SANSA
Sansa awoke to the polyphonic clamour of rough voices and smooth metal. Her head felt as if wasps were dancing in it and once again there was blood between her thighs. As she shook off sleep and gathered her wits as best she could, at length she realised that what she was hearing was not a single roar, as it initially had seemed to her, but the cheers of untold thousands upon thousands of men-at-arms as they banged their weapons, each man's voice on its own almost inaudible and blended into one for that they were so far away.
Swiftly she dressed, taking care to place the torn-off piece of cloth that she had made under her smallclothes, and she hurried to the only room on the top floor of the manse she dwelt in that had large windows. As she arrived to peer out of the glass she found that she was not alone. Dozens of the red cloaks who were housed here, bleary-eyed as she was, had clambered up to watch the battle. Of course they have, she thought. It would decide their fates as well as hers.
It was the hour of the gull, which came after the hour of the cock that started with the sunrise, and there was but a faint flavour of pink to the light, which was for the most part golden. There was almost palpable alarm in the city, but none of them were looking that way. A mile upstream of the King's Gate, the southernmost of those city gates that overlooked the Blackwater, lay the northernmost tents of the army of Renly Baratheon, and the rebel Lord of Storm's End's camp thrummed with activity. At many points on the river, miles apart, hastily built rafts, carved of felled trees from the kingswood but bound by hempen ropes that must have been carried all the way from Highgarden whence they had come, crossed the river with armoured men upon them. Only knowledge of the men surrounding her prevented Sansa from smiling as she saw how many they were. At this distance the furthest of them appeared more like ants than men, but the virtue of ants was that there were so many of them. Her heart sang. Surely Joff can't hope to kill them all.
"Why do they just let the rebels go across?" Sansa asked. "I thought they'd want to stop them from getting to our side of the river."
"'Twouldn't do no good, m'lady," said one of the elder men-at-arms, called Willem, a man of grey hair, one of those that fussed over her and pretended to look after her as if they had any right to, as if they were her father's men like Jory. All part of the Imp's ploy. She did not like dealing with them. She preferred those who were easier to hate.
"Why not?"
"See those?" Willem pointed to the ordered ranks of men who stood on the south bank of the river in groups, guarded by the unmistakeable shapes of spearmen. "Them's longbowmen, I'd stake my life on 't—all the longbowmen of a host a long way greater 'n ours. Too many. The boy king sends his ships there, I'd not want to be a sailor; they'll pelt 'em with arrows an' kill half the men on deck. Even if our archers kill twice more as they lose—an' I wouldn't bet on it—'tis poor trade for us. The rebels are too many. Best way is, let 'em cross; let 'em come to the walls."
Sansa's eyes followed his gnarled finger from north to south as it traced around the walls. The Old Gate, then the Gate of the Gods, the Lion Gate, and finally the King's Gate… all of them and the walls that linked them were flush with red cloaks. Lannister men-at-arms with lion-crafted halfhelms stood at the ready there, with swords to hand and oil to boil and archers behind murder holes, and other western soldiers were clustered in squares and streets in that part of the city, prepared to leap to the aid of any part of the walls that were hard pressed. Though this manse was not far in the west of the city, the great bulk of Visenya's Hill, crowned by the vast marble dome and seven crystal towers of the Great Sept of Baelor, loomed over it from nearby, so most of the eastern half of the city could never be seen from here. Thanks to that, Sansa's vision ended in the north at a part of the wall past the Old Gate, and in the south she could only see a small part of the ashen ruin that had used to be the waterfront, between the north bank of the river and the city walls. Sansa remembered it as a chaotic clutter of little shacks, warehouses and stalls for poor merchants and the dwellings of fisherfolk and pot shops and alehouses and the cheapest brothels, but the Lannisters had had it burnt to the ground and flattened even the rubble, for fear that it would ease the climb of Lord Renly's host onto the walls which, since the burning, now stood high, sheer and alone.
"These are our strength," the old soldier declared. "'T ain't no easy affair to storm walls like these, m'lady. High walls are the only way a host the size of ours can fight a host the size of theirs with hope of vict'ry. Any fight else, the losses will be too even; on the walls, only, they can be enough tilted to us." He gazed down at the stormlanders and Reachmen outside. "Poor bastards. I don't envy no man who's tryin' and take a fort by storm. Let 'em come here. Let 'em die here."
Sansa shivered. They won't. Lord Renly has too many. He'll win, she told herself, but could not vanquish her own fear and doubt.
"Look 'ere!"
