‘What are you doing?’ I demanded, quite angry since his noise and the stink of his sacrifice distracted my mind from a problem I had been considering for fifteen years.
‘Oh, puissant and all-knowing God,’ he said, groveling in the dirt. ‘I have come a thousand leagues to behold thy glory and to worship thee.’
‘Puissant?’ I said. ‘Get up, man, and stop this caterwauling. I am not a God, but a man, just as you are.’
‘Art thou not the great God, Aldur?’ he asked.
‘I am Belgarath,’ I said, ‘his Disciple. What is this foolishness?’ I pointed at his altar and his smoking offering.
‘It is to please the God,’ he said, rising and dusting off his clothes. ‘Dost thou think he will find it acceptable?’
I laughed, for I did not like this stranger much. ‘I cannot think of a single thing you might have done which would offend him more,’ I said.
The stranger looked stricken. He turned quickly and reached out as if he would seize the burning animal with his bare hands to hide it.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I snapped. ‘You’ll burn yourself.’
‘It must be hidden,’ he said desperately. ‘I would die rather than offend Mighty Aldur.’
‘Stand out of the way,’ I told him.
‘What?’
‘Get clear,’ I said, irritably waving him off. Then I looked at his grotesque little altar, willed it away and said, ‘Go away,’ and it vanished, leaving only a few tatters of confused smoke hanging in the air.
He collapsed on his face again.
‘You’re going to wear out your clothes if you keep doing that,’ I told him, ‘and my Master will not be amused by it.’
‘I pray thee,’ he said, rising and dusting himself off again, ‘mighty Disciple of the most high Aldur, instruct me so that I offend not the God.’
‘Be truthful,’ I told him, ‘and do not seek to impress him with false show.’
‘And how may I become his Disciple as thou art?’
‘First you become his pupil,’ I said, ‘and that is not easy.’
‘What must I do to become his pupil?’ the stranger asked.
‘You must become his servant,’ I said, a bit smugly I must admit.
‘And then his pupil?’
‘In time,’ I said, smiling, ‘if he so wills.’
‘And when may I meet the God?’
And so I took him to the tower.
‘Will the God Aldur not wish to know my name?’ the stranger asked.
‘Not particularly.’ I said. ‘If you prove worthy, he will give you a name of his own choosing.’ Then I turned to the grey stone in the wall and commanded it to open, and then we went inside.
My Master looked the stranger over and then turned to me. ‘Why hast thou brought this man to me, my son?’ he asked.
‘He besought me, Master,’ I said. ‘I felt it was not my place to say him yea or nay. Thy will must decide such things. If it be that he please thee not, I shall take him outside and bid him be no more and so put an end to him and his interruption.’
‘That is unkindly said, my son,’ Aldur said sternly. ‘The Will and the Word may not be used so.’*
‘Forgive me, Master,’ I said humbly.
‘Thou shalt instruct him, Belgarath,’ my Master said. ‘If it should be that thou findest him apt, inform me.’
‘I will, Master,’ I promised.
‘What is thy study currently?’
‘I examine the reason for mountains, Master,’ I said.
‘Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be that thou shalt find the study useful.’
‘As my Master commands,’ I said regretfully. I had almost found the secret of mountains, and I was not much enthused about allowing it to escape me. But that was the end of my leisure.
I instructed the stranger as my Master had bade me. I set him impossible tasks and waited. To my mortification, within six months he learned the secret of the Will and the Word. My Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as a pupil.
And then came the others. Kira and Tira were twin shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered to us one day – and stayed. Makor came from so far away that I could not conceive how he had even heard of my Master, and Din from so near that I wondered that his whole tribe did not come with him. Sambar simply appeared one day and sat down upon the earth in front of the tower and waited until we accepted him.
And to me it fell to instruct each of them until he found the secret of the Will and the Word – which is not a secret, after all, but lies within every man. And in time each of them became my Master’s pupil, and he named them even as he had named me. Zedar became Belzedar, Kira and Tira became Beltira and Belkira. Makor and Din and Sambar became Belmakor and Beldin and Belsambar. To each of our names our Master joined the symbol of the Will and the Word, and we became his Disciples.*
And we built other towers so that our labors and our studies should not interfere with our Master’s work or each other’s.
At first I was jealous that my Master spent time with these others, but, since time was meaningless to us anyway and I knew that my Master’s love was infinite, so that his love for the others in no way diminished his love for me, I soon outgrew that particular childishness. And also, I grew to love the others as the bonds of our brotherhood grew. I could sense their minds as they worked, and I shared their joy at each new discovery they made. Because I was the first Disciple, they often came to me as to an older brother with those things they were embarrassed to lay before our Master, and I guided them as best I could.
Thus passed a period of perhaps a thousand years, and we were content. The world beyond our Vale changed and the people also, and no more pupils came to us. It was a question I always intended to pursue but never found the time to examine. Perhaps the other Gods grew jealous and forbade their people to seek us out, or perhaps it was that in their long passage through the endless generations, men somehow lost that tiny spark that is the source of the power of Will and Word and is the lodestone that draws their spirits inevitably to the spirit of Aldur. So it was that we were seven only and were unlike any other men on earth.
And through all this time of study and learning, our Master, Aldur, labored in infinite patience with that grey stone he had shown me on the night he had accepted me as his Disciple. Once I marveled to him that he should devote so much time to it, and he laughed.
‘Truly, my son,’ he said, ‘I labored once at least so long to create a flower which is now so common that none take note of it. It blooms beside every dusty path, and men pass it by without even looking at it. But I know it is there, and I joy in its perfection.’
As I look back, I think I would give my life, which has stretched over so many years, if my Master had never conceived the idea of that grey stone which has brought so much woe into this world.
The stone, which he called a jewel, was grey (as I have said) and quite round and perhaps the size of a man’s heart. My Master found it, I believe, in the bed of a stream. To me it appeared to be a very ordinary stone, but things are concealed from me that Aldur in his wisdom perceived quite easily. It may be that there was something in the stone which he alone could see, or it may be that this ordinary grey stone became what it became because of his efforts and his will and his spirit with which