(Thank you to TheBattleSage for editing.)
26 Tammaz, 993 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste
"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."*
Or, at least, so the Wise Ones taught. There are, they claim, no beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time.
My own feelings on the matter were more mixed.
For one, with two past lives under my belt, I knew with absolute certainty that reincarnation was possible. While my rebirths had been directed to specific circumstances by Being X, it had mentioned at our first meeting that it simply managed the cycle of death and rebirth. So, if individuals were born and reborn, the existence of some sort of endless loop was implied. A wheel, perhaps.
On the other hand, the idea that every Age would come again in time struck me as horrifyingly deterministic. If, over the slow turning of the Wheel, all of the figures whose memories were destined to eventually solidify into legends (and then degraded into myths and so forth) were inevitably brought back to life in every age, then that meant that every decision had already been made time and again. Everything would just continue to loop endlessly.
Needless to say, I took the words of my tutors in Shende Hold with a grain of salt. While my people, the Chareen Aiel, lacked any form of organized religion, this universally accepted folk-belief that the entire world was a never-ending cosmic cycle smacked of religiosity nonetheless. A religion seemingly without gods or commandments or moral imperatives, although it did recognize a Creator and someone or something called a Dark One. Curiously, only the Dark One was ever given any sobriquets.
"Wise One," I had once asked, speaking up in my eighth year during one of the informal teaching sessions conducted by the hold's wise woman, who apparently happened to be some distant relation of mine, "who is Sightblinder? What is he? Was he ever a man?"
Does he look like an old man? Does he speak through the mouths of others? Does he take the form of a nutcracker doll that creepily smiles through his wooden teeth?
"Who is Sightblinder, you ask?" Sorelia was rarely amused, so I had been shocked to see a thin smile stretch those leathery lips. "He is chaos and destruction. All that is unnatural and discordant has its utmost source in him. His voice leads men into depravity. The urge to put oneself over sept and clan comes from him."
Ah, just a concept, then. Not an entity, just a way of explaining away the natural conflicts of life.
"But someday, on the Last Day," ancient Sorelia had continued, lecturing us as we sat in a circle around her, combing raw cotton into fibers usable for spinning; there was never any end to work at Shende Hold. "We will get the opportunity to dance the spears with Sightblinder himself."
"As it is prophesied," she said in a remarkably matter-of-fact tone, "so it shall be. Our blood will be poured out on the sands, but if we are sufficiently skillful, a remnant of a remnant will be saved. And that, children, is why we dwell in the Threefold Land: the land hones us to an edge, to better fight that last day; the land tests us, so we may survive that last day; the Land punishes us, so we will not forget our failures on that Last Day."
Numbly, I had focused on the comb in my hand, straightening out and polishing the cotton fibers and letting my ancestor's voice roll over my head, trying to sort through the implications of the apocalyptic vision she had so carelessly dropped at my feet.
What was immediately clear to me was that I couldn't ignore the statement of prophecy as the ramblings of a demented elder; while Sorelia had allegedly seen her two hundredth birthday the year before my birth, she was still the Wise One of Shende Hold. In addition to being a living repository of cultural and technical knowledge regarding all the tools of the Chareen Aiel, she was the village healer and the obvious power behind Parrag, the Sept Chief of the Jarra.
Beyond all that, she was also a channeler of the One Power, or so the whispers went. Nobody I'd asked could give me any details, as all female channelers of our people were Wise Ones, and, as my father had once told me, "no man willingly asks after a Wise One's business."
There were no male channelers of our people. Any man who could channel was a dead man walking, sent away from the People to throw himself against the endless hordes of Shadowspawn, twisted half-beast demons, that lurked in the blighted lands to the north.
Taken together, Sorelia spoke with both the voice of tradition and of authority. In a very literal sense, she was the Chareen Aiel; assuming an average Aiel lifespan of fifty years, Sorelia had guided eight generations from the cradle to the grave. And that guiding voice, that heart of the Chareen Aiel made manifest, was telling me that I had once again been born into a nation built for war.
Perhaps, I had reflected as I presented my sack of freshly combed cotton to my mother for spinning, the Wheel truly does weave the same patterns over and over again.