Another of the men-at-arms, a younger man, had spotted something in the distance. Miles upstream, beyond even the furthest of the rafting men, small shallow-draught boats were being rowed across the river, not just one but a dozen, no, not a dozen, dozens, no, not dozens, hundreds, one next to the other next to yet another next to yet another still.
"What are they doing?"
"A pontoon bridge, m'lady," said a soldier whose name she recalled as Petyr. He was a black-bearded man from Lannisport, mayhaps about her father's age. "They must've been built it, this moon an' a week past since they gots to the ci'y."
"What's that?"
"'S a way of crossin' a river when you need it quick. 'S normal, though I've never saw it done on a river big as this fat-arse, Father strike me if I lie. What you does is, you get some boats across the river and you lays a great big bit of wood on top of 'em—ah, I'm no poet, m'lady, you'll see it soon enough—and then you got a bridge o' sorts, though 't ain't a good one. Better hope 't ain't stormy, elsewise you're fucked like a dockyard lass when the fleet comes in. Beggin' your pardons, m'lady," he added, a little abashed.
"Why bother? Why don't they all cross by raft?"
Petyr chuckled, not ungently. "Rafts are for men. You try gettin' a horse or a stonethrower 'cross a river like this on a nice little raft, m'lady, 't won't go too sweet, I'd say."
She soon discovered Petyr had spoken true. From between the distant tents, carried by a hundred or a thousand men, there was mayhaps the biggest wooden structure that Sansa had ever seen. A dozen or so wooden planks, cut almost flat, side by side, all rendered the same length by axe-blows, were held in one by hemp and oak and iron bands, which also served to hold them to another set, and so on. It passed between the hands of men on the south bank, stretching back in a line, ever further into the hands of men who stood on the boats. At last, remarkably quickly, it had reached the north bank of the river, and only now when they put it down could Sansa see its entirety. The bridge was colossal. It made even the war-bred stallions look like the carven toys her father had given her when she was small, as though she could pluck them from the air.
The men who had borne it were the first to clamber onto the bridge from its sides and rush onto the other shore. A few hundred of the southerners who had crossed the river by raft—or was it a thousand? From this far away, it was hard to tell—had gathered already on the north bank. Sansa marvelled at how meticulously Lord Renly's men prepared for an attack they surely knew was not going to come, just so that they would not be caught in a poor position if it did.
More men gathered around the north end of the bridge, as the rafters rushed to defend it from any attack that sought to prevent the main bulk of the southern host from crossing. Sansa realised that there were not hundreds of them, or even a thousand. As they seemed to crawl like shiny-bodied ants with the sunlight gleaming on steel, with the sheer size of the ground they covered there must have been many thousands. Other southerners with swords and bows and spears were dashing across the bridge, while knights with proud destriers and gleaming mail arrayed themselves in neat lines on the south bank, headed by a helmed, armoured man on a white horse with a strikingly bright orange cloak. Lord Renly? Some lesser lord? She could not tell from his face, but when his standard-bearer caught up with him, holding high the black nightingales on a yellow field, she knew him for Bryce of House Caron, Lord of the Marches and Lord of Nightsong, one of Renly Baratheon's seven chosen companions and the mightiest of the lords sworn to Storm's End.
Tendrils of excitement crept up Sansa's spine. This must be Lord Renly's van, the foremost part of his host—though with an army of such size the van alone was larger than many whole armies in the songs—and this its lord commander. The fall of the city was at hand.
Suddenly their thoughts were drawn away by a very different sound, coming from the opposite window. From the Great Sept of Baelor, which thousands of cityfolk had gathered around and doubtless thousands more inside where Sansa could not see them, there issued a great noise of numberless voices, men and women, old and young, crying to the heavens. Sansa knew it, and she mouthed the words they spoke:
Gentle Mother, font of mercy,
save our sons from war, we pray,
stay the swords and stay the arrows,
let them know a better day
Gentle Mother, strength of women,
help our daughters through this fray,
soothe the wrath and ta—
Then came a clamour from the west, a bray of trumpets and thunder of hooves, surpassing the sound of the hymn as easily as an eagle surpasses a tree. The sept forgotten, Sansa dashed back to the former window. Thousands of knights were pouring across the pontoon bridge like a shining silver liquid, their fearsome lord commander at their head. Behind Lord Caron's nightingale sigil she saw others, countless lesser sigils, of course, knights and lords of small account, but also the standards of Houses mighty and well recalled in story and song. The white weasel on black of House Varner stood with the crossed quills on brown of House Penrose. The oak leaves of the Oakhearts decorated a banner just ahead of the turtle of the Estermonts, the House into which Renly's mother Lady Cassana had been born. The fox and flowers of Florent flew high, as did the suns and moons of Tarth. Sansa wondered whether the southerners' van alone was larger than the entire western host, even with the few thousand new westermen who had reinforced the city under Lord Lefford's banners near a fortnight ago. Mayhaps, mayhaps not; but it could not be far.
