They woke to the smoke of Mole’s Town burning.
Atop the King’s Tower, Jon Snow leaned on the padded
crutch that Maester Aemon had given him and watched the grey plume
rise. Styr had lost all hope of taking Castle Black unawares when
Jon escaped him, yet even so, he need not have warned of his
approach so bluntly. You may kill us, he reflected, but no one will
be butchered in their beds. That much I did, at least.
His leg still hurt like blazes when he put his weight on it.
He’d needed Clydas to help him don his fresh-washed blacks
and lace up his boots that morning, and by the time they were done
he’d wanted to drown himself in the milk of the poppy.
Instead he had settled for half a cup of dreamwine, a chew of
willow bark, and the crutch. The beacon was burning on Weatherback
Ridge, and the Night’s Watch had need of every man.
“I can fight,” he insisted when they tried to stop
him.
“Your leg’s healed, is it?” Noye snorted.
“You won’t mind me giving it a little kick,
then?”
“I’d sooner you didn’t. It’s stiff, but
I can hobble around well enough, and stand and fight if you have
need of me.”
“I have need of every man who knows which end of the spear
to stab into the wildlings.”
“The pointy end.” Jon had told his little sister
something like that once, he remembered.
Noye rubbed the bristle on his chin. “Might be
you’ll do. We’ll put you on a tower with a longbow, but
if you bloody well fall off don’t come crying to
me.”
He could see the kingsroad wending its way south through stony
brown fields and over windswept hills. The Magnar would be coming
up that road before the day was done, his Thenns marching behind
him with axes and spears in their hands and their
bronze-and-leather shields on their backs. Grigg the Goat, Quort,
Big Boil, and the rest will be coming as well. And Ygritte. The
wildlings had never been his friends, he had not allowed them to be
his friends, but her . . .
He could feel the throb of pain where her arrow had gone through
the meat and muscle of his thigh. He remembered the old man’s
eyes too, and the black blood rushing from his throat as the storm
cracked overhead. But he remembered the grotto best of all, the
look of her naked in the torchlight, the taste of her mouth when it
opened under his. Ygritte, stay away. Go south and raid, go hide in
one of those roundtowers you liked so well. You’ll find
nothing here but death.
Across the yard, one of the bowmen on the roof of the old Flint
Barracks had unlaced his breeches and was pissing through a crenel.
Mully, he knew from the man’s greasy orange hair. Men in
black cloaks were visible on other roofs and tower tops as well,
though nine of every ten happened to be made of straw. “The
scarecrow sentinels,” Donal Noye called them. Only
we’re the crows, Jon mused, and most of us were scared
enough.
Whatever you called them, the straw soldiers had been Maester
Aemon’s notion. They had more breeches and jerkins and tunics
in the storerooms than they’d had men to fill them, so why
not stuff some with straw, drape a cloak around their shoulders,
and set them to standing watches? Noye had placed them on every
tower and in half the windows. Some were even clutching spears, or
had crossbows cocked under their arms. The hope was that the Thenns
would see them from afar and decide that Castle Black was too well
defended to attack.
Jon had six scarecrows sharing the roof of the King’s
Tower with him, along with two actual breathing brothers. Deaf Dick
Follard sat in a crenel, methodically cleaning and oiling the
mechanism of his crossbow to make sure the wheel turned smoothly,
while the Oldtown boy wandered restlessly around the parapets,
fussing with the clothes on straw men. Maybe he thinks they will
fight better if they’re posed just right. Or maybe this
waiting is fraying his nerves the way it’s fraying mine.
The boy claimed to be eighteen, older than Jon, but he was green
as summer grass for all that. Satin, they called him, even in the
wool and mail and boiled leather of the Night’s Watch; the
name he’d gotten in the brothel where he’d been born
and raised. He was pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin,
and raven’s ringlets. Half a year at Castle Black had
toughened up his hands, however, and Noye said he was passable with
a crossbow. Whether he had the courage to face what was coming,
though . . .
Jon used the crutch to limp across the tower top. The
King’s Tower was not the castle’s tallest—the high,
slim, crumbling Lance held that honor, though Othell Yarwyck had
been heard to say it might topple any day. Nor was the King’s
Tower strongest—the Tower of Guards beside the kingsroad would be
a tougher nut to crack. But it was tall enough, strong enough, and
well placed beside the Wall, overlooking the gate and the foot of
the wooden stair.
The first time he had seen Castle Black with his own eyes, Jon
had wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to build a castle
without walls. How could it be defended?
“It can’t,” his uncle told him. “That is
the point. The Night’s Watch is pledged to take no part in
the quarrels of the realm. Yet over the centuries certain Lords
Commander, more proud than wise, forgot their vows and near
destroyed us all with their ambitions. Lord Commander Runcel
Hightower tried to bequeathe the Watch to his bastard son. Lord
Commander Rodrik Flint thought to make himself King-beyond-the-Wall.
Tristan Mudd, Mad Marq Rankenfell, Robin
Hill . . . did you know that six hundred years
ago, the commanders at Snowgate and the Nightfort went to war
against each other? And when the Lord Commander tried to stop them,
they joined forces to murder him? The Stark in Winterfell had to
take a hand . . . and both their heads. Which
he did easily, because their strongholds were not defensible. The
Night’s Watch had nine hundred and ninety-six Lords Commander
before Jeor Mormont, most of them men of courage and
honor . . . but we have had cowards and fools
as well, our tyrants and our madmen. We survive because the lords
and kings of the Seven Kingdoms know that we pose no threat to
them, no matter who should lead us. Our only foes are to the north,
and to the north we have the Wall.” Only now those foes have gotten past the Wall to come up from
the south, Jon reflected, and the lords and kings of the Seven
Kingdoms have forgotten us. We are caught between the hammer and
the anvil. Without a wall Castle Black could not be held; Donal
Noye knew that as well as any. “The castle does them no
good,” the armorer told his little garrison. “Kitchens,
common hall, stables, even the towers . . . let
them take it all. We’ll empty the armory and move what stores
we can to the top of the Wall, and make our stand around the
gate.”
So Castle Black had a wall of sorts at last, a crescent-shaped
barricade ten feet high made of stores; casks of nails and barrels
of salt mutton, crates, bales of black broadcloth, stacked logs,
sawn timbers, fire-hardened stakes, and sacks and sacks of grain.
The crude rampart enclosed the two things most worth defending; the
gate to the north, and the foot of the great wooden switchback
stair that clawed and climbed its way up the face of the Wall like
a drunken thunderbolt, supported by wooden beams as big as tree
trunks driven deep into the ice.
The last few moles were still making the long climb, Jon saw,
urged on by his brothers. Grenn was carrying a little boy in his
arms, while Pyp, two flights below, let an old man lean upon his
shoulder. The oldest villagers still waited below for the cage to
make its way back down to them. He saw a mother pulling along two
children, one on either hand, as an older boy ran past her up the
steps. Two hundred feet above them, Sky Blue Su and Lady Meliana
(who was no lady, all her friends agreed) stood on a landing,
looking south. They had a better view of the smoke than he did, no
doubt. Jon wondered about the villagers who had chosen not to flee.
There were always a few, too stubborn or too stupid or too brave to
run, a few who preferred to fight or hide or bend the knee. Maybe
the Thenns would spare them. The thing to do would be to take the attack to them, he thought.
With fifty rangers well mounted, we could cut them apart on the
road. They did not have fifty rangers, though, nor half as many
horses. The garrison had not returned, and there was no way to know
just where they were, or even whether the riders that Noye had sent
out had reached them. We are the garrison, Jon told himself, and look at us. The
brothers Bowen Marsh had left behind were old men, cripples, and
green boys, just as Donal Noye had warned him. He could see some
wrestling barrels up the steps, others on the barricade; stout old
Kegs, as slow as ever, Spare Boot hopping along briskly on his
carved wooden leg, half-mad Easy who fancied himself Florian the
Fool reborn, Dornish Dilly, Red Alyn of the Rosewood, Young Henly
(well past fifty), Old Henly (well past seventy), Hairy Hal,
Spotted Pate of Maidenpool. A couple of them saw Jon looking down
from atop the King’s Tower and waved up at him. Others turned
away. They still think me a turncloak. That was a bitter draft to
drink, but Jon could not blame them. He was a bastard, after all.
