Authors: Robert Jordan
More than once he had wished those bits of other men were out of his
head. Without them, he would not be where he was, commanding nearly six thousand soldiers and more wanting to join every day, about to lead them south and take command of the bloody invasion of a land controlled by one of the bloody Forsaken. He was no hero, and did not want to be one. Heroes had a bad habit of getting killed. When you were a hero, it was toss the dog a bone and shove him into a corner out of the way, unless it was promise the dog a bone and send him out to hunt again. The same for soldiers, for that matter.
On the other hand, without those memories he would not have six thousand soldiers around him. He would stand alone,
ta’veren
and tied to the Dragon Reborn, a naked target and known to the Forsaken. Some of them apparently knew entirely too much about Mat Cauthon. Moiraine had claimed he was important, that maybe Rand needed him and Perrin both to win the Last Battle. If she had been right, he would do what he had to—he would; he just had to get used to the idea—but he was not about to be a bloody hero. If he could just figure out what to do about the bloody Horn of Valere. . . . Offering up a small prayer for Moiraine’s soul, he hoped she had been wrong.
He and Betse reached the end of the clear space for the final time, and she collapsed against his chest laughing when he stopped. “Oh, that was wonderful. I felt like I was in a royal palace somewhere. Can we do it again? Oh, can we? Can we?” Mistress Daelvin applauded for a moment, then realized the other serving maids were standing about and rounded on them, sending them scurrying like chickens with vigorous waves of her arms.
“Does ‘Daughter of the Nine Moons’ mean anything to you?” The words just popped out. It was thinking about those
ter’angreal
that did it. Wherever he found the Daughter of the Nine Moons—
Please, Light, let it be a long time yet!
It was a fervent thought—wherever he found her, it would not be serving table at a small-town inn crammed full of soldiers and refugees. Then again, who could say when it came to prophecy? It had been prophecy, in a way. To die and live again. To marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons. To give up half the light of the world to save the world, whatever that meant. He
had
died, after all, swinging on that rope. If that was true, the rest had to be. No way out of that.
“Daughter of the Nine Moons?” Betse said breathlessly. Lack of breath did not slow her down. “Is it an inn? A tavern? Not here in Maerone, I know that. Maybe across the river in Aringill? I have never been to—”
Mat laid a finger across her lips. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s dance another dance.” A country dance this time; something from the here and now, with
no memories but his attached to it. Only, he really did have to think to tell them apart now.
A throat clearing made him glance over his shoulder, and he sighed at the sight of Edorion standing in the doorway, steel-backed gauntlets tucked behind his sword belt and helmet beneath his arm. The young Tairen lord had been a plump, pink-cheeked man when Mat gambled with him in the Stone of Tear, but he had grown harder and sun-dark since coming north. The rimmed helmet bore no plumes now, and chips and dents marred the once ornate gilding on his breastplate. His puffy-sleeved coat was blue striped with black, but showing wear.
“You told me to remind you of your rounds at this hour.” Edorion coughed into his fist; he ostentatiously did not glance at Betse. “But I could come back later if you wish.”
“I’ll come now,” Mat told him. It was important to make rounds every day, inspect something different every day; those other men’s memories told him that, and he had come to trust them about things like this. If he was stuck in this job, he might as well try to do it right. Doing it right might keep him alive. Besides, Betse had drawn away from him and was trying to pat sweat from her face with her apron and straighten her hair at the same time. The euphoria was fading from her face. It did not matter. She would remember.
Dance well with a woman
, he thought smugly,
and she’s halfway yours
.
“Give these to the musicians,” he told her, folding three gold marks into her hand. However badly they had played, for a time the tune had taken him away from Maerone and the immediate future. Anyway, women liked generosity. This was going very well. With a bow, just short of kissing her hand, he added, “Until later, Betse. We’ll dance again when I come back.”
To his surprise, she waggled a finger under his nose and gave an admonitory shake of her head as if she had read his mind. Well, he had never claimed to understand women.
Settling his hat on his head, he took up his black-hafted spear from beside the door. That was another gift from the other side of that
ter’angreal
, with its inscription of the shaft in the Old Tongue and its odd head like a short sword blade marked with two ravens.
