BIW - Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Chapter 10

The screaming carried clearly across the open ground between the camp and the castle walls. Galad stood at the edge of the camp and watched it, trying to keep his hands still at his sides.

The first ladder had gone up crooked and fallen before a man reached the third rung, taking two soldiers down with it into the men below. The second had found the parapet, briefly, and two men had made it onto the battlements before the Ironborn pushed them back over the edge. A third one had been hacked down with axes, and the soldiers half-way up to it had to scramble down under a hail of arrows and rocks.

Below the walls, the battering ram crew had been at the portcullis for several minutes. From this distance Galad could hear the dull, rhythmic impact of it, and each impact told him the same thing. The gate was not moving. The portcullis was iron and the ram was wood and the formula was not in the ram's favor.

Overhead, the vultures had noticed. There were not many yet, just a few circling above the hill in long, patient arcs, but they had a way of finding each other quickly. There would be more soon.

He had offered to lead the first wave himself. He had not wanted to, he had not wanted there to be a first wave at all, but if men were going to be sent at those walls, he had thought he might at least bring some of them back. Ser Manfryd had spoken before he could finish the offer. Glory, the man had said. The privilege of being the knight to take the castle. He had straightened his back when he said it, puffing out his chest like a cocksure bird showing off. 

Ser Owen had not wished to give Galad the honor, so Ser Manfryd Rodden took command.

Now he watched like the vultures, counting their numbers as they gathered above, and kept his hands still.

Another ladder went up. Another man made the parapet, got one leg over, and then an axe came down and he didn't get the other leg over. From the walls, a rock the size of a small child was heaved over the crenellations and dropped into the men clustered below with their ram. The screaming that followed was different from the screaming that had been going on before. Wetter.

He was already walking by the time Neral spoke behind him.

"Where are you going?"

He didn't answer. The grass was short and dry underfoot, the ground uneven with the earthworks the men had dug the previous day. He heard Neral follow, and then heard Mors a few steps behind him, and kept walking.

"Ser Galad." Mors caught up to his shoulder. "Ser Galad, don't do something—"

"Stay here," Galad said, and kept walking.

He found Ser Owen Inchfield on a low wooden platform that had been knocked together from siege timber, raised just enough to see over the heads of the men between him and the castle, or so that he could be seen instead. 

He stood with his arms crossed and his expression composed, watching the assault with the mild attention of a man watching a training exercise that wasn't going quite as he'd hoped.

Two men of his retinue moved to intercept as Galad came up. He walked past them.

Owen’s eyes flicked to him, but he did not turn around when he spoke. "Ser Galad." 

"There is still time to stop this." Galad stopped beside the platform and looked up at the man. He kept his voice level. They had already had this conversation once today as the men gathered to storm the castle, and Galad did not expect a different answer, but he would not stand at the edge of camp and watch in silence while men died against a wall for no reason. "Order the retreat. Let us set a proper siege, or at the least request engines from the ships."

Ser Owen turned to look at him. His expression was pleasant as if he was enjoying himself. The thrill of command suited him well, perhaps, or the thought of the glory to come, a castle to sack, a story with his name at the front of it to tell back in the Reach.

"This is Lord Tyrell's will, Ser Woodsman." He glanced back at the castle walls. "Are you a traitor to your lord now?"

Beneath the walls, someone was screaming a name. Calling for someone who wasn't answering.

"How many men must die before you see the folly in this?" Galad asked. He heard the edge in his own voice and did not bother smoothing it.

Ser Owen unfolded his arms and swept one of them out across the camp in a broad, generous gesture, as if offering Galad a view of something fine. "We are Reachmen, are we not? We have no shortage of men." A pause, deliberate. "Leal men. Some more than others."

Galad looked at him for a moment. Then he turned back to the castle and said nothing.

There was nothing to say. He had known men like Ser Owen before, in another life and in this one as well, men who wore their smallness like armor, more prideful than any true great man. Nothing Galad could offer would reach through that. He had spoken, twice now, and it had not mattered, and the only thing left was to stand here and watch or go back to the camp and wait.

So he stood and watched.

Fifteen minutes later, as the number of men dwindled along with their spirit, and not a breach was had, Ser Owen raised a hand to someone in his retinue. A trumpet sounded, two short notes, and the men below the walls began to pull back, to the cheering of the defenders above them.

