"I've got lots of bad habits, Grandfather."
"I don't know why you're taking this tone with me, boy," the old man complained. "All right, since you're going to be this way about it, I did, as a matter of fact, have to talk rather fast to get my Master to agree."
"You did all of this because you felt sorry for her?"
"That's not exactly the right term, Garion. Let's just say that I have certain feelings about justice."
"If you knew you were going to do it anyway, why did you argue with her?"
Belgarath shrugged. "I wanted to be sure that she really wanted it. Besides, it's not a good idea to let people get the idea that you'll do anything they ask just because you might feel that they have a certain claim on you."
Silk was staring at the old man in amazement. "Compassion, Belgarath?" he demanded incredulously. "From you? If word of this ever gets out, your reputation's going to be ruined."
Belgarath looked suddenly painfully embarrassed. "I don't know that we need to spread it around all that much, Silk," he said. "People don't really have to know about this, do they?"
Garion felt as if a door had suddenly opened. Silk, he realized, was right. He had never precisely thought of it that way, but Belgarath did have a certain reputation for ruthlessness. Most men felt that there was a kind of implacableness about the Eternal Man - a willingness to sacrifice anything in his single-minded drive toward a goal so obscure that no one else could ever fully understand it. But with this single act of compassion, he had revealed another, softer side of his nature. Belgarath the Sorcerer was capable of human emotion and feeling, after all. The thought of how those feelings had been wounded by all the horrors and pain he had seen and endured in seven thousand years came crashing in on Garion, and he found himself staring at his grandfather with a profound new respect.
The edge of the fens was marked by a solid-looking dike that stretched off into the misty distance in either direction.
"The causeway," Silk told Garion, pointing at the dike. "It's part of the Tolnedran highway system."
"Bel-grath," Tupik said, his head popping up out of the water beside the boat, "thank-you."
"Oh, I rather think you'd have learned to talk eventually anyway, Tupik," the old man replied. "You were very close to it, you know."
"May-be, may-be-not," Tupik disagreed. "Want-to-talk and talk did ferent. Not-same."
"Soon you'll learn to lie," Silk told him sardonically, "and then you'll be as good as any man alive."
"Why learn to talk if only to lie?" Tupik asked, puzzled.
"It'll come to you in time."
Tupik frowned slightly, and then his head slipped under the water. He came up one more time some distance away from the boat. "Goodbye," he called to them. "Tupik thanks you-for Mother." Then, without a ripple, he disappeared.
"What a strange little creature." Belgarath smiled.
With a startled exclamation, Silk frantically dug into his pocket. Something a pale green color leaped from his hand to plop into the water.
"What's the matter?" Garion asked him.
Silk shuddered. "The little monster put a frog in my pocket."
"Perhaps it was meant as a gift," Belgarath suggested.
"A frog?"
"Then again perhaps it wasn't." Belgarath grinned. "It's a little primitive perhaps, but it might just be the beginnings of a sense of humor."
There was a Tolnedran hostel a few miles up the great causeway that ran north and south through the eastern edge of the fens. They reached it in the late afternoon and purchased horses at a price that made Silk wince. The following morning they moved out at a canter in the direction of Boktor.
The strange interlude in the fens had given Garion a great deal to think about. He began to perceive that compassion was a kind of love broader and more encompassing than the somewhat narrow idea he had previously had of that emotion. The word love seemed, as he thought more deeply about it, to include a great number of things that at first glance did not seem to have anything whatsoever to do with it. As his understanding of this grew, a peculiar notion took hold of his imagination. His grandfather, the man they called Eternal, had probably in his seven thousand years developed a capacity for love beyond the ability of other men even remotely to guess at. In spite of that gruff, irntable exterior, Belgarath's entire life had been an expression of that transcendant love. As they rode, Garion glanced often at the strange old man, and the image of the remote, all-powerful sorcerer towering above the rest of humanity gradually faded; he began to see the real man behind that image - a complicated man to be sure, but a very human one.
Two days later in clearing weather, they reached Boktor.
Chapter Twenty
THERE WAS AN open quality about Boktor that Garion noticed immediately as they rode through its broad streets. The houses were not for the most part over two storeys high, and they were not jammed up against each other as they were in other cities he had seen. The avenues were wide and straight, and there was a minimum of litter in them.He commented on that as they rode along a spacious, tree-lined boulevard.
"Boktor's a new city," Silk explained. "At least relatively."
"I thought that it has been here since the time of Dras Bullneck."
"Oh, it has," Silk replied, "but the old city was destroyed by the Angaraks when they invaded, five hundred years ago."
"I'd forgotten that," Garion admitted.
"After Vo Mimbre, when the time came to rebuild, it was decided to take advantage of the chance to start over," Silk continued. He looked about rather distastefully. "I don't really like Boktor," he said. "There aren't enough alleys and back streets. It's almost impossible to move around without being seen." He turned to Belgarath. "That reminds me of something, by the way. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to avoid the central marketplace. I'm rather well-known here, and there's no point in letting the whole city know we've arrived."
"Do you think we'll be able to slip through unnoticed?" Garion asked him.
"In Boktor?" Silk laughed. "Of course not. We've already been identified a half dozen times. Spying is a major industry here. Porenn knew we were coming before we'd even entered the city." He glanced up at a second floor window, and his fingers flickered a quick rebuke in the gestures of the Drasnian secret language. The curtain at the window gave a guilty little twitch. "Just too clumsy," he observed with profound disapproval. "Must be a first-year student at the academy."