“We’ll do the drinking rooms today,” he told Edorion, and they strode out into the full heat of midday, into the bedlam of Maerone.
It was a small, unwalled town, though fifty times larger than anything he had seen before leaving the Two Rivers. An overgrown village, really,
few of the brick and stone buildings more than a single story high and only the inns rising as much as three, with as many roofs of wooden shingles or thatch as slate or tile. Now the streets, most hard-packed dirt, were thronged with people. The townsfolk were of every sort, mainly Cairhienin and Andorans. Although it lay on the Cairhienin side of the Erinin, Maerone was in no nation now, but balanced between, with folk from half a dozen lands living there or passing through. There had even been three or four Aes Sedai since Mat arrived. Even wearing the medallion he walked wide of them—no need to seek out trouble—but they all moved on as quickly as they came. His luck did run good when it was important. So far it had.
The townspeople hurried about their business, for the most part ignoring the many ragged men, women and children who wandered about blankly. All Cairhienin, those last usually found their way down to the river before returning to the refugee camps ringing the town. Few left to go home, though. The civil war might be over up in Cairhien, but there were still brigands, and they feared the Aiel. For all Mat knew, they feared running into the Dragon Reborn. The simple truth of it was, they had run as far as they could; none had energy remaining for much beyond those trips to the river to stare at Andor.
The Band’s soldiers added to the crowds, ones or threes meandering about the shops and taverns, troops in formation, crossbowmen and archers in jerkins covered with steel discs, pikemen in battered breastplates cast off by their betters or looted from the dead. Everywhere rode breastplated horsemen, Tairen lancers in rimmed helmets and Cairhienin in bell-shaped helmets, even some Andorans in conical helmets with barred face-guards. Rahvin had tossed a good many men out of the Queen’s Guards, men too loyal to Morgase, and some had joined the Band. Hawkers wove through the mass with their trays, crying needles and thread, ointments claimed to be good for any wound and remedies for everything from blisters to watery bowels to camp fever, soap, tin pots and cups guaranteed not to rust out, woolen stockings, knives and daggers of the finest Andoran steel—the seller’s word on it—every sort of thing that a soldier might need or the vendors thought he might be convinced he did. The din was such that any hawkers’ bellows were swallowed up three paces away.
The soldiers recognized Mat right away, of course, and many raised cheers, even men too far away to see more than his broad-brimmed hat and odd spear. Those picked him out as clearly as any noble’s sigil. He had heard all the rumors about why he disdained armor and helmet; there were
all sorts, from mad bravery to the claim that only a weapon forged by the Dark One himself could kill him. Some said the hat had been given him by Aes Sedai, and as long as he wore it
nothing
could kill him. The fact was it was an ordinary hat, and he wore it because it gave good shade. And because it was a good reminder to stay clear of anywhere he might need helmet and armor. The tales circulating about his spear, with that inscription that few even among the nobles could read, were more extravagant still. None could match the truth, though. That raven-marked blade had been made by Aes Sedai during the War of the Shadow, before the Breaking; it never needed sharpening, and he doubted he could break it if he tried.
Waving to acknowledge shouts of “The Light illumine Lord Matrim!” and “Lord Matrim and victory!” and such drivel, he made his way through the crowds with Edorion. At least he did not have to push; they gave way as soon as they saw him. He wished so many of the refugees did not stare as though he had the key to their hopes hidden in his pocket. Aside from making sure they got food from the wagon trains coming up from Tear, he did not know what he could do. A good many were dirty as well as ragged.
“Did the soap get out to the camps?” he muttered.
Edorion heard despite the uproar. “It did. Most trade it back to the peddlers for cheap wine. They don’t want soap; they want to cross the river, or else drown their miseries.”
Mat grunted sourly. Passage to Aringill was one thing he could not give them.
Until civil war and worse tore Cairhien apart, Maerone had been a transit point for trade between Cairhien and Tear, which meant it had almost as many inns and taverns as it did houses. The first five he poked his nose into varied little, from The Fox and Goose to The Wagoner’s Whip, stone buildings with packed tables and the occasional budding fistfight, which Mat ignored. No one was drunk, though.
