Eye of the World, chapter 37 and 38, in which Egwene is best at everything

Apologies for the delayed post; it was my country's birthday and I had a torrential rainstorm to get caught in.

The Eye of the World: p. 557--581

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Long Chase

The long chase?  Really?  I've been struck by a prophetic vision that this chapter will include lots of running around to create the illusion of plot development.

I have also formed a hypothesis there's some kind of rule every chapter must start with four pages that don't do anything to advance the plot or reveal character in any way.  Nynaeve, Moiraine, and Lan continue on Perrin's magic trail (not that they know which farmboy they're after) and eventually find the Whitecloak camp where we left him and Egwene.  Nynaeve snarks at Lan for implicitly impugning her willingness to face peril to save a neighbour, or her knowledge of wolf behaviours, which is presumably supposed to be a reminder of what a capable and courageous Lady Heroine Woman she is.  Personally, I think it'd have played better if Lan had been all 'You're a village Wisdom despite your youth and you've stuck with us this far, so obviously you're a colossal badass, here's what I need you to do'.  In fact, why hasn't Lan internalised that yet?  He's bonded with Moiraine; he knows better than to underestimate someone just because they're a woman or small enough to fit in his backpack.  Do better, Lan.

"There are two guards on that side of the camp, beyond the picket-lines, but if you are half as good as I think you are, they'll never see you." 

She swallowed hard. Stalking rabbits was one thing; guards, though, with spears and swords... So he thinks I'm good, does he? "I'll do it."

There's something ironic that the one skill of hers he is willing to notice is her ability to not be noticed.  Also, hasn't Nynaeve been fighting trollocs?  A few unwary guards don't strike me as unusual threat for her these days.  But she still freaks out a bit as she creeps in, dodges patrols, and starts cutting the ropes to loose the horses for purposes of distraction.  She almost runs after she's cut four out of five, and thinks for a moment about how Lan wouldn't judge her for running away now (given that she's just a little mortal), but Nynaeve is struck by a vision that if she leaves any horses secure, some of Our Heroes will die in the escape, and so cuts them loose too.  (The possibility that she just got an actual prophecy further freaks her out, because Nynaeve was trained to use magic but she didn't think it was Capital Letters Magic, I guess?)  The final group includes faithful horse Bela and another friendly one, and Nynaeve flees into the night with them as Moiraine starts fulminating the camp with a rain of lightning (go Moiraine), and wolves join in the fight, confusion, running, et cetera.

Well, that chapter wasn't nearly as prolonged as I expected it to be.  It helps, of course, that on my first read I accidentally skipped about a third of it and didn't notice.  Which is a reasonable measure of the breakneck crawl we're proceeding at.  Let's savour this opportunity to talk about Nynaeve, because she's one of my favourite characters so far.

We're more than 550 pages into the book, and Nynaeve's motivations are starkly few.  She chased after Our Heroes because she had no patience to sit around and wait for a Manly Decision, and she's stuck with them because it's her job to protect her neighbours.  That takes a hell of a lot of dedication.  She's been told that she has incredible potential to wield earthshakingly powerful magic, but she doesn't appear at all tempted by the prospect.  Admittedly, she doesn't have great reasons not to trust Aes Sedai, but tell the average person 'By the way, I can teach you to perform miracles' and see if that doesn't shake their convictions even a little.  Nynaeve doesn't even know that she's plot-relevant; she's just here because she knows who she is (or who she wants to be) and that person won't let her neighbour brats run off to get murdered on their own.

And somehow the main gorram character of this book still isn't her, but the brat who thinks it's insufficiently heroic that he has to sleep in haystacks while everyone tells him how incredibly important he is (quarry of the Darkfriends, warper of the Pattern of reality, first-name-basis with the fricking devil who hangs out in his dreams).

Rand al'Thor might be (shpoilersh) the Dragon Reborn, but as far as I'm concerned he's a case study in mediocre men inexplicably drawing attention away from extraordinary women.  I'm sure he's going to get 'character development', but I'm not at all convinced that said development will consist of him actually gaining sympathetic qualities to compare with Nynaeve's fierce loyalty, courage, and conviction.

Anyway, let's get back to Nynaeve and Moiraine saving the day.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Rescue

Perrin

FIGHT ME ROBERT JORDAN.

Perrin shifted as best he could with his wrists bound behind him and finally gave up with a sigh.

Do y'all know why this book is precisely seven hundred million pages long?  Because Jordan thinks that it's quality storytelling to give us an unnecessarily long depiction of rescuers catching up with hostages, making plans, enacting plans to save the hostages, and then leaping backwards in time to show us yet more of what things were like for the hostages before they got rescued.  Surely we could just have Egwene recap for Moiraine what their captivity was like afterwards?  (If we get all this description and then a recap as well, I will burn down the sun.)

