The Wheel of Time, page 257
“The King’s Palace,” Zarine said against his back, “and the Great Hall of the Council. It is said the first King of Illian said the Council of Nine could have any palace they wished, just as long as they did not try to build one larger than his. So the Council copied the King’s palace exactly, but two feet smaller in every measurement. That has been the way of Illian ever since. The King and the Council of Nine duel with each other, and the Assemblage struggles with both, and so while they carry on their battles, the people live much as they wish, with none to look over their shoulders too much. It is not a bad way to live, if you must be tied to one city. You would also like to know, I think, blacksmith, that this is the Square of Tammaz, where I took the Hunter’s Oath. I think I will end up teaching you so much, no one will notice the hay in your hair.”
Perrin held his tongue with an effort, resolving not to stare so openly again.
No one seemed to take Loial as anything much out of the ordinary. A few people looked at him twice, and some small children scampered along in their wake for a time, but it appeared that Ogier were not unknown in Illian. None of the folk seemed to notice the heat or the damp, either.
For once, Loial did not appear pleased with the people’s acceptance. His long eyebrows drooped down on his cheeks, and his ears had wilted, though Perrin was not sure that was not just the air. His own shirt clung to him with a mixture of sweat and the damp air.
“Are you afraid you’ll find other Ogier here, Loial?” he asked. He felt Zarine stir against his back and cursed his tongue. He meant to let the woman know even less than Moiraine apparently meant to tell her. That way, perhaps, she would grow bored enough to leave. If Moiraine will let her go, now. Burn me, I don’t want any bloody falcon perched on my shoulder, even if she is pretty.
Loial nodded. “Our stonemasons sometimes come here.” He spoke in a whisper not only for an Ogier, but for anyone. Even Perrin could barely hear. “From Stedding Shangtai, I mean. It was masons from our stedding who built part of Illian—the Palace of the Assemblage, the Great Hall of the Council, some of the others—and they always send to us when repairs need to be done. Perrin, if there are Ogier here, they will make me go back to the stedding. I should have thought of it before now. This place makes me uneasy, Perrin.” His ears shifted nervously.
Perrin moved Stepper closer and reached up to pat Loial’s shoulder. It was a long reach, above his head. Conscious of Zarine at his back, he chose his words carefully. “Loial, I do not believe Moiraine would let them take you. You have been with us a long time, and she seems to want you with us. She will not let them take you, Loial.” Why not? he wondered suddenly. She keeps me because she thinks I may be important to Rand, and maybe because she doesn’t want me telling what I know to anyone. Maybe that’s why she wants him to stay.
“Of course, she would not,” Loial said in a slightly stronger voice, and his ears perked up. “I am very useful, after all. She may need to travel the Ways again, and she could not without me.” Zarine shifted against Perrin’s back, and he shook his head, trying to catch Loial’s eye. But Loial was not looking. He seemed to have just heard what he had said, and the tufts on his ears had fallen a little. “I do hope it’s not that, Perrin.” The Ogier looked at the city around them, and his ears went all the way back down. “I do not like this place, Perrin.”
Moiraine rode closer to Lan and spoke softly, but Perrin managed to catch her words. “Something is wrong in this city.” The Warder nodded.
Perrin felt an itch between his shoulders. The Aes Sedai had sounded grim. First Loial, and now her. What don’t I see? The sun shone down on the sparkling roof tiles, made reflections from pale stone walls. Those buildings looked as if they might be cool, inside. The buildings were clean and bright, and so were the people. The people.
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Men and women moving about their business, purposeful, but slower than he was used to further north. He thought it might be the heat, and the bright sun. Then he spotted a baker’s lad trotting down the street with a big tray of fresh loaves balanced on his head; the young fellow wore a grimace on his face that was nearly a snarl. A woman in front of a weaver’s shop looked as if she might bite the man holding up the bright-colored bolts for her inspection. A juggler on a corner ground his teeth and stared at the folk who tossed coins into the cap lying in front of him as if he hated them. Not everyone looked so, but it seemed to him that at least one face in five wore anger and hatred. And he did not think they were even aware of it.
