#bones giving mudd the supplies one-by-one ahh

[jus-alilcomforblelad]

this episode was really a bunch of 60s actors doing ridiculous make-believe (for real this time) to fool an android legion into imploding from the amount of hijinks.

so many points i'd assumed were bloopers but no, that actually happened

[goodqueenaly]

What are some hints that a famine is about to occur in Westeros? I’ve read theories about it but I haven’t picked up any hints about it apparently. Could Sansa, in a grand humanitarian bid, use the grain Littlefinger has been gathering to help starving people when she goes North?

Ahh yes. Westeros might have just had the longest summer in living memory, but the War of the Five Kings has done a neat job of ruining preparations for winter … and with this winter looking to be particularly fierce, we’re bound to see quite a bit of famine savaging the land. (Got long; more under the cut)

Jaime’s arc in the FeastDance really underlines the ravages of the War of the Five Kings on the Westerosi food supply:

There were still cows and sheep to be seen near the city; apples on the trees and berries in the brush, stands of barleycorn and oats and winter wheat, wayns and oxcarts on the road. Farther afield, things would not be so rosy. 

Snow in the riverlands. If it was snowing here, it could well be snowing on Lannisport as well, and on King’s Landing. Winter is marching south, and half our granaries are empty. Any crops still in the fields were doomed. There would be no more plantings, no more hopes of one last harvest. He found himself wondering what his father would do to feed the realm, before he remembered that Tywin Lannister was dead. 

As Jaime Lannister and his escort wound through the rolling hills into the vale, little remained of the fields and farms and orchards that had once surrounded Raventree—only mud and ashes, and here and there the blackened shells of homes and mills. Weeds and thorns and nettles grew in that wasteland, but nothing that could be called a crop. Everywhere Jaime looked he saw his father’s hand, even in the bones they sometimes glimpsed beside the road. Most were sheep bones, but there were horses too, and cattle, and now and again a human skull, or a headless skeleton with weeds poking up through its rib cage. 

He’s only going through the Riverlands, of course, but everywhere the war has touched has suffered as a result. Asha notes the same in the North as a result of the Greyjoys’ invasion:

On the south side of the castle, moss grew thick upon the palisade and crept halfway up the towers. To east and west were empty fields. Oats and barley had been growing there when Asha took the castle, only to be crushed underfoot during her attack. A series of hard frosts had killed the crops they’d planted afterward, leaving only mud and ash and wilted, rotting stalks. 

Nor has Westeros seen the end of war, between Euron’s eldritch apocalypse coming to the Reach and Aegon’s invasion through the Stormlands, so the stresses of war on food stores will only grow worse. Indeed, Lady Mertyns notes this problem offhand in the “Arianne II” sample chapter:

“We are no thieves,” said Mudd. “We’re foragers.”

“Did you buy all that food down in the yard?”

“We foraged it,” said Mudd. “The smallfolk can grow more.[”]

“No one’s been doing any raping,” insisted Young John Mudd. “Connington won’t have that. We follow orders.”

Chain nodded. “Some girls was persuaded, might be.”

“The same way our smallfolk were persuaded to give you all their crops. Melons or maidenheads, it’s all the same to your sort.[”]

Even those places that have not seen direct fighting have suffered, because of the problems Alys Karstark points out to Jon:

“My lady, how do things stand at Karhold with your food stores?”

“Not well.” Alys sighed. “My father took so many of our men south with him that only the women and young boys were left to bring the harvest in. Them, and the men too old or crippled to go off to war. Crops withered in the fields or were pounded into the mud by autumn rains. And now the snows are come. This winter will be hard. Few of the old people will survive it, and many children will perish as well.”

War has not just demanded the food already stored away in preparation for winter, to feed the armies of the lords; it has also negatively affected the ability of those left behind to gather in more crops to offset those losses. It’s a double blow to the Westerosi, which can only mean terrible consequences in TWOW.

Moreover, as people have fled the threat of death and sought shelter with better-provisioned hosts, the stress on normal food stores is going to be that much more - and that’s not counting the particular fierceness of the coming winter.

The huge oak-and-iron doors of the Old Mint had always been closed when Davos had been in Fishfoot Yard before, but today they stood open. Inside he glimpsed hundreds of women, children, and old men, huddled on the floor on piles of furs. Some had little cookfires going.

Davos stopped beneath the colonnade and traded a halfpenny for an apple. “Are people living in the Old Mint?” he asked the apple seller.

