Chapter 9
Eyes lifted wearily before him, Justin trudged up the jutting jagged stones, following the man before him. The straps of the pack he bore felt like knives being pressed against his shoulders, heavy with provisions and mail. Around him, the wind cried like a dying child, ululating long and loud and low.
No trees grew on ground as high as here, but there were many bushes, stout short often-needled scrub. Every step had to be taken with care. Not for the first time, he missed his step, tripping over a protruding piece of rock he had failed to tell apart from the surrounding same-pinkish-grey stone. By instinct alone he put a hand out on a greenish boulder to his right, to steady himself, grasping the granite, for the ground was tilted to the left, not flat, and he dared not fall. Not for the first time, he pulled it straight back, recoiling like a snake. The stone was blisteringly hot, baked by the unceasing summer sun.
The pull sent his elbow almost into the man behind him. The sellsword swore at him in colourful Tyroshi; Justin picked out the words 'bastard', 'whore' and 'horse'. Inflamed by outraged pride, Justin was about to retort, until he saw the captain's eye upon him. He cursed under his breath and stayed silent. The captain disliked fighting in the ranks, and that was one man Justin was not willing to offend.
He took another turn around the mountainside, saw what lay before him, and groaned. Men were pulling themselves up a sheer face of rock, four times the height of a man. It was too steep to walk. Men were grasping at clefts in the rock, reaching out uncertainly with hands and feet. Perched at the top, a full man's height above any of the others, a great broad-shouldered figure glared down at them impatiently. An eagle was perched upon his shoulder and blood was dripping from his stone-cut hands. It seemed he did not notice. Justin could not make out much of his features, for the Essosi sun blazed at his back; it was like gazing at a faceless shadow that loomed over him.
He exhaled, wiping sweat from his forehead and long white-blond hair from where it tumbled in front of his eyes. There was nothing to it. He would not let himself look weak or hesitant in front of this man. He went on, carefully picking the places of his steps, and made it to the steeper part of rock, whereupon he started to look for handholds.
A clatter and a cry rang out behind him.
Justin whipped around, swift as a sword-thrust. Behind him, a line of men were winding about the mountain, hundreds of sellswords with their mail on their backs and their heads down beneath the beating golden sun. A man had stumbled over a sudden rise in the rock. As Justin watched, he tottered, waving his arms to keep his balance, and lost it. That was all it took. The luckless sellsword fell left of the column and rolled over on the tilted ground, over and over, over till he hit an outcropping and stopped with a hideous snap.
They all paused. Blood and brains of the fallen sellsword dribbled out over the bare rock. Then they turned back around and moved on.
"This is madness!" shouted Nomeo Lagan, commander of the Iron Shields. It was a struggle to hear his accented Braavosi over the wails of the wind. "There's reason that nobody lives here! Nothing awaits us by this path but grinding our host as grist to the mill, for slow drawn-out death!"
Ser Stannis Baratheon stared down at him. "Have patience, commander. We are not far now."
"Not far? Not far?" Lagan said incredulously. "We've been marching for a fortnight, and I've yet to see hide or hair of this valley of yours."
"It is there, and our passage will hasten greatly once we reach it," Ser Stannis replied in the same Braavosi tongue. "A few days only."
"You said that a few days ago."
Stannis bit out, "I did not expect you to be so slow."
"You should have! That's the fourth death today, and I wager it won't be the last. The men are hungry, weary, angry, insolent."
"They always are," Stannis said. His lips twisted with distaste. "When we leave these mountains, they'll have plenty of rapine and pillage to partake in. That will quieten them."
"'When'?" Lagan repeated. "Going east, there's no end for many miles, and they're in need of a good rest soon. This is a fool's scheme. The ground is too perilous. We must go some other way—south, out of the Ralemne Heights, into the lower parts of the Hills of Norvos—else we won't leave these mountains alive."
"South?" Justin pointed, though the sheer mountains on all sides blocked the sight. His voice dripped scorn. "Then I invite you to enjoy the company of sixty-thousand angry Qohoriks and Norvoshi and Lorathi and all the sellswords they could muster, marching through those hills. Their scouts will find you, as sure as sunrise. I'm sure they'll greet you with hospitality."
"It's your captain who means us to put ourselves at their hospitality—to come out behind them, far from our friends!"
"They set out from Norvos to take Braavos. We are too few to make them turn back for us," Ser Stannis said. "But when we emerge from the Ralemne Heights, east of their army, and plunder the fine estates of the wealthy men of Norvos, we will set their hearts aquiver. They will force their commanders to send a lesser host running to stop us, while their main strength marches west, against Handtaker. That lesser host is what Handtaker commands I am to destroy."
