“Perhaps you will, when we are done here.”
“Perhaps.” Not much chance of it, of course. None, really. He could have told the Aielman that, but he did not want to talk of it now, or think of it.
“This is where Manetheren stood? You are of Manetheren’s blood?”
“This was Manetheren,” Perrin replied. “And I suppose I am.” It was hard to believe that the small villages and quiet farms of the Two Rivers held the last of Manetheren’s blood, but that was what Moiraine had said. The old blood runs strong in the Two Rivers, she had said. “That was a long time ago, Gaul. We are farmers, shepherds; not a great nation, not great warriors.”
Gaul smiled slightly. “If you say it. I have seen you dance the spears, and Rand al’Thor, and the one called Mat. But if you say it.”
Perrin shifted uncomfortably. How much had he changed since leaving home? Himself, and Rand, and Mat? Not his eyes, and the wolves, or Rand’s channeling; he did not mean that. How much of what was inside remained unchanged? Mat was the only one who still seemed to be just himself, only more so. “You know about Manetheren?”
“We know more of your world than you think. And less than we believed. Long before I crossed the Dragonwall I had read books brought by peddlers. I knew of ‘ships’ and ‘rivers’ and ‘forests,’ or thought I did.” Gaul made them sound like words in a strange tongue. “This is how I envisioned a ‘forest.’” He gestured at the sparse trees, dwarfed from the height they should have had. “To believe a thing is not to make it true. What of the Nightrunner, and Leafblighter’s get? Do you believe it just coincidence they came near this Waygate?”
“No.” Perrin sighed. “I saw ravens, down the valley. Maybe that’s all they were, but I don’t want to take the chance, not after the Trollocs.”
Gaul nodded. “They could have been Shadoweyes. If you plan for the worst, all surprises are pleasant.”
“I could do with a pleasant surprise.” Perrin felt for wolves again, and again found nothing. “I may be able to find out something tonight. Maybe. If anything happens here, you might have to kick me to wake me.” That sounded odd, he realized, but Gaul only nodded again. “Gaul, you’ve never mentioned my eyes, or even given them a second glance. None of the Aiel have.” He knew they were glowing golden now, in the firelight.
“The world is changing,” Gaul said quietly. “Rhuarc, and Jheran, my own clan chief—the Wise Ones, too—they tried to hide it, but they were uneasy when they sent us across the Dragonwall searching for He Who Comes With the Dawn. I think perhaps the change will not be what we have always believed. I do
not know how it will be different, but it will be. The Creator put us in the Three-fold Land to shape us as well as to punish our sin, but for what have we been shaped?” He shook his head suddenly, ruefully. “Colinda, the Wise One of Hot Springs Hold, tells me I think too much for a Stone Dog, and Bair, the eldest Wise One of the Shaarad, threatens to send me to Rhuidean when Jheran dies whether I want to go or not. Beside all of that, Perrin, what does the color of a man’s eyes matter?”
“I wish everybody thought that way.” The merriment had finally stopped at the other fire. One of the Aiel women—Perrin could not tell which—was taking the first watch, her back to the light, and everyone else had settled down for sleep. It had been a tiring day. Sleep should be easy to find, and the dream he needed. He stretched out beside the fire, pulling his cloak around him. “Remember. Kick me awake, if need be.”
Sleep enfolded him while Gaul was still nodding, and the dream came at once.
It was daylight, and he stood alone near the Waygate, which looked like an elegantly carved length of wall, incongruous on the mountainside. Except for that there was no sign any human had ever set foot on that slope. The sky was bright and fine, and a soft breeze up the valley brought him the scent of deer and rabbits, quail and dove, a thousand distinct smells, of water and earth and trees. This was the wolf dream.
For a moment the sense of being a wolf rolled over him. He had paws, and … . No! He ran his hands over himself, relieved to find only his own body, in his own coat and cloak. And the wide belt that normally held his axe, but with the hammer haft thrust through the loop instead.
He frowned at that, and surprisingly, for a moment, the axe flickered there instead, insubstantial and misty. Abruptly it was the hammer again. Licking his lips, he hoped it stayed that way. The axe might be a better weapon, but he preferred the hammer. He could not remember anything like that happening before, something changing, but he knew little of this strange place. If it could be called a place. It was the wolf dream, and odd things happened there, surely as odd as in any ordinary dream.