Everyone knew that bastards were wanton and treacherous by nature,
having been born of lust and deceit. And he had made as many enemies
as friends at Castle Black . . . Rast, for one.
Jon had once threatened to have Ghost rip his throat out unless he
stopped tormenting Samwell Tarly, and Rast did not forget things
like that. He was raking dry leaves into piles under the stairs
just now, but every so often he stopped long enough to give Jon a
nasty look.
“No,” Donal Noye roared at three of the Mole’s
Town men, down below. “The pitch goes to the hoist, the oil
up the steps, crossbow bolts to the fourth, fifth, and sixth
landings, spears to first and second. Stack the lard under the
stair, yes, there, behind the planks. The casks of meat are for the
barricade. Now, you poxy plow pushers, NOW!” He has a lord’s voice, Jon thought. His father had always
said that in battle a captain’s lungs were as important as
his sword arm. “It does not matter how brave or brilliant a
man is, if his commands cannot be heard,” Lord Eddard told
his sons, so Robb and he used to climb the towers of Winterfell to
shout at each other across the yard. Donal Noye could have drowned
out both of them. The moles all went in terror of him, and
rightfully so, since he was always threatening to rip their heads
off.
Three-quarters of the village had taken Jon’s warning to
heart and come to Castle Black for refuge. Noye had decreed that
every man still spry enough to hold a spear or swing an axe would
help defend the barricade, else they could damn well go home and
take their chances with the Thenns. He had emptied the armory to
put good steel in their hands; big double-bladed axes, razor-sharp
daggers, longswords, maces, spiked morningstars. Clad in studded
leather jerkins and mail hauberks, with greaves for their legs and
gorgets to keep their heads on their shoulders, a few of them even
looked like soldiers. In a bad light. If you squint.
Noye had put the women and children to work as well. Those too
young to fight would carry water and tend the fires, the
Mole’s Town midwife would assist Clydas and Maester Aemon
with any wounded, and Three-Finger Hobb suddenly had more spit
boys, kettle stirrers, and onion choppers than he knew what to do
with. Two of the whores had even offered to fight, and had shown
enough skill with the crossbow to be given a place on the steps
forty feet up.
“It’s cold.” Satin stood with his hands tucked
into his armpits under his cloak. His cheeks were bright red.
Jon made himself smile. “The Frostfangs are cold. This is
a brisk autumn day.”
“I hope I never see the Frostfangs then. I knew a girl in
Oldtown who liked to ice her wine. That’s the best place for
ice, I think. In wine.” Satin glanced south, frowned.
“You think the scarecrow sentinels scared them off, my
lord?”
“We can hope.” It was possible, Jon
supposed . . . but more likely the wildlings
had simply paused for a bit of rape and plunder in Mole’s
Town. Or maybe Styr was waiting for nightfall, to move up under
cover of darkness.
Midday came and went, with still no sign of Thenns on the
kingsroad. Jon heard footsteps inside the tower, though, and Owen
the Oaf popped up out of the trapdoor, red-faced from the climb. He
had a basket of buns under one arm, a wheel of cheese under the
other, a bag of onions dangling from one hand. “Hobb said to
feed you, in case you’re stuck up here awhile.” That, or for our last meal. “Thank him for us,
Owen.”
Dick Follard was deaf as a stone, but his nose worked well
enough. The buns were still warm from the oven when he went digging in
the basket and plucked one out. He found a crock of butter as well,
and spread some with his dagger. “Raisins,” he
announced happily. “Nuts, too.” His speech was thick,
but easy enough to understand once you got used to it.
“You can have mine too,” said Satin.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” Jon told him. “There’s no knowing
when you’ll have another chance.” He took two buns
himself . The nuts were pine nuts, and besides the raisins there
were bits of dried apple.
“Will the wildlings come today, Lord Snow?” Owen
asked.
“You’ll know if they do,” said Jon.
“Listen for the horns.”
“Two. Two is for wildlings.” Owen was tall,
towheaded, and amiable, a tireless worker and surprisingly deft
when it came to working wood and fixing catapults and the like, but
as he’d gladly tell you, his mother had dropped him on his
head when he was a baby, and half his wits had leaked out through
his ear.
“You remember where to go?” Jon asked him.
“I’m to go to the stairs, Donal Noye says. I’m
to go up to the third landing and shoot my crossbow down at the
wildlings if they try to climb over the barrier. The third landing,
one two three.” His head bobbed up and down. “If the
wildlings attack, the king will come and help us, won’t he?
He’s a mighty warrior, King Robert. He’s sure to come.
Maester Aemon sent him a bird.”
There was no use telling him that Robert Baratheon was dead. He
would forget it, as he’d forgotten it before. “Maester
Aemon sent him a bird,” Jon agreed. That seemed to make Owen
happy.
Maester Aemon had sent a lot of
birds . . . not to one king, but to four.
Wildlings at the gate, the message ran. The realm in danger. Send
all the help you can to Castle Black, Even as far as Oldtown and
the Citadel the ravens flew, and to half a hundred mighty lords in
their castles. The northern lords offered their best hope, so to
them Aemon had sent two birds. To the Umbers and the Boltons, to
Castle Cerwyn and Torrhen’s Square, Karhold and Deepwood
Motte, to Bear Island, Oldcastle, Widow’s Watch, White
Harbor, Barrowton, and the Rills, to the mountain fastnesses of the
Liddles, the Burleys, the Norreys, the Harclays, and the Wulls, the
black birds brought their plea. Wildlings at the gate. The north in
danger. Come with all your strength.
Well, ravens might have wings, but lords and kings do not. If
help was coming, it would not come today.
As morning turned to afternoon, the smoke of Mole’s Town
blew away and the southern sky was clear again. No clouds, thought
Jon. That was good. Rain or snow could doom them all.
Clydas and Maester Aemon rode the winch cage up to safety at the
top of the Wall, and most of the Mole’s Town wives as well.
Men in black cloaks paced restlessly on the tower tops and shouted
back and forth across the courtyards. Septon Cellador led the men
on the barricade in a prayer, beseeching the Warrior to give them
strength. Deaf Dick Follard curled up beneath his cloak and went to
sleep. Satin walked a hundred leagues in circles, round and round
the crenellations. The Wall wept and the sun crept across a hard
blue sky. Near evenfall, Owen the Oaf returned with a loaf of black
bread and a pail of Hobb’s best mutton, cooked in a thick
broth of ale and onions. Even Dick woke up for that. They ate every
bit of it, using chunks of bread to wipe the bottom of the pail. By
the time they were done the sun was low in the west, the shadows
sharp and black throughout the castle. “Light the
fire,” Jon told Satin, “and fill the kettle with
oil.”
He went downstairs himself to bar the door, to try and work some
of the stiffness from his leg. That was a mistake, and Jon soon
knew it, but he clutched the crutch and saw it through all the
same. The door to the King’s Tower was oak studded with iron.
It might delay the Thenns, but it would not stop them if they
wanted to come in. Jon slammed the bar down in its notches, paid a
visit to the privy—it might well be his last chance—and hobbled
back up to the roof, grimacing at the pain.
The west had gone the color of a blood bruise, but the sky above
was cobalt blue, deepening to purple, and the stars were coming
out. Jon sat between two merlons with only a scarecrow for company
and watched the Stallion gallop up the sky. Or was it the Horned
Lord? He wondered where Ghost was now. He wondered about Ygritte as
well, and told himself that way lay madness.
They came in the night, of course. Like thieves, Jon thought.
Like murderers.
