Welcome back to my re-read, recap, and reaction to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This post will only have spoilers through the current chapter.
You can find my previous chapter recaps HERE.
Chapter 2: A New Arrival
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Rand al’Thor
The Andoran nobles get flighty again when Mazrim Taim‘s arrival is announced. The Aiel Maidens get tense. Rand declares that Taim is welcome under the amnesty Rand proclaimed for channelers. Rand needs male channelers to augment his forces for the Last Battle. Taim is ten to fifteen years older than Rand, surprising when madness usually overtakes channelers within a few years.
Taim is brought in and verbally spars with Davram Bashere while Rand fights to keep Lews Therin from taking over. He submits to Rand but Lews Therin wants him killed. Taim has a gift for Rand, one of the Seven Seals to the Dark One‘s prison, which gives him three unbroken seals. Driven by Lews Therin, Rand goes slightly mad and almost shatters the seal. Only Bashere’s intervention prevents the seal’s destruction. He gives the seal to Bashere to guard.
Rand decides to take Taim to the “farm”.
REACTION:
The reaction to Taim to start the chapter cracks me up. A room full of people – standing in a room with the Dragon Reborn, a foreign general, Aiel Maidens of the Spear, and who learned their recent short-term King was literally one of the Forsaken – start fainting and vomiting to learn Taim has arrived. The nobility is a sensitive lot in Andor.
Rand takes him in to join his collection of male channelers, but the most interesting thing preceding that is how stark raving mad Lews Therin becomes at the sight of him. He almost sounds like the voice of The Black Wind in the Ways. He hasn’t reacted that way to anyone we’ve met before. The voice seems to link Taim with Demandred in particular, though he doesn’t claim that Taim *is* Demandred. So either Rand is going even more insane or this is foreshadowing and the mad voice knows something Rand doesn’t.
The prologue opened with Demandred, btw.
The fact that Bashere – who has seen Taim before – does not recognize him feels… relevant. Taim blames it on the fact that he shaved and offers to prove it via channeling. He then gives details to Bashere about his attempted capture that only Taim should know and that seems to convince everyone. But conversations like that don’t happen for no reason from the POV of the author.
If (hypothetically) Taim is someone else, the real/missing Taim could have supplied new Taim the information before being killed.
Taim being older is also extremely relevant. Either he has channeled for a very long time, without going insane, or he wasn’t born with the spark and thus started later. The latter implies someone taught him, doesn’t it? Rand guesses though that Taim has somehow been channeling for 10 or 15 years, which makes no sense at all. It’s a GIANT red flag that Taim knows how to test men for whether they can channel. How did he learn that without being taught that? Who would have taught him except one of the Forsaken? How is he not exhibiting signs of madness after 10-15 years of channeling? How did he get one of the Seals to the Dark One’s prison?!
Rand really is a woolhead. Then again, he’s also at the point where he’s muttering unconsciously, out in the open, without being aware of it. That freaked out Taim (or whoever he really is) which is probably some work of the Pattern, keeping him a little bit nervous and unsure of himself around Rand.
[Note: 3 of the 7 Seals are broken and Rand now possesses 3 of the others.]
After Rand gives a long monologue about the history of the Forsaken, and discusses how he has killed several of them, then Taim suggests that he knows more about the One Power than Rand does and offers to teach him. Let’s assume that he isn’t Demandred or some other Darkfriend… Rand should kill him on the spot for being a moron. But I guess you can’t turn away moronic tools if the tools have enough knowledge to start teaching others and saving you the time of doing it yourself. Lews Therin’s mad raving about killing him at this point was probably just common sense, though. The more realistic answer though is that Taim is someone who knows more than Rand does, or was taught by someone who believes he knows more than Rand does.
This whole thin feels very much like an infiltration operation. And Rand is going to have the infiltrator *teach* the other male channelers. What could possibly go wrong?
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