The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  Adan met him at the first wagon, a tall young man, his blue eyes too wary. Jonai always expected to see Willim if he looked around quickly enough. But Willim had been sent away, of course, years ago, when he began to channel no matter how hard he tried to stop. The world had too many men channeling, still; they had to send away boys who showed the signs. They had to. But he wished he had his children back. When had Esole died? So little to be laid in a hastily dug hole, wasted with sickness there was no Aes Sedai to Heal.

  “There are Ogier, father,” Adan said excitedly. Jonai suspected his son had always thought his stories of the Ogier were just that, stories. “They came from the north.”

  It was a bedraggled band Adan led him to, no more than fifty in number, hollow-cheeked, sad-eyed, tufted ears drooping. He had become accustomed to his own people’s drawn faces and worn, patched clothing, but seeing the same on Ogier shocked him. Yet he had people to care for, and duties to discharge for the Aes Sedai. How long since he had seen an Aes Sedai? Just after Alnora died. Too late for Alnora. The woman had Healed the sick who still lived, taken some of the sa’angreal, and gone on her way, laughing bitterly when he asked her where there was a place of safety. Her dress had been patched, and worn at the hem. He was not sure she had been sane. She claimed one of the Forsaken was only partly trapped, or maybe not at all; Ishamael still touched the world, she said. She had to be as mad as the remaining male Aes Sedai.

  He pulled his mind back to the Ogier as they stood, unsteady on their great legs. His thoughts wandered too much since Alnora’s death. They had bread and bowls in their hands. He was shocked to feel a prick of anger that someone had shared their meager stock of food. How many of his people could eat on what fifty Ogier could consume? No. To share was the way. To give freely. A hundred people? Two hundred?

  “You have chora cuttings,” one of the Ogier said. His thick fingers gently brushed the trefoil leaves of the two potted plants tied to the side of a wagon.

  “Some,” Adan said curtly. “They die, but the old folk keep new cuttings before they do.” He had no time for trees. He had a people to look after. “How bad is it in the north?”

  “Bad,” an Ogier woman replied. “The Blighted Lands have grown southward, and there are Myrddraal and Trollocs.”

  “I thought they were all dead.” Not north, then. They could not turn north. South? The Sea of Jeren lay ten days south. Or did it, any longer? He was tired. So tired.

  “You have come from the east?” another Ogier asked. He wiped his bowl with a heel of bread and gulped it down. “How is it to the east?”

  “Bad,” Jonai replied. “Perhaps not so bad for you, though. Ten—no, twelve days ago, some people took a third of our horses before we could escape. We had to abandon wagons.” That pained him. Wagons left behind, and what was in them. The things the Aes Sedai had placed in Aiel charge, abandoned. That it was not the first time only made it worse. “Almost everyone we meet takes things, whatever they want. Perhaps they will not be so with Ogier, though.”

  “Perhaps,” an Ogier woman said as if she did not believe it. Jonai was not certain he did either; there was no safe place. “Do you know where any of the stedding are?”

  Jonai stared at her. “No. No, I do not. But surely you can find the stedding.”

  “We have run so far, so long,” an Ogier back in the huddle said, and another added in a mournful rumble, “The land has changed so much.”

  “I think we must find a stedding soon or die,” the first Ogier woman said. “I feel a . . . longing . . . in my bones. We must find a stedding. We must.”

  “I cannot help you,” Jonai said sadly. He felt a tightness in his chest. The land changed beyond knowing, changing still so the plain traveled last year might be mountains this. The Blighted Lands growing. Myrddraal and Trollocs still alive. People stealing, people with faces like animals, people who did not recognize Da’shain or know them. He could barely breathe. The Ogier, lost. The Aiel, lost. Everything lost. The tightness broke in pain, and he sank to his knees, doubled over, clutching his chest. A fist held his heart, squeezing.

  Adan knelt beside him worriedly. “Father, what is it? What is the matter? What can I do?”

  Jonai managed to sieze his son’s frayed collar and pull his face close. “Take—the people—south.” He had to force the words out between spasms that seemed to be ripping his heart out.