That lesson now five years in the past had settled like a stone in my gut. Each of my last two lives had been different, yet each had ended the same way. Elements of both were already echoing in this, my third life. I was once again male and already tall for my age, just like my first life. I had been born into a culture dedicated to war, just like my second life. I had been born into a loving and intact family, like my first life. The resonance was impossible to overlook.
And yet, I refused to resign myself to hopeless determinism. While the environment we inhabited informed our choices, it is our choices that inform us. In my previous life, I had volunteered to join the Imperial Army out of the sincere belief that I possessed no better option. I had submitted to the militarism to facilitate my own long-term survival. In the end, while I had been born into a militaristic society, it had been my choice that had ultimately led to my second betrayal.
So, I decided that I would make a different choice this time.
The Aiel, the Chareen included, were a military people, marked by a cultural mythology that held them eternally penitent for long forgotten crimes and destined for death in battle. Divided into clans, the Aiel were eternally at war with each other. But to call the Aiel barbarians would have been entirely incorrect. To my surprise, the constant violence was very carefully regulated.
When a clan raided the hold of another clan, the attackers would only take at most a fifth of the material goods of the hold, and never any of the food or water. Ji'e'toh, the unwritten honor code that defined what it was to be Aiel, held that taking an enemy prisoner was far more prestigious than killing. Forcing someone to kill you by fighting on in a hopeless situation was dishonorable, but abusing a prisoner of war was profoundly worse.
It was a remarkably civilized affair, for all that men and women died for puddles of water and sometimes for something as meager as a bundle of sticks. Most interesting to me was the prisoner-taking tradition, the taking of Gai'shain. Gai'shain, literally "sworn to peace through battle," could be taken in battle, enemy warriors outmaneuvered and forced to surrender, or they could be taken from the inhabitants of a Hold as part of the "Fifth", but in either case they were only ever held for a year and a day. While they were forced to work for their captor, abuse of a Gai'shain was strictly forbidden.
It was in the lesson about Gai'shain, from Sorelia of course, that I found my different choice. As it turned out, the taking of the Fifth from captured holds had more caveats than the simple prohibition against the seizure of foodstuffs; Wise Ones, children, pregnant women, women with a child under the age of ten, and blacksmiths were exempted from the Fifth as well.
For now, I was still safe; at thirteen, I would be a child for another five years before my father would proclaim me a man and I would become a guest under my mother's roof. Unlike my second life, the paths of a Wise One or a mother were closed to me. Blacksmiths, though, were rare in Threefold Land, and along with Wise Ones were the only Aiel who could wander from clan to clan armored in the certainty that no Aiel would raise a hand against them.
Two months after my thirteenth birthday, I followed the loud, resonant beats of a hammer through the cool, shadowy corridors of Shende Hold. As I neared the source of the rhythm, the heat began to grow. As I turned around the last bend in the hall and approached the smithy complex, the heat became almost unbearable, even by the standards of the Threefold Land, even through the wooden door, a rarity in the deserts of my people, the Aiel.
After hours in the cool dimness of Shende Hold, the sudden light was almost scalding. With only three walls to support the roof, the smithy was entirely open to the outside; I knew that in the event of a dust storm or high winds, the heavy cloth of a treated curtain would be unfurled to keep the grit from the shop, but at all other times, no matter the scorching heat or the freezing cold, the smithy would remain open, venting fumes and smoke out of the enclosed spaces of the Hold.
A man, tall even by Aiel standards, was silhouetted against the eye-watering glare, towering over the anvil before him. A great arm rose and fell with metronome regularity, its mate clamped around a pair of tongs pinning a cherry-red ingot against the cratered surface of the anvil.
For a moment, I was almost spellbound by the giant at work, his exposed back and arms dripping with sweat and scarred with shiny burns where sparks had slid past his heavy leather apron. Except for his hands and face, he was pasty pale, as most Aiel were. The sun of the Threefold Land was death, and the mottled cadin'sor, the lightweight but covering trousers and jacket traditional to all the clans, as well as the shoufa scarf wound around the head and neck and the black dust-veils, were the key to survival.
The blacksmith is the beating heart of civilization, I mused, watching the hammer descend again and again. This is the true magic, more than any mana channeled through an orb. Creating something from nothing, with just a hammer and an anvil.
"You there, boy!" The giant barked. "Did the sun slow your wits? The forge must be fed!"
