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

[baseborne]

"Aye, and they are only the thralls." Jon turns suddenly and reaches for the obsidian dagger he'd set down on his little nightstand while undressing for bed, as he did every night, and plucks it up. "The Others, they can only be killed with dragonglass, our oldest texts say. The claim is that their armor is so cold that it shatters steel blades, and I'd believe it." He hands the little rough-hewn knife to Gendry and sits down next to him again, wearier somehow now that he's found this subject than he had been when nosed awake by his wolf some time ago. "Though the scrolls do speak of some dragonsteel, as well, I'm not certain what it even is. Valyrian steel, if I could guess, but the Lords of Westeros won't even send me men when I beg, my chances of getting their valyrian steel blades are-- well. I suppose when we're all dead and set upon them they'll be willing enough."

[bullhorned]

Dragonsteel. Valyrian Steel. Gendry wondered if there as truth to that. He imagined if anyone would know, it would be Tobho Mott. "My master knew the spells to reforge Valyrian steel." He thought to mention the piece of Valyrian steel he'd been gifted, but thought better of it. Instead, he asked the question that really drew him here. "Lots of folks have been showing their dreams. You got any idea why yours did?"

[baseborne]

"Did he?" Jon sounds suitably impressed. Gendry talked of being a smith, but Jon hadn't truly known what manner of smith he was - he spoke as common as common could get, but surely a master who knew such ancient spells could not have been some small time laborer lost in the bustle of King's Landing. Even Donal Noye could not have boasted such skill, and he'd forged the weapons that made men into kings.

There's a long pause, because Jon can only think of one reason why the fairies would be cross with him and turn their magic to play tricks with his memories. Only one thing they'd asked of him that he hadn't immediately done - he'd sung for their sick and sworn aid to their cause despite all of his vows. "Days ago, while we traveled, I reached up into the night sky and when I pulled my hand back..." He reaches, embarrassingly, beneath the thick pillow they'd given him for the heavy, strange gem that was once a star in the sky. This, he holds in the light of the small fire but doesn't offer up. "A piece of the world, it has been named. A fairy came to collect it from me, how it was even known I'd found it I can't guess, but Ghost chased him off quickly enough. I asked Lord Reynard who has been long in this realm, and he called it part of the deep magic: a thing with the power to change the lives and fates of men." Of his family, is what he prays for. That would be worth any terrible thing he'd done put on display. "So I kept it. I do not imagine they are pleased, though if that was their revenge, it was quite strange."

[bullhorned]

A deep magic to toy with the lives and fates of men. Gendry felt unsettled as he looked into the strange gem. He had seen so many jewels of late, but this one seemed more valuable than all the rest. Was this the fruit of those unsettling nights with the strangeness of the stars?

This was the reason he wanted to have little to do with magic. "Is it wise to make enemies of them? What if it shows other things that should be secret?"

[baseborne]

Jon's fingers tighten around the gem enough that his knuckles start to go white. These are questions he's asked himself, but... "And what if it changes the fates of my brothers? Of my lord father and my sisters? What secrets could I have worth more than that?"

[bullhorned]

"How can you be sure it will change it for the better? As it is, you're doing better than you were here in this place already." Gendry reckoned that each Stark had been dead or alone before this place. Now at least part of their family was reunited. To his simple logic, he reasoned that should be enough for them to be content. Half a family was better than none.

[baseborne]

"Here, maybe," but he can only think of the future that Arya faces in Westeros, damned to Ramsay Bolton's wedding bed. Of Sansa, so broken. (And of his own words: I have no sisters, only brothers.)

Still, Gendry isn't wrong, exactly, and his shoulders slump. He feels suddenly as tired as he should, at the hour they've found themselves in. "It doesn't matter, Ghost chased the fairy off and I'd have no way to return it until we make our journey back to Caer Glaem." If he even planned to do so, and he doesn't really.

[bullhorned]

There was no helping it, he supposed. Gendry did not trust this strange gem that Jon had found and only hoped its fate altering powers did not have more dire consequences. Gendry's own fortune was ill enough that he did not need to inherit more from others.

"Best you keep it secret. Good or bad fortune, there will be others what fancy it."

[baseborne]

Gendry should really stay away from the Stark Clan if he doesn't want shit fortune rubbing off on him like a bad case of herpes, honestly. "Aye," Jon acquiesces, somewhat grudgingly, "Lord Reynard said as much himself."

[bullhorned]

"He seems a decent sort. Best you listen to him."

Not realizing how much he would regret saying that, Gendry rose to his feet again. "I'm going to try to sleep. Let me know if you start seeing tedious dreams about beating metal on the lockets."