The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon. David Eddings

      We had most of our main characters – good guys and bad guys – already in place, and I knew that Mallorea was somewhere off to the east, so I went back to the map-table and manufactured another continent and the bottom half of the one we already had. We got a lot of mileage out of Kal Zakath. That boy carried most of the Malloreon on his back. Then by way of thanks, we fed him to Cyradis, and she had him for lunch.

      I’ll confess that I got carried away with The Mallorean Gospels. I wanted the Dals to be mystical, so I pulled out all the stops and wrote something verging on Biblical, but without the inconveniences of Judaism, Christianity, or Mohammedanism. What it all boiled down to was that the Dals could see the future, but so could Belgarath, if he paid attention to the Mrin Codex. The whole story reeks of prophecy – but nobody can be really sure what it means.

      My now publicly exposed co-conspiratress and I have recently finished the second prequel to this story, and now if you want to push it, we’ve got a classic twelve-book epic. If twelve books were good enough for Homer, Virgil, and Milton, twelve is surely good enough for us. We are not going to tack on our version of The Odyssey to our already completed Iliad. The story’s complete as it stands. There aren’t going to be any more Garion stories. Period. End of discussion.

      All right, that should be enough for students, and it’s probably enough to send those who’d like to try it for themselves screaming off into the woods in stark terror. I doubt that it’ll satisfy those who are interested in an in-depth biography of their favorite author, but you can’t win them all, I guess.

      Are you up for some honesty here? Genre fiction is writing that’s done for money. Great art doesn’t do all that well in a commercial society. Nothing that Franz Kafka wrote ever appeared in print while he was alive. Miss Lonelyhearts sank without a ripple. Great literary art is difficult to read because you have to think when you read it, and most people would rather not.

      Epic fantasy can be set in this world. You don’t have to create a new universe just to write one. My original ‘doodle’, however, put us off-world immediately. It’s probably that ‘off-world’ business in Tolkien that causes us to be lumped together with science fiction, and we have no business on the same rack with SF. SF writers are technology freaks who blithely ignore that footnote in Einstein’s theory of relativity which clearly states that when an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. (So much for warp-drive.) If old Buck Rogers hits the gas-pedal a little too hard, he’ll suddenly become the universe. Fantasists are magic and shining armor freaks who posit equally absurd notions with incantations, ‘the Will and the Word’, or other mumbo-jumbo. They want to build a better screwdriver, and we want to come up with a better incantation. They want to go into the future, and we want to go into the past. We write better stories than they do, though. They get all bogged down in telling you how the watch works; we just tell you what time it is and go on with the story. SF and fantasy shouldn’t even speak to each other, but try explaining that to a book-store manager. Try explaining it to a publisher. Forget it.

      One last gloomy note. If something doesn’t work, dump it – even if it means that you have to rip up several hundred pages and a half-year’s work. More stories are ruined by the writer’s stubborn attachment to his own overwrought prose than by almost anything else. Let your stuff cool off for a month and then read it critically. Forget that you wrote it, and read it as if you didn’t really like the guy who put it down in the first place. Then take a meat-axe to it. Let it cool down some more, and then read it again. If it still doesn’t work, get rid of it. Revision is the soul of good writing. It’s the story that counts, not your fondness for your own gushy prose. Accept your losses and move on.

      All right, I’ll let you go for right now. We’ll talk some more later, but why don’t we let Belgarath take over for a while?

       PREFACE: THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF BELGARATH THE SORCERER ^*

      In the light of all that has happened, this is most certainly a mistake. It would be far better to leave things as they are, with event and cause alike half-buried in the dust of forgotten years. If it were up to me, I would so leave them. I have, however, been so importuned by an undutiful daughter, so implored by a great (and many times over) grandson, and so cajoled by that tiny and willful creature who is his wife – a burden he will have to endure for all his days – that I must, if only to have some peace, set down the origins of the titanic events which have so rocked the world.

      Few will understand this, and fewer still will acknowledge its truth. I am accustomed to that. But, since I alone know the beginning, the middle, and the end of these events, it is upon me to commit to perishable parchment and to ink that begins to fade before it even dries some ephemeral account of what happened and why.

      Thus, let me begin this story as all stories are begun, at the beginning.

      I was born in a village so small that it had no name.^* It lay, if I remember it correctly, on a pleasant green bank beside a small river that sparkled in the summer sun as if its surface were covered with jewels – and I would trade all the jewels I have ever owned or seen to sit beside that river again.

      Our village was not rich, but in those days none were. The world was at peace, and our Gods walked among us and smiled upon us. We had enough to eat and huts to shelter us from the weather. I do not recall who our God was, nor his attributes, nor his totem. It was, after all, a very, very long time ago.

      Like the other children, I played in the warm, dusty streets and ran through the long grass in the meadows and paddled in that sparkling river which was drowned by the eastern sea so many years ago that they are beyond counting.

      My mother died when I was quite young. I remember that I cried about it for a very long time, though I must honestly admit that I can no longer even remember her face. I remember the gentleness of her hands and the warm smell of fresh-baked bread that came from her garments, but I can not remember her face – but then, there have been so many faces.

      The people of my village cared for me and saw to it that I was fed and clothed and sheltered in one house or another, but I grew up wild. I never knew my father, and

      my mother was dead, and I was not content with the simple, drowsy life of a small, unnamed village beside a sparkling river in a time when the world was very young. I began to wander out into the hills above my village, at first with only a stick and a sling, but later with more manly weapons – though I was still but a child.

      And then came a day in early spring when the air was cool and the clouds raced overhead in the fresh, young wind, and I had climbed to the top of the highest hill to the west of our river. And I looked down at the tiny patch of dun-colored huts beside a small river that did not sparkle beneath the scudding clouds of spring. And then I turned and looked to the west at a vast grassland and white-topped mountains beyond and clouds roiling titanic in the grey sky. And I looked one last time at the village where I was born and where, had I not climbed that hill on just such a morning, I might well have died; and I turned my face to the west and I went from that place forever.

      The summer was easy. The plain yielded food in plenty to a young adventurer with the legs to chase it and the appetite to eat it – no matter how tough or poorly cooked. And in the fall I came upon a vast encampment of people whitened as if by the touch of frost. They took me in and wept over me, and many came to touch me and to look at me, and they wept also. But one thing I found most strange. In the entire encampment there were no children, and to my young eyes the people seemed most terribly old. They spoke a language I did not understand, but they fed me and seemed to argue endlessly among themselves over who might have the privilege of keeping me in his tent or pavilion.

      I passed the winter among these strange people, and, as is so frequently the case with the young, I learned nothing in that season. I can not remember even one word of the language