They glimpsed the eagle twice more the day after, and heard the hunting horn behind them echoing against the mountains. Each time it seemed a little louder, a little closer.

Synopsis: a grizzled veteran and a rookie agent are on the run from enemy military forces and hit the end of the road. The rookie agent is ordered by his superior to defect to the enemy.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.

Political Analysis:

And so we come to the end of Jon’s storyline in ACOK, and the end of our time with Qhorin Halfhand. I’ve already spoken at length about how much I love his interactions with Jon Snow and the genre and thematic arcs they have together. And with this chapter, these arcs conclude on an amazing high note with the perfect combination of espionage thriller and samurai drama – you could easily adapt this chapter into an episode of the Sandbaggers where a grizzled vet and a promising recruit try to evac from a failed operation and get stopped on the Soviet border and the older man orders the younger to defect, or a Kurosawa film in which two samurai try to get an urgent message to their daimyo and the younger acts as the older man’s second and must pretend to be a ronin in order to warn him about an invasion.

Hunted Men

The key to making this chapter work is establishing a consistent atmosphere of existential dread. As we saw in the last Jon chapter, Qhorin’s ranging band’s mission has failed due to circumstances outsider their control and are now being stalked by forces they cannot defeat:

Only the two of them remained of the five rangers who had fled the Skirling Pass, back into the blue-grey wilderness of the Frostfangs. At first Jon had nursed the hope that Squire Dalbridge would keep the wildlings bottled up in the pass. But when they’d heard the call of a far-off horn every man of them knew the squire had fallen. Later they spied the eagle soaring through the dusk on great blue-grey wings and Stonesnake unslung his bow, but the bird flew out of range before he could so much as string it. Ebben spat and muttered darkly of wargs and skinchangers. At first Jon had nursed the hope that Squire Dalbridge would keep the wildlings bottled up in the pass. But when they’d heard the call of a far-off horn every man of them knew the squire had fallen. Later they spied the eagle soaring through the dusk on great blue-grey wings and Stonesnake unslung his bow, but the bird flew out of range before he could so much as string it. Ebben spat and muttered darkly of wargs and skinchangers.

The use of the flashback – which can occasionally be a trap that GRRM inadvertently can set for himself (hence the five-year gap in the first draft of ADWD) – here works like the prologue of a tragedy, letting you know that the struggles of these hardened professionals will all fail. Squire Dalbridge was the first to volunteer in an effort to save the group, and here we learn that his efforts have come to naught, which in no way diminish the significance of his sacrifice. Stonesnake attempts to shoot it on the wing, but he’s got no better chance than he would if the eagle was instead a modern military drone imported into a medieval war. The supernatural power of warging makes the eagle untouchable, and so as it follows them along their journey, waiting for stragglers to fall away, it becomes a harbinger of death:

…After that the days and nights blurred one into the other. They slept in their saddles and stopped only long enough to feed and water the garrons, then mounted up again. Over bare rock they rode, through gloomy pine forests and drifts of old snow, over icy ridges and across shallow rivers that had no names. Sometimes Qhorin or Stonesnake would loop back to sweep away their tracks, but it was a futile gesture. They were watched. At every dawn and every dusk they saw the eagle soaring between the peaks, no more than a speck in the vastness of the sky.

In the face of this threat that cannot be faced, the rangers are forced into ever more desperate decisions to try to stave off disaster. Long before Qhorin makes Jon swear a vow, he has to spend the lives of his men like coins, and the morality of his decisions is gradually stretched to its limits:

When night fell, the Halfhand told Ebben to take the squire’s garron as well as his own, and ride east for Mormont with all haste, back the way they had come. The rest of them would draw off the pursuit. “Send Jon,” Ebben had urged. “He can ride as fast as me.” “Jon has a different part to play.” “He is half a boy still.” “No,” said Qhorin, “he is a man of the Night’s Watch.”

