Chapter III - Village Life is not for Taija

  

  Why did the world feel like it was spinning around her? Everything hurt, from the soles of her feet right to the top of her head, but it was her head that hurt more than anything, a piercing agony ripping through it. She slowly opened her eyes, but didn't try to move, she wasn't sure she could. Where was she? Actually, what day was it? She wasn't sure. Why did it feel like she was lying in cold mud? She wouldn't do that would she?

  She blinked against the too-bright sunlight as she looked up. Wasn't she underground? She wasn't really sure, but that sounded right. A young man loomed over her and with an effort she forced her bleary eyes to focus on him. Did she know him? He reminded her a little bit of a young Antero, what a silly thought. A giggle came out sounding more like a groan. Why did he look terrified?

  The man was sweating, which didn't make much sense, she was practically shivering from the cold. Had he been running? His clothes don't make any sense either. Some kind of rough tunic and trousers in drab colours.

  It reminded her of when she'd visited the Emalli Historic Village before the War. It had been full of actors dressed just like him, showing tourists about life in a past Age. Her brain was refusing to focus on working out where she was, in fact she couldn't think about much at all through the head-splitting pain. She vaguely thought the village would be full of trollocs now though. Hadn't the Shadow taken… She couldn't quite remember. She wanted to giggle-groan at the idea of trollocs in historic costumes, but some part of her told her that that was not at all funny and her ribs hurt too much anyway.

  The man stammered something incomprehensible at her. "Jweun whef qkkj cwe kmkw?"

  She wasn't sure if she couldn't understand because he was speaking nonsense or if it was because her own brain simply wasn't working. Either way, now seemed to be a good time to pass out.

  =====

  She didn't know how long it was before she woke again, but the next time she found herself in some kind of bed. She wasn't sure where she was, but it was definitely not a medical facility. The walls were made of wood and a glassless window let daylight filter in. Everything looked… rustic would be the nicest way to put it.

  She faded in and out of consciousness over the next few days, fever dreams sending her mind on spiraling journeys of delirium.

  In rare moments of what she hoped was lucidity she remembered seeing the man from when she passed out looking worried and wiping her brow with a damp cloth. Once or twice there was an elderly lady too. She'd spooned foul tasting concoctions down her throat. She liked the man better, assuming either of them was even real.

  Eventually though Taija's periods of lucidity grew longer and she gradually regained her awareness of her surroundings. She was able to stay awake longer and her exhausted mind could start to work on finding out where she was, what happened to her.

  The next time the young man returned, coincidentally accompanied by the the elderly lady that time, they both seem excited to see she was awake, babbling incomprehensibly at her.

  Taija was able to croak out a few words of her own. "Where am I? What happened? Why are you dressed like that?" Light, she was clearly still not all there if she thought that question was important.

  The woman hesitated, obviously confused and then replied, "Id djje wdfb wdkmfw he fhw nfw ewh nkn wekfmk."

  Taija could tell from the tone that the woman was asking questions. Her body language also said she was used to being obeyed. That didn't help either of them though as Taija had no idea what she was saying. Some of it sounded vaguely familiar, like it was on the edge of comprehension, but Taija just couldn't grasp it.

  Could she have suffered a brain injury? Should she be questioning everything she perceived now? No. She was sure there was a rational explanation for her situation. There were communities out there that rejected modern technology and isolated themselves from the world. She must have ended up in one somehow. A Traveling accident? A gateway that brushed against the wrong kind of ward? It still didn't make sense though!

  The two strangers were having a worried sounding conversation over her in their strange language and Taija was getting more and more agitated although she was too weak to actually do anything.

  Even in isolated communities where they exclusively spoke their own dialects they would still recognise the Common Tongue. They'd have called for help or have taken her to a hospital. Taija's still blurred vision took in the decrepit wooden walls of the shack they seemed to have put her in. This was more like some kind of roleplaying group that wouldn't break character, which made absolutely no sense.

  Taija tried to reach up, to get their attention. "Please, I am an Aes Sedai, if you can just contact…" She trailed off, her energy fleeing her. They seemed to react to the words Aes Sedai, but she was still met by the same incomprehension.

