The exhaustion he had felt after trying to lift the rock with his back was nothing compared to the bone-deep weariness that swept over him after he let the clenching of his will relax. He folded his arms on the grass and let his head sink down on them.
After a moment or two, that peculiar fact began to dawn on him. He was still standing, but his arms were folded comfortably in front of him on the grass. He jerked his head up and looked around in confusion. He had moved the rock, certainly. That much was obvious, since the rock now lay on its rounded top with its damp underside turned up. Something else had also happened, however. Though he had not touched the rock, its weight had nonetheless been upon him as he had lifted it, and the force he had directed at it had not all gone at the rock.
With dismay, Garion realized that he had sunk up to his armpits in the firm soil of the meadow.
"Now what do I do?" he asked himself helplessly. He shuddered away from the idea of once again mustering his will to pull himself out of the ground. He was too exhausted even to consider it. He tried to wriggle, thinking that he might be able to loosen the earth around him and work his way up an inch at a time, but he could not so much as budge.
"Look what you've done," he accused the rock. The rock ignored him.
A thought occurred to him. "Are you in there?" he asked that awareness that seemed always to have been with him.
The silence in his mind was profound. "Help!" he shouted.
A bird, attracted by the exposed worms and bugs that had been under the rock, cocked one eye at him and then went back to its breakfast. Garion heard a light step behind him and craned around, trying to see. The colt was staring at him in amazement. Hesitantly, the small horse thrust out his nose and nuzzled Garion's face.
"Good horse," Garion said, relieved not to be alone, at least. An idea came to him. "You're going to have to go get Hettar," he told the colt. The colt pranced about and nuzzled his face again.
"Stop that," Garion commanded. "This is serious." Cautiously, he tried to push his mind into the colt's thoughts. He tried a dozen different ways until he finally struck the right combination by sheer accident. The colt's mind flitted from here to there without purpose or pattern. It was a baby's mind, vacant of thought, receiving only sense impressions. Garion caught flickering images of green grass and running and clouds in the sky and warm milk. He also felt the sense of wonder in the little mind, and the abiding love the colt had for him.
Slowly, painfully, Garion began constructing a picture of Hettar in the colt's wandering thoughts. It seemed to take forever.
"Hettar," Garion said over and over. "Go get Hettar. Tell him that I'm in trouble."
The colt scampered around and came back to stick his soft nose in Garion's ear.
"Please pay attention," Garion cried. "Please!"
Finally, after what seemed hours, the colt seemed to understand. He went several paces away, then came back to nuzzle Garion again. "Go-get-Hettar," Garion ordered, stressing each word.
The colt pawed at the ground, then turned and galloped away - going in the wrong direction. Garion started to swear. For almost a year now he had been exposed to some of the more colorful parts of Barak's vocabulary. After he had repeated all the phrases he remembered six or eight times, he began to extemporize.
A flickering thought came back to him from the now-vanished colt. The little beast was chasing butterflies. Garion pounded the ground with his fists, wanting to howl with frustration.
The sun rose higher, and it started to get hot.
It was early afternoon when Hettar and Silk, following the prancing little colt, found him.
"How in the world did you manage to do that?" Silk asked curiously.
"I don't want to talk about it," Garion muttered, somewhere between relief and total embarrassment.
"He probably can do many things that we can't," Hettar observed, climbing down from his horse and untying Durnik's shovel from his saddle. "The thing I can't understand, though, is why he'd want to do it.
"I'm positive he had a good reason for it," Silk assured him. "Do you think we should ask him?"
"It's probably very complicated," Silk replied. "I'm sure simple men like you and me wouldn't be able to understand it."
"Do you suppose he's finished with whatever it is he's doing?"
"We could ask him, I suppose."
"I wouldn't want to disturb him," Hettar said. "It could be very important."
"It almost has to be," Silk agreed.
"Will you please get me out of here?" Garion begged.
"Are you sure you're finished?" Silk asked politely. "We can wait if you're not done yet."
"Please, " Garion asked, almost in tears.
Chapter Twelve
"WHY DID YOU try to lift it?" Belgarath asked Garion the next morning after he and Aunt Pol had returned and Silk and Hettar had solemnly informed them of the predicament in which they had found the young man the afternoon before."It seemed like the best way to tip it over," Garion answered. "You know, kind of get hold of it from underneath and then roll it-sort of."
"Why didn't you just push against it - close to the top? It would have rolled over if you'd done it that way."
"I didn't think of it."
"Don't you realize that soft earth won't accept that kind of pressure?" Aunt Pol asked.
"I do now," Garion replied. "But wouldn't pushing on it have just moved me backward?"
"You have to brace yourself," Belgarath explained. "That's part of the whole trick. As much of your will goes to holding yourself immobile as it does to pushing against the object you're trying to move. Otherwise all you do is just shove yourself away."
"I didn't know that," Garion admitted. "It's the first time I've ever tried to do anything unless it was an emergency . . . Will you stop that?" he demanded crossly of Ce'Nedra, who had collapsed into gales of laughter as soon as Silk had finished telling them about Garion's blunder.
She laughed even harder.
"I think you're going to have to explain a few things to him, father," Aunt Pol said. "He doesn't seem to have even the most rudimentary idea about the way forces react against each other." She looked at Garion critically. "It's lucky you didn't decide to throw it," she told him. "You might have flung yourself halfway back to Maragor."
"I really don't think it's all that funny," Garion told his friends, who were all grinning openly at him. "This isn't as easy as it looks, you know." He realized that he had just made a fool of himself and he was not sure if he were more embarrassed or hurt by their amusement.