A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

by George R. R. Martin

  Bennis laughed. He had two sorts of laughs. Sometimes he cackled like a chicken, and sometimes he brayed louder than Egg’s mule. This was his chicken laugh. “Dried up while you was gone, I guess. A drought’ll do that.”

  Dunk was dismayed. Well, I won’t be soaking now. He swung down to the ground. What’s going to happen to the crops? Half the wells in the Reach had gone dry, and all the rivers were running low, even the Blackwater Rush and the mighty Mander.

  “Nasty stuff, water,” Bennis said. “Drank some once, and it made me sick as a dog. Wine’s better.”

  “Not for oats. Not for barleycorn. Not for carrots, onions, cabbages. Even grapes need water.” Dunk shook his head. “How could it go dry so quick? We’ve only been gone six days.”

  “Wasn’t much water in there to start with, Dunk. Time was, I could piss me bigger streams than this one.”

  “Not Dunk,” said Dunk. “I told you that.” He wondered why he bothered. Bennis was a mean-mouthed man, and it pleased him to make mock. “I’m called Ser Duncan the Tall.”

  “By who? Your bald pup?” He looked at Egg and laughed his chicken laugh. “You’re taller than when you did for Pennytree, but you still look a proper Dunk to me.”

  Dunk rubbed the back of his neck and stared down at the rocks. “What should we do?”

  “Fetch home the wines, and tell Ser Useless his stream’s gone dry. The Standfast well still draws, he won’t go thirsty.”

  “Don’t call him Useless.” Dunk was fond of the old knight. “You sleep beneath his roof, give him some respect.”

  “You respect him for the both o’ us, Dunk,” said Bennis. “I’ll call him what I will.”

  The silvery grey planks creaked heavily as Dunk walked out onto the bridge, to frown down at the sand and stones below. A few small brown pools glistened amongst the rocks, he saw, none larger than his hand. “Dead fish, there and there, see?” The smell of them reminded him of the dead men at the crossroads.

  “I see them, ser,” said Egg.

  Dunk hopped down to the streambed, squatted on his heels, and turned over a stone. Dry and warm on top, moist and muddy underneath. “The water can’t have been gone long.” Standing, he flicked the stone sidearm at the bank, where it crashed through a crumbling overhang in a puff of dry, brown earth. “The soil’s cracked along the banks, but soft and muddy in the middle. Those fish were alive yesterday.”

  “Dunk the lunk, Pennytree used to call you, I recall.” Ser Bennis spat a wad of sourleaf onto the rocks. It glistened red and slimy in the sunlight. “Lunks shouldn’t try and think, their heads is too bloody thick for such.”

  Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. From Ser Arlan the words had been affectionate. He had been a kindly man, even in his scolding. In the mouth of Ser Bennis of the Brown Shield, they sounded different. “Ser Arlan’s two years dead,” Dunk said, “and I’m called Ser Duncan the Tall.” He was sorely tempted to put his fist through the brown knight’s face, and smash those red and rotten teeth to splinters. Bennis of the Brown Shield might be a nasty piece of work, but Dunk had a good foot and a half on him, and four stone as well. He might be a lunk, but he was big. Sometimes it seemed as though he’d thumped his head on half the doors in Westeros, not to mention every beam in every inn from Dorne up to the Neck. Egg’s brother Aemon had measured him in Oldtown, and found he lacked an inch of seven feet, but that was half a year ago. He might have grown since. Growing was the one thing that Dunk did really well, the old man used to say.

  He went back to Thunder and mounted up again. “Egg, get on back to Standfast with the wine. I’m going to see what’s happened to the water.”

  “Streams dry up all the time,” said Bennis.

  “I just want to have a look—”

  “Like how you looked under that rock? Shouldn’t go turning over rocks, lunk. Never know what might crawl out. We got us nice straw pallets back at Standfast. There’s eggs more days than not, and not much to do but listen to Ser Useless go on about how great he used to be. Leave it be, I say. The stream went dry, that’s all.”

  Dunk was nothing if not stubborn. “Ser Eustace is waiting on his wine,” he told Egg. “Tell him where I went.”

  “I will, ser.” Egg gave a tug on Maester’s lead. The mule twitched his ears, but started off again at once. He wants to get those wine casks off his back. Dunk could not blame him.

