THE W ALL AND B EYOND
THE NIGHT’S WATCH
Unique in the Seven Kingdoms is the Night’s Watch, the sworn brotherhood that has defended the Wall over centuries and millennia, born in the aftermath of the Long Night, the generation-long winter that brought the Others down on the realms of men and nearly put an end to them.
The history of the Night’s Watch is a long one. Tales still tell of the black knights of the Wall and their noble calling. But the Age of Heroes is long done, and the Others have not shown themselves in thousands of years, if indeed they ever existed.
And so, year by year, the Watch has dwindled. Their own records prove that this decline has been in progress even before the age of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters. Though the black brothers of the Watch still guard the realms of men as nobly as they may, the threats they face no longer come from Others, wights, giants, greenseers, wargs, skinchangers, and other monsters from children’s tales and legend, but rather, barbaric wildlings armed with stone axes and clubs; savages to be sure, but only men, and no match for disciplined warriors.
It was not always so. Whether the legends are true or not, it is plain that the First Men and the children of the forest (and even the giants, if we take the word of the singers) feared something enough that it drove them to begin raising the Wall. And this great construction, as simple as it is, is justly accounted among the wonders of the world. It may be that its earliest foundations were of stone—the maesters differ in this—but now all that can be seen for a distance of a hundred leagues is ice. Nearby lakes provided the material, which the First Men cut into huge blocks and hauled upon sledges to the Wall, and worked into place one by one. Now, thousands of years later, the Wall stands more than seven hundred feet tall at its highest point (though its height varies considerably over the hundred leagues of its length, as it follows the contours of the land).
Legend has it that the giants helped raise the Wall, using their great strength to wrestle the blocks of ice into place. There may be some truth to this though the stories make the giants out to be far larger and more powerful than they truly were. These same legends also say that the children of the forest—who did not themselves build walls of either ice or stone—would contribute their magic to the construction. But the legends, as always, are of dubious value.
Beneath the shadow of that wall of ice, the Night’s Watch raised nineteen strongholds—though they are unlike any other castles in the Seven Kingdoms, for they have no curtain walls or other defensive fortifications to protect them (the Wall itself being more than ample against any threat coming from the north, and the Watch insists it has no foes to the south).
The greatest and oldest of these is the Nightfort, which has been abandoned for the past two hundred years; as the Watch shrunk, its size made it too large and too costly to maintain. Maesters who served at the Nightfort whilst it was still in use made it plain that the castle had been expanded upon many times over the centuries and that little remained of its original structure save for some of the deepest vaults chiseled out of the rock beneath the castle’s feet.
Yet over the thousands of years of its existence as the chief seat of the Watch, the Nightfort has accrued many legends of its own, some of which have been recounted in Archmaester Harmune’s Watchers on the Wall. The oldest of these tales concern the legendary Night’s King, the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, who was alleged to have bedded a sorceress pale as a corpse and declared himself a king. For thirteen years the Night’s King and his “corpse queen” ruled together, before King of Winter, Brandon the Breaker, (in alliance, it is said, with the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Joramun) brought them down. Thereafter, he obliterated the Night’s King’s very name from memory.
In the Citadel, the archmaesters largely dismiss these tales—though some allow that there may have been a Lord Commander who attempted to carve out a kingdom for himself in the earliest days of the Watch. Some suggest that perhaps the corpse queen was a woman of the Barrowlands, a daughter of the Barrow King who was then a power in his own right, and oft associated with graves. The Night’s King has been said to have been variously a Bolton, a Woodfoot, an Umber, a Flint, a Norrey, or even a Stark, depending on where the tale is told. Like all tales, it takes on the attributes that make it most appealing to those who tell it.
CASTLES OF THE NIGHT’S WATCH
ACTIVE
The Shadow Tower
Castle Black (now the seat of the Lord Commander of the Watch)
Eastwatch-by-the-Sea
ABANDONED
Westwatch-by-the-Bridge
Sentinel Stand
Greyguard
Stonedoor
Hoarfrost Hill
Icemark
The Nightfort
Deep Lake
Queensgate (which was once named Snowgate before being renamed in honor of Good Queen Alysanne)
Oakenshield
Woodswatch-by-the-Pool
Sable Hall
Rimegate
Long Barrow
Torches
Greenguard
The Night’s Watch, which might well be called the first militant order in the Seven Kingdoms (for the first duty of all its members is to defend the Wall, and all are trained at arms to this end), has divided its sworn brothers into three groups:
1) the stewards, who supply the Watch with food, clothing, and all the other things they need to make war,
2) the builders, who tend to the Wall and the castles,
3) the rangers, who venture into the wilds beyond to make war upon the wildlings.
