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"What? You want us to go to Bitterbridge at once as envoys?"
Not long after the sun rose above the sea, Lord Rodrik repeated Robb's order in surprise inside the captain's cabin of the Great Kraken.
Robb nodded, his face serious. "Yes. I hear Renly's hundred-thousand-strong army is camped at Bitterbridge.
"Lord Rodrik, I would trouble you and Lady Barbrey to go persuade Renly Baratheon to join us in surrounding and destroying House Lannister."
"Your Grace, may I ask boldly why you chose us, when there are so many northern nobles?"
Barbrey shook her head at her father, who had been about to argue, then asked the question herself.
"I trust you, and I believe you have the ability to handle this matter well. So why would I not choose you?"
Hearing her words, Robb naturally showed a surprised expression and answered.
"Ah. Thank you for your trust. We will handle this matter properly.
"If there is nothing else, we will go back and make preparations, Your Grace."
Barbrey knew she could not refuse. She respectfully saluted Robb, then pulled her father out of the cabin.
As soon as they left the King in the North's large warship, Lord Rodrik could no longer endure it.
He looked left and right, then asked in a low voice, "Barbrey, why agree to go to Bitterbridge?
"We have not even received Lord Tywin's reply. And after we leave, how are we supposed to report the intelligence here to him?"
"Father, his decision to make us leave the northern army cannot be changed no matter what. Even if it were not a mission to Bitterbridge, he would arrange some other task for us."
Barbrey first turned her head and answered her father in a low voice. Then, looking toward a certain longship in the harbor, she continued.
"If he is making us leave only because of Roose, that is one thing. If it is because of Ramsay..."
"You mean Ramsay may have betrayed us?"
Lord Rodrik understood his daughter's meaning. His eyes widened, and in shock he forgot to keep his voice down.
"Shh, Father. It is only my guess. Whether it is true or not, we still need to test Ramsay."
"Good. We go now."
Unable to hold his temper, Lord Rodrik immediately strode toward Ramsay's longship.
Seeing her father so impatient, and wanting to know the truth herself, Barbrey followed closely behind.
After the father and daughter saw Ramsay, they tested him with all manner of words. Ramsay smoothly deflected them, playing the fool and brushing them aside.
Seeing this, Barbrey simply asked directly, "Lord Ramsay, my father and I were ordered by Robb Stark to go to Bitterbridge today. This matter should have nothing to do with you, should it?"
"Mm? You are going to Bitterbridge? Nothing to do with me? What does that mean?"
Hearing Barbrey's words, Ramsay first looked puzzled, then immediately showed sudden understanding.
"Oh, you suspect that I informed on you to Robb Stark?"
"Lord Ramsay, he gave us this order suddenly today. We are worried he is looking for a reason to move us out of everyone's sight, and then..."
Lord Rodrik saw that Ramsay understood and spoke his concern directly.
"By the honor of House Bolton, I swear to the gods above that I, Ramsay Bolton, absolutely did not inform Robb Stark."
Ramsay immediately swore with great seriousness, guaranteeing that he had not informed on them.
In this world, oaths carried considerable credibility for certain reasons.
Hearing this, Barbrey immediately smiled and softened the mood. "Heh. Lord Ramsay, there is truly no need for that. How could we not trust you?
"We are about to set out for Bitterbridge. I will tell you how to contact Casterly Rock. During this time, I must trouble you to pass intelligence to Lord Tywin."
"No problem. I am still waiting to ask Lord Tywin for my reward. Rest assured. So long as he can satisfy my terms, I will pass intelligence seriously."
"Do not worry. He will certainly satisfy you. The method of contact is..."
After Barbrey and her father conspired with Ramsay for a while, they returned to their own longship to pack. Before long, soldiers sent by the King in the North came to urge them along, saying the King in the North was already waiting for them to depart.
At midday, father and daughter left Lannisport's southern district with a few family retainers.
They had originally wanted to take the nearly nine hundred remaining soldiers of their houses with them, but Robb dismissed that with a single sentence: "If you bring a thousand men to Bitterbridge, are you envoys or an army?"
Clatter, clatter, clatter!
On Casterly Rock's first wall, and atop all its towers and watchposts, more than a thousand Lannister soldiers ran about busily. Some carried stones the size of heads, while others carried quivers full of arrows.
On the wall, a large number of male servants were heating great iron pots filled with boiling oil.
Ever since Daven had returned to Casterly Rock the day before, he had naturally taken overall command from the castle's castellan, as he held the highest position and the highest standing in the family there.
