Let's (re)Read The Great Hunt! Chapter 29: Seanchan
Let's get right to the point: Spoilers spoilers spoilers. This book, last book, next book, every book. Don't like? Don't read. I'm in a hurry, no time for big explanations.
We have a new chapter icon! This is the very buggy helmet of the Seanchan, which will be showing up whenever the Empire is the primary driver of events of a chapter.
Reining up before the inn, his eyes went past the prisoners his soldiers held near the village well to the long gibbet marring the village green. It was hastily made, only a long pole on uprights, but it held thirty bodies, their clothes ruffled by the breeze. There were small bodies hanging among their elders. Even Byar stared at that in disbelief.
Considering how awful the Seanchan are as a nation, you really have to appreciate how the Whitecloaks manage to be so deeply morally lacking as to be the bad guys during a colonial style invasion.
Also, I guess it's appropriate we're seeing these the Seanchan get introduced in a chapter that starts on a Whitecloak, since both represent the modern equivalents of Aridhol's paranoia to a large degree. The Seanchan also somewhat end up eclipsing them as the "With friends like these..." player of the setting.
“Cut them down,” Bornhald said wearily. “Cut them down, and make sure the villagers know there will be no more killing.” Unless some fool decides to be brave because his woman is watching, and I have to make an example.
Just so you don't think that Bornhald is a reasonable authority figure in all this. He's as good as Whitecloaks get in this time, but that's still not very much.
Bornhald’s requests for information from the Sea Folk had been met with silence. Amador did not hold the Atha’an Miere in good favor, and the attitude was returned with interest.
Oh no, I can't believe that Amador's irrational xenophobia is coming to bite them in the ass now that they need the xenos. Not even Pikachu could be surprised at this.
I would kinda like to know how the disdain was born though. Do Whitecloaks disapprove of boobies? Do the Sea Folk not let Questioners kill their sailors? What ridiculous pretext have the Whitecloaks come up with?
“My Lord Captain, he—he says you are moving too many men too close to Toman Head. He says the Darkfriends on Almoth Plain must be rooted out, and you are—forgive me, Lord Captain—you are to turn back at once and ride toward the heart of the plain.”
Oh no! The authoritarians who value unquestioning loyalty have been subverted by the very enemy they wish to destroy.
Even this Jeral dude knows this order is not a great one, poor dumb bastard.
“The sins of the mother are visited to the fifth generation,” Byar quoted, “and the sins of the father to the tenth.” But he looked uneasy. Even Byar had never killed a child.
Moms sin less because they've got less taint in them, I guess.
Also JFC Byar are you seriously okay with this?
“Has it never occurred to you, Byar, to wonder why Carridin has taken away our banners, and the cloaks of the men the Questioners lead? Even the Questioners themselves have put off the white. This suggests something, yes?”
It does! But even Bornhald doesn't dare say it, even as he plots his (completely justified except for how it doesn't go far enough) treason.
“Now, young man, you will tell me everything you know about these strangers, yes? If you need to think on what to say, I will send you back out with Child Muadh to consider it.”
Again, I cannot emphasize this enough: There are no good Whitecloaks. Not even Bornhald. Thankfully, we're done with them for now.
When Seanchan ships anchored off the coast, the villagers who drew up to defend their homes were rent by lightning from the sky while small boats were still ferrying the invaders ashore, and the earth erupted in fire under their feet. Domon had thought he was hearing nonsense until he was shown the blackened ground, and he had seen it in too many villages to doubt any longer. Monsters fought beside the Seanchan soldiers, not that there was ever much resistance left, the villagers said, and some even claimed that the Seanchan themselves were monsters, with heads like huge insects.
You gotta hand it to these Toman Head guys, in a world themed around the loss and corruption of information the further from its creation it gets, they manage to get just about every detail right.
New mayors were chosen by the Seanchan, and new Councils, and any who protested the disappearances of the women or having no voice in the choosing might be hung, or burst suddenly into flame, or be brushed aside like yapping dogs.
I wonder how the Seanchan are choosing to elevate the peasantry. Are they picking successful, rich types who seem compliant or something else?
The eruptions died as quickly as they were born, spray from them blown across the deck. Where they had been, the sea bubbled and steamed as if boiling.
Say what you want about the White Tower's failings (goodness knows I'm going to), for over 3,000 years they've kept their corner of the world safe from this crap. For all their failings, they certainly haven't been useless.
Then the armored figure removed his helmet, and Domon stared. He was a woman.
Domon is of course extra panicky about this because of the prophecy that no man of woman bo-
Wait, that was that other guy. JRR Shakespeare.
If this woman wore a dress, no one would look at her twice. He eyed her and revised his opinion, that cold stare and those hard cheeks would make her remarked anywhere.
She also probably doesn't have the body shape or way of carrying herself for the expected formalwear of the west, being far more muscled and disciplined than the average noblewoman.
The two women dressed as women were coming up from the longboat, one drawing the other—Domon blinked—by a leash of silvery metal as she climbed aboard. The leash went from a bracelet worn by the first woman to a collar around the neck of the second. He could not tell whether it was woven or jointed—it seemed somehow to be both—but it was clearly of a piece with both bracelet and collar.
There is so much to say here but since the sheer horror of this isn't evident yet, let's just all be disgusted by this form of chattel slavery for a moment and then move on. I don't want to use all my good invectives right now.
And I make no claim to be of the Blood. Not yet. After Corenne. . . . I am Captain Egeanin.
Well we'll see what you get after Corenne, Egeanin. But hello for now! It's funny to think how intertwined you and Domon are even now.
“To obey, to await, and to serve. Your ancestors should have remembered.”
Yeah god forbid things go weird after a thousand years. The Seanchan are way too high on their own supply, especially when you consider the textual evidence that the invaders themselves have been pretty fully absorbed into the upper echelons of those they've invaded and are thus barely even the ancestors of the High Blood.
A dark-eyed man in his middle years, with an old scar above his eyes and another nicking his chin, his name was Caban, and he had nothing but contempt for anyone this side of the Aryth Ocean. That gave Domon a moment’s pause. Maybe they truly do be. . . . No, that do be madness.
I'm impressed Domon got him to talk at all, to be honest. I'm also wondering where else Domon can think the Seanchan are from at this point. He knows all the major naval players.
“Oh. That is the First Watcher. Not the one who sat in the chair when we first came, of course. Every time he dies, they choose another, and we put him in the cage.”
One can't help but wonder how long Falme would have lasted against this initial Seanchan strike. One also wonders why people always remember the whole "They bring order" propaganda and never remember how they enforce that order.
He guided Spray to a place at one of the docks, and wondered, while the crew tied the ship fast, if the Seanchan might buy some of the fireworks in his hold. None of my business.
Moral cowardice, Domon. Though of course, his questions already show that he doesn't really think this. He wouldn't be our POV if he did.
A hulking creature with a leathery, gray-green hide and a beak of a mouth in a wedge-shaped head. And three eyes.
Have we met before?
The Seanchan captain had something wrapped in a piece of yellow silk, Domon noted warily. Something small enough to carry in one hand, but which she held carefully in both.
Domon doesn't even try to deny to himself what she has found, because there's really no point.
“Some of them be on your side?”
Egeanin frowned over her shoulder at him, obviously puzzled.
"What other side is there other than Empire?"
The man’s hands went white-knuckled gripping his knees, and there was suddenly sweat in his voice. “I have sworn the oaths, Captain. I obey, await, and serve.”
And how many people had to be tortured and killed for him to come to this level of dedication so quickly? At least the First Watcher and their successors. Presumably more.
Domon understood why the Seanchan could allow the people as much freedom as they did. He wondered if he would have had nerve enough to resist. Damane. Monsters.
Something something monopoly on violence. Another thing that the One Power pretty handily provides, since even the "monsters" ultimately derive from its applications.
Two men appeared in the doorway at the far end of the room. One had the left side of his scalp shaved, his remaining pale golden hair braided and hanging down over his ear to his shoulder. His deep yellow robe was just long enough to let the toes of yellow slippers peek out when he walked. The other wore a blue silk robe, brocaded with birds and long enough to trail nearly a span on the floor behind him. His head was shaved bald, and his fingernails were at least an inch long, those on the first two fingers of each hand lacquered blue.
Since the Seanchan are a fictional culture, I have absolutely no regrets in pronouncing their fashion choices "ugly as sin".
Domon imitated her with alacrity. Even the High Lords of Tear would no demand this, he thought.
Something worth remembering when we meet them and have a chance to consider the things they demand that perhaps the Seanchan would not.
After the Return, new names will be called to the Blood. Show yourself fit, and you may shed the name Egeanin for a higher.
Or a lower. Just saying.
“I do collect old things, High Lord, from times past. There do be those who would steal such, did they lay easy to hand.”
Another great Aes Sedai lie. They're just so powerful.
“Unshaven dog! You speak of giving the High Lord what Captain Egeanin has already given. You bargain, as if the High Lord were a—a merchant! You will be flayed alive over nine days, dog, and—”
I have a suspicion that even in Seanchan proper, this particular rank exists in part to vent anger in place of the High Lords and Ladies while allowing them to seem merciful by not permitting such grandiose threats to be followed through. Sort of a hideously inverted version of the court jester.
Domon took one look at the girl and pulled his eyes away with a strangled gasp; her white silk robe was embroidered with flowers, but so sheer he could see right through it, and there was nothing beneath but her own slimness.
Not creepy at all. Also fun to note that it's been a mere six chapters since our last naked lady incident and while this isn't been "all ladies must be naked" it's still interesting how we went from a very chaste book one to this.
Ah well. Next time, we check back in with Rand as the plot remembers that we're only three-fifths of the way through the story and that he really shouldn't have the plot coupons just yet.
