Belgarath the Sorcerer
Page 99I quickly laid a couple of books on the scroll to keep the place. That’s one of the reasons I don’t like scrolls. Left to their own devices, they’ll roll themselves back up without any outside assistance as soon as you let go of them.
I picked up the Mrin again and rolled my way through it until I came to the place I’d just remembered. ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘all shall seem lost, but curb thy despair, for the Rivan King shall return.’
They weren’t identical, but they were very close. I stared at the two passages with my heart sinking like a rock. A rather horrid prospect was looming in front of me. I knew how to wring coherence out of the Mrin now, but the sheer size of that job made me weak just thinking about it. There were matching passages in those documents. The Mrin had no sense of time, but the Darine did. All I had to do to get a coherent time-sequence for the Mrin was to compile a comparative concordance.
Then I read the next line of the Mrin. ‘I had fullest confidence in thee, Ancient and Beloved, knowing full-well that the solution would come to thee - eventually.’
Now that was really offensive, even though it confirmed my discovery. The Necessity knew the past and the present and the future, so it knew that I’d ultimately break its code. The clever remark was there for no reason other than to draw my attention to the fact so that I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Evidently, it thought I was stupid.
Incidentally, Garion, the next time your friend pays you a visit, you might tell him that I’ve occasionally taken advantage of his clever little trick. Why should I wrack my brains trying to make sense of that solid wall of gibberish we call the Mrin Codex when he’s speckled it with those very obvious signals? I’m not above letting somebody else do my work for me. Then you might ask him who got in the last laugh. I’m sure he won’t mind. He has an absolutely wonderful sense of humor.
I went back to the place in the Darine that more or less matched the warning in the Mrin that’d sent Pol and me flying off to the Isle of the Winds; then I settled down to work. It was very slow going, since I had to virtually memorize the Mrin in the process. The Darine usually gave only a brief summary of an event, and the Mrin expanded on it. There were certain key words that linked the two, and after I’d matched up a couple of those passages, I got a little better at pinpointing those keys. I devised a system of index marks that I’d put in the margins to correlate matching passages. Once I’d found a match, I didn’t want to lose it. The more I worked on it, the more I came to realize that the Darine was little more than a map to the Mrin. Neither of them was very useful by itself, but when you put them together, the message started to emerge. It was subtle and very complex, but it almost absolutely guaranteed that nobody was going to accidentally get his hands on information that was none of his business.
I slogged along for the better part of a year, and then Beldin came back to the Vale. ‘Did you get the Alorns back where they belong?’ I asked him when he came stumping up the stairs to my tower.
‘Finally,’ he said. ‘You were right about the Bear-Cult. They really wanted to stay in the south. You’d better keep an eye on Valcor. He’s not quite a cultist, but his sympathies sort of lean in that direction. Radek and Cho-Ram finally managed to bring him to his senses, though.’
‘Cultists don’t have any sense, Beldin.’
‘They’re not quite suicidal, though. Radek and Cho-Ram chained up all the cultists in their own ranks and started for home. The Chereks are savages, but they’re no match for the legions all by themselves. Once the Drasnians and Algars left, Valcor didn’t have any choice but to go home, too.’
‘Did Brand take sides?’
‘He was in complete agreement with Radek and Cho-Ram. He’s got responsibilities at home, so he wasn’t about to get involved in an extended war in the south.’ He looked at the scrolls on my work table. ‘Are you making any progress?’
‘Some. It’s very slow going, though.’ I explained the concordance I’d been working on.
‘Thank you.’
‘Not you, Belgarath; the Necessity.’
‘It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes to match up some of those passages.’
‘Have you talked with the twins about it?’
‘They’re busy with something else.’
‘Maybe they’d better put it aside. I think this is more important.’
‘I can handle it, Beldin.’
‘A little professional jealousy there, old boy? A prophecy isn’t really a prophecy if you don’t unravel it until after the fact, you know. To all intents and purposes, the twins have a single mind, don’t they?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘When you try to do this, you have to keep hopping back and forth, but they wouldn’t. Beltira could read the Darine, and Belkira the Mrin. When they hit these correspondences, they’ll both know it instantly. They’ll be able to do in minutes what takes you days.’
I blinked. ‘They could, couldn’t they? I never thought of that.’
‘Obviously. Let’s go drop your project into their laps. Then you’ll be able to do something useful - like cutting firewood or digging ditches. Have you looked in on Pol?’
‘I’ve been busy. Did it really take you a whole year to take the Alorns home?’
‘Is there?’
‘Not so far. Maybe word of what happened at Riva hasn’t reached Torak yet. Let’s go get Pol. I think we’d all better get together and make some plans before I go back and take up permanent residence in Mal Zeth.’
‘That might not be a bad idea. I’ve picked up a few hints about the next couple of centuries while I was putting the concordance together. I don’t think anything significant’s going to happen for a while, but let’s all put our heads together on it. Sometimes I miss things.’
‘You? Impossible.’
‘Quit trying to be clever, Beldin. I’m not in the mood for it. Let’s turn the concordance over to the twins and then go to Erat and talk to Pol.’
The twins understood the idea behind the concordance immediately, and Beldin had been right. With two sets of eyes, one reading Darine and the other reading Mrin, they could definitely make headway faster than I could. Then Beldin took the form of the blue-banded hawk he’s so fond of, I converted myself into the falcon again, and we winged off to the northwest to drop in on Polgara.
There’s an old fairy-tale about a princess who’s locked up in a lonely castle that’s completely surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny trees. Pol’s manor-house in north central Sendara is very much like that - except that her thicket has roses all over it. Those rose-bushes had been untended for centuries. The canes were as thick as tree-trunks, and they were covered with thorns that were at least four inches long. Their tendrils were so interwoven that nobody was going to get through them without ripping off most of his skin. Since the house was totally concealed, nobody’d have any reason to take the trouble, so Pol’s privacy was guaranteed.
We settled on her doorstep, changed back, and I pounded on the door, sending echoes booming back into the house.
After a few moments, I heard Pol’s voice just inside. ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me, Pol. Open up.’
She was wearing an apron, and she’d tied a kerchief around her head in a kind of turban. She was holding a cloth-wrapped broom that had cobwebs all over it.
‘What are you doing, Pol?’ Beldin asked her.
‘Cleaning house.’
‘It’s my house, uncle. I’ll clean it any way I choose.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re a strange person, Polgara,’ he noted. ‘You spend centuries learning all the short-cuts, and then you refuse to use them.’
‘It’s a matter of principle, uncle. You don’t have any principles, so you wouldn’t understand.’
He bowed to her. ‘Score one for you, Pol,’ he said. ‘An would y’ be willin’ t’ offer the hospitality of yer splendid house t’ a couple o’ weary travelers, great lady?’
She ignored his attempt at humor. ‘What do you two want?’ She wasn’t very gracious about it.
‘We’re having a little family get-together at the Vale, Pol,’ I told her. ‘It wouldn’t be the same without you.’
‘Out of the question.’
‘Don’t be difficult, Polgara,’ Beldin said. ‘This is important. We need you.’ He pushed his way past her into the hallway.
‘Did you chop a road right to my doorstep?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘We flew in.’
I looked around. The light was subdued because all of the windows in the house were covered with rose-vines, but I could see that the entryway to my daughter’s house had a highly-polished marble floor and glowing wooden wainscoting. ‘Are you just now getting around to tidying up, Pol?’ I asked her.