This is the definition of a futile effort – Ebben peeling off from the main group and taking a spare mount to leave a false trial might work if their opponents were only mortal men, but the eagle in the sky sees everything. Perhaps concluding that the eagle’s presence means that most of their pursuers will continue to follow Qhorin, or perhaps because he has guessed that Qhorin will turn Jon into an oathbreaker and murderer and seeks to spare a young man that heavy burden, in a cruel stab of irony Ebben offers to give Jon his ticket home, only to end up dead himself.

Stretched this thin, every decision brings unintended consequences and every accident is potentially fatal. A chance encounter with a “shadowcat…gaunt and half-starved” takes out Stonesnake’s horse. And with Ebben having taken the spare garron in order to lay a false trail, Stonesnake’s the next man to go:

…There was no question of riding double. Stonesnake offered to lay in wait for the pursuit and surprise them when they came. Perhaps he could take a few of them with him down to hell. Qhorin refused. “If any man in the Night’s Watch can make it through the Frostfangs alone and afoot, it is you, brother. You can go over mountains that a horse must go around. Make for the Fist. Tell Mormont what Jon saw, and how. Tell him that the old powers are waking, that he faces giants and wargs and worse. Tell him that the trees have eyes again.”

While Ebben believed himself to be likely to survive and dies, Stonesnake is seemingly doomed and unexpectedly survive. Indeed, Stonesnake is one of the missing whose fate we have yet to learn; perhaps we will see him with Benjen in TWOW, perhaps not. Unfortunately, we do know that Stonesnake’s warning never makes it to Lord Mormont. Interestingly, Qhorin’s warning has as much to do with the larger magical meta-plot than it does about Mance Rayder. And while we know where they’ve seen wargs and giants, we haven’t seen any sign on this ranging that “the trees have eyes again.” Yes, Jon Snow had his wolf-dream but that was clearly an example of warging not greensight. But I begin to repeat myself from last chapter.

The Ranger’s Hagakure

Unfortunately (and critically, not due to any action of Jon), all of this effort is for naught. There’s nothing that any of them can do about the eagle or the wildlings who are following them, and so the action takes on a bleak existential turn:

When Qhorin Halfhand told him to find some brush for a fire, Jon knew their end was near. It will be good to feel warm again, if only for a little while, he told himself while he hacked bare branches from the trunk of a dead tree. Ghost sat on his haunches watching, silent as ever. Will he howl for me when I’m dead, as Bran’s wolf howled when he fell? Jon wondered. Will Shaggydog howl, far off in Winterfell, and Grey Wind and Nymeria, wherever they might be?

This last fire that Jon and Qhorin will share is a critically important moment for Jon’s character development, setting him on a path that will ultimately lead him to the Lord Commandership of the Night’s Watch and his own death, so it’s important for GRRM to set the right tone. Equally mournful and contemplative, the pairing of ordinary human comfort and the thought of death reveals who these two men are. For Jon, as much as the vows of the Night’s Watch supposedly separated him from his family, his bond with his pack is too strong to be broken. For good (Shaggydog and Summer saving his life at Queenscrown) and for ill (his impulse to destroy Ramsay Bolton for harming his sister), his connection to the other Stark children define him.

By contrast, Qhorin is a company man, through and through: “he was not a man you’d expect to speak of maids and wedding nights. So far as Jon knew, Qhorin had spent his whole life in the Watch. Did he ever love a maid or have a wedding?” Qhorin’s commitment to the ascetic ideal of the Night’s Watch completely defines him as a person – we don’t learn why he joined, or who he was before he become a ranger. His first name, and his battle-born nickname, suggest that he was Ironborn, and his skill with the sword suggests he was born into a martial caste on the islands. Beyond these mere scraps, we know nothing about him beyond his duty.

As the two men share this fire, Qhorin begins to develop a last-minute plan, one based around his observations of Jon Snow’s character. He already knows that this plan will hinge on Jon killing him, but he needs to get the young man to commit to it:

“Is your sword sharp, Jon Snow?” asked Qhorin Halfhand across the flickering fire. “My sword is Valyrian steel. The Old Bear gave it to me.” “Do you remember the words of your vow?” “Yes.” They were not words a man was like to forget. Once said, they could never be unsaid. They changed your life forever. “Say them again with me, Jon Snow.” “If you like.” Their voices blended as one beneath the rising moon, while Ghost listened and the mountains themselves bore witness.

