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

I groaned inwardly, cursing my careless tongue. My casual offer to
vegetablize the stranger had saddled me with him. But Aldur was my
Lord, so I said,

"I will, Master."

"What is thy current study, my son?"

"I examine the reason for mountains. Master."

"Lay aside thy mountains, Belgarath, and study man instead. It may be
that the study shall make thee more kindly disposed toward thy fellow
creatures."

I knew a rebuke when I heard one, so I didn't argue. I sighed.

"As my Master commands," I submitted regretfully. I'd almost found the
secret of mountains, and I didn't want it to escape me. But then I
remembered how patient my Master had been when I first came to the
Vale, so I swallowed my resentment--at least right there in front of
him.

I was not nearly so agreeable once I got Zedar back outside, though.

I put that poor man through absolute hell, I'm ashamed to admit. I
degraded him, I berated him, I set him to work on impossible tasks and
then laughed scornfully at his efforts. To be quite honest about it, I
secretly hoped that I could make his life so miserable that he'd run
away.

But he didn't. He endured all my abuse with a saintly patience that
sometimes made me want to scream. Didn't the man have any spirit at
all? To make matters even worse--to my profoundest mortification--he
learned the secret of the Will and the Word within six months. My
Master named him Belzedar and accepted him as his pupil.

In time Belzedar and I made peace with each other. I reasoned that as
long as we were probably going to spend the next dozen or so centuries
together, we might as well learn to get along. Actually, once I ground
away his tendency toward hyperbole and excessively ornamental language,
he wasn't such a bad fellow. His mind was extraordinarily quick, but
he was polite enough not to rub my nose in the fact that mine really
wasn't.

The three of us, our Master, Belzedar, and I, settled in and learned to
get along with a minimum of aggravation on all sides.

And then the others began to drift in. Kira and Tira were twin Alorn
shepherd boys who had become lost and wandered into the Vale one day
--and stayed. Their minds were so closely linked that they always had