  “Father, you are the one who—”

  “Listen. Listen! Take them—south. Take—the Aiel—to safety. Keep—the Covenant. Guard—what the Aes Sedai—gave us—until they—come for it. The Way—of the Leaf. You must—” He had tried. Solinda Sedai must understand that. He had tried. Alnora.

  Alnora. The name faded, the pain in Rand’s chest loosened. No sense. It made no sense. How could these people be Aiel?

  The columns flashed in blinding pulses. The air stirred, swirling.

  Beside him, Muradin’s mouth stretched wide in an effort to scream. The Aiel clawed at his veil, clawed at his face, leaving deep bloody scratches.

  Forward.

  Jonai hurried down the empty streets, trying not to look at shattered buildings and dead chora trees. All dead. At least the last of the long abandoned jo-cars had been hauled away. Aftershocks still troubled the ground beneath his feet. He wore his work clothes, his cadin’sor, of course, though the work he had been given was nothing he had been trained for. He was sixty-three, in the prime of life, not yet old enough for gray hairs, but he felt a tired old man.

  No one questioned his entering the Hall of the Servants; there was no one at the great columned entrance to question anyone, or give greeting. Plenty of people darted about inside, arms filled with papers or boxes, eyes anxious, but none so much as looked at him. There was a feel of panic about them, and it grew by increments every time the ground shook. Distressed, he crossed the anteroom and trotted up the broad stairs. Mud stained the silvery white elstone. No one could spare time. Perhaps no one cared.

  There was no need to knock at the door he sought. Not one of the great gilded doors to an ingathering hall, but a door plain and unobtrusive. He slipped in quietly, though, and was glad he had. Half a dozen Aes Sedai stood around the long table, arguing, apparently not noticing when the building trembled. They were all women.

  He shivered, wondering if men would ever stand in a meeting such as this again. When he saw what was on the table, the shiver became a shudder. A crystal sword—perhaps an object of the Power, perhaps only an ornament; he had no way of telling—held down the Dragon banner of Lews Therin Kinslayer, spread out like a tablecloth and spilling onto the floor. His heart clenched. What was that doing here? Why had it not been destroyed, and memory of the cursed man as well?

  “What good is your Foretelling,” Oselle was almost shouting, “if you cannot tell us when?” Her long black hair swayed as she shook with anger. “The world rests on this! The future! The Wheel itself!”

  Dark-eyed Deindre faced her with a more usual calm. “I am not the Creator. I can only tell you what I Foretell.”

  “Peace, sisters.” Solinda was the calmest of them all, her old-fashioned streith gown only a pale blue mist. The sun-red hair falling to her waist was nearly the color of his own. His greatfather had served her as a young man, but she looked younger than he; she was Aes Sedai. “The time for contention among ourselves is past. Jaric and Haindar will both be here by tomorrow.”

  “Which means we cannot afford mistakes, Solinda.”

  “We must know . . . .”

  “Is there any chance of . . . ?”

  Jonai stopped listening. They would see him when they were ready. He was not the only one in the room besides the Aes Sedai. Someshta sat against the wall near the door, a great shape seemingly woven of vines and leaves, his head a little above Jonai’s even so. A fissure of withered brown and charred black ran up the Nym’s face and furrowed the green grass of his hair, and when he looked at Jonai, his hazelnut eyes seemed troubled.

  When Jonai nodded to him
, he fingered the rift and frowned. “Do I know you?” he said softly.

  “I am your friend,” Jonai replied sadly. He had not seen Someshta in years, but he had heard of this. Most of the Nym were dead, he had heard. “You rode me on your shoulders when I was a child. Do you remember nothing of it?”

  “Singing,” Someshta said. “Was there singing? So much is gone. The Aes Sedai say some will return. You are a Child of the Dragon, are you not?”

  Jonai winced. That name had caused trouble, no less for not being true. But how many citizens now believed the Da’shain Aiel had once served the Dragon and no other Aes Sedai?

  “Jonai?”

  He turned at the sound of Solinda’s voice, went to one knee as she approached. The others were still arguing, but more quietly.