As though thinking of the oddities triggered one of them, a patch of sky against the mountains darkened suddenly, became a window to somewhere else. Rand stood amid swirling stormwinds, laughing wildly, even madly, arms upraised, and on the winds rode small shapes, gold-and-scarlet, like the strange figure on the Dragon banner; hidden eyes watched Rand, and there was no telling whether he knew it. The odd “window” winked out, only to be replaced by another farther over, where Nynaeve and Elayne stalked cautiously through a demented landscape of twisted, shadowed buildings, hunting some dangerous beast. Perrin could not have said how he knew it was dangerous, but he did. That vanished, and another black blotch spread across the sky. Mat, standing where a road forked ahead of him. He flipped a coin, started down one branch, and suddenly was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and walking with a staff bearing a short sword blade. Another “window,” and Egwene and a woman with long white hair were staring at him in surprise while behind them the White Tower crumbled stone by stone. Then they were gone, too.
Perrin drew a deep breath. He had seen the like before, here in the wolf dream, and he thought the sightings were real in some way, or meant something. Whatever they were, the wolves never saw them. Moiraine had suggested that the wolf dream was the same as something called Tel’aran’rhiod, and then would say no more. He had overheard Egwene and Elayne speaking of dreams, once, but Egwene already knew too much about him and wolves, perhaps as much as Moiraine. It was not something he could talk about, not even with her.
There was one person he could have talked to. He wished he could find Elyas Machera, the man who had introduced him to the wolves. Elyas had to know about these things. When he thought of the man, it seemed for a moment he heard his own name whispered faintly in the wind, but when he listened, there was only the wind. It was a lonely sound. Here there was only himself.
“Hopper!” he called, and in his mind, Hopper! The wolf was dead, and yet not dead, here. The wolf dream was where wolves came when they died, to await being born again. It was more than that, to wolves; they seemed in some way to be aware of the dream even while awake. One was almost as real—maybe as real—as the other, to them. “Hopper!” Hopper! But Hopper did not come.
This was all useless. He was there for a reason, and he might as well get on with it. At best, getting down to where he had seen the ravens rise would take hours.
He took a step—the land around him blurred—and his foot came down near a narrow brook beneath stunted hemlock and mountain willow, with cloud-capped peaks towering above. For a moment he stared in amazement. He was at the far end of the valley from the Waygate. In fact, he was at the very spot he had been aiming for, the place where the ravens had come from, and the arrow that killed the first hawk. Such a thing had never happened to him before. Was he learning more of the wolf dream—Hopper had always said he was ignorant—or was it different this time?
He was more cautious with his next step, but it was only a step. There was no evidence of archer or ravens, no track, no feather, no scent. He was not sure what he had expected. There would be no sign unless they had been in the dream, too. But if he could find wolves in the dream, they could help him find their brothers and sisters in the waking world, and those wolves could tell him if there were Shadowspawn in the mountains. Perhaps if he were higher up they could hear him call.
Fixing his eye on the highest peak bordering the valley, just below the clouds, he stepped. The world blurred, and he was standing on the mountainside, with white billows not five spans overhead. In spite of himself, he laughed. This was fun. From here he could see the entire valley stretched out below.
“Hopper!” No answer.
He leaped to the next mountain, calling, and the next, and the next, eastward, toward the Two Rivers. Hopper did not answer. More troubling, Perrin did not sense any other wolves, either. There were always wolves in the wolf dream. Always.
From peak to peak he sped in blurred motion, calling, seeking. The mountains lay empty beneath him, except for deer and other game. Yet there were occasional signs of men. Ancient signs. Twice great carved figures took nearly an entire mountainside, and in another place strange angular letters two spans high had been incised across a cliff a shade too smooth and sheer. Weathering had worn away the figures’ faces, and eyes less sharp than his might have taken the letters themselves for the work of wind and rain. Mountains and cliffs gave way to the Sand Hills, great rolling mounds sparsely covered with tough grass and stubborn bushes, once the shore of a great sea before the Breaking. And suddenly he saw another man, atop a sandy hill.
The fellow was too distant to see clearly, just a tall, dark-haired man, but plainly not a Trolloc or anything of the sort, in a blue coat with a bow on his back, stooping over something on the ground hidden by the low brush. Yet there was something familiar about him.
The wind rose, and Perrin caught his smell faintly. A cold scent, that was the only way to describe it. Cold, and not really human. Suddenly his own bow was in his hand, an arrow nocked, and the weight of a filled quiver tugged at his belt.