They came in slowly at first, then more quickly, those who could walk helping those who couldn't. Most of the shields that came back had arrows in them. Some of the men had arrows in them too, the shafts bobbing as they walked, one man with two in his left arm moving with the fixed, silent concentration of someone refusing to acknowledge his own body. Others wept without seeming to know they were doing it, faces blank, tears cutting clean lines through the grime. A few cursed the gods, or the Ironborn, or the Ironborn’s mothers. 

Galad counted them as they crossed back through the earthworks. He counted until it was clear no more were coming.

Of the two hundred men sent out to ‘soften the defenders’, as Ser Owen had put it, some seventy men had not come back. He could see a few of them from here, shapes in the grass below the walls, one still moving faintly, too far for anyone to reach without going back into bow range.

The vultures were lower now. He could hear their grunting calls, like hungry pigs or dogs barking in the distance.

After speaking with someone close to him, a runner went out with Ser Owen’s orders, and returned a few minutes with a heavyset man-at-arms with a cut above his eye and his surcoat half torn away at the shoulder. 

He stopped in front of Owen and pulled off his helmet, breathing hard.

"Where is Ser Manfryd?" Owen asked.

The man wiped the blood from his eye with the back of his hand and looked at Owen without much expression. "Somewhere beneath the walls, ser.” He shrugged. “Took a stone to the head, he did."

A ripple moved through the men on the platform, a quick exchange of glances, a slight shift of weight. Owen was still for a moment. Then he turned to look at Galad, and the pleasantness in his expression had become something else, sharper, a gleam showing in his blue-grey eyes.

"It seems you'll have your chance after all, Ser Galad of Dustonbury." He spoke loudly enough for the men around him to hear it. "Indeed. I would expect the hero of the Flower Hearth to be the first man over the walls. Wouldn't that be an honor?"

He made no effort to sound genuine. Galad wasn't certain the man knew how.

Holding Owen's gaze for a moment, he could read what was there without difficulty. Owen wanted another assault because he needed the castle taken, and Owen wanted Galad in the front of it because the front of it was where the dying happened, and for some inane reason, Ser Owen Inchfield had decided some time ago that the world would suit him better with Galad of Dustonbury absent from it. It was not a complicated calculation.

And if Galad refused, or failed to take the castle at once, Owen would keep sending men at those walls in waves until the numbers solved the problem for him. Seventy men had died this time. Seventy more might next time. And the time after that.

"As you say, ser," Galad said simply before he left.

Neral and Mors fell in beside him before he had gone twenty yards.

“Is it to be a siege, then?” Neral asked.

Galad shook his head. "Second wave in one hour," he said. "I will lead the attack myself."

"Then we’ll follow you, ser" Mors said.

Stopping, Galad turned on the boy, looking into his fierce, impassioned eyes. In reality, Mors was the same age as he was now, and yet he was a boy still, with a boy’s heart, full of anger and grief that had been sitting in him since Mycah and Lorne went down on the beach. 

Galad had seen that look before, where all those emotions churning inside were begging to be released into the world in as violent a manner as possible. He had worn it himself once, a long time ago in another world, when he was younger and rasher and learned that the only woman who had ever been a mother to him had been taken.

Mors met his eyes without flinching, chin lifted slightly. 

"I will be in the thick of the fighting," Galad said. He held Mors's gaze. "The very thick of it. I want that understood."

Mors nodded, looking, if anything, more eager.

"Good," Neral said. "If you're there, it'll be the safest spot on the field. Easy choice."

"The safest—" Galad exhaled slowly through his nose. Shaking his head, he looked at them both for a moment, these two men who had no particular reason to follow him and had done so anyway, and felt something in his chest tighten in a way he did not entirely have words for.

"I did not wish to bury any more friends in this war," he said. "But I will not stop you."

They started walking again.

"You have a plan?" Neral asked.

Mors elbowed the older man in the side. "Course he has a plan. Don't be an idiot." He glanced at Galad. "You do have a plan, aye, Ser Galad?"

A simple one, but sometimes those worked best. “Yes.” 

Mors nodded as if this confirmed his entire worldview. Neral seemed satisfied.

"Mors," Galad said. "Find Ser Arys Oakheart and bring him to me."

