He pointed off to the north. ‘Too many strangers coming into the mountains in the last few months. It’s starting to get crowded. I’ve about talked myself out now, so I think I’ll go look myself up a bit of privacy.’ He turned his donkey and trotted off. ‘Good luck,’ he threw back over his shoulder by way of farewell and then he disappeared into the blue shadows under the trees.

  ‘You’re acquainted with him, I take it,’ Silk observed to Belgarath.

  The old sorcerer nodded. ‘I met him about thirty years ago. Polgara had come to Gar og Nadrak to find out a few things. After she’d gathered all the information she wanted, she sent word to me, and I came here and bought her from the man who owned her. We started home, but an early snowstorm caught us up here in the mountains. He found us floundering along, and he took us to the cave where he holes up when the snow gets too deep. Quite a comfortable cave really – except that he insists on bringing his donkey inside. He and Pol argued about t
hat all winter, as I recall.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Silk asked curiously.

  Belgarath shrugged. ‘He never said, and it’s not polite to ask.’

  Garion, however, had choked on the word ‘bought.’ A kind of helpless outrage welled up in him. ‘Somebody owned Aunt Pol?’ he demanded incredulously.

  ‘It’s a Nadrak custom,’ Silk explained. ‘In their society, women are considered property. It’s not seemly for a woman to go about without an owner.’

  ‘She was a slave?’ Garion’s knuckles grew white as he clenched his fists.

  ‘Of course she wasn’t a slave,’ Belgarath told him. ‘Can you even remotely imagine your Aunt submitting to that sort of thing?’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said I bought her from the man who owned her. Their relationship was a formality – nothing more. She needed an owner in order to function here, and he gained a great deal of respect from other men as a result of his ownership of so remarkable a woman.’ Belgarath made a sour face. ‘It cost me a fortune to buy her back from him. I sometimes wonder if she was really worth it.’

  ‘Grandfather!’

  ‘I’m sure she’d be fascinated by that last observation, old friend,’ Silk said slyly.

  ‘I don’t know that it’s necessary to repeat it to her, Silk.’

  ‘You never know.’ Silk laughed. ‘I might need something from you someday.’

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘I know.’ Silk grinned and looked around. ‘Your friend took quite a bit of trouble to look you up,’ he suggested. ‘What was behind it?’

  ‘He wanted to warn me.’

  ‘That things were tense in Gar og Nadrak? We knew that already.’

  ‘His warning was a great deal more urgent than that.’

  ‘He didn’t sound very urgent.’

  ‘That’s because you don’t know him.’

  ‘Grandfather,’ Garion said suddenly, ‘how did he manage to see my sword? I thought we’d taken care of that.’

  ‘He sees everything, Garion. He could glance once at a tree and tell you ten years later exactly how many leaves were on it.’

  ‘Is he a sorcerer?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. He’s just a strange old man who likes the mountains. He doesn’t know what’s going on because he doesn’t want to know. If he really wanted to, he could probably find out everything that’s happening in the world.’

  ‘He could make a fortune as a spy, then,’ Silk mused.

  ‘He doesn’t want a fortune. Isn’t that obvious? Any time he needs money, he just goes back to that river bar he mentioned.’

  ‘But he said he’d forgotten how to find it,’ Garion protested.

  Belgarath snorted. ‘He’s never forgotten anything in his life.’ Then his eyes grew distant. ‘There are a few people like him in the world – people who have no interest whatsoever in what other people are doing. Maybe that’s not such a bad trait. If I had my life to live over, I might not mind doing it his way.’ He looked around then, his eyes very alert. ‘Let’s take that path over there,’ he suggested, pointing at a scarcely visible track angling off across an open meadow, littered with bits of log bleached white by sun and weather. ‘If what he says is true, I think we’ll want to avoid any large settlements. That path comes out farther north where there aren’t so many people.’

  Not long afterward the terrain began to slope downward, and the three of them moved along briskly, riding down out of the mountains toward the vastness of the forest of Nadrak. The peaks around them subsided into forested foothills. Once they topped a rise, they were able to look out at the ocean of trees lying below. The forest stretched to the horizon and beyond, dark green beneath a blue sky. A faint breeze was blowing, and the sigh of its passage through the mile upon mile of trees below had a kind of endless sadness to it, a regretful memory of summers past and springs that would never come again.

  Some distance up the slope from the forest stood a village, huddled at the side of a vast, open pit that had been gouged, raw and ugly, in the red dirt of the hillside.

  ‘A mine town,’ Belgarath noted. ‘Let’s nose about a bit and see what’s going on.’

  They rode warily down the hill. As they drew closer, Garion could see that the village had that same temporary kind of appearance he had noticed about Yar Gurak. The buildings were constructed in the same way – unpeeled logs and rough stone – and the low-pitched roofs had large rocks laid on them to keep the shingles from blowing off during the winter blizzards. Nadraks seemed not to be concerned about the external appearance of their structures; once the walls and roofs were completed, they appeared quite content to move in and devote their attentions to other matters, without attending to those final finishing touches which gave a house that look of permanence that a Sendar or a Tolnedran would feel absolutely necessary. The entire settlement seemed to reflect an attitude of ‘good enough’ that offended Garion, for some reason.