Satin pissed himself when the horns blew, but Jon pretended not
to notice. “Go shake Dick by the shoulder,” he told the
Oldtown boy, “else he’s liable to sleep through the
fight.”
“I’m frightened.” Satin’s face was a
ghastly white.
“So are they.” Jon leaned his crutch up against a
merlon and took up his longbow, bending the smooth thick Dornish
yew to slip a bowstring through the notches. “Don’t
waste a quarrel unless you know you have a good clean shot,”
he said when Satin returned from waking Dick. “We have an
ample supply up here, but ample doesn’t mean inexhaustible.
And step behind a merlon to reload, don’t try and hide in
back of a scarecrow. They’re made of straw, an arrow will
punch through them.” He did not bother telling Dick Follard
anything. Dick could read your lips if there was enough light and
he gave a damn what you were saying, but he knew it all
already.
The three of them took up positions on three sides of the round
tower.
Jon hung a quiver from his belt and pulled an arrow. The shaft
was black, the fletching grey. As he notched it to his string, he
remembered something that Theon Greyjoy had once said after a hunt.
“The boar can keep his tusks and the bear his claws,”
he had declared, smiling that way he did. “There’s
nothing half so mortal as a grey goose feather.”
Jon had never been half the hunter that Theon was, but he was no
stranger to the longbow either. There were dark shapes slipping
around the armory, backs against the stone, but he could not see
them well enough to waste an arrow. He heard distant shouts, and
saw the archers on the Tower of Guards loosing shafts at the
ground. That was too far off to concern Jon. But when he glimpsed
three shadows detach themselves from the old stables fifty yards
away, he stepped up to the crenel, raised his bow, and drew. They
were running, so he led them, waiting,
waiting . . .
The arrow made a soft hiss as it left his string. A moment later
there was a grunt, and suddenly only two shadows were loping across
the yard. They ran all the faster, but Jon had already pulled a
second arrow from his quiver. This time he hurried the shot too
much, and missed. The wildlings were gone by the time he nocked
again. He searched for another target, and found four, rushing
around the empty shell of the Lord Commander’s Keep. The
moonlight glimmered off their spears and axes, and the gruesome
devices on their round leathern shields; skulls and bones,
serpents, bear claws, twisted demonic faces. Free folk, he knew.
The Thenns carried shields of black boiled leather with bronze rims
and bosses, but theirs were plain and unadorned. These were the
lighter wicker shields of raiders.
Jon pulled the goose feather back to his ear, aimed, and loosed
the arrow, then nocked and drew and loosed again. The first shaft
pierced the bearclaw shield, the second one a throat. The wildling
screamed as he went down. He heard the deep thrum of Deaf
Dick’s crossbow to his left, and Satin’s a moment
later. “I got one!” the boy cried hoarsely. “I
got one in the chest.”
“Get another,” Jon called.
He did not have to search for targets now; only choose them. He
dropped a wildling archer as he was fitting an arrow to his string,
then sent a shaft toward the axeman hacking at the door of
Hardin’s Tower. That time he missed, but the arrow quivering
in the oak made the wildling reconsider. It was only as he was
running off that Jon recognized Big Boil. Half a heartbeat later,
old Mully put an arrow through his leg from the roof of the Flint
Barracks, and he crawled off bleeding. That will stop him bitching
about his boil, Jon thought.
When his quiver was empty, he went to get another, and moved to
a different crenel, side by side with Deaf Dick Follard. Jon got
off three arrows for every bolt Deaf Dick discharged, but that was
the advantage of the longbow. The crossbow penetrated better, some
insisted, but it was slow and cumbersome to reload. He could hear
the wildlings shouting to each other, and somewhere to the west a
warhorn blew. The world was moonlight and shadow, and time became an
endless round of notch and draw and loose. A wildling arrow ripped
through the throat of the straw sentinel beside him, but Jon Snow
scarcely noticed. Give me one clean shot at the Magnar of Thenn, he
prayed to his father’s gods. The Magnar at least was a foe
that he could hate. Give me Styr.
His fingers were growing stiff and his thumb was bleeding, but
still Jon notched and drew and loosed. A gout of flame caught his
eye, and he turned to see door of the common hall afire. It was
only a few moments before the whole great timbered hall was
burning. Three-Finger Hobb and his Mole’s Town helpers were
safe atop the Wall, he knew, but it felt like a punch in the belly
all the same. “JON,” Deaf Dick yelled in his thick
voice, “the armory.” They were on the roof, he saw. One
had a torch. Dick hopped up on the crenel for a better shot, jerked
his crossbow to his shoulder, and sent a quarrel thrumming toward
the torch man. He missed.
The archer down below him didn’t.
Follard never made a sound, only toppled forward headlong over
the parapet. It was a hundred feet to the yard below. Jon heard the
thump as he was peering round a straw soldier, trying to see where
the arrow had come from. Not ten feet from Deaf Dick’s body,
he glimpsed a leather shield, a ragged cloak, a mop of thick red
hair. Kissed by fire, he thought, lucky. He brought his bow up, but
his fingers would not part, and she was gone as suddenly as
she’d appeared. He swiveled, cursing, and loosed a shaft at
the men on the armory roof instead, but he missed them as well.
By then the east stables were afire too, black smoke and wisps
of burning hay pouring from the stalls. When the roof collapsed, a
flames rose up roaring, so loud they almost drowned out the
warhorns of the Thenns. Fifty of them were pounding up the
kingsroad in tight column, their shields held up above their heads.
Others were swarming through the vegetable garden, across the
flagstone yard, around the old dry well. Three had hacked their way
through the doors of Maester Aemon’s apartments in the timber
keep below the rookery, and a desperate fight was going on atop the
Silent Tower, longswords against bronze axes. None of that
mattered. The dance has moved on, he thought.
Jon hobbled across to Satin and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“With me,” he shouted. Together they moved to the north
parapet, where the King’s Tower looked down on the gate and
Donal Noye’s makeshift wall of logs and barrels and sacks of
corn. The Thenns were there before them.
They wore halfhelms, and had thin bronze disks sewn to their
long leather shirts. Many wielded bronze axes, though a few were
chipped stone. More had short stabbing spears with leaf-shaped
heads that gleamed redly in the light from the burning stables.
They were screaming in the Old Tongue as they stormed the
barricade, jabbing with their spears, swinging their bronze axes,
spilling corn and blood with equal abandon while crossbow quarrels
and arrows rained down on them from the archers that Donal Noye had
posted on the stair.
“What do we do?” Satin shouted.
“We kill them,” Jon shouted back, a black arrow in
his hand.
No archer could have asked for an easier shot. The Thenns had
their backs to the King’s Tower as they charged the crescent,
clambering over bags and barrels to reach the men in black. Both
Jon and Satin chanced to choose the same target. He had just
reached the top of the barricade when an arrow sprouted from his
neck and a quarrel between his shoulder blades. Half a heartbeat
later a longsword took him in the belly and he fell back onto the
man behind him. Jon reached down to his quiver and found it empty
again. Satin was winding back his crossbow. He left him to it and
went for more arrows, but he hadn’t taken more than three
steps before the trap slammed open three feet in front of him.
Bloody hell, I never even heard the door break.
There was no time to think or plan or shout for help. Jon
dropped his bow, reached back over his shoulder, ripped Longclaw
from its sheath, and buried the blade in the middle of the first
head to pop out of the tower. Bronze was no match for Valyrian
steel. The blow sheared right through the Thenn’s helm and
deep into his skull, and he went crashing back down where
he’d come from. There were more behind him, Jon knew from the
shouting. He fell back and called to Satin. The next man to make
the climb got a quarrel through his cheek. He vanished too.
“The oil,” Jon said. Satin nodded. Together they
snatched up the thick quilted pads they’d left beside the
fire, lifted the heavy kettle of boiling oil, and dumped it down
the hole on the Thenns below. The shrieks were as bad as anything
he had ever heard, and Satin looked as though he was going to be
sick. Jon kicked the trapdoor shut, set the heavy iron kettle on
top of it, and gave the boy with the pretty face a hard shake.
