“They can’t hurt me, they’re dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain.”

Synopsis: Arya and the Brotherhood Without Banners visits Stoney Sept, where they debate the ethics of the death penalty and whether Gendry should bone his half-sister, before Arya meets someone from her past.

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:

Arya V is one of the better of her chapters with the Brotherhood Without Banners, in no small part because it more directly grapples with some of the thorny issues raised by a medieval guerilla insurgency, but also because the chapter more deftly combines this weightier material with more light-hearted character work and even some plot advancement.

The Battle of the Bells

In something of a swerve, the chapter opens not with the Brotherhood discussing the nature of revolutionary justice or Gendry and Arya bickering, but instead with a history lesson:

Stoney Sept was the biggest town Arya had seen since King’s Landing, and Harwin said her father had won a famous battle here. “The Mad King’s men had been hunting Robert, trying to catch him before he could rejoin your father,” he told her as they rode toward the gate. “He was wounded, being tended by some friends, when Lord Connington the Hand took the town with a mighty force and started searching house by house. Before they could find him, though, Lord Eddard and your grandfather came down on the town and stormed the walls. Lord Connington fought back fierce. They battled in the streets and alleys, even on the rooftops, and all the septons rang their bells so the smallfolk would know to lock their doors. Robert came out of hiding to join the fight when the bells began to ring. He slew six men that day, they say. One was Myles Mooton, a famous knight who’d been Prince Rhaegar’s squire. He would have slain the Hand too, but the battle never brought them together. Connington wounded your grandfather Tully sore, though, and killed Ser Denys Arryn, the darling of the Vale. But when he saw the day was lost, he flew off as fast as the griffins on his shield. The Battle of the Bells, they called it after. Robert always said your father won it, not him.”

What might come across as a mere info dump actually plays a couple of different roles: first, we get necessary context for explaining the chapter’s setting. The town of Stoney Sept is not merely the site of civil wars past and present but an active participant, which explains nicely why they’d become a safe haven for the Brotherhood Without Banners. The picture of Robert in hiding and emerging to rejoin the fight isn’t just colorful detail, but it also provides additional corroboration to the story of Bella’s parentage, which then links into Gendry’s character development.

At the same time, though, this story has deeper significance for the larger plot. As we see from Harwin’s recounting, the Battle of the Bells reshaped Westerosi politics quite profoundly: Hoster’s participation in the first place required the marriage of his daughters to Ned Stark and Jon Arryn; Denys Arryn’s death left the Lord Paramount of the Vale without an heir, which put much more of a burden on his marriage with Lysa than would otherwise have been the case; for his part, Hoster Tully’s “sore” wound reduced the role that he would otherwise have played in the new regime. But most consequentially, the Battle of the Bells destroyed Jon Connington’s political career, costing him lands and titles and forcing him into exile. And as we’ll learn in ADWD, the Battle of the Bells has profoundly reshaped his character, which has and will have major implications for how he attempts to conquer Westeros in TWOW.

There are some enduring mysteries: why is Myles Mooton’s death important enough to get mentioned here; is it because he was probably a witness to Lyanna’s abduction, or is there some other significance? I’ve already stated that I’m sure that Aegon VI was already planned by this point in GRRM’s writing process, but was Jon Connington always intended to be by his side? It is interesting how often he gets name-checked in ASOS, and we see in the passage above that Connington gets focused on a lot compared to Ned or Robert.

The Mad Huntsman and Revolutionary Justice

However, the meat of the chapter is the theme of revolutionary jsutice and its implications for the Brotherhood Without Banners, and it enters into the narrative almost immediately. However, given how dramatically it will be handled later in the chapter, George R.R Martin starts off with a light touch, gradually introducing the figure of the Mad Huntsman (who hovers over this chapter like Madame Defarge) by giving him some context:

“How you fixed for food?” Tom asked as they entered. “Not so bad as we were. The Huntsman brought in a flock o’ sheep, and there’s been some trading across the Blackwater. The harvest wasn’t burned south o’ the river. Course, there’s plenty want to take what we got. Wolves one day, Mummers the next. Them that’s not looking for food are looking for plunder, or women to rape, and them that’s not out for gold or wenches are looking for the bloody Kingslayer. Talk is, he slipped right through Lord Edmure’s fingers.” “Lord Edmure?” Lem frowned. “Is Lord Hoster dead, then?” “Dead or dying. Think Lannister might be making for the Blackwater?”

