King of the Murgos

  Durnik nodded. ‘At this time of year it probably won’t blow over for a week or so.’ He opened the leather pouch at his hip and took out his wad of tinder. ‘I suppose we’d better get a fire going,’ he said.

  Toth, huge and silent, went over to the side of their shelter, picked up two leather water bags and started down the steep slope toward the spring. Despite his enormous size, he made almost no sound as he moved through the fogshrouded bushes.

  Durnik knelt by the fire pit and carefully heaped dry twigs in the center. Then he laid his ball of tinder beside the twigs and took out his flint and steel.

  ‘Is Aunt Pol still asleep?’ Garion asked him.

  ‘Dozing. She says that it’s very pleasant to lie in a warm bed while somebody else builds up the fire.’ Durnik smiled gently.

  Garion also smiled. ‘That’s probably because for all those years she was usually the first one up.’ He paused. ‘Is she still unhappy about last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ Durnik said, bending over the pit and striking at his flint with his steel, ‘I think she’s regained her composure a bit.’ His flint and steel made a subdued clicking sound; with each click a shower of bright, lingering sparks spilled down into the pit. One of them fell glowing onto the tinder, and the smith gently blew on it until a tiny tongue of orange flame rose from the center. Then he carefully moved the tinder under the twigs, and the flame grew and spread with a dry crackling. ‘There we are,’ he said, brushing the fire from the tinder and returning it to his pouch along with his flint and steel.

  Garion knelt beside him and began snapping a dry branch into short lengths.

  ‘You were very brave last night, Garion,’ Durnik said as the two of them fed the small fire.

  ‘I think the word is insane,’ Garion replied wryly. ‘Would anybody in his right mind try to do something like that? I think the trouble is that I’m usually right in the middle of those things before I give any thought to how dangerous they are. Sometimes I wonder if Grandfather wasn’t right. Maybe Aunt Pol did drop me on my head when I was a baby.’

  Durnik chuckled softly. ‘I sort of doubt it,’ he said. ‘She’s very careful with children and other breakable things.’

  They added more branches to the fire until they had a cheerful blaze going, and then Garion stood up. The firelight reflected back from the fog with a soft, ruddy glow that had about it a kind of hazy unreality, as if, all unaware, they had inadvertently crossed the boundaries of the real world sometime during the night and entered the realms of magic and enchantment.

  As Toth came back up from the spring with the two dripping waterbags, Polgara emerged from their shelter, brushing her long, dark hair. For some reason the single white lock above her left brow seemed almost incandescent this morning. ‘It’s a very nice fire, dear,’ she said, kissing her husband. Then she looked at Garion. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. I’m fine.’

  ‘No cuts or bruises or singes you might have overlooked last night?’

  ‘No. I seem to have gotten through it without a scratch.’ He hesitated. ‘Were you really upset last night, Aunt Pol—with Eriond and me, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, Garion, I really was—but that was last night. What would you like for breakfast this morning?’

  Some time later, as the pale dawn crept steadily under the trees, Silk stood shivering on one side of the fire pit with his hands stretched out to the flames and his eyes suspiciously fixed on the bubbling pot Aunt Pol had set on a flat rock at the very edge of the fire. ‘Gruel?’ he asked. ‘Again?’

  ‘Hot porridge,’ Aunt Pol corrected, stirring the contents of the pot with a long-handled wooden spoon.

  ‘They’re the same thing, Polgara.’

  ‘Not really. Gruel is thinner.’

  ‘Thick or thin, it’s all the same.’

  She looked at him with one raised eyebrow. ‘Tell me, Prince Kheldar, why are you always so disagreeable in the morning?’

  ‘Because I detest mornings. The only reason there’s such a thing as morning in the first place is to keep night and afternoon from bumping into each other.’

  ‘Perhaps one of my tonics might sweeten your blood.’

  His eyes grew wary. ‘Ah—no. Thanks all the same, Polgara. Now that I’m all the way awake, I feel much better.’

  ‘I’m so glad for you. Now, do you suppose you could move away a bit? I’m going to need that side of the fire for the bacon.’

  ‘Anything you say.’ And he turned and went quickly back into the shelter.

