Chapter Seventeen
IT ALL SEEMED so tedious. The snow and cold they had endured on the journey to Prolgu had numbed Ce'Nedra, and the warmth here in the caverns made her drowsy. The endless, obscure talk of Belgarath and the strange, frail old Gorim seemed to pull her toward sleep. The peculiar singing began again somewhere, echoing endlessly through the caves, and that too lulled her. Only a lifetime of training in the involved etiquette of court behavior kept her awake.
The journey had been ghastly for Ce'Nedra. Tol Honeth was a warm city, and she was not accustomed to cold weather. It seemed that her feet would never be warm again. She had also discovered a world filled with shocks, terrors, and unpleasant surprises. At the Imperial Palace in Tol Honeth, the enormous power of her father, the Emperor, had shielded her from danger of any kind, but now she felt vulnerable. In a rare moment of absolute truth with herself, she admitted that much of her spiteful behavior toward Garion had grown out of her dreadful new sense of insecurity. Her safe, pampered little world had been snatched away from her, and she felt exposed, unprotected, and afraid.
Poor Garion, she thought. He was such a nice boy. She felt a little ashamed that he had been the one who'd had to suffer from her bad temper. She promised herself that soon - very soon - she would sit down with him and explain it all. He was a sensible boy, and he'd be sure to understand. That, of course, would immediately patch up the rift which had grown between them.
Feeling her eyes on him, he glanced once at her and then looked away with apparent indifference. Ce'Nedra's eyes hardened like agates. How dared he? She made a mental note of it and added it to her list of his many imperfections.
The frail-looking old Gorim had sent one of the strange, silent Ulgos to fetch the man he and Belgarath and Lady Polgara had been discussing, and then they turned to more general topics. "Were you able to pass through the mountains unmolested?" the Gorim asked.
"We had a few encounters," Barak, the big, red-bearded Earl of Trellheim, replied with what seemed to Ce'Nedra gross understatement.
"But thanks to UL you're all safe," the Gorim declared piously. "Which of the monsters are still abroad at this season? I haven't been out of the caves in years, but as I recall most of them seek their lairs when the snow begins."
"We encountered Hrulgin, Holy One," Baron Mandorallen informed him, "and some Algroths. And there was an Eldrak."
"The Eldrak was troublesome," Silk said dryly.
"Understandably. Fortunately there aren't very many Eldrakyn. They're fearsome monsters."
"We noticed that," Silk said.
"Which one was it?"
"Grul," Belgarath replied. "He and I had met before, and he seemed to hold a grudge. I'm sorry, Gorim, but we had to kill him. There wasn't any other way."
"Ah," the Gorim said with a slight note of pain in his voice. "Poor Grul."
"I personally don't miss him very much," Barak said. "I'm not trying to be forward, Holy One, but don't you think it might be a good idea to exterminate some of the more troublesome beasts in these mountains?"
"They're the children of UL, even as we," the Gorim explained.
"But if they weren't out there, you could return to the world above," Barak pointed out.
The Gorim smiled at that. "No," he said gently. "Ulgo will never leave the caves now. We've dwelt here for five millennia and, over the years, we've changed. Our eyes could not bear the sunlight now. The monsters above cannot reach us here, and their presence in the mountains keeps strangers out of Ulgo. We're not at ease with strangers, really, so it's probably for the best."
The Gorim was sitting directly across the narrow stone table from Ce'Nedra. The subject of the monsters obviously pained him, and he looked at her for a moment, then gently reached out his frail old hand and cupped her little chin in it, lifting her face to the dim light of the hanging globe suspended above the table. "All of the alien creatures are not monsters," he said, his large, violet eyes calm and very wise. "Consider the beauty of this Dryad."
Ce'Nedra was a little startled - not by his touch, certainly, for older people had responded to her flowerlike face with that same gesture for as long as she could remember - but rather by the ancient man's immediate recognition of the fact that she was not entirely human.
"Tell me, child," the Gorim asked, "do the Dryads still honor UL?"
She was completely unprepared for the question. "I - I'm sorry, Holy One," she floundered. "Until quite recently, I'd not even heard of the God UL. For some reason, my tutors have very little information about your people or your God."
"The princess was raised as a Tolnedran," Lady Polgara explained. "She's a Borune - I'm sure you've heard of the link between that house and the Dryads. As a Tolnedran, her religious affiliation is to Nedra."
