The last man to face him must have been a smith; he had shoulders like a bull, and one much more muscular than the other. His armor was a studded brigandine and a cap of boiled leather. The only blow he landed completed the ruin of Victarion’s shield, but the cut the captain dealt in answer split his head in two. Would that I could deal with the Crow’s Eye as simply. When he jerked his axehead free again, the smith’s skull seemed to burst. Bone and blood and brain went everywhere, and the corpse fell forward, up against his legs. Too late to plead for quarter now, Victarion thought as he untangled himself from the dead man.
By then the deck was slick beneath his feet, and the dead and the dying lay in heaps on every side. He threw his shield away and sucked in air. “Lord Captain,” he heard the Barber say beside him, “the day is ours.”
All around the sea was full of ships. Some were burning, some were sinking, some had been smashed to splinters. Between the hulls the water was thick as stew, full of corpses, broken oars, and men clinging to the wreckage. In the distance, half a dozen of southron longships were racing back toward the Mander. Let them go, Victarion thought, let them tell the tale. Once a man had turned his tail and run from battle he ceased to be a man.
His eyes were stinging from the sweat that had run down into them during the fight. Two of his oarsmen helped undo his kraken helm so he might lift it off. Victarion mopped at his brow. “That knight,” he grumbled, “the knight of the white rose. Did any of you pull him out?” A lord’s son would be worth a goodly ransom; from his father, if Lord Serry had survived the day. From his liege at Highgarden, if not.
None of his men had seen what became of the knight after he went over the side, however. Most like the man had drowned. “May he feast as he fought, in the Drowned God’s watery halls.” Though the men of the Shield Islands called themselves sailors, they crossed the seas in dread and went lightly clad in battle for fear of drowning. Young Serry had been different. A brave man, thought Victarion. Almost ironborn.
He gave the captured ship to Ragnor Pyke, named a dozen men to crew her, and clambered back up onto his own Iron Victory. “Strip the captives of arms and armor and have their wounds bound up,” he told Nute the Barber. “Throw the dying in the sea. If any beg for mercy, cut their throats first.” He had only contempt for such; better to drown on seawater than on blood. “I want a count of the ships we won and all the knights and lordlings we took captive. I want their banners too.” One day he would hang them in his hall, so when he grew old and feeble he could remember all the foes he had slain when he was young and strong.
“It will be done.” Nute grinned. “It is a great victory.”
Aye, he thought, a great victory for the Crow’s Eye and his wizards. The other captains would shout his brother’s name anew when the tidings reached Oakenshield. Euron had seduced them with his glib tongue and smiling eye and bound them to his cause with the plunder of half a hundred distant lands; gold and silver, ornate armor, curved swords with gilded pommels, daggers of Valyrian steel, striped tiger pelts and the skins of spotted cats, jade manticores and ancient Valyrian sphinxes, chests of nutmeg, cloves, and saffron, ivory tusks and the horns of unicorns, green and orange and yellow feathers from the Summer Sea, bolts of fine silk and shimmering samite. and yet all that was little and less, compared to this. Now he has given them conquest, and they are his for good and all, the captain thought. The taste was bitter on his tongue. This was my victory, not his. Where was he? Back on Oakenshield, lazing in a castle. He stole my wife and he stole my throne, and now he steals my glory.
Obedience came naturally to Victarion Greyjoy; he had been born to it. Growing to manhood in the shadow of his brothers, he had followed Balon dutifully in everything he did. Later, when Balon’s sons were born, he had grown to accept that one day he would kneel to them as well, when one of them took his father’s place upon the Seastone Chair. But the Drowned God had summoned Balon and his sons down to his watery halls, and Victarion could not call Euron “king” without tasting bile in his throat.
The wind was freshening, and his thirst was raging. After a battle he always wanted wine. He gave the deck to Nute and went below. In his cramped cabin aft, he found the dusky woman wet and ready; perhaps the battle had warmed her blood as well. He took her twice, in quick succession. When they were done there was blood smeared across her breasts and thighs and belly, but it was his blood, from the gash in his palm. The dusky woman washed it out for him with boiled vinegar.
“The plan was good, I grant him,” Victarion said as she knelt beside him. “The Mander is open to us now, as it was of old.” It was a lazy river, wide and slow and treacherous with snags and sandbars. Most seagoing vessels dared not sail beyond Highgarden, but longships with their shallow draughts could navigate as far upstream as Bitterbridge. In ancient days, the ironborn had boldly sailed the river road and plundered all along the Mander and its vassal streams. until the kings of the green hand had armed the fisherfolk on the four small islands off the Mander’s mouth and named them his shields.
Two thousand years had passed, but in the watchtowers along their craggy shores, greybeards still kept the ancient vigil. At the first glimpse of longships the old men would light their beacon fires, and the call would leap from hill to hill and island to island. Fear! Foes! Raiders! Raiders! When the fisherfolk saw the fires burning on the high places they would put their nets and plows aside and take up their swords and axes. Their lords would rush from their castles, attended by their knights and men-at-arms. Warhorns would echo across the waters, from Greenshield and Greyshield, Oakenshield and Southshield, and their longships would come sliding out from moss-covered stone pens along the shores, oars flashing as they swarmed across the straits to seal the Mander and hound and harry the raiders upriver to their doom.
Euron had sent Torwold Browntooth and the Red Oarsman up the Mander with a dozen swift longships, so the lords of the Shield Islands would spill forth in pursuit. By the time his main fleet arrived, only a handful of fighting men remained to defend the isles themselves. The ironborn had come in on the evening tide, so the glare of the setting sun would keep them hidden from the greybeards in the watchtowers until it was too late. The wind was at their backs, as it had been all the way down from Old Wyk. It was whispered about the fleet that Euron’s wizards had much and more to do with that, that the Crow’s Eye appeased the Storm God with blood sacrifice. How else would he have dared sail so far to the west, instead of following the shoreline as was the custom?
The ironborn ran their longships up onto the stony shingles and spilled out into the purple dusk with steel glimmering in their hands. By then the fires were burning in the high places, but few remained to take up arms. Greyshield, Greenshield, and Southshield fell before the sun came up. Oakenshield lasted half a day longer. And when the men of the Four Shields broke off their pursuit of Torwold and the Red Oarsman and turned downriver, they found the Iron Fleet waiting at the Mander’s mouth.
“All fell out as Euron said it would,” Victarion told the dusky woman as she bound up his hand with linen. “His wizards must have seen it.” He had three aboard the Silence, Quellon Humble had confided in a whisper. Queer men and terrible, they were, but the Crow’s Eye had made them slaves. “He still needs me to fight his battles, though,” Victarion insisted. “Wizards may be well and good, but blood and steel win wars.” The vinegar made his wound hurt worse than ever. He shoved the woman away and closed his fist, glowering. “Bring me wine.”