battle for the wall [memory: open to both courts]

[baseborne]

Then the rising sun broke through to send pale lances of light across the battleground. Jon found himself looking down the 700 feet of solid ice that made up the Wall, onto the great wildling host drawn up before it.

Mammoths centered the wildling line, he saw, a hundred or more with giants on their backs clutching mauls and huge stone axes. More giants loped beside them, fourteen or fifteen feet tall apiece, pushing along a tree trunk on great wooden wheels, its end sharpened to a point. A ram, he thought bleakly. If the gate still stood below, a few kisses from that thing would soon turn it into splinters. On either side of the giants came a wave of horsemen in boiled leather harness with fire-hardened lances, a mass of running archers, hundreds of foot with spears, slings, clubs, and leathern shields. The bone chariots from the Frozen Shore clattered forward on the flanks, bouncing over rocks and roots behind teams of huge white dogs. The fury of the wild, Jon thought as he listened to the skirl of skins, to the dogs barking and baying, the mammoths trumpeting, the free folk whistling and screaming, the giants roaring in the Old Tongue. Their drums echoed off the ice like rolling thunder.

He could feel the despair all around him. "There must be a hundred thousand," a pretty youth named Satin wailed beside him. "How can we stop so many?"

"The Wall will stop them," Jon heard himself say. He turned and said it again, louder, to the thirty-odd brothers left in Castle Black to face this hellish assault, every man of them too young or too old or too maimed to have left with the garrison. It's plainly hopeless. "The Wall will stop them. The Wall defends itself." Hollow words, but he needed to say them, almost as much as his brothers needed to hear them. "Mance wants to unman us with his numbers. Does he think we're stupid?" He was shouting now, his shaking, wounded leg forgotten, and every man was listening. "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?" He laughed, and Pyp and Owen and half a dozen more laughed with him. "They're nothing, they're less use 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, a great big shaggy youth, shouted.

"They're down there and we're up here," Jon said, "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 him, waving swords and longbows in the air as their cheeks flushed red. Jon saw Kegs standing there with a warhorn slung beneath his arm. "Brother," he told him, "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 itself seemed to shudder, and the echo of those great deep-throated moans drowned all other sound.

"Archers," Jon said when the horns had died away, "you'll aim for the giants with that ram, every bloody one of you. Loose at my command, not before. THE GIANTS AND THE RAM. I want arrows raining on them with every step, but we'll wait till they're in range. Any man who wastes an arrow will need to climb down and fetch it back, do you hear me?"

"I do," shouted Owen the Oaf, thickly. "I hear you, Lord Snow."

Jon laughed, laughed like a drunk or a madman, and his men laughed with him.

Comments

[teenyoda]

So... how do you wind up talking to someone that sort of looks like they expect you to turn around and punch them in the face every five minutes?

[Because that's what she looked like sometimes. Not always, but if he moved too fast or seemed to get angry at something, that look flickered over his face and he hated it.]

[baseborne]

I don't know. [There's a raw truth to that, and he looks away for a moment. Jon hates it too, more than he can put into words.] Patiently, I suppose.

[teenyoda]

I've been trying. I mean, I hope she doesn't think I'm thinking about throttling her. She's a nice girl.

[Totally unaware he's talking to her brother. Don't ask him what else he thinks, Jon.]

[baseborne]

I don't think she does. I think she just... can't turn it off.

[Haha... you just better know how to sleep with one eye open if you ever try to overshare, friend.]

[teenyoda]

["So I was pleasuring myself this morning in the shower thinking about your sister..." Hahah... heh... >>]

Well, maybe she needs a little time to feel less... I don't know. She said her dad sort of tolerated her, so I really don't know what's up with the parents in your world, but this whole bastard thing is pretty stupid.

[baseborne]

Her father-- [Oh, right. He means some... Lord Baelish. The "father" of Alayne Stone.] -must not have been so terrible, if he took her in. [He wants to believe that, and he hopes it's true, for her sake. He'd wanted to ask, but she had that same reaction to such questions as she'd had to tales of the things Joffrey's great ugly Hound had done to her little sister: denials, and a strange and troubling devotion.] A man is only expected to provide for his true children, not his by-blows.

[teenyoda]

[Have a look of so much not amusedness, Jon.]

Um, unless someone's using someone else's dick to impregnate women, they're his 'true children'. You don't borrow someone else's sperm to make your own babies, buddy. Well, you do where I come from, but there's a whole process and it's because--

Never mind. I'm digressing. Point is, if he did the deed, he needs to step up to it. This expected crap is just that; crap.

[baseborne]

[Jon just shakes his head. Sigrid had given him much the same speech, without so much crassness. Neither could seem to understand the nature of bastards.]

He did, it seems. [Jon just doesn't think it's some small thing to scoff at... or it wouldn't be, if Sansa were truthfully a bastard.]

[teenyoda]

Uh huh.

[Hear that, Jon? That's so much doubt. So much.]

The parenting skills in your world are lacking.

[baseborne]

Only in some. [Not in Jon's father. He would swear that up, down and sideways - never mind that he'd been abandoned at the Wall when it became convenient.] You can't honestly say that every man of your world does better.

[teenyoda]

No, I can't. Because people are assholes.

[And some people got to keep their kids and did horrible things to them, so... there really wasn't a perfect method. And it sucked. Lineface.]

[baseborne]

Aye, well. [Misanthropy and dead parents, they sure do find the best things to bond over.] At least some things remain constant.

[teenyoda]

Assholes unite across the universes? Yeah. Well, I'm still hoping there's a perfect one out there where people are genuinely nice.

I'm not holding my breath.