The four of us continued north along the gravelly banks of the mainstem Milkwater; gloaming pine barrens gradually flattened to open tundra – austere and still, dotted with thaw ponds, rust-red lichens encrusting the permafrost – then swelled to rocky highlands, with the jagged peaks of the distant Frostfangs spearing through the clouds.
All things considered, we made good time, and any bullshit drama was (thank God) kept to an appropriate minimum – not so much for want of friction, mind, but an unwillingness to break the fragile peace that had since settled between us. I passed the hours caroling, resorting to the likes of Annie Get Your Gun after the well of D'Oyly Carte ran dry, while Thoros studied his divinations, Ed brooded and angsted, and Brynden – when not dozing in the wagon I'd hitched to Ed's gelding – played tour guide.
"See the flowers, the blue ones, up there on the ridge? Coldsnaps, they're called – symbolize vitality, resilience, triumph through adversity and whatnot. I've always admired them."
"Among the wildlings, rather than the pageantry of courtship, a man simply abducts his bride, and holds her captive until she submits to him. It's a test, you see, of whether he can provide for a woman. After all, every burden is a liability in lands as harsh as these."
"Keep a lookout, those are shadowcat tracks. Damned vicious things, they've a ghastly penchant for devouring children. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. If only I were restored to my proper form … "
I had a sneaking suspicion she was trying to tell me something.
Paradoxically, as the valley deepened and hills steepened and terrain, on the whole, roughened, the chill lost the worst of its bite, and the foliage grew noticeably lusher – in other words, the climate got milder, or at least less viscerally hostile.
Geothermic vents, we shortly discovered – concentrated around the valley due to some quirk of geology – ceaselessly belched into the surrounding environs plumes of scalding, sulfuric gas, which the high cliff walls, acting as an insulator, sheltered and diffused. Soil black and leaves green, this volcanicity offset the arctic bleakness, inducing a particular fertility, and fostering temperatures mild enough for my companions to strip their outermost layers.
What's more, clear signs of human occupation (quite the novelty after a week or two of lonely bush) began to clutter the heights: hunters' caches tucked away in hollows, shanties plopped beside fallow fields, handfuls of tribals crouched around campfires.
"The Valley of the Thenn," Brynden exposited. "The last habitable tract before winter begins in earnest. Well-settled, I'd call it, insofar as anything can be this side of the Wall."
And, soon enough, a narrow footpath slowly emerged by the riverside, broadening to a packed-dirt road the further we traveled, until butting up against a log stockade that ran the width of the pass. With the Milkwater flowing through a trench at the center, the palisade was bounded by a matching pair of squat wooden keeps, and slim watchtowers were positioned intermittently across its length. Pudgy men in bronze lamellar, matted hair curled into elaborate knots, idly paced its ramparts, scanned the horizon, or (confident that their superiors' backs were turned) chatted and gambled amongst themselves.
Leaning on his spear, a listless sentry watched as we rode up to the gate; he signaled us to stop with a raised hand, and centered his gaze on me, the tallest and flashiest and unequivocally prettiest of our merry little band.
"Hail," he grunted, with all the enthusiasm of a McDonald's cashier. "You intrude upon the borders of the realm of the First Men."
His accusation bore no real heat, nor pressing scrutiny. If anything, the prevailing mood was apathy, underlined by a sense of obliged conscientiousness, the kind that typically accompanies a duty long-staled.
"You are foreigners, correct? Neither citizens nor kin?"
The Thenns' language – an especially grating offshoot of the Finnish-sounding Old Tongue – was a dense one, stingy when apportioning syllables, yet steeped in subtext and implications and a certain clunky formality.
Little surprise, then, that a working translation takes some finagling (along with a fair splash of creative license), and even still comes out hammy and forced, like a bad period drama.
"Last I checked."
Close enough for government work; he took that as a yes.
"What are your intentions?"
"Sightseeing."
Had the sentry actually cared, he'd have surely pressed me for something more substantial than clever laconicisms – for bureaucracy's sake, if nothing else.
