Game of Thrones: Viserys the Three-Headed Dragon.

Chapter 235: The White Walkers Attack
A cold wind blew across the hills.

A tall, deformed fish-beam tree grew above an abandoned house. When the cold wind blew, its dark red leaves and pale branches were covered with a layer of white frost by the wind that carried a strong, icy breath.

Fingers covered with frost slowly climbed up the weirwood, and the world became cold.

A shadow passed across the cloudy sky. It was an eagle with blue-gray wings, patrolling the night sky.

Varamyr is a powerful skinchanger who has made a name for himself north of the Wall over the years, with dozens of villages paying protection fees to him. He is an ally of Mance Rayder, and after the wights appeared, he joined Mance's army heading south.

With Varamyr's help, the army led by Mance escaped the pursuit of the wights and also avoided the rangers heading north. It was because of his reconnaissance that the wildling army was spared from the disaster of the rangers led by Mormont being besieged by the wights in the Fist of the First Men.

Now, it was Varamyr who used his eagle to scout the north for any unusual movements in the strange weather.

The results are chilling.

The White Tree Village that the savages passed by on their way south was no longer empty. Black shadows were moving through the snow. Blue eyes seemed to be swimming in the night, and white frost formed wherever the shadows passed, just like their bodies, as pale as snow.

Not a man, not a raider, not a crow, but a corpse. The corpse is moving.

Suddenly, one by one, they raised their heads, cold blue light flashing, and the corpses looked at the eagle in the sky with weird and strange blue eyes.

Varamyr felt a sudden, icy shock, as if he had been stripped naked and thrown into a frozen lake.

Chilled to the bone.

The skinchanger's spirit returned to his body, and he threw his head back and screamed. The sound was piercing, horrible, and full of pain. Varamyr fell to the ground and writhed. The shadowcat screamed, and three wolves roared at the void. The snow bear rolled around the camp, blindly hitting the trees.

Hundreds of crows flew through the sky, cawing.

The scream made Mance's teeth ache. His face turned pale, but he managed to remain calm. "Damn it, what are you standing there for? Quinn, Hammer, Tormund, come and cover his mouth with me!"

Varamyr twitched and trembled on the ground.

"I come!"

Hearing the sound, Tormund the Giantslayer took a big step forward and smashed the dejected Varamyr on the head with his sandbag-sized fist, knocking him unconscious.

This actually worked. The agitation of the animals in the "Six-Shaped Man" gradually subsided, though they were still roaring in anxiety.

Everyone in the tent looked at Tormund.

Tormund pouted and told Mance, "I've been meaning to do that for a long time."

Varamyr awoke a moment later, looking like a frightened hare until he felt his beasts were still there. Then a sinister look appeared on his face. "They are coming! From the north, from Craster's Keep and Whitetree Village!"

"White Walkers," Hammer frowned, "Caster's Fortress? Didn't they say that White Walkers wouldn't go through there?"

Quinn cursed, "Damn it, those crows must have killed Custer. Damn crows!"

Varamyr said, "The days are growing shorter, the nights longer, the weather is growing colder, and they are growing stronger. This is awful weather! Mance, we must get out of here! There is no time! We must attack with all our might!"

"How long will it take them to arrive?" Mance tried his best to remain calm. "White Walkers never appear when the sun shines. If we survive tonight, there will be another day tomorrow."

"Baishu Village is a day's journey from here," Hama replied, "but the weather is so bad that the sun won't come out tomorrow."

Varamyr said: "The wights never tire, they never rest!"

"The Crows are few," said Tormund. "They took Mance's bait. They can't stop us."

Everyone in the tent was a little anxious.

Mance's wife, who was about to give birth, poked her head out of the tent and said, "Jael brought thousands of men and mammoths to dig at the abandoned fortress. Maybe they have dug through the gate. Why didn't they send someone on horseback to find out the news?"

As Dana finished her words, everyone in the tent looked towards a corner of the tent, where Mance's wife, who was about to give birth, was, as well as weapons, daggers, short swords, bows and arrows, a bronze-tipped spear, and the most eye-catching thing on the side was a huge black horn.

Varamyr: "Damn, we wasted so much time looking for the Horn of Winter. If only we had gone south sooner."

"You know, Varamyr, if we could find the horn and blow it hard, we could crawl over the ruins," Mance said. Of course, if they found the horn, they would use it to threaten the defenders of the Wall. If the Wall fell, what would stop the White Walkers?
Varamyr said, "But we didn't find it. The damned Wall!"

"Haha, I can hear someone is scared, a six-shaped man?" Tormund laughed.

Varamyr was furious. "You!"

Tormund took a wineskin from his waist, pulled out the cork, and took a big gulp. "Mance, there is no time to hesitate."