  The stream flowed north and east when it was flowing, so he turned Thunder south and west. He had not ridden a dozen yards before Bennis caught him. “I best come see you don’t get hanged.” He pushed a fresh sourleaf into his mouth. “Past that clump o’ sandwillows, the whole right bank is spider land.”

  “I’ll stay on our side.” Dunk wanted no trouble with the Lady of the Coldmoat. At Standfast you heard ill things of her. The Red Widow, she was called, for the husbands she had put into the ground. Old Sam Stoops said she was a witch, a poisoner, and worse. Two years ago she had sent her knights across the stream to seize an Osgrey man for stealing sheep. “When m’lord rode to Coldmoat to demand him back, he was told to look for him at the bottom of the moat,” Sam had said. “She’d sewn poor Dake in a bag o’ rocks and sunk him. ’Twas after that Ser Eustace took Ser Bennis into service, to keep them spiders off his lands.”

  Thunder kept a slow, steady pace beneath the broiling sun.

  The sky was blue and hard, with no hint of cloud anywhere to be seen. The course of the stream meandered around rocky knolls and forlorn willows, through bare, brown hills and fields of dead and dying grain. An hour upstream from the bridge, they found themselves riding on the edge of the small Osgrey forest called Wat’s Wood. The greenery looked inviting from afar and filled Dunk’s head with thoughts of shady glens and chuckling brooks, but when they reached the trees they found them thin and scraggly, with drooping limbs. Some of the great oaks were shedding leaves, and half the pines had turned as brown as Ser Bennis, with rings of dead needles girdling their trunks. Worse and worse, thought Dunk. One spark, and this will all go up like tinder.

  For the moment, though, the tangled underbrush along the Chequy Water was still thick with thorny vines, nettles, and tangles of briarwhite and young willow. Rather than fight through it, they crossed the dry streambed to the Coldmoat side, where the trees had been cleared away for pasture. Amongst the parched brown grasses and faded wildflowers, a few black-nosed sheep were grazing. “Never knew an animal stupid as a sheep,” Ser Bennis commented. “Think they’re kin to you, lunk?” When Dunk did not reply, he laughed his chicken laugh again.

  Half a league farther south, they came upon the dam.

  It was not large as such things went, but it looked strong. Two stout wooden barricades had been thrown across the stream from bank to bank, made from the trunks of trees with the bark still on. The space between them was filled with rocks and earth and packed down hard. Behind the dam the flow was creeping up the banks and spilling off into a ditch that had been cut through Lady Webber’s fields. Dunk stood in his stirrups for a better look. The glint of sun off water betrayed a score of lesser channels, running off in all directions like a spider’s web. They are stealing our stream. The sight filled him with indignation, especially when it dawned on him that the trees must surely have been taken from Wat’s Wood.

  “See what you went and did, lunk,” said Bennis. “Couldn’t have it that the stream dried up, no. Might be this starts with water, but it’ll end with blood. Yours and mine, most like.” The brown knight drew his sword. “Well, no help for it now. There’s your thrice-damned diggers. Best we put some fear in them.” He raked his garron with his spurs and galloped through the grass.

  Dunk had no choice but to follow. Ser Arlan’s longsword rode his hip, a good straight piece of steel. If these ditch diggers have a lick of sense, they’ll run. Thunder’s hooves kicked up clods of dirt.

  One man dropped his shovel at the sight of the oncoming knights, but that was all. There were a score of the diggers, short and tall, old and young, all
baked brown by the sun. They formed a ragged line as Bennis slowed, clutching their spades and picks. “This is Coldmoat land,” one shouted.

  “And that’s an Osgrey stream.” Bennis pointed with his longsword. “Who put that damned dam up?”

  “Maester Cerrick made it,” said one young digger.

  “No,” an older man insisted. “The grey pup pointed some and said do this and do that, but it were us who made it.”

  “Then you can bloody well unmake it.”

  The diggers’ eyes were sullen and defiant. One wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. No one spoke.

  “You lot don’t hear so good,” said Bennis. “Do I need to lop me off an ear or two? Who’s first?”

  “This is Webber land.” The old digger was a scrawny fellow, stooped and stubborn. “You got no right to be here. Lop off any ears and m’lady will drown you in a sack.”