We do that as soon as we can, Justin thought, and then they have to send another host against us, lessening the numbers of their main host, so the great battles in the west are more winnable. As Ser Stannis doubtless knows. It was a good plan, in his opinion, or at least as good a plan as could be made when fighting a war against such a powerful foe. The Pact of Four's greatest strength over Braavos was the vastness of their armies; their greatest weakness was that, despite their careful preparations, they were split in two. The hosts of Qohor, Norvos and Lorath from the east would have to be weakened and then destroyed before they could join with the host of sellswords gathering to the south, in Pentos.
"Whereas your plan," Justin put in helpfully, "would be to face all the strength of three Free Cities at the same time."
The laughter of sellswords rang out, harsh and mocking. Ser Stannis did not smile. His mouth did not twitch. But his scowl grew slightly less irritable than was customary, which Justin counted as akin to another man howling and thumping his chest with glee.
Lagan reddened. "You say we'll emerge from the Ralemne Heights. What if we never do?" he demanded. "We're not even half-way through. Our crossing is too far from any town or village. There is nobody to turn to for aid. We lack the food to keep going forever. We should turn south, or join our comrades in the Braavosian Coastland. By your plan we will die here."
"The Braavosian Coastland? You mean, turn back, like whipped dogs with our tails between our legs?" Stannis's voice was a soft hiss. "Do you not recall what happens to men who desert or disobey in the Company of the Cat? The Red Tigers were one of the great free companies of the world, till they were fighting beside the Company of the Cat and they turned their cloaks. The hunt was long; but twelve years later, my commander caught up with the man who commanded them at the time. He was starved so badly he began to eat himself, rending his own flesh; then, with those open wounds bleeding, he was thrown in a pit of tigers. Real tigers. It amuses him to play little games like that, you see. You may not fear me, commander; but if you do not fear Handtaker, after all these years, the gods have never made a greater fool."
Nomeo Lagan's fleshy face had turned pale. "I did not say that—"
"You did not need to say it," Stannis said. "What you did not say, said enough. Let us have no more talk of desertion. You may be a commander and I a captain, but I have more men in my detachment of the Company of the Cat than the whole of the Iron Shields or any of the other free companies in this host. I am in command here. When I tell you to go on, you go on."
And so on they went.
The great granite mountains were everywhere in all directions, with no end in sight. The Ralemne Heights allowed not the slightest view of any land outside them. The hike was tedious drudgery, wearying to the bone, but not mindless work; the loss of thought could easily mean slipping and tumbling down to a grisly death upon the hot sun-beaten rocks below. Some men did. Others fell and were injured, and had to be slain by their comrades rather than abandoned to starve.
There was not so much as a goat path to ease their way. Justin would have fallen to both knees and thanked the Seven for a dirt track, let alone a road. Yet Ser Stannis Baratheon walked always at the fore of the host, finding trails that wrapped up, down and around the mountains in places where they were less steep and jagged than elsewhere.
Less than a week after the captain's threats to Nomeo Lagan, it was a toil to walk. Justin put one foot in front of the other, his head drooped down, following the footsteps of the Myrman in front of him. He ignored the whispered conversations and exclamations of the men around him, for he had always been an outsider among them, Westerosi as he was. The only man here whom he knew at all was Ser Stannis.
Then, turning around the mountainside, he bumped into the Myrman.
The Myrman had stopped, Justin noticed. They had all stopped.
Justin was bemused. They stopped once each day, after the end of the day's march, to greedily devour a thin dinner of stale bread with a bit of salted meat; but now the sun was bright. It was still morning.
Above them, having climbed up the slope to give more men space to see, Ser Stannis swept an arm. "Behold. I did not lie to you."
Before them, two or three miles away, lay a great smooth-sided valley in the mountains. The stone was dark and slightly green, a different colour to the pinkish-grey granite that dominated the Ralemne Heights, though, now he thought about it, Justin did recall seeing some boulders like that. The look of the rock was strangely smooth, as if part of the mountains had been scooped out by some tremendous force, like a man putting his fingers through butter. It was sometimes narrowing, sometimes widening, always at least a hundred yards wide; and it extended far in both directions, northwest to the desolate Bay of Lorath and southeast, outward.
Justin had never seen or heard of it. It had taken a long hike to get here, and there had been so many mountains between him and it that he had not caught even a glimpse of it before.
"Dear gods," one sellsword captain swore. He turned to Ser Stannis. "How did this come to be?"
"This valley was carved by a great river of ice," Stannis said, "that flowed here once, before the time of men."
"Ice? Here?" said another sellsword.
Nomeo Lagan's jaw had dropped. "How did you know of this? I've spoken to countless men from the Hills of Norvos. You were born in the Sunset Lands. Ere we came here, I studied every map of this place that there is, and none of them mentioned such a place as this."