The boy peeled off without another word, already moving at a jog between the tents. Galad watched him go, then turned to Neral.

"Gather forty men to you," he said. "Men with guts, Neral. They're going to need it."

Neral cracked his knuckles. "Aye," he said. "Shouldn't take long."

xxx

The wind was brisk as it came up from the distant sea, cutting through the gaps in his armor as Galad took his place at the front of the line. The sky above the hills was pale and featureless, the kind of flat grey light that made it seem as if the world had gone still. 

Ahead, the hill on which Grey Garden sat rose in a long, steady incline of rock and scrub grass, and at its crown the castle's walls rose dark and imponent.

Upon hearing the trumpet call, Galad started forward.

Behind him, forty-odd men moved with him, Neral and Mors among them, Ser Arys Oakheart somewhere in the middle of the group, the ladders distributed between teams of four. They carried the small ram between two men on handles of green timber, cut just that morning. The eastern wall drew closer with each step, lower than the rest of the curtain, which was the only reason they were pointed at it. Thirty feet was still thirty feet. In broad daylight, with nowhere among the rocky hills surrounding the castle to maneuver secretly, there was no advantage to be had here except that this was where the Harlaws would expect an attack, and Galad intended to give them what they expected.

The defenders saw them almost immediately. Heads appeared above the crenellations, fingers pointing, voices carrying down the hillside in the sharp tones of alarm. A horn sounded from somewhere inside the walls.

Galad did not quicken his step.

If anything, he slowed slightly, and the men behind him, as instructed, slowed with him. They climbed the incline at a steady pace, more with an illusion of urgency than true hurry. Every archer on those walls would be measuring the distance now, nocking arrows, deciding when to loose.

He wanted them deciding as long as possible.

More heads appeared, more movement on the battlements. A bow came up, was drawn, was loosed.

The first arrow struck the earth ten feet in front of him, standing upright in the thin soil.

"Shields up!"

The creak and shuffle of wood going overhead rolled back through the group. He glanced back once, saw shields raised in a broken roof of battered wood, and turned forward again.

"Hold your hearts steady!" he called.

The arrows came in earnest now. They hit the ground in scattered clusters, unpredictable, and the sound of them was everywhere at once, the whisper of the air they cut and the flat crack of impact against wood and the duller sound of impact against earth. One man cried out sharply somewhere behind him. He heard a body go down and kept walking.

The incline steepened toward the summit. They were in the open fully now, no crags or folds in the ground to offer any relief, just the grass and the rock and the sky and the walls above them getting larger with every step. Glimping over his shield, he could see the defenders clearly now, could see the shapes of men leaning over the crenellations with bows and rocks and anything that could be thrown at another man.

"Now!" Galad shouted, then he ran.

The roar came up behind him as if it had been waiting. He could hear the thunder of boots on the hillside, the voices of the men, and he ran with his shield angled up and forward, watching the wall getting closer beneath the rim. Above, defenders lined the stretch ahead of him. A glint of metal caught the grey light, and he quickly pulled the shield up hard and the arrow struck it with a force that jarred his arm from wrist to shoulder. He held the grip and kept running.

The wall came up and he hit the stone base and pressed himself flat against it, the cold of it reaching through his armor. Around him, the men came in fast and ragged, gasping from the run, and the ladder teams were already moving, bracing the feet of the ladders in the soil and shoving them up against the stone. 

Eight of them went up along the stretch of wall, the defenders above immediately trying to throw them clear. Rocks came down. Arrows flew at steep angles, finding the men who weren't tight enough against the wall's base.

A man put his foot on the first rung of the nearest ladder and made it to the third before a rock struck his shoulder. The sound was much like an arrow striking wood, a sharp crack, and the man fell away screaming, rolling on the ground with his arm held at an angle it should not have been.

Farther down, the ram crew made their attempt at the gate. He heard the first impact, and then heard the thin liquid sound of something being poured from above. The crew scattered away from the portcullis quickly after that, and Galad did not blame them for it. They had done their part. The attempt on the gate had never been the point.

Ser Arys appeared at his shoulder, back flat against the wall, breathing in controlled bursts, eyes quick and bright. Neral came in on his other side, a cut already bleeding on his forearm from something Galad hadn't seen. Arrow, likely. Mors was there too, teeth set, eyes slightly too wide.

"Where are they?" Arys asked.

