Getting Your Feet Dry

Dawn broke over Tar Valon in segments, or perhaps it was just the Tower’s reaching shadow that poured night into the wide avenues and broad plazas.  The figure swathed in blankets standing at the window was invisible, and at any rate, his six-foot-and-change frame would never be as dominating as that of the White Tower.  Serene and radiant, carved of a substance known as elstone, it stood proudly on its island, drawing eyes from travelers even days away.  Days, mused Akadias din Starwind, rubbing his sleep-deprived eyes, that he had not known were his last.  He should have known, should have guessed that he was but trading one prison and one death sentence for another, but he had been…naive.  In his innocence, the Tower had seemed a new beginning.  From within, with the perspective born of a week of study, he knew he had been wrong.  The only new beginning to be found in Tar Valon was the beginning of his end.

The first day, he had been kept in a narrow white closet, told that “the Mistress” would see him, and indeed, she had.  The white room had driven Akadias to distraction, and he had been eager to flee it.  Now, it was his haven.  Only, of course, the word haven was inflected heavily with sarcasm: it was less a home and more a cage.  He had lived in cramped spaces, so its tiny size was no bother to him, but…it was still.  And not in merely the physical sense, but it was also quiet: there was no wind, no weather, no sea.  He slept too long without the morning cry of the sea birds, and he could not find sleep when he tried for the lack of rocking under him.  The world was crazy, and wrong.  Even when someone had done him a seeming kindness by pointing out the tall flags of harbored ships, they had only demonstrated how far off the ground he had to live.

Automatically, his fingers clenched in the windowsill as he leaned out, his eyes searching the pearlstreaked horizon for a sign that the sea moved on.  Tar Valon was a wide delta in the River Erinin, which was hardly a sea, and from higher floors, one could see the haze of land across its muddy brown currents.  This was no place for an Atha’an Miere, bound on each side by land, cut off from the width and depth of the sea – but then again, he was no longer Atha’an Miere.  Exile, that was their word here.  Exile was a new word, but it was one he was familiar with, now: it was the shorelapper word for having no home save the one provided for you by strangers.  He was learning other new words, too, but none mattered so much as that one.  Another word he was coming to hate was ‘schedule’ – that seemed to be a word akin to “torment.”  When you began the day exhausted, being herded from task to task – and none the promised classes that he had been inveigled with – seemed akin to an afternoon spent with the Hand of the Light.

Well, he had another word for the Aes Sedai.  Codswallop.

“You! You, boy, what do ye be doing outside of your room?” a drawling voice demanded, and as Akadias glanced backward, hitching his blanket closed around his nudity, a panoply of answers presented themselves and were summarily decided against.  For all his faults, he was not actively suicidal, and the swaying fringe on the shawl about the woman’s shoulders was Red.  His first two days here, he had considered how the Ajahs described the women in them, and while he had come up with arbitrary classifications for the Blue – talking until blue in the face – and the Gray – putting you half to sleep with their lectures on protocol and procedure – the Red had defied him, until he’d heard one.  Shouting, her face an unattractive shade of puce, he had considered her the strongest proof yet in his theory, and wondered how he would be classified.  He couldn’t be Green, as there wasn’t a sea available that made him nauseous, but he supposed he could be Yellow – too frightened to leave this first safe bastion for the Black Tower.

He’d made the mistake of voicing this theory aloud, and a howling young man had set him to rights.  Now, he was just as wary of the Red Ajah as before, but he had far better reason.  While the Novice halls were patrolled by Accepted, there were no male Accepted, and the Accepted were as forbidden from the male Novice Galleries as the males were the female.  A pity, he considered, and not for the first time, either.  The small Taraboner woman sized him up, seeming nonplussed that her eyes had to travel up – and up – before they reached his.  “Faugh!” she declared, wrinkling her nose.  “You do be stinking!”

He blushed and shifted his feet, and she noticed just how much bare leg peeked out of his blanket.  “Do you no even be decent?” he was harangued, and his blush deepened.  He backed away, seeking the safety of his cubicle, but she chased him – remaining a decorous distance between them, of course, and with her handkerchief pressed to her nose.  Unsure whether to be offended or even more worried, he opted for the latter, and scrabbled for his doorknob.  Cracking his thick skull on the doorframe again, he cried out, and when the door shut between them, he unleashed his fury upon it, earning little more than a resounding rattle and a painfully stubbed toe.  Clearly, through the door, he heard, “See that you do be taking a bath before you do be reporting for chores!” and when he dared poke his head back out, the Red sister had moved on, presumably to attack some other hapless male.  Feeling a twinge of pity for the next lad to cross her path, Akadias let his blanket fall back to his bed.  The one set of chores he had completely ingrained were those regarding the cleanliness of his living space, for there was no room for slovenliness on a raker.  However, there was also no room for a bathtub aboard one.

