Chapter 30

It wasn’t long after Gelane was born that father came by the Stronghold with uncle Beldin, who’d made one of his periodic trips back from Mallorea to fill us in on what was happening on the other side of the Sea of the East. They visited briefly with Cho-Ram and with Garel, Aravina and the baby, and then the three of us adjourned to one of the squat, round towers atop the battlements of the Algars’ overgrown Murgo-trap.

My uncle looked almost absently out of one of the narrow, slitted windows with the wind ruffling his hair. ‘Nice view,’ he noted, staring out at the endless ocean of grass lying far below.

‘We aren’t here for sightseeing, Beldin,’ father said. ‘Why don’t you tell Pol what’s going on in Mallorea?’

Uncle sprawled in a chair at the roughly made table of the guard-tower. ‘Why don’t we go back a bit?’ he suggested. ‘Burnt-face has changed a lot, but he’s still not equipped to deal with a secular society. Back before the cracking of the world, he made all of the decisions for the Angaraks. A good Angarak wouldn’t even scratch his own backside without permission from Torak. Then, after he’d cracked the world apart and the Master’s Orb had dissolved half his face, Torak took all the old-style Angaraks to Cthol Mishrak and left the generals at Mal Zeth and the Grolims at Mal Yaska to run the rest of Angarak society. Over the centuries, the generals in particular grew more and more secular. Then the Melcenes and their bureaucrats joined the Angarak empire, and they buffed the raw edges off the basic barbarism of the Angarak character. Mal Zeth became a civilized city. It wasn’t Tol Honeth by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t Korim either.’

‘Was Korim really all that bad?’ I asked him.

‘Probably worse, Pol,’ he replied. ‘Independent thought was strictly prohibited. Torak did all the thinking, and the Grolims gutted anybody who even suggested that the sun might come up tomorrow morning. Anyway, Zedar had been with Torak at Ashaba for all those centuries while old One-eye was busy having religious experiences.’ Uncle paused. ‘I just had an interesting thought,’ he mused. ‘When the spirit of prophecy hits someone, it seems to erase his brain. Torak was probably on about the same mental level as that idiot on the banks of the Mrin for all those years.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ father demanded.

Beldin shrugged and scratched at his stomach. ‘I just thought it was interesting. Anyway, One-eye finally snapped out of his brainless reverie and came out of Ashaba, darkening the sun in the process, and he had no idea of what’d happened to his Angaraks. He’d been isolated in his iron tower at Cthol Mishrak and even more isolated at Ashaba. He’d been completely out of touch for forty-eight centuries or so. He stopped by Mal Yaska on his way to the capital, and that gave Urvon the opportunity to present him with a long list of grievances. Right at the top of the list was the fact that the generals at Mal Zeth were ignoring him, and Urvon can’t bear being ignored. He advised his Master that the generals were all unredeemed heretics. Since Urvon got to him first and talked very fast, Torak left Mal Yaska absolutely convinced that Mal Zeth was a hotbed of secular heresy, so he virtually depopulated the city when he got there. Then he turned Urvon and his Grolims loose on the rest of the continent, and the priesthood started settling old scores with their gutting knives. The altars of Torak ran red for years.’

I shuddered.

‘It was probably Zedar who finally convinced Torak that butchering your own army isn’t the best way to prepare for a foreign war, so Burnt-face finally reined Urvon in. By then the Angaraks, Melcenes, and Karands were all so terrified of the Grolims that they’d march into fire if Urvon ordered them to. It was probably the most amazing regression in history. A whole civilization collapsed back into the stone age in about ten years. Right now the average Mallorean’s on a par with the Thulls. Urvon’s even gone so far as to make reading a crime – except for his Grolims, of course – but even the Grolim libraries have been purged of all secular books. I’m waiting for him to outlaw the wheel.’

Father’s expression grew horrified. ‘They’ve been burning books?’ he exclaimed.

‘Don’t tie your guts in a knot, Belgarath,’ uncle told him. ‘The scholars at the university of Melcene carted off all their libraries and hid them in places where the Grolims can’t find them, and if nothing else, the Dals at Kell have probably got copies of every book that’s ever been written, and the Grolims won’t go anywhere near Kell.’

‘I’m not sure that I would either,’ father admitted. “The Dals are a very unusual people.’

‘ “Unusual” only begins to cover it,’ Beldin agreed. ‘Anyway, the army that’s going to come out of Mallorea is going to have numbers and not much else. Their brains have been erased.’

‘Those are the best kind of enemies,’ father almost gloated. ‘Give me a stupid enemy every time.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’ Then uncle looked around. ‘Is there anything to drink up here?’

‘Maybe you can have something with supper,’ I told him.

‘Why not before supper?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to spoil your appetite, uncle dear.’

Since the entire purpose of the impending Angarak invasion was to regain the Orb, the Alorns were certain to bear the brunt of that assault, and father and I had provided them with far more information than we’d given the non-Alorn rulers. When the Murgos and Nadraks closed the caravan routes in the autumn of 4864, however, the Tolnedrans in particular began to get wind of the fact that something significant was afoot. To make matters even worse for the merchant princes of Tol Honeth, Brand closed the port of Riva that winter – ostensibly for renovations. At that point even a simpleton would have realized that the Alorns and Angaraks were clearing things away in preparation for something fairly earth-shaking, and Ran Borune IV was far from being a simpleton.

We all met again at Riva that winter to review our preparations, and I suggested to father that courtesy, if nothing else, demanded that we advise Ran Borune of the impending invasion. ‘If this is all going to come to a climax in Arendia, father,’ I said, ‘we’re probably going to need the Tolnedran legions, so let’s stay on the good side of the emperor.’

Father grunted – he does that a lot – but he went on down to Tol Honeth to speak with the youthful Ran Borune. While they were talking, my sometimes bumbling father had a stroke of pure genius. Rather than waste time and effort hammering at the unassailable wall of Ran Borune’s scepticism about just how we were getting all this information, father blandly lied to him, handing all the credit to the Drasnian intelligence service. That’s been a very useful myth over the centuries.