Capítulo 11: Blood on the Frozen Shore
Early 270 Summer
My feet touched down on the Frozen Shore heralded by the rumbling brays of hundreds of walruses. I understood intellectually that the creatures could reach nearly two tons on Earth, but the sight of them, especially the gigantic Westeros variety, and their freaky eyes made my command for this venture all the more imperative. These monstrosities needed to die.
Not one to sit around, I got to work as my men leapt ashore from our five fully crewed longships. I ran at the nearest walrus, a huge beast that must be closer to six tons than four with tusks that wouldn't look out of place on an elephant, and rammed my sword spear into his fat neck. Wrenching my magically sharp blade nearly decapitated the massive monster of an animal.
To my sides, men charged with long bladed spears in hand, plunging their weapons into the herd of walruses. They carried out my command without hesitation, having hardened their hearts for the coming tasks. To kill every man and animal we encounter, to capture every woman and child, and to cut down every tree we can find for ninety days.
It was a final solution to an imminent existential problem. In less than thirty years the Others will descend from the Lands of Always Winter and will slay everything alive between there and the Wall to raise from the dead as soldiers in their army. So the question predicating such an extreme final solution was: How do I - Jorah Mormont, Lord of Bear Island, commander of five hundred fighting men - deny the Night King as many soldiers as possible?
The obvious Plan A is that by my virtue as a modern man with a decent understanding of the setting, I will gain enough renown and influence through innovation, manipulation, and uncanny judgment to rapidly change not only my home culture, but an opposing culture of stone age savages - whose only unifying characteristic is a contrarian attitude - to forgive eight thousand years of bullshit and integrate into a single new culture so that the savages can move south of the Wall and be saved from the ice zombies.
If that sounds crazy, it's because it is.
So then there was Plan B. Betray my home culture and allow over a hundred thousand stone age savages South of the Wall and hope for the best.
Since Plan B was a raw sewage sandwich, I chose Plan C. Use my twenty five-ish year window to depopulate as much of the Lands Beyond the Wall as possible. Not only was this plan something I could influence with my own power, but the citizens of Bear Island were vocally for counter raiding their hated foes. It was easy to whip the men into a frenzy for the campaign.
After the surviving walruses fled into the sea, my men and I got to the work of establishing our camp, and I sent a hundred men to the nearby tree line to begin felling everything. After setting up or tents and slaughtering our prey, we constructed a massive bonfire at the heart of our camp. Upon it we heaped the many trees we chose not to stockpile. Cedar, Oak, Fir, and Weirwood were spared the blaze, and the rare Ironwood as well, for they were simply too difficult to fell without skilled lumberjacks.
I had three hundred warriors raised up in the last year led in twenty man teams led by 15 of the veterans left over from my father's regime. The remaining thirty four veterans took up support roles in the camp, and would substitute for any team leader injured or slain. They maintained order and discipline for me, something incredibly necessary given the strict rules I imposed to maximize our safety during this campaign.
Every man had to wear his armor at all times, only removing it as needed to eat, relieve his bowels or bladder, or to once daily wash himself with a wool towel and tub of hot water. He did all of this with a buddy who would remain on guard during these times.
Though constraining on morale, the constant vigilance soon paid off as my men and I regularly encountered ambushes as we went about our destructive business. Many stone tipped arrows caught in our suits of chain. We didn't chase these archers, but instead continued our labor night and day of keeping the bonfire burning high and hot, and feasting on the flesh of all the animals we slew.
We stood more danger from the wild life. Roaming polar bears, cunning shadow cats, fierce direwolves and hounds, the occasional boar like something out of Princess Mononoke, moose. Our chumming of the waters attacked sharks and orcas which conveniently drove the walruses and seals back to shore on a number of occasions.
After a sennight of hard labor, our patience was rewarded when the enemy surrounded our unfortified camp in the night. The warning horn blasted it's note when the watchman saw them passing a brazier placed a good way from the camp, waking everyone asleep who took up their weapons and leapt from their tents fully ready for battle as we had drilled many times before and since we came to this shore.
Seeing us emerging from our tents, the Wildings charged while screaming in the Old Tongue. My men swiftly took up a square formation with shields and spears pointed at the enemy, and simply shrugged off any incoming arrows and spears that stood no chance of piercing their heavy chainmail armor.
With discipline we thrust our spears into the oncoming foe, any man who impaled his victim too deeply dropping the spear and hacking the next enemy with a steel bladed hand axe. The battle was brief, perhaps five minutes in total, and the Wildlings abandoned their failed attack, running into the night.
Once more, we did not pursue, not yet. The sun rose and revealed to us our nights efforts, and over five hundred bodies lay dead upon the ground, with only bruises and a few twisted ankles on our side of the equation. After stripping the bodies and burning their primitive equipment, we dragged them out into the bay during low tide and hacked them to pieces. Thus we denied the true enemy their foot soldiers.
When our work finished the fifteen teams of men finally chased after our enemies. They followed the trails left by those fleeing the battle, trails that more often than not led right back to their homes. Within a few days of the battle our camp was processing the first batch of 'thralls'. In Westeros, slavery is outlawed, but the taking of 'thralls' is completely legal.
The difference is that slaves can be purchased and sold, thralls must be taken by force for personal use. As such, our raiding party was fine collecting as many people as we wanted so long as they are distributed for ownership within the party without the changing of any wealth. We'd simply draw lots at the end of the campaign from those interested in taking thralls to determine picking order. I'd go first, no matter what. Noble privilege and whatnot.
But first we needed to take a pack of savages that even the savages call extra savage and instill obedience into them.
When thralls enter our camp, they are stripped, their clothing cast into fire, their hair is shaved off and their skin scrubbed by our roughest wool dunked into tubs of too hot water and burning soap, as well as their mouths. When clean, they are robed in more of our roughest wool and led to a coral. At any point in this process resistance is met with a beating delivered by a rod twice as thick as a man's thumb.
Here the thralls are often visited to teach us the Old Tongue. They had to tell us the names of things we showed them, and if they did not we would beat them. Cooperation was met with more food each day than the meager rations we gave them.
We gathered these people for an entire month, slowly working with over six score women captured and the almost fifteen score children. The wildlife removed a few of our names from the census, but human opposition mostly broken the night we shattered the army that attacked us, and a handful of men on each team were issued long bows to counter hit and run tactics.
During the latter half of our stay in the Frozen Shore, we focused on processing the thralls and our hunting and felling. By this time we'd scattered all the people in our area into the wilderness, and would have to wait for another large force to arrive or move locations to continue our genocide. Instead we finished the work in our controlled domain and began shipping the wood, pelts, and ivory back to Bear Island using only three ships at a time with minimum crew.
During the entire campaign I only heard two genuine complaints from the men, the whining about always wearing their armor not counting as genuine, just irritating. The first came with the cutting of weirwood trees, which are held sacred by our people who worshiped a formless pantheon known as the Old Gods. I countered with the trees being despoiled by the worship of the honourless Wildlings and the men had enough hate in their hearts to buy it.
The second came when it was time to distribute the Thralls. In our time conditioning our captures, a fifth of them proved fully resistant no matter the abuse heaped upon them. Far less in the child population, but a few of the boys took heart from their defiant mothers. My choice on the matter had many ill at ease.
Still, there were enough men with the stomach for it that the plan moved forward, and the day of our drawing lots we led the thralls into the bay as the tide receded. Those who were determined in their defiance were led to the water's edge and in sight of the others beaten to death and then hacked to pieces while my men repeated in the Old Tongue the words for 'disobedience' and 'death'.
The message sent and received I made the first pick, taking a willowy ginger with a pair of huge teats and her four year old daughter. The rest of the men who chose to take thralls were instructed to break up the mothers and children as much as possible.
Putting my hands around the back of their necks I took the pair to my tent and stripped the mother. When she panicked and tried to struggle the words 'disobedience' and 'death' stilled her. Her hot cunt felt like victory.
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I believe the title of this arc should be called, Based AF Jorah Saves Westeros. Some times I want to make Jorah musical and anytime someone would question him about these great raids have him bust out a version of the 'Savages' song from Pocahontas.
By my estimating of the seasons, with him not raiding during the Fall and Winter, Jorah can pull off seven of these invasions before Robert's rebellion, and it saves him the trouble of having to interact with the other Northern houses too much before he really has some weight to throw around, as all the resources he would buy from them can be acquired during his periods of doing everything but strip-mining the Wilding territories.
The next chapter is one I'm not entirely sure on. Alysa is not going to take kindly to Jorah's new Salt Wife, but I'm not hundi on how that turns out, so I'll let it go with a vote.
Jorah fucks Alysa into submission
or
Alysa leaves Jorah and goes home to her family
I know option one is porn logic, but it worked out for Jaime sortof and I am of the firm belief that anything Jaime can do Jorah can do better. Fuck, that might be a spoiler... Anyway, cast your votes on the option you choose.
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