Guardians of the West

One dark brown bull, finally goaded into a fury of frustration, lowered his head, pawed the earth a few times, and charged the fence with a great bellow. Durnik made a peculiar twisting gesture with one hand, and the bull was suddenly charging away from the fence, turned around somehow in midstride without even knowing it. He ran for several hundred yards before it occurred to him that his horns had not yet encountered anything substantial. He slowed and raised his head in astonishment. He looked dubiously back over his shoulder at the fence, then turned around and gave it another try. Once again Durnik turned him, and once again he charged ferociously off in the wrong direction. The third time he tried it, he charged over the top of the hill and disappeared on the other side. He did not come back.

Durnik looked gravely at Errand and then he winked. Polgara came out of the cottage, drying her hands on her apron, and noted the fence which had somehow constructed itself while she had been washing the breakfast dishes. She gave her husband a quizzical look, and Durnik seemed a bit abashed at having been caught using sorcery rather than an axe.

"Very nice fence, dear," she said encouragingly to him.

"We kind of needed one there," he said apologetically. "Those cows -well, I had to do it in a hurry."

"Durnik," she said gently, "there's nothing morally reprehensible about using your talent for this sort of thing and you should practice every so often." She looked at the zig-zag pattern of the interlocking rail fence, and then her expression became concentrated. One after another, each of the junctures of the rails was suddenly bound tightly together with stout rosebushes in full bloom. "There," she said contentedly, patted her husband's shoulder, and went back inside.

"She's a remarkable woman, do you know that?" Durnik said to Errand.

"Yes," Errand agreed.

Polgara was not always pleased with her husband's ventures into this new field, however. On one occasion toward the hot, dusty end of summer when the vegetables in her garden were beginning to wilt, Polgara devoted the bulk of one morning to locating a small, black rain cloud over the mountains in Ulgoland and gently herding its sodden puffiness toward the Vale of Aldur and, more specifically, toward her thirsty garden.

Errand was playing along the fence when the cloud came in low over the hill to the west and then stopped directly over the cottage and the waiting garden. Durnik glanced up from the harness he was mending, saw the blond-haired boy at play and the ominous black cloud directly over his head, and rather negligently pulled in his will. He made a small flipping gesture with one hand. "Shoo," he said to the cloud.

The cloud gave a peculiar sort of twitch, almost like a hiccup, then slowly flowed on eastward. When it was several hundred yards beyond Polgara's parched garden, it began to rain -a nice, steady, soaking downpour that very satisfactorily watered several acres of empty grassland.

Durnik was not at all prepared for his wife's reaction. The door to the cottage banged open, and Polgara emerged with her eyes flashing. She gave the happily raining cloud a hard stare, and the soggy-looking thing gave another of those peculiar hiccups and actually managed to look guilty.

Then Polgara turned and looked directly at her husband, her eyes a bit wild. "Did you do that?" she demanded, pointing at the cloud.

"Why -yes," he replied. "I suppose I did, Pol."

"Why did you do that?"

"Errand was out there playing," Durnik said, still concentrating most of his attention on the harness. "I didn't think you'd want him to get wet."

Polgara looked at the cloud wasting all of its rain on grass so deeply rooted that it could have easily survived a ten-month drought. Then she looked at her garden and its drooping turnip tops and pathetic beans. She clenched her teeth tightly together to keep in certain words and phrases which she knew might shock her strait-laced and proper husband.

She raised her face to the sky and lifted her arms in supplication. "Why me?" she demanded in a loud, tragic voice. "Why me?"

"Why, dear," Durnik said mildly, "whatever is wrong?"

Polgara told him what was wrong -at some length.

Durnik spent the next week putting in an irrigation system leading from the upper end of their valley to Polgara's garden, and she forgave him for his mistake almost as soon as he had finished it.

The winter came late that year, and autumn lingered in the Vale. The twins, Beltira and Belkira, came by just before the snows set in and told them that, after several weeks of discussion, both Belgarath and Beldin had left the Vale, and that each of them had gone away with that serious expression on his face that meant that there was trouble somewhere.

Errand missed Belgarath's company that winter. To be sure, the old sorcerer had, more often than not, managed to get him in trouble with Polgara, but Errand felt somehow that he shouldn't really be expected to devote every waking moment to staying out of trouble. When the snow came, he took up sledding again. After she had watched him come flying down the hill and across the meadow a few times, Polgara prudently asked Durnik to erect a barrier at the stream bank to prevent a recurrence of the previous winter's mishap. It was while the smith was erecting a woven wattle fence to keep Errand on dry land that he happened to glance down into the water. Because the often muddy little rills that emptied into their stream were all locked in ice now, the water was low and as clear as crystal. Durnik could very clearly see the long, narrow shapes hovering like shadows in the current above the beds of gravel that formed the bottom.

"What a curious thing," he murmured, his eyes taking on that peculiarly abstracted look. "I've never noticed them there before."

"I've seen them jumping," Errand said. "But most of the time, the water's too cloudy to see them when they're lying underwater."

"I imagine that's the reason for it, all right," Durnik agreed. He tied the end of the wattle fence to a tree and thoughtfully walked through the snow toward the shed he had built at the back of the cottage. A moment or so later he emerged with the skein of waxed cord in his hand; five minutes later he was fishing. Errand smiled and turned to trudge back up the long hill, towing his sled behind him. When he reached the top of the hill, a strange, hooded young woman awaited him.

"Can I help you?" he asked politely.

The young woman pushed back her hood to reveal the fact that a dark cloth was tightly bound across her eyes. "Thou art the one they call Errand?" she asked. Her voice was low and musical, and there was a peculiar lilt to her archaic speech.