  Bennis rode closer. “Don’t see no ladies here, just some mouthy peasant.” He poked the digger’s bare brown chest with the point of his sword, just hard enough to draw a bead of blood.

  He goes too far. “Put up your steel,” Dunk warned him. “This is not his doing. This maester set them to the task.”

  “It’s for the crops, ser,” a jug-eared digger said. “The wheat was dying, the maester said. The pear trees too.”

  “Well, maybe them pear trees die, or maybe you do.”

  “Your talk don’t frighten us,” said the old man.

  “No?” Bennis made his longsword whistle, opening the old man’s cheek from ear to jaw. “I said, them pear trees die, or you do.” The digger’s blood ran red down one side of his face.

  He should not have done that. Dunk had to swallow his rage. Bennis was on his side in this. “Get away from here,” he shouted at the diggers. “Go back to your lady’s castle.”

  “Run,” Ser Bennis urged.

  Three of them let go of their tools and did just that, sprinting through the grass. But another man, sunburned and brawny, hefted a pick and said, “There’s only two of them.”

  “Shovels against swords is a fool’s fight, Jorgen,” the old man said, holding his face. Blood trickled through his fingers. “This won’t be the end of this. Don’t think it will.”

  “One more word, and I might be the end o’ you.”

  “We meant no harm to you,” Dunk said, to the old man’s bloody face. “All we want is our water. Tell your lady that.”

  “Oh, we’ll tell her, ser,” promised the brawny man, still clutching his pick. “That we will.”

  On the way home they cut through the heart of Wat’s Wood, grateful for the small measure of shade provided by the trees. Even so, they cooked. Supposedly there were deer in the wood, but the only living things they saw were flies. They buzzed about Dunk’s face as he rode, and crept round Thunder’s eyes, irritating the big warhorse no end. The air was still, suffocating. At least in Dorne the days were dry, and at night it grew so cold I shivered in my cloak. In the Reach the nights were hardly cooler than the days, even this far north.

  When ducking down beneath an overhanging limb, Dunk plucked a leaf and crumpled it between his fingers. It fell apart like thousand-year-old parchment in his hand. “There was no need to cut that man,” he told Bennis.

  “A tickle on the cheek was all it was, to teach him to mind his tongue. I should’ve cut his bloody throat for him, only then the rest would’ve run like rabbits, and we’d’ve had to ride down the lot o’ them.”

  “You’d kill twenty men?” Dunk said, incredulous.

  “Twenty-two. That’s two more’n all your fingers and your toes, lunk. You have to kill them all, else they go telling tales.” They circled round a deadfall. “We should’ve told Ser Useless the drought dried up his little pissant stream.”

  “Ser Eustace. You would have lied to him.”

  “Aye, and why not? Who’s to tell him any different? The flies?” Bennis grinned a wet, red grin. “Ser Useless never leaves the tower except to see the boys down in the blackberries.”

  “A sworn sword owes his lord the truth.”

  “There’s truths and truths, lunk. Some don’t serve.” He spat. “The gods make droughts. A man can’t do a bloody buggering thing about the gods. The Red Widow, though…we tell Useless that bitch dog took his water, he’ll feel honor-bound to take it back. Wait and see. He’ll think he’s got to do something.”

  “He should. Our smallfolk need that water for their crops.”

  “Our smallfolk?” Ser Bennis brayed his laughter. “Was I off having a squat when Ser Useless made you his heir? How many smallfolk you figure you got? Ten? And that’s counting Squinty Jeyne’s half-wit son that don’t know which end o’ the axe to hold. Go make knights o’ every one, and we’ll have half as many as the Widow, and never mind her squires and her archers and the rest. You’d need both hands and both feet to count all them, and your baldhead boy’s fingers and toes too.”

  “I don’t need toes to count.” Dunk was sick of the heat, the flies, and the brown knight’s company. He may have ridden with Ser Arlan once, but that was years and years ago. The man has grown mean and false and craven. He put his heels into his horse and trotted on ahead, to put the smell behind him.