Mance seemed to be waiting for this sentence: "Go and call Magg and the others over. Let them know the threat of the White Walkers. Organize the people and don't blow the horn. Let the boys and old men chop wood and continue to make noises. There is no moonlight today. When all the people are gathered, we will launch the attack at night!"

-

Although the defenders had anticipated it, the darkness of the night still concealed the savages until they were discovered by the night watchman half a mile away.

When the horn sounded, the wildling archers were already firing at the towers and windows, and the number of arrows flying was staggering, but sadly, the target was seven hundred feet overhead, and the arrows could only fall harmlessly.

But the approaching savages charged with roars, mixed with drums and flutes, interweaving into a terrible melody. They learned their lesson and did not send out mammoths and horses, only the savages hiding behind bunkers approached. Ten years of long summers made the savages and the night watchmen have no shortage of meat. They did not have night blindness, and although the moonless night obscured most of their vision, when the fire was lit, everyone could see the enemy's position.

The archers of the Great Wall were in a dominant position and had the advantage of shooting from high up and low down. This advantage was even more obvious at night. They aimed and fired without stopping. The catapults and crossbows loaded with rockets shot into the wildling team, causing bursts of screams.

But the savages' attack was more fierce than during the day. A giant, holding a huge wooden board high, staggered to the turtle shield and battering ram that were destroyed at noon.

More than a hundred caltrops scattered through the air and landed in front of the giant, followed by prepared stones.

The giant's large wooden shield was smashed by the boulder, and the giant fell to the ground with a painful roar, but more people rushed out from the wooden shield, swinging axes and chopping at the outer wooden door of the Great Wall tunnel.

"Are they crazy!?"

But the savages came one after another and fought desperately to break down the door.

"fire!"

The oil barrels used to defend the gates rolled down from the seven hundred-foot-high wall. Torches ignited the cloth strips on the barrel lids, causing the barrels to explode as they fell. The sky was like a rain of fire, and countless savages screamed in the fire and rolled around on the ground.

"No, they're crazy, what are they doing?"

Amid the screams and roars of flames, a night watchman stuck his head out and looked down. He saw that behind the fleeing wild men, there was another group of wild men throwing something into the flames set by the defenders. As they threw those things into the flames, the flames burned higher and more fiercely.

"It's grease, they're trying to burn the door open!"

Amid the smoke and flames, the door of the Great Wall Tunnel was already burning fiercely, and the raging fire illuminated the area below the city in red.

The savages' ranks were scattered, and their lines in some areas had even collapsed. But there was one good thing about the night: when they couldn't see each other clearly, the savages did not suffer a large-scale collapse.

This time the barbarians attacked with all their might. Several tribes formed echelons that kept pouring out. The battle area at the city gate was not large. If one area collapsed, a new group of barbarians would immediately advance.

The cover of night provided good cover for the savages.

In fact, Mance's wildling army was quite embarrassing. The wildling army was said to have 30,000 soldiers, but there were at least 5,000 or 6,000 young men, spearwomen, and hunters who could actually fight. If the wildlings had a little more method in their attack, even if they built several arrow towers with wood, or dug a defensive fortification close to the Great Wall by relying on bunkers under the Great Wall and digging a fortification on the frozen ground, they would not have been suppressed by less than 200 defenders on the Great Wall every time they attacked the city gate, and they would not have lost dozens of lives every time they attacked and approached the city gate.

After all, the wildling army was just a bunch of rabble. They dug dozens of graves in Frostfang, but when they arrived at the foot of the Great Wall, they had no initiative at all and didn't know how to dig a fortification in the frozen soil under the Great Wall.

The Great Wall defenders were high up and attacked from low, targeting the fools like Mance who only knew how to send troops to attack the city gates. Any commander with a bit of brains should have realized that the real defense force of the Great Wall was not much after the first round of attack.

Mance had five or six thousand men at his disposal, but he was still stuck at the foot of the Great Wall for half a month. It was really puzzling that an army of 30,000 was blocked outside the Black Castle by more than a hundred people and could not advance an inch.

The night watchmen on Castle Black were all old, weak, sick and disabled, and there were even newly trained villagers and women.

To be honest, if Viserys was there, he would feel sad and ashamed for Mance Rayder. Some people may think that Mance was commanding a bunch of rabble and was not guilty of war.

But to be honest, Mance Rayder is really embarrassing.

Even if every hundred people could only erect a wooden stake and throw a basket of soil on the Great Wall, half a month would be enough to build a screen wall under the city that could withstand the huge rocks.

But Mance obviously had no idea how to attack the city and was just filling it with human lives.

