A Feast for Dragons

set with
gemstones, bracelets, rings, niello cups and golden goblets, warhorns and
drinking horns, a green jade comb, a necklace of freshwater
pearls … all yielded up and noted down by Bowen Marsh. One man
surrendered a shirt of silver scales that had surely been made for some great
lord. Another produced a broken sword with three sapphires in the hilt.
    And there were queerer things: a toy mammoth made of actual
mammoth hair, an ivory phallus, a helm made from a unicorn’s head, complete
with horn. How much food such things would buy in the Free Cities, Jon Snow
could not begin to say.
    After the riders came the men of the Frozen Shore. Jon
watched a dozen of their big bone chariots roll past him one by one, clattering
like Rattleshirt. Half still rolled as before; others had replaced their wheels
with runners. They slid across the snowdrifts smoothly, where the wheeled
chariots were foundering and sinking.
    The dogs that drew the chariots were fearsome beasts, as big
as direwolves. Their women were clad in sealskins, some with infants at their
breasts. Older children shuffled along behind their mothers and looked up at
Jon with eyes as dark and hard as the stones they clutched. Some of the men
wore antlers on their hats, and some wore walrus tusks. The two sorts did not
love each other, he soon gathered. A few thin reindeer brought up the rear,
with the great dogs snapping at the heels of stragglers.
    “Be wary o’ that lot, Jon Snow,” Tormund warned him. “A
savage folk. The men are bad, the women worse.” He took a skin off his saddle
and offered it up to Jon. “Here. This will make them seem less fearsome, might
be. And warm you for the night. No, go on, it’s yours to keep. Drink deep.”
    Within was a mead so potent it made Jon’s eyes water and
sent tendrils of fire snaking through his chest. He drank deep. “You’re a good
man, Tormund Giantsbabe. For a wildling.”
    “Better than most, might be. Not so good as some.”
    On and on the wildlings came, as the sun crept across the
bright blue sky. Just before midday, the movement stopped when an oxcart became
jammed at a turn inside the tunnel. Jon Snow went to have a look for himself.
The cart was now wedged solid. The men behind were threatening to hack it apart
and butcher the ox where he stood, whilst the driver and his kin swore to kill
them if they tried. With the help of Tormund and his son Toregg, Jon managed to
keep the wildlings from coming to blood, but it took the best part of an hour
before the way was opened again.
    “You need a bigger gate,” Tormund complained to Jon with a sour
look up at the sky, where a few clouds had blown in. “Too bloody slow this way.
Like sucking the Milkwater through a reed.
Har
. Would that I
had the Horn of Joramun. I’d give it a nice toot and we’d climb through the
rubble.”
    “Melisandre burned the Horn of Joramun.”
    “Did she?” Tormund slapped his thigh and hooted. “She burned
that fine big horn, aye. A bloody sin, I call it. A thousand years old, that
was. We found it in a giant’s grave, and no man o’ us had ever seen a horn so
big. That must have been why Mance got the notion to tell you it were
Joramun’s. He wanted you crows to think he had it in his power to blow your
bloody Wall down about your knees. But we never found the true horn, not for
all our digging. If we had, every kneeler in your Seven Kingdoms would have
chunks o’ ice to cool his wine all summer.”
    Jon turned in his saddle, frowning.
And Joramun blew
the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth
. That huge horn with
its bands of old gold, incised with ancient runes … had Mance Rayder lied
to him, or was Tormund lying now?
If Mance’s horn was just a feint,
where is the true horn?
    By afternoon the sun had gone, and the day turned grey and
gusty. “A snow sky,” Tormund announced grimly.
    Others had seen the same omen in those flat white clouds. It
seemed to spur them on to haste. Tempers began to fray. One man was stabbed
when he tried to slip in ahead of others who had been hours in the column.
Toregg wrenched the knife away from his attacker, dragged both men from the
press, and sent them back to the wildling camp to start again.
    “Tormund,” Jon said, as they watched four old women pull a
cartful of children toward the gate, “tell me of our foe. I would know all
there is to know of the Others.”
    The wildling rubbed his mouth. “Not here,” he mumbled, “not
this side o’ your