Already setting up his traps of moral ambiguity, GRRM introduces us to the Mad Huntsman as someone who feeds the poor, which (at least by the rules of genre fiction) clashes with his darker actions that are revealed later. Moreover, the forces which the Mad Huntsman fights are far less a figment of revolutionary paranoia than Madame Defarge’s enemies – there really are enemies motivated both by ideology and material greed all around them who are trying to do horrible things to the smallfolk of the Riverlands. (This passage also gives us a bit of an update of the situation with Jaime and Riverrun, although Stoney Sept hasn’t yet gotten the breaking news that Jaime’s been captured by the Bloody Mummers or that Hoster may well be already dead.)

This context is, in turn, used to explain (although not necessarily justify) the Mad Huntsman himself. Indeed, unlike most of GRRM’s perfectly human monsters, we actually get a backstory that explains why the Huntsman does what he does:

“…The Huntsman bloody well knows that, too.” “When the westermen came through they raped the Huntsman’s wife and sister, put his crops to the torch, ate half his sheep, and killed the other half for spite. Killed six dogs too, and threw the carcasses down his well. A chewed-up corpse would be plenty good enough for him, I’d say. Me as well.” “He’d best not,” said Lem. “That’s all I got to say. He’d best not, and you’re a bloody fool.”

Like so many guerilla leaders throughout history, the Mad Huntsman is a classic case of a civilian radicalized by war – he could as easily be a Spaniard who joined the irregulars after losing a relative on the Third of May, or a follower of Zapata who’d been pushed off his lands by the Diaz regime, or a Yugoslav partisan whose village had been targeted for retaliation by the Nazi occupiers. What gives this a more specific Westerosi political meaning is that, in this case, the Mad Huntsman’s unrelenting and merciless anger is a direct result of Tywin’s offhand brutality in the Riverlands.

The problem is that radicalization, like religion, is a powerful motivating force for both good and ill; believing yourself to be not merely a righteous avenger but the Agent of History justifies all manner of atrocities:

In the market square at the town’s heart stood a fountain in the shape of a leaping trout, spouting water into a shallow pool. Women were filling pails and flagons there. A few feet away, a dozen iron cages hung from creaking wooden posts. Crow cages, Arya knew. The crows were mostly outside the cages, splashing in the water or perched atop the bars; inside were men. Lem reined up scowling. “What’s this, now?” “Justice,” answered a woman at the fountain. “What, did you run short o’ hempen rope?” “Was this done at Ser Wilbert’s decree?” asked Tom. A man laughed bitterly. “The lions killed Ser Wilbert a year ago. His sons are all off with the Young Wolf, getting fat in the west. You think they give a damn for the likes of us? It was the Mad Huntsman caught these wolves.” Wolves. Arya went cold. Robb’s men, and my father’s. She felt drawn toward the cages… “Whose men were you?”

This passage is worth breaking down in detail for a number of reasons. First, there’s the fact that rather than being imposed by force or done under color of night, the crow cages are in fact quite popular with the common people of Stoney Sept. Moreover, rather than purely being motivated by bloodlust, the smallfolk describe the cages as “justice,” placing it in an ideological context. Second, the fact that they contrast this justice against the failed “right of pit and gallows” of the selfish absentee landlords speaks both to how radicalization has spread among the rank-and-file and further evidence of how the feudal order is breaking down in the Riverlands.