Justin saw Stannis frowning with irritation and he could not help himself. The opportunity was too perfect. Loud enough to be sure Stannis would hear, he suggested sweetly, "Mayhaps you should think to buy some better maps."
Days later, smoke stung at Justin's eyes and wailing filled his ears. Lobrenor was burning.
They had made much better pace after finding the valley. Men spoke of 'the Hills of Norvos' as if it were one place, but it was larger than some of the Seven Kingdoms. Parts of it were high peaks, like the Ralemne Heights. Others were hills so gentle they were scarcely hills at all. Here was in between. To the southeast, the great valley thinned and vanished, but it took them much of the way. The villagers of Lobrenor had had little warning when one and a half thousand hungry soldiers descended from the mountains.
They never stood a chance.
Dead men—fools who had thought they could defend their homes with pitchforks and hoes—littered the hillside fields where, in better times, the Lobrenoriks reared their sheep and goats. Their womenfolk were being taken as bedwarmers, often on the ground, rarely with a bed and rarely willingly; the sellswords had been without for longer than they were accustomed to. Their farmhouses were aflame. All the aforesaid sheep and goats of the villagers had been slaughtered, and the hungry sellswords were cooking their animals on pyres made from the wreckage of their homes.
It had been weeks since Justin had eaten as well as this, and so he ate. The mutton made for an excellent meal, though he was a little put off his food by the despairing screams of the Norvoshi villagers who were losing everything they had.
He would have to steel himself to it. Lobrenor was the first village they had come upon. He knew it would not be the last.
Justin did not partake in the rapine, nor did he venture into the little thatched-roof houses to take what few things the miserable smallfolk possessed, though he did allow himself to eat the stolen mutton. In this he followed the example of his captain. For he would not let himself be diminished in Ser Stannis's eyes. While the other sellsword captains and commanders found fearful, weeping women to shove against the walls, Justin was quick to notice, Stannis Baratheon stood alone upon the hilltop amidst the devastation, as austere as he had been on the day Justin met him.
Ser Stannis had made quite the impression, on that day. Justin still recalled it. After his ship reached Braavos and he signed his contract with a lowly recruiter of the Company of the Cat, he had stridden up to the king's brother and asked to speak with him.
"Who are you?" Stannis had demanded brusquely, in the Braavosi tongue, before Justin could give the elegant greeting he had intended.
"Ser Justin Massey, at your service," Justin had said in the Common Speech of Westeros, with a deep sweeping bow. "Of Stonedance, in the crownlands. Presently contracted to the Company of the Cat, but now and forever sworn to House Baratheon."
Those dark blue eyes had narrowed. "It has been years since I have heard words in that tongue."
"It is your tongue, ser, as much as mine," Justin had replied.
"Not any more," Ser Stannis had dismissed, and Justin, sensing the awkwardness of the subject, had not raised it again. "Well, out with it, man. Why are you here?"
The sheer rudeness of the king's brother took quite some time to get used to. Even now, it surprised Justin sometimes, albeit not on most occasions. Back then, it had shocked him speechless.
"Well?"
"I—I am not heir to a great estate," Justin had stammered, "but I squired for your royal brother, for a time, and I saw much of his court. It is not well in your absence, ser." He had taken a chance on that, assuming Stannis Baratheon would like to hear ill of King Robert. "His Grace pays little heed to matters of state, leaving them to his small council, while he… partakes in… matters of the flesh." He phrased it delicately. "The rule of the Seven Kingdoms is the province of his Hand, the Lord of the Eyrie, and his wife, Queen Cersei. They have filled royal offices with their cronies, not only the small council but many offices below it, from the greatest to the meanest. His Grace does not stop them. And these cronies are not skilled. They have signally failed to deal with the revolt of the ironmen."
"As I feared." That news had pleased Ser Stannis, Justin could tell, despite the words. "That is Robert's nature. He has never had patience for much that he does not understand, and there's little he understands. It is no wonder he fled to the Eyrie and abandoned all such matters at Storm's End to me. Lannisters, Arryns… doubtless the Tyrells will worm their way into his good graces next." His lips twisted into a grimace when he said that name.
"Ser, I do not think they will," Justin had said cautiously. He did not like contradicting the king's brother, but he was not the sort of man who would give false advice to his liege. He was a Massey of Stonedance, and he had his pride. "The king's court is enthralled to the Hand and the queen, and neither of them tolerate outsiders. All rewards are given only to their partisans. None of Lord Mace's vassals have been raised high."
"Oh? Then mayhaps Robert's reign is not entirely folly." The king's brother had looked at Justin with new interest, after that. Ser Stannis, he would come to understand, did not enjoy the company of men who told him only what they thought he wanted to hear.
