Nynaeve stopped dead. “Where and why?”
“Into the town.” He did not stop. He strode right on, flipping a hand for her to follow. “I don’t know what you’re flam—what you’re doing here, but I remember you were mixed up with that blue woman.”
Snarling under her breath, she gathered her skirts and hurried after him again; it was the only way to hear. He continued as if she had been beside him the whole time. “This is no blood—no place for you to be. I can scrape together enough bio—aagh!—enough coin to get you to Tear, I think. Rumor says that’s where the Lord Dragon is.” Again he looked around warily. “Unless you want to go to the island instead.” He must have meant Tar Valon. “There’s blo—there’s odd rumors floating around about that, too. Peace, if there aren’t!” He came from a land that had not known peace in three thousand years; Shienarans used the word as talisman and oath both. “They say the old Amyrlin’s been deposed. Executed maybe. Some say they fought and burned the whole—” He paused, taking a deep breath and grimacing horribly. “—the whole city.”
Walking along, she studied him in amazement. She had not seen him in nearly a year, had never spoken more than two words together to him, and yet he . . . Why did men always think a woman needed a man to look after her? Men could not lace up their own shirts without a woman to help! “We are doing quite well as we are, thank you. Unless you know when a river trader will dock on his way downriver.”
“We? Is the blue woman with you, or the brown?” That had to be Moiraine and Verin. He was certainly being cautious.
“No. Do you remember Elayne?” He gave a blunt nod, and a mischievous impulse seized her; nothing seemed to faze the man, and he obviously expected to just take charge of her welfare. “You saw her again just now. You said she had a”—she made her voice gruff in imitation of his—“face like a bloody queen.”
He stumbled in a quite satisfactory way, and glared around him so fiercely that even two Whitecloaks riding by skirted wide around him, though they tried to pretend he had nothing to do with it, of course. “Her?” he growled incredulously. “But her bloody hair was black as a raven’s. . . .” He glanced at her, and the next minute he was pacing up the cart path again, muttering half to himself, “The flaming woman is daughter to a queen. A bloody queen! Showing her bloody legs that way.” Nynaeve nodded in agreement. Until he added, “You bloody southlanders are bloody strange! No flaming decency at all!” He had fine room to talk. Shienarans might dress properly, but she still blushed to remember that in Shienar men and women bathed together as often as not, and thought no more of it than of eating together.
“Did your mother never teach you to talk decently, man?” His real eye frowned at her almost as darkly as the painted one, and he rolled his shoulders. In Fal Dara he and everyone else had treated her as nobly born, or the next thing to. Of course, it was hard to pass herself off as a lady in that dress, and with her hair a shade that nature never made. She arranged her shawl more snugly and folded her arms to hold it in place. The gray wool was terribly uncomfortable in
that dry heat, and she herself was not feeling very dry at all; she had never heard of anyone who died of sweating, but she thought she might well be the first. “What are you doing here, Uno?”
He looked around before answering. Not that he had need; there was little traffic on the path—an occasional ox-drawn cart, a few folk in farm clothes or rougher, here and there a man on a horse—and no one seemed willing to come any closer to him than they had to. He appeared a man who might cut somebody’s throat on a whim. “The blue woman gave us a name in Jehannah, and said we were to wait there until she sent instructions, but the woman in Jehannah was dead and buried when we arrived. An old woman. Died in her sleep, and none of her relatives had ever heard the blue woman’s name. Then Masema started talking to people, and . . . Well, there was no point staying there for orders we’d never hear if they did come. We stay close to Masema because he slips us enough to live on, though none except Bartu and Nengar listen to his trash.” The grizzled topknot swung as he shook his head in irritation.
Suddenly Nynaeve realized that there had not been a single obscene word in that. He looked about to swallow his tongue. “Perhaps if you cursed only occasionally?” She sighed. “Maybe once every other sentence?” The man smiled at her so gratefully that she wanted to throw up her hands in exasperation. “How is it that Masema has money when the rest of you do not?” She remembered Masema: a dark sour man who liked no one and nothing.
“Why, he’s the bloody Prophet they’ve all come to hear. Would you like to meet him?” He gave the impression of counting his sentences. Nynaeve breathed deeply; the man was going to take her literally. “He might find you a flaming boat, if you want one. In Ghealdan, what the Prophet wants, the Prophet usually gets. No, he always flaming gets it in the end, one way or another. The man was a good soldier, but who’d have ever thought he would turn out like this?” His frown took in all the rude villages and the people, even the shows and the city ahead.
Nynaeve hesitated. The dreaded Prophet, rousing mobs and riots, was Masema? But he did preach the coming of the Dragon Reborn. They were almost to the town gate, and there was time yet before she must stand up and let Birgitte shoot arrows at her. Luca had been more than disappointed that the woman insisted on being called Maerion. If Masema could find a boat heading downriver . . . Today, maybe. On the other hand, there were the riots. If rumor inflated them tenfold, then only hundreds had died in towns and cities farther north. Only hundreds.
“Just don’t remind him that you have anything to do with that bloody island,” Uno went on, eyeing her thoughtfully. Now that she thought of it, she realized that he very likely did not know what her connection to Tar Valon actually was. Women did go there without becoming Aes Sedai, after all, to seek help or answers. He was aware that she was involved in some way, but no more than that. “He isn’t much friendlier to women from there than the Whitecloaks are. If you just keep your mouth bloody well shut about it, he’ll likely pass it over. For somebody who comes from the same village as the Lord Dragon, Masema will probably have a flaming boat built.”