I snapped into action at once, darting over to the creaking leather bellows and seizing the handle. The rawhide bound tightly around the ancient grip was slipping, revealing the old wood underneath, stained dark with sweat and polished with uncounted generations of hands. The bellows resisted my pull until I put my back into it, and then the air wooshed out into the stone-lined forge, breathing a new life back into the orange and yellow flames dancing over the sullen red coals.
Two heaves later, I released the handle and darted over to the basket standing open a sensible distance from the forge, a shovel propped beside it. The coal heaped up in the basket was dark brown and coarse, far from the shiny black anthracite I vaguely remembered from the wealthy homes of my second life. The shovel scraped over the roughly hewn stones, but I managed to negotiate a few of the more uniform chunks onto the blade, which were swiftly shuffled off into the roaring furnace.
Another pump of the bellows and I was back at the basket again, this time abandoning pretense and scooping the gritty bituminous lumps onto the shovel with one hand, ignoring the stains they left behind on my skin. Underneath the cadin'sor my mother had woven for me just months earlier to fit my rapidly growing frame, I could feel my back and arms prickle as I began to sweat. The load of coals went into the fire and I joined the smith in stripping to the waist as I hurriedly scooped a third load onto the shovel.
"Don't glut it now, boy!" The giant growled as he strode forward and thrust the half-finished spearhead, almost cooled back to its typical dark gray, back into the forge. "The bellows, boy, the bellows! Long and slow, now; we're stalking a capar now, not running after a Maiden!"
I grinned my acknowledgement and wrapped both hands around the handle. A capar was a wild pig, wily and fast, and hunting the things usually entailed running them into exhaustion. A Maiden, on the other hand, a member of Far Dareis Mai, the Maidens of the Spear, should be pursued with everything a man had, if the gossip my father and his friends exchanged was to be believed on the rare nights they gathered to enjoy a bottle of peddler-purchased whiskey.
I pulled the bellows down slowly and firmly, the forge sighing like a marathoner as the flames flickered down to a vivid orange the color of Enaila's hair. Enaila, a Maiden of the Spear, had taught all of the children living at Shende Hold the basics of the spear. She was only five years older than me and had been in that same circle sitting at Sorelia's feet, but her unquestionable skill made it easier to accept her directions.
"Easy now, boy… Slow and steady…" The smith reminded as he rolled the spearhead under construction between the coals. "Patience is not among the secrets of the Wise Ones; good iron cannot be rushed."
"I hear you," I replied politely, redoubling my focus on the smooth, rhythmic focus of the pump. Up and down, up and down… The lungs to the anvil's heart, birthing new life in iron and steel… Up and down, up and down…
Fifteen minutes of steady pumping later, and the smith pronounced the head ready for further work.
"Now hold those tongs steady, boy!" He directed, passing the wrought-iron implement over to me. Judging by the clear hammermarks, it could well have been made in this very same smithy. "The iron will be soft, so I'll be putting a blank into the haft. You won't collapse it if you over squeeze, but you will leave a mark and introduce weakness. You don't want the head to snap away clean mid-dance, do you? Then hold steady, hold gently, and hold on."
I nodded my understanding, but the hammer was already descending on the anvil. It slammed onto the spearhead's blade, carefully balanced on the lip of the anvil, with shocking force. The tongs, bereft of any materials around the handle, easily conducted the impact up the length of my arms and tried to spring away. I ground my teeth and tensed my muscles, against the pain and against the attempted rebellion of my tool.
"Steady boy, steady!" The blacksmith reminded me with a growl, but nodded clear approval at my lack of reaction to the shock. The moment of reinforcement was short lived; the hammer was already stooping once more.
And again and again the short-handled blacksmith's hammer descended, the giant himself effortlessly shaping the crucible steel into a spearhead four hands long, double edged and tapering to a leaf-like point. My people had carried spears tipped with such heads for thousands of years in the Threefold Land, using them to hunt for food or to war with the Trollocs to the north, or to raid the Sheinarans to the northwest, the Sharans to the east, or the other clans.
"Ah, and now he's finished," crowed the smith, stepping away from the anvil with a smile as he wiped the sweat from his brow. "Quench it, boy, quench it! He needs to drink heartily to gain confidence!"
