Chapter 2: The Wall & The GiftDeep Lake is the newest of the Castles on the Wall at just undertwo hundred years old, built to replace the oldest, the Nightfort. Andjust two short centuries later it remains as empty as the ruin it replaced.The castle is largely intact, just closed up tight and choked with dust.There is a single chief tower holding quarters for the castle commander,four barracks with room enough for a five hundred men, a bath house,armory, great hall and kitchens. There are two stables, one on either side,east and west, with stalls for two hundred horses.The timber stair that climbs the Wall at Deep Lake is a shambles. Agreat sheet of ice slivered and fell away during the unusually long summer,bearing away a dozen of the braces anchored in it, leaving thosethat still stand twisted and dangerous. The wormwalks at Deep Lakesuffer from a dire case of damp. Many of them carry several inches ofwater that has seeped in from the lake and a walking through some ofthe deeper ones will have a man in water up to his waist.QueensgateWhen King Jaehaerys took his court north to see the Stark in Winterfelland take the measure of his Warden of the North, his queen consortAlysanne grew tired of the business of the realm, mounted her dragonSilverwing, flying north to see the Wall. She spent a night in a smallpeasant holdfast in what is now the New Gift. The tower house wasknown thereafter as Queenscrown and the villagers who lived about itpainted the top gold in Alyssanne’s honor.From there, the Good Queen flew to the castle called Snowgate. Shesaw the Wall and the men that stood their watch upon it. She procuredfor the <strong>Watch</strong> the New Gift and handed over her own jewels to fundthe construction of Deep Lake to replace the Nightfort. In her honor,the black brothers renamed the castle where she first landed on theWall, calling it ever after Queensgate.The <strong>Watch</strong> was glad to give the castle a new name at any rate—Snowgatehad been an ill-favored name for ages. Nothing but strife and hardshiphad come out of Snowgate for thousands of years. More commanderswere slain by their own Brothers at Snowgate than any other andseveral centuries before Aegon the Conqueror landed on Westeros’ shores,Snowgate and the Nightfort actually went to war against one another!No, the name Snowgate wasn’t missed by the <strong>Watch</strong>. Whether thenew name changed the castle’s luck may never be known. Only a fewscant years after the death of Queen Alysanne, the black brothers abandonedher namesake. They shut up the tunnel, tore down the stair, andemptied the towers, keeps, and halls of anything worth carrying and leftthe whole thing empty.OakenshieldOakenshield is the first castle east of Castle Black and the second youngestafter Deep Lake. In fact, the castle that remains was never meant tobe permanent, but was, rather, a temporary redoubt built of timber togive shelter to the men building the permanent fortress of stone. But onemishap after another plagued the construction until, hopelessly stymied,the <strong>Watch</strong> gave up on building in stone and made fast their wooden keep.Oakenshield never housed more than a hundred and fifty men. At itsheight, the castle numbered half a dozen wooden longhouses among itsretinue alongside a central keep built of whole oak timbers. Now onlythe keep remains, though it has weathered the years well.There is no tunnel through the Wall at Oakenshield. The work on cuttingone had only just begun when the orders came to leave. The earthen59
Chapter 2: The Wall & the Giftramp that used to lead up to the top was undermined and collapsed whenthe <strong>Watch</strong> abandoned the site. All that remains of it now is a mound ofearth three hundred feet high between the keep and the Wall.Woodswatch-by-the-PoolWoodswatch-by-the-Pool stands on the north edge of a mere with wateras smooth as glass and surrounded by a thick forest of oak, beech andmaple. The wood is rich with game, and in its heyday, Woodswatch-bythe-Poolhad both the largest and most fruitful larders on the Wall. Thehunters of Woodswatch put venison on tables all along the Wall. Theyput furs on the beds and backs of thousands of black brothers, as wellas the leather for armor, sword grips, boots and gloves, and the gut forbowstrings. In those days if it came from an animal, there was a goodchance it came from Woodswatch-by-the-Pool.The castle consists of three tall, round towers, each over three hundredfeet high, all soaring above the tops of the trees. At the feet of thesetowers there once stood more than a score of lesser buildings wherehides were stored, carcasses cleaned and butchered, and men werehoused. Of those, only the old tannery still stands. The tannery wasbuilt of field stones and roofed over with timbers cut from the thick foreston the castle’s doorstep. The roof has lost much of its thatching, butthe beams still span the old hall and look down on a score of tanningpits. The pits themselves have dried up, the towers stand empty, and thewood has grown up around them, but Woodswatch-by-the-Pool onlywaits for men to come again.Sable