Knife of Dreams (35 page)

“Yesterday. . . .” The strongman shook his head and patted the nearest animal, patiently waiting for the last straps to be buckled, as if the horse had showed signs of nerves. Maybe he felt edgy himself. The night was only cool, not really cold, yet he was bundled up in a dark coat and had on a knitted cap. His wife worried about him falling sick from drafts or the cold, and took care that he would not. “Well, we’re strangers everywhere, you see, and a lot of people think they can take advantage of strangers. But
if we let one man get away with it, ten more will try, if not a hundred. Sometimes the local magistrate, or what passes for one, will uphold the law for us, too, but only sometimes. Because we’re strangers, and tomorrow or the next day, we’ll be gone, and anyway, everybody knows strangers are usually up to no good. So we have to stand up for ourselves, fight for what’s ours if need be. Once you do that, though, it’s time to move along. Same now as when there were only a few dozen of us with Luca, counting the horse handlers, though in those days, we’d have been gone as soon as those soldiers left. In those days, there weren’t so many coins to be lost by leaving in a hurry,” he said dryly, and shook his head, perhaps for Luca’s greed or perhaps for how large the show had grown, before going on.

“Those three Seanchan have friends, or at least companions who won’t like their own being faced down. That Standardbearer did it, but you can be sure they’ll lay it to us, because they think they can hit at us, and they can’t at her. Maybe their officers will uphold the law, or their rules or whatever, like she did, but we can’t be sure of that. What is certain sure, though, is that those fellows will cause trouble if we stay another day. No point to staying when it means fights with soldiers, and maybe people hurt so they can’t perform, and sure trouble with the law one way or another.” It was the longest speech Mat had ever heard from Petra, and the man cleared his throat as though embarrassed by saying so much. “Well,” he muttered, bending back to the harness, “Luca will want to be on the road soon. You’ll want to be seeing to your own horses.”

Mat wanted no such thing. The most wonderful thing about having coin was not what you could buy, but that you could pay others to do the work. As soon as he realized the show was preparing to move, he had rousted the four Redarms from the tent they shared with Chel Vanin to hitch the teams for his wagon and Tuon’s, do as he instructed with the razor and saddle Pips. The stout horsethief—he had not stolen a horse since Mat had known him, but that was what he was—had roused himself long enough to say that he would get up when the others returned, then rolled over in his blankets and was snoring again before Harnan and the others had their boots half on. Vanin’s skills were such that no one voiced any complaint beyond the usual grumbling about the hour, and all but Harnan would have grumbled if allowed to sleep till noon. When those skills were needed, he would repay them tenfold, and they knew it, even Fergin. The skinny Redarm was none too bright except when it came to soldiering, but he was plenty smart enough there. Well, smart enough.

The show left Jurador before the sun broke the horizon, a long snake of
wagons rolling along the wide road through the darkness with Luca’s lurid monstrosity pulled by six horses at its head. Tuon’s wagon came just behind with Gorderan driving, almost wide-shouldered enough to seem a strongman himself, and Tuon and Selucia, well-cloaked and hooded, squeezed in on either side of him. The storage wagons and animal cages and spare horses brought up the tail. Sentries at the Seanchan camp watched them depart, silent armored figures in the night marching the camp’s perimeter. Not that the camp itself was quiet. Shadowy forms stood in rigid lines among the tents while loud voices bellowed the rollcall at a steady pace and others answered. Mat all but held his breath until those regular shouts faded away behind him. Discipline was a wonderful thing. For other men, anyway.

He rode Pips alongside the Aes Sedai wagon, near the middle of the long line, flinching a little every time the foxhead went cool against his chest, which it began to do before they had gone much more than a mile. It seemed that Joline was wasting no time. Fergin, handling the reins, chattered away about horses and women with Metwyn. Both were as happy as pigs in clover, but then, neither had any idea what was going on inside the wagon. At least the medallion only turned cool, and barely that. They were using small amounts of the Power. Still, he disliked being so near any channeling at all. In his experience, Aes Sedai carried trouble in their belt pouches and seldom were shy about scattering it, never mind who might be in the way. No, with the dice bouncing inside his head, he could have done without Aes Sedai within ten miles.

