Game of Thrones: The Impaler of the Blue Fork

Chapter 40: The Funeral in Long Summer and the Iron in Rotting Flesh

There were no white crows from the City of Learning to deliver messages.

The mud of the Blue Fork Valley was the first to provide its verdict.

The oppressive heat that had lingered for half a month was finally shattered on a windless midnight by a torrential downpour carrying ice particles and chilling air.

It rained for four days and three nights.

The river level rose by a foot.

The once clear water was now churning with brownish-yellow mud, carrying withered wood and stench washed down from upstream, frantically pounding against the row of hidden stakes surrounding the territory.

The rammed earth wall with limestone did not collapse—thanks to the raw lacquer and tung oil that had been applied beforehand.

But the cold rain soaked through the walls, and the damp chill that seeped into one's bones was more deadly than a knife.

In the space at the bottom of the stone tower, the sound of blacksmiths hammering can not be heard.

Only the acrid friction of serrated teeth cutting through living human bones and the uncontrollable, agonizing screams could be heard.

"Hold him down by the waist! Gag him with a burlap sack!"

The boots of Toren, a veteran from the North, were covered in yellow mud.

He knelt beside a long wooden table, pressing down on a burly man who was convulsing wildly.

That burly man was the hardest worker in the second labor group.

At this moment, his right calf was swollen like a purplish-black fermented wine sac, and the surface of his skin was covered with pustules the size of soybeans.

Thick, foul-smelling blood was dripping from cracked pores into the muddy ground.

That was poison seeping into the blood from the rotting flesh.

Or rather, it's a malignant gangrene that's rotten to the bone.

Brecken and Blackwood fought a fierce battle for almost half a month along the mudflats between the Blue Fork and Red Fork Rivers over control of the river.

The corpses of the dead soldiers, carried by the surging river, all rushed into the reed pits on the outskirts.

Faced with those complete chainmails, warhorse knee pads, and even broadswords of fine steel floating down—

Otto issued a cold-blooded order: Rescue.

In the iron-deficient wasteland, this is a windfall that saves more than half a month of mining and forging.

But in the autumn rain, without medicine or scholars, they bare their hands to peel away the armor of the dead, swollen from the mud and teeming with maggots—

"Saw it open! Apply the soldering iron! Quickly!"

One-Eyed Cole was covered in sweat.

Instead of using a hammer, he held a thick, red-hot broadsword and pressed it directly onto the wound below the burly man's knee, which had just been severed by a bone saw.

The skin and flesh were charred, and pungent blue smoke rose from it.

The burly man's eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets, and he made a gurgling sound as he breathed his last, his eyes rolling back as he passed out.

This is the third laborer to have a limb amputated today.

Otto Hohenzollern sat back on a wooden crate in a dark corner.

He was wrapped in a heavy gray linen cloak.

He showed no signs of fatigue.

Holding a rag soaked in strong liquor, he slowly wiped a fine steel short sword that he had just taken from a dead soldier.

Apart from the clanging of metal and painful sobs, there was no other sound in the longhouse.

Those who couldn't withstand the pain of amputation and died were not even wrapped in straw mats; they were simply dragged to a large lime pit half a mile away and filled in.

The clerk, Pollifer, slipped into the longhouse through the rain.

His thin clothes were soaked through, and water was running down his nose.

His face was even paler than the gray sky outside.

After pausing for two breaths, Pollifer dared to open the tabernacle wrapped in oilcloth that he was carrying.

"Sir, the number of ironware retrieved has been tallied."

"Forty-seven pieces of broken chainmail, twenty-two broadswords, and more than one hundred barbed arrowheads with blood grooves."

"Cole said that with some refining, it would be enough to equip half of the new formation."

After reading what he had learned, Pollifer's voice began to tremble uncontrollably.

"But the manpower losses this time... were too heavy."

"Report the numbers." Otto didn't even look up, his thumb tracing the slightly curled edge of the short sword.

"Because of the fish that went down into the river to retrieve the corpses, their hands and feet were cut by the fish scales, or they were exposed to the putrid water and suffered from chills and fever - fourteen people did not survive last night, they died, and have been burned to ashes and stuffed into the ditch."

Even the breath of Pollifer smelled of lime.

