"Dear Durnik," Aunt Pol said fondly, touching his arm. "Still willing to believe only what you can see. Garion's the same boy he's always been."
"You mean it was you?" Durnik looked at Chamdar's body and pulled his eyes quickly away.
"Of course," she said. "You know Garion. He's the most ordinary boy in the world."
But Garion knew differently. The Will had been his, and the Word had come from him.
"Keep still!" her voice warned inside his head. "No one must know."
"Why did you call me Belgarion?" he demanded silently.
"Because it's your name, " her voice replied. "Now try to act natural and don't bother me with questions. We'll talk about it later. " And then her voice was gone.
The others stood around awkwardly until the legionnaires left with Kador. Then, when the soldiers were out of sight and the need for imperial self possession was gone, Ce'Nedra began to cry. Aunt Pol took the tiny girl in her arms and began to comfort her.
"I guess we'd better bury this," Barak said, nudging what was left of Chamdar with his foot. "The Dryads might be offended if we went off and left it still smoking."
"I'll fetch my spade," Durnik said.
Garion turned away and brushed past Mandorallen and Hettar. His hands were trembling violently, and he was so exhausted that his legs barely held him.
She had called him Belgarion, and the name had rung in his mind as if he had always known that it was his - as if for all his brief years he had been incomplete until in that instant the name itself had completed him. But Belgarion was a being who with Will and Word and the touch of his hand could turn flesh into living fire.
"You did it!" he accused the dry awareness in one corner of his mind. "No, " the voice replied. "I only showed you how. The Will and the Word and the touch were all yours. "
Garion knew that it was true. With horror he remembered his enemy's final supplication and the flaming, incandescent hand with which he had spurned that agonized appeal for mercy. The revenge he had wanted so desperately for the past several months was dreadfully complete, but the taste of it was bitter, bitter.
Then his knees buckled, and he sank to the earth and wept like a broken-hearted child.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The earth was still the same. The trees had not changed, nor had the sky. It was still spring, for the seasons had not altered their stately march. But for Garion nothing would ever again be the way that it had been.
They rode down through the Wood of the Dryads to the banks of the River of the Woods which marked the southern boundary of Tolnedra, and from time to time as they rode he caught strange glances from his friends. The looks were speculative, thoughtful, and Durnik - good, solid Durnik - behaved as if he were almost afraid. Only Aunt Pol seemed unchanged, unconcerned. "Don't worry about it, Belgarion, " her voice murmured in his mind.
"Don't call me that," he replied with an irritated thought.
"It's your name, " the silent voice said. "You might as well get used to it.
"Leave me alone. "
And then the sense of her presence in his mind was gone.
It took them several days to reach the sea. The weather remained intermittently cloudy, though it did not rain. A stiff onshore breeze was blowing when they rode out onto the wide beach at the mouth of the river. The surf boomed against the sand, and whitecaps flecked the tops of the waves.
Out beyond the surf, a lean, black Cherek war-boat swung at anchor, the air above her alive with screeching gulls. Barak pulled his horse in and shaded his eyes. "She looks familiar," he rumbled, peering intently at the narrow ship.
Hettar shrugged. "They all look the same to me."
"There's all the difference in the world," Barak said, sounding a bit injured. "How would you feel if I said that all horses looked the same?"
"I'd think you were going blind."
Barak grinned at him. "It's exactly the same thing," he said.
"How do we let them know we're here?" Durnik asked.
"They know already," Barak said, "unless they're drunk. Sailors always watch an unfriendly shore very carefully."
"Unfriendly?" Durnik asked.
"Every shore is unfriendly when a Cherek war-boat comes in sight," Barak answered. "It's some kind of superstition, I think."
The ship came about and her anchor was raised. Her oars came out like long, spidery legs, and she seemed to walk through the froth-topped combers toward the mouth of the river. Barak led the way toward the riverbank, then rode along the broad flow until he found a spot deep enough so that the ship could be moored next to the shore.