“Retch later,” Jon yelled. “Come.”
They had only been gone from the parapets for a few moments, but
everything below had changed. A dozen black brothers and a few
Mole’s Town men still stood atop the crates and barrels, but
the wildlings were swarming over all along the crescent, pushing
them back. Jon saw one shove his spear up through Rast’s
belly so hard he lifted him into the air. Young Henly was dead and
Old Henly was dying, surrounded by foes. He could see Easy spinning
and slashing, laughing like a loon, his cloak flapping as he leapt
from cask to cask. A bronze axe caught him just below the knee and
the laughter turned into a bubbling shriek.
“They’re breaking,” Satin said.
“No,” said Jon, “they’re
broken.”
It happened quickly. One mole fled and then another, and
suddenly all the villagers were throwing down their weapons and
abandoning the barricade. The brothers were too few to hold alone.
Jon watched them try and form a line to fall back in order, but the
Thenns washed over them with spear and axe, and then they were
fleeing too. Dornish Dilly slipped and went down on his face, and a
wildling planted a spear between his shoulder blades. Kegs, slow
and short of breath, had almost reached the bottom step when a
Thenn caught the end of his cloak and yanked him
around . . . but a crossbow quarrel dropped the
man before his axe could fall. “Got him,” Satin crowed,
as Kegs staggered to the stair and began to crawl up the steps on
hands and knees. The gate is lost. Donal Noye had closed and chained it, but it
was there for the taking, the iron bars glimmering red with
reflected firelight, the cold black tunnel behind. No one had
fallen back to defend it; the only safety was on top of the Wall,
seven hundred feet up the crooked wooden stairs.
“What gods do you pray to?” Jon asked Satin.
“The Seven,” the boy from Oldtown said.
“Pray, then,” Jon told him. “Pray to your new
gods, and I’ll pray to my old ones.” It all turned
here.
With the confusion at the trapdoor, Jon had forgotten to fill
his quiver. He limped back across the roof and did that now, and
picked up his bow as well. The kettle had not moved from where
he’d left it, so it seemed as though they were safe enough
for the nonce. The dance has moved on, and we’re watching
from the gallery, he thought as he hobbled back. Satin was loosing
quarrels at the wildlings on the steps, then ducking down behind a
merlon to cock the crossbow. He may be pretty, but he’s
quick.
The real battle was on the steps. Noye had put spearmen on the
two lowest landings, but the headlong flight of the villagers had
panicked them and they had joined the flight, racing up toward the
third landing with the Thenns killing anyone who fell behind. The
archers and crossbowmen on the higher landings were trying to drop
shafts over their heads. Jon nocked an arrow, drew, and loosed, and
was pleased when one of the wildlings went rolling down the steps.
The heat of the fires was making the Wall weep, and the flames
danced and shimmered against the ice. The steps shook to the
footsteps of men running for their lives.
Again Jon notched and drew and loosed, but there was only one of
him and one of Satin, and a good sixty or seventy Thenns pounding
up the stairs, killing as they went, drunk on victory. On the
fourth landing, three brothers in black cloaks stood shoulder to
shoulder with longswords in their hands, and battle was joined
again, briefly. But there were only three and soon enough the
wildling tide washed over them, and their blood dripped down the
steps. “A man is never so vulnerable in battle as when he
flees,” Lord Eddard had told Jon once. “A running man
is like a wounded animal to a soldier. It gets his bloodlust
up.” The archers on the fifth landing fled before the battle
even reached them. It was a rout, a red rout.
“Fetch the torches,” Jon told Satin. There were four
of them stacked beside the fire, their heads wrapped in oily rags.
There were a dozen fire arrows too. The Oldtown boy thrust one
torch into the fire until it was blazing brightly, and brought the
rest back under his arm, unlit. He looked frightened again, as well
he might. Jon was frightened too.
It was then that he saw Styr. The Magnar was climbing up the
barricade, over the gutted corn sacks and smashed barrels and the
bodies of friends and foe alike. His bronze scale armor gleamed
darkly in the firelight. Styr had taken off his helm to survey the
scene of his triumph, and the bald earless whoreson was smiling. In
his hand was a long weirwood spear with an ornate bronze head. When
he saw the gate, he pointed the spear at it and barked something in
the Old Tongue to the half-dozen Thenns around him. Too late, Jon
thought. You should have led your men over the barricade, you might
have been able to save a few.
Up above, a warhorn sounded, long and low. Not from the top of
the Wall, but from the ninth landing, some two hundred feet up,
where Donal Noye was standing.
Jon notched a fire arrow to his bowstring, and Satin lit it from
the torch. He stepped to the parapet, drew, aimed, loosed. Ribbons
of flame trailed behind as the shaft sped downward and thudded into
its target, crackling.
Not Styr. The steps. Or more precisely, the casks and kegs and
sacks that Donal Noye had piled up beneath the steps, as high as
the first landing; the barrels of lard and lamp oil, the bags of
leaves and oily rags, the split logs, bark, and wood shavings.
“Again,” said Jon, and, “Again,” and,
“Again.” Other longbowmen were firing too, from every
tower top in range, some sending their arrows up in high arcs to
drop before the Wall. When Jon ran out of fire arrows, he and Satin
began to light the torches and fling them from the crenels.
Up above another fire was blooming. The old wooden steps had
drunk up oil like a sponge, and Donal Noye had drenched them from
the ninth landing all the way down to the seventh. Jon could only
hope that most of their own people had staggered up to safety
before Noye threw the torches. The black brothers at least had
known the plan, but the villagers had not.
Wind and fire did the rest. All Jon had to do was watch. With
flames below and flames above, the wildlings had nowhere to go.
Some continued upward, and died. Some went downward, and died. Some
stayed where they were. They died as well. Many leapt from the
steps before they burned, and died from the fall. Twenty-odd Thenns
were still huddled together between the fires when the ice cracked
from the heat, and the whole lower third of the stair broke off,
along with several tons of ice. That was the last that Jon Snow saw
of Styr, the Magnar of Thenn. The Wall defends itself, he
thought.
Jon asked Satin to help him down to the yard. His wounded leg
hurt so badly that he could hardly walk, even with the crutch.
“Bring the torch,” he told the boy from Oldtown.
“I need to look for someone.” It had been mostly Thenns
on the steps. Surely some of the free folk had escaped.
Mance’s people, not the Magnar’s. She might have been
one. So they climbed down past the bodies of the men who’d
tried the trapdoor, and Jon wandered through the dark with his
crutch under one arm, and the other around the shoulders of a boy
who’d been a whore in Oldtown.
The stables and the common hall had burned down to smoking
cinders by then, but the fire still raged along the wall, climbing
step by step and landing by landing. From time to time they’d
hear a groan and then a craaaack, and another chunk would come
crashing off the Wall. The air was full of ash and ice
crystals.
He found Quort dead, and Stone Thumbs dying. He found some dead
and dying Thenns he had never truly known. He found Big Boil, weak
from all the blood he’d lost but still alive.
He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the
Lord Commander’s Tower, with an arrow between her breasts.
The ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it
looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask.
The arrow was black, Jon saw, but it was fletched with white
duck feathers. Not mine, he told himself, not one of mine. But he
felt as if it were.
When he knelt in the snow beside her, her eyes opened.
“Jon Snow,” she said, very softly. It sounded as though
the arrow had found a lung. “Is this a proper castle now? Not
just a tower?”
“It is.” Jon took her hand.
“Good,” she whispered. “I wanted t’ see
one proper castle, before . . . before
I . . . ”
“You’ll see a hundred castles,” he promised
her. “The battle’s done. Maester Aemon will see to
you.” He touched her hair. “You’re kissed by
fire, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to kill
you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get you
some milk of the poppy for the pain.”
She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave?
We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so.”
“We’ll go back to the cave,” he said.
“You’re not going to die, Ygritte. You’re
not.”
“Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying.