"Proceed."
Instead, he waved us through, before returning to his woolgathering.
The road, from then on, was paved with thick, smooth cobblestones, and busily trafficked by messengers and peddlers, who buzzed up and down the chain of abutting relay stations and trading posts. Here and there, on terraces cut into the hillsides, crofters harvested tubers and barley, herded sheep and cattle, whilst gangs of burly menials picked and hauled and sorted within the nearby pit mines and quarries. Villages, too, sprouted up along the way, as did mills and foundries and granaries, and all those other infrastructures and industries endemic to civilization – simple, yes, primitive even, compared to the Seven Kingdoms, but civilization nonetheless.
We'd ridden some three hundred miles northeast from the border fort, through the piedmonts, and reached the base of the mountains proper when the Valley distended, landscape unfurled, and before us lay a wide, sweeping basin, granite cliffs enclosing forty leagues of grassy plains; where, on the shores of a turquoise glacier lake (the apparent source of the Milkwater), sprawled a settlement so vast, so expansive, that it could only be described as a city.
Interlaced with winding canals and causeways, the town radiated outward from an immense pyramidal mound, and the colossal weirwood planted at its apex. Palaces and citadels – constructed of massive, dry-fitted diorite blocks, then plastered and whitewashed with lime – dominated the city center, the broad, airy avenues between them stuffed with shrines and gardens, market squares and law courts. The rest, though, the destitute plurality, settled for cramped, dingy favelas, long stretches of slum, slapdashed together from wattle and daub, mud and clay, pebbles and sticks. It all sat atop the unmistakable bulge of a tell, of thousands of years of garbage, debris, and successive reconstruction, each new layer sloppily erected over the collapsed remains of the last.
Even from miles away, the stench was appalling.
"Behold, the armpit of the world," Brynden sneered. "One of them, anyhow."
Just eyeballing the place, I reckoned it was home to a solid fifty, possibly sixty-thousand – a footnote in absolute terms, but remarkable given its context.
Well-settled, indeed.
"Has it got a name?"
"Thenn."
A pause; I furrowed my brow.
"After the valley, or … ?"
She gave me a side-eyed glower, disdainful and weary.
"Does it honestly matter?"
I frowned huffily, then grunted – we both knew it didn't – and flicking my feet in the stirrups, spurred Typhoon onward.
Sour sweat, barking dogs, streets littered with chicken bones and feces, the fetid urbanity brought to mind the squalor of the third world, and the rust of a late empire – so too, for that matter, did the feckless, feculent, sub-sapient untermenschen who infested it. These harridans and pickpockets, screeching infants and toothless layabouts, existed solely for the gratification of their base animal appetites; they wrote no symphonies, built no wonders, achieved, contributed, and understood nothing. As long as they'd their fill of bread and circuses, a bottle to suck and a warm hole to fuck, they – and their children, and their children's children ad infinitum – were content to spend eternity wallowing in their own filth.
Like most humans, really.
The city's rulers, meanwhile, skulls artificially elongated and faces ritualistically scarred, revelled and rollicked within their roomy stone halls, content in their anointed mastery over the stolid, fermenting masses. Frankly, they weren't anything revolutionary, just stamped from the tired mold of archaic god-kings, with the typical pretensions of radiance and purity, and a penchant for grand, sweeping proclamations about their supposed greatness.
Case in point, a cheering crowd had gathered at the foot of the mound, and to the wailing of horns and beating of drums, watched with rapt attention as a richly robed priest paced by the altar at the peak.
From the mob's periphery, I couldn't but notice that, despite the weirwood's magnitude, some wasting blight afflicted its raw, patchy bark, and its leaves shriveled as they hung from drooping branches – about as apt a metaphor for their society as you can get.
"Valiant fellows," the priest exclaimed, "last of the First Men, these are the days of our deepest lament! The earth howls in anger, bites in rage, withers our crops and scourges our bodies!"
One hand swept the crowd, and the other clenched into a fist.
