This week’s Reading The Wheel of Time is a bit of a short one, since the two chapters we’re tackling—chapters 11 and 12—are each finishing up the interludes of traveling/waiting that Perrin and Mat have been in for a little while. Neither is quite done with this stage of his journey, but it’s clear that the next time we revisit them, the action will have caught up to them again. Mat is now actively looking for a way to return Tuon home without getting her assassinated as an imposter, while Perrin is now, finally, only steps away from being able to enact his plan to rescue Faile. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s recap.
Luca’s show travels to the large and prosperous town of Maderin. Luca cautions everyone not to speak of the sinking village they saw the day before. He also says the performance is only going to be for one night, as they are leaving early the next morning. Selucia summons Mat to attend Tuon, who expresses her desire to visit a hell, the lowest and most dangerous kind of gathering space, where basically every patron is some kind of criminal and killing is not uncommon.
Wondering how she even learned of such places, Mat tells Tuon that he couldn’t possibly bring a woman like her to a place like that without ending up in a knife fight. This seems to please Tuon for some reason. When Thom learns of Tuon’s desire to visit a hell, he suggests a place called The White Ring, which he already intended to visit to gather information. Mat guesses that Thom intends to take Tuon to a slightly rougher place and pass it off as a hell.
The four of them set off into the town. Thom questions the guards about the state of the countryside, gleaning information about the local lords’ attitude towards the Seanchan. The White Ring turns out to be an inn with a woman’s garter on its sign—not a hell, but a rough place certainly. Mat checks all his knives before they go inside.
He isn’t sure Tuon will be fooled by the place, where locals and outlanders seem to be drinking and dicing together as part of trade negotiations. Mat makes a bet with Thom about whether or not Tuon will accept The White Ring as a Hell, and loses his coin when a singer’s bawdy song convinces Tuon that it can’t be a reputable place.
Tuon insists on ordering beer. She also insists on seeing Mat’s luck in action, so he participates in a dice game with a few locals and an apparently very inebriated Taraboner trader. But he realizes that the woman’s intoxication is an act, and one of the men, a merchant named Vane, quickly excuses himself from the game.
Mat’s luck runs well and he wins every toss, explaining the rules to Tuon as he goes. But eventually he starts to worry that he’ll be accused of cheating. Buying a round for the entire room helps alleviate the danger of the crowd turning on him. On the very last toss the dice come up the Dark One’s eyes, meaning that Mat walks away from the table with only a little bit more than he sat down with. Tuon remarks that his luck isn’t endless.
“Nobody has endless luck, Precious. Myself, I think that last toss was one of the luckiest I’ve ever made.” He explained about the Taraboner woman’s suspicions, and why he had bought wine for the whole common room.
At the table, he held her chair for her, but she remained standing, looking at him. “You may do very well in Seandar.”
While Tuon and Selucia visit the facilities, Thom comes to Mat with the information he has gathered from the other patrons. It is somewhat alarming. First, there was a killing in Jurador, only a day or two after the show left, that was clearly committed by the gholam. Somehow, it is still on Mat’s trail.
Thom also reports that there is a Seanchan army assembled on the border of Murandy, and that every woman who wants to pass is forced to drink a tea that makes channelers go wobbly in the knees. Those who are affected are immediately collared. The army is also looking for someone matching Tuon’s description.
“They’re looking for an impostor, Mat. Somebody claiming to be the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Except the description fits her too closely. They don’t talk about it openly, but there are always men who drink too much, and some always talk too much as well when they do. They mean to kill her when they find her. Something about blotting out the shame she caused.”
Thom convinces Mat that Tuon will be killed, whether she is recognized as the true Daughter of the Nine Moons or not. They begin to plan what they need to leave the show and take to the forest, perhaps letting Vanin lead them on a smuggler’s route. When Tuon returns, Mat insists that they leave at once, despite her complaints that she hasn’t seen a fight yet.