At present, Casterly Rock had around one thousand and fifty soldiers left to defend it. Nearly eight hundred were cavalry, while only a little more than one hundred and fifty were infantry. Added to that were almost one hundred lucky members of the Lannisport guard who had survived and reached the Rock.
Daven knew that with the enemy's numbers, there was no need for their cavalry to ride out in a sortie. So he ordered without hesitation that all cavalry dismount and serve as infantry, assisting in the defense of the walls.
There were also several hundred male servants inside Casterly Rock, and he summoned them as well to help defend the castle.
As a man who had once followed Tywin in the attack on King's Landing during Robert's Rebellion, he possessed basic military common sense.
However, he also possessed the Lannister habit of self-admiration. He thought rather highly of his own military talent.
He always felt that he was an excellent general, in no way inferior to Tywin, and that he had simply never had a suitable stage on which to display himself.
Jaime and Tyrion's private assessment of him, however, was this: Daven Lannister was a thoroughly mediocre commander.
Daven had prepared all sorts of defensive measures so early because he believed that after taking Lannisport, the northern army would certainly besiege Casterly Rock as quickly as possible.
After all, Casterly Rock would certainly notify Lord Tywin, and his army would hurry back to reinforce it as fast as possible. The northern army's only choice was to storm Casterly Rock as quickly as they could.
And since Casterly Rock had high walls and strong defenses, it could not possibly be taken in a short time. So if the North wanted to take it before Tywin's army returned, forcing an immediate attack was the most correct choice.
As a result, on the second day after he returned to Casterly Rock, all the soldiers stood on the walls in high spirits and waited for an entire day.
Only a few northern scouts came on horseback, looked over the defenses from beyond bowshot, and turned away.
Late that night, Daven was sleeping soundly in the castle when he was startled awake by noise from the walls. He immediately jumped out of bed and hurried outside to ask what had happened.
It turned out that soldiers on the forward watchtower had seen dense torches appear outside the castle and immediately rung the alarm.
But it had only been a false alarm. The roughly two thousand northern cavalry had reached the Lion's Mouth, the broad approach before the main gate where twenty horses could ride abreast, then immediately turned back without attempting to attack.
After being tormented like this again and again, by the third day, the soldiers on the wall were clearly in worse spirits than they had been the day before.
The third day was exactly like the second. Northern scouts came by day, and the enemy came at night to harass them. The only difference was the time at which they were awakened.
By the fourth day, many defenders actually fell asleep while standing guard on the walls. Their condition was seen clearly by the northern scouts who came to observe.
After several days of this torment, not only the soldiers and servants who spent every day and night on the walls, but even Daven, who rested in a comfortable bed inside the castle, felt he could no longer bear it.
In truth, remaining tense all the time would have been better. This sudden tightening and loosening of nerves was even more torturous.
On the fourth night, at the watchtower before Casterly Rock's main gate, the Lion's Mouth.
Four fully armed Lannister soldiers stood their routine watch. Two of them had eyelids that kept drooping, and they swayed as they nodded off.
The other two forced themselves to stay awake by chatting, though the deep shadows beneath their eyes showed their condition clearly.
"Eh? They are coming again? Are they not tired of this?"
One of the chatting soldiers looked at the thousand torches moving toward them in the distance like a long dragon and spoke impatiently.
"Should we ring the alarm?"
The other chatting soldier asked.
"Not yet. Let us see whether they come and leave right away like the last two nights.
"The men who rang the alarm those nights were punished for false warnings."
The soldier hesitated, then answered.
"Fine. In truth, there was no need for them to ring it before. The enemy was all cavalry. How could cavalry attack a castle?
"Are they going to ride their horses up Casterly Rock's walls?"
The other soldier nodded and grumbled about the previous watchmen.
As the torches drew closer, the two soldiers widened their eyes, trying to make out the details.
"It seems... they are not cavalry. What are those long things?"
"I cannot see clearly."
Their discussion woke one of the soldiers who had been dozing.
He rubbed his eyes and leaned forward to look. His expression slowly shifted from drowsy confusion to horror. "They are carrying scaling ladders!"
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
A dozen sharp sounds cut through the air. The four sentries on the watchtower were each struck by at least two arrows in an instant.
The soldier leaning out to look was hit and fell directly from the tower into the deep rocky drop below.
The dragon-like line of torches approached Casterly Rock. More than ten thousand northern soldiers carried long scaling ladders, one torch for every five men, and advanced steadily toward Casterly Rock by the faint light.