"The southern degenerates say this makes us weak! They say our nation bleeds! They say that our destiny is sickness and destruction, to scatter into obscurity!"
"Never!" the multitude roared.
Chest inflated, feet planted wide, the priest thrust his arms above his head.
"I say no! We are strong! We are brave! We are wise! Of all, our race is closest to the gods!"
For a moment, he almost seemed to revel in the adulation.
"And I say, let our strength, and bravery, and wisdom appease the earth, and testify to our glory!"
A pair of acolytes – painted with crimson swirls and fitted with grotesque masks – dragged a kicking, crying captive onto the altar; stripped naked, the poor sod was then bent over a pedestal, the acolytes holding him in place as he writhed in desperation.
"Gallant warrior, undaunted and unflinching, we give our thanks to you!"
With a flourish, the priest raised a flint dagger over the captive's heaving chest.
"Great tree, spirits of the earth, accept your servant's sacrifice! With his blood, we sate your thirst! With his blood, we quench your fury!"
The captive's face contorted with a silent scream when the knife plunged through his breastbone, split his diaphragm, and sawed towards the navel; shoving a hand into the gash, the priest excised the still-beating heart, and with blood raining down onto his robes, held it aloft; he then handed the heart to a hunchbacked crone, whose eyes rolled back as she read the auguries, whereupon the acolytes seized the twitching captive by the limbs and tossed him headlong down the mound; bouncing and flailing, the body was caught by the executioners assembled at the bottom, who flayed and butchered it, and doled out the flesh to the crowd.
We didn't stick around for the rest.
Further on from the city, across the rolling prairie, the road slanted to a gradual incline, squeezing through a notch in the cliffs, then meandered along the Frostfangs' rugged slopes, temperatures falling as the altitude rose. If their foothills were fertile and insulated, then the mountains themselves were barren and exposed, rocks dusted with ice and snow, and greenery scoured by flurries and gales.
Once, the region had done rather well for itself (thrived would be too strong a word), as the abandoned settlements scattered about can attest; now, though, the few remaining residents – the stubborn ones, the hardy ones, the ones who refused to pack their bindles and bugger off south to the city – sluggishly scratched at frozen crops, or foraged for rabbits and mice, hollow-cheeked and frostbitten within their drafty huts.
Perhaps the only structure, population, institution of any real note was the small, isolated garrison hunkered atop a knoll, overlooking the spot where the increasingly derelict road conclusively transitioned to unpaved gravel.
It was the platonic ideal of a punishment posting.
A wandering patrol, shivering underneath their heavy fur coats, gaped in bemusement when we passed them by, before shouting and scrambling towards us.
"H-halt!"
Spears raised, they blocked our path, hastily assembling into some pell-mell facsimile of a battle line.
"State your business!" the apparent leader (or at least the gutsiest) barked.
A leaf-shaped spearhead trembled at the tip of my nose – I flicked it aside.
"Calm down, calm down," I sighed. "There's no need for hysterics."
That didn't do much to assuage them.
"Look, we've got a tight schedule, so if you kindly step aside, we'll be on our way."
Frowning and grimacing in silent conversation, the leader nodded, and one of the soldiers took off towards the fort.
The standoff continued until, a few minutes later – mere moments before my frayed patience finally snapped – the soldier returned with reinforcements, among them a fifty-something in noticeably finer kit. Arms crossed, bags under his eyes, the commander scanned my party, brow knitting when he caught sight of Bryden, then centered on his subordinate.
"Explain."
"Sir, these – "
"As I told your man here, we're just passing through."
The commander searched my eyes, then snorted; "Be it on your heads," he dismissively grunted, and waved his troops to stand down.
Only a short ride away, the decisive boundary between Thenn territory and true terra nullius sat in a boulder field between two escarpments, demarcated by totems and cairns and strings of colorful prayer flags.
Had I been the sentimental sort, I'd have probably delivered some plodding soliloquy, full of flowery homilies and allusions to the Rubicon – as things were, though, we crossed over without a second thought.
By this point, the four of us just wanted to get it over with.