The crowds were thicker at the city gates, flanked by squat gray towers, men and women streaming in and out, afoot and mounted, in every sort of garb from rags to embroidered silk coats and dresses. The gates themselves, thick and iron-bound, stood open under the guard of a dozen spearmen in scaled tunics and round steel caps with flat rims. Actually, the guards paid more attention to half their number of Whitecloaks lounging nearby than to anything else. It was the men in snowy cloaks and burnished mail who watched the flow of people.
“Do the Whitecloaks cause much trouble?” she asked quietly.
Uno pursed his lips as if to spit, glanced at her, and did not. “Where do they bloody not? There was a woman with one of these traveling shows who did tricks, sleight of hand. Four days ago a flaming mob of pigeon-gutted sheep-heads tore the show apart.” Valan Luca had certainly never mentioned that! “Peace! What they wanted was the woman. Claimed she was”—he glowered at the folk hurrying by, and lowered his voice—“Aes Sedai. And a Darkfriend. Broke her bloody neck getting her to a rope, so I hear, but they hung her corpse anyway. Masema had the ringleaders beheaded, but it was Whitecloaks whipped up the bloody mob.” His scowl matched the red eye painted on his patch. “There’s been too many flaming hangings and beheadings, if you bloody well ask me. Bloody Masema’s as bad as the bloody Whitecloaks when it comes to finding a Darkfriend under every flaming rock.”
“Once every other sentence,” she murmured, and the man actually blushed.
“Don’t know what I’m thinking,” he grumped, coming to a stop. “Can’t take you in there. It’s half festival and half riot, with a cutpurse every third step and a woman not safe out-of-doors after dark.” He sounded more scandalized about the last than the rest; in Shienar, a woman was safe anywhere, any time—except from Trollocs and Myrddraal, of course—and any man would die to see it so. “Not safe. I’ll take you back. When I find a way, I’ll come for you.”
That settled it for her. Pulling her arm loose before he could get a grip on it, she quickened her pace toward the gates. “Come along, Uno, and do not dawdle. If you dawdle, I will leave you behind.” He caught up to her, grumbling under his breath about the stubbornness of women. Once she understood that that was his subject, and that apparently he did not think her injunction against cursing held when talking to himself, she stopped listening.
CHAPTER
39
Encounters in Samara
The Whitecloaks at the gates gave Uno and Nynaeve no more mind than they gave anyone else in the steady throng, which was to say a cold suspicious stare, searching yet quick. Too many people made anything else impossible, and maybe the scale-armored guards did, too. Not that there was any reason for more except in her mind. Her Great Serpent ring and Lan’s heavy gold ring both nestled in her pouch—the dress’s low neckline meant she could not wear them on the thong—but somehow she almost expected Children of the Light to pick out a Tower-trained woman by instinct. Her relief was palpable when those icy, unfeeling eyes swept past her.
The soldiers paid the two of them as little attention—once she rearranged her shawl yet again. Uno’s scowl might have helped send their eyes back to the Whitecloaks, but the man had no right to scowl in the first place. It was her business.
Rewrapping the folded length of gray wool one more time, she tied the ends around her waist. The shawl defined her bosom more than she wished, and still exposed a bit of cleavage, yet it was a considerable improvement on the dress alone. At least she would not have to worry about the shawl slipping again. If only the thing were not so hot. The weather really should be turning soon. They were not that far south of the Two Rivers.
Uno patiently waited on her for a change. She was of two minds as to whether this was simple courtesy—his scarred face looked a deal too patient—but finally they walked together into Samara. Into chaos.
A babble of noise hung over everything, no one sound distinguishable. People jammed the rough stone-paved streets all but shoulder to shoulder from slate-roofed taverns to thatch-roofed stables, from raucous inns with simple painted signs like The Blue Bull or The Dancing Goose to shops where the signs had no words, only a knife-and-scissors here, a bolt of cloth there, a goldsmith’s scales or a barber’s razor, a pot or a lamp or a boot. Nynaeve saw faces as pale as that of any Andorman and as dark as that of any of the Sea Folk, some clean, some dirty, and coats with high collars, low collars, no collars, drably colored and bright, plain and embroidered, shabby and near new-made, in styles strange as often as familiar. One fellow with a dark forked beard wore silver chains across the chest of his plain blue coat, and two with their hair in braids—men, with a black braid over each ear below their shoulders!—had tiny brass bells sewn to their red coatsleeves and the turned-down tops of thigh-high boots. Whatever land they hailed from, those two were not fools; their dark eyes were hard and searching as Uno’s, and they carried curved swords on their backs. A bare-chested man in a bright yellow sash, skin a deeper brown than aged wood and hands intricately tattooed, had to be one of the Sea Folk, though he wore neither earrings nor nose ring.
The women were equally as diverse, hair ranging from raven black to yellow so pale it was nearly white, braided or gathered or hanging loose, cut short, to the shoulders, to the waist, dresses in worn wool or neat linen or shimmering silk, collars brushing chins with lace or embroidery and necklines every bit as low as the one she hid. She even saw a copper-complexioned Domani woman in a barely opaque red gown that covered her to the neck and hid next to nothing! She wondered how safe that woman would be after dark. Or in this broad daylight, for that matter.
The occasional Whitecloaks and soldiers in that milling mass seemed overwhelmed, struggling to make ground as hard as anyone else. Ox-carts and horse-drawn wagons inched along the haphazardly crisscrossing streets, bearers jostled sedan chairs through the crowds, and now and then a lacquered coach with a plumed team of four or six made its laborious way, liveried footman and steel-capped guards vainly trying to clear a path. Musicians with flute or zither or bittern played at every corner where there was not a juggler or an acrobat—their skill certainly nothing to make Thom or the Chavanas worry—always with another man or woman holding out a cap for coins. Ragged beggars wove through it all, plucking at sleeves and proffering grimy hands, and hawkers bustled with trays of everything from pins to ribbons