This is why I love plots that are grounded in character, because only Qhorin Halfhand would come up with this plan. The experienced pragmatist knows how to use the principle of cognitive dissonance to establish a chain of logic that commits people to a position they would find impossible to back away from. By starting with the Night’s Watch oath, Qhorin knows it will make it that much harder for Jon to refuse an order from his superior officer. But it’s the idealist in him that makes Qhorin reach for the oath as opposed to promises of life or wealth or glory or freedom, his faith that Jon Snow is a true believer like himself.

Once Qhorin has gotten Jon to agree to the general proposition, he then gradually leads him into a trap:

“The fire will soon go out,” Qhorin said, “but if the Wall should ever fall, all the fires will go out….we may escape them yet,” the ranger said. “Or not.” “I’m not afraid to die.” It was only half a lie. “It may not be so easy as that, Jon…if you are taken, you must yield.” “Yield?” He blinked in disbelief. The wildlings did not make captives of the men they called the crows. They killed them, except for…”They only spare oathbreakers. Those who join them, like Mance Rayder.” “And you…I command it of you…

It starts by linking the Night’s Watch oath (especially the lines about “I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn”) to the larger military and political implications of their situation: if Jon and Qhorin fail, the Night’s Watch fails, and the Wall will fail and the rest of humanity with it. To avert that fate, any and all sacrifice is justified. Only after Jon has committed himself to paying that price – in proper teenage fashion by dying heroically in battle – does Qhorin drop the bomb on him that his sacrifice will take the form of breaking his oath. And by making it an order, Jon cannot refuse without going back on all of his previous commitments.

And ultimately, this is the dark side of espionage, that it leads idealistic people to think of their own ideals as a mere tool that can be used to make people rationalize and justify actions they would normally consider abhorrent.

But perhaps out of a sense of mercy, or perhaps because he recognizes that Jon needs additional encouragement to ensure he’ll follow through, Qhorin justifies his order in both philosophical and practical terms:

“Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe. Are you a man of the Night’s Watch?” “…I am.” “Then hear me. If we are taken, you will go over to them, as the wildling girl you captured once urged you. They may demand that you cut your cloak to ribbons, that you swear them an oath on your father’s grave, that you curse your brothers and your Lord Commander. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. Do as they bid you…but in your heart, remember who and what you are. Ride with them, eat with them, fight with them, for as long as it takes. And watch… Your wolf saw their diggings in the valley of the Milkwater. What did they seek, in such a bleak and distant place? Did they find it? That is what you must learn, before you return to Lord Mormont and your brothers. That is the duty I lay on you, Jon Snow.”

Philosophically, Qhorin’s argument is rooted in his existential philosophy. If the life of a Night’s Watchman is a coin to be spent in service to the cause, it’s not much of an extension to say that honor, something far more ephemeral than one’s life, should also be sacrificed. It’s a code that fits Qhorin’s special forces life to a T – the mission justifies any moral compromise necessary for its completion, with the personal abnegation of the Night’s Watchman balancing the scales.

And this is why I titled this section the Ranger’s Hagakure, after the 17th century manuscript compiled by Tsuramoto Tashiro from the commentaries of Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Probably the most famous text on bushido, the Hagakure was ironically written after the rise of the shogunate had made the warrior virtues the book extolled unnecessary. Nevertheless, the book’s thesis is one that exemplifies Qhorin’s thinking perfectly – embracing death to achieve one’s aim:

The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim. We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaining one’s aim is a dog’s death and fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.

On a practical level, Qhorin sells Jon further by laying out the specific information that the Night’s Watch needs. Not only does Lord Commander Mormont need to know the numbers, location, direction, and intentions of Mance Rayder’s army vis-a-vis the Wall, but he also needs to complete the original mission (which the eagle’s presence forced them to abort) and find out why Mance Rayder was digging in the Frostfangs.