  Standfast was a castle only by courtesy. Though it stood bravely atop a rocky hill and could be seen for leagues around, it was no more than a towerhouse. A partial collapse a few centuries ago had required some rebuilding, so the north and west faces were pale grey stone above the windows and the old black stone below. Turrets had been added to the roofline during the repair, but only on the sides that were rebuilt; at the other two corners crouched ancient stone grotesques, so badly abraded by wind and weather that it was hard to say what they had been. The pinewood roof was flat but badly warped and prone to leaks.

  A crooked path led from the foot of the hill up to the tower, so narrow it could only be ridden single file. Dunk led the way on the ascent, with Bennis just behind. He could see Egg above them, standing on a jut of rock in his floppy straw hat.

  They reined up in front of the little daub-and-wattle stable that nestled at the tower’s foot, half-hidden under a misshapen heap of purple moss. The old man’s grey gelding was in one of the stalls, next to Maester. Egg and Sam Stoops had gotten the wine inside, it seemed. Hens were wandering the yard. Egg trotted over. “Did you find what happened to the stream?”

  “The Red Widow’s dammed it up.” Dunk dismounted and gave Thunder’s reins to Egg. “Don’t let him drink too much at once.”

  “No, ser. I won’t.”

  “Boy,” Ser Bennis called. “You can take my horse as well.”

  Egg gave him an insolent look. “I’m not your squire.”

  That tongue of his will get him hurt one day, Dunk thought. “You’ll take his horse, or you’ll get a clout in the ear.”

  Egg made a sullen face but did as he was bid. As he reached for the bridle, though, Ser Bennis hawked and spat. A glob of glistening red phlegm struck the boy between two toes. He gave the brown knight an icy look. “You spit on my foot, ser.”

  Bennis clambered to the ground. “Aye. Next time I’ll spit in your face. I’ll have none o’ your bloody tongue.”

  Dunk could see the anger in the boy’s eyes. “Tend to the horses, Egg,” he said, before things got any worse. “We need to speak with Ser Eustace.”

  The only entrance into Standfast was through an oak-and-iron door twenty feet above them. The bottom steps were blocks of smooth black stone, so worn they were bowl-shaped in the middle. Higher up, they gave way to a steep wooden stair that could be swung up like a drawbridge in times of trouble. Dunk shooed the hens aside and climbed two steps at a time.

  Standfast was bigger than it appeared. Its deep vaults and cellars occupied a good part of the hill on which it perched. Aboveground, the tower boasted four stories. The upper two had windows and balconies, the lower two only arrow slits. It was cooler inside, but so dim that Dunk had to let his eyes adjust. Sam Stoops’s wi
fe was on her knees by the hearth, sweeping out the ashes. “Is Ser Eustace above or below?” Dunk asked her.

  “Up, ser.” The old woman was so hunched that her head was lower than her shoulders. “He just come back from visiting the boys, down in the blackberries.”

  The boys were Eustace Osgrey’s sons: Edwyn, Harrold, Addam. Edwyn and Harrold had been knights, Addam a young squire. They had died on the Redgrass Field fifteen years ago, at the end of the Blackfyre Rebellion. “They died good deaths, fighting bravely for the king,” Ser Eustace told Dunk, “and I brought them home and buried them among the blackberries.” His wife was buried there as well. Whenever the old man breached a new cask of wine, he went down the hill to pour each of his boys a libation. “To the king!” he would call out loudly, just before he drank.

  Ser Eustace’s bedchamber occupied the fourth floor of the tower, with his solar just below. That was where he would be found, Dunk knew, puttering amongst the chests and barrels. The solar’s thick grey walls were hung with rusted weaponry and captured banners, prizes from battles fought long centuries ago and now remembered by no one but Ser Eustace. Half the banners were mildewed, and all were badly faded and covered with dust, their once-bright colors gone to grey and green.

  Ser Eustace was scrubbing the dirt off a ruined shield with a rag when Dunk came up the steps. Bennis followed fragrant at his heels. The old knight’s eyes seemed to brighten a little at the sight of Dunk. “My good giant,” he declared, “and brave Ser Bennis. Come have a look at this. I found it in the bottom of that chest. A treasure, though fearfully neglected.”

  It was a shield, or what remained of one. That was little enough. Almost half of it had been hacked away, and the rest was grey and splintered. The iron rim was solid rust, and the wood was full of wormholes. A few flakes of paint still clung to it, but too few to suggest a sigil.