Even now, the only idea that came to mind was to throw grease on the door to burn it.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of meat in the savage camp, with quite a few sheep and prey slaughtered every day, but he only thought of this idea today.

But the wildlings are like this, without planning and order. They are called free folk, but Mance Rayder, the wildling king, is just a fool with a slightly smart mind.

To be honest, even if there were no White Walkers this time or reinforcements from Eastwatch in the original world line, the wildling army would not be able to capture Castle Black.

In the original world line, the wildlings were unable to capture the Great Wall due to heavy casualties. The wildling king Mance tried to negotiate with the Night's Watch using a fake Horn of Winter when he still had thousands of men capable of fighting.

How to say it, maybe this is the matching mechanism of the Great Wall. Tens of thousands of wildlings, with thousands of combat-capable soldiers, were beaten by less than two hundred Night's Watchmen and had to take the initiative to propose negotiations.

The strategy of attempting to burn the city gate did not produce very good results. As the defenders discovered the wildlings' intentions, they began to block the city gate with slingstones and caltrops, and threw barrels of kerosene and asphalt down without hesitation. As wave after wave of wildlings died tragically, burned to death, scalded to death, screamed and wailed, the wildlings' formation, which had gained courage from their fear of the White Walkers, collapsed again, and the ranks became more and more chaotic, until they could no longer be driven and fled in all directions.

God knows, up to this point in the Great Wall, less than a hundred savages and four giants had died.

But the savages just collapsed.

No wonder the Night Watchmen often have a perception that only a small group of steadfast black brothers are enough to resist a hundred times more savages.

The gate at the entrance of the tunnel of the Black Castle of the Great Wall was still burning, and the smoke and flames reflected the corpses below the city.

The drums on the battlefield were still beating, but the savages no longer moved forward. Some even began to flee towards the outskirts of the savage camp, as if they wanted to escape to another place at night.

The cheers of the Night's Watchmen on the city wall rang out in the night sky, while Mance and several wildling leaders could only gather the scattered wildlings in the darkness.

In fact, the defeated wildlings may never know that the old oak door on the outermost layer of the Great Wall Tunnel had been chopped through by the first wave of suicide squads, and as the grease burned, the wooden door could no longer withstand the impact. Even the scattered stones thrown from the Great Wall by the Night's Watch had smashed a hole. In fact, as long as a few more brave men rushed in and broke the hinges, they could rush in through the oak door that had lost its defensive properties.

Inside the gate is a pure meat-grinding battlefield. Each side can only line up seven or eight people, fighting in close combat with crossbows and spears. It all depends on the bloodiness of both sides.

Trading lives for lives was not a loss at all for the wildlings. They only had to kill several Night's Watch death squads between the first and second iron bars in the tunnel, and then they could easily pry open the fence and go deep into the Great Wall.

Unfortunately, these wildlings are not real soldiers at all, but just freemen who have been brought together to survive. They seem to be a whole, united under the banner of the wildling king Mance Rayder, but the fact is that they are still independent freemen who are only trying to survive and are probably not willing to sacrifice themselves for others. The wildlings may be brave, but their individual bravery cannot be well reflected in the army, which requires coordination and unity most of the time.

They are doomed.

What else can be said about this?

If Viserys were here, perhaps he would think of a famous quote: "Though they died, they were free."

Such a rabble could not withstand a pincer attack.

Even if the Great Wall is just a wall to block the savages' way.

In the second half of the night, the weather was freezing cold, and the thick dark clouds finally began to bloom into a long-accumulated storm.

Heavy snow began to fall outside the Great Wall.

Acting commander Jon Snow, who was still too excited to fall asleep, was awakened: "Jon, it's snowing outside the city, something is wrong!"

Jon struggled to get up from the warming shed. His leg was unfortunately hit by a stray arrow just now. In order to keep his mind clear, Jon did not take the poppy milk and sleeping wine recommended by Master Aemon. When he came out, he found that Master Aemon was also climbing out of the warming shed with the help of Clydas holding a lantern.

Although the night was dark, they could still clearly see the dark clouds covering the sky, and the Wall was high enough so that they could see the flames of Mance Rayder's camp rising into the sky, and the snowflakes in the sky covered the area like fog.

Just a few hundred steps outside the city, heavy snow was falling from the sky.

But only a few hundred steps away, there was only a rustling cold wind at the Great Wall, and not a single snowflake.

"Corpses under the city!" Someone suddenly exclaimed in the silence.

Jon Snow recalled the cold blue shadow that had sneaked into the tower to kill Commander Mormont. Now he knew the name of that thing, the wight.

Jon swallowed hard and leaned his head over the wall.

He saw pairs of blue eyes below the city, like cold rays of light, looking back at him.

So cold.

(End of this chapter)