Third, even more than in the previous chapter, the crow cages cause Arya to confront the conflict between the ideology of the Brotherhood Without Banners and that of the Stark cause. While Robb Stark sees his western campaign as a means to the end of establishing independence for the North and the Riverlands, the smallfolk of Stoney Sept clearly see it as a betrayal of the feudal contract by nobles who don’t “give a damn for the likes of us.” At the same time, the fact that these wolves are here, rather than being theoretical or second hand means that Arya can interrogate them directly, to see if men associated with her family could be evil, whether it’s true that there is no difference between lions and wolves:

The bars allowed so little room that prisoners could neither sit nor turn; they stood naked, exposed to sun and wind and rain. The first three cages held dead men. Carrion crows had eaten out their eyes, yet the empty sockets seemed to follow her. The fourth man in the row stirred as she passed. Around his mouth his ragged beard was thick with blood and flies. They exploded when he spoke, buzzing around his head. “Water.” The word was a croak. “Please…water…” The man in the next cage opened his eyes at the sound. “Here,” he said. “Here, me.” An old man, he was; his beard was grey and his scalp was bald and mottled brown with age. There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big red-bearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and part of his temple. But the worst thing was between his legs, where nothing remained but a crusted brown hole crawling with maggots. Farther down was a fat man. The crow cage was so cruelly narrow it was hard to see how they’d ever gotten him inside. The iron dug painfully into his belly, squeezing bulges out between the bars. Long days baking in the sun had burned him a painful red from head to heel. When he shifted his weight, his cage creaked and swayed, and Arya could see pale white stripes where the bars had shielded his flesh from the sun.

The problem is that GRRM has no interest in clearly answering that sort of uestion. In a clear sign that he’s preparing to smack the reader around the head with the cudgel of empathy, before he’ll tell us what these men have done, he confronts us with the undeniable fact of the human body under torment. The Huntsman and his followers might call it justice, but the signs of exposure, denial of food and water, stress positioning, and physical mutiliation are clear. Whatever else these men may have done, they are also victims of torture.

But once he’s gotten you to fully empathize with these prisoners, GRRM hits you with the full story – these are Karstark men who, not content with their complicity in the murder of child hostages, decided to commit some freelance atrocities:

“…Pay them no mind, boy,” the townsmen told her. “They’re none o’ your concern. Ride on by.” “What did they do?” she asked him. “They put eight people to the sword at Tumbler’s Falls,” he said. “They wanted the Kingslayer, but he wasn’t there so they did some rape and murder.” He jerked a thumb toward the corpse with maggots where his manhood ought to be. “That one there did the raping. Now move along.”

The townsman’s brief indictment – “they put eight people to the sword at Tumbler’s Falls…they wanted the Kingslayer, but he wasn’t there so they did some rape and murder” – can’t help but bring one up short, because the idea of mass murder and rape undertaken by armed men against civilians almost out of boredom has unfortunately become part of the modern lexicon of war crimes. This new information raises troubling questions: are these men still worthy of empathy, given their actions? Is it morally acceptable to torture people as long as we’re sure they’re bad people? Do we entirely condemn or entirely absolve the people who put the Karstark men in the crow cages, given the breakdown of normal law and order and the perfectly human desire for revenge?

Arya’s struggle with this information comes on two levels: first, the difficulty of reconciling the heinous nature of the Karstark men’s crimes with the human ordinariness of their condition (“she looked at their filthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips”); and second, the feeling of moral complicity that comes with the identification of these criminals as Stark men (“wolves…Like me. Was this her pack? How could they be Robb’s men?”). What I find fascinating is how quickly Arya is able to reconcile these tensions and come to the conclusion that that it is the current condition of the prisoners that ought to take precedence as to how they should be treated:

“A swallow,” the fat one called down. “Ha’ mercy, boy, a swallow.” The old one slid an arm up to grasp the bars. The motion made his cage swing violently. “Water,” gasped the one with the flies in his beard. She looked at their filthy hair and scraggly beards and reddened eyes, at their dry, cracked, bleeding lips. Wolves, she thought again. Like me. Was this her pack? How could they be Robb’s men? She wanted to hit them. She wanted to hurt them. She wanted to cry. They all seemed to be looking at her, the living and the dead alike. The old man had squeezed three fingers out between the bars. “Water,” he said, “water.” Arya swung down from her horse. They can’t hurt me, they’re dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain. “What do you think you’re doing, boy?” the townsman snapped. “They’re no concern o’ yours.” She raised the cup to the fish’s mouth. The water splashed across her fingers and down her sleeve, but Arya did not move until the cup was brimming over. When she turned back toward the cages, the townsman moved to stop her. “You get away from them, boy—”

