Certain the man had seen the Flame of Tar Valon seal by that time—and little more, Mat hoped—he folded the paper again and thrust it back out of sight. Eyeing the two big men uneasily as they came up on either side of the captain—Burn me, they both have arms like Perrin’s!—he wished he had his quarterstaff in hand. He could see it lying where it had landed, further down the deck. He tried to look sure and confident, the sort of man others had better not trifle with, a man with the power of the White Tower behind him. A long way behind me, I hope.
The captain looked at Mat doubtfully, and even more so at Thom in his gleeman’s cloak and none too steady afoot, but he motioned Sanor and Vasa to stop where they were. “I would not anger the Tower. Burn my soul, for the time being the river trade takes me from Tear to this den of. . . . I come too often to anger . . . anyone.” A tight smile appeared on his face. “But I spoke the truth. By the Stone, I did! Six cabins I have for passengers, and all full. You can sleep on deck and eat with the crew for another gold crown. Each.”
“That is ridiculous!” Thom snapped. “I don’t care what the war has done downriver, that is ridiculous!” The two large sailors shifted their bare feet.
“It is the price,” the captain said firmly. “I do not want to anger anyone, but I’d as soon not have any business you can be on aboard my vessel. Like letting a man pay you so he can coat you with hot tar, mixing in that business. You pay the price, or you go over the side, and the Amyrlin Seat herself can dry you off. And I’ll keep this for the trouble you’ve given me, thank you.” He stuffed the gold crown Mat has tossed him into a pocket of his puffy-sleeved coat.
“How much for one of the cabins?” Mat asked. “To ourselves. You can put whoever is in it now with someone else.” He did not want to sleep out in the cold night. And if you don’t overwhelm a fellow like this, he’ll steal your breeches and say he is doing you a favor. His stomach rumbled loudly. “And we eat what you eat, not with the crew. And plenty of
it!”
“Mat,” Thom said, “I’m the one who is supposed to be drunk here.” He turned to the captain, flourishing his patch-covered cloak as well as he could with blanketroll and instrument cases hung about him. “As you may have noticed, Captain, I am a gleeman.” Even in the open air, his voice suddenly seemed to echo. “For the price of our passages, I would be more than glad to entertain your passengers and your crew—”
“My crew is aboard to work, gleeman, not be entertained.” The captain stroked his pointed beard; his pale eyes priced Mat’s plain coat to the copper. “So you want a cabin, do you?” He barked a laugh. “And my meals? Well, you can have my cabin and my meals. For five gold crowns from each of you! Andoran weight!” Those were the heaviest. He began to laugh so hard his words came out in wheezes. Flanking him, Sanor and Vasa grinned wide grins. “For ten crowns, you can take my cabin, and my meals, and I’ll move in with the passengers and eat with the crew. Burn my soul, I will! By the Stone, I swear it! For ten gold crowns. . . .” Laughter choked off anything else.
He was still laughing and gasping for breath and wiping tears from his eyes when Mat pulled out one of his two purses, but laughter stopped by the time Mat had counted five crowns into his hands. The captain blinked in disbelief; the two big crewmen looked poleaxed.
“Andoran weight, you said?” Mat asked. It was hard to judge without scales, but he laid seven more on the pile. Two actually were Andoran, and he thought the others made up the weight. Close enough, for this fellow. After a moment, he added another two gold Tairen crowns. “For whoever you’ll be pushing out of the cabin they paid for.” He did not think the passengers would see a copper of it, but it sometimes paid to appear generous. “Unless you mean to share with them? No, of course not. They ought to have something for having to crowd in with others. There’s no need for you to eat with your crew, Captain. You are welcome to share Thom’s meals and mine in your cabin.” Thom stared at him as hard as the others did.
“Are you . . . ?” The bearded man’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Are you . . . by any chance . . . a young lord in disguise?”
“I am no lord.” Mat laughed. He had reason to laugh. The Gray Gull was well out into the darkness of the harbor, now, with the wharf a band of light pointing up the black gap, not far ahead now, where the water gates let out onto the river. The sweeps drove the vessel toward that gap quickly. Men were already swinging the long, slanting booms around preparatory to unlashing the sails. And with gold in his hands, the captain no longer seemed ready to throw anyone overboard. “If you don’t mind, Captain, could we see our cabin? Your cabin, I mean. It’s late, and I for one want a few hours’ sleep.” His stomach spoke to him. “And supper!”
As the vessel put its bow into the blackness, the bearded man himself led the way down a ladder to a short, narrow passage lined with doors set close together. While the captain cleared his things from his cabin—it ran the width of the stern, with its bed and all of its furnishings built into the walls except two chairs and a few chests—and saw that Mat and Thom were settled, Mat learned a great deal, beginning with the fact that the man would not be pushing any passengers out of their quarters. He had too much respect for the coin they had paid, if not for them, to allow that. The captain would take his first’s cabin, and that officer would take the second’s bed, pushing each lower man down till the deckmaster would end sleeping up in the bow with the crew.
Mat did not think that information could be very useful, but he listened to everything the man said. It was always best to know not only where you were going, but who you were dealing with, or they might just take your coat and boots and leave you to walk home through the rain in bare feet.
