Reading The Wheel of Time: Perrin Embraces Pain in <i>Crossroads of Twilight</i> (Part 18)

This week in Reading the Wheel of Time, we’re covering Chapter 27 of Crossroads of Twilight, in which Perrin reaches a personal crossroads of sorts, and faces the question of What Must Be Done to save his Faile.

Perrin supervises the So Habor merchants as the townspeople winnow the weevil infested barley. It is a touch affair, given how oddly the inhabitants of So Habor are behaving, but it helps that they are outside the town walls while doing the work and loading the carts. Perrin finds that, for some reason he can’t understand, his own display of unconcern seems to settle the nerves of his cart drivers and soldiers. As Perrin watches the pile of cleaned bags begin to grow, Berelain joins him, reminding him that he can’t save everyone, and that it was Lord Cowlin’s duty to look after his people. Perrin asks if Annoura has any idea what is going on here, and Berelain replies that Annoura is not as forthcoming as Berelain once believed her to be and rides off. Having overheard, Annoura informs Perrin that, even as a ta’veren, he is only a thread in the Pattern, as she is, and even as the Dragon Reborn is. Perrin remarks that sometimes people don’t want to be woven into the Pattern without any say, and she only asks if he thinks that matters.

Seonid keeps asking to stay behind until Perrin eventually threatens to send the Wise Ones to bring her back if she stays. When Masuri comes up to him, Perrin asks if she wants to stay as well. She only responds that there are many ways to serve, and that one cannot always serve in the way one might wish.

They are having what passes for lunch when one of the Cha Faile, Latian, discreetly reports to Perrin that Balwer’s “friend” is away but will be back in town in a day or two, and Balwer asks permission to catch up with Perrin in a few days. Perrin hesitates, thinking of Faile, then passes the message for Balwer not to wait too long.

Perrin is ready to leave an hour later, taking the Two Rivers men and the loaded carts with him, and leaving Kireyin and the Ghealdanin soldiers to guard the rest and escort them back when they are fully loaded. As soon as Perrin is through Neald’s gateway, he kicks Stayer towards the camp.

He senses tension even before Dannil reports that the Maidens brought in five Shaido, and that Arganda took them to put them to the question, and that Masema is with them. Perrin goes to Arganda, pushing past both Ghealdanin soldiers and Masema’s men to the front of a crowd, where he sees four Aiel lying bound on the ground and a fifth stretched out naked, with Hari—the prophet’s man who likes to collect people’s ears—putting hot coals on the Aiel ’s body while the screams into a gag. Without thinking, Perrin knocks the coals away, hitting Hari in the process and hurting his hand.

Masema explains that Aiel don’t feel pain the way other men do, and you have to be willing to do more to make them talk, while Arganda and Aram both remind Perrin that they must do what they have to. Perrin interrogates the prisoner about Faile, but the man only sings about washing the spears, and around him Perrin feels the judgment of everyone looking on. Aram pleads for Perrin to leave, as Perrin looks around, viewing the faces of his allies and remembering the words that they have all said to him.

The man grunts in pain and deliberately sprays Perrin in the face with the resulting gout of blood, but he still doesn’t smell afraid. Perrin instructs Seonid to heal the man, and then explains that there will be no more hot coals, only questions, and if the Aiel refuse to answer or their answers do not match, everybody loses something. Further, he promises that if they continue to hold out even after they have lost both hands and both feet, he will find a town to leave them in where people will take pity on them and treat them as beggars.

Even Masema was staring at him as if he had never before seen the man standing there with an axe. When he turned to go, Masema’s men and the Ghealdanin alike parted in front of him as though to let a whole fist of Trollocs through.

Perrin walks out of the camp and through the snow-covered trees, unaware of how far he has walked, until at last he hurls the axe, hard, into the trunk of a tree. Then he sits down on a rock and informs the nearby, hidden Elyas that he knows Elyas is there.

Elyas asks if Perrin threw the axe away because he was starting to like it. Perrin answers that it isn’t about liking the axe but about how he feels more alive when he’s in battle, more alive than he feels at any other time except when he’s holding Faile. He doesn’t know what he would be if he started to feel that alive doing what he just did to the Aielman, but he is sure he wouldn’t be a man Faile would want to come back to.

Elyas explains that when your heart starts pounding it quickens your blood and heightens your senses, so of course you feel more alive when facing danger and battle, and that doesn’t mean that you like it. Perrin wishes he could believe that.

Eventually Aram and Neald arrive to tell Perrin that the Aielmen talked, probably because they were more frightened of Perrin’s threat of leaving them to beg than anything else, but that unfortunately, none of them have seen anyone matching Faile’s description, or the Queen or the other captives. Elyas remarks that there are thousands of Shaido and that this was a slim chance, while Aram suggests killing the captives, so that they can’t escape and warn the other Shaido. Perrin replies that the prisoners can be guarded.

He leaves the axe stuck in the tree as he returns to camp.