“What is the matter?” Zarine asked. “You are tensing. It is like holding on to a rock.”
“Something is wrong,” he told her. “I do not know what, but something is wrong.” Loial nodded sadly, and murmured about how they would make him go back.
The buildings around them began to change as they rode, crossing more bridges as they crossed Illian to its other side. The pale stone was as often undressed as polished, now. The towers and palaces vanished, to be replaced by inns and warehouses. Many of the men in the streets, and some of the women, had an oddly rolling gait; they all had the bare feet he associated with sailors. The smells of pitch and hemp were strong in the air, and the scent of wood, both freshly cut and cured, with sour mud overlying both. The canals’ odors changed, too, making his nose wrinkle. Chamber pots, he thought. Chamber pots and old privies. It made him feel queasy.
“The Bridge of Flowers,” Lan announced as they crossed yet another low bridge. He inhaled deeply. “And now we are in the Perfumed Quarter. The Illianers are a poetic people.”
Zarine stifled a laugh against Perrin’s back.
As if he were suddenly impatient with the slow pace of Illian, the Warder led them quickly through the streets to an inn, two stories of rough, green-veined stone topped with pale green tiles. Evening was coming on, the light growing softer as the sun settled. It gave a little relief from the heat, but not much. Boys seated on mounting blocks in front of the inn hopped up to take their horses. One black-haired lad about ten asked Loial if he were an Ogier, and when Loial said he was, the boy said, “I did think you did be,” with a self-satisfied nod. He led Loial’s big horse away, tossing the copper Loial had given him into the air and catching it.
Perrin frowned up at the inn sign for a moment before following the others in. A white-striped badger danced on its hind legs with a man carrying what seemed to be a silver shovel. Easing the Badger, it read. It must be some story I never heard.
The common room had sawdust on the floor, and tabac smoke filled the air. It also smelled of wine, and fish cooking in the kitchen, and a heavy, flowered perfume. The exposed beams of the high ceiling were rough-hewn and age-dark. This early in the evening, no more than a quarter of the stools and benches were filled, by men in workmen’s plain coats and vests, some with the bare feet of sailors. All of them sat clustered as close as they could manage around one table where a pretty, dark-eyed girl, the wearer of the perfume, sang to the strumming of a twelve-string bittern and danced on the tabletop with swirls of her skirt. Her loose, white blouse had an extremely low neck. Perrin recognized the tune—“The Dancing Lass”—but the words the girl sang were different from what he knew.
“A Lugard girl, she came to town, to see what she could see.
With a wink of her eye, and a smile on her lip,
she snagged a boy or three, or three.
With an ankle slim, and skin so pale,
she caught the owner of a ship, a ship.
With a soft little sigh, and a gay little laugh,
she made her way so free. So free.”
She launched into another verse, and when Perrin realized what she was singing, his face grew hot. He had thought nothing could shock him after seeing Tinker girls dance, but that had only hinted at things. This girl was singing them right out.
Zarine was nodding in time to the music and grinning. Her grin widened when she looked at him. “Why, farmboy, I do not think I ever knew a man your age who could still blush.”
He glared at her and barely stopped himself from saying something he knew would be stupid. This bloody woman has me jumping before I can think. Light, I’ll wager she thinks I never even kissed a girl! He tried not to listen to any more of what the girl was singing. If he could not get the red out of his face, Zarine was sure to make more of it.
A flash of startlement had passed across the face of the proprietress when they entered. A large, round woman with her hair in a thick roll at the back of her neck and a smell of strong soap about her, she suppressed her surprise quickly, though, and hurried to Moiraine.
“Mistress Mari,” she said, “I did never think to see you here today.” She hesitated, eyeing Perrin and Zarine, glanced once at Loial, but not in the searching way she looked at them. Her eyes actually brightened at the sight of the Ogier, but her real attention was all on “Mistress Mari.” She lowered her voice, “Have my pigeons no arrived safely?” Lan, she seemed to accept as a part of Moiraine.