Leading them are the senior officers of the Watch, the chief of whom is the Lord Commander. He himself is appointed by election: the men of the Watch, each and every one—from the unlettered former poachers to the scions of the great houses—will cast a vote for the man he believes should lead them. Once one man has the greater part of the votes, he will lead the Watch until his death. It is a custom that has largely served the Watch well, and efforts to subvert it (as when Lord Commander Runcel Hightower attempted to leave the Watch to his bastard son some five hundred years ago) have never lasted.
Sadly, the most important truth about the Night’s Watch today is its decline. It may once have served a great purpose. But if the Others ever existed, they have not been seen in thousands of years and are of no threat to men. It is the wildlings beyond the Wall who are the danger the Night’s Watch now face. Yet only when there are kings-beyond-the-Wall have the wildlings ever truly presented a threat to the realms of men.
The vast expense in sustaining the Wall and the men who man it has become increasingly intolerable. Only three of the castles of the Night’s Watch are now manned, and the order is a tenth of the size that it was when Aegon and his sisters landed, yet even at this size, the Watch remains a burden.
Some argue that the Wall serves as a useful way of ridding the realm of murderers, rapers, poachers, and their ilk, whilst others question the wisdom of putting weapons in the hands of such and training them in the arts of war. Wildling raids may rightly be considered more of a nuisance than a menace; many wise men suggest that they might be better dealt with by allowing the lords of the North to extend their rule beyond the Wall so that they can drive the wildlings back.
Only the fact that the Northmen themselves greatly honor the Watch has kept it functioning, and a great part of the food that keeps the black brothers of Castle Black, the Shadow Tower, and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea from starving comes not from the Gift but from the yearly gifts these Northern lords deliver to the Wall in token of their support.
The castles of the Night’s Watch. (illustration credit 98)
THE WILDLINGS
In the lands beyond the Wall live the diverse people—all descended from the First Men—that we of the more civilized south name wildlings.
This is not a term they use themselves. The largest and most numerous of the various peoples beyond the Wall named themselves the free folk, in their belief that their savage customs allow them lives of greater freedom than the kneelers of the south. And it is true that they live with neither lords nor kings and need bow to neither man nor priest, regardless of their birth or blood or station.
But they also live meanly, and are not free from starvation, from the extremities of cold, from barbaric warfare, or from the depredations of their own kind. The lawlessness beyond the Wall is nothing to envy, as any man who has seen wildlings can attest. (And many have so attested, in a number of works based on accounts from the rangers of the Night’s Watch). Their pride in their poverty, in their stone axes and wicker-wood shields, and in their flea-infested pelts, is part of the reason they are set apart from the people in the Seven Kingdoms.
The countless tribes and clans of the free folk remain worshippers of the old gods of the First Men and children of the forest, the gods of the weirwood trees (some accounts say that there are those who worship different gods: dark gods beneath the ground in the Frostfangs, gods of snow and ice on the Frozen Shore, or crab gods at Storrold’s Point, but such has never been reliably confirmed).
The wildling raiders trouble the realm largely for iron and steel—things they lack the skill to make themselves. Many raiders are armed with weapons of wood and stone, even of horn in some cases. Some carry bronze axes and knives, but even these are considered valuable. The famous war leaders amongst them often sport stolen steel, sometimes taken from rangers of the Watch whom they have killed.
Rangers of the Night’s Watch speak of still stranger peoples who dwell in the more distant corners of the lands beyond the Wall, of bronze-clad warriors from a hidden vale far to the north, and Hornfoots who go barefoot even over ice and snow. We know of the wild people of the Frozen Shore who live in huts of ice and ride sleds pulled by hounds. There are half a dozen tribes who make their homes in caverns, and rumors tell of cannibals in the upper reaches of the icy rivers beyond the Wall. But few rangers have penetrated more than half a hundred leagues into the haunted forest, and doubtless there are more kinds of wildlings than even they can imagine.
