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apocalypticavolition · 4 months

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Let's (re)Read The Great Hunt! Chapter 26: Discord

Gather around everyone and I'll tell you a tale. It's a tale of my reactions to someone else telling me a different story in book form. Many book form, to be technical. And I already know the story, so my reactions will be very spoilery for all the books. Every book. If that's gonna be a problem, plug your ears or something I guess.

This chapter has a harp icon because it's Thom time! I'm as happy as Rand is to see him.

Rand, I may have been too hasty in leaving Stedding Shangtai the way I did. When I do go home, I may be in a great deal of trouble.

Not sure why you couldn't just lie about being a young Ogier from Saldaea or something, Loial. You all can't keep that close a set of tabs on each other. Or is the unbearded look a dead giveaway?

When they came pounding through the common room, Rand winked at the innkeeper, then laughed at his startled look. Let him think I’m off to play his bloody Great Game. Let him think what he wants. Thom’s alive.

What is it about needing to keep a low profile in inns that makes Rand so reckless? First Baerlon and his channeling sickness, now this when he doesn't even have that excuse.

The innkeeper was a woman with hair as white as Thom’s, and sharp eyes that studied Loial as well as Rand.

Innkeeper size, and therefore loyalty, uncertain.

The slender woman sitting cross-legged on the bed with her skirts tucked under her was keeping six colored balls spinning in a wheel between her hands.

Dena meanwhile has to be small so that Jordan can fit her into the fridge more easily.

“I have never heard of a woman gleeman,” Loial said.

And this frankly makes Dena's fridging all the more exhausting. Why are there no gleegals anyway? Surely there'd be a good source: women who go to the Tower to become Aes Sedai and then get put out again when it's clear they're not worthy but who don't want to go back home now that they've tasted the world. Especially since this world seems to be pretty low on sex work, you'd think that gals who don't have much else in the realm of prospects would pick up the job.

But also, it's infuriating that Dena is intro'd in this way and then killed off and then we never have any other woman who tries to take up the mantle later. One can hardly blame Thom for being in a hurry to pick up a lady apprentice given what happens to Dena and the events of the next few months, but by the time he ended up in Ebou Dar it should have been going again. It's a wasted opportunity.

They hang a scrap of painted canvas behind them, supposed to make the audience believe these fools are in Matuchin Hall, or the high passes of the Mountains of Dhoom. I make the listener see every banner, smell every battle, feel every emotion. I make them believe they are Gaidal Cain. Seaghan will have his hall torn down around his ears if he puts this lot on to follow me.

And here's another apparent revolution in the world's culture that doesn't seem to go anywhere. Theater exists; there's a play held in Andor much later, but apparently Gleemen will stay the preferred style for now. I suppose after the circus it's probably for the best we didn't pick up a subplot of players.

“She listens to a tale once—once only, mind!—and she has it right, not just the words, but every nuance, every rhythm. She has a fine hand on the harp, and she played the flute better the first time she picked it up than you ever did.”

Yes yes, we all know she's too pure for this sinful Earth.

She’ll be court-bard to a king or a queen before she’s done.

Okay but for real Thom, there's only so many monarchs in the world and I doubt many more nobles besides their immediate subordinates could afford court-bards so what are all the women in the world who aren't mind-bogglingly talented supposed to do in the performance arts? They can't all just give up their dreams and move on. Why are they absent?

“Your clumsy sheepherder’s fingers were never meant for the harp.”

There is something very sad in Rand not being meant for the sophisticated forms of art (and science) that he'd really rather be a part of than conquering.

There is even a lord in the city has what he claims is the Horn locked up inside his manor. He says it’s a treasure handed down in his House since the Breaking.

You know, I'm willing to believe that this lord really does have a 3,500 year old horn in his basement. Obviously not a magic one, but still. Stranger things have happened.

“Moiraine says it’s the Horn,” Rand said. Thom’s mirth was cut short.

Thom takes Moiraine as gospel even now.

“I don’t suppose you are talking about simply riding to Shienar and handing the Horn to—who?—the King? Why Shienar? The legends all tie the Horn to Illian.”

I suppose this must be one of those myths that grew in the telling. That or there was some confusion with a Foretelling and the sea that the Horn gets tossed into is off of Illian's coast.

“Thom,” he said at last, “are there any books that have The Karaethon Cycle in them?” Easier to call it that than the Prophecies of the Dragon. “In the great libraries,” Thom said slowly. “Any number of translations, and even in the Old Tongue, here and there.”

Thom of course has to answer slowly because Rand's question has given him a heart attack and he needs to take deep breaths. This might well be one of the more terrifying moments of Thom's life, having a young boy taken from his home on suspicion of channeling asking about the Prophecies while waving the sign of their imminent fulfillment around. Or at least this would be the case if Thom was taking it at all seriously (he's not, not yet).

For a moment, Rand could only gape at him, and when he could speak, his voice was unsteady. “The sword makes five. Hilt, scabbard, and blade.” He turned his hand down on the table, hiding the brand on his palm. For the first time since Selene’s salve had done its work, he could feel it. Not hurting, but he knew it was there.

Moiraine of course thought she was fulfilling prophecy but as Rand points out the coat counts for nothing, though funnily enough the sword and the coat are echoes of the later, true markings: the sword setting Rand on his path away from home and the coat being Moiraine naming him among the candidates as the real deal.

Thom's got to be happy Rand's denying it though.

I suspect Aes Sedai would want to make events fit the Prophecies as closely as they can. Dying somewhere in the Blasted Lands would be a high price to pay for going along with them.

Thom's a very kind mentor for actually telling Rand straight out what the price of being the Dragon is and suggesting that if he's just doing it for the Aes Sedai that it's time to do something.

“Then why ask about the Prophecies? Why send the Ogier out of the room?”

One of the problems of being an expert player of the Great Game is that when a novice shows up and starts blundering around, you're going to mistake his idiotic moves for strategic ones. Thom correctly identifies Rand's got an ulterior motive for his behavior and skips right past the obvious, simple, and true answer in favor of a conspiracy theory.

“I’ve learned a few things since we parted, Thom. They will come for whoever blows the Horn, even a Darkfriend.”

I'm not sure you've learned that at all Rand, and I suppose we should have taken Thom not knowing that detail as warning enough that it wasn't true.

“Owyn held it off almost three years. He never hurt anyone. He didn’t use the Power unless he had to, and then only to help his village. He. . . .” Thom threw up his hands.

The taint on saidin was an absolutely masterful counterstroke if you think about it. The perfect way for the divisive paranoia of the Shadow to worm its way into the minds of Light aligned individuals. Thom knows that Owyn was a danger to society but he still tries to make excuses out of love.

If Moiraine’s let you go, then you are well out of it.

While Rand outplays Thom through naivety, Moiraine outflanks him legitimately.

“A clean break is best, boy. If you’re always coming around, even if you never mention it, I won’t be able to get the Horn out of my head. And I won’t be tangled in it. I won’t.”

A cruel move by Thom, but one can hardly blame an old man for trying to refuse the call. One can blame the Wheel for how refusing the call plays out for him though.

Ruefully, he realized he was considering whether to tell Zera the truth or let her continue thinking as she did. All it takes is to think about the Great Game, and I start playing it.

Politics as a whole are a rather infectious way of corrupting the Light too, and the fools do it to themselves. It's no wonder part of Rand's coming is resetting the whole damn board on the players.

Coat or no coat, Rand was still only a shepherd. If he had been more, if he had been what Thom once suspected—a man who could channel—neither Moiraine nor any other Aes Sedai would ever have let him walk away ungentled.

Frankly, I think Thom's very much hiding in denial here like Rand does. He has to know that the facts don't add up in any way that's good but he pretends he can send Rand away and not have to worry about it.

Ah well. We have to part ways here too. See you next chapter!

#let's read #wheel of time #wot #robert jordan #wheel of time spoilers #wot spoilers #rand al'thor #cuale #loial #hurin #zera #dena #thom merrilin

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apocalypticavolition · 4 months

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Let's (re)Read The Great Hunt! Chapter 23: The Testing

Welcome back to my reread! The way to see spoilers for the whole series, yes that's right not just this book but everything all the way to the end, will come but once. Be steadfast. Or just click wildly, whatever you like. But if you like not being spoiled, don't click below and just keep doomscrolling through tumblr with no hope of escape.

This chapter has the Flame icon because it concerns one of the initiation rites of the White Tower.

Centered under the dome was a thing made of three rounded, silver arches, each just tall enough to walk under, sitting on a thick silver ring with their ends touching each other. Arches and ring were all of one piece.

So what the heck is this thing, one wonders. I've seen people suggest it's a holodeck with the safeties off, though that seems frivolous even by AoL standards since it seems to be connected to genuine mirror worlds. It may be some device meant for observing and experiencing such worlds that has become damaged in some way, causing memory loss. Maybe one of the forgotten Darkfriends of old built it as a bizarre punishment system.

All four Aes Sedai wore their shawls, as Sheriam did; blue-fringed for Sheriam, red for the swarthy woman by the table, green, white, and gray for the three around the arches.

We (a word which here means "the wiki") don't know who most of these ladies are, but apparently the "swarthy woman" is Silviana. Not too sure how we know this exactly (the Companion?) but hey! Hi Silviana! You're delightful.

“The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and when it wills. Patience is a virtue that must be learned, but we must all be ready for the change of an instant.”

Nynaeve was patient really, by waiting at all, and she's more than ready for change. The Tower's usual deliberate refusal to communicate is silly under these circumstances. They could have given her something to do.

Nynaeve shook her head. It sounded either like too much to swear or too little, and she said so.

She's exactly right. The First Oath is too little and easily sidestepped, the others give up far too much utility and helped hinder the institution.

Light, child, I am trying to teach you what any other woman standing where you are would have learned over the course of years.

Honestly Sheriam is pretty good as an undercover Black, giving a huge infodump that's legit and not misleading. And I suppose it's pretty appropriate we transition from Moiraine acknowledging the Black to a big spiel by one.

Once you begin, you must continue to the end. Refuse to go on, and no matter your potential, you will be very kindly put out of the Tower with enough silver to support you for a year, and you will never be allowed back.

Oh look it's another policy that only guarantees the Tower doesn't get the numbers it needs.

Some women have entered, and never come out.

And don't forget that this is a price of the ter'angreal they chose to use. They aren't selecting for great women this way, just the stubborn ones who get lucky.

You may turn back now, right now, and I will put your name in the novice book, and you will have only one mark against you.

Literally the only sensible winnowing process they have! If after three chances a woman still doesn't think she's ready, then unless it's the Tower's teachings itself that failed her (and we don't see evidence that such happens often), it's a good sign that she's not ever going to be ready.

I must make Moiraine pay for what she has done to us. I must.

I'm still sad she never quite gets to act on this. It's such a great motivation.

Nynaeve’s cheeks colored at forgetting already what Sheriam had told her on the way down from her room. Hastily she removed her clothes, her shoes and stockings.

Note that she's not at all ashamed to be naked in front of strangers.

And note that this is the first of many "all ladies must be naked" sequences. Yes there's some historical accuracy here, but you'll note that the Black Tower never picks up such a tradition even under Taim's messed up supervision.

Taking a deep breath, she went on straight, through more passages that all looked exactly alike.

It is the nature of video games, even magic post-apocalyptic ones, that sooner or later someone will reinvent Colossal Cave Adventure.

Dimly, she remembered playing mazes on paper as a child; there had been a trick to finding your way out, but she could not bring it to mind.

There are many tricks to exhausting mazes, though not every trick works for every maze. The simplest and most well known is to pick a wall and follow it. In a maze where both entry and exit are upon the outer perimeter, this is guaranteed to work eventually. On the other hand, if you start in the middle like Nynaeve (or if you want to reach the center from the outside), this might not work. The walls may not all be connected, so you loop around to where you started without ever reaching your destination.

She started to take the left fork . . . and spun around at another glimpse of movement. There was nothing there, but this time she was sure. There had been someone behind her. Was someone.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how pathetic is it that dream Aginor manages to be a more compelling threat than he was in book 1 or books 6 through 9?

“You are a pretty one, girl. I will enjoy you.” Suddenly Nynaeve remembered she wore not a stitch.

While obviously the main threat here is the implication of rape, let's step past that and get into the metaphorical. Nudity isn't the normal state of affairs in the arch worlds, only this one. This is Nynaeve beyond the Two Rivers, in a place where the authority she covers herself with is entirely absent. Aginor isn't just the Forsaken, he's also to a degree everyone she's had to deal with since she's left home - even the Aes Sedai who gleefully relish recruiting such a powerhouse.

“You dare? You dare!” He quivered, and spittle leaked down his chin.

This is honestly a pretty good prep for how scary we should actually think the Forsaken are: not at all.

“You cannot! It cannot be!”

Another reason I think Aginor is as much a stand-in for the Aes Sedai as he is for his allies in this sequence is that protests that Nynaeve can't have done awesome stuff and pointless hostility define their reactions to her.

And she could feel Aginor doing . . . something, as well. Dimly she felt it, and far distant, as if it were something she could never truly know, but around her she saw the effects and knew them for what they were.

Early installment weirdness? Or perhaps one of the tells that this isn't real; the arch isn't really drawing on saidin (or perhaps draws to a lesser extent on both), so Nynaeve has a dim awareness of it now that she's connected.

She looked back at Aginor, just in time to see him crawl out of sight over the mounded stone and disappear. She hissed in frustration.

Finally, and rather disappointingly in contradiction to what I've been saying, the last reason to view Aginor as a stand-in for the Aes Sedai is that to succeed in what she has to do, Nynaeve needs to give up her feud with Moiraine and not worry about what she's up to out of sight.

“You are washed clean of what sin you may have done,” the Aes Sedai intoned, “and of those done against you. You are washed clean of what crime you may have committed, and of those committed against you. You come to us washed clean and pure, in heart and soul.”

See what I mean? No reason to include this if not to say that the Moiraine feud is being wiped clean.

“That isn’t supposed to be possible. You should not even remember being able to channel.”

"Not possible! You dare channel in our sacred space?"

It's really rather a blatant parallel now that I'm seeing it.

She kept her memories, and she channeled the One Power when she was threatened. And she came out with her abilities burned to nothing, unable to channel, unable even to sense the True Source. The second to go in was also warded, and she, too, was destroyed in the same way.

To me it sounds like it's the wards plus channeling that cause problems, not the channeling itself. That's one hell of a vicious anti-cheating mechanism though.

There was more than an air of neglect about it, whitewash faded, a shutter hanging loose, the rotted end of a rafter showing at a gap in the roof tiles.

A final final reason (for real this time?) to consider Aginor a stand-in for the Aes Sedai as much as himself is that otherwise the past/present system doesn't line up. The Forsaken are real, present threats and the Two Rivers isn't exactly, but if Aginor is as much about Nynaeve's fear of the Power (oh shit it's that too) and the Aes Sedai then it makes sense that that's a trial she's already put behind her just by being in the Tower. Abandoning her notions of herself as a Two Rivers woman though, that's a harder struggle. It's not Bran neglecting his inn, it's Nynaeve neglecting the whole of her home.

“If Malena knows you’re here, there will be trouble. I just know Cenn went scurrying off to find her. He’s the Mayor, now.”

Malena's name of course comes from the Latin "malus", meaning "bad" or "evil".

She beat Alsbet all around the Green with a stick, and none of us who saw had the nerve to try to stop it.

Nice try, silver arches! There's no possible Mirror World where the Two Rivers folk would watch the blacksmith's wife get beat up and not immediately tear the aggressor to shreds.

She said that was why they died; the Light abandoned them. She talks about sin all the time.

Sin doesn't really get brought up a whole bunch in this universe. Like obviously becoming a Darkfriend is sinning and the Whitecloaks claim all sorts of stuff is tantamount to being a Darkfriend, but it's not as if more mundane behavior gets this description usually. Yet in this chapter the Aes Sedai mention it without and Malena worries about it within. Is she yet another reflection of Nynaeve's fear of the Aes Sedai? Destroying families, marking men with the Dragon... It's not too far off from how Nynaeve sees Moiraine, is it?

If she can’t make you afraid of her, she makes you think you need her for the children.

Is this how Nynaeve internally views her discussion with Moiraine after Shadar Logoth? Moiraine couldn't make Nynaeve be afraid of her but she could make her worry about Egwene and the boys even though she was the reason Nynaeve worried about them at all.

The way back—No! These are my people!

Not anymore. :(

“We have to run. We have to hide. Nynaeve, come on. Cenn will have told her who you are. She hates anyone even to speak of you.”

Does Nynaeve think Moiraine doesn't much like Lan speaking of her, I wonder.

“You are washed clean of false pride. You are washed clean of false ambition. You come to us washed clean, in heart and soul.”

Nynaeve's not a Wisdom anymore. It wasn't her real path.

The third is the worst. “I’m afraid,” she whispered. What could be worse than what I just did?

Having to walk away from the happy ending already won for you.

The city had a thousand gardens, but she preferred this wild garden on the hilltop.

Because a garden growing by itself in what was so recently the Blight feels more wonderous than those maintained by human hands?

“Go back? Where? To Emond’s Field? If you wish it. I’ll send letters to Morgase, and command an escort.”

Morgase of course won't be queen at this point. I wonder what reason besides dramatic necessity causes the arches to get a few things wrong.

To her horror, she found herself remembering him as her husband, remembering laughter and tears, bitter arguments and sweet making up. They were dim memories, but she could feel them growing stronger, warmer.

Did some fools in the AoL think that the Dark One's reach was limited purely to their timeline? Did they build this device in the hopes of finding a place beyond his touch, that would let them forget the horrors of the Shadow and recall all the sweet memories in its place instead?

I could stay here. With Lan. Nothing has changed. Her thoughts turned. Nothing has changed. Egwene is alone in the White Tower. Rand will channel the Power and go mad. And what of Mat and Perrin? Can they take back any shred of their lives? And Moiraine, who tore all our lives apart, still walks free.

It says a great deal about Nynaeve's character that the thing that gets her out of this gilded cage is her love for the others.

And also, I do so love ironic echoes, even if they're only separated by a single sentence.

She tried to picture the arch in her mind, to shape it and form it to the last detail, curve of gleaming metal filled with a glow like snowy fire. It seemed to waver there, in front of her, first there between her and the trees, then not, then there.

Perhaps this is just an ordinary entertainment device. Perhaps you forget for the immersive experience and then the arch is meant to be a primer to remind you of what you're supposed to call back to you. It seems unlikely that only Nynaeve would have this capability, after all. Presumably others should have been able to call the archway back, if only they'd known how.

Child, almost every woman who does this says much the same thing. It is no small thing to be made to face your fears.

It's no wonder so many women go Black, with trauma being such a central part of their identities as sisters. And the arches were only found after the Trolloc Wars, when the corruption began in earnest...

A gift from Ishamael?

“There shouldn’t be any scarring. And how did you only get two, and both placed so precisely? If you tangled yourself in a blackthorn bush, you should be covered with scratches and thorns.”

If scarring yourself permanently is part of the exit conditions, I could definitely see this being something Ishamael specifically devised. Not from scratch of course, he's not an engineer, but a relic he deliberately tampered with, setting admin access at a high price. There is always a price.

The Amyrlin’s eyes seemed to hold a dark glow. Nynaeve’s shiver had nothing to do with being naked and wet.

Yeah, this really only cements the Aginor thing. Too late now to escape, Nynaeve! You've committed.

Next time: A whole bunch of characters from book 1 come back. Some of them plan on being important this book, and others are only flirting with importance for the next three or twelve.

#let's read #wheel of time #wot #robert jordan #rand al'thor #wheel of time spoilers #wot spoilers #nynaeve al'meara #sheriam bayanar #silviana brehon #aginor #cenn buie #marin al'vere #lan mandragoran #siuan sanche

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