They were not discovered by the exhausted defenders on the walls until they had nearly reached the main gate.
"Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"
Loud, panicked shouts rang out through Casterly Rock. Every soldier and servant forced himself awake and began the life-and-death defense of the castle.
Casterly Rock had three entrances in total. The broadest was the main gate on the road, the Lion's Mouth. To the left and right were narrower side gates, each near a sea-facing cliff.
Every entrance to Casterly Rock was protected not only by towers and watchposts full of archers, but also by high stone walls, sturdy oak doors, and iron portcullises.
As a stone castle that had never fallen, its defenses truly were extraordinary.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
The defenders on the walls hastily drew bows and loosed arrows. Their aim was poor, and the northern soldiers carried one-handed shields, but enough arrows always took a few unlucky lives.
At the very front, more than a dozen mail-clad soldiers of House Ryswell and House Dustin were struck through gaps by arrows, bleeding as they fell.
That fresh red blood opened the siege of Casterly Rock.
As the dozen arrow-struck men fell, the soldiers behind them immediately filled the gaps, lifting the scaling ladders and approaching Casterly Rock quickly.
The closer they came to the castle, the brighter the light became. The northern soldiers were already close. After only one volley from the defenders, they reached the wall, raising their long ladders.
Bang, bang, bang!
From atop Casterly Rock's walls, large numbers of hard stones the size of heads fell downward. Their own weight, combined with the force of the long drop, made them terrifying.
When they struck one-handed shields, cracks instantly spread across the wood. Some weaker shields were smashed apart outright, breaking into uneven fragments.
Those stones that struck northern soldiers directly shattered bones and sent men collapsing while coughing blood.
As for northern soldiers struck in the head, there was no possibility of survival. The lucky ones had only part of the skull smashed in, leaving at least enough to identify them.
The unlucky ones had their entire faces smashed to pulp, the flesh, blood, and brain matter mixed into a blurred red mass.
In an age without soldiers' identification tags, such bodies could not be identified at all. Only after comrades confirmed that the man was missing and had not fled the battlefield could his name be entered into the rolls for death compensation.
Casterly Rock truly deserved its reputation as a castle easy to defend and difficult to attack. Even fighting in haste, the defenders used every means available. The northern soldiers had not even touched the battlements.
Those who nearly climbed to the tops of the ladders were met head-on by scalding oil. Their flesh burned and split as they clutched their faces and fell back below the wall.
The siege of Casterly Rock raged with terrible brutality. Daven hurried over with his clothes in disarray. When he saw the bloody scene, he immediately understood that this time, it truly was the main army attacking.
In front of nearly fifteen hundred defenders made up of Lannister soldiers, guardsmen, and household servants, the northern army would have to sustain a long siege and pay losses more than ten times greater if it wanted to take this sturdy stone castle.
But that was obviously only his calculation from historical siege records, made on paper.
Reality would be shaped by all sorts of factors.
The Lannister soldiers were clearly in poor spirits, while the northern soldiers, who had eaten and slept well for several days in advance, were fresh and full of energy.
As the intensity of the siege increased, the more than eight hundred Lannister soldiers at the main gate gradually felt their strength running out. The hands drawing bows grew sore and weak. The men throwing stones also lost strength.
Even the servants pouring oil no longer had the same speed and precision they had at the start.
One northern soldier seized the moment when a servant was scooping boiling oil, leapt onto Casterly Rock's battlements, and cut a huge gash in the servant's neck with one sword.
But the brave northern soldier was stabbed full of bloody holes by several Lannister soldiers with spears in the next instant and fell back below the wall.
Such a situation was actually normal. One or two enemies would always find a chance to leap onto the battlements in the chaos. As long as no true gap opened in the defense and the enemy could not stand firm on the wall, it was not a great problem.
Daven, however, was clearly startled badly by it. He immediately ordered the messenger beside him, "Quickly transfer the soldiers from the side gates here to help defend the main gate."
"Lord Daven, the side gates also need defenders."
Behind Daven, the former castellan of Casterly Rock reminded him.
"I am not telling you to pull everyone away. Leave a few dozen men to guard them. The side gates are narrow, and the cliffs beside them are steep. A large-scale attack there would be impossible.
"If they truly attack from both sides, then the pressure at the front will ease, and I can send soldiers to reinforce them.
"Enough. Go deliver the order. If you delay and the main gate falls, the consequences will be unimaginable."
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