A wildling raider. (illustration credit 99)
The threat posed to the realm by these savage peoples can safely be discounted, save for the times, once in a great while, when they united beneath the leadership of a king-beyond-the-Wall. Though many wildling raiders and war chiefs have aspired to this title, few have ever achieved it. None of the wildlings who have risen up to become King-Beyond-the-Wall have done aught to build a true kingdom or care for their people; in truth, such men are warlords, not monarchs, and though elsewise much different one from the other, each has led his peoples against the Wall, in hopes of breaching it and conquering the Seven Kingdoms to the south.
The first King-Beyond-the-Wall, according to legend, was Joramun, who claimed to have a horn that would bring down the Wall when it woke “the giants from the earth.” (That the Wall still stands says something of his claim, and perhaps even of his existence.)
Hardhome was once the only settlement approaching a town in the lands beyond the Wall, sheltered on Storrold’s Point and commanding a deepwater harbor. But six hundred years ago, it was burned and its people destroyed, though the Watch cannot say for a certainty what happened. Some say that cannibals from Skagos fell on them, others that slavers from across the narrow sea were at fault. The strangest stories, from a ship of the Watch sent to investigate, tell of hideous screams echoing down from the cliffs above Hardhome, where no living man or woman could be found. A most fascinating account of Hardhome can be found in Maester Wyllis’s Hardhome: An Account of Three Years Spent Beyond-the-Wall among Savages, Raiders, and Woods-witches. Wyllis journeyed to Hardhome on a Pentoshi trader and established himself there as a healer and counselor so that he might write of their customs. He was given the protection of Gorm the Wolf—a chieftain who shared control of Hardhome with three other chiefs. When Gorm was murdered in a drunken brawl, however, Wyllis found himself in mortal danger and made his way back to Oldtown. There he set down his account, only to vanish the year after the illuminations were done. It was said in the Citadel that he was last seen at the docks, looking for a ship that would take him to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.
The brothers Gendel and Gorne were joint kings three thousand years ago. Leading their host down beneath the earth into a labyrinth of twisting subterranean caverns, they passed beneath the Wall unseen to attack the North. Gorne slew the Stark king in battle, then was killed in turn by the king’s heir, and Gendel and his remaining wildlings fled back to their caverns, never to been seen again.
A wildling host gathering at the Wall. (illustration credit 100)
The Horned Lord would follow them, a thousand years after (or perhaps two). His name is lost to history, but he was said to have used sorcery to pass the Wall. After him, centuries later, came Bael the Bard, whose songs are still sung beyond the Wall … but there are questions as to whether he truly existed or not. The wildlings say he did and credit many songs to his name, but the old chronicles of Winterfell say nothing of him. Whether this was due to the defeats and humiliations he was said to have visited upon them (including, according to one improbable story, deflowering a Stark maid and getting her with child) or because he never existed, we cannot truly say.
Among the wildlings, it is said that Gendel and his people became lost and trapped in the caverns and still wander there today. Among the histories of the rangers, however, it is said that Gendel was slain as well, and that only a handful of his followers lived to flee back into the ground.
The last King-Beyond-the-Wall to cross the Wall was Raymun Redbeard, who brought the wildlings together in 212 or 213 AC. It was not until 226 AC that he and the wildlings would breach the Wall by climbing in their hundreds and thousands up the slick ice and down the other side.
Raymun’s host numbered in the thousands, by all accounts, and they fought their way as far south as Long Lake. There, Lord Willam Stark and the Drunken Giant, Lord Harmond of House Umber, brought their armies against them. With two hosts surrounding him, and the lake to his back, Redbeard fought and died, but not before slaying Lord Willam.
When the Night’s Watch appeared at last, led by its Lord Commander Jack Musgood (called Jolly Jack Musgood before the invasion, and Sleepy Jack Musgood forever after), the battle was done and the angry Artos Stark (the late Lord Willam’s brother, accounted the most fearsome warrior of his age) gave the black brothers the duty of burying the dead. This task, at the least, they performed admirably.