The fur-clad sailors who threw Barak a mooring line looked familiar, and the first one who leaped across to the riverbank was Greldik, Barak's old friend.
"You're a long ways south," Barak said as if they had only just parted.
Greldik shrugged. "I heard you needed a ship. I wasn't doing anything, so I thought I'd come down and see what you were up to."
"Did you talk to my cousin?"
"Grinneg? No. We made a run down from Kotu to the harbor at Tol Horb for some Drasnian merchants. I ran into Elteg - you remember him - black beard, only one eye?"
Barak nodded.
"He told me that Grinneg was paying him to meet you here. I remembered that you and Elteg didn't get along very well, so I offered to come down instead."
"And he agreed?"
"No," Greldik replied, pulling at his beard. "As a matter of fact, he told me to mind my own business."
"I'm not surprised," Barak said. "Elteg always was greedy, and Grinneg probably offered him a lot of money."
"More than likely." Greldik grinned. "Elteg didn't say how much, though."
"How did you persuade him to change his mind?"
"He had some trouble with his ship," Greldik said with a straight face.
"What kind of trouble?"
"It seems that one night after he and his crew were all drunk, some scoundrel slipped aboard and chopped down his mast."
"What's the world coming to?" Barak asked, shaking his head.
"My thought exactly," Greldik agreed.
"How did he take it?"
"Not very well, I'm afraid," Greldik said sadly. "When we rowed out of the harbor, he sounded as if he was inventing profanities on the spot. You could hear him for quite some distance."
"He should learn to control his temper. That's the kind of behavior that gives Chereks a bad name in the ports of the world."
Greldik nodded soberly and turned to Aunt Pol. "My Lady," he said with a polite bow, "my ship is at your disposal."
"Captain," she asked, acknowledging his bow. "How long will it take you to get us to Sthiss Tor?"
"Depends on the weather," he answered, squinting at the sky. "Probably ten days at the most. We picked up fodder for your horses on the way here, but we'll have to stop for water from time to time."
"We'd better get started then," she said.
It took a bit of persuading to get the horses aboard the ship, but Hettar managed it without too much difficulty. Then they pushed away from the bank, crossed the bar at the mouth of the river and reached the open sea. The crew raised the sails, and they quartered the wind down along the gray-green coastline of Nyissa.
Garion went forward to his customary place in the bow of the ship and sat there, staring bleakly out at the tossing sea. The image of the burning man back in the forest filled his mind.
There was a firm step behind him and a faint, familiar fragrance.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Aunt Pol asked.
"What's there to talk about?"
"Many things," she told him.
"You knew I could do that kind of thing, didn't you?"
"I suspected it," she said, sitting down beside him. "There were several hints. One can never be sure, though, until it's used for the first time. I've known any number of people who had the capability and just never used it."
"I wish I never had," Garion said.
"I
don't see that you really had much choice. Chamdar was your enemy."
"But did it have to be that way?" he demanded. "Did it have to be fire?"
"The choice was yours," she answered. "If fire bothers you so much, don't do it that way next time."
"There isn't going to be a next time," he stated flatly. "Not ever."
"Belgarion, " her voice snapped within his mind, "stop this foolishness at once. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. "
"Quit that," he said aloud. "Stay out of my mind - and don't call me Belgarion."
"You are Belgarion," she insisted. "Like it or not, you will use the power again. Once it's been released, you can never cage it up. You'll get angry or frightened or excited, and you'll use it without even thinking. You can no more choose not to use it than you can choose not to use one of your hands. The important thing now is to teach you how to control it. We can't have you blundering through the world uprooting trees and flattening hills with random thoughts. You must learn to control it and yourself. I didn't raise you to let you become a monster."
"It's too late," he said. "I'm already a monster. Didn't you see what I did back there?"
"All this self pity is very tedious, Belgarion, " her voice told him. "I don't think we're getting anywhere."