  As she got more frantic in her attempts to speak the woman whispered soothing words and pushed a cup to her lips. Before Taija knew what she was doing she was drinking the strange… tea? Yes it must be tea that the woman was pouring into her mouth.

  It didn't take long for sleep to claim her once again, despite the increasingly tense conversation going on over her head.

  =====

  It took a while for lucidity to properly return to Taija, but over the next few weeks she slowly recovered and started trying to work out where she was and what had happened to her.

  It was pretty obvious that something must have gone badly wrong, although what it was she still wasn't sure. As for where she was, she was completely flummoxed. Nothing seemed to make sense, not even Taija's most outlandish theories about where she could have ended up properly fit what she was seeing.

  Taija also knew she was definitely not feeling like herself. She thought she might have had a bad concussion and she felt weak as a kitten. Worse, the first time she'd tried to embrace the Power, a couple of weeks after she first woke up, the pain spearing through her head had been so bad that she'd been left lying in bed with silent tears of pain and frustration streaming down her cheeks.

  However, her very nature rebeled against staying in bed, especially when she was in such a strange situation. She desperately wanted to push herself to get out and at least regain some sense of control over her circumstances. She knew she needed the rest though.

  The elderly lady who'd been helping the young man look after her also made sure that Taija stayed in bed. She might be some kind of crazy homesteader, but she was still formidable. Normally Taija wouldn't put up with it, but in her current state there wasn't much she could do against the woman's unyielding insistence.

  Given that she was stuck in bed anyway, she did all that she could to improve her situation. The first step was to turn the young man and older woman's babbling into something more comprehensible. Taija had spent the last five years of her life fighting a desperate war for the survival of her very civilisation, but she was no intellectual slouch before that. So she turned her intellect towards learning the language that those people spoke. It wasn't physics, but it was still an intellectual problem.

  It was humiliating having to communicate through pointing and making basic sounds, but needs must. Taija quickly realised that their language seemed to be related to the Common Tongue. It also seemed to be simpler, which was helpful, although she did realise that the simplicity might simply be because her hosts were talking down to her.

  It didn't take her long to learn that the owner of the 'rustic' building she was in and her rescuer was called Aleksi. The stern, elderly woman was Elena. She seemed to be some kind of a healer. Certainly she was no doctor or nurse, but she had many of their attitudes and was very determined to dispense various herbs to Taija.

  Taija also noticed that she both expected and received a lot of deference from Aleksi. He seemed to refer to her by a title of some kind although Taija struggled to work out what it meant. Still, she made sure to be as respectful as possible to her too. Not that she'd be disrespectful to Aleksi, or anyone else. He'd looked after her, despite apparently living in crushing poverty, and regardless she was pretty much at his mercy. Given the weirdness of these people she prefered not to think about that.

  Once she was awake, but still immobile Taija received a few more visitors. Apparently she was somewhere named Ramshorn, which meant absolutely nothing to her. Elena supervised those visits and, as far as Taija could tell, it was just curious rubber necking. No one spoke the Common Tongue and they all wore the same rough, drab clothes. Could it be some kind of strange cult?

  More pleasant were the visits she started to get from the young children of the village. At first they weren't left alone with her, Elena sternly watching them, but when she didn't seem to mind and presumably because she didn't seem very dangerous it wasn't long before they were coming alone.

  It was nice having happy, innocent kids playing around. The contrast to the days of the War were stark. It was also actually very good for Taija's language skills. The children thought her difficulties in making herself understood were hilarious, but explaining things to her seemed to quickly become a sort of game for them and her progress with their language moved forward in leaps and bounds.

  By the time Taija felt able to get out of bed and totter short distances she'd learnt enough of the language to communicate on a basic level. She wasn't going to be discussing abstract concepts for a while, but at least she could function.

  =====

  As Elena walked through Ramshorn, returning the respectful nods from the people she passed, her mind turned to the village's newest arrival.

  It was good to see the woman Aleksi had found back on her feet. She'd been worried that young Taija would die when Aleksi first came running to her, but the girl was strong and she'd pulled through.

  Aleksi's refusal to elaborate on where he'd found her was more than irritating, but the man had always been stubborn. If she hadn't known better, Elena would have thought the young woman had been thoroughly beaten, but there was no one within leagues of Ramshorn who would do such a thing to her and it didn't explain her illness. Nor her perplexing lack of knowledge of the Common Tongue. Elena could admit she wasn't the most worldly woman, but she had once traveled as far as Caemlyn and she had never met anyone who couldn't speak the Common Tongue.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Oh well, she shrugged to herself with a wry smile. Taija was harmless and Aleksi certainly seemed taken with her. Like so many young men, Aleksi dreamed of nobly rescuing maidens in distress and it seemed like he'd actually found one, Light knew where. She'd find that out eventually of course, sooner or later he'd crack.

  Still, this Taija seemed like a sweet enough woman. She might be a year or two older than Aleksi, but the village could do with new blood.

  =====

  Once Taija was moving again, she insisted on helping Aleksi with his farm, doing what light tasks her gradual recovery allowed. At the same time she started working harder on finding out where she was and what happened.

  When she was able to walk around Aleksi's village (indeed called Ramshorn) it only fed the growing anxiety she was feeling in her belly. This wasn't some kind of cult or weird roleplay situation. It was just too convincing and too odd.

  No one spoke the Common Tongue, there was no hint at all of modern technology, no modern fabrics no nothing. Even more perplexing there were no contrails from sho-wings in the air. Even with the reduction in civil aviation because of the War, there were few places in the world where she would never see anything in the sky.

  Taija even stayed up one clear night staring into the sky, hoping to see the familiar sight of one of the four Great Stations as they orbited the planet. There was nothing though. At least the constellations still seemed familiar, glittering brightly in a night sky unmarred by light pollution.

  While Taija was indulging her curiosity, Aleksi and Elena were clearly extremely curious about her too. However, she was more than a little reticent in how much she said to them. There was simply too much she didn't know and, while they'd been nothing but kind, well learned paranoia made her careful.

  Aleksi seemed rather shy and occasionally even a bit scared of Taija, Elena on the other hand had no issues with questioning her. In a way it was lucky that she was struggling so much to communicate. Her awkward, almost childlike conversations, made it much easier to be vague with her answers.

  Neither of them had ever heard of Taija's home city, Adanza, or any of the other Great Cities in fact. It was hard to believe anybody in the world wouldn't have heard of them; however, isolated they were.

  She did, however, manage to establish that Ramshorn was in Andor. That would have been much more helpful to her if she had any idea where Andor was. A lot of back and forth let her establish that its biggest city was named Caemlyn and there was a single ruler there, she thought a queen but maybe a president? It was definitely a woman based on the grammatical forms. There were apparently other big cities, but they didn't seem to know much more than names.

  More careful interrogation told Taija that Caemlyn was maybe three weeks' travel away. Obviously they couldn't be talking about travel by car, Taija could easily cross a continent in three weeks that way. However… even on foot that would still be hundreds of kilometres.

  Taija's worries only grew with that realisation. There was no way she could possibly not have heard about a community like this that covered such a large area. It didn't make any sense!

  Her frustration was added to by her lack of vocabulary. It was driving her up the wall and however fast she learnt their language she still felt her grasp of it was deeply inadequate.

  =====

  Another couple of weeks found her feeling almost back to normal. Taija wasn't back in the fighting shape that she wanted to be in, but she was finally feeling more like herself.

  She'd also managed to get herself to the level where she could say she had a working knowledge of their language. Ironically they also seemed to call it the Common Tongue, which was a ridiculous conceit for their backwards community. Taija couldn't say she was completely fluent in the language, but at least she could understand most things the villagers were saying.

  She was hugely grateful for the way the villagers had accepted her into their village. They'd been nothing but kind to her, although she'd had to bite your tongue a few times when Elena had called her girl and ordered her around. Taija was fairly sure Elena was well under half her age. However, they didn't seem to know she was an aes sedai, in fact she wasn't totally sure they even know anything about aes sedai at all.

  Either way, while Taija felt they'd earned some measure of trust with their treatment of her, she thought that, given how little she really knew about them, some things were best kept hidden. She hadn't tried to ask about the War or the One Power, she didn't know how they'd react and her ability as a channeler was a huge trump card to have in reserve if it turned out they were darkfriends after all.

  Of course it was easier to say that when she hadn't been able to channel without almost incapacitating herself from the pain.

  Without knowing what was wrong with her and a proper medical examination Taija knew it was dangerous to try to channel. However, it was pretty clear that she wasn't going to be seeing a doctor any time soon. She knew the addictive nature of saidar as well as anyone and it was been a growing struggle resisting the urge to just embrace it and hold it for a while, even with the risk of inadvertently burning herself out hovering over her.

  Eventually Taija decided she couldn't hold herself back any longer. She reached out to the Power, slowly, carefully going through basic visualisation exercises that had been second nature to her for well over a century. Tentatively she reached out to the glowing warmth of saidar and embraced it, channelling just a trickle of it into a glowing ball of light.

  There was no pain, everything was just as it should be. She shivered happily, luxuriating in the wonderful feel of saidar within her, and draw more of the power. More and more she pulled, drawing in a deep, deep river of saidar's sweetness, just holding it in herself until she started to feel the warning pinpricks that told her she was at the limit of what she could safely channel.

  After another moment Taija released the Power with a soft sigh, a hole in her spirit that she hadn't even realised was there now healed. A second later she was kicking herself for her idiocy. These people might not know anything about the One Power, but any woman, or myrddraal within kilometres of her might have sensed that display, like a lighthouse spearing through the night. She'd need to conceal her ability and make sure to only use inverted webs.

  =====

  Thankfully no one seemed to have noticed Taija's channelling, certainly there was no reaction over the next couple of days.

  Reassured by that she started to use saidar a bit more to make her life easier. Even with all her experience and rigid discipline, it was hard to stop herself. She was a researcher not a farmer and while the years of war had hardened her, digging through fields or hauling water from a well was never going to be something she'd aspired to doing.

  Taija also started to become restless. Now that she was fully healed again the smallness of the world she was living in started to chafe. She missed her books, writing, educated debates.

  Taija didn't miss the War at all, but the Light needed her, there were people she cared about. She'd done her best not to think about it, but she needed to know what was happened to her friends, her comrades, her love. With how strange everything was she'd been avoiding doing anything about it, but the Shadow must still be out there somewheree, killing, torturing, reveling in its depravity and she was sitting there using saidar to plant seeds when no one was looking.

  Taija knew she'd been avoiding talking about the future and so had Aleksi, but her conscience won't let her keep doing it forever. So the next day she cornered him outside his house.

  "Aleksi, I am always grateful for all that you have done for me." Her face was serious and his normal cheerful smile slipped slightly. "But I cannot stay with your charity for all the times. I am better, fully healthy, I must know what happened to me, how I come to be here. I know you do not want to talk of it, but this is important." Taija knew she hadn't quite expressed herself the way she wanted, but she thought he understood.

  He definitely wasn't smiling after that, but he eventually nodded at her earnest expression. "Yes… You're right, I should have told you sooner," he smiled hopefully, "but I had wished we could avoid it. I'm…" He seemed lost for words. "You've been a blessing coming into my life and I had hoped we could forget about…"

  Aleksi sighed and then shrugged and continued, "but you have a right to know. I don't know how to explain… but I can just show you, this evening, after the day's work, I'll take you."

  Taija was distracted for the whole day and struggled to focus on her work, menial labour holding even less appeal than before. When the evening finally arrived, Aleksi was there as promised. It was a silent, awkward walk to a field that she hadn't realised he farmed.

  Looking at the neatly ploughed furrows in the dimming light, Taija quickly saw there was something sticking out the dirt in the middle of the field. It looked like someone had dug around it.

  For a second she stood, just staring. Was that…? Before she knew it she found herself running towards it, a horrifying suspicion growing in her chest.

  She didn't need to get close before she could properly see what it was. The smooth, metallic shape of an open stasis box, sticking out of the ground it had been buried in.

  Taija slowed to a walk as she got closer. Why did she feel dizzy? Her legs were trembling and the world seemed to spin around her until she paused, resting her hands on her thighs and breathing heavily. After a moment she was able to master herself again and straighten up. A glance back showed her that Aleksi was hanging back, looking worried.

  She almost felt like she could remember… As she got closer to the open box, saw the papers strewn inside it the memories crashed back into her mind.

  She remembered. Desperate flight back to the town hall. The basement. Antero. Channeling. Crashing darkness.

  After a moment Taija realised she'd sunk to her knees, tears running down her cheeks as she stared at it. She wasn't sure how long she knelt there, but eventually she was startled from her reverie by the feel of Aleksi's hand on her shoulder. She was too out of sorts to even react to the unexpected touch.

  "Are you alright?" His voice was filled with concern.

  Taija didn't say anything. The stasis box looked inert, completely untouched, but she wasn't stupid enough to assume that meant anything. Quickly embracing saidar, ignoring the way her mind whirled from the shock, she put together the lightest of diagnostic webs and let it flow over the box - nothing.

  There were still drifts of paperwork in the stasis box, secret information that needed to be kept from the Shadow, but nothing that would tell her anything about what went wrong.

  Shrugging off Aleksi's hand Taija stood up and tottered over to the stasis box on unsteady feet before putting a trembling hand onto it, where the control screen was. Nothing happened. Tentatively she sent a thread of spirit and fire into it. Still nothing, it was completely dead.

  Aleksi was still a little distance away, watching her with concern when Taija turned back to him. "What happened?" She demanded, a bit more sharply than she meant to.

  He hesitated and then began to speak, words spilling out. "It it was like in the stories, I was ploughing the field and I found this, so I dug it out. I didn't know what it was, I still don't… But I thought it was something ancient, perhaps it had treasure in it. When I tried to open it there was some kind of witchcraft, Aes Sedai business." Her heart skipped a beat when he mentioned Aes Sedai.

  Aleksi continued, oblivious to Taija's reaction, "there were lights and a voice speaking in a strange language." He hesitated before continuing in a rush, "the same language you speak. I thought I'd disturbed some ancient curse, but then it opened and you came out. You were hurt and you just passed out right there. I grabbed you and brought you back to my house and called for the Wisdom and that's it. I haven't touched this box since, I don't want to get entangled in aes sedai business!" He made a gesture that she thought might be meant to ward off evil.

  Behind her impassive expression Taija's mind was whirring desperately trying to work out what could have happened.

  A stasis box was an incredibly complex piece of technology, something only a real specialist could really understand. She'd been holding the Power, Antero was probably channelling saidin and there was the darkfriend channeler coming after her, perhaps even one of the Forsaken. Maybe she channelled instinctively as the roof fell in, she wasn't sure, but there must have been some kind of power interaction with the stasis box.

  Taija wondered how long she'd been in there for, what kind of interaction there might have been with the very fabric of reality. These people, their language, their technology level like something from the distant past of the dimly remembered First Age, the lack of Standing Flows, no mention of the War.

  She realised with growing dread that she might have been in that box for more than a few days, more than a few years even. She needed to find out what happened! To find her friends, her fiancé! How long could it have been?

  "Taija? Are you alright?" She heard Aleksi tentatively ask and she realised she'd been standing there, blank faced and lost in thought for far too long.

  "I am sorry." She quickly said. "I was just… thinking." One thing was clear, she couldn't stay in Ramshorn. She was never suited for the village life, let alone their backwards version of it. She needed answers. When was she? What had happened over the last years, or was it centuries? It was obvious that those answers wouldn't be forthcoming in Ramshorn.

  As she walked back to Aleksi's house she started planning. Taija the invalid was done and Taija Kosola Miranen, the Aes Sedai was back.

  As a first step she was going to need to go somewhere with more information. This Caemlyn was the only place that made sense. It seemed to be the closest real city and maybe there would be answers there.

  Taija had no money and her grasp of their language was more than a little shaky, but she'd make do. If only she had a better idea of where she was trying to go she could just Travel there, but oh well. They always did say walking was good for the soul.