“I am sure they have, Nieda,” Moiraine said. “I have been away, but I am sure Adine has noted down everything you reported.” She eyed the girl singing on the table with no outward disapproval, nor any other expression. “The Badger was considerably quieter when last I was here.”
“Aye, Mistress Mari, it did be that. But the louts have no gotten over the winter yet, it does seem. I have no had a fight in the Badger in ten years, till the tail of this winter gone.” She nodded toward the one man not sitting near the singer, a fellow even bigger than Perrin, standing against the wall with his thick arms folded, tapping his foot to the music. “Even Bili did have a hard time keeping them down, so I did hire the girl to take their minds from anger. From some place in Altara, she does come.” She tilted her head, listening for a moment. “A fair voice, but I did sing it better—aye, and dance better, too—when I did be her age.”
Perrin gaped at the thought of this huge woman capering on a table, singing that song—a bit of it came through; “I’ll wear no shift at all. At all”—until Zarine fisted him hard in the short ribs. He grunted.
Nieda looked his way. “I’ll mix you some honey and sulphur, lad, for that throat. You’ll no want to take a chill before the weather warms, no with a pretty girl like that one on your arm.”
Moiraine gave him a look that said he was interfering with her. “Strange that you should suffer fights,” she said. “I well remember how your nephew stops such. Has something occurred to make people more irritable?”
Nieda mused for a moment. “Perhaps. It do be hard to say. The young lordlings do always come down to the docks for the wenching and carousing they can no get away with where the air does smell fresher. Perhaps they do come more often, now, since the hard of the winter. Perhaps. And others do snap at each other more, too. It did be a hard winter. That does make men angrier, and women as well. All that rain, and cold. Why, I did wake two mornings to find ice in my washbasin. No so hard as the last winter, of course, but that did be a winter for a thousand years. Almost enough to make me believe those travelers’ tales of frozen water falling from the sky.” She giggled to show how little she believed that. It was an odd sound from such a large woman.
Perrin shook his head. She doesn’t believe in snow? But if she thought this weather was cool, he could believe it of her.
Moiraine bent her head in thought, her hood shadowing her face.
The girl on the table was beginning a new verse, and Perrin found himself listening in spite of himself. He had never heard of any woman doing anything remotely like what the girl was singing about, but it did sound interesting. He noticed Zarine watching him listen, and tried to pretend he had not been.
“What has occurred out of the ordinary in Illian of late?” Moiraine said finally.
“I do suppose you could call Lord Brend’s ascension to the Council of Nine unusual,” Nieda said. “Fortune prick me, I can no remember ever hearing his name before the winter, but he did come to the city—from somewhere near the Murandian border, it be rumored—and did be raised inside a week. It do be said he be a good man, and strongest of the Nine—they all do follow his lead, it be said, though he be newest and unknown—but sometimes I do have strange dreams of him.”
Moiraine had opened her mouth—to tell Nieda she had meant in the last few nights, Perrin was sure—but she hesitated, and instead said, “What sort of strange dreams, Nieda?”
“Oh, foolishness, Mistress Mari. Just foolishness. You do truly wish to hear it? Dreams of Lord Brend in strange places, and walking bridges hanging in air. All fogged, these dreams do be, but near every night they do come. Did you ever hear of such? Foolishness, Fortune prick me! Yet, it do be odd. Bili does say he does dream the same dreams. I do think he does hear my dreams and copy them. Bili do be none too bright, sometimes, I do think.”
“You may do him an injustice,” Moiraine breathed.
Perrin stared at her dark hood. She had sounded shaken, even more shaken than when she thought a new false Dragon had risen in Ghealdan. He could not smell fear, but. . . . Moiraine was frightened. It was a far more terrifying thought than Moiraine angry. He could imagine her angry; he could not begin to conceive of her afraid.