General advice: if you can timeskip something in a story and not leave the reader confused about how you got there, there's a good chance you should timeskip it.  More specific advice: if you can timeskip something in a story, for the love of gay shipping, please don't pretend to timeskip it and then go back to explain.  This is like episodes of TV shows that start with a Dramatic Scene, go to opening credits, and then come back with Three Days Earlier... which never fails to annoy me.  (Not least because it's used to set up shocking swerves like Why Are These Two Bros Pointing Guns At Each Other and then forty minutes later we discover they were both actually aiming at ambushers behind each other.)

Uuuuugh.

BUT BACK TO PERRIN.  He's spent the last few days walking tied to a horse and getting regular updates from Byar about the inventive ways the Questioners will torture him into confessing when they get to Amador.  They're also in a rush to Caemlyn, though, and one day Byar shows up, tosses him a sharp rock, and says it'd be much more convenient if Perrin somehow managed to cut himself loose and vanish into the night.  Perrin rolls just well enough to realise that there's something fishy about this generosity, but not quite enough to realise that if he makes a getaway they'd have ample reason to just kill him on the spot and wrap matters up that way.  He gets a telepathic ping from Dapple that there's a rescue coming, and stalls long enough for Lan to arrive and karate the guards into submission.

Lan, Egwene, and Perrin meet up with Moiraine, who reports that she's lost track of Nynaeve, whom she fears has "done something foolish".  Hey, why hasn't Moiraine given the rest of the party those tracker coins like she did the boys?  Can she only maintain three of that charm at once?  It's not like they haven't had time for her to make more.  Anyway, Lan turns and almost charges back to find Nynaeve, but Moiraine tries to stop him:

"Some things are more important than others. You know that. [....] Remember your oaths, al'Lan Mandragoran, Lord of the Seven Towers! What of the oath of a Diademed Battle Lord of the Malkieri?" 

Perrin blinked. Lan was all of that?

Lan was all of those things that we don't understand and have no context for and therefore I don't care about?  ASTONISHING.  (Also, I see Jordan is one of those authors who thinks that bemusement is best identified by a character's blinking, which strikes me as particularly weird in this high-tension high-action scene where presumably they're running around a lot and blinking away sweat or dust from one's eyes might be expected rather a lot.  Suggestion: if a character's shock is so understated that it can best be expressed through blinking while they flee homicidal religious zealots, maybe you're not dealing with as dramatic a moment as you'd like to think.  Shout something gaspworthy, at least.)

Nynaeve returns with the horses and as she leaps off to embrace Egwene she gets intercepted by Lan who just grabs her arm for an intense second.  He wants to tap that, if we hadn't noticed yet.  He wants to tap that like he's sending a telegram.  Nynaeve has picked up on this, as highlighted by the way she gives "a low laugh" as she runs to hug Egwene, which Perrin figures doesn't have "anything to do with happiness at seeing them again".

Let us take a moment to contemplate the situation: our split party has just started to mend itself after eight thousand chapters of running around scattered, they're being hunted by religious zealots, and this is the moment that Jordan has decided to drop in a romantic subplot with all the grace and versimilitude of a new fanfic author.  We got none of this last chapter, when Lan was actually talking to Nynaeve about sending her into danger, but now they're reunited and there is Needful Tension.  Priorities, Jordan.  Lan is the male character I hate least, but that's such a low bar.  Try to remember you had a plot in here somewhere.

They make their getaway, and the wolves leave Perrin with a mental note that they are ordained to meet again someday.  The next day, Nynaeve tends their wounds, treating us to a scene in which she rubs ointments all over Perrin's bare chest--he's been gruesomely bruised, but his ribs were protected from breakage because he's so incredibly ripped.

If you unlock the secret ninth ab, you become fireproof.

Nynaeve's ointments basically heal his mangled torso instantaneously, which either means they have some really sweet herbs in this world or she should have realised she was a gorram sorcerer a long time ago.  Nynaeve notices Perrin's wolf eyes, but doesn't know what they are; Moiraine does, but doesn't say what it means; Nynaeve is upset that Moiraine won't 'heal' Perrin's eyes, but is weirdly uninterested in knowing what's actually going on.  Lan just hears the name Elyas MacWolferson and says he used to be a Warder until the Red Ajah came after him, and assures Perrin that communing with wolves isn't of itself satanic.  He does note how improbable it is that Perrin would have the ancient gift and meet someone who was capable of teaching him:

"The Pattern is forming a Great Web, what some call the Lace of Ages, and you lads are central to it. I don't think there is much chance left in your lives, now."