However, Qhorin still withholds a critical piece of information. Jon has committed only to defecting, not to the murder necessary to establish his bona-fides. And so he lies without lying:

“I’ll do as you say,” Jon said reluctantly, “but . . . you will tell them, won’t you? The Old Bear, at least? You’ll tell him that I never broke my oath.” Qhorin Halfhand gazed at him across the fire, his eyes lost in pools of shadow. “When I see him next. I swear it.”

Like all undercover agents, Jon holds out for the promise of extraction and recognition to absolve him for the actions he has to take to maintain his cover – which of course will be impossible if the only person who knows about the order is dead. And so, fully intending to die, Qhorin promises that he will tell Lord Commander Mormont…in the next life. Once again, dramatic irony strikes – Qhorin will die in just a few pages, and in only a few chapters, Lord Commander Mormont will be joining him. Perhaps they met in the afterlife?

Qhorin Halfhand’s Last Stand

The next morning, Qhorin Halfhand and Jon Snow reach their intended place of reckoning. The location is a deliberate evocation of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (another text featuring protagonist forced into impossible moral choices while being hunted across the mountains): the cave behind the waterfall, the Thermopylae-like path that limits the superior foe’s numbers, a willing human sacrifice used to save others. And the location is chosen by Qhorin for a purpose:

The cleft in the rock was barely large enough for man and horse to pass, but beyond, the walls opened up and the floor turned to soft sand. Jon could feel the spray freezing in his beard. Ghost burst through the waterfall in an angry rush, shook droplets from his fur, sniffed at the darkness suspiciously, then lifted a leg against one rocky wall. Qhorin had already dismounted. Jon did the same. “You knew this place was here.” “…Here is as good a place as any to make a stand,” he declared. “The mouth of the cave shelters us from above, and they cannot get behind us without passing through the mountain. Is your sword sharp, Jon Snow?” …Qhorin drew his longsword. The tale of how he had taught himself to fight with his left hand after losing half of his right was part of his legend; it was said that he handled a blade better now than he ever had before. Jon stood shoulder to shoulder with the big ranger and pulled Longclaw from its sheath. Despite the chill in the air, sweat stung his eyes.

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s unpack. First, in order to make Jon’s defection possible, Qhorin needs to create a standoff situation where the wildlings cannot simply overwhelm the both of them without Jon’s intervention. Second, it’s the second time that Qhorin asks Jon “is your sword sharp?,” playing into GRRM’s threefold revelation strategy by again making the reader think that he’s referring to the looming fight with the wildlings (whereas re-readers know that he’s referring to his duel with Jon). The “shoulder to shoulder” moment further reinforces those expectations, because genre fans are primed to expect these characters to go out in a blaze of glory. Third, all of the imagery works to build up the legend of Qhorin Halfhand as an epic badass – on a re-read, you really notice how the legend of Qhorin pops up again out of nowhere as GRRM leans on repetition to fix the idea in the reader’s mind – right before his death, so that when Jon kills him the moment has real impact. (More on this when we get to the Book vs. Show section…)

The Glory That Is Rattleshirt

And finally the enemy arrives. And what I love about the way that GRRM describes the wildlings here is that he avoids both the dehumanization of the savage horde trope and the judo-flip dehumanization of the noble savage trope, by using Rattleshirt to show variation among the wildlings:

Ten yards below the cave mouth the hunters halted. Their leader came on alone, riding a beast that seemed more goat than horse, from the surefooted way it climbed the uneven slope. As man and mount grew nearer Jon could hear them clattering; both were armored in bones. Cow bones, sheep bones, the bones of goats and aurochs and elk, the great bones of the hairy mammoths…and human bones as well. “Rattleshirt,” Qhorin called down, icy-polite. “To crows I be the Lord o’ Bones.” …Qhorin snorted. “I see no lord. Only a dog dressed in chickenbones, who rattles when he rides.” “The wildling hissed in anger, and his mount reared. He did rattle, Jon could hear it; the bones were strung together loosely, so they clacked and clattered when he moved. “It’s your bones I’ll be rattling soon, Halfhand. I’ll boil the flesh off you and make a byrnie from your ribs. I’ll carve your teeth to cast me runes, and eat me oaten porridge from your skull.” “If you want my bones, come get them.” That, Rattleshirt seemed reluctant to do…