"Nine people had their hands and feet sawed off to save their lives. These nine men will never be able to lift a hoe or a spear again. They will have to take their share of the territory's rations every day."

The accountant swallowed hard.

"The rest, plus those who caught a cold from the wind on the outer wall, couldn't get out of bed, vomited, had diarrhea and high fever—there were a total of forty-five such laborers."

"In total, nearly seventy able-bodied men in the territory have been rendered useless!"

The number struck the longhouse so hard that even Cole, who had just had his wounds burned, gasped in shock.

The entire inner fortress, including women and children, numbered only 450.

There were fewer than two hundred able-bodied men who could wield pickaxes and were able to stand on the front line.

One-third of the able-bodied men were directly lost.

"Any animal with a fever should be thrown into one of the two spare livestock sheds and not allowed to come near the water area. If it dies, it should be burned."

"Survived by amputation—"

Otto slammed the blood-grooved dagger into the wooden table in front of him with a clang. Wood chips flew everywhere.

"He was sent to a shed where linen was woven, to do handicrafts with the widows."

"As long as they can still move a single finger, Hohenzollern gives them half a bowl of porridge, and they have to give it their all!"

Pollifer nodded and noted the markings.

---

"My lord." Toren washed the blood from his hands, strode over, and looked extremely stern.

"Seventy people have been killed, so the labor can be put on hold. But the defensive line is now empty."

The veteran pointed to the rain outside the longhouse.

"Of your sixteen soldiers, two were poisoned by the rotting flesh and fell ill in the heating shed."

"Of the original forty peasant militiamen who could form a battle formation, nearly twenty could not stand up."

"The remaining half... I was dragging the bodies in the rain yesterday, and I'm completely exhausted."

The heavy rain outside showed no signs of stopping.

The river wind howled, as if scraping the bones off the high walls.

"We've been worn down by this autumn rain to the point of our weakness."

"If Brecken or the defeated soldiers of Blackwood, or even those wandering bandits and refugees, were to come along the river—the remaining thirty-odd weaklings wouldn't even be able to move the barricades."

No sooner had Torun finished speaking than the broken bell on the inner lookout tower began to ring frantically.

The sound of the bells didn't travel far in the heavy rain, but to those in the longhouse, it sounded like a death knell.

One of the remaining four light cavalry scouts scrambled and crawled through the side gate of the rainproof log fence.

He even lost one of his boots while running.

"My lord! People are coming from the south!"

The scout lay prone in the lime and muddy water, the heavy rain extinguishing the heat from his body.

"They weren't just a couple of petty thieves. They were routed soldiers!"

"They were wearing tattered armor in two different colors, like ragtag soldiers who had fled from the Blackwood and Brecken families after they were scattered on the rubble!"

"More than fifty of them! They didn't take the main road; they just crept along the shallows of our main drainage canal. They're less than half a mile from the south wall!"

The room fell into a deathly silence.

More than fifty armored soldiers.

The number of people capable of fighting in the territory was so small that they couldn't even muster a complete formation; their strength had long been drained by days of hard labor and cold rain.

"Sir. There's a row of ditches outside the gate..." Pollifer's hand trembled as he pointed outside the gate.

"The heavy rains a few days ago caused flooding. All the pits and hidden trenches that you had Instructor Torun dig on both sides of the road... were completely filled with muddy water, and you couldn't even tell how deep they were from above."

Otto stood up from the wooden crate.

He hunched over slightly, but he didn't use his right hand to steady himself.

He walked to the wooden table and pulled out the short sword, which was still stained with blood.

"Pass on the order. Anyone who can still breathe and lift a wooden pole, take those black cloth spears that have been issued."

Otto did not mention the name of the hook-and-sickle spear.

A secret is nothing more than a tattered black cloth until the moment you break the other person's neck.

"Leave the gates wide open. Let them into the dirt path of the log canal."

Toren drew his longsword and wiped the rain off his face.

"Sir, let them in! Those starving, routed soldiers will tear the farmers' ranks to shreds!"

"In open battle, these weaklings will be torn to shreds."

Otto strode into the downpour, the rain pelting his linen cloak.

"Let them wade through the muddy water where they couldn't tell which was flat ground and which was a hidden pit."

"The mud will drag their iron boots."

"We're using human lives to block the breach; we don't rely on formations."

"It's all about who's less afraid of death than the other side!"