They woke to the smoke of Mole’s Town burning.
Atop the King’s Tower, Jon Snow leaned on the padded
crutch that Maester Aemon had given him and watched the grey plume
rise. Styr had lost all hope of taking Castle Black unawares when
Jon escaped him, yet even so, he need not have warned of his
approach so bluntly. You may kill us, he reflected, but no one will
be butchered in their beds. That much I did, at least.
His leg still hurt like blazes when he put his weight on it.
He’d needed Clydas to help him don his fresh-washed blacks
and lace up his boots that morning, and by the time they were done
he’d wanted to drown himself in the milk of the poppy.
Instead he had settled for half a cup of dreamwine, a chew of
willow bark, and the crutch. The beacon was burning on Weatherback
Ridge, and the Night’s Watch had need of every man.
“I can fight,” he insisted when they tried to stop
him.
“Your leg’s healed, is it?” Noye snorted.
“You won’t mind me giving it a little kick,
then?”
“I’d sooner you didn’t. It’s stiff, but
I can hobble around well enough, and stand and fight if you have
need of me.”
“I have need of every man who knows which end of the spear
to stab into the wildlings.”
“The pointy end.” Jon had told his little sister
something like that once, he remembered.
Noye rubbed the bristle on his chin. “Might be
you’ll do. We’ll put you on a tower with a longbow, but
if you bloody well fall off don’t come crying to
me.”
He could see the kingsroad wending its way south through stony
brown fields and over windswept hills. The Magnar would be coming
up that road before the day was done, his Thenns marching behind
him with axes and spears in their hands and their
bronze-and-leather shields on their backs. Grigg the Goat, Quort,
Big Boil, and the rest will be coming as well. And Ygritte. The
wildlings had never been his friends, he had not allowed them to be
his friends, but her . . .
He could feel the throb of pain where her arrow had gone through
the meat and muscle of his thigh. He remembered the old man’s
eyes too, and the black blood rushing from his throat as the storm
cracked overhead. But he remembered the grotto best of all, the
look of her naked in the torchlight, the taste of her mouth when it
opened under his. Ygritte, stay away. Go south and raid, go hide in
one of those roundtowers you liked so well. You’ll find
nothing here but death.
Across the yard, one of the bowmen on the roof of the old Flint
Barracks had unlaced his breeches and was pissing through a crenel.
Mully, he knew from the man’s greasy orange hair. Men in
black cloaks were visible on other roofs and tower tops as well,
though nine of every ten happened to be made of straw. “The
scarecrow sentinels,” Donal Noye called them. Only
we’re the crows, Jon mused, and most of us were scared
enough.
Whatever you called them, the straw soldiers had been Maester
Aemon’s notion. They had more breeches and jerkins and tunics
in the storerooms than they’d had men to fill them, so why
not stuff some with straw, drape a cloak around their shoulders,
and set them to standing watches? Noye had placed them on every
tower and in half the windows. Some were even clutching spears, or
had crossbows cocked under their arms. The hope was that the Thenns
would see them from afar and decide that Castle Black was too well
defended to attack.
Jon had six scarecrows sharing the roof of the King’s
Tower with him, along with two actual breathing brothers. Deaf Dick
Follard sat in a crenel, methodically cleaning and oiling the
mechanism of his crossbow to make sure the wheel turned smoothly,
while the Oldtown boy wandered restlessly around the parapets,
fussing with the clothes on straw men. Maybe he thinks they will
fight better if they’re posed just right. Or maybe this
waiting is fraying his nerves the way it’s fraying mine.
The boy claimed to be eighteen, older than Jon, but he was green
as summer grass for all that. Satin, they called him, even in the
wool and mail and boiled leather of the Night’s Watch; the
name he’d gotten in the brothel where he’d been born
and raised. He was pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin,
and raven’s ringlets. Half a year at Castle Black had
toughened up his hands, however, and Noye said he was passable with
a crossbow. Whether he had the courage to face what was coming,
though . . .
Jon used the crutch to limp across the tower top. The
King’s Tower was not the castle’s tallest—the high,
slim, crumbling Lance held that honor, though Othell Yarwyck had
been heard to say it might topple any day. Nor was the King’s
Tower strongest—the Tower of Guards beside the kingsroad would be
a tougher nut to crack. But it was tall enough, strong enough, and
well placed beside the Wall, overlooking the gate and the foot of
the wooden stair.
The first time he had seen Castle Black with his own eyes, Jon
had wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to build a castle
without walls. How could it be defended?
“It can’t,” his uncle told him. “That is
the point. The Night’s Watch is pledged to take no part in
the quarrels of the realm. Yet over the centuries certain Lords
Commander, more proud than wise, forgot their vows and near
destroyed us all with their ambitions. Lord Commander Runcel
Hightower tried to bequeathe the Watch to his bastard son. Lord
Commander Rodrik Flint thought to make himself King-beyond-the-Wall.
Tristan Mudd, Mad Marq Rankenfell, Robin
Hill . . . did you know that six hundred years
ago, the commanders at Snowgate and the Nightfort went to war
against each other? And when the Lord Commander tried to stop them,
they joined forces to murder him? The Stark in Winterfell had to
take a hand . . . and both their heads. Which
he did easily, because their strongholds were not defensible. The
Night’s Watch had nine hundred and ninety-six Lords Commander
before Jeor Mormont, most of them men of courage and
honor . . . but we have had cowards and fools
as well, our tyrants and our madmen. We survive because the lords
and kings of the Seven Kingdoms know that we pose no threat to
them, no matter who should lead us. Our only foes are to the north,
and to the north we have the Wall.” Only now those foes have gotten past the Wall to come up from
the south, Jon reflected, and the lords and kings of the Seven
Kingdoms have forgotten us. We are caught between the hammer and
the anvil. Without a wall Castle Black could not be held; Donal
Noye knew that as well as any. “The castle does them no
good,” the armorer told his little garrison. “Kitchens,
common hall, stables, even the towers . . . let
them take it all. We’ll empty the armory and move what stores
we can to the top of the Wall, and make our stand around the
gate.”
So Castle Black had a wall of sorts at last, a crescent-shaped
barricade ten feet high made of stores; casks of nails and barrels
of salt mutton, crates, bales of black broadcloth, stacked logs,
sawn timbers, fire-hardened stakes, and sacks and sacks of grain.
The crude rampart enclosed the two things most worth defending; the
gate to the north, and the foot of the great wooden switchback
stair that clawed and climbed its way up the face of the Wall like
a drunken thunderbolt, supported by wooden beams as big as tree
trunks driven deep into the ice.
The last few moles were still making the long climb, Jon saw,
urged on by his brothers. Grenn was carrying a little boy in his
arms, while Pyp, two flights below, let an old man lean upon his
shoulder. The oldest villagers still waited below for the cage to
make its way back down to them. He saw a mother pulling along two
children, one on either hand, as an older boy ran past her up the
steps. Two hundred feet above them, Sky Blue Su and Lady Meliana
(who was no lady, all her friends agreed) stood on a landing,
looking south. They had a better view of the smoke than he did, no
doubt. Jon wondered about the villagers who had chosen not to flee.
There were always a few, too stubborn or too stupid or too brave to
run, a few who preferred to fight or hide or bend the knee. Maybe
the Thenns would spare them. The thing to do would be to take the attack to them, he thought.
With fifty rangers well mounted, we could cut them apart on the
road. They did not have fifty rangers, though, nor half as many
horses. The garrison had not returned, and there was no way to know
just where they were, or even whether the riders that Noye had sent
out had reached them. We are the garrison, Jon told himself, and look at us. The
brothers Bowen Marsh had left behind were old men, cripples, and
green boys, just as Donal Noye had warned him. He could see some
wrestling barrels up the steps, others on the barricade; stout old
Kegs, as slow as ever, Spare Boot hopping along briskly on his
carved wooden leg, half-mad Easy who fancied himself Florian the
Fool reborn, Dornish Dilly, Red Alyn of the Rosewood, Young Henly
(well past fifty), Old Henly (well past seventy), Hairy Hal,
Spotted Pate of Maidenpool. A couple of them saw Jon looking down
from atop the King’s Tower and waved up at him. Others turned
away. They still think me a turncloak. That was a bitter draft to
drink, but Jon could not blame them. He was a bastard, after all.
Everyone knew that bastards were wanton and treacherous by nature,
having been born of lust and deceit. And he had made as many enemies
as friends at Castle Black . . . Rast, for one.
Jon had once threatened to have Ghost rip his throat out unless he
stopped tormenting Samwell Tarly, and Rast did not forget things
like that. He was raking dry leaves into piles under the stairs
just now, but every so often he stopped long enough to give Jon a
nasty look.
“No,” Donal Noye roared at three of the Mole’s
Town men, down below. “The pitch goes to the hoist, the oil
up the steps, crossbow bolts to the fourth, fifth, and sixth
landings, spears to first and second. Stack the lard under the
stair, yes, there, behind the planks. The casks of meat are for the
barricade. Now, you poxy plow pushers, NOW!” He has a lord’s voice, Jon thought. His father had always
said that in battle a captain’s lungs were as important as
his sword arm. “It does not matter how brave or brilliant a
man is, if his commands cannot be heard,” Lord Eddard told
his sons, so Robb and he used to climb the towers of Winterfell to
shout at each other across the yard. Donal Noye could have drowned
out both of them. The moles all went in terror of him, and
rightfully so, since he was always threatening to rip their heads
off.
Three-quarters of the village had taken Jon’s warning to
heart and come to Castle Black for refuge. Noye had decreed that
every man still spry enough to hold a spear or swing an axe would
help defend the barricade, else they could damn well go home and
take their chances with the Thenns. He had emptied the armory to
put good steel in their hands; big double-bladed axes, razor-sharp
daggers, longswords, maces, spiked morningstars. Clad in studded
leather jerkins and mail hauberks, with greaves for their legs and
gorgets to keep their heads on their shoulders, a few of them even
looked like soldiers. In a bad light. If you squint.
Noye had put the women and children to work as well. Those too
young to fight would carry water and tend the fires, the
Mole’s Town midwife would assist Clydas and Maester Aemon
with any wounded, and Three-Finger Hobb suddenly had more spit
boys, kettle stirrers, and onion choppers than he knew what to do
with. Two of the whores had even offered to fight, and had shown
enough skill with the crossbow to be given a place on the steps
forty feet up.
“It’s cold.” Satin stood with his hands tucked
into his armpits under his cloak. His cheeks were bright red.
Jon made himself smile. “The Frostfangs are cold. This is
a brisk autumn day.”
“I hope I never see the Frostfangs then. I knew a girl in
Oldtown who liked to ice her wine. That’s the best place for
ice, I think. In wine.” Satin glanced south, frowned.
“You think the scarecrow sentinels scared them off, my
lord?”
“We can hope.” It was possible, Jon
supposed . . . but more likely the wildlings
had simply paused for a bit of rape and plunder in Mole’s
Town. Or maybe Styr was waiting for nightfall, to move up under
cover of darkness.
Midday came and went, with still no sign of Thenns on the
kingsroad. Jon heard footsteps inside the tower, though, and Owen
the Oaf popped up out of the trapdoor, red-faced from the climb. He
had a basket of buns under one arm, a wheel of cheese under the
other, a bag of onions dangling from one hand. “Hobb said to
feed you, in case you’re stuck up here awhile.” That, or for our last meal. “Thank him for us,
Owen.”
Dick Follard was deaf as a stone, but his nose worked well
enough. The buns were still warm from the oven when he went digging in
the basket and plucked one out. He found a crock of butter as well,
and spread some with his dagger. “Raisins,” he
announced happily. “Nuts, too.” His speech was thick,
but easy enough to understand once you got used to it.
“You can have mine too,” said Satin.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat,” Jon told him. “There’s no knowing
when you’ll have another chance.” He took two buns
himself . The nuts were pine nuts, and besides the raisins there
were bits of dried apple.
“Will the wildlings come today, Lord Snow?” Owen
asked.
“You’ll know if they do,” said Jon.
“Listen for the horns.”
“Two. Two is for wildlings.” Owen was tall,
towheaded, and amiable, a tireless worker and surprisingly deft
when it came to working wood and fixing catapults and the like, but
as he’d gladly tell you, his mother had dropped him on his
head when he was a baby, and half his wits had leaked out through
his ear.
“You remember where to go?” Jon asked him.
“I’m to go to the stairs, Donal Noye says. I’m
to go up to the third landing and shoot my crossbow down at the
wildlings if they try to climb over the barrier. The third landing,
one two three.” His head bobbed up and down. “If the
wildlings attack, the king will come and help us, won’t he?
He’s a mighty warrior, King Robert. He’s sure to come.
Maester Aemon sent him a bird.”
There was no use telling him that Robert Baratheon was dead. He
would forget it, as he’d forgotten it before. “Maester
Aemon sent him a bird,” Jon agreed. That seemed to make Owen
happy.
Maester Aemon had sent a lot of
birds . . . not to one king, but to four.
Wildlings at the gate, the message ran. The realm in danger. Send
all the help you can to Castle Black, Even as far as Oldtown and
the Citadel the ravens flew, and to half a hundred mighty lords in
their castles. The northern lords offered their best hope, so to
them Aemon had sent two birds. To the Umbers and the Boltons, to
Castle Cerwyn and Torrhen’s Square, Karhold and Deepwood
Motte, to Bear Island, Oldcastle, Widow’s Watch, White
Harbor, Barrowton, and the Rills, to the mountain fastnesses of the
Liddles, the Burleys, the Norreys, the Harclays, and the Wulls, the
black birds brought their plea. Wildlings at the gate. The north in
danger. Come with all your strength.
Well, ravens might have wings, but lords and kings do not. If
help was coming, it would not come today.
As morning turned to afternoon, the smoke of Mole’s Town
blew away and the southern sky was clear again. No clouds, thought
Jon. That was good. Rain or snow could doom them all.
Clydas and Maester Aemon rode the winch cage up to safety at the
top of the Wall, and most of the Mole’s Town wives as well.
Men in black cloaks paced restlessly on the tower tops and shouted
back and forth across the courtyards. Septon Cellador led the men
on the barricade in a prayer, beseeching the Warrior to give them
strength. Deaf Dick Follard curled up beneath his cloak and went to
sleep. Satin walked a hundred leagues in circles, round and round
the crenellations. The Wall wept and the sun crept across a hard
blue sky. Near evenfall, Owen the Oaf returned with a loaf of black
bread and a pail of Hobb’s best mutton, cooked in a thick
broth of ale and onions. Even Dick woke up for that. They ate every
bit of it, using chunks of bread to wipe the bottom of the pail. By
the time they were done the sun was low in the west, the shadows
sharp and black throughout the castle. “Light the
fire,” Jon told Satin, “and fill the kettle with
oil.”
He went downstairs himself to bar the door, to try and work some
of the stiffness from his leg. That was a mistake, and Jon soon
knew it, but he clutched the crutch and saw it through all the
same. The door to the King’s Tower was oak studded with iron.
It might delay the Thenns, but it would not stop them if they
wanted to come in. Jon slammed the bar down in its notches, paid a
visit to the privy—it might well be his last chance—and hobbled
back up to the roof, grimacing at the pain.
The west had gone the color of a blood bruise, but the sky above
was cobalt blue, deepening to purple, and the stars were coming
out. Jon sat between two merlons with only a scarecrow for company
and watched the Stallion gallop up the sky. Or was it the Horned
Lord? He wondered where Ghost was now. He wondered about Ygritte as
well, and told himself that way lay madness.
They came in the night, of course. Like thieves, Jon thought.
Like murderers.
