NOVEL NEXT Chapter 29: Progress
Mid 277 Summer
Turns out I had everything I needed to start my copper empire on hand. The guild out of the Westerlands digging cisterns for our fortifications didn't mind peeling off a hundred men to help establish a mining camp just a bit farther north, not with some additional hazard pay for working outside the Seven Kingdoms on the table for the taking. The foundry workers I so arduously pursued found it no different processing ore from the Frostfangs as they had from the hills and crags of the Westerlands. With the Wildlings mostly abandoning the region, I had a number of men willing to sit around all day making sure the thralls kept working.
I opened this opportunity to the other members of the Federation, an equal share for equal effort, and while the others sent men for the job, they neither matched mine in numbers or skill, so I took the lion's share of the product with minor whinging. If I had simply chosen to cut the others out entirely I'd have had hell to pay once word finally got out, and would have risked giving Lord Stark a cause to forgive my debtors. Feudal society is all a balancing act and unrestrained greed will bring the hammer down unless you are the guy wielding it.
While the fortified mining camp went up I led a lean group of riders on a merry chase of the Wildings that fled into the nearby hills and mountains. The men with me were those sworn to my service, well rewarded for all the combat I dragged them into and always eager for more. I trained their sons alongside my own, a continuation of the chain of fealty and violence. During the long effort establishing ourselves here we hunted down hundreds of people and each man gained a new Salt Wife. Mine a honey blonde of strong build. Not as physically powerful as Helga, but perhaps her meeker cousin.
I became incredibly familiar with the region due to my travels and the scouting of my birds, and I knew that The Gorge would be the biggest threat to our operation, so I made sure none passed through it's dark depths safely, my owls dropping rocks on anyone attempting the to get to the Haunted Forest and potentially bringing the many tens of thousands of Wildlings down on my now permanent operation.
It would be very hard to rally the fractured Wildings to make the journey to fight me when I am gone from the Frozen Shore for most of the year. The Wildlings on the other side of the Frostfangs have a poor opinion of the Men of Frozen Shore, and would have to sacrifice much to ward against my raids, but a permanent outpost would give them a solid target to rage against.
So long as I control The Gorge, they'd have to take the Skirling Pass to get to me, two hundred miles as the eagle flies to my mine, and over mountainous terrain for all of those two hundred miles. The actual journey without risking the mountains is over four hundred miles through less than fertile territory, and they'd find no succor in the previously lean, now devastated region between Lorn Point and my mine.
In essence I had free reign of the region, though that didn't stop me from keeping everyone's heads on a swivel. No point in dying dumb preventable deaths because we got too comfortable.
Lord Stark wished to survey the area, no doubt looking to possibly send his own forces or those of other houses up to claim some free real estate, and I'd make sure the Federation is compensated for our pacification of the region. While we have no legal claim on this land, I doubt Rickard will step on our collective toes for access to resources, especially not with us on the upswing like we are. In any case the man is half a year out from any personal trip out this way, so I have plenty of time to claim the best locations for myself.
Back home on Bear Island I was erecting five major fortifications. The First is my personal keep up high upon the largest of my stony hills. Not as high as Casterly Rock, but high enough. I called the future keep Weathertop, and while not designed for complete impregnability like the hundred foot high walls of Winterfell, Weathertop was designed with the only form of access being a road up the steep stone hill, a road with a dozen murderous gate houses along it.
That murderousness was a theme of my planned fortifications of my home harbor, as Weathertop is more of a defensive retreat, the business end of my defenses starts with two tall signal towers at each end of my protective south facing bay. Each four stories tall and hard nuts to crack, once again designed not to completely stump an enemy, but to hold him up and be absolutely bloody to take. Not that anyone would likely stop to take them as all they really do is serve as a warning system. One signal fire for enemies spotted, the other to light when they enter into the harbor.
Halfway into the harbor, roughly fifteen miles, are six towers, three on each side of the harbor. These trios are connected by walls wide enough for ten armored men to march across shoulder to shoulder, with battlements on each side. They form an obtuse angle each with two towers on the shore and a third in the water, narrowing the channel at its narrowest point and enabling a chain to be raised across it.
The machicolated walls and towers were further protected with steep sloped wooden roofs, to shed the frequent rain and snow, but also to better protect against incoming arrows. Six ballistae will sit atop the six finished towers, the bigger meaner cousin of the much fellated scorpion. Though slower to maneuver and requiring eight men to operate, the ballista is capable of flinging much larger bolts and stones over greater distances. Fully capable of sinking long ships in a single well aimed strike, and a good ballista crew can pick off a specific man on the field. Quite the tantalizing morsel, the thought of that chain going up and enemy ships subjected to artillery and arrow fire till they can reverse course and get out of range.
My aging maester, Lyle, helped build the siege engines using a book I brought back a copy of from the Citadel, my rep in Old Town paying dividends on acquiring the expensive hand scribed tomes. He also instructed the still in training crews, and felt quite confident that he could have three crews for each piece trained up within three months of each engine's completion.
Our estimated schedule for these projects has the last of them, Weathertop, completed before 286, so long as the next Winter lasts no longer than three years. Of course Lyle and the builders don't know about that little less than a year long trip we'll be making down south in 282 for Robert's Rebellion, but 287 gave me more than enough time to get my preparations finished before the Greyjoys finish theirs.
I honestly have no idea how my presence will change the actions of the Greyjoys. I might even shift the events that lead to Robert's Rebellion, but I don't really control anything to do with Aerys and Rhaegar being two different forms of absolutely crazy. I do however shift the balance of power on the west coast. For all I know the Greyjoys might send the Iron Fleet right at me, which I estimate to be a hundred of their seventy oar ships. I remember something stating that it's one hundred one hundred oar ships, but that just doesn't compute.
At their peak under the Hoares the Ironborn could field no more than twenty five thousand men. The only reason they could hold the Riverlands down is because the only thing you can count on the River Lords for is that they hate each other more than they hate everyone else, and will gladly take a fat L from a foreign power if they get to backstab their local rival first.
It makes more sense for the Iron Fleet to be one hundred seventy oar ships, crewed by fourteen thousand reavers. That allows the miscellaneous smaller ships to fill out the rest of the hundreds of ships they field with the remainder of their forces. There's even estimates that the Ironborn can only field as few as ten thousand men, but I believe that number is from the War of Five Kings. No matter how many there are, I can only hope I get the opportunity to kill as many as possible before someone has the audacity to accept a surrender before I decide it's over.
I hoped to be able to predict the flow of the future soon through my green dreams. Though largely symbolic and murky, I'd attempted in recent days to gain a measure of control over my dreams, green and otherwise. Though my results are middling, they are an infinite percent improvement over my formerly zero control, and I'd turned my mind each night to dreaming about coming storms and trade opportunities. I'd begun to recognize patterns in my dreams that I can plan around. Dodging storms and making gold might seem fairly mundane, but it's the baby steps to getting to some freaky Bloodraven game where I can engineer a complex sequence of events to deliver outcomes I want while sitting around at home. Hopefully unpenetrated by tree roots.
Just like how transforming my nose was baby steps towards shapeshifting. Now that I am magically bound to a handful of Westeros's version of polar bears, my long term goal of becoming a four thousand pound mega predator has become a short term goal. It's a little struggle each day, but a little progress each day, and soon enough the work will be finished, and the reward mine. Where once I floundered in the dark trying to feel out the path on my hands and knees, there is now a light in the darkness.
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Did a lot of prewriting yesterday, hammering out details, testing the feasibility of certain plotlines. I also started using a different map with a better scale of Planetos. Turns out Bear Island is about a about a thousand square miles larger than I thought it was.
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