In fairness, if Jordan doesn't find a new word to capitalise every four pages, his keyboard will explode.  Lace of Ages?  Honestly, at this point I almost want to congratulate him on so thoroughly committing: he actually made it an emphatic plot point that incredibly convenient coincidences and contrivances swarm around our heroes.  That's so much more audacious than just trying to make the story feel plausible.

I also feel like this chapter highlights a certain weakness of prophecy: Lan claims that Perrin's life is basically already set in the world, but it's only thanks to Lan's intervention just now that Perrin's life wasn't a very brief sprint in the night or several long days of torturous dying at the hands of the inquisition.  So, Perrin has no choice in what happens to him next, but Lan apparently does, since he had the option of turning and running.  Or a lucky whitecloak could have murdered them all with a few quick sword strokes.  At what proximity to Our Heroes do people stop having choices?  If there are certain people who bend fate around themselves, shouldn't the Dark One's central plan be to stay the hell away from those people as much as possible and stick to working with the people who have no fates at all and therefore might be capable of anything?  Lan implies that the Dark One can manipulate events a little, but when he says the three boys are definitely super-prophesied for either good or evil, he doesn't make it clear whether he thinks that has been determined yet.

Basically, what I'm saying is that there are at least three kinds of prophecy and it matters a lot which kind we're dealing with.  There's contingent prophecy ("If/unless this happens, this other thing is guaranteed to happen"), total predestination (choice is an illusion and all future events are fixed), and fate in the ancient Greek style ("No matter what choices you make, sooner or later you're going to X").  Lan doesn't appear to believe in predestination, but his talk about the lack of chance in Perrin's life implies that fate is a thing, except that he obviously still thinks Rand and Mat can be and need to be saved from evil, which suggests that his non-predetermined actions still matter.

Jordan could have saved me a headache by dropping the vague prophecy talk and just saying "The universe has willed that the three of you are main characters, so please do better".

That's it for me; come back next Wednesday to see if I managed to convince Erika to watch Bring It On for her next post!

The Eye of the World, chapters 14 and 15, in which a dream sequence is actually good

Only two chapters this week, because there's actually stuff worth talking about in them.  Still have to sift out great tracts of chatter, but I knew what I was getting into, and the novelty of a dream sequence that's actually got some weight to it was worth the slog.

(Content: animal death. Fun content: I am the captain of the HMS Mat/Perrin.)

The Eye of the World: p. 192--229

Chapter Fourteen: The Stag and Lion

We last left our heroes arriving at an inn, which is apparently jam-packed with waves of people finally leaving the mountains after getting snowed in all winter.  Wouldn't people leave the mountains for the winter and work mines in the summer?  I confess to not knowing standard practice, but that seems counterintuitive to me.  Lan splits off to find news from the loud and joyful common room, and Rand decides not to follow because he smells.  (Literally.  Shouldn't Lan smell just as much?  Or more?)  The ladies split off and the dudes are brought to a bath chamber, with a circle of twelve copper tubs (everyone likes washing themselves panopticon-style, right?) and inexplicably extensive quantities of hot water.  The gleeman is at one point described as sinking up to his nose, and there are four tubs, so I'm guessing 140 gallons of water at 38C, and they were just able to provide that, in this super-crowded inn in the chilly springtime, in the time it took Our Heroes to get naked.  [Drink!  Sorry, no, wait, this isn't Orson Scott Card anymore.]  The first house I rented couldn't provide that many hot baths on its best day.  Apparently there are witch-hunters in the city looking for Aes Sedai; have they searched the boiler rooms?  Or grown suspicious that there are boiler rooms?

The bathtub attendant (most awkward job?) sees their weapons and asks if there's anything Dangerous going on in hick country, and there's half a page of everyone bluffing and trying to stop Mat from revealing that they were attacked by trollocs.  Lan arrives and shoves the bath attendant out of the room.

"Don't talk about Trollocs," Lan said grimly. "Don't even think about Trollocs. [...] If the Children of the Light heard Trollocs were after you, they'd be burning to get their hands on you.  To them, it would be as much as naming you Darkfriend."

Doesn't that make the opposite of sense?  'The forces of evil want to murder him--he must be on their side!'  Shouldn't being wanted by trollocs be a badge of honour?  Anyway, Lan is so frigid about the risk they're putting Moiraine in that they all spend the rest of the bath in silence.  (That or Lan got naked and everyone was just so 'daaaamn, that butt is cubic' that they couldn't speak.)  Afterwards, despite the uber-crowded inn they get a private dining room.  There was no one else in the baths, either; how is this crowded?