Arya’s decision to give water to dying men – here explicitly equated with “mercy” – is particularly interesting for the re-reader becausse of how closely it foreshadows Arya’s time at the House of Black and White and the gift of mercy in the waters of the pool. This connection between mercy, water, and death is made even more explicit by what happens next:

“…Lord Beric don’t hold with caging men to die of thirst. Why don’t you hang them decent?” “There was nothing decent ’bout them things they did at Tumbler’s Falls,” the townsman growled back at him… “The Mad Huntsman will hear of this,” a man threatened. “He won’t like it. No, he won’t.” “He’ll like this even less, then.” Anguy strung his longbow, slid an arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, loosed. The fat man shuddered as the shaft drove up between his chins, but the cage would not let him fall. Two more arrows ended the other two northmen. The only sound in the market square was the splash of falling water and the buzzing of flies.

For the very specific purposes of this blog, one of the most important things we learn in this section is that, well before the rise of Lady Stoneheart, there was significant levels of ideological division within the Brotherhood Without Banners. This is not particularly surprising; insurgent movements tend to at least start as coalitions of different dissident groups, and where groups often operate with significant autonomy from the central command structure.

The lines between the two factions can be somewhat difficult for contemporary readers to parse: after all, a modern commitment to due process is hard to reconcile with Anguy’s cheerful acceptance of show trials or Lem’s advocacy of nooses as the cutting edge of humane execution. But as we’ll see in great detail in Arya VI and VII, Beric Dondarrion is literally a true believer when it comes to his particular, R’hllor-inspired vision of how revolutionary justice ought to be carried out. No wonder then, that his close associates are willing to court internal strife in order to carry it out.

Arya and the Giant Peach

After this extended sequence on murder, rape, torture, and the ethics of incarceration and capital punishment, GRRM gives the reader a welcome moment of comic relief, where the Brortherhood Without Banners stops at the Peach in search of beds, baths, and beyond:

On the east side of the market square stood a modest inn with whitewashed walls and broken windows. Half its roof had burnt off recently, but the hole had been patched over. Above the door hung a wooden shingle painted as a peach, with a big bite taken out of it. They dismounted at the stables sitting catty-corner, and Greenbeard bellowed for grooms. The buxom red-haired innkeep howled with pleasure at the sight of them, then promptly set to tweaking them. “Greenbeard, is it? Or Greybeard? Mother take mercy, when did you get so old? Lem, is that you? Still wearing the same ratty cloak, are you? I know why you never wash it, I do. You’re afraid all the piss will wash out and we’ll see you’re really a knight o’ the Kingsguard! And Tom o’ Sevens, you randy old goat! You come to see that son o’ yours? Well, you’re too late, he’s off riding with that bloody Huntsman. And don’t tell me he’s not yours!” “He hasn’t got my voice,” Tom protested weakly. “He’s got your nose, though. Aye, and t’other parts as well, to hear the girls talk.” She spied Gendry then, and pinched him on the cheek. “Look at this fine young ox. Wait till Alyce sees those arms. Oh, and he blushes like a maid, too. Well, Alyce will fix that for you, boy, see if she don’t.” Arya had never seen Gendry turn so red. “Tansy, you leave the Bull alone, he’s a good lad,” said Tom Sevenstrings. “All we need from you is safe beds for a night.” “Speak for yourself, singer.” Anguy slid his arm around a strapping young serving girl as freckly as he was. “Beds we got,” said red-haired Tansy. “There’s never been no lack o’ beds at the Peach. But you’ll all climb in a tub first. Last time you lot stayed under my roof you left your fleas behind.” She poked Greenbeard in the chest. “And yours was green, too. You want food?”

When they arrive, Tansy takes up the mantle of Macbeth’s Porter, Hamlet‘s Gravedigger, and Lear‘s Fool, all double entendres and personal putdowns (which makes her something of a downstairs parallel to Lady Smallwood). At the same time, her bawdy jests also shed additional light on these secondary characters – Greenbeard is getting old (which might explain why he chooses not to follow Lady Stoneheart), Lem might secretly be Richard Lonmouth (doubt it), Tom o’ Sevens really needs to look into birth control, and (more significantly for what happens next) Gendry’s a virgin.

