often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and even
stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant,
how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body. “You don’t feel your
wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat
running down into your eyes. You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop
being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next
and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you’re not, you’re alive,
and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance
through them laughing.” Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter,
let them kill me if they can!
They tried. Another spearman ran at him. Tyrion lopped off the head of his
spear, then his hand, then his arm, trotting around him in a circle. An archer,
bowless, thrust at him with an arrow, holding it as if it were a knife. The destrier
kicked at the man’s thigh to send him sprawling, and Tyrion barked laughter. He
rode past a banner planted in the mud, one of Stannis’s fiery hearts, and chopped
the staff in two with a swing of his axe. A knight rose up from nowhere to hack
at his shield with a two-handed greatsword, again and again, until someone
thrust a dagger under his arm. One of Tyrion’s men, perhaps. He never saw.
“I yield, ser,” a different knight called out, farther down the river. “Yield. Ser
knight, I yield to you. My pledge, here, here.” The man lay in a puddle of black
water, offering up a lobstered gauntlet in token of submission. Tyrion had to lean
down to take it from him. As he did, a pot of wildfire burst overhead, spraying
green flame. In the sudden stab of light he saw that the puddle was not black but
red. The gauntlet still had the knight’s hand in it. He flung it back. “Yield,” the
man sobbed hopelessly, helplessly. Tyrion reeled away.
A man-at-arms grabbed the bridle of his horse and thrust at Tyrion’s face with
a dagger. He knocked the blade aside and buried the axe in the nape of the man’s
neck. As he was wresting it free, a blaze of white appeared at the edge of his
vision. Tyrion turned, thinking to find Ser Mandon Moore beside him again, but
this was a different white knight. Ser Balon Swann wore the same armor, but his
horse trappings bore the battling black-and-white swans of his House. He’s more
a spotted knight than a white one, Tyrion thought inanely. Every bit of Ser Balon
was spattered with gore and smudged by smoke. He raised his mace to point
downriver. Bits of brain and bone clung to its head. “My lord, look.”
Tyrion swung his horse about to peer down the Blackwater. The current still
flowed black and strong beneath, but the surface was a roil of blood and flame.
The sky was red and orange and garish green. “What?” he said. Then he saw.
Steel-clad men-at-arms were clambering off a broken galley that had smashed
into a pier. So many, where are they coming from? Squinting into the smoke and
glare, Tyrion followed them back out into the river. Twenty galleys were
jammed together out there, maybe more, it was hard to count. Their oars were
crossed, their hulls locked together with grappling lines, they were impaled on
each other’s rams, tangled in webs of fallen rigging. One great hulk floated hull
up between two smaller ships. Wrecks, but packed so closely that it was possible
to leap from one deck to the other and so cross the Blackwater.
Hundreds of Stannis Baratheon’s boldest were doing just that. Tyrion saw one
great fool of a knight trying to ride across, urging a terrified horse over gunwales
and oars, across tilting decks slick with blood and crackling with green fire. We
made them a bloody bridge, he thought in dismay. Parts of the bridge were
sinking and other parts were afire and the whole thing was creaking and shifting
and like to burst asunder at any moment, but that did not seem to stop them.
“Those are brave men,” he told Ser Balon in admiration. “Let’s go kill them.”
He led them through the guttering fires and the soot and ash of the riverfront,
pounding down a long stone quay with his own men and Ser Balon’s behind
him. Ser Mandon fell in with them, his shield a ragged ruin. Smoke and cinders
swirled through the air, and the foe broke before their charge, throwing
themselves back into the water, knocking over other men as they fought to climb
up. The foot of the bridge was a half-sunken enemy galley with Dragonsbane
painted on her prow, her bottom ripped out by one of the sunken hulks Tyrion
had placed between the quays. A spearman wearing the red crab badge of House
Celtigar drove the point of his weapon up through the chest of Balon Swann’s
horse before he could dismount, spilling the knight from the saddle. Tyrion
hacked at the man’s head as he flashed by, and by then it was too late to rein up.
His stallion leapt from the end of the quay and over a splintered gunwale,
landing with a splash and a scream in ankle-deep water. Tyrion’s axe went
spinning, followed by Tyrion himself, and the deck rose up to give him a wet
smack.
Madness followed. His horse had broken a leg and was screaming horribly.
Somehow he managed to draw his dagger, and slit the poor creature’s throat.
The blood gushed out in a scarlet fountain, drenching his arms and chest. He
found his feet again and lurched to the rail, and then he was fighting, staggering
and splashing across crooked decks awash with water. Men came at him. Some
he killed, some he wounded, and some went away, but always there were more.