"A serviceable God," the Gorim said. "Perhaps a bit stuffy for my taste, but certainly adequate. The Dryads themselves, though - do they still know their God?"
Belgarath coughed a bit apologetically. "I'm afraid not, Gorim. They've drifted away, and the eons have erased what they knew of UL. They're flighty creatures anyway, not much given to religious observances."
The Gorim's face was sad. "What God do they honor now?"
"None, actually," Belgarath admitted. "They have a few sacred groves - a rough idol or two fashioned from the root of a particularly venerated tree. That's about it. They don't really have any clearly formulated theology."
Ce'Nedra found the whole discussion a trifle offensive. Rising to the occasion, she drew herself up slightly and smiled winsomely at the old Gorim. She knew exactly how to charm an elderly man. She'd practiced for years on her father. "I feel the shortcomings of my education most keenly, Holy One," she lied. "Since mysterious UL is the hereditary God of the Dryads, I should know him. I hope that someday soon I may receive instruction concerning him. It may be that I - unworthy though I am - can be the instrument of renewing the allegiance of my sisters to their rightful God."
It was an artful little speech, and on the whole Ce'Nedra was rather proud of it. To her surprise, however, the Gorim was not satisfied to accept a vague expression of interest and let it go at that. "Tell your sisters that the core of our faith is to be found in The Book of Ulgo, " he told her seriously.
"The Book of Ulgo, " she repeated. "I must remember that. As soon as I return to Tol Honeth, I'll obtain a copy and deliver it to the Wood of the Dryads personally." That, she thought, should satisfy him.
"I'm afraid that such copies as you'd find in Tol Honeth would be much corrupted," the Gorim told her. "The tongue of my people is not easily understood by strangers, and translations are difficult."
Ce'Nedra definitely felt that the dear old man was becoming just a bit tiresome about the whole thing.
"As is so often the case with scriptures," he was saying, "our Holy Book is bound up in our history. The wisdom of the Gods is such that their instruction is concealed within stories. Our minds delight in the stories, and the messages of the Gods are implanted thus. All unaware, we are instructed even as we are entertained."
Ce'Nedra was familiar with the theory. Master Jeebers, her tutor, had lectured her tediously concerning it. She cast about rather desperately, trying to find some graceful way to change the subject.
"Our story is very old," the Gorim continued inexorably. "Would you like to hear it?"
Caught by her own cleverness, Ce'Nedra could only nod helplessly. And so the Gorim began: "At the Beginning of Days when the World was spun out of darkness by the wayward Gods, there dwelt in the silences of the heavens a spirit known only as UL."
In utter dismay, Ce'Nedra realized that he fully intended to recite the entire book to her. After a few moments of chagrin, however, she began to feel the strangely compelling quality of his story. More than she would have cared to admit, she was moved by the first Gorim's appeal to the indifferent spirit that appeared to him at Prolgu. What manner of man would thus dare to accuse a God?
As she listened, a faint flicker seemed to tug at the corner of her eye. She glanced toward it and saw a soft glow somewhere deep within the massive rocks that formed one of the walls of the chamber. The glow was peculiarly different from the dim light of the hanging crystal globes.
"Then the heart of Gorim was made glad," the old man continued his recitation, "and he called the name of the high place where all this had come to pass Prolgu, which is Holy Place. And he departed from Prolgu and returned unto-"
"Ya! Garach tek, Gorim!" The words were spat out in the snarling Ulgo language, and the harsh voice that spoke them was filled with outrage.
Ce'Nedra jerked her head around to look at the intruder. Like all Ulgos, he was short, but his arms and shoulders were so massively developed that he seemed almost deformed. His colorless hair was tangled and unkempt. He wore a hooded leather smock, stained and smeared with some kind of mud, and his large black eyes burned with fanaticism. Crowded behind him were a dozen or more other Ulgos, their faces set in expressions of shock and righteous indignation. The fanatic in the leather smock continued his stream of crackling vituperation.
The Gorim's face set, but he endured the abuse from the wild-eyed man at the door patiently. Finally, when the fanatic paused for breath, the frail old man turned to Belgarath. "This is Relg," he said a bit apologetically. "You see what I mean about him? Trying to convince him of anything is impossible."
"What use would he be to us?" Barak demanded, obviously irritated by the newcomer's attitude. "He can't even speak a civilized tongue."