  “All is in readiness, Jonai?” she said.

  “All, Aes Sedai. Solinda Sedai . . . .” He hesitated, took a deep breath. “Solinda Sedai, some of us wish to remain. We can serve, still.”

  “Do you know what happened to the Aiel at Tzora?” He nodded, and she sighed, reaching out to smooth his short hair as if he were a child. “Of course you do. You Da’shain have more courage than . . . . Ten thousand Aiel linking arms and singing, trying to remind a madman of who they were and who he had been, trying to turn him with their bodies and a song. Jaric Mondoran killed them. He stood there, staring as though at a puzzle, killing them, and they kept closing their lines and singing. I am told he listened to the last Aiel for almost an hour before destroying him. And then Tzora burned, one huge flame consuming stone and metal and flesh. There is a sheet of glass where the second greatest city in the world once stood.”

  “Many people had time to flee, Aes Sedai. The Da’shain earned them time to flee. We are not afraid.”

  Her hand tightened painfully in his hair. “The citizens have already fled Paaran Disen, Jonai. Besides, the Da’shain yet have a part yet to play, if Deindre could only see far enough to say what. In any case, I mean to save something here, and that something is you.”

  “As you say,” he said reluctantly. “We will care for what you have given into our charge until you want them again.”

  “Of course. The things we gave you.” She smiled at him and loosened her grip, smoothing his hair once more before folding her hands. “You will carry the . . . things . . . to safety, Jonai. Keep moving, always moving, until you find a place of safety, where no one can harm you.”

  “As you say, Aes Sedai.”

  “What of Coumin, Jonai? Has he calmed?”

  He did not know any way but to tell her; he would rather have bitten his tongue out. “My father is hiding somewhere in the city. He tried to talk us into . . . resisting. He would not listen, Aes Sedai. He would not listen. He found an old shocklance somewhere, and . . . .” He could not go on. He expected her to be angry, but her eyes glistened with tears.

  “Keep the Covenant, Jonai. If the Da’shain lose everything else, see they keep the Way of the Leaf. Promise me.”

  “Of course, Aes Sedai,” he said, shocked. The Covenant was the Aiel, and the Aiel were the Covenant; to abandon the Way would be to abandon what they were. Coumin was an aberration. He had been strange since he was a boy, it was said, hardly Aiel at all, though no one knew why.

  “Go now, Jonai. I want you far from Paaren Disen by tomorrow. And remember—keep moving. Keep the Aiel safe.”

  He bowed where he knelt, but she was already being drawn back into the argument.

  “Can we trust Kodam and his fellows, Solinda?”

  “We must, Oselle. They are young and inexperienced, but barely touched by the taint, and . . . . And we have no choice.”

  “Then we will do what we must. The sword must wait. Someshta, we have a task for the last of the Nym, if you will do it. We have asked too much of you; now we must ask more.”

  Jonai bowed his way out formally as the Nym rose, his head brushing the ceiling. Already immersed in their plans, they were not looking at him, but he did them this last honor anyway. He did not think he would ever see them again.

  He ran from the Hall of the Servants, all the way out of the city to where the great gathering waited. Thousands of wagons in ten lines stretching nearly two leagues, wagons loaded with food and water barrels, wagons loaded with the crated things the Aes Sedai had given into Aiel charge, angreal and sa’angreal and ter’angreal, all the things that had to be kept from the hands of men going mad while they wielded the One Power. Once there would have been other ways to carry them, jo-cars and jumpers, hov-erflies and huge sho-wings. Now painfully assembled horses and wagons had to suffice. Among the wagons stood the people, enough to populate a city but perhaps all the Aiel left alive in the world.

  A hundred came to meet him, men and women, the representatives demanding word of whether the Aes Sedai had granted leave for some to stay. “No,” he told them. Some frowned reluctantly, and he added, “We must obey. We are Da’shain Aiel, and we obey the Aes Sedai.”

  They dispersed back to their wagons slowly, and he thought he heard Coumin’s name mentioned, but he could not let it trouble him. He hurried to his own wagon, at the head of one of the center lines. The horses were all nervous with the ground shaking at intervals.