He would have ridden up beside Tuon, for the chance to talk with her, no matter that Selucia and Gorderan would hear every word, but you never wanted a woman thinking you were too eager. Do that, and she either took advantage or else skittered away like a water drop on a hot greased griddle. Tuon found enough ways to take advantage already, and he had too little time for very much in the way of chasing. Sooner or later she would speak the words that completed the marriage ceremony, sure as water was wet, but that only made it more urgent for him to find out what she was like, which had hardly been easy so far. That little woman made a blacksmith’s puzzle seem simple. But how could a man be married to a woman if he did not know her? Worse, he had to make her see him as something more than Toy. Marriage to a woman with no respect for him would be like wearing a shirt of blackwasp nettles day and night. Worse still, he had to make her care for him, or he would find himself forced to hide from his own wife to keep her from making him
da’covale
! And to cap it off, he had to do all of
that in whatever time remained before he had to send her back to Ebou Dar. A fine stew, and doubtless a tasty meal for some hero out of legend, a little something to occupy his idle time before he rushed off to perform some great deed, only Mat bloody Cauthon was no bloody hero. He still had it to do, though, and no time or room for missteps.

It was the earliest start they had made yet, but his hopes that the Seanchan had frightened Luca into moving faster were soon dashed. As the sun climbed, they passed stone farm buildings clinging to hillsides and occasionally a tiny tile- or thatch-roofed village nestled beside the road in a surround of stone-walled fields carved out of the forest, where men and women stood gaping as the show streamed past and children ran alongside until their parents called them back, but in the midafternoon, the show reached something larger. Runnien Crossing, near a so-called river that could have been waded in fewer than twenty paces without going more than waist-deep despite the stone bridge across it, was never a patch on Jurador, but it possessed four inns, each three stories of stone roofed in green or blue tiles, and near half a mile of hard-packed dirt between the village and the river where merchants could park their wagons for the night. Farms with their walled fields and orchards and pastures made a quilt of the countryside for a good league along the road and maybe more beyond the hills to either side of it. They certainly covered the hillsides Mat could see. That was enough for Luca.

Ordering the canvas wall erected in the clearing, near to the river to make watering the animals easier, the man strutted into the village wearing coat and cloak red enough to make Mat’s eyes hurt and so embroidered with golden stars and comets that a Tinker would have wept for the shame of donning the garments. The huge blue-and-red banner was stretched across the entrance, each wagon in its place, the performing platforms unloaded and the wall nearly all up by the time he returned escorting three men and three women. The village was not all that far from Ebou Dar, yet their clothing might have come from another country altogether. The men wore short wool coats in bright colors embroidered with angular scrollwork along the shoulders and sleeves, and dark, baggy trousers stuffed into knee boots. The women, their hair in a sort of coiled bun atop their heads, wore dresses nearly as colorful as Luca’s garments, their narrow skirts resplendent with flowers from hem to hips. They did all carry long belt knives, though with straight blades for the most part, and caressed the hilts whenever anybody looked at them; that much was the same. Altara was Altara when it came to touchiness. These were the village Mayor, the four innkeepers, and
a lean, leathery, white-haired woman in red; the others addressed her respectfully as Mother. Since the round-bellied Mayor was as white-haired as she, not to mention mostly bald, and none of the innkeepers lacked at least a little gray hair, Mat decided she must be the village Wisdom. He smiled and tipped his hat to her as she passed, and she gave him a sharp look and sniffed in near perfect imitation of Nynaeve. Oh, yes, a Wisdom all right.

Luca showed them around with wide smiles and expansive gestures, elaborate bows and flourishes of his cloak, stopping here and there to make a juggler or a team of acrobats perform a little for his guests, but his smile turned to a sour grimace once they were safely back on their way and out of sight. “Free admission for them and their husbands and wives and
all
the children,” he growled to Mat, “and I’m supposed to pack up if a merchant comes down the road. They weren’t that blunt, but they were clear enough, especially that Mother Darvale. As if this flyspeck ever attracted enough merchants to fill this field. Thieves and scoundrels, Cauthon. Country folk are all thieves and scoundrels, and an honest man like me is at their mercy.”