Satin pissed himself when the horns blew, but Jon pretended not
to notice. “Go shake Dick by the shoulder,” he told the
Oldtown boy, “else he’s liable to sleep through the
fight.”
“I’m frightened.” Satin’s face was a
ghastly white.
“So are they.” Jon leaned his crutch up against a
merlon and took up his longbow, bending the smooth thick Dornish
yew to slip a bowstring through the notches. “Don’t
waste a quarrel unless you know you have a good clean shot,”
he said when Satin returned from waking Dick. “We have an
ample supply up here, but ample doesn’t mean inexhaustible.
And step behind a merlon to reload, don’t try and hide in
back of a scarecrow. They’re made of straw, an arrow will
punch through them.” He did not bother telling Dick Follard
anything. Dick could read your lips if there was enough light and
he gave a damn what you were saying, but he knew it all
already.
The three of them took up positions on three sides of the round
tower.
Jon hung a quiver from his belt and pulled an arrow. The shaft
was black, the fletching grey. As he notched it to his string, he
remembered something that Theon Greyjoy had once said after a hunt.
“The boar can keep his tusks and the bear his claws,”
he had declared, smiling that way he did. “There’s
nothing half so mortal as a grey goose feather.”
Jon had never been half the hunter that Theon was, but he was no
stranger to the longbow either. There were dark shapes slipping
around the armory, backs against the stone, but he could not see
them well enough to waste an arrow. He heard distant shouts, and
saw the archers on the Tower of Guards loosing shafts at the
ground. That was too far off to concern Jon. But when he glimpsed
three shadows detach themselves from the old stables fifty yards
away, he stepped up to the crenel, raised his bow, and drew. They
were running, so he led them, waiting,
waiting . . .
The arrow made a soft hiss as it left his string. A moment later
there was a grunt, and suddenly only two shadows were loping across
the yard. They ran all the faster, but Jon had already pulled a
second arrow from his quiver. This time he hurried the shot too
much, and missed. The wildlings were gone by the time he nocked
again. He searched for another target, and found four, rushing
around the empty shell of the Lord Commander’s Keep. The
moonlight glimmered off their spears and axes, and the gruesome
devices on their round leathern shields; skulls and bones,
serpents, bear claws, twisted demonic faces. Free folk, he knew.
The Thenns carried shields of black boiled leather with bronze rims
and bosses, but theirs were plain and unadorned. These were the
lighter wicker shields of raiders.
Jon pulled the goose feather back to his ear, aimed, and loosed
the arrow, then nocked and drew and loosed again. The first shaft
pierced the bearclaw shield, the second one a throat. The wildling
screamed as he went down. He heard the deep thrum of Deaf
Dick’s crossbow to his left, and Satin’s a moment
later. “I got one!” the boy cried hoarsely. “I
got one in the chest.”
“Get another,” Jon called.
He did not have to search for targets now; only choose them. He
dropped a wildling archer as he was fitting an arrow to his string,
then sent a shaft toward the axeman hacking at the door of
Hardin’s Tower. That time he missed, but the arrow quivering
in the oak made the wildling reconsider. It was only as he was
running off that Jon recognized Big Boil. Half a heartbeat later,
old Mully put an arrow through his leg from the roof of the Flint
Barracks, and he crawled off bleeding. That will stop him bitching
about his boil, Jon thought.
When his quiver was empty, he went to get another, and moved to
a different crenel, side by side with Deaf Dick Follard. Jon got
off three arrows for every bolt Deaf Dick discharged, but that was
the advantage of the longbow. The crossbow penetrated better, some
insisted, but it was slow and cumbersome to reload. He could hear
the wildlings shouting to each other, and somewhere to the west a
warhorn blew. The world was moonlight and shadow, and time became an
endless round of notch and draw and loose. A wildling arrow ripped
through the throat of the straw sentinel beside him, but Jon Snow
scarcely noticed. Give me one clean shot at the Magnar of Thenn, he
prayed to his father’s gods. The Magnar at least was a foe
that he could hate. Give me Styr.
His fingers were growing stiff and his thumb was bleeding, but
still Jon notched and drew and loosed. A gout of flame caught his
eye, and he turned to see door of the common hall afire. It was
only a few moments before the whole great timbered hall was
burning. Three-Finger Hobb and his Mole’s Town helpers were
safe atop the Wall, he knew, but it felt like a punch in the belly
all the same. “JON,” Deaf Dick yelled in his thick
voice, “the armory.” They were on the roof, he saw. One
had a torch. Dick hopped up on the crenel for a better shot, jerked
his crossbow to his shoulder, and sent a quarrel thrumming toward
the torch man. He missed.
The archer down below him didn’t.
Follard never made a sound, only toppled forward headlong over
the parapet. It was a hundred feet to the yard below. Jon heard the
thump as he was peering round a straw soldier, trying to see where
the arrow had come from. Not ten feet from Deaf Dick’s body,
he glimpsed a leather shield, a ragged cloak, a mop of thick red
hair. Kissed by fire, he thought, lucky. He brought his bow up, but
his fingers would not part, and she was gone as suddenly as
she’d appeared. He swiveled, cursing, and loosed a shaft at
the men on the armory roof instead, but he missed them as well.
By then the east stables were afire too, black smoke and wisps
of burning hay pouring from the stalls. When the roof collapsed, a
flames rose up roaring, so loud they almost drowned out the
warhorns of the Thenns. Fifty of them were pounding up the
kingsroad in tight column, their shields held up above their heads.
Others were swarming through the vegetable garden, across the
flagstone yard, around the old dry well. Three had hacked their way
through the doors of Maester Aemon’s apartments in the timber
keep below the rookery, and a desperate fight was going on atop the
Silent Tower, longswords against bronze axes. None of that
mattered. The dance has moved on, he thought.
Jon hobbled across to Satin and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“With me,” he shouted. Together they moved to the north
parapet, where the King’s Tower looked down on the gate and
Donal Noye’s makeshift wall of logs and barrels and sacks of
corn. The Thenns were there before them.
They wore halfhelms, and had thin bronze disks sewn to their
long leather shirts. Many wielded bronze axes, though a few were
chipped stone. More had short stabbing spears with leaf-shaped
heads that gleamed redly in the light from the burning stables.
They were screaming in the Old Tongue as they stormed the
barricade, jabbing with their spears, swinging their bronze axes,
spilling corn and blood with equal abandon while crossbow quarrels
and arrows rained down on them from the archers that Donal Noye had
posted on the stair.
“What do we do?” Satin shouted.
“We kill them,” Jon shouted back, a black arrow in
his hand.
No archer could have asked for an easier shot. The Thenns had
their backs to the King’s Tower as they charged the crescent,
clambering over bags and barrels to reach the men in black. Both
Jon and Satin chanced to choose the same target. He had just
reached the top of the barricade when an arrow sprouted from his
neck and a quarrel between his shoulder blades. Half a heartbeat
later a longsword took him in the belly and he fell back onto the
man behind him. Jon reached down to his quiver and found it empty
again. Satin was winding back his crossbow. He left him to it and
went for more arrows, but he hadn’t taken more than three
steps before the trap slammed open three feet in front of him.
Bloody hell, I never even heard the door break.
There was no time to think or plan or shout for help. Jon
dropped his bow, reached back over his shoulder, ripped Longclaw
from its sheath, and buried the blade in the middle of the first
head to pop out of the tower. Bronze was no match for Valyrian
steel. The blow sheared right through the Thenn’s helm and
deep into his skull, and he went crashing back down where
he’d come from. There were more behind him, Jon knew from the
shouting. He fell back and called to Satin. The next man to make
the climb got a quarrel through his cheek. He vanished too.
“The oil,” Jon said. Satin nodded. Together they
snatched up the thick quilted pads they’d left beside the
fire, lifted the heavy kettle of boiling oil, and dumped it down
the hole on the Thenns below. The shrieks were as bad as anything
he had ever heard, and Satin looked as though he was going to be
sick. Jon kicked the trapdoor shut, set the heavy iron kettle on
top of it, and gave the boy with the pretty face a hard shake.