Rand shows a rare flash of Doing Better when he sees Egwene again:

It seemed they could not trust anyone but themselves [....] And Egwene was still Egwene. Moiraine said it would have happened to her anyway, this touching the True Source. She had no control over it, and that meant it was not her fault. And she was still Egwene.

Folks round these parts already know my feelings on the 'born this way' argument, but if Rand's childhood friendships and teenage boners can help him grapple with the idea that people are complex and not just inherently and arbitrarily good or evil based on fairy tales, that's a start.  Of course, Egwene immediately spins away from him and he thinks 'well, if she's going to be like that about it' and they don't talk.  I would call this teenage realism, except I gather that this is going to be a running problem for everyone in the series.

The innkeeper delivers chickens and veggies for all, and his Distinguishing Character Trait is that he can't shut up, so his every appearance has resulted in at least half a page of blather, but Moiraine insists the food is a feast and he should feel proud.  I hope Lan overpays the hell out of him too and this isn't just perks of celebrity.  Lan's news says that the false Dragon, Logain, has won a major battle, but no one can agree what happened to the Aes Sedai that fought him, if they died or lived or joined him.  Rand's genre-savviness power detects that Lan and Logain were previously bros.  (Logain is such a brooding bad boy name; is he going to stay a mid-level bad guy or switch to Team Good?)

They get split among three rooms, girls in one, Lan, Thom, and Rand in another, so the good ship Mat/Perrin is still sailing steady.  Rand immediately falls into another plot-relevant dream, but I don't hate this one.  I actually think it's one of the better passages we've had so far, because Rand wanders an Escher-esque castle with a view of an impossible sky until he meets a dude who calls himself "Ba'alzamon".  I was a big fan of Digimon as a child, so I'm going to take this sole incident to call him Ballsmon and then show restraint for the rest of the series.  For some reason Rand identifies this dude as the Dark One, but he's the guy from the prologue:

Dressed in dark clothes of a fine cut, he seemed in the prime of his maturity, and Rand supposed women would have found him good-looking. [NO HOMO YOU GUYS.] 

"Once more we meet face-to-face,"the man said and, just for an instant, his mouth and eyes became openings into endless caverns of flame.

The thing that's less boring about this dream sequence is that Rand spends the whole time insisting that it is a dream and being distressed about his inability to wake up, while Ba'alzamon basically starts singing Sympathy for the Devil:

"I stood at Lews Therin Kinslayer's shoulder when he did the deed that named him. [....] I whispered in Artur Hawkwing's ear, and the length and breadth of the land Aes Sedai died."

He tries to get Rand to drink from a goblet, insists that he has never been bound and could destroy Rand at any time, mutters a lot of stuff that obviously won't make sense until later, but there's one interesting bit, when he claims that Logain and various others (past false Dragons, I assume) are "being used", as Rand will be.  He also claims that if Rand tells the Aes Sedai about this, he'll be a threat to them and they'll kill him instead of using him.  I've become so inured to people expositing half-sensical phrases at me that I mostly just enjoyed the scene.  Maybe that's the secret of the series?  Sort of like how in Fifty Shades we start looking forward to the sex scenes because people talk less, maybe Wheel of Time transitions into a state where the Generic Fantasy Cliches become a kind of bland cracker base upon which we can start to savour the hints of things that have actual flavour.  (Plus I just enjoy villains cheerfully delivering their resumes.)  When Rand finally awakes, he thinks about asking Moiraine for help with his nightmares, but doesn't, because that would make that last scene relevant.

Chapter Fifteen: Strangers and Friends

Rand wakes late with aches and a headache, which are obviously totally reasonable symptoms of a nightmare.  He sees the others have taken their weapons with them, and straps on his sword as well, with a nice lampshade as he tells himself "it was not because he had often daydreamed about walking the streets of a real city wearing a sword".  Of course, Rand knows that his heron sword hypothetically marks him as a master fencer, which could be a mite attention-grabbing, but I guess we'll just skip that for now.

