"I'm obliged to," Fulrach said. "The council's to be general, and Sendaria's involved."

"You haven't heard the last of this, Fulrach," Aunt Pol said.

"Never mind, Pol," Mister Wolf said. "He's only doing what he thinks is right. We'll straighten it all out in Val Alorn."

Garion was trembling as he stepped away from the door. It was impossible. His skeptical Sendarian upbringing made him at first incapable of even considering such an absurdity. Reluctantly, however, he finally forced himself to look the idea full in the face.

What if Mister Wolf really was Belgarath the Sorcerer, a man who had lived for over seven thousand years? And what if Aunt Pol was really his daughter, Polgara the Sorceress, who was only slightly younger? All the bits and pieces, the cryptic hints, the half truths, fell together. Silk had been right; she could not be his Aunt. Garion's orphaning was complete now. He was adrift in the world with no ties of blood or heritage to cling to. Desperately he wanted to go home, back to Faldor's farm, where he could sink himself in unthinking obscurity in a quiet place where there were no sorcerers or strange searches or anything that would even remind him of Aunt Pol and the cruel hoax she had made of his life.

PART TWO - CHEREK.

Chapter Twelve.

IN THE GRAY FIRST LIGHT Of early morning they rode through the quiet streets of Sendar to the harbor and their waiting ship. The finery of the evening before had been put aside, and they had all resumed their customary clothes. Even King Fulrach and the Earl of Seline had donned plain garb and now resembled nothing quite so much as two moderately prosperous Sendars on a business trip. Queen Layla, who was not to go with them, rode beside her husband, talking earnestly to him with an expression on her face that seemed almost to hover on the verge of tears. The party was accompanied by soldiers, cloaked against the raw, chill wind off the sea.

At the foot of the street which led down from the palace to the harbor, the stone wharves of Sendar jutted out into the choppy water, and there, rocking and straining against the hawsers which held her, was their ship. She was a lean vessel, narrow of beam and high-prowed, with a kind of wolfish appearance that did little to quiet Garion's nervousness about his first sea voyage. Lounging about on her deck were a number of savage-looking sailors, bearded and garbed in s.h.a.ggy garments made of fur. With the exception of Barak, these were the first Chereks Garion had ever seen, and his first impression was that they would probably prove to be totally unreliable.

"Barak!" a burly man halfway up the mast shouted and dropped hand over hand down a steeply slanting rope to the deck and then jumped across to the wharf.

"Greldik!" Barak roared in response, swung down from his horse and clasped the evil-looking sailor in a bear hug.

"It would seem that Lord Barak is acquainted with our captain," the Earl of Seline observed.

"That's disquieting," Silk said wryly. "I was hoping for a sober, sensible captain of middle years and a conservative disposition. I'm not fond of ships and sea travel to begin with."

"I'm told that Captain Greldik is one of the finest seamen in all of Cherek," the earl a.s.sured him.

"My Lord," Silk said with a pained look, "Cherek definitions can be deceptive." Sourly he watched Barak and Greldik toasting their reunion with tankards of ale that had been pa.s.sed down to them from the ship by a grinning sailor.

Queen Layla had dismounted and she embraced Aunt Pol. "Please watch out for my poor husband, Pol," she said with a little laugh that quivered a bit. "Don't let those Alorn bullies goad him into doing anything foolish."

"Of course, Layla," Aunt Pol said comfortingly.

"Now, Layla," King Fulrach said in an embarra.s.sed voice. "I'll be all right. I'm a grown man, after all."

The plump little queen wiped her eyes. "I want you to promise to wear warm clothes," she said, "and not to sit up all night drinking with Anheg."

"We're on serious business, Layla," the kind said. "There won't be time for any of that."

"I know Anheg too well," the queen sniffed. She turned to Mister Wolf, stood on her tiptoes and kissed his bearded cheek. "Dear Belgarath," she said. "When this is over, promise that you and Pol will come back for a long visit."

"I promise, Layla," Mister Wolf said gravely.

"The tide is turning, Lord King," Greldik said, "and my ship is growing restless."

"Oh dear," the queen said. She put her arms around the king's neck and buried her face in his shoulder.

"Now, now," Fulrach said awkwardly.

"If you don't go now, I'm going to cry right here in public," she said, pushing him away.

