‘Busy-work.’
‘That one missed me, Pol.’
‘We’re just running around telling people about a party they won’t be interested in attending.’
‘Call it diplomatic courtesy, Pol.’
‘I’d rather call it a waste of time.’
‘There’s an element of that in all diplomacy. Let’s go to Prolgu, shall we?’
The endless rain which had so bedeviled the low country during the years since Torak’s Eclipse had fallen as snow in the mountains of holy Ulgo, but father and I didn’t have to make the trip on foot, so we avoided that particular unpleasantness. Flying when it’s snowing is tiresome, but not nearly as tiresome as wading through hip-deep snowbanks. It also avoided encounters with the frolicsome creatures who live in the mountains of Ulgoland.
Prolgu, of course, is a mountain more than a city. The Algars constructed that mountain they call the Stronghold, but the Ulgos integrated Prolgu with the mountain where the original Gorim met with UL and shamed the father of the Gods into accepting the outcasts of the world.
We came to earth in an abandoned city like none other in all the world. Most ancient cities were ruined as the result of war, and war leaves some fairly visible marks on the walls and buildings. Prolgu, however, had not been destroyed by any human agency. The Ulgos had simply moved down into the caves beneath the city, leaving their houses standing intact and vacant behind them. An abandoned city would normally attract looters, but I rather think it might have taken a very special kind of looter to trek to Prolgu to wander through those empty streets in search of valuables. The mountains of Ulgo quite literally teem with creatures that look upon humans as something to eat. Even the mice are dangerous, or so the story goes.
I’ve rarely had occasion to go to Prolgu. My family’s made a practice of dividing up our labors, and maintaining contact with the Ulgos has always been one of my father’s tasks. We wandered, seemingly without purpose, through the snow-clogged streets with the blizzard swirling about us as evening approached and the light began to fade.
‘Ah, there it is,’ father said finally, pointing at a house that seemed no different from any of the others. ‘This snow isn’t making things any easier.’
‘I don’t think it’s supposed to, father.’
‘Was that meant to be funny?’
‘No, not particularly.’
Like all the houses of Prolgu, the one we entered had long since lost its roof, and there was a dusting of snow on the floor when we entered. Father led me to a central room and scraped here and there with his foot for several minutes. ‘Well, finally,’ he muttered to himself when he found the flagstone he’d been looking for. He picked up a large rock from one corner of the room and banged on the flagstone three times.
Nothing happened.
He banged again, and the sound seemed somehow hollow.
Then there was a low grinding sound, and the very large, flat stone tilted upward to reveal a dimly lighted space beneath. ‘Belgarath,’ a hollow sounding voice came from down there, ‘Yad ho, groja UL.’
‘It’s a formality,’ father muttered to me. Then he said, ‘Yad ho, groja UL. Yad mar ishum.’
‘Veed mo, Belgarath. Mar ishum Ulgo.’
‘We’ve been invited to enter,’ father said to me. ‘Have you studied the Ulgo language at all?’
‘Not intensively. The grammar’s Dalish, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It’s more ancient than Morind or Karandese, though. The languages of isolated peoples tend to petrify – and you don’t get much more isolated than the Ulgos. Let’s go on down and talk to the Gorim.’
‘You’ll have to translate for me, father.’
‘Not really. The Gorim speaks our language.’
‘That’s helpful.’
The light in the caverns of Ulgo is of chemical origin, and it’s very dim. I couldn’t see how big the caves were, but the echoes strongly suggested that they were vast. I’m never entirely comfortable in the Ulgo caves. The image of moles keeps intruding on me. Theirs is an orderly society, though, and they live in neat apartments cut into the walls of long, dim galleries, and they go about their daily occupations in much the same way as they would if they lived above ground. I rather wryly conceded that there was at least one benefit to living underground. The weather was never a problem.
For the most part, the Ulgos ignored my father and me as we passed through their galleries. We skirted several enormous chasms and went along one edge of a dark lake as big as an underground sea. That sea was fed by waterfalls cascading down from the surface to whisper endlessly in the dimness. The echoes of those waterfalls joined with the echoes of the Hymn to UL sung at regular intervals by the devout, and those combined echoes turn all of Ulgo into one vast cathedral.
The house of the Gorim of Ulgo is constructed of a marble so fine that it puts the stately buildings of imperial Tol Honeth to shame. It sits on a small islet in the center of a shallow underground lake, and it’s reached by a formal looking causeway. The white-robed and white-bearded old Gorim, probably the holiest man in the world, stood waiting for us at the far end of that causeway. I hadn’t been in the Ulgo caves in over a millennium, but this Gorim was very much like his predecessors.
‘It’s been a while, Belgarath,’ the Gorim greeted my father when we reached the isle.
‘I know, Gorim,’ father apologized. ‘I’ve been busy, so I’ve been sort of letting my social obligations slide. You haven’t met my daughter, have you?’
‘Sacred Polgara? I don’t believe so.’
‘Sacred? You might want to wait until you know her a little better before you start assigning descriptions to her, Gorim. Pol’s a little on the prickly side.’
‘That’ll do, father,’ I told him. Then I curtsied to the Gorim. ‘Iad Hara, Gorim an Ulgo,’ I greeted him.
‘Dalish?’ He seemed startled. ‘I haven’t heard anyone speak the Dalish language in over a century. You’re gifted, Polgara.’
‘Probably not, Holy Gorim,’ I replied. ‘My studies have led me down some fairly obscure paths. I don’t speak Ulgo as yet, though, so I fell back on Dalish. My accent probably isn’t too good.’
‘It’s close. You might want to spend a month or two at Kell if you feel the need of polishing it.’
‘After the current crisis, Pol,’ father cautioned.