Game of Thrones: The Impaler of the Blue Fork

Chapter 51: The Rust on the Leftover Porridge and the Starving Soldiers of the Darryl Family

Inside the longhouse on the east side of Graystone Fortress, the hearth was filled with damp tree roots, emitting choking smoke. The iron pot wasn't simmering broth, but rather dried oats mixed with tree bark powder. The pot was almost entirely water.

Pollyver's boots sank into the unmelted ice as he strode into the bottom of the stone tower.

"Sir, the bucket in the dungeon is too shallow." The clerk's voice was stuck in his dry throat. "There's a clean puddle of water outside the iron cage where that Blackwood scout is kept."

Otto sat behind a hard wooden table. His left arm was wrapped in a thick burlap bandage. He didn't touch the longsword on the weapon rack.

"Who did it?"

"Old Qyburn, the dungeon keeper." Pollifer pulled a dark object from his sleeve and placed it on the rough wooden table. "I found this in the haystack beneath him."

It was a silver clasp engraved with the raven's crest. It had been pried off the scabbard of a Blackwood nobleman's sword, and blackened nail polish still clung to the crevices.

A cold sweat broke out on Pollifer's back. Old Coburn had his left hand broken by a flail while digging the ditch, and in the middle of the night, for a few silver deer, he loosened the cast iron fence on the back wall of the sewer.

Otto picked up the black raven silver ornament. His rough thumb rubbed the congealed blood and grime on it.

"Ring the bell. Distribute the porridge."

On the muddy ground outside the longhouse, more than four hundred farmers, soldiers, women, and children, their lips blue from the cold, huddled together in front of the iron pot of porridge.

"Old Kobe, come out here."

Old Coben, holding the broken earthenware bowl, shuddered. His face, already sallow from hunger, instantly lost all color. He dragged his crippled left arm to the wooden table.

Otto threw an iron plate onto the cutting board.

There was no dagger for judgment on the plate. Instead, there were three pure silver deer, a thick roll of windproof cowhide, and a packet of dried meat enough for ten days. Beside the iron plate was black oat porridge with tree bark scraps floating on top.

"When this gray wall came together, your left arm was caught in the water gate and crushed by the hooves of the Blackwood family's horses. You shed blood for the land."

Otto didn't look at the severed hand; his gaze was as cold and gloomy as the freezing sky above him, fixed on the iron plate.

"According to the oath, the territory should support you for the rest of your life. But this bowl of gruel mixed with moldy sawdust is not worthy of the blood you shed."

Silence reigned around the longhouse. Old Coben knelt down on the frozen ground with a thud, the clasp of the Black Raven hidden in his crotch pocket pressed against his thigh.

"The western gate has been opened. King's Road outside the gate leads west, and there are no ambushes in that swamp."

Otto pushed the iron plate forward with one hand. "This is three silver deer, the full weight, enough for you to reach the city of Haijiang, or a richer town to the south."

"Take the jerky and the fur blanket, and with your woman, go through the gate and head west. Go south and find some hot soup."

"Or—pick up this bowl of pungent tree bark porridge and swear to the gods that you'll rot in this shack for the rest of your life."

A cold wind howled. More than four hundred pairs of hungry eyes stared intently at old Kobe.

There were indeed no ambushes outside the gate, but there were scattered defeated soldiers who had retreated from the Red Fork River. An old man with a severed arm, carrying three silver deer in his pocket, walked along the desolate road. He would be skinned and dismembered by the ruffians in less than half an hour.

Old Coben didn't dare move an inch.

He scrambled forward half a foot across the frozen mud, using both hands and feet. Avoiding the gleaming silver coins and leather blanket, he clung tightly to the rough earthenware bowl of porridge with his trembling right hand.

The veteran looked up, his murky tears leaving two dark lines on his muddy face.

He buried his face in the bowl, swallowing large gulps of the pungent tree bark residue. The rough residue got stuck in his throat, and he desperately pounded his shrunken chest, forcing the dry heaving, sour water mixed with black chaff, down his throat.

The remaining soldiers around them, who had been secretly complaining about the lack of salt and food, glanced at the open gate, their eyes sweeping over the three silver coins. Finally, they silently retreated and rejoined the line for porridge.

Three days later in the Southern Territory. The last biting cold rain of summer lashed against King's Road.

Dragged by thirty Twin Towers remnants with sunken eyes and desiccated appearances, three heavy wooden carts left deep ruts in the mud and came to a stop in front of the stone steps of Darryl City.

The dark red wooden gate of Dairui City was half-open. Several knights wearing faded armor stood on the crenellations of the city wall.

At the oak head table in the hall, Lehman Darryl coldly watched his niece below the steps. His cloudy, yellowish eyes swept over the coolie before finally settling on Maria.

"The Twin Towers threw you out, and you ran back to Darryl City begging for food with just a few beat-up carts?"

Maria slightly lifted the hem of her mud-stained wool skirt, stepped back with her left foot, and bent her knee.

"Lord Lehman," Maria's voice rang out clearly in the cold wind, "I am here on the orders of my husband, Baron Hohenzollern, to pay my respects to the Darryl family."

She turned her head and winked at the laborer behind her.

Untie the knot that prevents rain and remove the mud seal from the black pottery jar.

A cold wind rushed into the hall. A handful of snow-white, top-quality refined salt lay quietly in a rough earthenware jar.

The dozen or so knights of the Darryl family in the hall swallowed hard. With the continuous autumn rains, the dried meat in their cellars would all develop green spots before winter if it weren't cured with salt.

Lehman's eyelids twitched violently a few times. "A few jars of fine salt, and you think you can exchange them for my armored soldiers in my hall?"

"Thirty urns. All filled with refined salt."

Maria clasped her hands in front of her. "The Baron knows that Darryl has suffered from war, and this is a small token of the Hohenzollern family's goodwill. Just fifty veterans who have seen battle. Armored, along with their families."

Lehman gripped the ceramic cup on the table, his knuckles turning blue. He maintained his lordly airs: "Dairy City has suffered, but these people are still my subjects. Leave the salt behind, and take your men back to the swamp. Consider it a toll your mother owed the Dary family years ago."

Maria sighed, her gaze sweeping past Lehman and over the veterans behind him who were swallowing hard as they smelled the salt.

“If my uncle insists on collecting this toll, I can’t stop him,” Maria said softly. “It’s just that the Baron has a bad temper. If I go back empty-handed, he’ll just think that Darryl doesn’t care about such a meager gift. So I can only continue south with the caravan to King’s Landing or Women’s Town to try my luck. There are plenty of lords in the south willing to trade veterans for fine salt.”

She paused, looking at Lehman's ashen face.

"If it weren't for the salted meat... the rotting flesh in the Dai Rui family's cellar probably wouldn't even yield a few pots of hot soup. I wonder if these warriors in the hall, who shed their blood for you, would be willing to chew on their green-spotted, rotten flesh to help you get through this long winter?"

Lehman ultimately didn't lift the ceramic cup from his hand. At the back of the hall, the panting of the veterans who had served him for half his life had already penetrated through the gaps in their helmets, pounding heavily on his eardrums.

Seven days later. Late summer.

Night fell heavily over the Blue Fork River. Horse hooves and iron boots shattered the shallow ice on the mudflats.

Fifty old armored soldiers, wrapped in tattered gray robes and carrying worn-out longswords and missing-eared shields, along with one hundred and twenty-eight women and children wrapped in old sheepskins behind them, stepped through the gates of Graystone Fortress. Meanwhile, the thirty Twin Towers soldiers pulling the cart, their lungs filled with frozen mud, died in the frozen ruts along the way.

The door slammed shut with a creak.

Maria stepped off the cart, her hands bleeding from the cold. Lifting her mud-caked wool skirt, she pushed open the heavy oak door at the base of the stone tower.

There was no brazier in the inner room.

The nineteen-year-old baron sat at a hard wooden table, his intact right hand gripping a charcoal stick. Under the oil lamp, the expansion pit of the earthen kiln for the coming spring was meticulously drawn on a parchment scroll.

Otto looked up at the woman who was clutching the waterlogged sheepskin register tightly in her arms.

"What did you get in return?"

"Fifty old soldiers in tattered chainmail. And their women and children."

Maria placed the heavy roster on the table, the bunch of brass keys at her waist clinking coldly. "Not a single one is missing. They're all in this ration book."

She rubbed her frozen fingers: "To save face for the lord, my uncle insisted that this was a wedding gift for me. Besides the person, he also stuffed a few bundles of old pig iron into my bag to get rid of me."

Maria pushed the roster to the center of the table. Otto glanced at the numbers on the parchment scroll, his fingers, which were holding a charcoal stick, paused.