NOVEL NEXT Chapter 23: Shot Down in May
Mid 275 Spring
This is a deep pain.
Half the crew burned hot with fever by the time we barely managed to pull into the docks of Lannisport. I kept my hand on the steering oar through a mix of willpower and familiarity with exhaustion and delirium.
Thanks Old Gods, sometimes when you are busy being awful, you manage to error hard enough to do something useful.
A Spring Fever raged throughout the south, and the apothecaries and street level healers were already taxed heavily in their efforts to relieve the symptoms of the masses, let alone the actual trained maesters who had their hands full of caring for their own charges.
I managed to secure a supply of yarrow flowers, lemons, and raw honey by nature of money and the fact that even stumbling and soaked in sweat I'm the scariest looking guy you'll see short of a run in with a Clegane brother. I boiled a tea using the yarrow and lemon, dosed it with honey and spread it among my family and crew while we waited for another pot filled with bones, garlic, and onion to form a broth.
I treated the ill of my crew for over two weeks. Fevers broke and new men fell ill, and in that time only three people died in my care. A miracle considering our rough conditions, lacking supplies, and the number of dead getting carted out of the city each day. But a miracle is cold comfort considering just who died in my care.
My first mate, an older man, the type who normally die when illness runs rampant. A good man that I will miss for he served me ably and without complaint. No whinging ever came from his lips in the years I knew him. Truly the image of a Northman to his bones.
Next was Njada, my youngest. Another in the category of those particularly susceptible to plague. I didn't know the girl and even if she lived to adulthood I never would have. Maybe we could have had some kind of fantasy relationship where she's some kind of tomboy hellion and I teach her to fight because I'm so woke, but in truth I would have fobbed her off onto Maege and she'd have been better served for it.
The one that hurt was Alysa. Not only was my best friend dead, but she died after ten years of marriage, like some effort to bring the narrative back to canon. Fuck, I'm even a slaver. God damn it, I need to sail to Lyse and bang enough Valyrian whores to inoculate me against Dany simping. Maybe I'll find Daario and we can run the gauntlet of silver haired cunts together. Pave the way for Jon Snow to one day follow in our footsteps to get his self-respect back.
And maybe I'm distracting myself with absurdism to stop thinking about the sight of Alysa and our baby girl on a funeral pyre, and the five kids with tears and snot running down their faces who are essentially orphans because losing their mom to spring fever doesn't stop me from being a viking warlord. I spend a quarter of my productive years systematically stripping my neighbors of all resources, and over half my remaining time sailing for trade. When I'm at home I'm always building, my body, my skills, my ships, my town, my future. Doesn't leave a lot of time for being the rock for five grieving kids.
I can't get Maege to help raise them. I like to be able to like my kids, after all. Helga's got five kids or her own and three grandkids, both those numbers looking to grow again next year. Dad ran off for a never ending boys weekend at the Wall.
Poor Maester Lyle. I finally got the Citadel to agree to make some copies of certain texts for him, and now he's going to have to read them with five annoying kids treating him like a makeshift parent. I'd hesitate about it, since he swore off family in the name of the Citadel, but his three year old son and new daughter with Milk Tits - I mean Brandy, my former wetnurse - imply a desire for it. What's five sudden children to a man of his learning and a woman of her bounteous experience.
So bounteous.
No matter what, I'm not going to let this loss slow me down. I can't, I have too many plans going and too much at stake. It may be disrespectful to the quality of the woman that I do not tear my robes and pour dust on my head, weeping loudly, but at least her funeral was well attended. I am down half my friends in this life, but the one friend I do have left happens to live in this city, and he and I have a good number of associates to drag along with us.
Ser Lionel, good man that he is, never brought up the change in my eye color. His entire family got sick, but all pulled through. He thanked the Seven who are One for his blessing and lo and behold the horses aren't eating each other. I remember the fandom being full spurg about the Faith of the Seven, but I'm cool with it even though I don't practice the religion. I find a religion with its problem rooted in the people rather than the horrific deities being worshiped, which are quite real in this world, adorable. Almost as cute as the Old Gods, but even as trees those things murder folk on the reg with their psyker powers.