I have great affection for Rattleshirt as a character, because he is so wonderfully awful. The bone armor is a wonderfully satirical detail, turning a cliché of over-the-top villainy into pathetic over-compensation (no one who wears chicken bones is intimidating in the slightest). But it’s his personality, the classic miles gloriosos combination of big talk, cowardice, and spin, that makes him so important. Rather than having every wildling be a proud, fierce barbarian warrior, GRRM shows that there are just as many swaggering assholes north of the Wall as there are south of the Wall. And almost immediately, GRRM turns around and shows that none of the wildlings respect him any more than anyone in the south respects the Freys:

“Gut him.” That was Rattleshirt… “He yielded,” Ygritte reminded them. “Aye, and slew his brother,” said a short homely man in a rust-eaten iron halfhelm. Rattleshirt rode closer. “The wolf did his work for him. It were foully done. The Halfhand’s death was mine.” “We all saw how eager you were to take it,” mocked Ragwyle. “…a warg he may be,” Gyritte said, but that has never frightened us.” Others shouted agreement. Behind the eyeholes of his yellowed skull Rattleshirt’s stare was malignant, but he yielded grudgingly. These are a free folk indeed, thought Jon.

In turn, this sets up much of the themes for Jon’s ASOS – the idea of the wildlings as a heterogeneous, diverse people, and their commitment to a genuinely democratic society where every decision is up to popular debate and decision-making. It also subtly sets up the idea that the wildlings treat warging very differently from those who live south of the Wall (which is actually something that I feel GRRM could have done a better job setting up from the start, to be honest), and that Jon’s status as a warg is an important part of the reason why they’ll accept him.

A Duel to the Death

And so at last we come to the event that the entire chapter has been building towards, the swordfight between Jon and Qhorin. And this fight in particular shows GRRM at the top of his game, making it one of the best fight scenes in the entire series…which is why I’m going to be raging about it in the Book vs. Show section below. It starts on an interesting psychological note.

The word burst from Jon’s lips before the bowmen could loose…”We yield!” “They warned me bastard blood was craven,” he heard Qhorin Halfhand say coldly behind him. “I see it is so. Run to your new masters, coward…” “I’ll do whatever you ask.” The words came hard, but Jon said them. Rattleshirt’s bone armor clattered loudly as he laughed. “Then kill the Halfhand, bastard.” “As if he could,” said Qhorin. “Turn, Snow, and die.”

To begin with, we have a moment of ambiguity where you have to wonder whether Jon, who after all is an ordinary human being who doesn’t want to die, is legitimately trying to defect or just a rather good method actor. Speaking of which, Qhorin really makes it personal, latching onto Jon Snow’s complex about his bastard status both to sell the defection to the wildlings and to get Jon’s blood up enough to strike a killing blow. And of course, because good artists copy and great artists steal, GRRM just has to throw a little Macbeth in there before the bladework starts. And what bladework it is:

And then Qhorin’s sword was coming at him and somehow Longclaw leapt upward to block. The force of impact almost knocked the bastard blade from Jon’s hand, and sent him staggering backward. You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. He shifted to a two-hand grip, quick enough to deliver a stroke of his own, but the big ranger brushed it aside with contemptuous ease. Back and forth they went, black cloaks swirling, the youth’s quickness against the savage strength of Qhorin’s left-hand cuts. The Halfhand’s longsword seemed to be everywhere at once, raining down from one side and then the other, driving him where he would, keeping him off balance. Already he could feel his arms growing numb. Even when Ghost’s teeth closed savagely around the ranger’s calf, somehow Qhorin kept his feet. But in that instant, as he twisted, the opening was there. Jon planted and pivoted. The ranger was leaning away, and for an instant it seemed that Jon’s slash had not touched him. Then a string of red tears appeared across the big man’s throat, bright as a ruby necklace, and the blood gushed out of him, and Qhorin Halfhand fell…”sharp,” he said, lifting his maimed fingers. And then his hand fell, and he was gone. He knew, he thought numbly. he knew what they would ask of me.