There he is found by Balwer and an unkempt, bearded man that Perrin doesn’t immediately recognize… until he catches his scent. Balwer seems surprised that Perrin recognizes Tallanvor, explaining that he found the young man in So Habor and that Tallanvor may have some allies for Perrin. After hesitating for a moment, Tallanvor explains that there are fifteen thousand Seanchan, including a large number of Taraboners riding under the Seanchan banner, and that they have at least a dozen damane with them. They are also hunting the Shaido, and although it would be like taking help from the Dark One, Tallanvor would take the Dark One’s help to free Maighdin.

I’m curious if there is anything going on between Berelain and Annoura besides the fact that she and Masuri were both spotted visiting Masema. Not that secret visits to the Prophet aren’t enough by themselves to warrant Berelain’s hostility, but Berelain is canny enough that I would expect her to keep that hostility a secret from Annoura, lest Annoura suspect that Berelain knows what she’s been up to.

But perhaps Berelain decided to confront her advisor, and Annoura either refused to explain anything or gave an answer that Berelain found unsatisfactory. As we well know, Aes Sedai do what they do for their own reasons, and rarely feel like they owe others any kind of explanation. It would certainly make sense if Annoura and Masuri wanted to keep tabs on someone as powerful and unhinged as Masema. Plus Annoura is a Gray, so she might have been interested to see if she could do anything from a mediation angle, especially since Perrin vetoed getting rid of the guy.

But whatever the exact nature of the conflict between them is, Annoura and Berelain give Perrin very similar advice about So Habor. Berelain tried to assuage any guilt Perrin might be feeling by reminding him that he can’t save everyone and pointing out that Lord Cowlin is the one who abandoned his duty. Annoura took a more expansive perspective when she reminded Perrin that individual threads can’t choose how they are woven into the Pattern—not even if they are ta’veren, or the Dragon Reborn himself. 

Every time a character makes a comment like this, I am returned to the question of how free will works (or doesn’t) in the universe of The Wheel of Time. It’s a concept I’ve explored in other posts so I won’t get back into it now, but what I’m particularly interested in this week is how the idea of being a thread in the Pattern, of your path being chosen and directed for you by a higher power, can either be a very comforting thought or a very distressing one, depending on what happens to you and what your general perspective on life is.

In our own world we have similar philosophies, such as the Christian idea of “God’s plan,” or the more secular and vague “everything happens for a reason.” Many people do find such a perspective comforting, because it means that their losses or pain aren’t meaningless. Others, however, might find the idea that someone, or something, deliberately engineered their suffering to be a patronizing or even cruel idea, no matter if it is part of some greater design. In Perrin, we see the latter: Faile is his world, and the needs of the Wheel or the Pattern can’t really factor into his perspective. This is why, I think, he loses his empathy and sense of guilt around what is happening in So Habor. His sense of the world narrowed to one single loss, his sense of self to one single need. He doesn’t choose between So Habor and Faile, doesn’t consider letting Seonid stay before deciding that he has to choose the option of saving Faile instead of the option of helping So Habor. For him, there are no options, only one goal.

There are two thoughts that Perrin pairs together even before he’s confronted with the question of how to get information from the Shaido prisoners. The first is that a man “does what he can,” which is about accepting human limitations and releasing oneself from those responsibilities you can never hope to fill. The second is that a man “does what he has to,” which is about finding the strength to do difficult and unpleasant things in the service of important goals. The two ideas are somewhat related, but ultimately are very different ideas, and it’s interesting that Perrin seems to be treating them as one concept. 

It reminds me very much of Rand, I think, who has already made the mistake of equating strength with hardness, of believing that he must make himself into a cold, inhuman thing in order to have the strength to carry out his duty as the Dragon Reborn. He learned that he couldn’t always afford to make his decisions based on his kinder emotions—emotions like compassion and empathy and love and sorrow—so he decided that he had to get rid of those emotions, rather than learning how to balance emotion and judgement, and how to be guided without being controlled by his feelings.

Perrin is embodying that struggle differently, but I think he is suffering from the same confusion, for lack of a better word, that Rand is. So many people are pushing Perrin, telling him how to be a lord and how to be a leader, and giving him advice based on their own experiences as lords and generals and leaders of men and women. Perrin has found almost all of it distasteful, and has resisted as much as he can, giving in only when he felt he had no other choice. And that is what the chopping off hands incident feels like, to me. It feels like Perrin giving in to what he believes everyone has been telling him all along. And its heartbreaking to watch.

It’s interesting that Perrin assumes that Berelain has never lost a night’s sleep over sentencing a man to death, that he doesn’t think in this moment about how Arganda is driven by almost the same emotion as Perrin is, that he takes Masema’s (very racist) judgment about the Aiel to heart even as he recognizes the man’s madness and hatred of everything. You can see him starting to buy into the concept that he has been resisting, that violence and torture are necessary and that true leaders don’t suffer from grief or attacks of conscience when they do what has to be done. It never occurs to Perrin to take the advice and judgments of his companions as helpful information that he can explore and interpret in his own way, that advice is meant to be helpful, and not a trap.