Just as he spoke, the trumpets came.

Not one. Several, from the far side of the hill, building on each other, and with them the sound of voices, hundreds of voices, rising into a single roar that carried across the rocky ground and up the walls above him. The main force, the bulk of the army, coming up the opposite slope with as much noise as three hundred men could produce between them.

Above, the shouting changed character. He could hear the pitch of it shifting, the alarm becoming something more urgent, Ironborn horns answering the Reachmen's trumpets.

"We go now," Galad said, and took the ladder.

The rungs passed under his hands quickly. He looked up once and a defender was leaning over the crenellation with a rock raised above his head, only for an arrow from below strike the man in the chest. He fell back from the parapet with the rock still in hand. Another man took his place almost immediately, but the head count above this stretch of wall was visibly thinner than it had been a minute ago. Fewer arrows zip around them. Fewer rocks drop down.

The sound of the main assault was pulling them. No doubt, the defenders would think his own group of attackers were just meant to distract them away from the main attack. They would rush there in numbers, and would likely get there in time to prevent the storming as well. 

But the men there did not need to take the walls. They needed only to wait for him. Galad would see the gates open himself.

At last, he came over the top of the ladder and onto the battlements.

The spear came fast at him. He caught it on the shield and felt the impact push him back half a step, his rear foot finding the parapet's inner lip. He grabbed the shaft with his free hand before the defender could pull it back, wrapped his fingers around it, and used it to haul himself fully onto the wall walk. Swinging his shield in a short arc, the metal rim connected with the spearman's head above the ear. The man sat down heavily against the crenellation and did not try to stand.

Around him on the battlements, Ironborn were still at their posts, some with bows still drawn toward the ladders below, others turning toward the new threat on the wall. Throwing rocks over the parapet. Working to push the ladders clear. Three of the ladders went over before the men could stop them, their occupants dropping away with shouts that faded quickly. But five ladders still stood, and he could hear boots on the rungs of the nearest one.

He needed to keep this section of wall until those boots cleared the parapet. That was all. It would all be for naught if he couldn’t hold. So he would.

Four men came at him, and his sword sang out of its scabbard in a rasp of metal on wood.

He went deep into the void, and in the void he was very still and very cold and every moving thing around him was completely legible, for they were a part of him as much as his own self. 

He knew the exact arc of the first sword before it reached him. He knew the second man's footwork and where the gap was going to be. He knew, distantly and without concern, that there was a fifth man coming from the far side of the merlons, and he filed that fact away for when it became relevant.

The sword he deflected into the path of the second man's axe, and two necks are sliced open in one counter stroke. The third man thrust low and Galad stepped aside it and cut him across the back of the knee in passing. The fourth man had a mace and more courage than sense, and he swung it in a wide horizontal arc that would have taken someone's head off if Galad had been where it expected him to be. He was not where it expected him to be. 

He danced amongst them as if it was all a choreographed routine, his feet never in the same spot for more than a second, sword flashing to strike an artery or a gap in the mail. The fifth man strikes him at his blindspot, and he only hears it because, in the void, he is also the Ironman’s blade, and one cannot be blind to oneself. The sword skitters harmlessly against his shield, and he kills the attacker without turning around, footwork only, a quarter-step to the left and a backhanded cut and then he was moving forward again.

In the space of as many heartbeats, five men fall dead around him, and then boots hit the battlements from the ladders.

He heard Ser Arys's voice coming up behind him, and the sound of the young knight engaging the defenders coming from the left. The wall walk was narrow, barely wide enough for three men abreast, and Arys was using it well, keeping his shield forward and working in short controlled cuts, giving ground only when he had to.

With the left side held, Galad swept right.

Some defenders here were pulling back from their positions, some abandoning the wall entirely, others backing toward the gatehouse in a knot. He did not let the knot become a wall. He moved through the retreating men like a fine butcher, his sword finding each one in turn, the blade moving between guards and through them, and the battlements behind him emptying except for the bodies.

Three large men stepped up together from the direction of the gatehouse, big-framed Ironborn with the look of men who had done this before. One carried an axe with both hands. The second had a mace. The third held a spear and shield at close-quarters range, which in a narrow space was the most dangerous of the three.

The spearman rushed him with half his body hidden behind the shield. Feinting right, Galad batted the spear away, used his foot to trip the man, then pushed him off the wall before he realized what was happening.

