‘Just now,’ Beldin admitted. ‘Hold that light up a little higher, would you, please?’
Father’s expression was growing sulkier by the minute.
‘What’s your problem?’ Beldin demanded.
‘You’re cheating.’
‘Of course I am. We all cheat. It’s what we do. Are you only just now realizing that?’
Father spluttered at that point.
‘Oh, dear,’ I sighed.
‘What’s the matter, Pol?’ Belkira asked me.
‘I’m living with a group of white-haired little boys, uncle. When are you old men ever going to grow up?’
They all looked slightly injured by that particular suggestion. Men always do, I’ve noticed.
Beldin continued to unroll the original codex while the twins rapidly compared the copies to it line by line. ‘Any mistakes yet?’ the dwarf asked.
‘Not a one,’ Beltira replied.
‘Maybe I’ve got it right then.’
‘How much longer are you going to be at that?’ father demanded.
‘As long as it takes. Give him something to eat, Pol. Get him out of my hair.’
Father stamped away, muttering to himself.
Actually, it took Beldin no more than an hour, since he wasn’t actually reading the text he was copying. He explained the process to us later that evening. All he was really doing was transferring the image of the original to those blank scrolls. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘that’s that. Now we can all snuggle up to the silly thing.’
‘Which one’s the original?’ father demanded, looking at the seven scrolls lined up on the table.
‘What difference does it make?’ Beldin growled.
‘I want my original copy.’
And then I laughed at them, even as I checked the ham we were having for dinner.
‘It’s not funny, Pol,’ father reprimanded me.
‘I found it fairly amusing. Now, why don’t you all go wash up? Supper’s almost ready.’
After we’d eaten, we each took up our own copy of Bormik’s ravings and retired to various chairs scattered about father’s tower to be alone with the word of the Gods – or with the word of that unseen Purpose that controlled the lives of every living thing on the face of the earth.
I took my copy to my favorite oversized chair beside the fireplace in the kitchen area and untied the ribbon that kept it rolled up. There was a brief note from Luana inside. ‘Lady Polgara,’ Bormik’s daughter began. “Thus I’ve kept my part of our bargain. I feel I must thank you once more for your gift to me. I’m living in central Algaria now, and would you believe that I actually have a suitor? He’s older, of course, but he’s a good, solid man who’s very kind to me. I thought that I’d never marry, but Belar’s seen fit to provide me a chance for happiness. I can’t begin to thank you enough.’
It hadn’t been Belar who’d rewarded Luana, of course. Over the years I’ve noticed again and again that the Purpose that created everything that is, that was, or ever will be has a sense of obligation, and it always rewards service. I don’t have to look any further than the faces of my own children and my husband to see mine.
The handwriting on Luana’s note was identical to the script in which our copies of the Darine Codex were cast, a clear indication that she’d meticulously copied off the document her scribes had produced. It hadn’t really been necessary, of course, but Luana appeared to take her obligations very seriously.
The Darine Codex, despite its occasional soarings, is really a rather pedestrian document, since it seems almost driven by a need to keep track of time. I know why now, but when I first read through it, it was tedious going. I thought that the tediousness was no more than a reflection of Bormik’s deranged mentality, but I now know that such was not the case.
Uncle Beldin ploughed his way through the Darine in about six months, and then one evening in midwinter he trudged through the snow to father’s tower. ‘I’m starting to get restless,’ he announced. ‘I think I’ll go back to Mallorea and see if I can catch Urvon off guard long enough to disembowel him just a little bit.’
‘How can you disembowel somebody just a little bit?’ father asked with an amused expression.
‘I thought I’d take him up to the top of a cliff, rip him open, wrap a loop of his guts around a tree stump and then kick him off the edge.’
‘Uncle, please!’ I objected in revulsion.
‘It’s something in the nature of a scientific experiment, Pol,’ he explained with a hideous grin. ‘I want to find out if his guts break when he comes to the end or if he bounces instead.’
‘That will do, uncle!’
He was still laughing that wicked laugh of his as he went down the stairs.
‘He’s an evil man,’ I told my father.
‘Fun, though,’ father added.
The twins had watched Beldin’s mode of copying the Darine Codex very closely and had duplicated the procedure with the uncompleted Mrin. I think it was that incompleteness that made us all pay only passing attention to the Mrin – that and the fact that it was largely incomprehensible.
‘It’s all jumbled together,’ father complained to the twins and me one snowy evening after we’d eaten supper and were sitting by the fire in his tower. ‘That idiot in Braca has absolutely no concept of time. He starts out talking about things that happened before the cracking of the world and in the next breath he’s rambling on about what’s going to happen so far in the future that it makes my mind reel. I can’t for the life of me separate one set of EVENTS from another.’
‘It think that’s one of the symptoms of idiocy, brother,’ Beltira told him. ‘There was an idiot in our village when Belkira and I were just children, and he always seemed confused and frightened when the sun went down and it started to get dark. He couldn’t seem to remember that it happened every day.’
‘The Mrin mentions you fairly often though, Belgarath,’ Belkira noted.
Father grunted sourly. ‘And usually not in a very complimentary way, I’ve noticed. It says nice things about Pol, though.’
‘I’m more loveable than you are, father,’ I teased him.
‘Not when you talk that way, you aren’t.’
I’d browsed into various passages in the Mrin myself on occasion. The term the Prophet used most frequently to identify father was ‘ancient and beloved’, and there were references to ‘the daughter of the ancient and beloved’ – me, I surmised, since the daughter mentioned was supposed to do things that Beldaran was clearly incapable of doing. The incoherent time-frame of the Prophecy made it almost impossible to say just exactly when these things were going to happen, but there was a sort of sense that they’d be widely separated in time. I’d always rather taken it for granted that my life-span was going to be abnormally long, but the Mrin brought a more disturbing reality crashing in on me. Evidently I was going to live for thousands of years, and when I looked at the three old men around me, I didn’t like that idea very much. ‘Venerable’ is a term often applied to men of a certain age, and there’s a great deal of respect attached to it. I’ve never heard anyone talking about a venerable woman, however. The term attached to us is ‘crone’, and that didn’t set too well with me. It was a little vain, perhaps, but the notion of cronehood sent me immediately to my mirror. A very close examination of my reflection didn’t reveal any wrinkles, though – at least not yet.