When she hears his news, she assumes that her older sister is responsible for laying the trap; she’s even impressed with the ingenuity of it. Selucia remarks that this plot would be easily dealt with if Tuon were in the Tarasin Palace where she belongs, which results in Tuon rounding on her, furious, and apparently yelling at her using the secret hand signals they share. Selucia falls to her knees and bows her head, but the two go through some reconciliation as Mat watches and both are smiling tremulously and have tears in their eyes by the time it finishes. Mat is baffled.
Mat is just reassuring Tuon that he’ll find a way to get her back to her people safely when a group of seven or eight people, armed with swords, appear. Mat shouts for Tuon to run and Thom to protect her as he himself charges, closing the gap and hurling knives. He receives some injuries but manages to take out every attacker except one, a snarling, rag-wearing woman with a knife. Mat tells her that he’ll let her go, but she throws herself at him. He narrowly escapes being killed by her when Tuon interferes, expertly subduing the woman. She demands to know why Mat nearly let the woman kill him, and he answers that he promised himself he would never kill another woman.
Turning, he finds Selucia and Thom standing by half a dozen bodies and sporting a few of their own defensive injuries. Tuon is unmarked. She tells Mat that she won the game—he used her name before she used his.
When Mat recognizes Vane, the merchant from the dice game, he realizes that their plans have to change, because no one will believe that this respectable merchant attacked them in the street and that they only defended themselves.
“Luca will give us horses to be rid of this.” It was very strange. The man had not lost a coin to him, had not wagered a coin. So, why? Very strange indeed. And reason enough to be gone quickly.
Perrin rides with Tylee and Mishima into the town of Almizar, wearing his best silk coat in order to look as official as possible for this endeavor. Khirgan is curious about Perrin and his extraordinary life, but he expresses a wish for it to be ordinary. Balwer and Medore slip away, ostensibly to visit a friend of Balwer’s.
The first stop is to talk to a Captain Faloun, who is in charge of the raken. Before Tylee can say what they came for, a clerk begins coughing up borer beetles. Everyone screams and begins climbing onto chairs.
Again and again the man vomited, sinking to his knees, then falling over, twitching disjointedly as he spewed out more and more beetles in a steady stream. He seemed somehow to be getting… flatter. Deflating. His jerking ceased, but black beetles continued to pour from his gaping mouth and spread across the floor. At last—it seemed to have gone on for an hour, but could not have been more than a minute or two—at last, the torrent of insects dwindled and died.
Everyone is terrified, but Perrin points out that, whatever their supernatural origins, the beetles are still just ordinary beetles that can be crushed underfoot. No one else is willing to crush them, but Faloun sets his people to work carrying out the body and sweeping the insects away.
Tylee negotiates for raken and fliers, and even obtains a map of Altara that was sent to Faloun by mistake. This is so fortunate Perrin wonders if it could be ta’veren power at work, though that seems impossible. She also arranges for extra soldiers to be put under her command, and Perrin’s letter smoothes the way for all of it.
Outside, Perrin has to reassure and strengthen his own people, who heard about the death by borer beetles.
Tylee is not very confident that their trip to the manufactory—where they will be dealing with an Imperial functionary, not a soldier—will be successful, even with Perrin’s paper. She gives him strict orders not to speak unless he has to, and to always address her, never the functionary directly. After being made to wait, they are eventually greeted by someone called a Third Hand, who Tylee addresses as Honorable. They learn that there is just shy of five hundred pounds of tea currently prepared; the Hand boasts of how she has solved the problem of finding enough by paying some of the local farmers to grow the herb as their crop. She is clearly very proud of her accomplishment, suggesting that she might even be offered a new name for her achievement.
Despite Tylee’s deference and the presentation of Perrin’s letter, the Hand refuses outright to give them all the tea she has—she has been very precise about her delivery schedule, never missing a shipment, and this would throw everything off. As Tylee starts to bargain for a smaller amount, Perrin interjevts, speaking carefully to Tylee that Suroth promised death for any hindrance to her plans, though surely “the Honorable” would escape Suroth’s wrath and that it will fall squarely on his and Tylee’s shoulders. The Hand relents, promising to have the tea and carts ready by the end of the day.
Outside, Tylee praises Perrin’s strategic gamble, surprised to learn that Perrin merely intended to scare the Hand with the prospect of death and had no idea what he was actually doing.