Anyway, the fool bathing in saltwater deserved the swimmer’s itch – or worse, the scaliness of salt drying to the skin.

He was not going to hunt the patrolling Aes Sedai down again just to ask where – or how – one took a bath, and so, he prepared to explore.  He slept in his skin, as he always had, and so, as he bent to the creaking wooden chest that held a bundle of assorted things given him at his…induction…he tried to puzzle out which would best serve him now.  Reasoning that he must require a cloth, soap, soda for his teeth, and the largest piece of battered white fabric that was neither sheet nor blanket, he leaned back on his heels.  Collecting his requirements, he eased out of his room – looking every direction for that blasted Aes Sedai – and then, he began his search.  Naked as he’d been born, he moved through the halls of identical doors, not noticing how far he’d gone astray as his search radius widened.  It was the sound of splashing that caught his attention at last, and as he elbowed the door open, his fabric loincloth low on his hips, he was unsurprised to discover the bathing room was full of women.  They liked the facilities aboard ship, too.  It was not uncommon to be chased out by a woman wishing to bathe, but the rule was rather matter of fact.  If you were unwed, and she was as well, then bathing was allowed.  At any rate, their method was quick, and he honestly did not think he had ever seen more than went on display for anyone once the brown hulk of land disappeared behind the raker’s sails.

Well, he had, but certainly not aboard ship.

A shriek sounded, and a red-cheeked, red-haired woman barreled past him, her bottom twitching most prettily as she fled.  The remaining women were akin to a stirred antheap.  The familiar sallow complexion of a Domani retreated behind a tall screen, and a shocked and pale face under wet hair took him in with wide blue eyes, her hands on a cloth plastered over her chest by the iron bands of her arms.  A Borderlander glanced back over her shoulder at him and frowned, opening her mouth as if to say something, but she shut it again as he studied her face.  As the Atha’an Miere were scrutinized in every port, he turned his eyes on her, drinking in the odd placement of bones and skin that made her so many wheels distant from the sea.  He reached the closest tub and as he was folding the towel neatly to the stool beside it, the door banged open, startling him upright. He reached for the towel again, but it was too late.  The red-cheeked woman had returned, her face tear-streaked, and she’d brought a friend.

Although, she certainly didn’t have an iota of friendliness on her face for him.

The other women in the room filed out behind the Accepted’s banded skirts, most only partially dressed.  With little chance to admire them, Akadias arched an eyebrow at the Accepted, his mouth firing off the opening salvo in this latest land war.

“I was commanded to take a bath,” he protested.

“In the women’s bathing room?  A likely tale!” she shot back, her skirts twitching from the pressure of her clutching handhold.

“It does not matter.  I will stand guard on the room from the outside,” she emphasized, her glare dark with disdain, falling toward the half-concealing bit of toweling that was all that kept him off display, “and you will bathe and then, you will…”  He frowned.  What had he done wrong this time?  Was this how the Tower would be every day?  One woman to tell you to do a thing, or else, and another to catch you at it and say you could not, and here was the consequence?

“Light, just be glad I am not telling the Mistress of Novices,” the Accepted snapped, turning on her heel.  “But if I catch sight of you in the Novice halls again, you can rest assured she will hear of your filthy-minded antics!  And…this afternoon! When your assigned chore time is.  You’ll be sweeping paths in the Garden, to contemplate the many sorts of filth that occlude your mind.”  Seeming pleased with herself, she swept out, closing the door in a gust and a crash.

Akadias stewed in his bath, finding no pleasure in coming clean, wondering how it was again that for the crime of being a stranger in a very strange land, he was punished.  For the sake of the filth in his mind, he was to sweep paths in the Gardens!  No matter how he protested that this was bathing in the manner to which he was accustomed, although it was a lie anyway, he was wrong: the more he spoke, the stormier the Accepted’s mien had become.  “And be glad,” he mocked the door, “that I do not tell the Mistress of Novices.”

Tell her, Akadias wanted to argue: tell her that I did what I am accustomed to!  What crime could there be in that?

But three days’ survival in the White Tower had taught him one new custom: take what you are given, and pay for it.  It argued and went across the grain of twenty-eight years of Atha’an Miere law and tradition, and it left him with more questions than anyone had answers for – or time to explain the few he had.  Why was it wrong for him to continue living as he had before, when it was allowed for others to live in the way that they had been raised and were accustomed to? Did some places breed better people? Were there more behaviors he would be punished for? Was he considered inferior?

He could answer that one for himself, and it seemed that the answer was yes.

Once dressed, he was escorted to the head gardener, a small and decrepit man with a full and glorious head of white hair.  For all that he was on dry land, a broom felt the same in the hands now as it had then.