What I love about this fight is how fast it is – the whole thing takes two paragraphs – because sword combat is very fast moving (swords aren’t as heavy as people think, armor isn’t as heavy as people think) and ends very quickly (since any one cut or stab could be fatal). And GRRM is very good at presenting the fight through the perspective of a young man who’s only ever been in one serious fight who’s up against a master, where the sheer speed of contact, the numbing impact, causes a sense of dissociation. At the same time, it’s critical for the payoff of the fight that we have a strong contrast between Qhorin and Jon that illuminates the Halfhand at the height of his power – he’s so fast and so strong that the fact that Jon is using a Valyrian sword and has two hands to the other man’s one is only barely keeping him alive.

And the climax is equally fast and equally shocking – Jon is saved, not through the strength of his swordsmanship, but because he is a warg. Without Ghost there to save him, Jon likely would have died, which is kind of ironic considering what happens to him in ADWD. At the same time, we realize in the moment along with Jon that Qhorin intended to die, that every time he asked Jon about the sharpness of his sword, he was looking for a quick, clean death. We also realize in that moment that the Halfhand practiced what he preached when it comes to his belief that a Night’s Watchman must be ready to sacrifice his life even if it goes unnoticed and unheralded. Westeros has many fine swordsmen and we’ll see a lot of them in action before the series is done, but it has precious few true believers.

Historical Analysis:

I don’t really have a good topic for this week – I’m saving the stuff about the history of pre-modern military espionage for Jon’s ASOS arc – so check back next time!

What If?

So there’s really only two hypotheticals here, and I feel like they cover similar ground to ones we’ve discussed earlier:

Jon dies? If Jon dies in the fight, which I consider to be highly unlikely since neither Qhorin nor GRRM want him to die, there is a possibility that Mance wins at Castle Black. Now, I consider this somewhat unlikely – Stannis is going to show up regardless of what Jon does, the Night’s Watch might well have held off the southern attack without him, etc. And even if he does, it’s not going to end well for him. Leaving aside the fact that the wildlings are going to be bushwhacked every step along the way as they head south, I honestly think the majority of his 100,000 people will starve to death, because you can’t feed that many people from raiding.

They both escape? This is unlikely, because the eagle is there as a Deus Ex Machina to prevent it, but to me the main difference is that Jon doesn’t spend his time among the wildlings, which might well mean he doesn’t let them cross the Wall. OTHO, if Qhorin survives, it’s quite likely Jon doesn’t get elected Lord Commander either way.

Book vs. Show:

This chapter is why I call Jon’s storyline in Season 2 a botch. Because Benioff and Weiss give us the mere function of this chapter – Qhorin dies at Jon’s hands – but none of the meaning and very little of the flair. In part, this is due to previous mistakes – Jon ran off with Ygritte, so he (and the viewer) never had a chance to get to know Qhorin; Jon and Qhorin meet again when both have been taken prisoner, so there’s no opportunity for the quiet conversation over their last fire.

But the moment itself is staged clumsily. After only a single line from Qhorin that “one brother inside his army will be worth 1,000 fighting against it” that is honestly quite easy to miss in the moment, Qhorin attacks Jon seemingly out of nowhere and for no reason – both Jon and Qhorin are prisoners, so the idea of defection doesn’t really work. And then for no reason, the wildlings decide to allow their prisoners to keep their swords and try to kill each other. And the fight itself is pretty undistinguished, completely failing to sell Qhorin as a master swordsman. And of course, because Ghost isn’t there, there’s no opportunity to develop the idea that Jon is a warg and that’s something the wildlings care about.

But the worst part is that no one really cares or remembers. Jon’s killing of Qhorin isn’t memorable – as a fight, it’s not even mentioned in the same breath as Oberyn vs. the Mountain or the Hound vs. Brienne; as a killing, it barely registers at all. And attention must be paid.