He lost his knife and gained a broken spear, he could not have said how. He
clutched it and stabbed, shrieking curses. Men ran from him and he ran after
them, clambering up over the rail to the next ship and then the next. His two
white shadows were always with him; Balon Swann and Mandon Moore,
beautiful in their pale plate. Surrounded by a circle of Velaryon spearmen, they
fought back to back; they made battle as graceful as a dance.
His own killing was a clumsy thing. He stabbed one man in the kidney when
his back was turned, and grabbed another by the leg and upended him into the
river. Arrows hissed past his head and clattered off his armor; one lodged
between shoulder and breastplate, but he never felt it. A naked man fell from the
sky and landed on the deck, body bursting like a melon dropped from a tower.
His blood spattered through the slit of Tyrion’s helm. Stones began to plummet
down, crashing through the decks and turning men to pulp, until the whole
bridge gave a shudder and twisted violently underfoot, knocking him sideways.
Suddenly the river was pouring into his helm. He ripped it off and crawled
along the listing deck until the water was only neck deep. A groaning filled the
air, like the death cries of some enormous beast. The ship, he had time to think,
the ship’s about to tear loose. The broken galleys were ripping apart, the bridge
breaking apart. No sooner had he come to that realization than he heard a sudden
crack, loud as thunder, the deck lurched beneath him, and he slid back down into
the water.
The list was so steep he had to climb back up, hauling himself along a
snapped line inch by bloody inch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the hulk
they’d been tangled with drifting downstream with the current, spinning slowly
as men leapt over her side. Some wore Stannis’s flaming heart, some Joffrey’s
stag-and-lion, some other badges, but it seemed to make no matter. Fires were
burning upstream and down. On one side of him was a raging battle, a great
confusion of bright banners waving above a sea of struggling men, shield walls
forming and breaking, mounted knights cutting through the press, dust and mud
and blood and smoke. On the other side, the Red Keep loomed high on its hill,
spitting fire. They were on the wrong sides, though. For a moment Tyrion
thought he was going mad, that Stannis and the castle had traded places. How
could Stannis cross to the north bank? Belatedly he realized that the deck was
turning, and somehow he had gotten spun about, so castle and battle had
changed sides. Battle, what battle, if Stannis hasn’t crossed who is he fighting?
Tyrion was too tired to make sense of it. His shoulder ached horribly, and when
he reached up to rub it he saw the arrow, and remembered. I have to get off this
ship. Downstream was nothing but a wall of fire, and if the wreck broke loose
the current would take him right into it.
Someone was calling his name faintly through the din of battle. Tyrion tried to
shout back. “Here! Here, I’m here, help me!” His voice sounded so thin he could
scarcely hear himself. He pulled himself up the slanting deck, and grabbed for
the rail. The hull slammed into the next galley over and rebounded so violently
he was almost knocked into the water. Where had all his strength gone? It was
all he could do to hang on.
“MY LORD! TAKE MY HAND! MY LORD TYRION!”
There on the deck of the next ship, across a widening gulf of black water,
stood Ser Mandon Moore, a hand extended. Yellow and green fire shone against
the white of his armor, and his lobstered gauntlet was sticky with blood, but
Tyrion reached for it all the same, wishing his arms were longer. It was only at
the very last, as their fingers brushed across the gap, that something niggled at
him . . . Ser Mandon was holding out his left hand, why . . .
Was that why he reeled backward, or did he see the sword after all? He would
never know. The point slashed just beneath his eyes, and he felt its cold hard
touch and then a blaze of pain. His head spun around as if he’d been slapped.
The shock of the cold water was a second slap more jolting than the first. He
flailed for something to grab on to, knowing that once he went down he was not
like to come back up. Somehow his hand found the splintered end of a broken
oar. Clutching it tight as a desperate lover, he shinnied up foot by foot. His eyes
were full of water, his mouth was full of blood, and his head throbbed horribly.
Gods give me strength to reach the deck . . . There was nothing else, only the
oar, the water, the deck.
Finally he rolled over the side and lay breathless and exhausted, flat on his
back. Balls of green and orange flame crackled overhead, leaving streaks
between the stars. He had a moment to think how pretty it was before Ser
Mandon blocked out the view. The knight was a white steel shadow, his eyes
shining darkly behind his helm. Tyrion had no more strength than a rag doll. Ser
Mandon put the point of his sword to the hollow of his throat and curled both
hands around the hilt.
And suddenly he lurched to the left, staggering into the rail. Wood split, and
Ser Mandon Moore vanished with a shout and a splash. An instant later, the hulls came slamming together again, so hard the deck seemed to jump. Then someone
was kneeling over him. “Jaime?” he croaked, almost choking on the blood that
filled his mouth. Who else would save him, if not his brother?
“Be still, my lord, you’re hurt bad.” A boy’s voice, that makes no sense,
thought Tyrion. It sounded almost like Pod.