  Some of the miners who lived in the village came out into the dirt streets to watch the strangers ride in. Their black leather clothing was stained red by the earth in which they dug, and their eyes were hard and suspicious. An air of fearful wariness hung over the whole place, seasoned with a touch of defiant bellicosity.

  Silk jerked his head toward a large, low building with a crude painting of a cluster of grapes on a sign banging in the breeze by the double doors at the front. A wide, roofed porch surrounded the building, and leather-garbed Nadraks lounged on benches along the porch, watching a dogfight in progress out in the middle of the street.

  Belgarath nodded. ‘But let’s go around to the side,’ he suggested, ‘in case we have to leave in a hurry.’

  They dismounted at the side porch, tied their horses to the railing, and went inside.

  The interior of the tavern was smoky and dim, since windows seemed to be a rare feature in Nadrak buildings. The tables and benches were rough-hewn, and what light there was came from smoking oil lamps that hung on chains from the rafters. The floor was mud-stained and littered with bits of food. Dogs roamed at will under the tables and benches. The smell of stale beer and unwashed bodies hung heavy in the air, and, though it was only early afternoon, the place was crowded. Many of the men in the large room were already far gone with drink. It was noisy, since the Nadraks lounging at the tables or stumbling about the room seemed all habitually to speak at the top of their voices.

  Belgarath pushed his way toward a table in the corner where a solitary man sat bleary-eyed and slack-lipped, staring into his ale cup.

  ‘You don’t mind if we share the table, do you?’ the old man demanded of him in an abrupt manner, sitting down without awaiting a reply.

  ‘Would it do any good if I did?’ the man with the cup asked. He was unshaven, and his eyes were pouchy and bloodshot.

  ‘Not much,’ Belgarath told him bluntly.

  ‘You’re new here, aren’t you?’ The Nadrak looked at the three of them with only a hint of curiosity, trying with some difficulty to focus his eyes.

  ‘I don’t really see that it’s any of your business,’ Belgarath retorted rudely.

  ‘You’ve got a sour mouth for a man past his prime,’ the Nadrak suggested, flexing his fingers ominously.

  ‘I came here to drink, not fight,’ Silk declared in a harsh tone. ‘I might change my mind later, but right now, I’m thirsty.’ He reached out and caught the arm of a passing servingman. ‘Ale,’ he ordered. ‘And don’t take all day.’

  ‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ the servingman told him. ‘Are you with him?’ He pointed at the Nadrak they had joined.

  ‘We’re sitting with him, aren’t we?’

  ‘You want three cups or four?’

  ‘I want one – for now. Bring the others what they want, too. I’ll pay for the first time around.’

  The servingman grunted sourly and pushed his way off through the crowd, pausing long enough to kick a dog out of his way.

  Silk’s offer seemed to
quiet their Nadrak companion’s belligerence. ‘You’ve picked a bad time to come to town,’ he told them. ‘The whole region’s crawling with Mallorean recruiters.’

  ‘We’ve been up in the mountains,’ Belgarath said. ‘We’ll probably go back in a day or so. Whatever’s happening down here doesn’t interest us very much.’

  ‘You’d better take an interest while you’re here – unless you’d like to try army life.’

  ‘Is there a war someplace?’ Silk asked him.

  ‘Likely to be – or so they say. Someplace down in Mishrak ac Thull.’

  Silk snorted. ‘I’ve never met a Thull worth fighting.’

  ‘It’s not the Thulls. It’s supposed to be the Alorns. They’ve got a queen – if you can imagine such a thing – and she’s moving to invade the Thulls.’

  ‘A queen?’ Silk scoffed. ‘Can’t be much of an army, then. Let the Thulls fight her themselves.’

  ‘Tell that to the Mallorean recruiters,’ the Nadrak suggested.

  ‘Did you have to brew that ale?’ Silk demanded of the servingman, who was returning with four large cups.

  ‘There are other taverns, friend,’ the servingman replied. ‘If you don’t like this one, go find another. That’ll be twelve pennies.’

  ‘Three pennies a cup?’ Silk exclaimed.

  ‘Times are hard.’

  Grumbling, Silk paid him.

  ‘Thanks,’ the Nadrak they were sitting with said, taking one of the cups.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Silk said sourly.

  ‘What are the Malloreans doing here?’ Belgarath asked.

  ‘Rounding up everyone who can stand up, see lightning, and hear thunder. They do their recruiting with leg-irons, so it’s a little hard to refuse. They’ve got Grolims with them too, and the Grolims keep their gutting knives out in plain sight as a sort of a hint about what might happen to anybody who objects too much.’

  ‘Maybe you were right when you said we picked a bad time to come down out of the mountains,’ Silk said.

  The Nadrak nodded. ‘The Grolims say that Torak’s stirring in his sleep.’