All of this is a new experience for Arya, who despite her travels and travails and secret identities is still a preteen noblewoman who ordinarily wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the Peach. (Harwin, who’s been sticking by Arya’s side up until now, conveniently drops out of the narrative so that Arya and Gendry can get up to some shenanigans. Presumably either he got really distracted by his “conversation” with Tansy or Harwin is more used to looking after horses than human children.) As a result, Arya doesn’t quite get what’s going on:

Arya remembered what Syrio Forel had told her, the trick of looking and seeing what was there. When she looked, she saw more serving wenches than any inn could want, and most of them young and comely. And come evenfall, lots of men started coming and going at the Peach. They did not linger long in the common room, not even when Tom took out his woodharp and began to sing “Six Maids in a Pool.” The wooden steps were old and steep, and creaked something fierce whenever one of the men took a girl upstairs. “I bet this is a brothel,” she whispered to Gendry. “You don’t even know what a brothel is.” “I do so,” she insisted. “It’s like an inn, with girls.” He was turning red again. “What are you doing here, then?” he demanded. “A brothel’s no fit place for no bloody highborn lady, everybody knows that.”

For someone who usually (and rightly) gets dinged for not being the best about writing about sex, I was actually surprised by how well GRRM evokes the pre-adolescent mindset here, where old school lessons about “where babies come from” are a vague memory but “the talk” is still in the future and you’ve stitched together a hazy understanding of how things work from snippets of pop culture that you weren’t really old enough to understand.

And I think that mindset is necessary for how we should think the Arya/Gendry interactions in this chapter, because at the end of the day, Arya is a preteen who doesn’t understand why Gendry makes her feel funny when he’s working shirtless in the forge, and Gendry is another awkward teen virgin in the Jon Snow mode who’s largely sublimated his sexuality into hitting metal with a big hammer, and hasn’t exactly spent a lot of time around women while working in Tobho Mott’s shop.

Bella the Belle

As a good genre writer ought, GRRM chooses this moment of pseudo-romantic tension (don’t worry, I’ll talk about Gendry’s class issues in just a second) for Bella to suddenly arrive and increase the awkwardness even further:

One of the girls sat down on the bench beside him. “Who’s a highborn lady? The little skinny one?” She looked at Arya and laughed. “I’m a king’s daughter myself.” Arya knew she was being mocked. “You are not.” “Well, I might be.” When the girl shrugged, her gown slipped off one shoulder. “They say King Robert fucked my mother when he hid here, back before the battle. Not that he didn’t have all the other girls too, but Leslyn says he liked my ma the best.” The girl did have hair like the old king’s, Arya thought; a great thick mop of it, as black as coal. That doesn’t mean anything, though. Gendry has the same kind of hair too. Lots of people have black hair. “I’m named Bella,” the girl told Gendry. “For the battle. I bet I could ring your bell, too. You want to?” “No,” he said gruffly. “I bet you do.” She ran a hand along his arm. “I don’t cost nothing to friends of Thoros and the lightning lord.” “No, I said.” Gendry rose abruptly and stalked away from the table out into the night. Bella turned to Arya. “Don’t he like girls?” Arya shrugged. “He’s just stupid. He likes to polish helmets and beat on swords with hammers.”

Bella plays several roles here: first, she bring in a different perspective on Robert’s actions during the Battle of the Bells that re-contextualizes Harwin’s story. Rather than just being “wounded, being tended by some friends” and staying in “hiding” a step ahead of Connington’s soldiers, instead we find out that Robert was living it up while everyone else was doing the espionage and the fighting, sleeping with the entire workforce of at least one brothel. It’s a less noble, more classical model of heroism; one can easily imagine Hercules doing the same on one of his adventures.

Second, Bella’s presence and appearance obviously introduces the idea of Robert’s bastards being distinguished by their hair “as black as coal.” Arya’s disbelief provides ironic confirmation that both Gendry and Bella are, in fact, unacknowledged royal bastards. Given that it’s been almost a book and a half since Eddard read of “the gold yielding before the coal,” and a book since Stannis’ allegations about Cersei’s children being “abominations born of incest,” it’s a useful reminder to the reader about what GRRM’s narrative rules about identifying the children of Robert’s body and distnguishing them from the children who bear his name.

