‘Don’t be,’ she replied. ‘One would have you understand that one is discontented about this.’

Anyway, the twins and I left the Vale and started north the first thing the next morning. When we reached the cottage where I’d met Poledra, the she-wolf was waiting for us. The twins were somewhat surprised, but I don’t think I really was. ‘Another of those errands?’ she asked me.

‘Yes,’ I replied flatly, ‘and one does not require company.’

‘Your requirements are none of my concern,’ she told me, her tone just as flat as mine. ‘I will go along with you whether you like it or not.’

‘As you wish.’ I surrendered. I’d learned a long time ago just how useless it was to give her orders.

And so we were four when we reached the southern border of Aloria and began looking for Belar. I think he was avoiding us, though, because we weren’t able to find him. He could have stopped the clan wars at any time, of course, but Belar had a stubborn streak in him that was at least a mile wide. He absolutely would not take sides when his Alorns started bickering with each other. Even-handedness is probably a good trait in a God, but this was ridiculous. We finally gave up our search for him and went on to the mouth of the river that bears our Master’s name and looked out across what has come to be known as the Gulf of Cherek. We saw ships out there, but they didn’t look all that seaworthy to me. A flat-bottomed scow with a squared-off front end isn’t my idea of a corsair that skims the waves. The twins and I talked it over and decided to change form and fly across rather than hail one of those leaky tubs.

‘One notes that you still have not learned to fly well,’ the snowy owl ghosting along at my side observed.

‘I get by,’ I told her, clawing at the air with my wings.

‘But not well.’ She always had to get in the last word, so I didn’t bother trying to answer, but concentrated instead on keeping my tail feathers out of the water.

After what seemed an interminable flight, we reached the crude seaport that stood on the site of what’s now Val Alorn and went looking for King Chaggat’s direct descendant, King Uvar Bent-beak. We found him splitting wood in the stump-dotted clearing outside his log house. Ran Vordue IV, the then-current Emperor of Tolnedra, lived in a palace. Uvar Bent-beak ruled an empire at least a dozen times the size of Tolnedra, but he lived in a log shack with a leaky roof, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him to order one of his thralls to chop his firewood for him. Thralldom never really worked in Aloria, since Alorns don’t make good slaves. The institution was never actually abolished. It just fell into disuse. Anyway, Uvar was stripped to the waist, sweating like a pig, and chopping for all he was worth.

‘Hail, Belgarath,’ he greeted me, sinking his axe into his chopping block and mopping the sweat off his bearded face. I always kept in touch with the Alorn kings, so he knew me on sight.

‘Hail, Bent-beak,’ I replied. ‘What’s going on up here?’

‘I’m cutting wood,’ he told me, his face very serious.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I noticed that almost immediately, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. We heard that you’ve got a war on your hands.’

Uvar had little pig-like eyes, and he squinted at me around that huge broken nose of his. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. It’s not much of a war really. I can deal with it.’

‘Uvar,’ I told him as patiently as I could, ‘if you plan to deal with it, don’t you think it’s time you got started? It’s been going on for a year and a half now.’

‘I’ve been sort of busy, Belgarath,’ he said defensively. ‘I had to patch my roof, and winter’s coming on, so I have to lay in a store of firewood.’

Can you believe that this man was a direct ancestor of King Anheg?

To hide my exasperation with him, I introduced the twins.

‘Why don’t we all go inside?’ Uvar suggested. ‘I’ve got a barrel of fairly good ale, and I’m a little tired of splitting wood anyway.’

The twins, with an identical gesture, concealed the grins that came to their faces, and we went into Uvar’s ‘palace,’ a cluttered shack with a dirt floor and the crudest furniture you can imagine.

‘What started this war, Uvar?’ I asked the King of Aloria after we’d all pulled chairs up to his wobbly table and sampled his ale.

‘Religion, Belgarath,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that what starts every war?’

‘Not always, but we can talk about that some other time. How could religion start a war in Aloria? You people are all fully committed to Belar.’

‘Some are a little more committed than others,’ he said, making a sour face. ‘Belar’s idea of going after the Angaraks is all very well, I suppose, but we can’t get at them because there’s an ocean in the way. There’s a priest in a place off to the east somewhere who’s just a little thick-witted.’ This? Coming from Uvar? I shudder to think of how stupid that priest must have been for Uvar to notice!

‘Anyway,’ the king went on, ‘this priest has gathered up an army of sorts, and he wants to invade the kingdoms of the south.’

‘Why?’

Uvar shrugged. ‘Because they’re there, I suppose. If they weren’t there, he wouldn’t want to invade them, would he?’

I suppressed an urge to grab him and shake him. ‘Have they done anything to offend him?’ I asked.

‘Not that I know of. You see, Belar’s been away for a while. He gets homesick for the old days sometimes, so he takes some girls, a group of warriors, several barrels of beer, and goes off to set up a camp in the woods. He’s been gone for a couple of years now. Anyway, this priest has decided that the southern kingdoms ought to join us when we go to make war on the Angaraks, and that it’d probably be more convenient if we all worshiped the same God. He came to me with his crazy idea, and I ordered him to forget about it. He didn’t, though, and he’s been out preaching to the other clans. He’s managed to persuade about half of them to join him, but the other half is still loyal to me. They’re fighting each other off there a ways.’ He made a vague gesture toward the east. ‘I don’t think the clans that went over to him are so interested in religion as they are in the chance to loot the southern kingdoms. The really religious ones have formed what they call “the Bear Cult”. I think it’s got something to do with Belar - except that Belar doesn’t know anything about it.’ He drained off his tankard and went into the pantry for more ale.

‘He’s not going to move until he finishes cutting firewood,’ Belkira said quietly.

I nodded glumly. ‘Why don’t you two see what you can do to speed that up?’ I suggested.

‘Isn’t that cheating?’ Beltira asked me.

‘Maybe, but we’ve got to get him moving before winter settles in.’

They nodded and went back outside again.

Uvar was a little startled by how much his wood pile had grown when he and I went back outside again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘now that that’s been taken care of, I guess maybe I’d better go do something about that war.’

The twins and I cheated outrageously in the next several months, and we soon had the breakaway clans on the run. There was a fairly large battle on the eastern plains of what is now Gar og Nadrak. Uvar might have been a little slow of thought, but he was tactician enough to know the advantage of taking and holding the high ground and concealing the full extent of his forces from his enemies. We quietly occupied a hill during the middle of the night. Uvar’s troops littered the hillside with sharpened stakes until the hillside looked like a hedgehog, and his reserves hunkered down on the back side of the hill.

The breakaway clans and Bear-Cultists who had camped on the plain woke up the next morning to find Uvar staring down their throats. Since they were Alorns, they attacked.

Most people fail to understand the purpose of sharpened stakes. They aren’t there to skewer your opponent. They’re there to slow him down enough to give you a clean shot at him. Uvar’s bowmen got lots of practice that morning. Then, when the rebels were about half-way up the hill, Uvar blew a cow’s-horn trumpet, and his reserves swept out in two great wings from behind the hill to savage the enemy’s rear.

It worked out fairly well. The clansmen and the cultists didn’t really have any options, so they kept charging up the hill, slashing at the stakes with their swords and axes. The founder of the Bear-Cult, a big fellow with bad eyesight, came hacking his way up toward us. I think the poor devil had gone berserk, actually. He was frothing at the mouth by the time he got through all the stakes, anyway.

Uvar was waiting for him. As it turned out, the months the King of Aloria had spent splitting wood paid off. Without so much as changing expression, Bent-beak lifted his axe and split the rebellious priest of Belar from the top of his head to his navel with one huge blow. Resistance more or less collapsed at that point, and the Bear-Cult went into hiding, while the rebellious clans suddenly became very fond of their king and renewed their vows of fealty.

Now do you see why war irritates me? It’s always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn’t seem to occur to people.