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What is dead may never die (Chapter 86)
🕑 Added 2023-08-20 14:44:11 +0000 UTCThe Night's Defiance
Jon POV
I limped through the dungeons supporting myself with one hand on the wall. The walls were cold to the touch, but my leg hurt more than I was cold. I have put too much pressure on my leg while fighting the free folk. Even after a month, my leg hasn’t healed. Even if the pain seemed duller, sometimes it would flare up.
Still, I left my crutch behind. I couldn’t show weakness before the Free Folk I was about to meet. Biting down my lip, I lowered my hand and stepped the last few steps ignoring the pain. I reached the cell where a redhead woman was held. She looked up at me but then turned her head away and ignored me. I stood still, waiting a few moments for the pain to pass.
“Are you going to stare down me the whole time?” Ygritte asked. “Or are you enjoying your victory?”
“Many men died in the battle,” I said. “Good men. Your arrow killed one of them, Donal Noye, one-armed blacksmith.”
“Should I be sorry for him? And how many of us your pet killed?” Ygritte asked. “More of you going to die soon, anyway. Mance is coming.”
“That's why I am here,” I replied. “Mance won’t be able to breach the Wall. We both know he doesn’t have the Horn of the Winter. How many more are you willing to lose before you realize it.”
“As I have said previously, my answer is no,” Ygritte said. “I will not help you to break peace with Mance. He will take the Wall and lead us to safety.”
“He will kill all of you. My brother is coming with an army. He will crush Mance and his army. The only place you are safe is Beyond the Wall.”
Before Ygritte could reply, I heard a horn blasting above me. Then the next blast came soon after. Part of me wanted to turn and run to the exit to see the situation, but I knew better. My leg is still injured, and others will be on it by now. Instead, I looked at Ygritte, I wanted to say I was sorry for betraying her trust, but I couldn’t.
“Mance is coming,” Ygritte said. “Yet I don’t see your dear brother. We know of the conflicts in the South. Will he even care for you?”
“You know nothing, Ygritte,” I replied. “If Mance can’t offer anything to the King of the North, he will be killed with the rest of you.”
I left at Ygritte’s silence. After a few steps, I let out a pained sigh and limped to the exit. Even though Yoren told me that I was out of duty and was to rest, I couldn’t do nothing. So, once I found my crutch, I took a bow and a quiver of arrows before limping to the winch. I entered the cage with five other men carrying food and hot wine.
“Would you like one cup, Jon,” Three-Finger Hobb, the cook of the castle black, offered me a cup of wine. “It will warm you up and remove some pain.”
I thanked the man and took the cup with a slice of black bread. The wine had various spices that tingled my throat, but it did warm me up. The bread was hard, but it filled my stomach. A line of fires burned along the top of the Wall, contained in iron baskets on poles taller than a man. But the cold hit me in the teeth like a fist.
Bundles of quarrels, arrows, spears, and scorpion bolts stood ready on every hand. Rocks were piled ten feet high, and giant wooden barrels of pitch and lamp oil lined up beside them. Bowen Marsh had left Castle Black well supplied in everything save men. The wind was whipping at the black cloaks of the scarecrow sentinels who stood along the ramparts, spears in hand.
Yoren was observing the Haunted Forest beneath the Wall. It was hard to see anything, but one could notice black dots moving on the ground with keen eyes. Some were bigger than others. I sighed in relief as the wind carried the sound of dozens of horns and drums. At least they weren’t dead, but I recognized the other sound that others didn’t.
“A mammoth,” I said to Yoren as he tried to determine what was happening under him.
Yoren turned toward the two great trebuchets that Bowen Marsh had restored to working order. I would have to thank for it when he returns. Using them to throw barrels of pitch at night saved us a couple of times. The fire they provided to the darkness let us see our enemies. Yet I had to wonder how long it would last until they won’t be enough.
They must take the gate, or they cannot pass. The Wall was too big to be stormed by any conventional means, too high for ladders or siege towers, and too thick for battering rams. No catapult could throw a stone large enough to breach it, and if you tried to set it on fire, the icemelt would quench the flames. Climbing it as I did was dangerous too. One needed to be strong and fit, and sure-handed.
“Continue losing the arrows at them,” Yoren said. “And drop barrels of the pitch at the Mammoths you see. Maybe fire will scare them. I need two bows and two spears to help me hold the tunnel if they break the gate.”
The gate was a crooked tunnel through the ice, smaller than any castle gate in the Seven Kingdoms, so narrow that rangers must lead their horses through a single file. Three iron grates closed the inner passage, each locked, chained and protected by a murder hole. The outer door was old oak studded with iron, not easy to break through. But Mance has mammoths and giants as well. So, it might not stop them.