  Belgarath, who was lounging on top of his blankets, looked at the little man with an amused expression. ‘For a supposedly intelligent man, you do have a tendency to blunder from time to time, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘You should have learned by now not to bother Pol when she’s cooking.’

  Silk grunted and picked up his moth-eaten fur cape. ‘I think I’ll go check the horses,’ he said. ‘Do you want to come along?’

  Belgarath cast an appraising eye at Aunt Pol’s dwindling supply of firewood. ‘That might not be a bad idea,’ he agreed, rising to his feet.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Garion said. ‘I’ve got a few kinks I’d like to work out. I think I slept on a stump last night.’ He slung the loop of his sword belt across one shoulder and followed the other two out of the shelter.

  ‘It’s sort of hard to believe that it really happened, isn’t it?’ Silk murmured when they reached the clearing. ‘The dragon, I mean. Now that it’s daylight, everything looks so prosaic.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Garion said, pointing at the scaly chunk of the dragon’s tail lying on the far edge of the clearing. The tip end of it was still twitching slightly.

  Silk nodded. ‘That is the sort of thing you wouldn’t ordinarily run across on a casual morning stroll.’ He looked at Belgarath. ‘Is she likely to bother us again?’ he asked. ‘This is going to be a very nervous journey if we have to keep looking back over our shoulders every step of the way. Is she at all vindictive?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ the old man asked him.

  ‘Well, Garion did kind of cut her tail off, after all. Do you think she might take it personally?’

  ‘Not usually,’ Belgarath replied. ‘She doesn’t really have that much in the way of a brain.’ He frowned thoughtfully. ‘What bothers me is that there was something about the whole encounter that was all wrong.’

  ‘Even the idea of it was wrong,’ Silk shuddered.

  Belgarath shook his head. ‘That’s not what I mean. I can’t be sure if I imagined it or not, but she seemed to be looking specifically for one of us.’

  ‘Eriond?’ Garion suggested.

  ‘It sort of seemed that way, didn’t it? But when she found him, she looked almost as if he frightened her. And what did he mean by those peculiar things he said to her?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Silk shrugged. ‘He’s always been a strange boy. I don’t think he lives in the same world with the rest of us.’

  ‘But why was the dragon so afraid of Garion’s sword?’

  ‘That sword frightens whole armies, Belgarath. The fire alone is pretty terrifying.’

  ‘She likes fire, Silk. I’ve seen her try to be coy and seductive for the benefit of a burning barn, and one time she flew around for a week making calves’ eyes at a forest fire. There’s something about last night that keeps nagging at me.’

  Eriond came out of the thicket where the horses were picketed, walking carefully around the dripping bushes.

  ‘Are they all right?’ Garion asked.

  ‘The horses? They’re fine, Belgarion. Is breakfast almost ready?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it,’ Silk replied sourly.

  ‘Polgara’s really a very good cook, Kheldar,’ Eriond assured him earnestly.

  ‘Not even the best cook in the world can do very much with porridge.’

  Eriond’s eyes brightened. ‘She’s making porridge? I love porridge.’

  Silk gave him a long look, t
hen turned sadly to Garion. ‘You see how easily the young are corrupted?’ he observed. ‘Just give them the faintest hint of a wholesome upbringing, and they’re lost forever.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘All right,’ he said grimly, ‘let’s go get it over with.’

  After breakfast, they broke down their night’s encampment and set out through the soft drizzle falling from the weeping sky. It was about noon when they reached a wide swath of cleared land, a stretch of bushy, stump-dotted ground perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, and in the center of that swath lay a wide, muddy road.

  ‘The high road from Muros,’ Silk said with some satisfaction.

  ‘Why did they cut down all the trees?’ Eriond asked him.

  ‘They used to have trouble with robbers lying in ambush right beside the road. The cleared space on each side gives travelers a sporting chance to get away.’

  They rode out from under the dripping trees and across the weed-grown clearing to the muddy road. ‘Now we should be able to make better time,’ Belgarath said, nudging his horse into a trot.

  They followed the road south for several hours, moving at a steady canter. As they rode down out of the forested foothills, the trees gave way to rolling grasslands. They crested a hilltop and reined in to give their steaming mounts a brief rest. Somewhat to the northwest they saw the dark border of the great Arendish forest, hazy in the misty drizzle, and not far ahead the grim, gray-walled pile of a Mimbrate castle brooding down on the grasslands lying below. Ce’Nedra sighed as she stared out over the sodden plain and at the fortress that seemed to hold in its very stones all the stiff-necked, wary suspicion that was at the core of Arendish society.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Garion asked her, fearful that her sigh might signify a return to that bleak melancholy which she had so recently shaken off.

  ‘There’s something so mournful about Arendia,’ she replied. ‘All those thousands of years of hatred and grief, and what did they prove? Even that castle seems to be weeping.’

  ‘That’s just the rain, Ce’Nedra,’ he said carefully.

  ‘No,’ she sighed again. ‘It’s more than that.’

  The road from Muros was a muddy yellow scar, stretching between fields of browned, drooping grasses as it wound down to the Arendish plain, and for the next several days they rode past great, rearing Mimbrate castles and through dirty thatch and wattle villages where acrid wood smoke hung in the chill air like a miasma and the hopeless expressions on the faces of the ragged serfs bespoke lives lived out in misery and despair. They stopped each night in mean, shabby wayside inns reeking of spoiled food and unwashed bodies.

  On the fourth day, they crested a hill and looked down at the garish sprawl of the Great Arendish Fair, standing at the junction of the high road from Muros and the Great West Road. The tents and pavilions spread for a league or more in every direction in a gaudy profusion of blue and red and yellow beneath a weeping gray sky, and pack-trains going to and from that great commercial center crawled across the plain like streams of ants.

  Silk pushed his shabby hat back from his face. ‘Maybe I’d better go down and take a quick look around before we all ride in,’ he said. ‘We’ve been out of touch for a while, and it might not hurt to get the feel of things.’

  ‘All right,’ Belgarath agreed, ‘but no chicanery.’

  ‘Chicanery?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Silk. Keep your instincts under control.’

  ‘Trust me, Belgarath.’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  Silk laughed and thumped his heels to his horse’s flanks.

  The rest of them rode at a walk down the long slope as Silk galloped on ahead toward that perpetually temporary tent-city standing in its sea of mud. As they approached the fair, Garion could hear a cacophonous tumult filling the air—a sort of bawling clamor of thousands of voices shouting all at once. There was also a myriad of scents—of spices and cooking food, of rare perfumes, and of horse corrals.

  Belgarath drew in his mount. ‘Let’s wait here for Silk,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to blunder into anything.’

  They sat their horses to one side of the road in the chill rain, watching the slow crawl of pack trains slipping and sliding up the muddy road toward them.

  About three-quarters of an hour later, Silk came pounding back up the hill. ‘I think we might want to approach carefully,’ he said, his pointed face serious.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Belgarath asked.

  ‘I ran into Delvor,’ Silk replied, ‘and he told me that there’s an Angarak merchant who’s been asking questions about us.’

  ‘Maybe we should just bypass the fair, then,’ Durnik suggested.

  Silk shook his head. ‘I think we ought to find out a little bit more about this curious Angarak. Delvor’s offered to put us up in his tents for a day or so, but it might not be a bad idea if we circle the fair and come in from the south. We can join one of the caravans coming up from Tol Honeth. That way we won’t be quite so obvious.’

  Belgarath considered it, squinting up at the rainy sky. ‘All right,’ he decided. ‘I don’t want to waste too much time, but I don’t like the idea of someone following us, either. Let’s go see what Delvor can tell us.’

  They rode in a wide half circle through the rain-drenched grass and reached the muddy track of the Great West Road a mile or so south of the fair. A half-dozen Tolnedran merchants wrapped in rich fur cloaks rode at the head of a string of creaking wagons, and Garion and his friends unobtrusively fell in at the tail end of their column as the gradual darkening of the sky announced the approach of a dreary, rain-swept evening.