Soon enough he was toting up what he might earn there despite the complimentary admissions, but he never did give over complaining entirely, even when the line at the entrance stretched nearly as far as it had in Jurador. He just added complaining about how much he would have taken in with another three or four days at the salt town. It was three or four more days, now, and likely he would have lingered until the crowds had dwindled to nothing. Maybe those three Seanchan had been
ta’veren
work. Not likely, but it was a pleasant way to think of it. Now that it was all in the past, it was.

That was how they progressed. At best a mere two leagues or perhaps three at an unhurried pace, and usually Luca would find a small town or a cluster of villages that he felt called for a halt. Or better to say that he felt their silver calling to him. Even if they passed nothing but flyspecks not worth the labor of erecting the wall, they never made as much as four leagues before Luca called a halt. He was not about to risk having to camp strung out along the road. If there was not to be a show, Luca liked to find a clearing where the wagons could be parked without too much crowding, though if driven to it, he would dicker with a farmer for the right to stop in an unused pasture. And mutter over the expense the whole next day if it cost no more than a silver penny. He was tight with his purse strings, Luca was.

Trains of merchants’ wagons passed them in both directions, making good speed and managing to raise small clouds of dust from the hard-packed
road. Merchants wanted to get their goods to market as quickly as possible. Now and then they saw a caravan of Tinkers, too, their boxy wagons as bright as anything in the show except for Luca’s wagon. All of them were headed toward Ebou Dar, oddly enough, but then, they moved as slowly as Luca. Not likely any coming the other way would overtake the show. Two or three leagues a day, and the dice rattled away so that Mat was always wondering what lay beyond the next bend in the road or what was catching him up from behind. It was enough to give a man hives.

The very first night, outside Runnien Crossing, he approached Aludra. Near her bright blue wagon she had set up a small canvas enclosure, eight feet tall, for launching her nightflowers, and she straightened with a glare when he pulled back a flap and ducked in. A closed lantern sitting on the ground near the wall gave enough light for him to see that she was holding a dark ball the size of a large melon. Runnien Crossing was only big enough to merit a single nightflower. She opened her mouth, all set to chivvy him out. Not even Luca was allowed in here.

“Lofting tubes,” he said quickly, gesturing to the metal-bound wooden tube, as tall as he was and near enough a foot across, sitting upright in front of her on a broad wooden base. “That’s why you want a bellfounder. To make lofting tubes from bronze. It’s the why I can’t puzzle out.” It seemed a ridiculous idea—with a little effort, two men could lift one of her wooden lofting tubes into the wagon that carried them and her other supplies; a bronze lofting tube would require a derrick—but it was the only thing that had occurred to him.

With the lantern behind her, shadows hid her expression, but she was silent for a long moment. “Such a clever young man,” she said finally. Her beaded braids clicked softly as she shook her head. Her laugh was low and throaty. “Me, I should watch my tongue. I always get into the trouble when I make promises to clever young men. Never think I will tell you the secrets that would make you blush, though, not now. You are already juggling two women, it seems, and me, I will not be juggled.”

“Then I’m right?” He was barely able to keep the incredulity from his voice.

“You are,” she said. And casually tossed the nightflower at him!

He caught it with a startled oath, and only dared to breathe when he was sure he had a good grip. The covering seemed to be stiff leather, with a tiny stub of fuse sticking out of one side. He had a little familiarity with smaller fireworks, and supposedly those only exploded from fire or if you let air touch what was inside—though he had cut one open once without it
going off—yet who could say what might make a nightflower erupt? The firework he had opened had been small enough to hold in one hand. Something the size of this nightflower would likely blow him and Aludra to scraps.

Abruptly he felt foolish. She was not very likely to go throwing the thing if dropping it was dangerous. He began tossing the ball from hand to hand. Not to make up for gasping and all that. Just for something to do.