I started after him.

- Leave him alone, Belgarath. - It was my friend again.

- If I’m going to have his cooperation, I’m going to have to make peace with him. -

- He’s a little upset right now. He’ll settle down. Don’t weaken your position by going to him. Make him come to you. -

- What if he doesn’t? -

- He has to. You’re the only one who can tell him what to do, and he knows it. He’s got an enormous sense of responsibility. That’s why I chose him. Dras is bigger, and Algar’s smarter, but Riva sticks to something once he starts it. Go back to baking boards. It’ll keep your mind off your troubles. -

Somehow he always knew what the most insulting thing he could say would be. Baking boards! I still get hot around the ears when I remember that particular expression.

Two days later, Riva came to me apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, Belgarath,’ he said contritely.

‘What for? You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I have torn your life apart, I have separated you from your family, and I am going to take you to the Isle of the Winds to spend the rest of your life. The only thing you left out was the fact that none of it’s been my idea. You’re the Keeper of the Orb now, and somebody has to tell you what to do. I’m your teacher. Neither one of us asked for the jobs, but we got them anyway. We might as well make the best of it. Now come over here, and I’ll show you the plans I’ve drawn up for your boats.’

‘Ships,’ he corrected absently.

‘Any way you want it, Orb-keeper.’

The Alorns began drifting in the next afternoon. Alorns don’t march. They don’t even stay together when they’re traveling, and their direction is pretty indeterminate, since small groups of them periodically break off to go exploring.

Riva put them to work building ships immediately, and that lonely beach turned into an impromptu shipyard. There were a number of arguments about my design for those ships, and some of the objections raised by various Alorns were even valid. Most of them were silly, however. Alorns love to argue, probably because arguments in their culture are usually preludes to fights.

I drifted up and down the beach, cheating wherever it was necessary, and we finished about ten of those ships in just under six weeks. Then Riva left his cousin Anrak in charge, and we took an advance party out into the Sea of the Winds toward the Isle.

If you’ve never seen the Isle of the Winds, you might think that the descriptions of it you’ve heard are exaggerations. Believe me, they aren’t. In the first place, the island has only one beach, a narrow strip of gravel about a mile long at the head of a deeply indented bay on the east side of the isle. The rest of the shoreline is comprised of cliffs. There are woods inland, dark evergreen forests such as you’ll find in any northern region, and some fairly extensive meadows in the mountain valleys to the north. It probably wouldn’t be so bad, except that the wind blows all the time, and it can - and frequently does - rain for six straight months without letup. Then, when it gets tired of raining, it snows.

We rowed around the Isle twice, but we didn’t find any other beaches, so we rowed up that bay I mentioned and came ashore on the island’s only beach.

‘Where am I supposed to build this fort?’ Riva asked me when the two of us finally got our feet on solid ground again.

‘That’s up to you,’ I replied. ‘What’s the most logical place to build it?’

‘Right here, I suppose, since this is the only place where anybody can come ashore. If I’ve got my fort here, I’ll be able to see them coming, at least.’

‘Sound thinking.’ I looked at him rather closely. That boyish quality was starting to fade. The responsibility he’d so lightly accepted back in Cthol Mishrak was starting to sit heavily on him.

He looked at the steep valley running down out of the mountains to the head of the bay. ‘The fort’s going to have to be a little bigger than I’d thought,’ he mused. ‘I’ll need to block that whole valley with it. I guess I’ll have to build a city here.’

‘You might as well. There won’t be much to do on this island except make babies, so your population’s going to expand. You’ll need lots of houses.’

He suddenly blushed.

‘You do know what’s involved in that, don’t you? Making babies, I mean?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I just wanted to be sure that you weren’t going to be out turning over cabbage leaves or trying to chase down storks looking for them.’

‘Don’t be insulting.’ He looked up the valley again. ‘There are enough trees to build a city, I guess.’

‘No,’ I told him flatly. ‘Don’t build a wooden city. The Tolnedrans tried that at Tol Honeth, and they no sooner got it finished than it burned to the ground. Use rock.’

‘That’ll take a long time, Belgarath,’ he objected.

‘Have you got anything better to do? Set up a temporary camp here on the beach and put signal fires on those headlands at the mouth of the bay to guide the rest of your people here. Then you and I are going to spend some time designing a city. I don’t want this place just growing here like a weed. Its purpose is to protect the Orb, and I want to be certain that there aren’t any holes in the defenses.’

Over the next several weeks the rest of Riva’s ships rowed in, six or eight at a time, and by then Iron-grip and I had completed the layout of the city.

‘What do you think I ought to call it - the city I mean?’ he asked me when we were finished.

‘What difference does it make?’

‘A city ought to have a name, Belgarath.’

‘Call it anything you like. Name it after yourself, if you want.’

‘Val Riva?’

‘Isn’t that a little ostentatious? Just call it Riva and let it go at that.’

‘That doesn’t really sound like a city, Belgarath.’

‘It will, once people get used to it.’

Finally Anrak arrived. ‘That’s the last of us, Riva,’ he bellowed as he waded ashore. ‘We’re all here now. Have you got anything to drink?’

The party there on the beach got rowdy that night, and after I’d had a few tankards, the noise began to make my head hurt, so I climbed up the steep valley to get away from the carousing and to think a bit. I still had a number of things to do before I could go home, and I considered various ways to get them all taken care of in a hurry. I really wanted to get back to the Vale and to Poledra. I was undoubtedly a father by now, and I sort of wanted to have a look at my offspring.

It was probably a couple of hours past midnight when I glanced down toward the beach. I jumped to my feet swearing. All the ships were on fire!

I ran back down the valley to the beach and found Riva and his cousin standing at the water’s edge singing an Alorn drinking song. They were bleary-eyed and swaying back and forth, as drunk as lords.

‘What are you doing?’ I screamed at them.

‘Oh, there you are Belgarath,’ Riva said, blinking owlishly at me. ‘We looked all over for you.’ He gestured out at the burning ships. ‘Nice fire, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a splendid fire. Why did you set it?’

‘That lumber you made for us is nice and dry, so it burns very well.’

‘Riva, why are you burning the ships?’

He looked at his cousin. ‘Why are we burning the ships, Anrak? I forget.’

‘It’s to keep people from getting bored and running off,’ Anrak replied.

‘Oh, yes. Now I remember. Isn’t that a good idea, Belgarath?’

‘It’s a rotten idea!’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘How am I supposed to get home now?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that, I guess.’ His eyes brightened. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked me.

Chapter 17

‘Belgarath?’ Riva said to me one morning a few days later when we were standing at the upper end of the narrow valley stretching up from the beach watching his Alorns clearing stair-stepped terraces across the steep valley floor.

‘Yes, Riva?’

‘Am I supposed to have a sword?’

‘You’ve already got one.’

‘No, I mean a special sword.’

‘Yes,’ I replied. Where had he found out about that?

‘Where is it then?’

‘It doesn’t exist yet. You’re supposed to make it.’

‘I can do that, I guess. What am I supposed to make it from?’

‘Stars, as I understand it.’

‘How am I going to get my hands on any stars?’

‘They’ll fall out of the sky.’

‘I guess it was Belar who talked to me last night, then.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘I had a dream - at least I thought it was a dream. I seemed to hear Belar’s voice. I recognized it because I used to watch him play dice with Dras. He used to swear a lot while he was playing, because Dras always won. Isn’t that odd? You’d think a God could make the dice come up any way he wanted them to, but Belar doesn’t even think about cheating. Dras does, though. Dras could roll a ten with only one die.’