‘Oh?’

‘I gather that my mother’s people had a fairly simple way to rid themselves of defectives. As soon as they laid eyes on me, they took me out in the woods and left me there to starve - or to provide some wolf with a light snack. My mother was a sentimentalist, though, so she used to sneak out of the village to feed me.’

And I thought my childhood had been hard.

‘She stopped coming a year or so after I’d learned to walk, though,’ he added in a deliberately harsh tone. ‘Died, I suppose - or they caught her sneaking out and killed her. I was on my own after that.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘Does it really matter?’ There was a distant pain in his eyes, however. ‘There are all sorts of things to eat in a forest - if you’re not too particular. Vultures and ravens manage fairly well. I learned to watch for them. I found out early on that anyplace you see a vulture, there’s probably something to eat. You get used to the smell after a while.’

‘You’re an animal!’ I exclaimed.

‘We’re all animals, Belgarath.’ It was the first time he’d used my name. ‘I’m better at it than most, because I’ve had more practice. Now, do you suppose we could talk about something else?’

Chapter 4

And now we were seven, and I think we all knew that for the time being there wouldn’t be any more of us. The others came later. We were an oddly assorted group, I’ll grant you, but the fact that we lived in separate towers helped to keep down the frictions to some degree.

The addition of Beldin to our fellowship was not as disruptive as I’d first imagined it might be. This is not to say that our ugly little brother mellowed very much, but rather that we grew accustomed to his irascible nature as the years rolled by. I invited him to stay in my tower with me during what I suppose you could call his novitiate - that period when he was Aldur’s pupil before he achieved full status. I discovered during those years that there was a mind lurking behind those bestial features, and what a mind it was! With the possible exception of Belmakor, Beldin was clearly the most intelligent of us all. The two of them argued for years about points of logic and philosophy so obscure that the rest of us hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were talking about, and they both enjoyed those arguments enormously.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to persuade Beldin that an occasional bath probably wouldn’t be harmful to his health, and that if he bathed, the fastidious Belmakor might be willing to come close enough to him that they wouldn’t have to shout during their discussions. As my daughter’s so fond of pointing out, I’m not an absolute fanatic about bathing, but Beldin sometimes carries his indifference to extremes.

During the years that we lived and studied together, I came to know Beldin and eventually at least to partially understand him. Mankind was still in its infancy in that age, and the virtue of compassion hadn’t really caught on as yet. Humor, if you want to call it that, was still quite primitive and brutal. People found any sort of anomaly funny, and Beldin was about as anomalous as you can get. Rural folk would greet his entry into their villages with howls of laughter, and after they’d laughed their fill, they would normally stone him out of town. It’s not really very hard to understand his foul temper, is it? His own people tried to kill him the moment he was born, and he’d spent his whole life being chased out of every community he tried to enter. I’m really rather surprised that he didn’t turn homicidal. I probably would have.

He’d lived with me for a couple hundred years, and then on one rainy spring day, he raised a subject I probably should have known would come up eventually. He was staring moodily out the window at the slashing rain, and he finally growled, ‘I think I’ll build my own tower.’

‘Oh?’ I replied, laying aside my book. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’

‘I need more room, and we’re starting to get on each other’s nerves.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that.’

‘Belgarath, you don’t even notice the seasons. When you’re face-down in one of your books, I could probably set fire to your toes, and you wouldn’t notice. Besides, you snore.’

‘I snore? You sound like a passing thunderstorm every night, all night.’

‘It keeps you from getting lonesome.’ He looked pensively out the window again. ‘There’s another reason, too, of course.’

‘Oh?’

He looked directly at me, his eyes strangely wistful. ‘In my whole life, I’ve never really had a place of my own. I’ve slept in the woods, in ditches, and under haystacks, and the warm, friendly nature of my fellow-man has kept me pretty much constantly on the move. I think that just once, I’d like to have a place that nobody can throw me out of.’

What could I possibly say to that? ‘You want some help?’ I offered.

‘Not if my tower’s going to turn into something that looks like this one,’ he growled.

‘What’s wrong with this tower?’

‘Belgarath, be honest. This tower of yours looks like an ossified tree-stump. You have absolutely no sense of beauty whatsoever.’

This? Coming from Beldin?

‘I think I’ll go talk with Belmakor. He’s a Melcene, and they’re natural builders. Have you ever seen one of their cities?’

‘I’ve never had occasion to go into the east.’

‘Naturally not. You can’t pull yourself out of your books long enough to go anyplace. Well? Are you coming along, or not?’

How could I turn down so gracious an invitation? I pulled on my cloak, and we went out into the rain. Beldin, of course, didn’t bother with cloaks. He was absolutely indifferent to the weather.

When we reached Belmakor’s somewhat overly ornate tower, my stumpy little friend bellowed up, ‘Belmakor! I need to talk with you!’

Our civilized brother came to the window. ‘What is it, old boy?’ he called down to us.

‘I’ve decided to build my own tower. I want you to design it for me. Open your stupid door.’

‘Have you bathed lately?’

‘Just last month. Don’t worry, I won’t stink up your tower.’

Belmakor sighed. ‘Oh, very well,’ he gave in. His eyes went slightly distant, and the latch on his heavy iron-bound door clicked. The rest of us had taken our cue from our Master and used rocks to close the entrances to our towers, but Belmakor felt the need for a proper door. Beldin and I went in and mounted the stairs.

‘Have you and Belgarath had a falling out?’ Belmakor asked curiously.

‘Is that any business of yours?’ Beldin snapped.

‘Not really. Just wondering.’

‘He wants a place of his own,’ I explained. ‘We’re starting to get under each other’s feet.’

Belmakor was very shrewd. He got my point immediately. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asked the dwarf.

‘Beauty,’ Beldin said bluntly. ‘I may not be able to share it, but at least I’ll be able to look at it.’

Belmakor’s eyes filled with sudden tears. He always was the most emotional of us.

‘Oh, stop that!’ Beldin told him. ‘Sometimes you’re so gushy you make me want to spew. I want grace. I want proportion, I want something that soars. I’m tired of living in the mud.’

‘Can you manage that?’ I asked our brother.

Belmakor went to his writing desk, gathered his papers, and inserted them in the book he’d been studying. Then he put the book upon a top shelf, spun a large sheet of paper and one of those inexhaustible quill pens he was so fond of out of air itself, and sat down. ‘How big?’ he asked Beldin.

‘I think we’d better keep it a little lower than the Master’s, don’t you?’

‘Wise move. Let’s not get above ourselves.’ Belmakor quickly sketched in a fairy castle that took my breath away - all light and delicacy with flying buttresses that soared out like wings, and towers as slender as toothpicks.

‘Are you trying to be funny?’ Beldin accused. ‘You couldn’t house butterflies in that piece of gingerbread.’

‘Just a start, brother mine,’ Belmakor said gaily. ‘We’ll modify it down to reality as we go along. You have to do that with dreams.’

And that started an argument that lasted for about six months and ultimately drew us all into it. Our own towers were, for the most part, strictly utilitarian. Although it pains me to admit it, Beldin’s description of my tower was probably fairly accurate. It did look somewhat like a petrified tree-stump when I stepped back to look at it. It kept me out of the weather, though, and it got me up high enough so that I could see the horizon and look at the stars. What else is a tower supposed to do?

It was at that point that we discovered that Belsambar had the soul of an artist. The last place in the world you would look for beauty would be in the mind of an Angarak. With surprising heat, given his retiring nature, he argued with Belmakor long and loud, insisting on his variations as opposed to the somewhat pedestrian notions of the Melcenes. Melcenes are builders, and they think in terms of stone and mortar and what your material will actually let you get away with. Angaraks think of the impossible, and then try to come up with ways to make it work.