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 5: A Different Dance
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Matrim Cauthon
Mat is enjoying a pleasant evening of drinking and dancing with the barmaids and getting teased a bit along the way. Mat tries to teach the musicians some of the songs from his memory, but they don’t play nearly as well as he remembers. Talmanes is musing aloud on how he recover from the gambling losses he has with Mat. Betse Silvin comes over to pour wine and Mat starts a conversation with her. She fiddles with his scarf and sees his hanging scar and wonders why someone would try to hang him. Mat gets her to dance, which stops her chattering for a while. When they finish Mat checks to make sure Betse is not the “Daughter of the Nine Moons“, since it was foretold that that is who he will marry.
Mat has some of his soldiers perform policing duty for the rest of his troops, different men each day, called Redarms. There are many Hunters of the Horn in town. As far as Mat knows, it is still in the White Tower. Edorion mentions a rumor that Rand was in town recently, which surprises Mat since Rand came to his room by Gateway and no one else was around. During the meeting Rand was excited because he could see a good chance that he can unite all of the nations under him before the last battle.
Mat heads toward a disturbance in the street and finds a man shaking a little boy like a dog with a rat. It is a Hunter that is upset because the peasant boy sat on his horse. Mat disables him with the butt end of his spear and then when the Hunter’s companion tries to draw his sword, disables him also. Edorion catches the boy and Mat notes that he is the ugliest boy he’s ever seen. The boy’s name is Olver and he is nine years old and horses like him. Estean comes up to Mat to announce a Sea Folk ship has come up the river. A Sea Folk wavemistress and her blademaster are aboard, but debark on the Andoran side of the river so Mat will not be able to find out what this is all about.
As evening falls, Mat is finished with his rounds and is back dancing with Betse. As the dancing finally winds down early in the morning Mat tells his officers the Band will be marching south at first light, so they better get busy preparing.
In the morning, the troops pass in review. Mat has implemented a more formal military organization to the Band, based on his memories. Even marching fast with long days, it will take a month to reach the rest of the army in Tear.
REACTION:
This is another chapter – and a very long one at that – where very little happens, but we get a lot of recapping and setting up of the plot for the ret of the book. The good thing is that when these chapters involve a Mat POV, it’s generally a good read and this was definitely no exception.
Honestly, I could probably just do chapter after chapter of Mat reminiscing about his memories of Coremanda. The way he reflects on the Ten Nations is pretty similar to the way others reflect on the Age of Legends. Once the Breaking ended, the world got back into another Golden Age… just maybe an echo of the first one. The present is multiple echoes from that original now, and it shows. I was trying to think of a character from fiction who feels like a Mat parallel and the only one I can come up with is Duncan MacLeod. Like Mat, he is also a reluctant but brilliant warrior who would rather dance and romance the ladies than fight, but always ends up in the midst of a war zone. Like Mat, he has flashback memories to days long gone. Age made Duncan more of a somber person, but young Duncan was also very rogue-ish like Mat, too.
Mat’s interactions with Betse were a lot of fun to read, especially his inability to figure out whether she was a feather-brain or whether she was very clever. He never actually got an answer and neither do the readers. I think Jordan was making a subtle comment about the way we sometimes ascribe cleverness to someone who confuses us. We also ascribe lack of cleverness to someone who confuses us. Perhaps one’s own confusion isn’t the best tool. It’s too bad that Betse was finally starting to fall for Mat just as he had to pack up and leave town. That is probably why she resisted him initially in the first place. It’s weird to think she’s going to wake up some degree of heartbreak. He’ll probably be famous enough at some point not too far down the road that she’ll hear about it and thus remember her interactions with Mat for the rest of her life.
The one thing that feels like a major plot development is that Mat takes in an orphan boy named Olver (after finding him being abused by two Hunters of the Horn.) Olver got enough page time here that he seems likely to be a recurring character going forward. I am going soft in my old age because while I definitely never really *felt* Olver’s backstory in my reading of this book, in years gone by, now I feel a lot of my feelings reading his backstory now. My boy lost his father to the Shaido and then buried his mother himself just a short time later after she got sick and died. The somewhat defensive way Olver explains to Mat that he picked a place with flowers tugs a lot on the old heartstrings.
We learn a little more from Mat about the whole set-up for the battle against Sammael. He confirms what we learned in the last chapter – namely that this entire build-up of Rand’s armies plot is a diversion and that there is another plan against Sammael to which only Rand, Mat, and Bashere are privy. I guess we’ll see where that eventually goes.
So we’re updated on the goings-on with Mat and he’s still awesome.
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