  His sons were already up on the seat—Willim, fifteen, with the reins, and Adan, ten, beside him, both grinning with nervous excitement. Little Esole lay playing with a doll on top of the canvas tied over their possessions—and, more important, their charges from the Aes Sedai. There was no room for any to ride but the young and the very old. A dozen rooted chora cuttings in clay pots sat behind the wagon seat, to be planted when they found a place of safety. A foolish thing to carry, perhaps, but no wagon was without its potted cuttings. Something from a time long gone; symbol of a better time to come. People needed hope, and symbols.

  Alnora waited beside the team, glossy black hair tumbling about her shoulders and reminding him of the first time he saw her as a girl. But worry had etched lines around her eyes now.

  He managed a smile for her, hiding the worry in his own heart. “All will be well, wife of my heart.” She did not answer, and he added, “Have you dreamed?”

  “Of no time soon,” she murmured. “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Smiling tremulously, she touched his cheek. “With you I know it will be so, husband of my heart.”

  Jonai waved his arms over his head, and the signal rippled down the lines. Slowly the wagons began to move, the Aiel leaving Paaren Disen.

  Rand shook his head. Too much. Memories crowding together. The air seemed filled with sheet lightning. The wind swirled gritty dust into dancing whirlwinds. Muradin had clawed deep furrows in his face; he was digging at his eyes now. Forward.

  Coumin knelt at the edge of the plowed ground in his working clothes, plain brownish gray coat and breeches and soft laced boots, in a line with others like him that surrounded the field, ten men of the Da’shain Aiel at twice stretched-arm’s length and then an Ogier, all the way around. He could see the next field, lined the same way, beyond the soldiers with their shocklances sitting atop armored jo-cars. A hoverfly buzzed overhead in its patrol, a deadly black metal wasp containing two men. He was sixteen, and the women had decided his voice was finally deep enough to join in the seed singing.

  The soldiers fascinated him, men and Ogier, the way a colorful poisonous snake might. They killed. His father’s greatfather, Charn, claimed there had been no soldiers once, but Coumin did not believe it. If there were no soldiers, who would stop the Nightriders and the Trollocs from coming to kill everyone? Of course, Charn claimed there had not been any Myrddraal or Trollocs then, either. No Forsaken, no Shadowwrought. He had many stories he claimed were from a time before soldiers and Nightriders and Trollocs, when he said the Dark Lord of the Grave had been bound away, and no one knew his name, or the word “war.” Coumin could not imagine such a world; the war had been old when he was born.

  He enjoyed Charn’s stories even if he could n
ot make himself believe, but some earned the old man frowns and scoldings. Like when he claimed to have served one of the Forsaken, once. Not just any Forsaken, but Lanfear herself. As well say he had served Ishamael. If Charn had to make up stories, Coumin wished he could say he had served Lews Therin, the great leader himself. Of course, everyone would ask why he was not serving the Dragon now, but that would be better than the way things were. Coumin did not like the way citizens looked at Charn when he said that Lanfear had not always been evil.

  A stir at the end of the field told him one of the Nym was approaching. The great form, head and shoulders and chest taller than any Ogier, stepped out onto the seeded ground, and Coumin did not have to see to know he left footprints filled with sprouting things. It was Someshta, surrounded by clouds of butterflies, white and yellow and blue. Excited murmurs rose from the townspeople and the folk whose fields these were, gathered to watch. Each field would have its Nym, now.

  Coumin wondered if he could ask Someshta about Charn’s stories. He had spoken to him once, and Someshta was old enough to know if Charn was telling the truth; the Nym were older than anyone. Some said the Nym never died, not so long as plants grew. But this was no time to be thinking of questioning a Nym.

  The Ogier began it, as was fitting, standing to sing, great bass rumbles like the earth singing. The Aiel rose, men’s voices lifting in their own song, even the deepest at a higher pitch than the Ogier’s. Yet the songs braided together, and Someshta took those threads and wove them into his dance, gliding across the field in swooping strides, arms wide, butterflies swirling about him, landing on his spread fingertips.