"Books - David Eddings - Belgarath the Sorcerer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

When I think back on it, I realize that I owe that heavy-handed
villager an enormous debt of gratitude. Had he not come into that barn
when he did, I might never have climbed that hill on such a day to gaze
to the west, and I might very well have lived out my life in Gara and
died there. Isn't it odd how the little things can change a man's
entire life?

The lands of the Tolnedrans lay to the west, and by morning I was well
within their borders. I had no real destination in mind, just that odd
compulsion to travel westward. I passed a few villages, but saw no
real reason to stop.

It was two--or perhaps three--days after I left Gara when I encountered
a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart.

"Where be ye bound, boy?" he asked me in what seemed to me at the time
to be an outlandish dialect.

"Oh," I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, "that way, I
guess."

"You don't seem very certain."

I grinned at him.

"I'm not," I admitted.

"It's just that I've got a powerful urge to see what's on the other
side of the next hill."

He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a
Tolnedran, and I've noticed that they're all very literal-minded.

"Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin," he
told me.

"Tol Malin?"

"It's a fair-size town. The people who live there have a puffed-up
opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn't have bothered with that

"Tol," but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I'm
going that way myself, and if you're of a mind, you can ride along. Hop
up, boy. It's a long way to walk."

I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I
soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in
Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of
money.