Justin had seized the opportunity. "I came to seek a worthier Baratheon to serve," he had lied through his perfect white teeth. He could hardly say, I came because the queen has dismissed me from court, the king seems like as not to drink himself into an early grave, the prince and princess are young, young children sometimes die, and I hope to be well rewarded if perchance you come to the crown, after all. "May I accompany you, ser?"
Stannis had waved a hand. "Very well, Massey. If you must."
And so it was that Ser Justin Massey found himself today upon a blighted hillside, somewhere in the Hills of Norvos, a thousand miles away from home.
He walked up to the hilltop, between celebrating sellswords, mutilated corpses, weeping villagers and burning crops and homes. There Stannis Baratheon stood. He was garbed in a black surcoat over his mail, featureless, without any sigil, reddened slightly with a bit of blood. His boots, too, were as black as his hair. The only thing upon him with much colour was the golden eagle resting on his left shoulder.
"Massey," Ser Stannis said as Justin surmounted the hill. By his standards, that terse greeting was high courtesy.
"Ser."
"I've told you not to call me that. I am a captain, not a knight."
Justin did not contradict him, but did not intend to stop. Westeros was Stannis Baratheon's place, as it was Justin Massey's, and Justin meant to remind him of it. The last thing he wanted was for the king's brother to give up on crossing the Narrow Sea. Elsewise, how would he get his reward?
Characteristically, the captain spoke what he wished, on whatever matter he wished, without anything to lead to it. "When I was younger, I hanged men like that."
Justin followed his captain's eyes to a sellsword who stood not twenty feet away from them, holding a screaming woman up against a tree.
"Shall I put a stop to it, ser?" Justin asked. He unsheathed his sword.
"No," Stannis said. "We must be cruel. Every act of cruelty and banditry we inflict upon these lands serves our purpose; it serves to offend and outrage our foes, and force them to send a host eastward to root us out. I should not restrain them. Thus I was commanded. And there are some men who are not disobeyed."
As if without noticing, Stannis's hand drifted from where it had been stroking the eagle's feathers to his back. When it touched, he trembled, ever-so-slightly, like a riverbank reed in the breeze.
"Men like you should not have to obey men like him," said Justin.
"There are no other men like him."
"I do not believe that's so. Handtaker does not maim and kill for cold necessity. He maims and kills because he enjoys maiming and killing. There are other lowborn men—men like him—who do that. When they are born here in Essos, they call them 'commander' and do them honour and give them riches. When they are born in Westeros, we call them 'murderer'. We hang them."
"And when they are highborn, we call them 'Your Grace'."
"Aerys?"
"Robert."
Justin raised an eyebrow. "Ser, I do not think—"
"You did not hear of Prince Rhaegar's children. I heard it from the mouth of Lord Eddard Stark. He was there, and he is the closest friend of my brother, the last man who would contrive lies against him." The king's brother shook his head. "I served Robert well, and would have continued in that, if he had let me. I have not been sworn to a good man since my lord father died."
His humours have turned to melancholy, Justin reflected. To him it seemed they often did, suddenly, without warning. When they did, he knew not what he ought to do. He sought to find some clever turn of phrase, some wit that would lift his captain from that bleak mood, and he came up short.
It was a while before Stannis spoke again. "I suppose I should partake in it myself," he said at last. "Gods know the others do. But I cannot bring myself to that. I do not like it. I do not like it."
"No good men do," Justin said. He hesitated. "Captain—"
"You only call me that when you wish to please me," Stannis interrupted. "There is something you would have of me. Go on. What is it?"
"I turned Lagan's question away from you," he said, "but there was something in that. It seems to me he was right. That ice-valley of yours is surrounded by mountains, so it is beyond the sight of man until you're near. And if you're near… well, why would you be? It was a long, hard, perilous journey to reach it. Men don't live in the heart of the Ralemne Heights, or even near them. The ground is too harsh. Crossing the Heights is easier with that passage, but they're nigh impassable without it; you'd need to carry with you more food than a man can bear. You can't see the passage until you're near. But without the passage, the crossing seems hopeless; so you wouldn't come near unless you already knew."
Four eyes studied Justin's face. Stannis's thin lips quirked into a smile, slight and cold.
"Unless you already knew," Justin repeated, meaningfully.
"I wondered whether anyone would notice that," Stannis murmured. "Yes, I knew. Beyond the sight of man, you say; but there are many things in this world that lie beyond the sight of man. That does not make them less real. That does not mean they cannot kill."
Another eagle fluttered down to land on Stannis's unoccupied shoulder. He put up a hand towards its beak, to give it food.
"Go to sleep, Massey," Stannis said. "I would not have you be weary. We will fight again tomorrow."