The Belgariad, Vol. 2 Read Online Free PDF Page A

insists on bringing his donkey inside. He and Pol argued about that all winter, as I recall."
    "What's his name?" Silk asked curiously.
    Belgarath shrugged. "He never said, and it's not polite to ask."
    Garion, however, had choked on the word "bought." A kind of helpless outrage welled up in him.
    "Somebody owned Aunt Pol?" he demanded incredulously.
    "It's a Nadrak custom," Silk explained. "In their society, women are considered property. It's not seemly for a woman to go about without an owner."
    "She was a slave?" Garion's knuckles grew white as he clenched his fists.
    "Of course she wasn't a slave," Belgarath told him. "Can you even remotely imagine your Aunt submitting to that sort of thing?"
    "But you said-"
    "I said I bought her from the man who owned her. Their relationship was a formality - nothing more. She needed an owner in order to function here, and he gained a great deal of respect from other men as a result of his ownership of so remarkable a woman." Belgarath made a sour face. "It cost me a fortune to buy her back from him. I sometimes wonder if she was really worth it."
    "Grandfather! "
    "I'm sure she'd be fascinated by that last observation, old friend," Silk said slyly.
    "I don't know that it's necessary to repeat it to her, Silk."
    "You never know." Silk laughed. "I might need something from you someday."
    "That's disgusting."
    "I know." Silk grinned and looked around. "Your friend took quite a bit of trouble to look you up," he suggested. "What was behind it?"
    "He wanted to warn me."
"That things were tense in Gar og Nadrak? We knew that already."
    "His warning was a great deal more urgent than that."
    "He didn't sound very urgent."
    "That's because you don't know him."
    "Grandfather," Garion said suddenly, "how did he manage to see my sword? I thought we'd taken care of that."
    "He sees everything, Garion. He could glance once at a tree and tell you ten years later exactly how many leaves were on it."
    "Is he a sorcerer?"
    "Not as far as I know. He's just a strange old man who likes the mountains. He doesn't know what's going on because he doesn't want to know. If he really wanted to, he could probably find out everything that's happening in the world."
    "He could make a fortune as a spy, then," Silk mused.
    "He doesn't want a fortune. Isn't that obvious? Any time he needs money, he just goes back to that river bar he mentioned."
    "But he said he'd forgotten how to find it," Garion protested.
    Belgarath snorted. "He's never forgotten anything in his life." Then his eyes grew distant. "There are a few people like him in the world - people who have no interest whatsoever in what other people are doing.
    Maybe that's not such a bad trait. If I had my life to live over, I might not mind doing it his way." He looked around then, his eyes very alert. "Let's take that path over there," he suggested, pointing at a scarcely visible track angling off across an open meadow, littered with bits of log bleached white by sun and weather. "If what he says is true, I think we'll want to avoid any large settlements. That path comes out farther north where there aren't so many people."
    Not long afterward the terrain began to slope downward, and the three of them moved along briskly, riding down out of the mountains toward the vastness of the forest of Nadrak. The peaks around them subsided into forested foothills. Once they topped a rise, they were able to look out at the ocean of trees lying below.
    The forest stretched to the horizon and beyond, dark green beneath a blue sky. A faint breeze was blowing, and the sigh of its passage through the mile upon mile of trees below had a kind of endless sadness to it, a regretful memory of summers past and springs that would never come again.
    Some distance up the slope from the forest stood a village, huddled at the side of a vast, open pit that had been gouged, raw and ugly, in the red dirt of the hillside.
    "A mine town," Belgarath noted. "Let's nose about a bit and see