“How I do maunder on,” Nieda said, patting the rolled hair at the back of her neck. “As if my foolish dreams do be important.” She giggled again. A quick giggle; this was not as foolish as believing in snow. “You do sound tired, Mistress Mari. I will show you to your rooms. And then a good meal of fresh-caught red-stripe.”
Red-stripe? A fish, he thought it must be; he could smell fish cooking.
“Rooms,” Moiraine said. “Yes. We will take rooms. The meal can wait. Ships. Nieda, what ships sail for Tear? Early on the morrow. I have that which I must do tonight.” Lan glanced at her, frowning.
“For Tear, Mistress Mari?” Nieda laughed. “Why, none for Tear. The Nine did forbid any ship to sail for Tear a month gone now, nor any from Tear to call here, though I do think the Sea Folk pay it no mind. But there do be no Sea Folk ship in the harbor. It do be odd, that. The order of the Nine, I do mean, and the King silent on it, when he does always raise his voice if they but take a step without his lead. Or perhaps it be no that, exactly. All talk do be of war with Tear, but the boatmen and wagoneers who do carry supplies to the army do say the soldiers do all look north, to Murandy.”
“The paths of the Shadow are tangled,” Moiraine said in a tight voice. “We will do what we must. The rooms, Nieda. And then we will eat that meal.”
Perrin’s room was more comfortable than he expected, given the look of the rest of the Badger. The bed was wide, the mattress soft. The door was made of tilted slats, and when he opened the windows, a breeze crossed the room carrying the smells of the harbor. And something of the canals, too, but at least it was cooling. He hung his cloak on a peg along with his quiver and axe, and propped his bow in the corner. Everything else he left in the saddlebags and blanketroll. The night might not be restful.
If Moiraine had sounded afraid before, it had been nothing to when she said that something must be done tonight. For an instant then, fear scent had steamed from her as from a woman announcing that she was going to stick her hand in a hornets’ nest and crush them with her bare fingers. What in the Light is she up to? If Moiraine is frightened, I should be terrified.
He was not, he realized. Not terrified, or even frightened. He felt . . . excited. Ready for something to happen, almost eager. Determined. He recognized the feelings. They were what wolves felt just before they fought. Burn me, I’d rather be afraid!
He was first back down to the common except for Loial. Nieda had arranged a large table for them, with ladder-back chairs instead of benches. She had even found a chair big enough for Loial. The girl across the room was singing a song about a rich merchant who, having just lost his team of horses in an improbable way, had for some reason decided to pull his carriage himself. The men listening around her roared with laughter. The windows showed darkness coming on more quickly than he had expected; the air smelled as if it might be making up to rain.
“This inn has an Ogier room,” Loial said as Perrin sat down. “Apparently, every inn in Illian has one, in hopes of gaining Ogier custom when the stonemasons come. Nieda claims it is lucky, having an Ogier under the roof. I cannot think they get many. The masons always stay together when they go Outside to work. Humans are so hasty, and the Elders are always afraid tempers will flare and someone will put a long handle on his axe.” He eyed the men around the singer as if he suspected them of it. His ears were drooping again.
The rich merchant was in the process of losing his carriage, to more laughter. “Did you find out whether any Ogier from Stedding Shangtai are in Illian?”
“There were, but Nieda said they left during the winter. She said they had not finished their work. I do not understand it. The masons would not have left work undone unless they were not paid, and Nieda said it was not that. One morning, they were just gone, though someone saw them walking down the Maredo Causeway in the night. Perrin, I do not like this city. I do not know why, but it makes me . . . uneasy.”
“Ogier,” Moiraine said, “are sensitive to some things.” She still had her face hidden, but Nieda had apparently sent someone to buy her a light cloak of dark blue linen. The fear smell was gone from her, but her voice sounded under tight control. Lan held her chair for her; his eyes looked worried.
Zarine was the last down, running her fingers through just-washed hair. The herbal scent was stronger around her than before. She stared at the platter Nieda placed on the table and muttered under her breath. “I hate fish.”