Third, Bella is also here to set up the comedy plot thread by offering to sleep with Gendry, partially out of ideologically affinity with the Brotherhood Without Banner (which fits in with the Robin Hood romance spirit of the Bortherhood) and partially because of the already-established irresistability of Gendry’s biceps.

What’s slightly odd about this scene is that neither the POV character, nor indeed any of the characters in this chapter, have any idea, makes it an oddly meta-texual sex-farce. Gendry escapes sleeping with his half-sister not due to misunderstandings or slamming doors but because of his Freudian sublimation (“polish helmets and beat on swords with hammers,” indeed) and his unresolved class issues with Arya, which isn’t exactly how Molière would handle the situation.

As we’ve already seen above, Gendry’s having a hard time reonciling Arya’s highborn status with their current environment. Under the surface (and mostly subconsiously), however, Gendry resents the fact that Arya’s birth creates a social distance between them. Hence his over-reaction when Arya objects to the cover story he tries to use to fend off an unwanted pervert:

“She’s my sister.” Gendry put a heavy hand on the old man’s shoulder, and squeezed. “Leave her be.” The man turned, spoiling for a quarrel, but when he saw Gendry’s size he thought better of it. “Your sister, is she? What kind of brother are you? I’d never bring no sister of mine to the Peach, that I wouldn’t.” He got up from the bench and moved off muttering, in search of a new friend. “Why did you say that?” Arya hopped to her feet. “You’re not my brother.” “That’s right,” he said angrily. “I’m too bloody lowborn to be kin to m’lady high.” Arya was taken aback by the fury in his voice. “That’s not the way I meant it.” “Yes it is.” He sat down on the bench, cradling a cup of wine between his hands. “Go away. I want to drink this wine in peace. Then maybe I’ll go find that black-haired girl and ring her bell for her.” “But…” “I said, go away. M’lady.”

This scene reads a bit strangely now, because it’s where the teen romance aspects of the character interactions are at their strongest – she’s a runaway highborn girl with wildness in her heaert, he’s a common blacksmith who doesn’t know that he’s secretly a Hidden Prince, and so forth. However, the combination of age issues (she’s maybe 11, he’s 15) and the fact that, across ASOS, AFFC, and ADWD, this plot peters out rather than being resolved makes me think that this was a plot that GRRM wanted to pick up after the five year gap (when Arya would be “sixteen going on seventeen” and Gendry would be 20-21), but has largely let go when he had to abandon that particular narrative device.

At the same time, however, the running theme of Gendry’s class issues is consistent both with Gendry’s past behavior and his future decision to become a knight of the Brotherhood without Banners. Similarly, Gendry’s threat to sleep with Bella seems motivated more by the idea that “she doesn’t think she’s too good for me” and the desire to piss off Arya rather than any particular interest in Bella for her own sake.

The Fake-Out

Arya’s reaction to all these confusing emotions is to retreat into the comfort of previous identities, first by reciting her list of names (which is something she hasn’t done in a while), and second by falling into a wolfdream. Of course, GRRM’s not going to allow to her to regress, so instead he leaves us with one last twist in a chapter not exactly lacking in them (although here it’s more of a classic Shyamalan plot fake-out rather than a tonal or stylistic shift):

Down below, in the square, the dogs were barking, running in circles, growling and howling. There was a pack of them, great black mastiffs and lean wolfhounds and black-and-white sheepdogs and kinds Arya did not know, shaggy brindled beasts with long yellow teeth. Between the inn and the fountain, a dozen riders sat astride their horses, watching the townsmen open the fat man’s cage and tug his arm until his swollen corpse spilled out onto the ground. The dogs were at him at once, tearing chunks of flesh off his bones… “Best find him. Archer too. The Mad Huntsman’s come back, with another man for the cages.” “Lannister,” said Arya. “I heard him say Lannister.” “Have they caught the Kingslayer?” Gendry wanted to know. Down in the square, a thrown stone caught the captive on the cheek, turning his head. Not the Kingslayer, Arya thought, when she saw his face. The gods had heard her prayers after all.