The stones of the wharf were slippery, and the slim Cherek ship bobbed and rolled in the chop. The narrow plank they had to cross heaved and swayed dangerously, but they all managed to board without accident. The sailors slipped the hawsers and took their places at the oars. The lean vessel leaped away from the wharf and moved swiftly into the harbor past the stout and bulky merchantmen anch.o.r.ed nearby. Queen Layla stood forlornly on the wharf, surrounded by tall soldiers. She waved a few times and then stood watching, her chin lifted bravely.

Captain Greldik took his place at the tiller with Barak by his side and signaled to a squat, muscular warrior crouched nearby. The squat man nodded and pulled a ragged square of sailcloth off a hide-topped drum.

He began a slow beat, and the oarsmen immediately took up the rhythm. The ship surged ahead and made for the open sea.

Once they were beyond the protection of the harbor, the swells grew so ponderous that the ship no longer rocked but ran instead down the back of each wave and up the face of the next. The long oars, dipping to the rhythm of the sullen drum, left little swirls on the surface of the waves. The sea was lead-gray beneath the wintry sky, and the low, snow-covered coastline of Sendaria slid by on their right, bleak and desolate-looking.

Garion spent most of the day shivering in a sheltered spot near the high prow, moodily staring out at the sea. The shards and shambles into which his life had fallen the night before lay in ruins around him. The idea that Wolf was Belgarath and Aunt Pol was Polgara was of course an absurdity. He was convinced, however, that a part of the whole thing at least was true. She might not be Polgara, but she was almost certainly not his Aunt. He avoided looking at her as much as possible, and did not speak to anyone.

They slept that night in cramped quarters beneath the stern deck of the ship. Mister Wolf sat talking for a long time with King Fulrach and the Earl of Seline. Garion covertly watched the old man whose silvery hair and short-cropped beard seemed almost to glow in the light from a swinging oil lamp hanging from one of the low beams. He still looked the same as always, and Garion finally turned over and went to sleep.

The next day they rounded the hook of Sendaria and beat northeasterly with a good following wind. The sails were raised, and the oarsmen were able to rest. Garion continued to wrestle with his problem.

On the third day out the weather turned stormy and bitterly cold. The rigging crackled with ice, and sleet hissed into the sea around them. "If this doesn't break, it will be a rough pa.s.sage through the Bore," Barak said, frowning into the sleet.

"The what?" Durnik asked apprehensively. Durnik was not at all comfortable on the ship. He was just recovering from a bout of seasickness, and he was obviously a bit edgy.

"The Cherek Bore," Barak explained. "It's a pa.s.sage about a league wide between the northern tip of Sendaria and the southern end of the Cherek peninsula - riptides, whirlpools, that sort of thing. Don't be alarmed, Durnik. This is a good ship, and Greldik knows the secret of navigating the Bore. It may be a bit rough, but we'll be perfectly safe unless we're unlucky, of course."

"That's a cheery thing to say," Silk observed dryly from nearby. "I've been trying for three days not to think about the Bore."

"Is it really that bad?" Durnik asked in a sinking voice.

"I make a special point of not going through it sober," Silk told him.

Barak laughed. "You ought to be thankful for the Bore, Silk," he said. "It keeps the Empire out of the Gulf of Cherek. All Drasnia would be a Tolnedran province if it wasn't there."

"I admire it politically," Silk said, "but personally I'd be much happier if I never had to look at it again."

On the following day they anch.o.r.ed near the rocky coast of northern Sendaria and waited for the tide to turn. In time it slackened and reversed, and the waters of the Sea of the Winds mounted and plunged through the Bore to raise the level of the Gulf of Cherek.

"Find something solid to hold on to, Garion," Barak advised as Greldik ordered the anchor raised. "With this following wind, the pa.s.sage could be interesting." He strode along the narrow deck, his teeth gleaming in a broad grin.

It was foolish. Garion knew that, even as he stood up and began to follow the red-bearded man toward the prow, but four days of solitary brooding over a problem that refused to yield to any kind of logic made him feel almost belligerently reckless. He set his teeth together and took hold of a rusted iron ring embedded in the prow.

Barak laughed and clapped him a stunning blow on the shoulder. "Good boy," he said approvingly. "We'll stand together and look the Bore right down the throat."

Garion decided not to answer that.

With wind and tide behind her, Greldik's ship literally flew through the pa.s.sage, yawing and shuddering as she was seized by the violent riptides. Icy spray stung their faces, and Garion, half blinded by it, did not see the enormous whirlpool in the center of the Bore until they were almost upon it. He seemed to hear a vast roar and cleared his eyes just in time to see it yawning in front of him.

"What's that?" he yelled over the noise.