HallSable Hall is a single building huddled in the shadow of the Wall. Atits height, the castle housed three hundred men. It was built when LordBeric Bracken took the Black and came to the Wall disgraced, but shortof none of his pride. A command was not enough, nor even high officeunder a post commander. Beric Bracken would settle for nothing lessthan a castle of his own to command and when none were forthcoming,he wrote to his brother, the new Lord Bracken, and had one built.That summer was short. The white raven had flown from Old townlong before construction was completed. Lord Beric took command amonth before Sable Hall was buried in forty foot drifts. He and the sixscoremen the Lord Commander assigned to the new castle closed thedoors on the cold and dug in for the winter.The summer was short, but the winter terribly long. A year aftertaking the first snows flew, eight men stumbled into Rimegate castle,starved and half-frozen, telling a tale of madness, desperate hunger, anddeath. Sable Hall was buried under a blizzard that lasted six months. Adozen deserters had raided the larder and taken much of the food thathad been laid in to last out the winter into the snow and disappeared.Lord Beric had forbidden anyone from going after them, forbidden anyfrom abandoning the castle and making for their neighbors. Instead heholed up in the rich chambers he’d had built for himself while the windhowled and his men starved.The men were reduced to eating their own dead to survive. The oldman went mad. He threw open the shutters on his chamber windows,proclaimed himself King of the Others, and leaped into the raging white.When the snow finally let up and the men were able to dig out, thethirteen who survived emerged and made for Rimegate. Five died alongthe way. The others reached the safety of the castle and were taken in.They joined the men of Rimegate and lived out their days there. Whenthe spring came, the Lord Commander sent two hundred to man LordBeric’s castle—the <strong>Watch</strong> wastes nothing.Lord Beric’s body was never found.RimegateThe Rimegate’s history is void of the sort of strange events most othercastles on the Wall have. There have been no madmen. No ghosts ortreacherous deserters. No desperate cannibals or traitorous commanders.The men of Rimegate have down their duty down through the centuriesand done it well. Their commanders have been competent or, atthe very worst, harmless.The castle is neither large nor small. It has three towers and five stonekeeps. Beds enough to billet a thousand men, and stables for four hundred.A timber stair once climbed the Wall, but has collapsed in thecentury since it was abandoned. The buildings have held up well though,with only a few stones missing here and there, a wall or two leaningmore than they should.Curiously, it’s the unremarkable history of the place that spawns rumorsand suspicions. What bargains were made, and with what powers,to secure such an uneventful span of years? Theories abound, but if anyoneever knew of such a thing, they never told another soul.The Long BarrowThe Long Barrow stands in a rolling, treeless country of hills rich inlimestone, all surrounding a generous deposit of granite. Of all thecastles on the Wall, only the Nightfort is of greater age. Over the eightthousand years of its existence its population has waxed and waned. TheNightfort was built with stone quarried from these hills, but in thosedays The Long Barrow was little more than a camp for the buildersquarrying stone and was never intended to be permanently occupied.The stone for the Nightfort was quarried from a single, long hill andfrom those earliest days it was called the Barrow. As more castles werebuilt, more stone needed, the temporary camp became permanent. Thebuilders returned to the hills they’d dug out and shored them up withstone walls and arches to support the roof. Empty hills became halls anda camp became a castle.At its peak, the Long Barrow housed three thousand men in a scoreof halls scattered around the central pit. A thousand years after the firststone cutters came to harvest the stone for the Nightfort, the blackbrothers built the Long Barrow’s only tower to stand beside the tunnelgate through the Wall and the stone stair that climbs to its top. Thetower is just sixty feet high and has quarters for twenty, along with asmall kitchen, hall, and a shallow well.After the castle at Deep Lake was built there ceased to be an enduringreason to man the Long Barrow. The Builders that occupied theBarrow itself were reassigned over the course of a few years until onlythe tower was inhabited on a regular basis. For eight years men fromSable Hall would come and occupy the tower for a few months at atime, but when that castle burned and was abandoned, Long Barrowwas abandoned as well.The tower still stands. The builders used the best stone available, andbuilt soundly and well. The hills all around are riddled with subterraneanhalls, large and small. No one knows how many caves and holesand hollows there are. The builders kept maps, but they’ve since been60
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