“Take some fire with you, my lord,” I told Yoren. “The Mammoths get disturbed by it.”
“Aye, good thinking,” Yoren replied. “And if they break through, we can set the tunnel on fire and let them burn. I am leaving the Wall to you, Jon.”
“My lord?” I sharply turned to Yoren in surprise.
“Don’t give me that look,” Yoren said. “If I can’t order you to rest, then I will make you take responsibility for these sorry excuses of men.”
There are older men, better men. I am still as green as summer grass. I'm wounded, and I stand accused of desertion. Yet I only managed to nod. Yoren being satisfied with it, chose his men and left for the gates, not before taking a few barrels of pitch. Afterward, everything felt like a dream. As hours passed and the sun started to set, I shouted orders.
Side by side with the straw soldiers, longbows or crossbows clutched in half-frozen hands. The archers launched a hundred volleys of arrows at the men below them. I sent men to the smaller catapults and filled the air with jagged rocks the size of a giant's fist. Even if the stones didn’t hit anyone most of the time, they did knock the trees down, obscuring the way for the free folk.
The left-hand trebuchet kept throwing, but the free folk had quickly learned to shun the place where its loads were landing. We needed twenty trebuchets, not two, and they should be mounted on sleds and turntables so we could move them. But it was a futile thought. I would like another thousand men and a dragon or three.
As the sun started to set and shadows got longer, Mance showed his true forces for all of us to see and tremble in fear. Beneath the trees were all the wildlings in the world; raiders and giants, wargs and skinchangers, mountain men, salt sea sailors, ice river cannibals, cave dwellers with dyed faces, dog chariots from the Frozen Shore, Hornfoot men with their soles like boiled leather, all the queer wild folk Mance had gathered to break the Wall.
“I never knew there would be so many,” Satin said.
I knew, and now I knew why Mance attacked in daylight. He wanted to see how many of us there were, and before the night fell, he wanted to show how many there were. Now, we know, and once the darkness engulfs us, we won’t forget the sight of a hundred thousand men trying to breach the Wall. I could feel and hear the despair around me as men gulped down their saliva, and some even dropped their weapons.
“There must be a hundred thousand,” Satin almost cried out, trying to hold tears from the fear and despair. “How can we stop so many?”
“The Wall will stop them,” I needed to be the voice they heard, not the hundred thousand below them. “Mance wants to unman us with his numbers. Does he think we're stupid? The chariots, the horsemen, all those fools on foot, what are they going to do to us up here? Any of you ever see a mammoth climb a wall? They're nothing. They're less used than our straw brothers here. They can't reach us, they can't hurt us, and they don't frighten us, do they?”
“No!” Grenn and Satin were the first to shout, and soon everyone else joined.
I knew they were hollow words, but I needed to say them almost as much as my brothers needed to hear them. And it seemed it worked as men started laughing at the free folk below them. Raising their swords and bows, their spirits were regained. I even forgot the pain in my leg and joined them, raising Longclaw into the air.
“They're down there, and we're up here, and so long as we hold the gate, they cannot pass. They cannot pass!” They were all shouting then, roaring his own words back at me. I saw Kegs standing there with a warhorn slung beneath his arm. “Brother, sound for battle.”
Grinning, Kegs lifted the horn to his lips and blew the two long blasts that meant wildlings. Other horns took up the call until the Wall seemed to shudder, and the echo of those great deep-throated moans drowned all different sounds. I laughed like a drunk or a madman, and my men laughed with me.
The chariots and the racing horsemen on the flanks were well ahead of the center now as arrows rained on the giants. The free folk battle line was dissolving soon after. I had trebuchet loaded with caltrops. The wildling archers shot as they advanced; they would dash forward, stop, loose, then run another ten yards. There were so many that the air was constantly full of arrows, all falling woefully short.
While the wind carried our arrows into their ranks. One volley after another was loosened into the giants that the Mance wanted to show us. Seeing that the mammoths weren’t disturbed by our arrows, I had my men loose fire arrows. The wind was kind to us as it didn’t extinguish the fire before it reached its target. Soon one of the mammoths was running berserk, smashing wildlings with his trunk and crushing archers underfoot.
Yet night quickly fell on us. Darkness covered the hundred thousand men nearing us. But I still stood and ordered trebuchets to throw caltrops so their horsemen couldn’t move as quickly as they wished. For stones to smash their rams. For pitch set on fire to burn their mammoths. No matter who came, I would not let them reach the gates.
Nobody left their stations. We pissed where we stood, ate, and drank where we stood. Even if the cold froze our sweat, we continued. My voice cracked at this point, but I continued giving orders, for I knew that as long as my men heard my voice, they would continue fighting. I needed my voice to drown their fears. The night was long and full of terrors, and we stood to stop them.