This is actually a great example of the way that GRRM hides his twists, because the arrival of the Mad Huntman and the idea that there might be a sudden confrontation between these two factions of the Brotherhood Without Banners misdirects the reader, so that we briefly forget that it’s completely impossible for Jaime to be in Stoney Sept. At the same time, because we’re now staring at the two distractions, we don’t notice GRRM’s repeated reference to the mystery captive’s “cheek…head” and “face,” which in retrospect are neon signs that we’re dealing with one Sandor Clegane.

Historical Analysis:

Tony Judt’s Postwar is one of the formative texts on my thinking about the tricky issue of revolutionary justice. In the first two chapters of his book, Judt puts the events that took place immediately after WWII as part of a longer trend of violence stemming from the dynamics of occupation and resistance:

“Above all, violence became part of daily life. The ultimate authority of the modern state has always rested in extremis on its monopoly of violence and its willingness to deploy force if necessary. But in occupied Europe authority was a function of force alone, deployed without inhibition. Curiously enough, it was precisely in these circumstances that the state lost its monopoly of violence. Partisan groups and armies competed for a legitimacy determined by their capacity to enforce their writ in a given territory.” (Judt, p. 37)

Given the dynamic on the home front – the slow starvation of the masses versus the privileges of wealthy collaborators; the spiral of violence where acts of resistance were met by reprisal killings, which in turn radicalized people to join the resistance and take revenge; the rising tide of denunciations and then the targeting of informers by the resistance – I think Judt’s description of “partisan groups and armies” in a competition for “legitimacy determined by their capacity to enforce their writ” is apt.

Thus, in that period between 1944-1945 when the arrival of the Allied armies suddenly tipped the balance in favor of one side, allowing its writ to run almost anywhere, the result was almost inevitable:

“The punishment of collaborators (real and imagined) began before the fighting ended. Indeed it had been going on throughout the war, on an individual basis or under instructions from underground resistance organizations. But in the interval between the retreat of the German armies and the establishment of effective control by Allied governments, popular frustrations and personal vendettas, often coloured by political opportunism and economic advantage, led to a brief but bloody cycle of score-settling. In France some 10,000 people were killed in ‘extrajudicial’ proceedings, many of them by independent bands of armed resistance groups, notably the Milices Patriotiques, who rounded up suspected collaborators, seized their property and in many cases shot them out of hand. About a third of those summarily executed in this way were dispatched before the Normandy landings of June 6th 1944, and most of the others fell victim during the next four months of fighting on French soil. If anything, the numbers are rather low considering the level of mutual hatred and suspicion abroad in France after four years of occupation and Marshall Pétain’s regime at Vichy. …The same sentiment was felt in Italy, where reprisals and unofficial retribution, especially in the Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions, resulted in death tolls approaching 15,000 in the course of the last months of the war—and continued, sporadically, for at least three more years. Elsewhere in western Europe the degree of bloodshed was much lower.” (ibid, p. 42.)

Viewed in isolation, I think it is as easy and natural to see these revolutionary tribunals as kangaroo courts which traded in due process for violence as it is to recoil at the Mad Huntsman’s crow cages. And indeed, one of the first things that the new governments of postwar Europe did was to regularize the process of punishing collaborators in the name of the rule of law:

“But nowhere did the unregulated settling of accounts last very long. It was not in the interest of fragile new governments, far from universally accepted and often distinctly makeshift, to allow armed bands to roam the countryside arresting, torturing and killing at will. The first task of the new authorities was to assert a monopoly of force, legitimacy and the institutions of justice. If anyone was to be arrested and charged with crimes committed during the occupation, this was the responsibility of the appropriate authorities. If there were to be trials, they should take place under the rule of law. If there was to be bloodletting, then this was the exclusive affair of the state. This transition took place as soon as the new powers felt strong enough to disarm the erstwhile partisans, impose the authority of their own police and damp down popular demands for harsh penalties and collective punishment. The disarming of the resisters proved surprisingly uncontentious in western and central Europe at least. A blind eye was turned to murders and other crimes already committed in the frenzied liberation months.” (ibid, p. 44.)