"The Great Maelstrom," Barak shouted. "Hold on."

The Maelstrom was fully as large as the village of Upper Gralt and descended horribly down into a seething, mist-filled pit unimaginably far below. Incredibly, instead of guiding his vessel away from the vortex, Greldik steered directly at it.

"What's he doing?" Garion screamed.

"It's the secret of pa.s.sing through the Bore," Barak roared. "We circle the Maelstrom twice to gain more speed. If the ship doesn't break up, she comes out like a rock from a sling, and we pa.s.s through the riptides beyond the Maelstrom before they can slow us down and drag us back."

"If the ship doesn't what?"

"Sometimes a ship is torn apart in the Maelstrom," Barak said. "Don't worry, boy. It doesn't happen very often, and Greldik's ship seems stout enough."

The ship's prow dipped hideously into the outer edges of the Maelstrom and then raced twice around the huge whirlpool with the oarsmen frantically bending their backs to the frenzied beat of the drum. The wind tore at Garion's face, and he clung to his iron ring, keeping his eyes averted from the seething maw gaping below.

And then they broke free and shot like a whistling stone through the churning water beyond the Maelstrom. The wind of their pa.s.sage howled in the rigging, and Garion felt half suffocated by its force.

Gradually the ship slowed in the swirling eddies, but the speed they had gained from the Maelstrom carried them on to calm water in a partially sheltered cove on the Sendarian side.

Barak was laughing gleefully and mopping spray from his beard. "Well, lad," he said, "what do you think of the Bore?"

Garion didn't trust himself to answer and concentrated on trying to pry his numb fingers from the iron ring.

A familiar voice rang out from the stern.

"Garion!"

"Now you've gone and got me in trouble," Garion said resentfully, ignoring the fact that standing in the prow had been his own idea. Aunt Pol spoke scathingly to Barak about his irresponsibility and then turned her attention to Garion.

"Well?" she said. "I'm waiting. Would you like to explain?"

"It wasn't Barak's fault," Garion said. "It was my own idea." There was no point in their both being in trouble, after all.

"I see," she said. "And what was behind that?"

The confusion and doubt which had been troubling him made him reckless. "I felt like it," he said, half defiantly. For the first time in his life he felt on the verge of open rebellion.

"You what?"

"I felt like it," he repeated. "What difference does it make why I did it? You're going to punish me anyway."

Aunt Pol stiffened, and her eyes blazed.

Mister Wolf, who was sitting nearby, chuckled.

"What's so funny?" she snapped.

"Why don't you let me handle this, Pol?" the old man suggested.

"I can deal with it," she said.

"But not well, Pol," he said. "Not well at all. Your temper's too quick, and your tongue's too sharp. He's not a child anymore. He's not a man yet, but he's not a child either. The problem needs to be dealt with in a special way. I'll take care of it." He stood up. "I think I insist, Pol."

"You what?"

"I insist." His eyes hardened.

"Very well," she said in an icy voice, turned, and walked away. "Sit down, Garion," the old man said.

"Why's she so mean?" Garion blurted.

"She isn't," Mister Wolf said. "She's angry because you frightened her. n.o.body likes to be frightened."

"I'm sorry," Garion mumbled, ashamed of himself.

"Don't apologize to me," Wolf said. "I wasn't frightened." He looked for a moment at Garion, his eyes penetrating. "What's the problem?" he asked.

"They call you Belgarath," Garion said as if that explained it all, "and they call her Polgara."

"So."

"It's just not possible."

"Didn't we have this conversation before? A long time ago?"

"Are you Belgarath?" Garion demanded bluntly.

"Some people call me that. What difference does it make?"

"I'm sorry," Garion said. "I just don't believe it:"

"All right," Wolf shrugged. "You don't have to if you don't want to. What's that got to do with your being impolite to your Aunt?"

"It's just " Garion faltered. "Well-" Desperately he wanted to ask Mister Wolf that ultimate, fatal question, but despite his certainty that there was no kinship between himself and Aunt Pol, he could not bear the thought of having it finally and irrevocably confirmed.

"You're confused," Wolf said. "Is that it? Nothing seems to be like it ought to be, and you're angry with your Aunt because it seems like it has to be her fault."

"You make it sound awfully childish," Garion said, flushing slightly.

"Isn't it?"

Garion flushed even more.

"It's your own problem, Garion," Mister Wolf said. "Do you really think it's proper to make others unhappy because of it?"

"No," Garion admitted in a scarcely audible voice.