She stood up. "Do try to grow up a little, dear," she said aloud. "It's very hard to instruct someone who's so self absorbed that he won't listen."
"I'll never do it again," he told her defiantly.
"Oh yes, you will, Belgarion. You'll learn and you'll practice and you'll develop the discipline this requires. If you don't want to do it willingly, then we'll have to do it the other way. Think about it, dear, and make up your mind - but don't take too long. It's too important to be put off." She reached out and gently touched his cheek; then she turned and walked away.
"She's right, you know, " the voice in his mind told him.
"You stay out of this, " Garion said.
In the days that followed, he avoided Aunt Pol as much as possible, but he could not avoid her eyes. Wherever he went on the narrow ship, he knew that she was watching him, her eyes calm, speculative.
Then, at breakfast on the third day out, she looked at his face rather closely as if noticing something for the first time. "Garion," she said, "you're starting to look shaggy. Why don't you shave?"
Garion blushed furiously and put his fingers to his chin. There were definitely whiskers there - downy, soft, more like fuzz than bristles, but whiskers all the same.
"Thou art truly approaching manhood, young Garion," Mandorallen assured him rather approvingly.
"The decision doesn't have to be made immediately, Polgara," Barak said, stroking his own luxuriant red beard. "Let the whiskers grow for a while. If they don't turn out well, he can always shave them off later."
"I think your neutrality in the matter is suspect, Barak," Hettar remarked. "Don't most Chereks wear beards?"
"No razor's ever touched my face," Barak admitted. "But I just don't think it's the sort of thing to rush into. It's very hard to stick whiskers back on if you decide later that you wanted to keep them after all."
"I think they're kind of funny," Ce'Nedra said. Before Garion could stop her, she reached out two tiny fingers and tugged the soft down on his chin. He winced and blushed again.
"They come off," Aunt Pol ordered firmly.
Wordlessly, Durnik went below decks. When he came back, he carried a basin, a chunk of brown-colored soap, a towel, and a fragment of mirror. "It isn't really hard, Garion," he said, putting the things on the table in front of the young man. Then he took a neatly folded razor out of a case at his belt. "You just have to be careful not to cut yourself, that's all. The whole secret is not to rush."
"Pay close attention when you're near your nose," Hettar advised. "A man looks very strange without a nose."
The shaving proceeded with a great deal of advice, and on the whole it did not turn out too badly. Most of the bleeding stopped after a few minutes, and, aside from the fact that his face felt as if it had been peeled, Garion was quite satisfied with the results.
"Much better," Aunt Pol said.
"He'll catch cold in his face now," Barak predicted.
"Will you stop that?" she told him.
The coast of Nyissa slid by on their left, a blank wall of tangled vegetation, festooned with creepers and long tatters of moss. Occasional eddies in the breeze brought the foul reek of the swamps out to the ship. Garion and Ce'Nedra stood together in the prow of the ship, looking toward the jungle.
"What are those?" Garion asked, pointing at some large things with legs slithering around on a mud bank along a stream that emptied into the sea.
"Crocodiles," Ce'Nedra answered.
"What's a crocodile?"
"A big lizard," she said.
"Are they dangerous?"
"Very dangerous. They eat people. Haven't you ever read about them?"
"I can't read," Garion admitted without thinking.
"What?"
"I can't read," Garion repeated. "Nobody ever taught me how."
"That's ridiculous!"
"It's not my fault," he said defensively.
She looked at him thoughtfully. She had seemed almost half afraid of him since the meeting with Chamdar, and her insecurity had probably been increased by the fact that, on the whole, she had not treated him very well. Her first assumption that he was only a servant boy had gotten their whole relationship off on the wrong foot, but she was far too proud to admit that initial mistake. Garion could almost hear the little wheels clicking around in her head. "Would you like to have me teach you how?" she offered. It was probably the closest thing he'd ever get to an apology from her.
"Would it take very long?"
"That depends on how clever you are."