I followed the wave of his hand and saw a large ceramic basin, full of water. Dirty water, blackened with soot and no doubt full of metal flakes, but… Water, liquid water, a whole bath of the stuff? In the Threefold Land, septs paid with blood for puddles the length of my arm. The only thing more valuable than water in my people's home was wood, which could only be purchased off the foreign traveling merchants called peddlers and only at great expense.
Almost reverently, I lowered the heated spearhead into the water, and after shooting a questioning glance at the smith, I loosened my grip on the tongs, allowing the newly forged spearhead to disappear into the depths of the bath.
"And now…" The gigantic man carefully laid his hammer on the anvil, tilting the handle until it rested at a precise angle for some unknowable reason, "why have you come to my smithy, boy?"
"I see you, Salin, blacksmith of Shende Hold," I replied, offering the correct response for a first meeting. "I have come to learn the ways of the smith, if you will teach me. Jeorra, your previous apprentice, has gone to Shiagi Hold to forge arrowtips and spearpoints for the Salt Flat Sept of the Nakai Aiel. I would take his place."
"And I see you, Taric," Salin rumbled, leaning against a rack laden with nail-presses, casting molds, and blanks. "Taric, son of Ayesha and Leiran of the Cosaida. Greatson of Sorelia the Wise One's greatdaughter Amaryn, also a Wise One. Why do you come to me? What calls you to the smithy?"
"I come to you, Salin, because I wish to learn your trade," I repeated, falling into the easy cadence of Aiel debate. In a society where insults were a deadly business, one that could easily bring as much toh, dishonor, on the one who spoke them as on their target, direct conversation free of confrontation could be something of an art. "I wish to forge useful tools for my sept and for my clan, both for our use and exchange, so that I may bring benefit to Shende Hold and find worth in the eyes of our kin."
"There are many ways to help the sept, many paths," Salin noted, unconvinced. "You are strong of body, Taric, and quick of mind. In a few years, you could join a society, perhaps your father's own, the Sha'mad Conde, the Thunder Walkers. If your hands prove as deft as your wits, you would rise high in their ranks. This is the path the other boys will choose, for even those who farm our maize, our peppers, and our cotton dance the spears with the other clans.
"Tell me," he demanded for a second time, "why do you come to me? What calls you to the smithy?"
"Wars come and go, and dances begin and end, yet the Dream continues on," I replied, mind spinning as I sought to convey my thoughts in a manner appropriate to Aiel sensibilities. "The Threefold Land tests us endlessly, and the sept must always be prepared. A smith can forge new spears, but can also forge pickheads to claw the coal from the Dragonwall or hoes and trowels to plant the maize and the melons.
"As long as I am a smith," I continued, "I shall always be a boon to the sept, providing the tools that keep our people strong, warm, and fed."
"Wars between the clans come and go," Salin agreed, nodding his grizzled head, "but the war against Sightblinder ends only on the Last Day. There will always be another dance until that Last Day, and perhaps, dare we hope, even past that. The Threefold Land is a place to hone our People's skills, as well as a place of punishment. To live in our Hold is to prepare to wake from the Dream at last.
"So tell me," Salin the Smith said for the third and presumably last time, "why do you come to me? What calls you to do work and learn the ways of the smithy?"
I sensed that this was the moment my future job security and safety hinged upon. I had presented good, logical reasons for taking up the smith's trade, and Salin had pronounced me of sufficient mental and physical prowess to take up the honored trade. And yet, I knew that this was the moment that would make his decision.
I said I'd make a different choice this time. I said that I'd fight the turning of the Wheel, the endless recurrence.
And so, I pushed away the memories of the man climbing the corporate ladder and the hard-won impulses of the girl scrambling up the military hierarchy. Instead, I let myself sink into the traditions and cultural ethos built after three thousand years in the desert, three thousand years of struggle.
I tried honesty.
"Salin, blacksmith of Shende Hold," I began, my tone as implacable as the death-march my people had set themselves upon so many centuries ago, the death-march of which my ancestor Sorelia was the living icon, ancient and hardened past any attempt at diversion, "I would rather use my hands to create, rather than to destroy. I have no wish to dance the spears, to wake others of my People from our shared Dream. While we all must wake from the Dream eventually, iron sleeps forever, regardless of the dreamer's waking."