Trumpets called from the city, as if in answer. From both directions now, the calls of war overrode the Mother's hymn. Lion standards flew streaming, greatest among them a monstrosity of red silk with an exquisitely rendered lion in cloth-of-gold that Ser Kevan Lannister had borne with him from his lord brother's host at Harrenhal. The defenders responded. Men in cloaks of red or gold rushed in their multitudes to the south of the city, where they gathered, awaiting their master. Sansa felt a little savage enjoyment. Clearly the Lannisters sought to issue from the gates and give battle to Lord Renly—why else would they be here?—but it was plain to see they were too late.
Sansa gazed out of both windows, each and the other in turn. Through one, the westermen milled around the city, waiting, waiting. Through the other, the power of the south stood assembled in all its glory. More knights were appearing on the north bank of the river every minute, and their fellows on that side, both those ahorse and those afoot, were having to move further and further from the other end of the bridge to give them space to enter, leaving a close-bound mesh of men and metal.
Sansa watched them, mesmerised, until a soldier scarcely older than her brother Robb pointed and shouted, "Look! On the river!"
She turned back at once to the eastern window. An enormous many-oared ship, a galley of war, had come into view on the river Blackwater, downstream of the King's Gate. At first Sansa thought her to be Renly's, for the mighty standard waving above her was not Joffrey's rampant lion and stag opposing but King Robert's prancing black stag on gold, but she and near a dozen others like her on each side sailed serenely through the calm waters, untroubled by any arrows from the city, and as they did, another line of ships came into view behind her.
Those two lines, by Sansa's count, were the right number of Joffrey's fleet. That, she thought, or mayhaps merely wanted to, is what I'm seeing. But then there came another line of ships. And then another. And then another. And then another…
Mother's mercy. Is there any end to them?
Sansa watched with her heart in her mouth as the royal fleet of King Robert Baratheon, in all its martial magnificence, sailed down the mouth of the Blackwater. At last, at once, like a flash of lightning, she perceived in that instant the terrible simplicity of the Lannisters' trap. Lord Renly would not have known, could not have known; any host of great size needed to forage and could thus be tracked on land, but by sea it would not be such an easy task for a spy to send a message to his master from the isle of Dragonstone. The fleet could have been left well to the north of the city, beyond the lands held by Lord Renly, till this fateful day, and even on the day of battle his host would not have seen it, for the same reason why she had not: the bulk of King's Landing and the hills on which the dragon-kings had built it stood in the way of their eyes. And now, with the southern host in the midst of crossing, the fury of the royal fleet was heading for the hastily assembled bridge—at the very moment that the southern host was divided, part of it on each side of the river.
"Gods be good," swore another of the men-at-arms, golden-haired Jonothor. "So Lord Stannis's sour old cunt took our side?"
"No wonder in 't," grey-bearded Philip advised him. "Slain by his own brother… o' course the widow of Dragonstone wants revenge."
Sansa knew the very moment the rebel Lord of Storm's End's army saw the royal fleet. Like the coiled muscles of a shadowcat, they sprang into action. As helmed and mounted lords barked orders, standards flying high, men on the north bank formed up to repel an assault, and archers arrayed themselves on both sides of the river in greater numbers than ever before, aiming downstream. Lord Renly did not intend to let the royal fleet pass without exacting a toll, bloodier by far than that of any lowborn tollkeeper.
In time, Ser Kevan Lannister gave a sharp command, and, with the near silence of well-oiled hinges, its keepers opened the Lion Gate. The Lord Regent held aloft his lance and with a roar of hate and purpose the host of the west in cloaks of red and gold sallied to meet its enemy upon an open field.
"Madness," muttered Petyr. "I didn't never doubt m'lord before, you have my oath on 't, but this is folly. Even with the Golden Tooth men, on the north bank they have us three to two, and I say, them crownland-born laggards in them pretty cloaks of theirs, they'll part ways like a whore's cunt first sign the battle looks sour."
"No, m'lord is wise," Willem said. "'Tis true, this is no perfect battle, o' course—that's if we'd hit them earlier before there were so many crossed—but when you ever saw that? I never did. Wait for a perfect battle and you'll die waitin'. This's the best chance we'll get to break them in the field, so the Lord Regent's takin' it."