But rather than letting the story end there as the triumph of reason over passion, law over vengeance, Judt goes on to point out that the state was hardly an uncorruptible paragon, because the demands of justice had to contend with the necessities of keeping the government of economy functioning, or indeed the necessity of keeping society itself at peace when millions of people had been on the wrong side of history for decades:

“The balance of political advantage in 1944-45 lay in assigning blanket responsibility for war crimes and crimes of collaboration to predetermined categories of people: members of certain political parties, military organizations and government agencies. But such a procedure would still pass over many individuals whose punishment was widely demanded; it would include people whose chief offence was inertia or cowardice; and above all it would entail a form of collective indictment, something anathema to most European jurists. Instead, it was individuals who were brought to trial, with results that varied greatly with time and place. Many men and women were unfairly singled out and punished. Many more escaped retribution altogether. …Any judicial process brought about as the direct consequence of a war or a political struggle is political. The mood at the trials of Pierre Laval or Philippe Pétain in France, or the police chief Pietro Caruso in Italy, was hardly that of a conventional judicial proceeding. Score-settling, blood-letting, revenge and political calculation played a crucial role in these and many other post-war trials and purges. …“Death sentences were frequent at the time and provoked scant opposition: the wartime devaluation of life made them seem less extreme—and better warranted— than under normal circumstances. What caused greater offence, and may ultimately have undercut the value of the whole proceedings in some places, was the manifest inconsistency of the punishments, not to mention that many of them were being passed by judges and juries whose own wartime record was spotty or worse.” (ibid, p. 45, 49, 51.)

As Judt demonstrates exhaustively, this often meant that the thoroughness of official justice was often in inverse proportion to the scale of collaboratation. Norway put 3% of its population on trial for collaboration, but in France only 38,000 were imprisoned, and less than 50,000 given the lesser sentence of “national degredation,” and by the early 1950s almost all had been released, amnestied, or re-instated to their civil service positions. In Germany itself, only 5,000 people in the Western zones were convicted, simply because the scale and duration of Nazi rule had left it impossible to govern Germany otherwise:

“The real problem with any consistent programme aimed at rooting out Nazism from German life was that it was simply not practicable in the circumstances of 1945. In the words of General Lucius Clay, the American Military Commander, ‘our major administrative problem was to find reasonably competent Germans who had not been affiliated or associated in some way with the Nazi regime… ll too often, it seems that the only men with the qualifications…are the career civil servants…a great proportion of whom were more than nominal participants (by our definition) in the activities of the Nazi Party.’ Clay did not exaggerate. On May 8th 1945, when the war in Europe ended, there were 8 million Nazis in Germany. In Bonn, 102 out of 112 doctors were or had been Party members. In the shattered city of Cologne, of the 21 specialists in the city waterworks office—whose skills were vital for the reconstruction of water and sewage systems and in the prevention of disease—18 had been Nazis. Civil administration, public health, urban reconstruction and private enterprise in post-war Germany would inevitably be undertaken by men like this, albeit under Allied supervision. There could be no question of simply expunging them from German affairs.” (ibid, p. 56.)

To me, this second regime of justice should make us re-examine our first instincts, to ask which is worse: the Scylla of revolutionary justice and the Charybides of official neglect? To bring this back to Westeros for a minute, we know that the Mad Huntsman’s crow cages will turn into Lady Stoneheart’s nooses, but we also know that the official, “peaceful” alternative will be Randyll Tarly’s brutality against civilians in Maidenpool contrasted against the Lannister regime’s pensioning off of the Mountain’s Men and complete inaction against the Bloody Mummers, arguably the worst of the perpetrators of the violence in the War of Five Kings.

What If?

I don’t see much of an opportunity for plot-relevant hypotheticals in this particular chapter (since it doesn’t particularly matter for the plot whether Gendry sleeps with Bella). But stay tuned, because Arya VI is chock-full of them.

Book vs. Show:

The show pretty much cut out this entire interlude by having the Hound be brought to the Inn of the Kneeling Man and having him identify Arya right from the jump, which to my mind is an acceptable rationing of resources, since it goes straight from Arya meeting the Brotherhood to the high point of the duel between Beric and Sandor.

Where everything went wrong came after…