The River Gate, all the way across town, had been Maerone’s best inn, but heavy planks nailed across its sun-carved doors served as a reminder to the innkeepers and tapsters not to get the Band’s soldiers drunk. Still, even sober soldiers fought, Tairen against Cairhienin against Andoran, foot against horse, one lord’s men against another’s, veterans against new recruits, soldiers against civilians. Fights were quelled before they got out of hand, though, by soldiers carrying cudgels and wearing red armbands that stretched from wrist to elbow. Each unit had to take its turn providing Redarms, different men every day, and the Redarms had to pay for any
damage the day they were on duty. It made them industrious in keeping the peace.
At The Fox and Goose a gleeman was juggling flaming batons, a stout man in his middle years, while another, a skinny balding fellow at The Erinin Inn, had his harp in hand and declaimed part of
The Great Hunt of the Horn
. Despite the heat each wore his distinctive cloak, all covered with patches in a hundred colors that fluttered when he moved; a gleeman would give up a hand before that cloak. They had fairly attentive audiences—many of the onlookers came from villages that eagerly greeted a gleeman’s visit—more so than the girl singing on a table in a tavern called The Three Towers. She was pretty enough, with her long dark curls, but a song about true love was not likely to interest the raucously laughing men drinking there. The remaining places had no entertainment beyond a musician or two, yet the crowds were louder still, and dice games at half the tables made Mat’s fingers twitch. But he really did almost always win, at least with dice, and it would not be right to take coin from his own soldiers. That was what most of the men at the tables were; few refugees had coin to spend in common rooms.
A handful of others dotted the members of the Band. Here a lean, fork-bearded Kandori with a moonstone the size of his thumbnail in one earlobe and silver chains across the chest of his red coat, there a copper-skinned Domani woman, though wearing a modest blue dress, with quick eyes and gemmed rings on all her fingers, elsewhere a Taraboner in a conical flat-topped blue cap, thick mustache hidden behind a transparent veil. Plump men in Tairen coats tight to the waist or bony fellows in Murandian coats hanging to the knee; sharp-eyed women in dresses high-necked or ankle-length, but always in well-cut wool of sober color. Merchants all, ready to leap in when trade reopened between Andor and Cairhien. And in every common room two or three men sat apart from the others, usually alone, for the most part hard-eyed fellows, some well dressed, others little better garbed than the refugees, but every one looking as if he knew how to use the sword at his hip or on his back. Mat identified two women with that lot, though neither showed a weapon; one had a long walking staff propped against her table, and he supposed the other had knives hidden in her riding dress. He carried a few throwing knives tucked about his person, too. He was sure he knew what she and the others were about, and she was a fool if she went at it unarmed.
As he and Edorion stepped out of The Wagoner’s Whip, Mat stopped to watch a blocky woman in divided brown skirts wend her way through
the crowds. Unblinking eyes that caught everything in the street belied the apparent placidity of her round face, and so did the studded cudgel at her belt, and a dagger heavy-bladed enough to do for an Aielman. So, a third woman in the lot. Hunters for the Horn was what they were, the legendary Horn of Valere that would call dead heroes back from the grave to fight in the Last Battle. Whoever found it would earn a place in the histories.
If there’s anyone left to write a bloody history
, Mat thought wryly.
Some believed the Horn would turn up where there was turmoil and strife. Four hundred years since the Hunt of the Horn was last called, and this time people had all but dropped out of the trees to take the oaths. He had seen flocks of Hunters in the streets of Cairhien, and he expected to see more flocks when he reached Tear. Without doubt they would be streaming toward Caemlyn now as well. He wished one of them had found the thing. To the best of his knowledge the Horn of bloody Valere lay somewhere deep in the White Tower, and if he knew anything about Aes Sedai he would be surprised if a dozen of them were aware of it.
A troop of foot behind a mounted officer in a dented breastplate and a Cairhienin helmet marched between him and the blocky woman, close to two hundred pikemen, weapons a tall forest of spikes, followed by fifty or more archers with quivers on hips and bows slung on shoulders. Not the Two Rivers longbow Mat had grown up with, but a fair enough weapon. He had to find enough crossbows to go around, though the archers would not willingly make the change. They sang as they marched, the massed voices enough to punch through the rest of the noise.