Belgarath the Sorcerer. David Eddings

beer-barrel.’

      ‘She’ll pull out your beard if she catches you in her pantry.’

      ‘She isn’t going to catch me, Garion. She’s too busy being a mother right now.’ The old man crossed the room to the pantry and began rummaging around.

      Garion pulled off his cloak, hung it on a wooden peg, and went back to the fireplace. His feet still felt cold. He looked up at the latticework of rafters overhead. It was easy to see that Durnik had crafted them. The smith’s meticulous attention to detail showed in everything he did. The rafters were exposed over this central room, but there was a loft over the bedroom, and a flight of stairs reaching up to it along the back wall.

      ‘Found it,’ Belgarath called triumphantly from the pantry. ‘She tried to hide it behind the flour barrel.’

      Garion smiled. His grandfather could probably find a beer-cask in the dark at the bottom of a coal-mine.

      The old man came out with three brimming tankards, set them down on the table, and moved a chair around until it faced the fireplace. Then he took one of the tankards, sat, and stretched his feet out toward the fire. ‘Pull up a chair, Garion,’ he invited. ‘We might as well be comfortable.’

      Garion did that. ‘It’s been quite a night,’ he said.

      ‘That it has, boy,’ the old man replied. ‘That it has.’

      ‘Shouldn’t we say goodnight to Aunt Pol?’

      ‘Durnik’s with her. Let’s not disturb them. This is a special sort of time for married people.’

      ‘Yes,’ Garion agreed, remembering that night a few weeks ago when his daughter had been born.

      ‘Will you be going back to Riva soon?’

      ‘I probably should,’ Garion replied. ‘I think I’ll wait a few days, though – at least until Aunt Pol’s back on her feet again.’

      ‘Don’t wait too long,’ Belgarath advised with a sly grin. ‘Ce’Nedra’s sitting on the throne all by herself right now, you know.’

      ‘She’ll be all right. She knows what to do.’

      ‘Yes, but do you want her doing things on her own?’

      ‘Oh, I don’t think she’ll declare war on anybody while I’m gone.’

      ‘Maybe not, but with Ce’Nedra you never really know, do you?’

      ‘Quit making fun of my wife, grandfather.’

      ‘I’m not making fun of her. I love her dearly, but I do know her. All I’m saying is that she’s a little unpredictable.’ Then the old sorcerer sighed.

      ‘Is something the matter, grandfather?’

      ‘I was just chewing on some old regrets. I don’t think you and Durnik realize just how lucky you are. I wasn’t around when my twins were born. I was off on a business trip.’

      Garion knew the story, of course. ‘You didn’t have any choice, grandfather,’ he said. ‘Aldur ordered you to go to Mallorea. It was time to recover the Orb from Torak, and you had to go along to help Cherek Bear-shoulders and his sons.’

      ‘Don’t try to be reasonable about it, Garion. The bald fact is that I abandoned my wife when she needed me the most. Things might have turned out very differently if I hadn’t.’

      ‘Are you still feeling guilty about that?’

      ‘Of course I am. I’ve been carrying that guilt around for three thousand years. You can hand out all the royal pardons you want, but it’s still there.’

      ‘Grandmother forgives you.’

      ‘Naturally she does. Your grandmother’s a wolf, and wolves don’t hold grudges. The whole point, though, is that she can forgive me, and you can forgive me, and you can get up a petition signed by everybody in the known world that forgives me, but I still won’t forgive myself. Why don’t we talk about something else?’

      Durnik came back out of the bedroom. ‘She’s asleep,’ he said softly. Then he went to the fireplace and stacked more wood on the embers. ‘It’s a cold night out there,’ he noted. ‘Let’s keep this fire going.’

      ‘I should have thought of that,’ Garion apologized.

      ‘Are the babies still asleep?’ Belgarath asked the smith.

      Durnik nodded.

      ‘Enjoy it while you can. They’re resting up.’

      Durnik smiled. Then he too pulled a chair closer to the fire. ‘Do you remember what we were talking about earlier?’ he asked, reaching for the remaining tankard on the table.

      ‘We talked about a lot of things,’ Belgarath told him.

      ‘I mean the business of the same things happening over and over again. What happened tonight isn’t one of those, is it?’

      ‘Would it come as a surprise to you if I told you that Pol isn’t the first to give birth to twins?’

      ‘I know that, Belgarath, but this seems different somehow. I get the feeling that this isn’t something that’s happened before. This seems like something new to me. This has been a very special night. UL himself blessed it. Has that ever happened before?’

      ‘Not that I know of,’ the old sorcerer conceded. ‘Maybe this is something new. If it is, it’s going to make things a little strange for us.’

      ‘How’s that?’ Garion asked.

      ‘The nice thing about repetitions is that you sort of know what to expect. If everything did stop when the “accident” happened, and now it’s all moving again, we’ll be breaking into new territory.’

      ‘Won’t the prophecies give us some clues?’

      Belgarath shook his head. ‘No. The last passage in the Mrin Codex reads, “And there shall come a great light, and in that light shall that which was broken be healed, and interrupted Purpose shall proceed again, as was from the beginning intended”. All the other prophecies end in more or less the same way. The Ashabine Oracles even use almost exactly the same words. Once that light reached Korim, we were on our own.’

      ‘Will there be a new set of prophecies now?’ Durnik asked.

      ‘Next time you see Eriond, why don’t you ask him? He’s the one in charge now.’ Belgarath sighed. ‘I don’t think we’ll be involved in any new ones, though. We’ve done what we were supposed to do.’ He smiled just a bit wryly. ‘To be perfectly frank about it, I’m just as glad to pass it on. I’m getting a little old to be rushing out to save the world. It was an interesting career right at first, but it gets exhausting after the first six or eight times.’

      ‘That’d be quite a story,’ Durnik said.

      ‘What would?’

      ‘Everything you’ve been through – saving the world, fighting Demons, pushing the Gods around, things like that.’

      ‘Tedious, Durnik. Very, very tedious,’ Belgarath disagreed. ‘There were long periods when nothing was happening. You can’t make much of a story out of a lot of people just sitting around waiting.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure there were enough lively parts to keep it interesting. Someday I’d really like to hear the whole thing – you know, how you met Aldur, what the world was like before Torak cracked it, how you and Cherek Bear-shoulders stole the Orb back – all of it.’

      Belgarath laughed. ‘If I start telling that story, we’ll still be sitting here a year from now, and we won’t even be half-way through by then. We’ve all got better things to do.’

      ‘Do we really, grandfather?’ Garion asked. ‘You just said that