In silence, they watched on. The royal fleet drew near to the bridge before the Lannister army did. "Y'know, I ain't sure they can break it," Philip said thoughtfully. "That's a proper big bridge, that one, wrought of hardwood and iron. And there's only so big a stonethrower can be stuffed on a ship."
This received a response of gloomy assent. Sansa thought differently; her heart soared.
The ships drew nearer. Flight after flight of arrows rained upon them from the men on the banks, wreaking red ruin to give their sailors cruel deaths, and arrows fell upon the southerners in answer. So the clash of arms proceeded, till the foremost ships' trebuchets allowed their counterweights to drop and threw their burdens forth.
Yet there was no shriek or shudder of wood and iron gravely struck. Instead, the world went green.
Sansa shied her eyes from the flash of vast and terrible light, as though a second sun had been born on the bridge about a mile hence. When she dared to return them, it was in flames. Green fire, cruel and piercingly bright, blazed like tongues of demons, making no distinction between wood and iron, nor between the structure of the bridge, the boats that bore it, and the flesh of horses and even of armoured men who were upon it. All things burnt. The screams were unlike anything Sansa had ever known, in loudness and in number. What could be so horrible as to watch hordes of people cooked alive?
The soldiers in the manse shrank back. "Good gods!" "Fuck!" "Mother's mercy!" and countless other prayers and obscenities were uttered, in their amazement and horror at what could be seen. It was soon determined that even Willem and Philip knew nothing of this. They turned to Hendry, the eldest of them all, who, as he never ceased to remind them, had seen two-and-sixty namedays and fought against Maelys the Monstrous in the War of the Ninepenny Kings.
"Wildfire," he pronounced it. "Alchemist's piss, some call it. I've seen it before. Dangerous stuff; it burns water no less than wood. Piss on it and your cock burns off. But even I never saw it used much as this."
The wildfire did not stop there. The ships drew nearer to that great inferno, and their trebuchets cast more loads of it. More of the bridge, and of the men gathered so close together on either side of it, disappeared amid green flames. She saw lords and knights near either end of the bridge trying to rally their men, but the cause was hopeless. Men threw down their weapons, cast off their helms, their mail, anything that might slow them down, and in their thousands they fled like hunted animals. Many even turned their swords against their former fellows that stood in their way, preventing them from running from the wildfire. Within minutes the bridge and the boats upon which it had rested were gone, wiped from the face of the earth as though they had never existed, save for the long, wide, river-spanning streak of flames. It seemed nothing at all, not even water, could withstand the all-devouring fire.
While the bridge blazed green, Ser Kevan Lannister's charge, his foot not far behind, drew nearer to Lord Caron's defences. The latter had hastily arranged a wall of spears, but moments before the charge struck, there was a great commotion from within the defences. The men under the fox-and-flowers standard of House Florent, one of the few that had been awarded a place of great honour and great danger in the vanguard, turned warhammer and lance and pike and spear and sword against their erstwhile allies. Chaos was wrought in the line at the worst possible moment. In the parts of the line where the Florents were near, the Lannisters drove through them like a polished knife through cheese, and that allowed them to carve through much of the remainder of the line from behind, utterly unexpected. Moreover, the nature of the betrayal was not so obvious to the men on the ground as it was to Sansa looking from far away and above. Attacked by their allies in the chaos of battle, some men judged the traitors wrongly and fought those whom they should have been befriended. And the panic of the desperate men fleeing the spread of the wildfire was no aid at all to the strength and cohesion of Lord Renly's host. Even on the south bank, the lords and captains of the south struggled to restore order. Their comrades on the north bank fared poorer still. And the trebuchets did not cease launching wildfire. With the bridge consumed, they sent it at Lord Renly's army, on both banks, and clusters of men vanished in screams and green flame.
It was inevitable. Pressed from several sides, by a wave of panic fleeing from the bridge of fire and by their former allies and by the tremendous force of Ser Kevan's charge that had broken through their lines, and suffering a rain of wildfire, shocked and struck and battered, Lord Renly's host on the north bank broke. Florent men-at-arms met with red-cloaked Lannisters, along with the gold-clad men of King's Landing, and tore through what remained. Slowly the pretender restored some measure of order to his soldiers on the south bank of the river, the bulk of his army still, and unlimbered the siege weapons they had brought from Highgarden. With spears and arrows and stonethrowers they attacked the galleys of the royal fleet, which fought for a while and then retreated, lacking further need to suffer their decks to be painted red with the blood of dead men; their chief grisly purpose was done. On the north bank, while their comrades in arms watched, helpless for separation, southerners were cut down in their thousands, many whilst trying to flee. Even from as far as this manse, it was no trial to see the totality of the rout, but the victors allowed them not even the faintest chance of re-amassing and presenting resistance. Mercilessly, the Lannister horse were riding them down.