The captain was a Tairen named Huan Mallia, and he spoke with great volubility once he had worked out Mat and Thom to his own satisfaction. He was not nobly born, he said, not him, but he would not have anyone think he was a fool. A young man with more gold than any young man should have by right might be a thief, if everyone did not know thieves never escaped Tar Valon with their haul. A young man dressed like a farmboy but with the air and confidence of the lord he denied being—“By the Stone, I’ll not say you are, if you say you are not.” Mallia winked and chuckled and tugged the point of his beard. A young man carrying a paper bearing the Amyrlin Seat’s seal and bound for Andor. There was no secret that Queen Morgase had visited Tar Valon, though her reason certainly was. It was obvious to Mallia something was afoot between Caemlyn and Tar Valon. And Mat and Thom were messengers—for Morgase, he thought, by Mat’s accent. Anything he could do to help in so great an enterprise would be his pleasure, not that he meant to poke where he was not wanted.
Mat exchanged startled looks with Thom, who was stowing his instrument cases under a table built out from one wall. The room had two small windows on either side, and a pair of lamps in jointed brackets for light. “That’s nonsense,” Mat said.
“Of course,” Mallia replied. He straightened from pulling clothes out of a chest at the foot of the bed and smiled. “Of course.” A cupboard in the wall seemed to hold charts of the river he would need. “I’ll say no more.”
But he did mean to poke, though he attempted to disguise it, and he rambled while he tried to pry. Mat listened, and answered the questions with grunts or shrugs or a word or two, while Thom said less than that. The gleeman kept shaking his head while unburdening himself of his possessions.
Mallia had been a river man all his life, though he dreamed of sailing on the sea. He hardly spoke of a country beside Tear without contempt; Andor was the only one to escape, and the praise he finally managed was grudging despite his obvious efforts. “Good horses in Andor, I’ve heard. Not bad. Not as good as Tairen stock, but good enough. You make good steel, and iron goods, bronze and copper—I’ve traded for them often enough, though you charge a weighty price—but then you have those mines in the Mountains of Mist. Gold mines, too. We have to earn our gold, in Tear.”
Mayene received his greatest contempt. “Even less a country than Murandy is. One city and a few leagues of land. They underprice the oil from our good Tairen olives just because their ships know how to find the oilfish shoals. They’ve no right to be a country at all.”
He hated Illian. “One day we’ll loot Illian bare, tear down every town and village, and sow their filthy ground with salt.” Mallia’s beard almost bristled with outrage at how filthy the Illian land was. “Even their olives are putrid! One day we’ll carry every last Illianer pig off in chains! That is what the High Lord Samon says.”
Mat wondered what the man thought Tear would do with all those people if they actually fulfilled this scheme. The Illianers would have to be fed, and they would surely do no work in chains. It made no sense to him, but Mallia’s eyes shone when he spoke of it.
Only fools let themselves be ruled by a king or a queen, by one man or woman. “Except Queen Morgase, of course,” he put in hastily. “She is a fine woman, so I’ve heard. Beautiful, I’m told.” All those fools bowing to one fool. The High Lords ruled Tear together, reaching decisions in concert, and that was how things should be. The High Lords knew what was right and good and true. Especially the High Lord Samon. No man could go wrong obeying the High Lords. Especially the High Lord Samon.
Beyond kings and queens, beyond even Illian, lay a bigger hatred Mallia attempted to keep hidden, but he talked so much in trying to find out what they were up to, and grew so carried away by the sound of his own voice, that he let more slip than he intended.
They must travel a great deal, serving a great Queen like Morgase. They must have seen many lands. He dreamed of the sea because then he could see lands he had only heard of, because then he could find the Mayener oilfish shoals, could out-trade the Sea Folk and the filthy Illianers. And the sea was far from Tar Valon. They must understand that, forced as they were to travel among odd places and people, places and people they could not have stomached if they were not serving Queen Morgase.
“I never liked docking the
re, never knowing who might be using the Power.” He almost spat the last word. Since he had heard the High Lord Samon speak, though. . . . “Burn my soul, it makes me feel like hullworms are burrowing into my belly just looking at their White Tower, now, knowing what they plan.”
The High Lord Samon said the Aes Sedai meant to rule the world. Samon said they meant to crush every nation, put their foot on every man’s throat. Samon said Tear could no longer hold the Power out of its own lands and believe that was enough. Samon said Tear had its rightful day of glory coming, but Tar Valon stood between Tear and glory.
“There’s no hope for it. Sooner or later they will have to be hunted down and killed, every last Aes Sedai. The High Lord Samon says the others might be saved—the young ones, the novices, the Accepted—if they’re brought to the Stone, but the rest must be eradicated. That’s what the High Lord Samon says. The White Tower must be destroyed.”
For a moment Mallia stood in the middle of his cabin, arms full of clothes and books and rolled charts, hair almost brushing the deck beams overhead, staring at nothing with pale blue eyes while the White Tower tumbled into ruin. Then he gave a start as if realizing what he had just said. His pointed beard waggled uncertainly.