‘I’ve seen some of the creatures who live in Hell, Arthon,’ I told him quite firmly. ‘You don’t want to spend any time with them. It’s up to you, though. What’s happening here in Tolnedra?’
‘Oh, not too much, Belgarath.’ He said it just a bit evasively, and I could almost smell what he was trying to hide.
I sighed. ‘Don’t be coy, Arthon,’ I told him wearily. ‘The Church is not supposed to get involved in politics. You’ve been taking bribes, haven’t you?’
‘How did you know that?’ His voice was a little shrill.
‘I can read you like a book, Arthon. Give the money back and keep your nose out of politics.’
‘You must pay a call on the emperor,’ he said, skillfully sidestepping the issue.
‘I’ve met members of the Honeth family before. One’s pretty much the same as the others.’
‘His Majesty will be offended if you don’t call on him.’
‘Spare him the anguish then. Don’t tell him that I’ve been here.’
He wouldn’t hear of that, of course. He definitely didn’t want me to start probing into the question of who was bribing him, nor of how large his share of the admission fees was, so he escorted me to the palace, which was teeming with members of the Honeth family. Patronage is the absolute soul of Tolnedran politics. Even the toll-takers at the most remote bridges in the empire change when a new dynasty comes into power.
The current emperor was Ran Honeth the Twenty-something or other, and he’d discarded imbecility in favor of the unexplored territory of idiocy. As is usually the case in such situations, an officious relative had assumed his defective kinsman’s authority, scrupulously prefacing each of his personal decrees with, ‘The emperor has decided …’ or some other absurdity, thus maintaining the dignity of the cretin on the throne. The relative, a nephew in this case, kept Arthon and me cooling our heels in an anteroom for two days while he escorted all manner of high-ranking Tolnedrans immediately into the imperial presence.
Eventually, I got tired of it. ‘Let’s go, Arthon,’ I told Nedra’s priest. ‘We both have better things to do.’
‘We cannot!’ Arthon gasped. ‘It would be considered a mortal insult!’
‘So? I’ve insulted Gods in my time, Arthon. I’m not going to worry about hurting the feelings of a half-wit.’
‘Let me talk with the Lord High Chamberlain again.’ He jumped to his feet and hurried across the room to speak with the imperial nephew.
The nephew was a typical Honeth. His first response was to look down his nose at me. ‘You will await his Imperial Majesty’s pleasure,’ he told me in a lofty tone.
Since he was feeling so lofty, I stood him on a vacant patch of empty air up near the rafters so that he could really look down on people. I’ll grant you that it was petty, but then so was he. ‘Do you think that his Imperial Majesty’s pleasure might have worked its way around to us yet, old boy?’ I asked him in a pleasant tone. I left him up there for a little while to make sure that he got my point, and then I brought him down again.
We got in to see the emperor immediately.
This particular Ran Honeth was sitting on the imperial throne sucking his thumb. The blood-line had deteriorated even further than I’d imagined. I nudged at the corner of his mind and didn’t find anything in there. He haltingly recited a few imperial pleasantries – I shudder to think of how long it must have taken him to memorize them – and then he regally gave Arthon and me permission to withdraw. His entire performance was somewhat marred by the fact that forty some-odd years of sucking his thumb had grossly misaligned his front teeth. He looked like a rabbit, and he lisped outrageously.
I assessed the mood of the imperial nephew as Arthon and I bowed our way out of the throne room, and I decided that it might be a good time for me to leave Tol Honeth. As soon as the fellow regained his composure, the trees in the neighborhood were almost certainly going to flower with more of those posters. This was getting to be a habit.
I thought about that as I made my way toward Tol Borune. Ever since I’d abandoned my career as a common drunk, I’d been misusing my gift. The Will and the Word is a fairly serious thing, and I’d been turning it into a bad joke. Despite my grief, I was still my Master’s disciple, not some itinerant trickster. I suppose I could excuse myself by pointing to my emotional state during those awful years, but I don’t think I will. I’m supposed to know better.
I by-passed Tol Borune, largely to avoid any more opportunities to turn offensive people into pigs or to stick them up in the air just for fun. That was probably a good idea; I’m sure the Borunes would have irritated me. I’ve got a fair amount of respect for the Borune family, but they can be awfully pig-headed sometimes.
Sorry, Ce’Nedra. Nothing personal intended there.
At any rate, I traveled through the lands of the Anadile family and finally reached the northern edge of the Wood of the Dryads. The passing centuries have altered the countryside down there to some degree, but now that I think back on it, I followed almost exactly the same route as I did three thousand years later when a group of friends and I were going south on the trail of the Orb. Garion and I have talked about ‘repetitions’ any number of times, and this may have been another of those signals that the purpose of the universe had been disrupted. Then again, the fact that I followed the same route might have been due to the fact that it was the natural way south and also the fact that I was familiar with it. Once you get a theory stuck in your head, you’ll go to almost any lengths to twist things around to make them fit.
Even in those days the Wood of the Dryads was an ancient oak forest with a strange kind of serene holiness about it. Humans have a tendency to compartmentalize their religion to keep it separate from everyday life. The Dryads live in the center of their religion, so they don’t even have to think – or talk – about it. That’s sort of refreshing.
I’d been in their wood for more than a week before I even saw a Dryad. They’re timid little creatures, and they don’t really care to come into contact with outsiders – except at certain times of the year. Dryads are all females, of course, so they’re obliged to have occasional contacts with the males – of various species – in order to reproduce.
I’m sure you get the picture.
I didn’t really make an effort to find any Dryads. Technically, they’re ‘monsters,’ though certainly not as dangerous as the Eldrakyn or Algroths, but I still didn’t want any incidents.
Evidently, though, it was ‘that time of year’ for the first Dryad I encountered, because she’d laid aside her customary shyness and was aggressively trying to track me down. When I first saw her, she was standing in the middle of the forest path I was following. She had flaming red hair, and she was no bigger than a minute. She was, however, holding a fully drawn bow, and her arrow was pointed directly at my heart. ‘You’d better stop,’ she advised me.
I did that – immediately.
Once she was certain that I wasn’t going to try to run, she became very friendly. She told me that her name was Xana, and that she had plans for me. She even apologized for the bow. She explained it by telling me that travelers were rare in the Wood, and that a Dryad with certain things on her mind had to take some precautions to prevent escapes.
I tried to explain to her that what she was proposing was wildly inappropriate, but I couldn’t seem to get through to her. She was a very determined little creature.
I think I’ll just let it go at that. What happened next isn’t central to the story I’m telling, and there’s no point in being deliberately offensive.
Dryads customarily share things with their sisters, so Xana introduced me to other Dryads as well. They all pampered me, but there was no getting around