“Retch later,” Jon yelled. “Come.”
They had only been gone from the parapets for a few moments, but
everything below had changed. A dozen black brothers and a few
Mole’s Town men still stood atop the crates and barrels, but
the wildlings were swarming over all along the crescent, pushing
them back. Jon saw one shove his spear up through Rast’s
belly so hard he lifted him into the air. Young Henly was dead and
Old Henly was dying, surrounded by foes. He could see Easy spinning
and slashing, laughing like a loon, his cloak flapping as he leapt
from cask to cask. A bronze axe caught him just below the knee and
the laughter turned into a bubbling shriek.
“They’re breaking,” Satin said.
“No,” said Jon, “they’re
broken.”
It happened quickly. One mole fled and then another, and
suddenly all the villagers were throwing down their weapons and
abandoning the barricade. The brothers were too few to hold alone.
Jon watched them try and form a line to fall back in order, but the
Thenns washed over them with spear and axe, and then they were
fleeing too. Dornish Dilly slipped and went down on his face, and a
wildling planted a spear between his shoulder blades. Kegs, slow
and short of breath, had almost reached the bottom step when a
Thenn caught the end of his cloak and yanked him
around . . . but a crossbow quarrel dropped the
man before his axe could fall. “Got him,” Satin crowed,
as Kegs staggered to the stair and began to crawl up the steps on
hands and knees. The gate is lost. Donal Noye had closed and chained it, but it
was there for the taking, the iron bars glimmering red with
reflected firelight, the cold black tunnel behind. No one had
fallen back to defend it; the only safety was on top of the Wall,
seven hundred feet up the crooked wooden stairs.
“What gods do you pray to?” Jon asked Satin.
“The Seven,” the boy from Oldtown said.
“Pray, then,” Jon told him. “Pray to your new
gods, and I’ll pray to my old ones.” It all turned
here.
With the confusion at the trapdoor, Jon had forgotten to fill
his quiver. He limped back across the roof and did that now, and
picked up his bow as well. The kettle had not moved from where
he’d left it, so it seemed as though they were safe enough
for the nonce. The dance has moved on, and we’re watching
from the gallery, he thought as he hobbled back. Satin was loosing
quarrels at the wildlings on the steps, then ducking down behind a
merlon to cock the crossbow. He may be pretty, but he’s
quick.
The real battle was on the steps. Noye had put spearmen on the
two lowest landings, but the headlong flight of the villagers had
panicked them and they had joined the flight, racing up toward the
third landing with the Thenns killing anyone who fell behind. The
archers and crossbowmen on the higher landings were trying to drop
shafts over their heads. Jon nocked an arrow, drew, and loosed, and
was pleased when one of the wildlings went rolling down the steps.
The heat of the fires was making the Wall weep, and the flames
danced and shimmered against the ice. The steps shook to the
footsteps of men running for their lives.
Again Jon notched and drew and loosed, but there was only one of
him and one of Satin, and a good sixty or seventy Thenns pounding
up the stairs, killing as they went, drunk on victory. On the
fourth landing, three brothers in black cloaks stood shoulder to
shoulder with longswords in their hands, and battle was joined
again, briefly. But there were only three and soon enough the
wildling tide washed over them, and their blood dripped down the
steps. “A man is never so vulnerable in battle as when he
flees,” Lord Eddard had told Jon once. “A running man
is like a wounded animal to a soldier. It gets his bloodlust
up.” The archers on the fifth landing fled before the battle
even reached them. It was a rout, a red rout.
“Fetch the torches,” Jon told Satin. There were four
of them stacked beside the fire, their heads wrapped in oily rags.
There were a dozen fire arrows too. The Oldtown boy thrust one
torch into the fire until it was blazing brightly, and brought the
rest back under his arm, unlit. He looked frightened again, as well
he might. Jon was frightened too.
It was then that he saw Styr. The Magnar was climbing up the
barricade, over the gutted corn sacks and smashed barrels and the
bodies of friends and foe alike. His bronze scale armor gleamed
darkly in the firelight. Styr had taken off his helm to survey the
scene of his triumph, and the bald earless whoreson was smiling. In
his hand was a long weirwood spear with an ornate bronze head. When
he saw the gate, he pointed the spear at it and barked something in
the Old Tongue to the half-dozen Thenns around him. Too late, Jon
thought. You should have led your men over the barricade, you might
have been able to save a few.
Up above, a warhorn sounded, long and low. Not from the top of
the Wall, but from the ninth landing, some two hundred feet up,
where Donal Noye was standing.
Jon notched a fire arrow to his bowstring, and Satin lit it from
the torch. He stepped to the parapet, drew, aimed, loosed. Ribbons
of flame trailed behind as the shaft sped downward and thudded into
its target, crackling.
Not Styr. The steps. Or more precisely, the casks and kegs and
sacks that Donal Noye had piled up beneath the steps, as high as
the first landing; the barrels of lard and lamp oil, the bags of
leaves and oily rags, the split logs, bark, and wood shavings.
“Again,” said Jon, and, “Again,” and,
“Again.” Other longbowmen were firing too, from every
tower top in range, some sending their arrows up in high arcs to
drop before the Wall. When Jon ran out of fire arrows, he and Satin
began to light the torches and fling them from the crenels.
Up above another fire was blooming. The old wooden steps had
drunk up oil like a sponge, and Donal Noye had drenched them from
the ninth landing all the way down to the seventh. Jon could only
hope that most of their own people had staggered up to safety
before Noye threw the torches. The black brothers at least had
known the plan, but the villagers had not.
Wind and fire did the rest. All Jon had to do was watch. With
flames below and flames above, the wildlings had nowhere to go.
Some continued upward, and died. Some went downward, and died. Some
stayed where they were. They died as well. Many leapt from the
steps before they burned, and died from the fall. Twenty-odd Thenns
were still huddled together between the fires when the ice cracked
from the heat, and the whole lower third of the stair broke off,
along with several tons of ice. That was the last that Jon Snow saw
of Styr, the Magnar of Thenn. The Wall defends itself, he
thought.
Jon asked Satin to help him down to the yard. His wounded leg
hurt so badly that he could hardly walk, even with the crutch.
“Bring the torch,” he told the boy from Oldtown.
“I need to look for someone.” It had been mostly Thenns
on the steps. Surely some of the free folk had escaped.
Mance’s people, not the Magnar’s. She might have been
one. So they climbed down past the bodies of the men who’d
tried the trapdoor, and Jon wandered through the dark with his
crutch under one arm, and the other around the shoulders of a boy
who’d been a whore in Oldtown.
The stables and the common hall had burned down to smoking
cinders by then, but the fire still raged along the wall, climbing
step by step and landing by landing. From time to time they’d
hear a groan and then a craaaack, and another chunk would come
crashing off the Wall. The air was full of ash and ice
crystals.
He found Quort dead, and Stone Thumbs dying. He found some dead
and dying Thenns he had never truly known. He found Big Boil, weak
from all the blood he’d lost but still alive.
He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the
Lord Commander’s Tower, with an arrow between her breasts.
The ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it
looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask.
The arrow was black, Jon saw, but it was fletched with white
duck feathers. Not mine, he told himself, not one of mine. But he
felt as if it were.
When he knelt in the snow beside her, her eyes opened.
“Jon Snow,” she said, very softly. It sounded as though
the arrow had found a lung. “Is this a proper castle now? Not
just a tower?”
“It is.” Jon took her hand.
“Good,” she whispered. “I wanted t’ see
one proper castle, before . . . before
I . . . ”
“You’ll see a hundred castles,” he promised
her. “The battle’s done. Maester Aemon will see to
you.” He touched her hair. “You’re kissed by
fire, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to kill
you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get you
some milk of the poppy for the pain.”
She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave?
We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so.”
“We’ll go back to the cave,” he said.
“You’re not going to die, Ygritte. You’re
not.”
“Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand.
“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying.