Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time #11)

Knife of Dreams (The Wheel of Time #11) Page 57

She turned out to have been exactly right about Therava’s reaction. Just before midday all of the gai’shain were herded into the open and made to strip to their skins. Covering herself as best she could with her hands, Faile huddled together with other women wearing Sevanna’s belt and collar—they had been made to put those on again straightaway—huddled for a scrap of decency while Shaido rummaged through the gai’shain tents, tossing everything out into the mud. All Faile could do was think about her hiding place inside the town and pray. Hope and danger, and no way to untangle them.

CHAPTER 6 A Stave and a Razor

Mat had never really expected Luca to leave Jurador after only one day—the stone-walled salt town was wealthy, and Luca did like to see coin stick to his hands—so he was not exactly disappointed when the man told him that Valan Luca’s Grand Traveling Show and Magnificent Display of Marvels and Wonders would remain there at least two more days. Not exactly disappointed, yet he had hoped that his luck might hold good, or his being ta’veren. But then, being ta’veren had never brought anything other than bad that he could see.

“The lines at the entrance are already as long as they were at their best, yesterday,” Luca said, gesturing expansively. They were inside Luca’s huge gaudy wagon, early in the morning after Renna’s death, and the tall man sat in the gilded chair at the narrow table—a real table, with stools tucked under for guests; most other wagons had an affair rigged on ropes from the ceiling, and people sat on the beds to eat. Luca had not yet donned one of his flamboyant coats, but he made up for it with gestures. Latelle, his wife, was cooking the breakfast porridge on a small, iron-topped brick stove built into a corner of the windowless wagon, and the air was sharp with spices. The harsh-faced woman put so many spices into everything she prepared that it was all inedible, in Mat’s estimation, yet Luca always gobbled down whatever she set in front of him as if it were a feast. He must have a leather tongue. “I expect twice as many visitors today, maybe three times as many, and tomorrow as well. People can’t see everything in one visit, and here they can afford to come twice. Word of mouth, Cauthon. Word of mouth. That brings as many as Aludra’s nightflowers. I feel almost like a ta’veren, the way things are falling out. Large audiences and the prospect of more. A warrant of protection from the High Lady.” Luca cut off abruptly, looking faintly embarrassed, as if he had just remembered that Mat’s name was on that warrant as being excluded from protection.

“You might not like it if you really were ta’veren,” Mat muttered, which made the other man give him an odd look. He put a finger behind the black silk scarf that hid his hanging scar and tugged at it. For a moment, the thing had felt too tight. He had spent a night of bleak dreams about corpses floating downstream and woken to the dice spinning in his head, always a bad sign, and now they seemed to be bouncing off the inside of his skull harder than before. “I can pay you as much as you’ll make for every show you give between here and Lugard, no matter how many people attend. That’s on top of what I promised for carrying us to Lugard.” If the show was not stopping all the time, they could cut the time to reach Lugard by three quarters at the least. More, if he could convince Luca to spend whole days on the road instead of half days, the way they did now.

Luca seemed taken with the idea, nodding thoughtfully, but then he shook his head with a sadness that was plainly feigned and spread his hands. “And what will that look like, a traveling show that never stops to give shows? It will look suspicious, that’s what. I have the warrant, and the High Lady will speak up for me besides, but you certainly don’t want to pull the Seanchan down on us. No, it’s safer for you this way.” The man was not thinking of Mat Cauthon’s bloody safety, he was thinking that his bloody shows might earn him more than Mat paid. That, plus making himself as much the center of attention as any of the performers was nearly as important to him as gold. Some of the showfolk talked of what they would do when they retired. Not Luca. He intended to keep on until he fell over dead in the middle of a show. And he would arrange it so he had the largest audience possible when he did.

“It’s ready, Valan,” Latelle said affectionately as she lifted the iron pot from the stove with a cloth protecting her hands and set it down on a thick woven mat on the table. Two places had already been set, with white-glazed plates and silver spoons. Luca would have silver spoons when everyone else settled for tin or pot metal or even horn or wood. Stern-eyed, with a hard set to her mouth, the bear trainer looked quite odd wearing a long white apron over her spangled blue dress. Her bears probably wished they had trees to climb when she frowned at them. Strangely, though, she jumped to ensure her husband’s comforts. “Will you be eating with us, Master Cauthon?” There was no welcome in that; in fact, just the opposite, and she showed no sign of turning to the cupboard where the plates were stored.

Mat gave her a bow that soured her face further. He had never been less than civil to the woman, but she refused to like him. “I thank you for the kind invitation, Mistress Luca, but no.” She grunted. So much for being courteous. He put on his flat-brimmed hat and left, the dice rattling away.

Luca’s big wagon, glittering in red and blue and covered with golden stars and comets, not to mention the phases of the moon in silver, stood in the middle of the show, as far as possible from the animals’ smelly cages and the horselines. It was surrounded by smaller wagons, little houses on wheels, most windowless and most painted just a single color with none of Luca’s extra decorations, and by wall-tents the size of small houses in blue or green or red, sometimes striped. The sun stood nearly its own height above the horizon in a sky where a sprinkling of white clouds drifted slowly, and children ran playing with hoops and balls while the showfolk were limbering up for their morning performances, men and women twisting and stretching, many with glittering, colorful spangles on their coats or dresses. Four contortionists, in filmy trousers tied at the ankle and blouses thin enough to leave little to the imagination, made him wince. Two were sitting on their own heads atop blankets spread on the ground beside their red tent, while the others had twisted themselves into a pair of knots that looked beyond untying. Their backbones must have been made of spring-wire! Petra, the strongman, stood bare-chested beside the green wagon he shared with his wife, warming up by lifting weights with either hand that Mat was not sure he could have lifted with both. The man had arms thicker than Mat’s legs, and he was not sweating at all. Clarine’s small dogs stood in a line at the steps of the wagon wagging their tails and eagerly waiting on their trainer. Unlike Latelle’s bears, Mat figured the plump woman’s dogs performed so