‘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.
The she-wolf’s observations were chilling. ‘One wonders what they plan to do with the meat,’ she said. That raised the hackles on the back of my neck, but I rather dimly perceived a way to end wars forever. If the victorious army had to eat the fallen, war would become much less attractive. I’d gone wolf enough to know that meat is flavored by the diet of the eatee, and stale beer isn’t the best condiment in the world.
Uvar was clearly in control now, so the twins, the wolf, and I went back to the Vale. The wolf, of course, left us when we reached Poledra’s cottage, and my wife was in my tower when I got there, looking for all the world as if she’d been there all along.
Belmakor had returned during our absence, but he’d locked himself in his tower, refusing to respond when we urged him to come out. The Master told us that our Melcene brother had gone into a deep depression for some reason, and we knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t appreciate any attempts to cheer him up. I’ve always been somewhat suspicious about Belmakor’s depression. If I could ever confirm those suspicions, I’d go back to where Belzedar is right now and put him someplace a lot more uncomfortable.
This was a painful episode, so I’m going to cut it short. After several years of melancholy brooding about the seeming hopelessness of our endless tasks, Belmakor gave up and decided to follow Belsambar into obliteration.
I think it was only the presence of Poledra that kept me from going mad. My brothers were dropping around me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Aldur summoned Belzedar and Beldin back to the Vale, of course. Beldin had been down in Nyissa keeping an eye on the snake-people, and we all assumed that Belzedar had still been in Mallorea, although it didn’t take him long to arrive. He seemed peculiarly reluctant to join us in our sorrow, and I’ve always thought