Sansa thought of crying, of screaming, of raging against the gods who had proven themselves so monstrously cruel. She did no such thing. She owed better than that to the courageous men who had been her last, best hope of salvation, despite that, mayhaps even because, they had been thwarted. So while the westermen beside her toasted the cunning of their lords and cheered their victory, she stayed, with a calm pale face and dry eyes, and she watched them die.
Author's Note: The Lannisters sprung three surprises on Renly in Knees Falling's Battle of the Blackwater. The Florents asked for a place in the vanguard, where they would get lots of glory and also lots of deaths. Foolishly, Renly and the Tyrells granted it. Oops. That was the least important of the surprises, though; the battle would probably have been won by the Lannisters without it. The more important two were the royal fleet and the wildfire, since that isolated a large part of Renly's army on the wrong side of the river and allowed the Lannisters to destroy them. Neither would have worked without the other. Without the wildfire, the royal fleet wouldn't have been able to so quickly destroy the bridge, and in the time they spent there, they would have suffered plenty of losses from Renly's own catapults and archers. Without the royal fleet, the bridge wouldn't have been destroyed at all, since Lannister catapults would have to be transported to the bridge on land, and they could be easily overrun and destroyed by Renly's men on the north bank. Renly didn't lose this battle because of incompetence, though he is of course militarily incompetent. The Clash of the Stags was one hell of a lesson to him; he was arrogant, and as a result, he watched his lover die horribly, trampled and drowning in the mud. Watching Loras die is an experience that he will never forget. Ever since, he still isn't a competent commander but he's now self-aware enough to realise that he isn't a competent commander, so he listens to advice from people who are. The problem is, there are matters that were genuinely difficult to foresee. One could argue he should have foreseen the Florent betrayal, and he did foresee that it was a possibility that the royal fleet might arrive and march against him; all those people assembling to harass the royal fleet with arrows and catapults weren't an accident, that was a well-drilled contingency plan. But the Lannisters only had such a gargantuan amount of wildfire (enough to pull off a trick like this) because magic is returning to the world with the hatching of Dany's dragons, thus enabling the pyromancers to make far more wildfire than was thought possible. If we're being reasonable, there's no way Renly could have foreseen that when he hasn't even heard of the hatching yet; it takes a while for news to reach Westeros from so far in the east. Not every defeat is due to one side being really incompetent (and I'm not just talking about defeats in war). Real life isn't that convenient. Sometimes you have a sensible plan and you don't do anything obviously stupid and yet you lose anyway.
Let me emphasise that, as I said in the chapter itself, the bulk of Renly's army was still on the south bank of the river, unharmed, by the end of the battle. Most of Renly's army is still alive and in good order. (If the Lannisters had waited longer, and allowed most or even half of Renly's army to cross, even with all their advantages there would have been a great deal of doubt as to whether they could win the battle on the north bank, due to being so badly outnumbered.) The Lannisters slew about 15,000 men (vastly disproportionate casualties, like what Ramsay Snow achieved against Rodrik Cassel in canon's A Clash of Kings by surprise and treachery, though Ramsay didn't have wildfire) and the Florents' 2,000 men deserted Renly, but Renly still has about 60,000 left, albeit on the wrong side of the river. In canon, Stannis's cause was de facto broken after the Battle of the Blackwater, and, facing the huge numbers of men available to the victorious Lannister-Tyrell alliance, the Starks and Tullys didn't really stand a chance, with what little army they had left; Robb won many battles but he lost his war in a battle he didn't show up to, since if Stannis had won and managed to kill Joffrey and Tommen, the marriage alliance holding Houses Tyrell and Lannister together would have broken. After Knees Falling's Battle of the Blackwater, however, Renly's cause is wounded but still alive. This is a significant Lannister victory but the war isn't over yet.
Oh and also, just because someone will say it otherwise—no, Petyr the random soldier from Lannisport is not Petyr Baelish, is not employed by Petyr Baelish, is not at all related to Petyr Baelish, and has never met Petyr Baelish. This is not an elaborate conspiracy. It's just that Littlefinger isn't the only man in Westeros who happens to be named Petyr.