Rand wanders to the kitchen, where there's a full page and a half of the innkeeper and cook talking about her cat and guest complaints, but in a shocking twist, it turns out to be plot-relevant, as a dozen rats were found around the inn with their backs broken, just as Ba'alzamon did to a rat in Rand's dream.  Interesting way to prove your power.  I don't expect this to be anything more than a throwaway scare tactic, but having sufficient physical power to snap a dozen rats in half at will seems like a waste of that power, when you're an imprisoned god of evil threatening the Chosen One.  If you know where he is (in order to kill the surrounding rats), why not drop your monster horde on him?  If you have Rat Control, why not swarm him in the night?  If you can snap bones, why not kill him outright, or one of his friends if you have some purpose for Rand left?  The only way this makes sense to me is if the Dark One only has the power to harm vermin, and can channel that into the vicinity of someone whose mind he has invaded, but can't use that connection to actually find the target.  That is a very specific power.

Perrin turns out also to be in bed, and he and Mat apparently had the same dream Rand did, but Mat tried to laugh it off, whereas Perrin still feels ill.  Rand leaves him behind, steps outside and is immediately bewildered by the sheer number of people on the street, none of whom know each other.  Rand's bemusement at the idea of people from the same city being strangers is the first rural thing with any verisimilitude about him, and I approve.

Also, called it, because a short-haired girl whom he saw talking with Moiraine the night before appears and immediately comments on how weird it is to see a country boy with a heron sword.  Rand is a bad spy.  The girl introduces herself as Min, reveals that she knows their deal, and quickly exposits that she has Plot Relevance Senses, or sees "pieces of the Pattern", if you prefer.  There's some really blatant imagery about how their party altogether creates and aura of sparks trying to ward off a great black shadow.  She also states that Rand and Egwene are in love with each other (which: what, no, they at best are in boners with each other) but are not meant for each other, so yay for the initial love interest not being the real One True Love Interest?

Oh god, it goes on with the symbolism forever, Lan has "seven ruined towers around his head" and a baby with a sword, Mat and Perrin have stuff like "an eye on a balance scale", and this would all be much more interesting to me if it were in any way informative.  It's just the author coming up with shorthand symbols for future plot points and rattling them off, so that readers can spend the rest of the series going 'That's the thing that Min meant when she saw the thing!'  Rand gets a better quality of montage, including "a sword that isn't a sword" and three women standing around his funeral bier.  That's at least got some plot gravitas to it, because we've already heard something about a legendary maybe-a-sword-but-not-quite, and in another series we might actually be wondering if Rand would die in the end.  She also sees a fuckton of lightning, which I assume hints at Rand's future duel with the false Dragon.

Pseudo-exposition done, Min lets Rand run off to wander the city in a distressed daze.  We get a solid page and a half of city description before Rand finally finds the peddler from several chapters ago, believed deceased, now a ragged homeless man.  Rand promises his horses are safe back in Emond's Field, and says he should come back with Rand to the inn, where they're staying with Moiraine.  I'm going to say 85% chance that the peddler is going to sell them out to the witch-hunting Whitecloaks in vengeance for how he feels Rand's village betrayed him.

Rand runs into Mat next, they recap their dream and the rats, and resolve not to tell Moiraine, because she's obviously untrustworthy and might murder them all on the spot if she finds out the devil is in their heads.  Rand also promised not to tell her that he found the peddler.  So beginneth the path of Oh My Fucking Word Just Tell People What You Know And Get It Over With, I think.

They spot a bunch of dudes with white cloaks and pointy metal hats, making me wonder if they are intentionally supposed to invoke the KKK.  If so: I find this sketchy, especially since thus far we have an utterly white cast.  They're the Children of the Light, of course, and because Mat makes bad decisions he 'pranks' them by using his sling to set a small avalanche of full barrels rolling into the street, thus panicking everyone and splattering the neat white cloaks with mud, ha ha.  Rand half thinks this is a bad idea and half wants to run with it, and is left laughing alone with the whitecloaks when they recover.  He tries to intimidate them by casually displaying his heron sword, to little effect, and they bluster until the town guard arrives.  I think the implication is that some magical force is pushing Rand to get into trouble, but it's not clear.

Rand escapes, they regroup with the gleeman, and recap again all that's happened.  Thom confirms that all the names in their dreams were powerful figures in history (he doesn't say what they have in common, but I'm running with 'false Dragons' for now), but he's Obi-Wan levels of vague on whether the Aes Sedai killed them.  We've also now had the Eye of the World and the Horn of Valere name-dropped as big magical artifacts (the Horn being related to the Great Hunt, which I know is book two's title) that people go on quests to find.  They return to the inn where Perrin reports that Nynaeve from back home has caught up with them, having bullied the ferryman into rowing her across the river after Moiraine obliterated his ferry.

"From my observation of the young woman," Thom said, "I don't think she will stop until she has had her say." [....] 

They exchanged glances, drew deep breaths, and marched inside as if to face Trollocs.

Totally less sexist than Tolkien, though!

Next week: