The Cauldron

from Destiny: Chapter 10, pg. 98 [American PB] (Rhapsody talking to Achmed)

 

“It’s easy to criticize something you think of as a weakness, something you’ve never had.  But if you’ve never been in love yourself, never had to balance it against duty, never been totally lost in it, you can’t---“

 

“Stop!”  The word came forth so violently enough to make Rhapsody drop the remains of the grass stalk.  “How do you know what I have had?  How do you know I can’t understand from personal experience how weak love can make you?  How dare you presume that I would condemn anyone even (Ashe), without having walked that path myself.”

Achmed’s eyes finally turned on her, and they were blazing with dark light.  “I know everything about the promises of youth.  I know that stupid surrender, that need to save the unsavable that love makes you believe is possible…”

 

First off, according to spell check, “unsavable” is not even a word (and I copied it exactly).  I know its dialogue so it is technically okay, but maybe Tinkerbolg  should pay EH a visit just in case.

 

 

from Elegy for a Lost Star: Chapter 22, pg. 225 [American edition PB] (Jal’asee referring to Achmed)

 

The Sea Mage sighed.  “Many years ago, when he was a fairly young man, a terrible tragedy occurred at Quieth Keep, the place of scholarship I mentioned…,” he said solemnly.  “Someone he apparently cared a great deal for---perhaps several such someones---did not survive the mishap...”

 

 

Now back to the inane point that I was going to make; I don’t think Achmed’s love was ever returned and therefore his argument is misused.  I believe that it was just some mega crush that he had on some girl back at Quieth Keep where he use to learn about the healing lore.

 

I mean what are the odds that there are three girls in the universe that find Achmed’s true face attractive.  First there is Rhapsody, next there is Achmed’s Lover, and that’s it.  Everyone else belongs to the “Artists (or readers) Who Can’t Draw (or envision) Achmed Ugly Enough” Club---including me (who sees him as a dirt smudged, eye-patch wearing Brad Pitt).  There’s no chance that the girl he fancied would have even remotely found his appearance acceptable---unless she was blind (like Laura Dern in that Cher movie Mask).   

 

Or unless Achmed was a totally different person back then, and his charming personality was so winning that girls overlooked his “unfinished” face that only a God could love.  Maybe he was even a smooth talking, woman juggling “player” back in day, that would explain the “perhaps several such someones” line in the above quote.  But I seriously doubt that; I believe the only feelings he ever experienced were merely heavy doses of infatuation.  And unlike Rhapsody (whose love is actually returned by Ashe), I believe that Achmed has never experienced a love that was ever reciprocated---so he can know nothing of it, thereby rendering his argument (in the first quote) as moot.

 

(* disclaimer: I haven’t read The Assassin King yet so if any of the above theories is forthrightly debunked by it (or debunked by common sense), I apologize.)

So you're saying that all females of all species are shallow?  That in all the world only two women could possibly fall for a guy like Achmed just because he's ugly?  That's a strong indictment of women.  I don't buy it.

Newsflash: Ugly people fall in love all the time.  Sometimes they even get married.  Occasionally they manage to hook up with very attractive people.

Go to WalMart and take a look around.  They're ubiquitous.

If Achmed says he knows love, then he knows love.  We don't question Achmed.

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"Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

The Dread Pirate Roberts wrote:

If Achmed says he knows love, then he knows love.  We don't question Achmed.

Love isn’t the only thing that Achmed seems to know about.  He seems also to have an extraordinary insight into the minds of women.

 

 

from Requiem for the Sun: Chapter 33, pg. 406 [American PB] (Achmed referring to Esten)

 

“She’s a tool sl*t, he thought in amusement, watching as she scrawled the list.  Like Rhapsody and her weakness for clothes.  Every woman he had known, no matter how formidable, had a secret obsession for something.”

 

Who’s doing the stereotyping now?  LOL!  I bet if Rhapsody ever heard Achmed call her a “clothes sl*t,” she would totally kick his butt!!!  And knowing of his pretension to bring up Rhapsody’s old profession, I’m sure he would actually call her that to her face.

 

Sam I am. wrote:

 

He seems also to have an extraordinary insight into the minds of women.

 

 

 

I guess men as well...he doesn't seem to have a problem with Grunthor's penchant for collecting and naming his weapons, and erm, other kinds of trophies. 

 

And, by the way, Tink, speaking of renaming, it looks like Sam I am has bestowed a new moniker on you.

 

Edit to add:   Nevermind, it looks like he corrected it.  He seems to value your beauty sleep along with the rest of us! lol

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"No, they're not real, but thanks for noticing"! WoW Dwarf Female /silly
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The Dread Pirate Roberts wrote:

Ugly people fall in love all the time.  Sometimes they even get married. 

And then they (unfortunately) reproduce...

 

Sam I am. wrote:

 I believe that it was just some mega crush that he had on some girl back at Quieth Keep

I don't know...I think I'm going to have to go with DPR on this one.  (See below)

 

Sam I am. wrote:

I mean what are the odds that there are three girls in the universe that find Achmed’s true face attractive. 

 

Then how do you explain his huge fan base? 

 

Sam I am. wrote:

There’s no chance that the girl he fancied would have even remotely found his appearance acceptable---unless she was blind 

 

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha  (you're mean)  hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha  (and I like it....as long as it's not TOO mean towards Achmed lol)

 

Sam I am. wrote:

I believe the only feelings he ever experienced were merely heavy doses of infatuation.  I believe that Achmed has never experienced a love that was ever reciprocated

 

Here is your answer (and can I just add a BOO YA to it  haha j/k)

The Dread Pirate Roberts wrote:

If Achmed says he knows love, then he knows love.  We don't question Achmed.

 

You said it, DPR!!  I couldn't have said it better myself!

Sam I am. wrote:

Love isn’t the only thing that Achmed seems to know about. 

You are correct.  In fact, I seem to recall a quote from Rhapsody when Achmed and Rhaps go visit what becomes the Duchy of Elysian for the first time.  Achmed rowed the boat over the lake and then struggled to tie it up, and the quote was something like, "This was the first time Rhapsody had ever seen Achmed not being the master of the task he set out to do, and she enjoyed it immensely."  (I will find the exact quote when I get home...)

So you see, Achmed is a man of MANY, MANY talents, with the apparent one exception of boat-tying...which is understandable given his dislike of that particular element...

Actually, I think Achmed knows about love all to well, but not from his past.  He gets taught a harsh lesson about it in the present; every time he sees Rhapsody and Ashe together it is a revelation unto him.

 

I think deep within that fortified armor of the heartless assassin lies a jealous heart.  I believe Achmed is envious of the way Ashe can be so openly affectionate towards Rhapsody.

 

If Achmed ever did something affectionate towards the Duchess (that didn’t involve some epic life and death battle right before or after it) she might react like it was an international incident or something.  Or she would most assuredly think the kind gesture was a part of some sort of subterfuge.

 

I think once you get pigeon holed into being seen in a certain way, it is mighty difficult to break out of that typecast in the eyes of others.

 

Ahhh…  to love someone and not be able to express it in any publicly discernable way must be brutal.  Poor Achmed.

Achmed has only felt jealousy where Ashe is concerned. So I think over-all that he is not a 'jealous' man. But he was jealous, in some way, of Ashe, from the moment Ashe came to Ylorc for the first time. I don't remember the exact quote or page, but it said that Achmed was feeling jealousy, but he didn't recognize the emotion, because he had never truly felt it before. And in a way, Ashe is jealous of Achmed, too, when it's about Rhapsody. I don't see why either man has to be jealous of the other, since they are both awesome in their own right, but it's a vicious circle.

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"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
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Wow!
Yeah. Achmed knowing a lot about love...Let's think about this for a moment. Remember that one little moment in time where Achmed bit Rhaps head off for assuming he didn't know about love? Remember what he said? He said "love makes you weak" practically. Some where along that line. In truth, it kinda does. Love makes you just as weak as it makes you strong, though. Ashe seems to gain most of his kick *** strength when Rhaps is in trouble, don't you think? Achmed seems to be more acute to the ways of love then we think, he just unbalances the understanding of it by giving a bias opinion of what it is. If Achmed had said "Love is wonderful and it makes me happy with glee" then we would shake our heads, go to the time editor and look feverishly for the place it time where Achmed knocked the poop out of his head. But when Achmed says "Love is this that and the other thing that clearly defines my 'Bad-***-ness'" then we, as a whole feel happy and content with that answer. I don't think Achmed knows EVERYTHING about love, but nor do I think anyone does. He knows what he knows, and as DPR intellectually put it "We don't argue with Achmed".

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A flower that blooms at night is a blessing to the day that follows
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I think that he does know about love. I believe that he truly loves Rhapsody, even though he has a bad way of showing it.

I thought it was sad when he watched Rhapsody and Ashe get married in Requiem for the Sun. I hope that after Ashe takes his ethereal form [probably in the VERY distant future] that Rhapsody and Achmed get together. I've felt a connection between them from the beginning.

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Avi by Wallflower *used with permission*

Achmed must know something about love.  At least, he has experienced some of the negative sides of it.  He feels that it makes someone weak, likely because it made him weak.  I think the fact that he refused to tell Rhapsody about his "sleeping child" shows that he hasn't truly learned to cope with whatever happened rather than a lack of experience with the emotion.  He's still locked in survival mode - block the emotions and push on.  While it's possible that Rhapsody is his sleeping child (after all, Achmed admitted to feeling like she addled his mind, giving him false hope and blinding him to the inevitability of the F'dor Tsoltan catching up to him in Rhapsody (p. 600)), I suspect that he is referencing an earlier love, one that he lost hundreds, maybe thousands of years before on Serendair.

After all, in Elegy the Seren ambassador, Jal'asee, told Rhapsody that Achmed had lost someone, perhaps several someones, that he cared for deeply in the accident at Quieth Keep.  Maybe Achmed’s first love died there.  Maybe this is the person he tried to save with his blood lore and failed (mentioned in Elegy when Elynsynos talks Achmed through the healing side of his blood lore.)  In the scene from Elegy, Achmed mentions his attempt not going so well the last time he tried healing. When Elynsynos tells him that this time he had love as an incentive, he gets angry at her presumption that love wasn’t involved the last time.

So yeah, Achmed knows love.  Unfortunately for him, he’s now fallen for Rhapsody, something that is both poorly timed (with Rhapsody’s love for Ashe, manipulated as it is by the original Meridion) and throws a kink in his survival practices (no ties.)

Achmed's Lover wrote:

Sam I am. wrote:

Love isn’t the only thing that Achmed seems to know about. 

You are correct.  In fact, I seem to recall a quote from Rhapsody when Achmed and Rhaps go visit what becomes the Duchy of Elysian for the first time.  Achmed rowed the boat over the lake and then struggled to tie it up, and the quote was something like, "This was the first time Rhapsody had ever seen Achmed not being the master of the task he set out to do, and she enjoyed it immensely."  (I will find the exact quote when I get home...)

So you see, Achmed is a man of MANY, MANY talents, with the apparent one exception of boat-tying...which is understandable given his dislike of that particular element...

Maybe Achmed is just really immersed in everything BUT love, and gave up on it after he tried to heal someone at Quieth

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"And then upsp'ke the Fairy Queen,
'Tam Lin, if I had known,
I would have pulled out both your eyes,
To give you eyes of stone.'"

Good point eternal light, I too think that Achmed tried to heal someone (a woman) and failed in doing so because he was more tied to the other coin-side of his blood gift besides the other. Or maybe he just wasn't trained enough (kind of like how Rhapsody didn't receive the last bit of her training and missed out on some of the benefits of that) and failed in healing him/her. I think maybe the "several such someone’s," were perhaps his classmates, fellow Dhracians being trained by Father Halphasion, who, of course, died in the destruction of Quieth Keep. But what’s got me is, did Achmed LEAVE before the destruction of Quieth Keep, and learned about it later from Jal'asee, or was there to witness the destruction of the royal academy of scholarship and was in no power to stop it?

P.S: I also heard that perhaps Quieth Keep was burned in a fire of some sort, did I hear correctly?

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"Fire-child, star-child, what is kel? Sword-bearers, song-weavers, that is kel."
-The Faded Sun trilogy by C.J.Cherryh.
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I'm re-reading Destiny right now, and this passage jumped out at me as a potential clue as to whom Achmed's lost love might be:

Destiny p 98 American Paperback:

Achmed's eyes finally turned on her, and they were blazing with dark light.  "I know everything about the promises of youth.  I know that stupid surrender, that need to save the unsavable that love makes you believe is possible.

I bolded the "save the unsavable" portion, because in Destiny, much of the action is focused on identifying the F'dor's host - and that is done through the blood of the demonspawn: the unsavables which Achmed agrees not to harm because he needs this blood to track the F'dor to its host.  

Could it be that Achmed's unknown love became an unwilling F'dor host and he was presented with the agonizing decision and responsibility to track and destroy her...though because he wasn't fully educated in the thrall ritual, merely killed her body, setting the F'dor's spirit free to corrupt another?  Might that also be why he didn't fully resist Tsoltan's command to go into the Vault...might he have thought by entering the Vault, he could redeem her soul? 

 

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"No, they're not real, but thanks for noticing"! WoW Dwarf Female /silly
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Whoa! Now that is a very interesting theory! And it does make sense. What would have broken his heart more than that? I really think you are on to something there, Krin. That's a very interesting line of thinking you have going.

I can't believe no one has ever even thought of that (as far as I remember). How did we read that and not make the connection? Once you said it, it seems to fit so perfectly. Good find, K!

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I really like this theory :D It not only makes sense of why Achmed is so mad at Jal'asee, but also goes on to explain why he was in the Vault ( besides the fact that the F'dor had his name and wanted to get him to let them out.) It also might explain why he had that key and didn't use it for evil, but kept it anyway....

Oh, and if Quieth Keep was destroyed by fire....that really sounds like a F'dor did it, doesn't it?

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"And then upsp'ke the Fairy Queen,
'Tam Lin, if I had known,
I would have pulled out both your eyes,
To give you eyes of stone.'"

It does eternal light. But I can't remmember where I heard it from...

---

"Fire-child, star-child, what is kel? Sword-bearers, song-weavers, that is kel."
-The Faded Sun trilogy by C.J.Cherryh.
My Avatar is my cat, Niun.
*Keeper of The Dictionary of All Symphony of Ages Knowledge & The Ven Polypheme Dictionary Guide.*