Of course, in a way, Perrin is trapped. He can’t go back to the person he was, and even if he was willing to abandon all the responsibilities he’s accidentally acquired and run off to live in the woods somewhere or get a blacksmithing job in a remote village where no one will ever find him, there’s still the whole ta’veren problem to be considered, with all its Pattern-mandated ties to Rand. So it’s not really surprising that Perrin felt, when confronted with the need for information from the Shaido prisoners, that his only choices were to resist the trap or to step into it fully, just as Rand seems to have accepted that all his fears about what being the Dragon Reborn would will definitely come true.

Which brings us back to the fact that Perrin sees the Pattern and the nature of fate as a curse, not as a reassurance.

And now Perrin has thrown his axe away, which I think was the right decision, not because of the morality of what he has or has not done with it, but because it has been a source of distress for him since he first picked it up. Perhaps Perrin has made the axe too much of a symbol for violence. In no way do I think he is renouncing violence entirely by throwing away the axe, but perhaps discarding the symbol will be helpful in his journey towards finding some kind of equilibrium with the part of him that abhors violence and the part of him that believe he must stand up and defend those who cannot defend themselves. And that he is willing to do just about anything if it’s about protecting his wife.

The best moment of all, however, is the conversation between Perrin and Elyas. I’m always keeping Jordan in mind when I’m reading these books, his past, and what he has said about his intentions in writing the book. In chapter 27, I felt Jordan’s presence, the weight of his experience in the army, more than I have in any single chapter so far. I remember coming across a post from his blog in which he talked about one of the nicknames he gained in Vietnam after a particularly intense feat of gunnery—the Iceman. It was a reference to the Eugene O’Neil play, in which the Iceman is Death, but I thought of the story when Neald remarked that he didn’t think Perrin’s blood was quite cold when cut of the Shaido warrior’s hand.

Jordan wrote about hating the nickname, but being unable to shake it, and while there are aspects of that story that we also see in Rand—particularly in how he describes how cold of a person he was, and how he metaphorically killed and left behind that man before returning to civilian life. But I think there is a lot of that experience in this moment for Perrin, as well, because we are seeing how people interpret what he did, and label him accordingly. Arganda thinks Perrin’s blood is so hot he should be given time to cool off before anyone talks to him. Neald sees him as being ice cold, like an Asha’man, and is pleased, or at least amused, about it. Everyone sees Perrin differently now, even Masema, and he can never go back to the person he was before he committed that action.

And I suspect, going forward, that this action will change everything and also nothing for Perrin. It’s a huge moment in a personal sense, and its going to inform how he sees himself and engages with his capacity for violence and willingness to do everything for Faile—whether for good or ill, or a mix of both remains to be seen. On the other hand, as intense and immoral the action was, in the grand scheme of the terrible things that have been done by characters in this world, from the “good guys” like the Aes Sedai to the bad guys like the Whitecloaks and Seanchan and Shaido, to the Evil-capital-E of the Forsaken and other Darkfriends, it’s not exactly the worst thing we’ve seen. The Shaido were still going to be tortured, burned by coals and worse, and over a longer period of time, and with Masema and his goons in charge might have ended up just as mutilated, or worse, than one man losing a hand and the rest remaining untouched. That hardly makes what Perrin did morally okay, but it does… lend some perspective, I think.

I was so happy when Elyas showed up again, and boy does Perrin need him. Perhaps more than he needs Faile, though Perrin wouldn’t agree with that assessment.

And what touched me most was Elyas sitting down beside Perrin, without judgment or a desire to influence Perrin’s decisions one way or another, to say that he understands, and to provide the perspective of someone who has been where Perrin is, and who has survived and come out of it without losing his empathy or his humanity. And I wonder if it was healing for Robert Jordan to write out that part of heat of battle is the awareness of life that comes from the nearness of death, and to have an older character offer the words;

I wonder if he wished, as he wrote this chapter, there had been someone to tell him that, when he was a young soldier. I wonder if in some ways, he felt like he was Elyas, speaking to Perrin, and to the younger version of himself who feared what violence and war might make of him.

This is one of the greatest powers of storytelling, the ability to relate to, and even to heal, real life trauma through fiction and art. And although I have been fortunate enough in my life to never face the kind of violence that the characters in this story faced, that their creator faced, I still felt drawn to, and deeply moved by, the truths that Jordan was exploring here.

It’s this kind of exploration that has kept Perrin as one of my favorite characters throughout the series.

We’ll be moving on to catch up with Mat next week, covering chapters 28 and 29, and then there will be a (slightly awkward) two-week break for the holidays before we finish up with chapter 30 and the Epilogue. It’s hard to believe that book ten is almost over, but here we are!