The axeman was next. He was fast and his reach was long and his first blow would have split Galad to the navel if Galad had not already been moving laterally along the parapet's inner face. The axe took a chip out of the stone instead. By the time the man recovered for a second swing, Galad was too close inside his reach for the axe to be useful. The man realized this and grabbed for him. Letting him get a grip on his shield arm, Galad used the pull to drive his elbow into the man's jaw, and then his sword into the gap below his raised arm.

The mace-carrier struck at him from the right while this was happening. Galad took the blow on the edge of his shield and felt it all the way up into his neck. The man reared back for a second swing.

To his left, a hand was appearing over the crenellation, and the mace-carrier shifted his eyes toward it for perhaps a quarter of a second.

That was enough. His sword flashed, and suddenly three big men looked just as small as the rest of them when laying flat on the ground.

The man cleared the parapet beside him. Neral, he ralized, the older man stopping to catch his breath, but then Galad was already moving toward the gatehouse because there was no longer time.

The defenders were running toward the gatehouse, abandoning this stretch of wall to them when it became clear they could not stem the tide. 

Galad ran after them. “With me!” he called back, but he did not slow.

He reached the door as the last man was pulling it shut behind him, one hand braced on the frame, and hit it with his full weight and the door came back hard. Something on the other side gave a sound between a shout and a grunt. He kicked the door fully open and went through.

A short stone landing, the top of a stairwell, torchlight shining below. Two men in the doorway, one of them with a hand pressed to his face where the door had caught him. The other had his sword drawn. Galad killed him first in a single pass, then the men behind him piled in through the door, killing the defender on the ground and streaming past him toward the stairwell.

Galad followed them quickly. The going was tight on the steps, barely wide enough for one man at a time, curving down and to the left in a tight spiral. The stone here was old, the mortar between it dark with damp. Torches in iron brackets sat every ten feet. 

Two of his men died in front of him as they fought their way down. He had to climb over their bodies, and the bodies of the Ironborn who tried to hold the stairwell but fell to his blade.

The space turned into a coffin. There was no room for footwork, no room to move off a line, no room for the forms the way he had learned them. He fought with small movements, elbow and wrist and the flat of the blade, using the wall as a backstop when he needed it and using the bodies as obstacles as more men streamed up. 

The torchlight made everything amber and strange. Pained screams echoed against the stone. Galad felt like he was being pressed on all sides, but the discomfort was a distant thing in the void. There was no room for fear, for doubt and remorse, even as he killed so many men, even as some of them look like young boys wearing armor too big for their bodies.

Near the bottom of the stairs, three defenders were hauling a door shut behind them as he came off the final turn. Galad parried a feeble attempt as he reached them, answered with a flashing thrust, then kicked the body down so that it fell across the threshold, sprawling over the gap before the door could close. The other two took one look and abandoned the attempt, sprinting down an adjacent stairway that led deeper into the castle.

A low-ceilinged square room laid open before him, with the stairways side by side, the one they had come down from, and the other the defenders had fled to. And in the farther wall, a heavy door of banded oak, barred and chained from the inside, stood in their way.

According to the men they had captured during the raid of the Ironborn camp, the mechanism to pull the chains that would raise the portcullis laid behind that door. 

Ser Arys came through first behind him, his silk surcoat dark with blood. The others crowded in after. Among them Mors appeared, looking around the room with a dazed expression as if he had not expected to get this far. Neral too still stood, the cut on his forearm soaking his sleeve through.

"What now, ser?" Arys asked.

"Lock and hold the door upstairs," Galad said. He pointed at the oak door. "Bring the ram down and start working on that." Turning back to the stairhead, he added, "I will hold the stairs when they come."

And they came. Quickly at that, which was right. The defenders who had run would have reached the castle's garrison within minutes, and Ser Harras Harlaw would have understood immediately that the chain room was the real threat and that everything else was secondary.

They came up the stairs and Galad stood at the threshold and held it.

He had done this before. In another life, in another world, under different circumstances with different enemies, some not even humans, he had stood in narrow places and held them against those who wanted very badly to push through. 

Behind him, the men worked with the ram, short rhythmic impacts crashing against the oak door. He counted the blows without meaning to. One blow turned to two, one body turned to three. 