  The narrow lanes lying between the tents and pavilions seethed with merchants from all parts of the world. The soupy mud was ankle-deep, churned by the hooves of hundreds of horses and the feet of brightly dressed men of trade, who bawled and shouted and haggled with each other, ignoring the mud and rain. Torches and lanterns hung at the sides of open-fronted booths made of canvas, where treasures of incalculable worth stood in curious proximity to brass pots and cheap tin plates.

  ‘It’s this way,’ Silk said, turning into a side lane. ‘Delvor’s tents are a few hundred yards on up ahead.’

  ‘Who’s Delvor?’ Ce’Nedra asked Garion as they rode past a noisy tavern pavilion.

  ‘A friend of Silk’s. We met him the last time we were here. I think he’s a member of Drasnian Intelligence.’

  She sniffed. ‘Aren’t all Drasnians members of the intelligence service?’

  He grinned. ‘Probably,’ he agreed.

  Delvor was waiting for them in front of his blue and white striped pavilion. Silk’s friend had changed very little in the years since Garion had last seen him. He was as bald as an egg, and his expression was still as shrewd and cynical as it had been before. He wore a fur-trimmed cloak pulled tightly about his shoulders, and his bald head gleamed wetly in the rain. ‘My servants will care for your horses,’ he told them as they dismounted. ‘Let’s get in out of sight before too many people see you.’

  They followed him into his warm, well-lighted pavilion, and he carefully tied down the tent flap behind them. The pavilion was very nearly as comfortable-looking as a well-appointed house. There were chairs and divans and a large, polished table set with a splendid supper. The floors and walls were carpeted in blue, oil lamps hung on chains from the ceiling, and in each corner there was an iron brazier filled with glowing coals. Delvor’s servants all wore sober livery and they wordlessly took the dripping cloaks from Garion and his friends and carried them through a canvas partition to an adjoining tent.

  ‘Please,’ Delvor said politely, ‘seat yourselves. I took the liberty of having a bit of supper prepared.’

  Silk looked around as they all sat down at the table. ‘Opulent,’ he noted.

  Delvor shrugged. ‘A little planning—and quite a bit of money. A tent doesn’t have to be uncomfortable.’

  ‘And it’s portable,’ Silk added. ‘If one has to leave someplace in a hurry, a tent can
be folded up and taken along. That’s hard to do with a house.’

  ‘There’s that, too,’ Delvor admitted blandly. ‘Please eat, my friends. I know the kind of accommodations—and meals—that are offered in the inns here in Arendia.’

  The supper that had been set for them was as fine as one that might have come to the table of a nobleman. A heap of smoking chops lay on a silver platter, and there were boiled onions and peas and carrots swimming in a delicate cheese sauce. The bread was of the finest white, still steaming hot from the oven, and there was a wide selection of excellent wines.

  ‘Your cook appears to be a man of some talent, Delvor,’ Polgara noted.

  ‘Thank you, my Lady,’ he replied. ‘He costs me a few dozen extra crowns a year and he’s got a foul temper, but I think he’s worth the expense and aggravation.’

  ‘What’s this about a curious Angarak merchant?’ Belgarath asked, helping himself to a couple of the chops.

  ‘He rode into the fair a few days ago with a half-dozen servants, but no pack horses or wagons. Their horses looked hard-ridden, as if he and his men had come here in a hurry. Since he arrived, he hasn’t done any business at all. He and his people have spent all their time asking questions.’

  ‘Are they specifically asking for us?’

  ‘Not by name, Ancient One, but the way they’ve been describing you didn’t leave much doubt. He’s been offering money for information—quite a bit of money.’

  ‘What kind of Angarak is he?’

  ‘He claims to be a Nadrak, but if he’s a Nadrak, I’m a Thull. I think he’s a Mallorean. He’s about medium height and build, clean-shaven and soberly dressed. About the only thing unusual about him is his eyes. They seem to be completely white—except for the pupils. There’s no color to them at all.’

  Aunt Pol raised her head quickly. ‘Blind?’ she asked.

  ‘Blind? No, I don’t think so. He seems to be able to see where he’s going. Why do you ask, my Lady?’

  ‘What you just described is the result of a very rare condition,’ she replied. ‘Most of the people who suffer from it are blind.’