Chapter 7: Jon Snowdon Takes His Post on the Wall

The northern road, it must be said, does not flatter itself. It offers no picturesque vistas composed for the benefit of the traveller, no charming inns arranged at convenient intervals, no accommodation of the sort that a young man of good breeding might describe to his family without qualification. It offers instead a progressive education in the actual nature of the north, delivered through the medium of cold, mud, and the particular silence of a landscape that has long since stopped attempting to impress anyone.

Jon Snowdon had been receiving this education for eleven days when Castle Black announced itself — not with the dramatic gesture of a fortress proud of its silhouette, but with a smell, which arrived some twenty minutes before the structure itself became visible through the grey afternoon: woodsmoke, horse, and the particular note of a great many men living at close quarters with varying commitment to the conventions of personal hygiene.

He had imagined it larger.