The last line had not been part of what I had meant to say, but I knew it to be true. Life was so very fragile, most especially of all in the Threefold Land. Scorching hot by day and freezing cold by night, the plants and animals as dangerous, if not more, to the unprepared, as the inhabitants, and water all but a dream, life in the Threefold Land was a constant struggle, a losing game. Yet, even in this desert, the works we left behind lingered on. High up in the peaks of the Dragonwall were the remnants of ancient cities, whose wharves protruding out into the air spoke of long vanished seas.
The inhabitants of those cities were thousands of years dead, yet their works remained.
Salin stared at me, eyes glittering in the unrelenting sunlight streaming in through the open wall. "You almost sound like you would rather put on the white rather than pick up a spear," he said conversationally, no hint of accusation or even curiosity touching his voice. "Indeed, boy, you almost sound like one of the Lost Ones, wandering endlessly in search of their song."
The only Aiel who wore white were the gai'shain. The implication that I would voluntarily submit as a gai'shain danced on the edge of insult, but I doubted it had been meant as such, especially not by a smith, who could neither take nor be taken as gai'shain. The mention of the Lost Ones, the traveling pacifists who roamed in small trains of brightly painted wagons…
"I am not of the Lost," I replied carefully. "I do not hate the dance, nor would I stand by and let Shadowspawn from the north come down to devour the world in preference to taking up the spear and the bow. I simply do not wish to seek out the dance for its own sake. Should the dance come to me, and should I be forced to dance the spears to defend my family, my sept, my clan, I will."
I spread my hands in a gesture of acknowledgement. "I would rather defend my sept by giving it the tools to prosper and grow strong and swift, a task of much ji; while the Sovin Nai Knife Hands would rejoice in going to the dance without so much as a belt knife, I doubt the other eleven societies would be as joyous."
Salin stood silently against the forge's wall, his pale blue eyes peering at me from under his sun-baked brows. As the quiet dragged on, it grew as oppressive as the heat of the smoldering forge beside me, but I paid it no heed. In the hierarchy of teachers and students among the Aiel, the student always waited on the teacher.
Oftentimes, the wait proved to be its own lesson, if looked at the right way.
Besides, as Salin just said, good iron cannot be rushed. The wait is definitely part of the work.
Finally, the big man levered himself up from the wall, limber despite his age and exertions. "Get your tongs, boy. That spear has drunk deeply enough to quench his thirst. Bring him over to the anvil, and I'll show you how to put an edge to his tongue."
Without showing a flicker of the relief flaring inside me, I did as I was told, pulling the spearhead from the precious water. Actions always speak louder than words; when Salin told me to resume my work on the spearhead, when he said he would share his knowledge, starting from the very basics, he had announced his acceptance of my offer. In doing so, he had given me both a job and much ji. Recognizing that fact directly would reduce the implied honor, and I would not be thanked for it.
After the edges and point of the spearhead had been sharpened to a deadly hone, Salin demonstrated how to use the nail-press to mold the pegs necessary to fix the spearhead to the precious wooden shaft, the penultimate step in the weapon's manufacture. He finished the lesson by skillfully assembling the spear, sliding the shaft into the head's perfectly sized socket and driving the freshly forged nails home with two swift blows of the hammer.
As he sat on a bench and completed the finishing work, chanting to the shaft as he polished and oiled the wood against rot and the wet, he set me to work with the first of the many tasks of the apprentice: fetching coal. The storage room was two hallways down in Shende Hold and the first of the many large baskets waiting there was heavy, at least five stone, and after my time with the tongs my arms were worn sore.
It took most of my remaining strength to wrestle the basket into the smithy, and I was thankful that I had not put my coat back on when I realized how the dark dust had mixed with my sweat and smeared across my body. Salin looked up from the shaft, in the process of binding rawhide cord around it as a grip, and held up a pair of fingers, indicating two more baskets.
I fought down the urge to groan. I had pursued this job, hunted down this quarry. I would not shame myself and Salin by backing down now, no matter how much my back and arms protested.
Besides, I thought as I wrapped my arms around another basket of bituminous coal, learning a new trade is always a difficult task. And if some coal dust is what it takes to finally break away from my cycle of violent death?
With a heaving grunt, I lifted the woven basket up onto my shoulder and began staggering back to the smithy. Then that is the price I will pay. I am my own man and I will make my own choices. If that means breaking the Wheel, then so be it.
(*From the opening narration of the Lord of Chaos.)