“That woman knew she stood in the shadow of death as soon as she read Suroth’s words, but she was ready to risk it to do her duty to the Empire. A Lesser Hand of the Third Rank has standing enough that she might well escape death on the plea of duty done. But you used Suroth’s name. That’s all right most of the time, except when addressing the High Lady herself, of course, but with a Lesser Hand, using her name without her title meant you were either an ignorant local or an intimate of Suroth herself. The Light favored you, and she decided you were an intimate.”
Perrin barked a mirthless laugh. Seanchan. And maybe ta’veren, too.
Tylee asks if Perrin’s marriage brought him powerful connections. When he turns in surprise, an arrow scrapes across his chest, another burying itself in his arm. Perrin realizes that, if he hadn’t turned at the exact right moment, he would have been killed. Tylee spots movements on a rooftop and sends Mishima after the attacker, then apologizes to Perrin, saying that it lowers her eyes that he has been hurt while under her protection. Perrin responds that it doesn’t—he never asked her to treat him like a child.
The members of Cha Faile tend to Perrin’s injuries and remove the arrow in his arm, as Perrin sharply reminds Neald not to Heal him in the middle of a watching crowd. Tylee is surprised that Perrin would let the man touch him with the One Power. Mishima returns to report that two men with bows and quivers fell from the roof, but that they were already dead before they hit the ground—he thinks they took poison when they failed to kill Perrin.
“If men will kill themselves rather than report failure,” Tylee said gravely, “it means you have a powerful enemy.”
A powerful enemy? Very likely Masema would like to see him dead, but there was no way Masema’s reach could extend this far. “Any enemies I have are far away and don’t know where I am.” Tylee and Mishima agreed that he must know about that, but they looked doubtful. Then again, there were always the Forsaken. Some of them had tried to kill him before.
Perrin isn’t going to bring up the Forsaken, however, and suggests they find an inn where he can rent a room. He thinks of how it has been fifty-one days since he lost Faile, and wonders how many more will pass before he can get to her.
I think the most significant thing for me in these chapters is not just that both Perrin and Mat were attacked by Darkfriends, or even that Perrin seems to suspect the Forsaken’s hand behind it while Mat is left puzzled. What feels important is how quickly they were able to find them, in comparison to the first time Moridin/Ishamael gave their image to his followers. After Carridin/Bors and the other Darkfriends were given the images of Rand, Perrin, and Mat, it wasn’t too long before Rand and Mat had an encounter with some. It showed the boys, and the audience, how Darkfriends could be anywhere, but it didn’t quite give the impression that they are everywhere.
This time, however, Mat happened into a random town where he was immediately clocked by a Darkfriend, who not only had the information about his appearance and the orders to kill him but could also quickly and easily scare up an entire gang of Darkfriends, a dozen or more, which would have been enough to subdue Mat if he hadn’t happened to have three extraordinary fighters with him.
(I think that’s what Thom is saying to Selucia when he suggests that sometimes he sees things and then forgets him. I think she took part in the fighting and doesn’t want Mat to know about it, for some reason. Maybe just to keep the balance of knowledge and power favoring Tuon? Maybe because part of being Tuon’s protector is about being underestimated by potential enemies.)
The ordinary people of this random town probably aren’t important Darkfriends, and they probably weren’t spoken to directly by one of the Forsaken, but I imagine it’s not that many steps up the chain of command to find one, either. It seems like either the number of Darkfriends has increased or their organization has improved a lot—perhaps both—which speaks to the fact that everyone knows how close the Last Battle is, and the Forsaken are tightening their grip on their army even as the Light scrambles to organize its own side of things.
Perrin, in another city on a very different errand, was found just as quickly as Mat was. It was so interesting to see him have a ta’veren moment that was more like Mat and Rand’s experiences. In the case of the latter two, we have seen both Mat and Rand avoid death simply by moving at the right moment. Mat tripping just in time for the leaping gholam to sail over his head is one example, and Rand, meanwhile, has had a moment basically exactly like this one for Perrin, where an arrow that would have killed him missed only because he happened to turn at the perfect moment. (It has happened for Rand enough that I don’t even remember when that was, but I believe someone else was struck and killed instead. Fortunately for Perrin, it was a horse who took the arrow meant for him, and not a person.)
Perrin’s ta’veren influence has always been more subtle, less easy to clock, than Mat’s warping of chance and Rand’s, well, everything. It was suggested that Perrin was able to convince the people of the Two Rivers to stand and fight the Trollocs because he exerted ta’veren power over them, but Perrin argued at the time that people were only listening because he made sense, and that’s a fair point. Even if his ta’veren nature took a result that could come from his speech and made it less likely, you can’t say for sure that it wouldn’t have happened even without his being ta’veren.
Of course, you could argue that his avoiding of the arrow was also pure chance, but it certainly seems like a more extraordinary result than Perrin being able to convince his friends and neighbors—people he grew up with, who know and like him and who think similarly to him, being from the same place—to see things from his perspective. When you know someone is ta’veren and also see them have extraordinary good luck, you can probably assume that a twisting of the Pattern is to blame.
Still, I think Perrin’s convincing of the Hand also shows his ta’veren power at work. This is not a woman he’s known since he was a boy, from a place and culture he knows well. His gamble in suggesting that Suroth would execute anyone getting in the way of “her” plans didn’t pay out because he made a calculated risk; he had none of the knowledge he needed in order to make those calculations. Instead, through sheer ignorance, he accidentally made the woman think that he was an intimate of Suroth’s, which was probably the only thing that would have convinced the woman to grant their request. As Tylee points out, she could just as easily have deduced that Perrin was “an ignorant local” making a social gaffe, which seems much more likely given the fact that, well, that’s the truth of the situation. The positive result, I think, can be put down to Perrin’s ta’veren nature swaying events in his favor.
Perrin’s astonishment at Faloun’s possession of the map of Altara and his question about whether or not ta’veren-ness could be responsible for such a thing does have me thinking more about what it means to be ta’veren and why the Pattern creates people with such abilities. We know that ta’veren pull the threads of the Pattern around them, creating ripples that run outward, changing and affecting other threads down the line, and that the people who are ta’veren aren’t exactly in control over that effect. But we also know that the Wheel directs all lives and that the Pattern might bend a little for someone’s desire, their free will, if we can call it that, but that in the end everyone’s lives are at least somewhat directed by the spinning of the Wheel. When Moiraine decided to swear obedience to Rand, she compared the direction of the Pattern to channeling saidar: Control only comes through surrender.
If the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, what is the difference between the Pattern bringing that map to be at the right spot for Perrin and his allies to have it and ta’veren power doing it? If ta’veren are a tool for the Wheel to affect threads of a Pattern it already controls, then why is that effect needed in the first place?
I think we can find the answer in what is happening to the Pattern right now. As the Dark One is able to touch and exert influence over the Pattern, we are increasingly seeing strange events, from bubbles of evil, to ghosts and towns of dead people, to strange winds and… men filling up with bugs somehow? This latest event is a very odd addition to the effects of the Dark One’s touch, feeling more like a witch’s curse in a horror movie than the disintegration of creation, but Jordan understands the rules of his world better than I do, so I’ll accept it the same way Perrin does. It’s happening, and how is less important than my understanding of why.
Back in chapter three, when Moridin ordered the other Forsaken to kill Perrin and Mat, he observed that they should be easy to find because they are ta’veren. Graendal responds with;
“Finding ta’veren was never as simple as you made out, and now it’s harder than ever. The whole Pattern is in flux, full of shifts and spikes.”
Perhaps not all of these shifts and spikes are the Dark One’s influence, but I can’t think of what else they might be; certainly some of the fluctuations in the Pattern must be responsible for the ghosts and the other strange occurrences we’ve encountered. This suggests, therefore, that the ways that ta’veren affect the Pattern and the way the Dark One affects the Pattern are, in some sense, similar. Perhaps ta’veren effects are the exact opposite of the Dark One’s, creating order and harmony where he creates disorder and conflict, but they seem to work very similarly, on a functional level.
It would make sense that ta’veren aren’t just granted their power so that they can be effective leaders in the last battle (or so they can survive long enough to get there), but also to affect the Pattern for the Pattern’s sake. I find myself wondering if Rand, in particular, might have a stabilizing effect on the Pattern. What humanity witnesses as spontaneous marriages and freak accidents might, if viewed from the Wheel or the Creator’s perspective, look like a shoring up of the threads themselves, a patch, or even a re-weaving of a worn or breaking part of the Pattern. Perhaps that is why Rand seems to have a greater or lesser “random” effect on the places he goes. Perhaps the results have to do with whether or not that area of the Pattern needs a little TLC.
This is all speculation, of course, but I do like where it’s taking me. The theory even suggests a way that the Bore might be fixed—not patched but actually rewoven into solidity. As we know, this must be possible, since the cyclical nature of time demands there be a point at which the Bore doesn’t exist so that it can be drilled in the first place. If Rand has the ability to reweave parts of the Pattern simply by being present in the place where it is frayed or torn, maybe he can find a way to bring that effect to bear on the Bore itself, perhaps with the aid of Mat and Perrin.
Speaking of which, I’m so intrigued by the connection the three have through the swirling colors and visions of each other. So far they have all been too busy to stop and pay attention to it, and Perrin seems to have found a way to dismiss it from his mind at will, but this connection must exist because of their shared nature as ta’veren, and might well represent a way to combine their powers in some way. At the very least, it would be endlessly useful on the battlefield to be able to know what the other generals are doing at any given moment, no matter how far they are from your position, simple by thinking about them. Mat has already gotten some small use from the visions: He knows that Rand isn’t dead or captured the way so many rumors suggests.
Maybe they’ll even find a way to communicate with each other through the visions, like some kind of ta’veren telepathy.
I have to admit, I enjoyed the fact that Mat and Thom were able to fool Tuon with the fake Hell. Tuon is kind of annoying, I must admit. She’s an impressive person, to be sure, intelligent and highly competent, but she’s also just so narcissistic, so confident of her own superiority over everyone else, that it makes her kind of unbearable. Her “games” with Mat don’t really come off as flirtatious so much as a need to exert her own authority, and superiority, over him, and the way she keeps judging him like she’s grading a student or evaluating a slave is irksome at best. She may have won the game (the one only she knew they were playing) as to who would use the other person’s actual name first, but she also believed that a normal inn was the Hell she wanted to visit just because a singer’s performance is, in her opinion, too bawdy for a respectable establishment.
Not that she thinks of it as an opinion. Seanchan don’t, as a matter of course, seem to be able to easily get their heads around the huge cultural differences between their nation and those they’ve come to conquer. Their hierarchical thinking is too rigid, too ingrained, for them not to bring that perspective to bear.
I did particularly enjoy the cultural difference around what is considered too sexual for public spaces. The song being performed in the White Ring is deemed by Tuon to be too “salacious” for a respectable establishment, but she thinks that someone singing such a song should be more scantily clad. Since most da’covale are dressed in sheer robes, it’s clear that nudity and partial nudity are more common place in Seanchan. It is only seen in those of lower rank—the so’jinn, for example, don’t wear transparent clothing—but witnessing it would not be considered very scandalous when every slave owner would have at least a few sheer-clad da’covale. From the point of view of the rest of the nations, however, much less nudity is on view even among lower-class or less honorable women, but songs about making love are apparently alright in places where goods can be bought and sold, and business is conducted.
In any case, I’m getting pretty tired of Tuon’s righteousness, especially after the reminder of her views on Aes Sedai and channelers. It would be nice to see Mat get an edge over her once in a while, even if she never finds out she was duped.
Tylee’s shock that Perrin would allow Neald to Heal him was a good reminder of how the Seanchan see the One Power. She doesn’t make a point about it being the male half that would be used, though she could very well be thinking it, I suppose. Still, I am reminded that the Seanchan see the One Power—all of it, not just the male half—as being something Evil, emanating from the Dark. Like the Whitecloaks, they see female channelers as witches or monsters, and I wonder if they even see a difference between male and female channelers, other than the fact that one can be controlled and one can’t. Tuon brought this up when she collared the Aes Sedai, but for some reason it hit me especially when Tylee questioned Perrin’s willingness to be Healed.
Perhaps this is because the damane don’t seem to know how to Heal. Their channeling is almost entirely focused on war, though we’ve heard of a few other things they can do, including some weather control, delving for ore, and fortune telling/Foretelling. With the Seanchan attitude towards the One Power being what it is (a legacy of Hawkwing’s final years of hatred towards the White Tower), it’s hard to imagine any of them being willing to be touched by the One Power even to save their own lives.
Tylee mentioned needing to find more a’dam along with the raken and the Forkroot, yet another point towards the fact that many Shaido are probably going to end up collared. But perhaps some good will come of this as well. We know that marath’damane are being found everywhere due to the use of forkroot; with the warehouse emptied, there will be interruptions in supply that might allow some channelers to escape the Seanchan drag net.
I’m not sure if Forkroot also affects channelers who have never touched the True Source before. We know the a’dam can indicate a woman born with the spark, but even there, girls are not tested at birth but when they are teenagers, around the time when anyone born with the spark would start touching the Source for the first time. Those who are not born with the spark but have the ability to learn are not affected by being collared, but sul’dam who have used the a’dam for a while are.
This suggests that a woman or girl must have connected to the One Power in some way in order for the collar end of the a’dam to work on her. It can’t sense the potential, only the reality. Women born with the spark probably become connected to the One Power before they ever actually use it, hence the ability to collar them even before they have shown an ability to channel. But if it were possible to sense the spark in someone when they are newborns, I’m sure the Seanchan would test accordingly.
So the question is whether forkroot would operate by the same rules. Would a woman with the ability to learn be affected by Forkroot even though she wasn’t born with the spark and has never channeled before? Would a six year old girl born with the spark but still years away from expressing that ability be affected by it?
It’s hard to say, based on what we know so far. On the one hand, the Seanchan seem to be using the tea to find more marath’damane than they could find by the usual means, which would suggest that the forkroot test is more effective than damane sensing channelers as they pass. But there are only so many sul’dam and damane pairs, and the forkroot allows any Seanchan soldier to test a woman to see if she can channel, and to subdue her until a sul’dam can arrive with a collar. The increased number of marath’damane might simply be a numbers game, and nothing to do with forkroot being a more effective way to test for channelers or potential channelers.
But what if it is more effective? It’s awful enough that the Seanchan have a quick and simple way to test women that can be employed by any one of their agents. If forkroot works on those born with the spark who haven’t yet manifested their abilities, or on women who only have the ability to learn, that is a crazy powerful tool for the Seanchan, or anyone with hostile intentions towards channelers, to have in their arsenal.
However, unless forkroot is actually pretty rare, it seems more unlikely than likely that it could affect such a wide range of people, just because its nature would be more likely to have been discovered before now, but that’s not a guarantee; we have no idea how rare the plant is or how it was used before Ronde Macura discovered its unique properties.
In any case, I hate the fact that the Seanchan have it, and in such quantities, and I hope that some good comes of Perrin and Tylee taking everything that was currently ready to be shipped. I’m also very curious to see what comes of the fact that Suroth has apparently made everyone think that Tuon is actually an impersonator of herself. No doubt she will present a “real” Tuon to complete the misdirection, probably Semirhage in disguise. Much of Tuon’s safety may depend on how the meeting between the Daughter of the Nine Moons and the Dragon Reborn goes—whether Rand detects a trap, whether Semirhage pulls her punches because of Moridin’s orders. Whether ta’veren power has a hand in any of it.
Before we get to that, it’s time to return to Caemlyn and Elayne’s struggle for the throne. I’m a little chagrined to admit that I actually forgot what was going on with her and the fact that there was actually fighting going on. Depending on how my reading goes, we’ll cover at least chapters 13 and 14, possibly 15 as well.
In the meantime, did anyone else picture that clerk’s death by beetles to be just like all the people whose brain gets eaten by scarab beetles in The Mummy? Because I did. Also, I really enjoyed the description of Mat’s fighting prowess, and the fact that Tuon had to step in and stop him from letting his chivalry get him killed. Even if she’s not my favorite person, that was a good moment.