For nearly half an hour, they came up one after another in the narrow space, and one after another he killed them, and the void held everything at the same clean distance. The screaming, the smell, the weight building in his sword arm. 

Voices spoke to him at times, offering to stand in his place, or just to stand beside him. He ignored it all. Only once did the rush stop, when the bodies had stacked deep enough in the steps that the defenders paused to drag their fallen clear. In that quiet, someone pressed a waterskin into his hand, and he drank without stepping back from the threshold.

Eventually, the locking bar finally splintered and the door swung inward. They made quick work of the poor Ironmen left inside and soon the chains were manned, the windlass worked, and the heavy links grinding as the portcullis began to rise. 

Galad heard the roaring cheers from the men outside, and the man around him screamed along, some patting him on the back, hugging him, reaching out in the crowded room as if only wanting to touch him. 

Then, from somewhere below and deeper in the castle, he heard the horns.

Not Reachmen trumpets. Ironborn. Three notes in a falling pattern, the same signal he had heard at the beach in the valley. Withdraw. By the time the portcullis was fully up, so many defenders had died on those stairs that Ser Harras would have known his position was finished.

Gathering the men, he led them down the stairway, over the bodies, and out into the courtyard, only to find it nearly empty. A few defenders sprinted across the open ground toward the keep, but its doors firmly closed now, even as some stragglers begged them to be open. 

Walking to the gates, Galad and two others pulled the first timber slat from its bracket. Then he stepped aside and let the men do the work.

Soon the gates swung open, and the cheering came through like a wave breaking as the men streamed past him, with cries of “Tyrell!” and “Highgarden!” and then his own name, rising and falling, echoing back off the castle walls. 

He saw wide-eyed looks on most faces, awed that they had taken the castle so quickly, and that so few men had fallen in the attempt. 

Galad did not let himself feel any of the joy. Not that he could, having delved so deep into the void, so much that even the bone-weariness he felt in his body didn’t slow him down. It was only one body, and in the oneness, he was many. 

He was the men coming through the gate and the defenders pulling back into the keep and the frightened people inside it, the women and children pressing themselves into corners in dark rooms, praying in low voices to gods he did not know, for a salvation only he could deliver to them. He was the castle itself, its thick wooden beams, its cold stones. And stones did not grow weary. Did not tire, unlike his body. And so the weariness could not touch him.

Soon, Ser Owen Inchfield would be coming up from the camp as well, and when he arrived he would want the keep taken, and more men would die against its door for the same reasons more men had died against the castle's walls this morning. And with their blood up and their leash loose, Galad knew well the fate that awaited the women and children inside.

Before that happened, there was something he could still do.

He found Mors and Arys near the gatehouse doors, speaking animatedly about the battle with boyish enthusiasm. Neral sat nearby, another man helping him tie a bandage across his forearm. Conversation stopped when they saw him, and soon they were walking back across the courtyard toward the squat stone keep that remained unconquered. 

Before them, the doors were closed and barred. Even as the attackers spread across the rest of the castle, breaking into the flanking towers and stables and outbuildings, he could hear movement inside the walls, voices in low urgent conference. Stopping ten feet out, he waved a piece of white cloth from a broken spear where the defenders above the keep's parapet could see it.

A voice came down. "What do you want, greenlander?"

"Ser Harras Harlaw," Galad said simply. "I would speak with him."

A pause. Movement above. Then the Knight of Grey Garden appeared at the parapet and looked down at him.

He offered the same terms as before, an honorable surrender, in which no harm to anyone inside the walls. He made sure the man understood that, once Ser Owen took command of the siege, the offer would be no longer his to make.

Still, the man refused him again, but only the first offer. When Galad spoke of single combat this time, Ser Harras Harlaw did not ride away without answering. Perhaps he fancied his odds now, after Galad had fought for the better part of an hour. Perhaps he feared what his men would think of him if he turned away from the offer a second time, with his own walls already taken around him. Or perhaps he simply wished to spare his subjects the pain of a forceful sacking.

Whatever the reason, his hand moved to Nightfall's hilt and stayed there.

"So be it," Harras said. "See to your injuries now if you have any, ser. Your blood shall soon stain the cobbles where you stand."

xxx

AN: Next chapter: End of the Greyjoy Rebellion + Tourney of Lannisport begins.