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neuxue · 6 years

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 27

Mat takes luck out for a night on the town

Chapter 27: The Tipsy Gelding

Oh great, it’s a Mat chapter. Hang on, I’ve definitely got some enthusiasm lying around here somewhere…

At least Aludra, Amathera, and Egeanin hadn’t insisted on coming. This group was too big as it was.

Right, well in that case, I’m going to stay behind with Aludra because that’s where all the fun is.

Dramatic irony just isn’t something Sanderson uses much – at least, not as a characterisation tool – and it makes everything feel awkward and stilted.

Thom’s still reading Moiraine’s letter because he forgot to bring any other books with him to keep him entertained. That’s what Kindle is for, Thom.

If Moiraine was still alive…Light, what would that mean? How would Rand react?

That sure is the question, isn’t it? If the first name on his List can be erased, if the List itself is broken…the Wheel of Time turns, and in an endless cycle of death and rebirth are any of those named in the list truly gone?

But at the same time, Rand’s grasp on everything is so tenuous right now, and he’s just killed Semirhage and threatened to kill Cadsuane, and learning that his List is flawed (and therefore not a solid foundation or anchor) could just as easily break him further as help him find his way back, at this point.

That’s when you know your hero has been brought to his darkest hour, I suppose: when even good things could easily just send him spiralling further. When it feels like he’s a glass sculpture hanging by threads of spiderweb, and any movement or change at all could send it crashing down.

But…he also couldn’t let Thom go alone. There was an inevitability to it. As if a part of Mat had known all along that he had to go back and face those creatures again. They’d gotten the better of him twice now, and the Eelfinn had tied strings around his brain with those memories in his head. He had a debt to settle with them, that was for certain.

The second half of that is fine, but the first…inevitability is just not a concept I associate with Mat. Or rather, it’s not something I see Mat thinking about himself. He pulls at the strings of his fate so stubbornly, and manages a tone of denial even in his acceptance of things that he has finally acknowledged he maybe can’t quite run from.

Something more like…

But Thom had said he was going with or without Mat, and Mat was not about to let the old man run off and get himself killed. Besides, he suspected those snaky and foxy folk were just waiting for another chance to get their hands on Matrim Cauthon. They’d gotten the better of him twice now – he cursed himself for ever setting foot in that doorway; this was what came of meddling with ter’angreal– and the Eelfinn had tied strings around his brain with those memories in his head. Well, he was not playing their game anymore. He had a debt to settle with them, and that was for certain.

Essentially something that plays a bit more with his ‘I’ll do it because I want to, not because you tell me to’ attitude towards fate, ta’veren, or really anyone telling him to do something, or even nudging him in a particular direction. The fact that he usually ends up going anyway is, of course, entirely unrelated, nothing to do with that, definitely nothing to do with ta’veren…etc.

He’d probably be tempted to ride in and save one of the Forsaken themselves if they were trapped there.

Again, a little too direct for Mat. This is the sort of thing you’d see Kaladin thinking, and on him it would work with that kind of wry self-awareness, but with Mat it’s just a shade too self-aware.

“We need to reach Caemlyn if possible, though maybe we’ll stop at Four Kings on the way.”

That would be potentially entertaining, given it was one of the first towns he and Rand fucked up. Just to see a character return to the same place, some absurd number of levels later.

Sanderson also slips into present tense more than Jordan did; we get things like:

Moiraine trapped, being tortured or who knows what.

It’s not wrong; that’s one of those weird syntactic grey areas where you can kind of go either way, but it stands out because as far as I remember, Jordan pretty much always went with past.

Why did [Thom] care so much? What was Moiraine to him but another Aes Sedai, one of those who had cost the life of Thom’s nephew?

Trust me, Mat, we’re all wondering the same thing. The whole Moiraine/Thom thing, like so many of the other romantic pairings, relies heavily on foreshadowing rather than on actual relationship building. Sure, as a reader you can see it coming, but there’s no actual buildup to it. There’s what, one scene featuring the two of them alone, having a conversation?

But my general exasperation with much of the romance in WoT is hardly new, so I’ll just move on.

(Like Moiraine should)

(I mean what?)

At least Mat remembers Rand playing the flute; I’m not even sure Rand does anymore.

Colours swirled in Mat’s head, resolving to an image of Rand, sitting alone in a room by himself.

People who are alone are usually by themselves, yes.

Okay sorry, I will try to stop nitpicking. Maybe it’s just to emphasise how entirely alone Rand is. Yep, that’s definitely it, let’s go with that. (Then again, he has an entire party in his head. He’s never alone, but he’s always isolated).

Rand had one hand to his forehead as if trying to squeeze away the pain of a headache.

Or the pain of two lifetimes and a breaking world, but sure.

His other was…

That arm ended in a stump. The first time Mat had seen that – a few weeks back – it had shocked him. How had Rand lost the hand? The man barely seemed alive, propped up like that, unmoving. Though his lips did seem to be moving, mumbling or muttering. Light! Mat thought. Burn you, what are you doing to yourself?

Oh Rand. You don’t want to know the answer to that question, Mat. And you’re not far off the mark thinking that Rand barely seems alive. He’s falling apart, literally and figuratively, just trying to drag himself and the rest of the world with him to the end and no further. And there’s so little left of him, of Rand al’Thor; there’s too much of himself that he’s let go or has torn away or pushed away or had taken from him, and even the boundaries he’s set for himself and the anchors he’s been trying to hold to are failing, and what is there left, now, besides force of will and sheer Power?

Sure, Rand was a friend. But Mat didn’t mean to be there when Rand went insane and killed everyone he knew.

In The Great Hunt, that kind of thinking seemed rather harsh. Now, with what Rand has done and become and where he’s standing…

“Ah, Rand,” Thom said. “That boy could have made a life for himself as a gleeman, I warrant. Maybe even a proper bard, if he’d started when he was younger.”

This reminds me of when Herid Fel, not really knowing who Rand was, insisted he’d be an excellent student. These brief, soft moments of almost-lament for what could have been. But Rand’s life is not his own; he belongs, as Moiraine said, to the Pattern and to history, and instead of student or gleeman or farmer he became a weapon.

And we see what that’s done to him. The question, then, is whether there’s a way for him to still find a balance there, to choose in truth what was chosen for him.

The banter that follows between Mat and Thom is back to being awkward and stilted, and even Mat’s syntax is just…off. Mat doesn’t say ‘Here now’ and ‘Rand and I did right well for ourselves’.

“Burn you, none of that!” Mat said, pointing at him. “Rand practically sleptwith that harp. Wouldn’t think of selling it, even when we were so hungry we’d have gnawed on our own boots if we hadn’t needed them to get to the next town.”

This is Mat’s loyalty. He’ll complain about Rand aloud and in his thoughts, and go on about how he wants to be nowhere near the guy…but he’ll also defend him to the last, when it comes down to it. Even when it’s something relatively minor like this. It’s the almost sibling-like ‘no one insults you/hurts you but me’, and he doesn’t even realise he’s doing it. Which is a fairly central aspect of Mat’s character.

“We can’t go back, Mat. The Wheel has turned, for better or worse. And it will keep on turning, as lights die and forests dim, storms call and skies break. Turn it will. The Wheel is not hope, and the Wheel does not care, the Wheel simply is. But so long as it turns, folk may hope, folk may care.”

It’s not Mat that needs to hear this – it’s Rand. This is what he has lost: this sense of purpose and of hope and of the reason why he’s trying. Everything for him is too…final, too fixed. It’s all focused on one end, and he has forgotten or lost sight of the fact that the very end he’s fighting for is an end in which there is no ending. He focuses on his List and on those he has killed, rather than remembering that they will be reborn so long as there is a future. He focuses on absolute necessity and shatters all restraints and crosses all thresholds and has lost all thought of second chances or redemption.

It’s a pretty speech, and it suits Thom. He has these moments of poetic wisdom from time to time.

“That has the sound of a song about it, Thom.”

“Aye,” Thom said, almost with a sigh. “An old one, forgotten by most. […] This road is old, Mat. Ancient. Probably was here before the Breaking. Landmarks like this have a tendency to find their way into songs and stories. I think this area is what was once called the Splintered Hills. If that’s true, then we’re in what was once Coremanda, right near the Eagle’s Reaches. I bet you if we climbed a few of those taller hills, we’d find old fortifications.”

“And what does that have to do with Doreille?” Mat asked, uncomfortably. She’d been Queen of Aridhol.

“She visited here,” Thom said. “Penned several of her finest poems in the Eagle’s Reaches.”

Burn me, Mat thought. I remember.

I kind of love this exchange. The contrast here, between one who has made a life of finding and knowing old songs and stories, collecting forgotten pieces of history and putting them back together, singing of what has been lost to time, and one who remembers it. It’s a clever contrast of perspectives, as if they’re looking at the same thing from completely opposite ends of time. Or as if one is describing a photograph while the other is looking at its negative.

Really I’m just here for anything at all that goes deeper into the implications of Mat’s memory dump.

Mat hadn’t felt the pull of the ruby dagger in a very long time. He was nearly beginning to forget what it had been like to be tied to it, if it was possible to forget such a thing. But sometimes he remembered that ruby, red like his own blood. And the old lust, the old desire, would seep into him again…

…interesting.

I haven’t thought of the ruby dagger in relation to Mat in quite a while either, to be honest. Huh. So that’s still in play. Good to know…

This whole next section of dialogue feels off, and I feel like I’m once again being unnecessarily critical and negative about the writing but Mat’s chapters really are standing out as…um…less than excellent. To the point where it’s actually hard to ignore; it keeps pulling me out of the story.

“Besides, somebody needs to be here to watch, then put this all to song, someday.”

I like this side of Thom. It’s the natural extension of what he was talking about previously, with the long-forgotten songs about long-forgotten history. He tells stories of the past, remembers these events through the songs and legends that they have become…but that means he also knows the nature of stories; he can look at the present and see a glimpse of what it will look like when it is distant past, when it too is just a story. So he’s a link in the chain, telling the stories of those that came before him, and watching and waiting and preparing to set down the stories that will be told by those who come after. He has some view to the concept of The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memory that becomes legend. Legend fades to myth…

And now we’re back to trying-too-hard awkward banter between Mat and Talmanes.

Part of the problem here is that it’s a bit like a game of telephone, in that your perception and interpretation of the information you’re receiving changes how you then present it. If you think Mat is funny, when you sit down to write him the result is very much going to be coloured by your own sense of humour. And it will be more difficult for you to notice that anything is amiss, because hey, he’s funny. You repeated the word you heard. It just…isn’t the word that was said.

“People expect a gleeman to bring information, so we pull it out and brush it off for display – but much of the ‘news’ we tell is just another batch of stories, in many cases less true than the ballads from a thousand years ago.”

So…fake news?

But that’s been a theme of the story all along – the nature of stories themselves, and the way rumour and truth and story intermingle and change across distance and time, and how it’s never possible to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Blah Olver stuff blah etc.

Sorry, I just…really do not care about Olver. I tried. For maybe a second or two. But fictional children are very much not my thing, 99% of the time.

(The 1% is Lyra, in case you were wondering).

“At least this [town] doesn’t seem likely to vanish on us…”

Don’t jinx it, Talmanes.

“You have the look of a lord about you,” the man said, approaching Mat.

“He’s a pr—” Talmanes began before Mat cut him off hastily.

“I suppose I do at that,” Mat said

Nothing like calling him a prince to get him to finally answer to Lord, I suppose.

Unless Talmanes was just going to say ‘PR disaster’, in which case I really can’t blame him.

Alright, opening bets on what’s wrong withthistown. Outsiders need to be out by nightfall? The inns are compensated? There’s definitely something going on here, and it’s probably not a surprise party.

The dice are rolling in Mat’s head.

Every time this happens, I hear ~dice are rolling, the knives are out~from Evita and I mean it’s not really wrong but brain, why?

Mat’s found the hipster inn: too cool to have something so passé as a sign on the front.

[The coin chest] carried Mat’s personal stash: he wouldn’t risk the Band’s wages on gambling.

Is it really a risk when you have probability bound and gagged in your basement?

I miss Talmanes, and I’m not sure how Nalesean ended up in Talmanes’s body – was he a Forsaken in disguise?

Why did people here wear clothing that was once so nice, yet now torn and patched?

Once is an observation, twice is foreshadowing, three is imminent disaster.

And Mat’s flashing gold. Time for the show. Everyone got your knives ready?

There was only one dicer in the game, with the crowd of onlookers betting against or for his tosses.

Ah, so it’s the financial crisis.

Last time he won every toss until the last, and the loss was the true luck. Now, he’s starting with losses…

Talmanes placed a hand on his arm. “No offence, Mat,” the man said in a quiet voice. “But maybe you should stop. Everyone has an off night. Let’s finish our drinks and go buy what supplies we can before night falls.”

I feel like Talmanes would be quicker on the uptake here. He’s Cairhienin after all, and no stranger to strategy and manipulation.

Part of what’s bothering me about Talmanes is that, while he was still in a ‘sidekick’ role when Jordan was writing, he still felt like his own character, with his own thoughts and aims and purpose. Here, though, he plays more the role of sounding board. He’s just there for Mat to bounce off of – to ask the obvious questions so that they can be answered (by Mat) for the reader, or to set Mat up for one-liners. He feels flat, where once he felt like he had quite a bit of depth, even if we only saw glimpses of him.

“This is what I wanted.”

Talmanes raised an eyebrow, lowering his mug.

Mat said, “I can lose when I want to, if it’s for the best.”

“How can losing be for the best?” Talmanes asked, watching the men argue about how to divide Mat’s gold.

“Wait.”

It’s a lesson Mat has learned, and I do enjoy the way it’s played with: this idea that sometimes you can win by losing, and sometimes what looks like a win can be more dangerous than a loss. For one thing, it suits him. The gambler, the trickster – he would be the one to turn a loss into a win, to see opportunity in what at first glance looks like failure. It suits his strange luck. And it also feels like something that could very easily be extended to his other aspect. Losing small to win big is not a bad skill for a general, strategist, or even tactician to have, and I very much hope that’s where this is going. The band’s motto is It’s time to toss the dice, after all; gambling and games and battles and strategy are all very much intertwined in Mat’s story.

I have to question one thing, though. He says he can lose when he wants to. Does it really work like that? Has he actually achieved some measure of conscious control here? His luck does to some extent respond to his specific needs, but is it working on a more meta level or does his own specific concept of what he needs have an effect? Or is it more a case of…knowing his luck better, and knowing the rules it operates under, and understanding the situation? I could buy that, I suppose; he has come to understand it a great deal more than he once did, when he was searching for inns in a Tairen storm.

Mat made sure to win a few tosses – just as he had to lose a bit when spending a night winning.

It’s something that frustrates me about the authorship switch and my own reaction to it: I keep questioning things like this, when if it were Jordan writing I would just assume I had been mistaken in my understanding or assumptions before. But as it is, I look at something like this and think ‘but is that reallyhow it works?’ So I can’t help but wonder if this is Sanderson just taking a cool trick and running with it like he does in his own worlds and magic systems – something that works well there, because that’s almost built into the systems themselves and thus becomes a key part of characters and worldbuilding – or is this actually something Mat can do?

And I don’t want to be second-guessing things like that; after all, Jordan had some inconsistencies of his own, and no doubt changed his mind on events or rules or whatnot at various points. But c’est la vie.

Mat’s still losing money like there’s no tomorrow, but Talmanes has moved on to all the foreshadowing and has concluded that something is rotten in the state of Hinderstap.

To which Mat more or less replies ‘nah, we’re fine. Now hold my beer and watch this!’

Which everyone knows is always a sign of nothing but great things to come.

The mayor wants them to go, Mat wants to bring in a chest full of gold, and I am immediately suspicious of any large wooden boxes that ostensibly hold coin for the purposes of playing to people’s greed to make them forget about their surroundings. Ahem.

Just…make sure no dragons end up in the box and we should be fine.

One last throw, everyone’s all in with gold and turnips, and this is an excellent method of grocery shopping. I’ll have to try it sometime.

“We don’t bend the rules here,” the mayor said. “The price is too high.”

For some reason – okay, the reason being because it’s Mat and he has a holiday booked in the near future to the lovely Tower of Ghenjei – this puts me in mind of Snakes and Foxes, and how the only way to win is to break the rules. Between that and ‘what was asked is given; the price is paid’, it’s a fun little contrast. Likely unintentional, but still rather perfect.

Desperate, he pulled open the top of the chest again, revealing the gold coins inside.

The lesson here is that greed always gets you what you want.

“I see what you’re doing,” the mayor said to Mat. He didn’t seem to be in a rush to gather anything.

Mat turned towards him, questioningly.

“I won’t have you cheating us with a miracle win at the end of the evening.”

Is it really cheating if you’re just doing unspeakable things to statistics? Probability did consent, as far as I can tell…

“I suspect that if we search you, we’ll find a couple of sets of dice hidden on your person.”

Nah, just knives.

“It’s a fine scheme, dressing like a lord, loading dice so they make you lose instead of win. Never heard of a man bold enough to throw away gold like that on fake dice.”

The mayor isn’t really wrong, even. It’s just that Mat doesn’t need weighted dice because the Pattern weights them for him.

I feel like the mayor making the throw for him kind of defeats the purpose of the game. At least, if you’re betting on it and have any shred of superstition and/or belief in the abstract concept of luck. From a purely statistical standpoint, of course, it doesn’t much matter. But from the perspective of the townsfolk gambling? Seems like they might have an issue with that.

Mat stuck out his hand for a shake, but the mayor turned away, holding the dice in his hand. “No,” he said. “You’ll get no chance to swap these dice, traveller.”

I kind of like this guy. His conclusions are not unreasonable, given what he would have been able to observe, and he’s sticking to his guns. Besides, he’s not telling Mat that the throw can’t be made, or tossing him in prison without evidence or anything; he’s just doing his level best to make sure nothing interferes with good old probability. I just like seeing random side characters showing a spine like this, even when confronted with A Protagonist. It makes them feel a little more real, a little more like they have their own aims and agency in the world, and thus makes the world feel more nuanced and true.

Barlden demanded that the chest remain open so that it couldn’t be switched.

Or filled with a dragon when no one’s looking. Not a bad call – this guy really is trying to cover all his bases.

Blood and bloody ashes, the man was a stickler for his rules! Well, Mat would show him, and all of them. He’d show them…

Show them what? That he couldn’t be beaten? What did that prove?

Ego has no place in grocery shopping.

I’m not doing anything wrong, he thought. I’ve got to feed my men, don’t I? These men are betting fair, and I’m betting fair. No loaded dice. No cheating. Except his luck. Well, his luck was his own – just as every man’s luck was his own.

Is it though? This much at least is more or less true to Mat’s mentality and also his particular method of denial: he knows full well he’s ta’verenbut he dances around it here. And he once almost killed a man for suggesting that he had ‘the Dark One’s own luck’. Autonomy and agency are important to Mat, and he doesn’t like giving them up or accepting that they can be superceded by forces he doesn’t completely understand. And so his luck is his, as far as he sees it.

Except the fact that he has to rationalise it to himself means he does know, on some level, that it’s not that simple. (Or that ‘luck’ as an actual phenomenon doesn’t exist, and is simply the human mind’s general failure to truly understand probability on an intuitive level, seeking instead to find pattern in chaos and coincidence, but that’s…one for another day).

There is definitely something wrong here, and there are far too many mentions of how close the sun is to the horizon for that curfew to be a random rule. What the fuck happens at sundown?

“We can go, then?” Talmanes asked.

“No,” Mat said. “We’re staying.”

And the dice stopped rattling in his head.

Well if there was any doubt left that Something Is Up, that did away with it.

It would be so disconcerting, to have something like that in your head. Because Mat’s not wrong; it’s not exactly useful in the sense that there’s not much you can do with the knowledge that something important or fateful is coming. The dice in his head give no indication of what or when or where or why, or whether it’s positive or negative, or anything.

No, it’s just an alarm bell set to ‘plot point incoming’ and if you think about it too hard, that’s a rather terrifying fourth-wall intrusion in the wrong direction. It’s something in your head telling you ‘you are part of a story, and something is about to happen’ or ‘you are part of a story, and the decision you just made is going to have an impact’ and yikes, do not want.

Groceries are loaded, tension is rapidly climbing, and Mat just wants the dice to be thrown already because shit’s getting weird. Having an indicator of narrative importance in your head would do that, yeah.

It’s a winning toss that doesn’t feel like a win at all; it does nothing at all to lessen the tension in the air and they’ve taken too long and the mayor is shouting at them to leave. This chapter has done an interesting thing in playing with the notions of winning and losing; we’ve seen it before in Maderin, and now it’s being extended further. Losing tosses in a lighthearted, almost carefree atmosphere contrasted with this winning toss amidst growing anxiousness and a sense of wrongness, and no release or catharsis at the point of victory. Losing is winning, and winning outright is…not what it seems.

“Now, see, I told you, Talmanes. Nothing to be worried about at all.” And that’s when the screaming began.

So it is a surprise party!

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#absurdly long Mat chapters: my favourite #/sarcasm font #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

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