"When do you think we could start?"
She frowned. "I've got a couple of books, but we'll need something to write on."
"I don't know that I need to learn how to write," he said. "Reading 'ought to be enough for right now."
She laughed. "They're the same thing, you goose."
"I didn't know that," Garion said, flushing slightly. "I thought-" He floundered with the whole idea. "I guess I never really thought about it," he concluded lamely. "What sort of thing do we need to write on?"
"Parchment's the best," she said, "and a charcoal stick to write with - so we can rub it off and write on the parchment again."
"I'll go talk to Durnik," he decided. "He'll be able to think of something."
Durnik suggested sailcloth and a charred stick. Within an hour Garion and Ce'Nedra were sitting in a sheltered spot in the bow of the ship their heads close together over a square of canvas nailed to a plank. Garion glanced up once and saw Aunt Pol not far away. She was watching the two of them with an indecipherable expression. Then he lowered his eyes again to the strangely compelling symbols on the canvas.
His instruction went on for the next several days. Since his fingers were naturally nimble, he quickly picked up the trick of forming the letter.
"No, no," Ce'Nedra said one afternoon, "you've spelled it wrong, used the wrong letters. Your name's Garion, not Belgarion."
He felt a sudden chill and looked down at the canvas square. The name was spelled out quite clearly - "Belgarion."
He looked up quickly. Aunt Pol was standing where she usually stood, her eyes on him as always.
"Stay out of my mind!" He snapped the thought at her.
"Study hard, dear, " her voice urged him silently. "Learning of any kind is useful, and you have a great deal to learn. The sooner you get the habit, the better." Then she smiled, turned and walked away.
The next day, Greldik's ship reached the mouths of the River of the Serpent in central Nyissa, and his men struck the sail and set their oars into the locks along the sides of the ship in preparation for the long pull upriver to Sthiss Tor.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There was no air. It seemed as if the world had suddenly
been turned into a vast, reeking pool of stagnant water. The River of the Serpent had a hundred mouths, each creeping sluggishly through the jellied muck of the delta as if reluctant to join the boisterous waves of the sea. The reeds which grew in that vast swamp reached a height of twenty feet and were as thick as woven fabric. There was a tantalizing sound of a breeze brushing the tops of the reeds, but down among them, all thought or memory of breeze was lost. There was no air. The delta steamed and stank beneath a sun that did not burn so much as boil. Each breath seemed to be half water. Insects rose in clouds from the reeds and settled in mindless gluttony on every inch of exposed skin, biting, feeding on blood.
They were a day and a half among the reeds before they reached the first trees, low, scarcely more than bushes. The main river channel began to take shape as they moved slowly on into the Nyissan heartland. The sailors sweated and swore at their oars, and the ship moved slowly against the current, almost as if she struggled against a tide of thick oil that clung to her like some loathsome glue.
The trees grew taller, then immense. Great, gnarled roots twisted up out of the ooze along the banks like grotesquely misshapen legs, and trunks vast as castles reached up into the steaming sky. Ropey vines undulated down from the limbs overhead, moving, seeming to writhe with a kind of vegetable will of their own in the breathless air. Shaggy tatters of grayish moss descended in hundred-foot-long streamers from the trees, and the river wound spitefully in great coils that made their journey ten times as long as it needed to be.
"Unpleasant sort of place," Hettar grumbled, dispiritedly looking out over the bow at the weedy surface of the river ahead. He had removed his horsehide jacket and linen undertunic, and his lean torso gleamed with sweat. Like most of them, he was covered with the angry welts of insect bites.
"My very thought," Mandorallen agreed.
One of the sailors shouted and jumped up, kicking at his oar-handle. Something long, slimy, and boneless had crawled unseen up his oar, seeking his flesh with an eyeless voracity.
"Leech," Durnik said with a shudder as the hideous thing dropped with a wet plop back into the stinking river. "I've never seen one so big. It must be a foot long or more."