Give me the Seven who are One and their combined zero miraculous murders any day. After all, if I have a problem with the Faith of the Seven I can sail to Kings Landing and murder the High Septon, no magical curses to worry about at all. Truly a grand and intoxicating innocence.
I collected the charred bones and ashes of my wife and daughter and boxed them up for the trip home, a far more somber affair than we'd expected. Still a near twenty four hundred mile sea voyage provides enough time for children hardened by the nature of this harsh world to find their grit, even if my men and I had learned to get the most out of our speed at sea over the years, dropping the once ten day trip down to seven.
Seven days to Lannisport, two on to Old Town, four on to Sunspear and Planky Town. Four more to King's Landing should the Stepstone pirates let you by. Two days to Gulltown, and four on to White Harbor. Twenty one days of sailing though perfect weather to hit every major port in Westeros.
The Three Daughters of Valyria, three of the most economically powerful cities in the world are only fifteen days at sea away from my frozen home. The world really seems to shrink once you get good at sailing, and that isn't even the top speed we can achieve, just our average. I can see why having this advantage makes the Ironborn feel so special, to know for sure that you can go anywhere in the world and take whatever you want then sail off before anyone that can stop you has time enough to catch you.
Taking on such long voyages and to go even further beyond made my strides towards figuring out copper plated hulls go from a costly novelty to a money printing plan. Even through tragedy, I made the final step in the production of such ships during this trip to Lannisport.
I knew about the idea from my days in custom carpentry. I wasn't someone who worked on sailboats, but I did have an interest in them. Copper plated hulls was one of the last big technological pushes before modern naval design, and the technology was something developed over decades seeing many changes and forms
As such I knew that it was more than just copper plating the hulls of my ships. After all, copper and iron go ham on each other causing iron to corrode away faster than straight exposure to seawater. I'd need to swap all the iron fittings and fasteners out. I also knew that the technology involved copper alloys, but I didn't know what precise alloy.
To remedy this I paid a foundry in Lannisport that worked in bronze ship fittings to make me sample pieces of every copper alloy they could think of and tested those samples with various woods and a year of exposure to seawater. Once I had my register ringer in the combination of white oak and what I would come to call naval bronze, I kindly killed three of four master craftsmen who owned the foundry and convinced the last to move his business to Bear Island. Something we would finish on this trip.
It was to be another perfect victory for me.
I didn't just walk into a foundry and start killing small folk. When I knew I needed to relocate these guys to better hold on to the secrets of my ships, I made them a generous offer to move their business. When that failed I consulted my good friend who works in the Lannisport City Guard about the local cutthroat population. A few bottles of wine and ten silvers later the first of the men died and a month later I gave the other three another offer. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat, and finally the last master craftsman in the foundry accepted my forth and less than generous offer.
Never accuse the small folk of intelligence, but even they have the low cunning required to see that once it bad luck, twice is coincidence, and three times is a man making an offer you should have accepted before he murdered three of your friends.
I'd keep him and his apprentices up to their eyeballs in work from now on. My ships are starting to get long in the tooth, especially the original three I started with, and soon I won't be expanding my fleet, but keeping up with the replacement rate until the many children who have been born under my rule reach adulthood and are productive cogs in my economic machine. But that won't be for another ten years.
Till then, the work done by these men I so laboriously recruited will raise up my Bronze Fleet, the ships that will put me on top of this world. Corlys Velaryon made his family the wealthiest in Westeros with his nine voyages.
I'll do ten just to be petty.
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I'm happy that everyone came to really love Alysa as Jorah's wife. She needed to go right from the start, but finding the right time for it was paramount. The fact that their tenth year together matched up to Jorah reaching a new stratus of success made the timing perfect. While she didn't get much screen time, Alysa had her own character arc from the start, not necessarily for the good, but she maintained herself as a supportive wife the entire time. She was a healthy partner for Jorah.
F
As for copper plated hulls, I believe I talked about it in the comments, and forgot to bring it up in the text, so sorry for this feeling like a retcon, it was the plan the whole time. As for Jorah's travel times, they are calculated using a scaled map of Planetos and a thirty mile an hour average for his travel time of twelve hour days. I realize now that my understanding of longship speed was in kph, and I was defaulting to mph while still using a top speed of 35.
Oh well, fantasy setting. The ships are almost twice as fast as they should be. YOLO
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