I came upon him near our tower one golden day in autumn after I’d served my Master for five hundred years or so. This stranger had built a rude altar and was burning the carcass of a goat on it. That got us off on the wrong foot right at the outset. Even the wolves knew enough not to kill things in the Vale. The greasy smoke from his offering was fouling the air, and he was prostrated before his altar, chanting some outlandish prayer.
‘What are you doing?’ I demanded - quite abruptly, I’ll admit, since his noise and the stink of his sacrifice distracted my mind from a problem I’d been considering for the past half-century.
‘Oh, puissant and all-knowing God,’ he said, groveling in the dirt, ‘I have come a thousand leagues to behold thy glory and to worship thee.’
‘Puissant? Quit trying to show off your education, man. Now get up and stop this caterwauling. I’m no more a God than you are.’
‘Art thou not the great God Aldur?’
‘I’m his disciple, Belgarath. What is all this nonsense?’ I pointed at his altar and his smoking goat.
‘It is to please the God,’ he replied, rising and dusting off his clothes. I couldn’t be sure, but he looked rather like a Tolnedran - or possibly an Arend. In either case, his babble about a thousand leagues was clearly a self-serving exaggeration. He gave me a servile, fawning sort of look. ‘Tell me truly,’ he pleaded, ‘dost thou think he will find this poor offering of mine acceptable?’
I laughed. ‘I can’t think of a single thing you could have done that would offend him more.’
The stranger looked stricken. He turned quickly and reached out as if he were going to grab up the animal with his bare hands to hide it.
‘Don’t be an idiot!’ I snapped. ‘You’ll burn yourself!’
‘It must be hidden,’ he said desperately. ‘I would rather die than offend mighty Aldur.’
‘Just get out of the way,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘Stand clear,’ I said, irritably waving him off, ‘unless you want to take a trip with your goat.’ Then I looked at his grotesque little altar, willed it to a spot five miles distant, and translocated it with a single word, leaving only a few tatters of confused smoke hanging in the air.
He collapsed on his face again.
‘You’re going to wear out your clothes if you keep doing that,’ I told him, ‘and my Master won’t find it very amusing.’
‘I pray thee, mighty disciple of most high Aldur,’ he said, rising and dusting himself off again, ‘instruct me so that I offend not the God.’ He must have been an Arend. No Tolnedran could possibly mangle the language the way he did.
‘Be truthful,’ I told him, ‘and don’t try to impress him with false show and flowery speech. Believe me, friend, he can see right straight into your heart, so there’s no way you can deceive him. I’m not sure which God you worshiped before, but Aldur’s like no other God in the whole world.’ What an asinine thing that was to say. No two Gods are ever the same.
‘And how may I become his disciple, as thou art?’
‘First you become his pupil,’ I replied, ‘and that’s not easy.’
‘What must I do to become his pupil?’
‘You must become his servant.’ I said it a bit smugly, I’ll admit. A few years with an axe and a broom would probably do this pompous ass some good.
‘And then his pupil?’ he pressed.
‘In time,’ I replied, ‘if he so wills.’ It wasn’t up to me to reveal the secret of the Will and the Word to him. He’d have to find that out for himself - the same as I had.
‘And when may I meet the God?’
I was getting tired of him anyway, so I took him to the tower.
‘Will the God Aldur wish to know my name?’ he asked as we started across the meadow.
I shrugged. ‘Not particularly. If you’re lucky enough to prove worthy, he’ll give you a name of his own choosing.’ When we reached the tower, I commanded the grey stone in the wall to open, and we went inside and on up the stairs.
My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me. ‘Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?’ he asked me.
‘He besought me, Master,’ I replied. ‘I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay.’ I could mangle language as well as Zedar could, I guess. ‘Thy will must decide such things,’ I continued. ‘If it turns out that he doesn’t please thee, I’ll take him outside and turn him into a carrot, and that’ll be the end of it.’
‘That was unkindly said, Belgarath,’ Aldur chided.
‘Forgive me, Master,’ I said humbly.
‘Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath. Should it come to pass that he be apt, inform me.’
I groaned inwardly, cursing my careless tongue. My casual offer to vegetabilize the stranger had saddled me with him. But Aldur was my Lord, so I said, ‘I will, Master.’
‘What is thy current study, my son?’
‘I examine the reason for mountains, Master.’
‘Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that the study shall make thee more kindly disposed toward thy fellow-creatures.’
I knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn’t argue. I sighed. ‘As my Master commands,’ I submitted regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I didn’t want it to escape me. But then I remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the Vale, so I swallowed my resentment - at least right there in front of him.
I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though. I put that poor man through absolute hell, I’m ashamed to admit. I degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he’d run away.
But he didn’t. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that sometimes made me want to scream. Didn’t the man have any spirit at all? To make matters even worse - to my profoundest mortification - he learned the secret of the Will and the Word within six months. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.
In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language, he wasn’t such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really wasn’t.
The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.
And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day - and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had the same thoughts at the same time and even finished each other’s sentences. Despite the fact that they’re Alorns, Belkira and Beltira are the gentlest men I’ve ever known. I’m quite fond of them, actually.
Makor was the next to arrive, and he came to us from so far away that I couldn’t understand how he had ever heard of my Master. Unlike the rest of us, who’d been fairly shabby when we’d arrived, Makor came strolling down the Vale dressed in a silk mantle, somewhat like the garb currently in fashion in Tol Honeth. He was a witty, urbane, well-educated man, and I took to him immediately.
Our Master questioned him briefly and decided that he was acceptable - with all the usual provisos.
‘But, Master,’ Belzedar objected vehemently, ‘he cannot become one of our fellowship. He is a Dal - one of the Godless ones.’
‘Melcene, actually, old boy,’ Makor corrected him in that ultra-civilized manner of his that always drove Belzedar absolutely wild. Now do you see why I was so fond of Makor?
‘What’s the difference?’ Belzedar demanded bluntly.
‘All the difference in the world, old chap,’ Makor replied, examining his fingernails. ‘We Melcenes separated from the Dals so long ago that we’re no more like them than Alorns are like Marags. It’s not really up to you, however. I was summoned, the same as the rest of you were, and that’s an end on it.’
I remembered the odd compulsion that had dragged me out of Gara, and I looked sharply at my Master. Would you believe that he actually managed to look slightly embarrassed?
Belzedar spluttered for a while, but, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, he muffled his objections.
The next to join us was Sambar, an Angarak. Sambar - or Belsambar as he later became - was not his real name, of course. Angarak names are so universally ugly that my Master did him a favor when he renamed him. I felt a great deal of sympathy for the boy - he was only about fifteen when he joined us. I’ve never seen anyone so abject. He simply came to the tower, seated himself on the earth, and waited for either acceptance or death. Beltira and Belkira fed him, of course. They were shepherds, after all, and shepherds won’t let anything go hungry. After a week or so, when it became obvious that he absolutely would not enter the tower, our Master went down to him. Now that was something I’d never seen Aldur do before. He spoke with the lad at some length in a hideous language - old Angarak, I’ve since discovered - and turned him over to Beltira and Belkira for tutelage. If anyone ever needed gentle handling, it was Belsambar.