“Them as have no other place to live. Smallfolk from up the White Knife, most o’ them. Hornwood’s people too. With that Bastard o’ Bolton running loose, they all want to be inside the walls. I don’t know what his lordship means to do with all o’ them. Most turned up with no more'n the rags on their backs.”

Jon had just been thinking that all the meat in the world surrounded them. You know nothing, Jon Snow. “How so? This seems a deal of food to me.”

“It was a long summer. The harvests were bountiful, the lords generous. We had enough laid by to see us through three years of winter. Four, with a bit of scrimping. Now, though, if we must go on feeding all these king’s men and queen’s men and wildlings … Mole’s Town alone has a thousand useless mouths, and still they come. Three more turned up yesterday at the gates, a dozen the day before. It cannot go on. Settling them on the Gift, that’s well and good, but it is too late to plant crops. We’ll be down to turnips and pease porridge before the year is out. After that we’ll be drinking the blood of our own horses.”

White Harbor is a bustling port, and as Bowen Marsh notes, the Wall has been well-provisioned, albeit for only a three- to four-year winter. They still have stores, albeit now will much more added stress. Other places, though, have not fared so well:

Winterfell’s storerooms and cellar vaults were empty. A long supply train had come with Bolton and his friends of Frey up through the Neck, Lady Dustin had brought food and fodder from Barrowton, and Lord Manderly had arrived well provisioned from White Harbor … but the host was large. With so many mouths to feed, their stores could not last for long. 

Winterfell has long helped its vassals and smallfolk survive the winter, with the winter town outside its walls providing shelter and provisions for those unable to survive the harsh conditions elsewhere. Now, with Winterfell depleted, there will be nothing to give the winter town when the really hard snows begin to fall - bad news indeed for those who have traditionally relied up it to live.

All of this leads to the vulgar but true conclusion Harwood Stout’s cook states in ADWD:

The riders had been sixteen days on the hunt, with only hard bread and salt beef to eat, aside from the occasional stolen kid, so that night Lord Ramsay commanded that a feast be laid to celebrate his return to Barrowton. Their host, a grizzled one-armed petty lord by the name of Harwood Stout, knew better than to refuse him, though by now his larders must be well nigh exhausted. Reek had heard Stout’s servants muttering at how the Bastard and his men were eating through the winter stores. “He’ll bed Lord Eddard’s little girl, they say,” Stout’s cook complained when she did not know that Reek was listening, “but we’re the ones who’ll be fucked when the snows come, you mark my words.”

Oh, and there’s one more thing … cannibalism. Cannibalism is rampant in the FeastDance, from the ominous stories of Skagos remembered by Sam and Davos (the latter now on his way there):

Some songs said the Skaggs were cannibals; supposedly their warriors ate the hearts and livers of the men they slew. In ancient days, the Skagosi had sailed to the nearby isle of Skane, seized its women, slaughtered its men, and ate them on a pebbled beach in a feast that lasted for a fortnight. Skane remained unpeopled to this day.

For half a heartbeat Davos considered asking Wyman Manderly to send him back to the Wolf’s Den, to Ser Bartimus with his tales and Garth with his lethal ladies. In the Den even prisoners ate porridge in the morning. But there were other places in this world where men were known to break their fast on human flesh.

To the “sow” Coldhands finds for Bran and Co. as they travel to the three-eyed crow:

Meera Reed was turning a chunk of raw red flesh above the flames, letting it char and spit. “Just in time,” she said. Bran rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and wriggled backwards against the wall to sit. “You almost slept through supper. The ranger found a sow.”

“What happened to the men? The foes behind us?”

“They will not trouble you.”

“Who were they? Wildlings?”

Meera turned the meat to cook the other side. Hodor was chewing and swallowing, muttering happily under his breath. Only Jojen seemed aware of what was happening as Coldhands turned his head to stare at Bran. “They were foes.”

Men of the Night’s Watch. “You killed them. You and the ravens. Their faces were all torn, and their eyes were gone.” Coldhands did not deny it. “They were your brothers. I saw. The wolves had ripped their clothes up, but I could still tell. Their cloaks were black. Like your hands.”

To the desperation of Stannis’ men on the long march to Winterfell (with a particular ominous thought from Asha):

And there was no food, beyond their failing horses, fish taken from the lakes (fewer every day), and whatever meagre sustenance their foragers could find in these cold, dead woods. With the king’s knights and lords claiming the lion’s share of the horsemeat, little and less remained for the common men. Small wonder then that they had started eating their own dead.

Asha had been as horrified as the rest when the She-Bear told her that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late Lord Fell’s, carving chunks of flesh from his thighs and buttocks as one of his forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to be surprised. The four were not the first to taste human flesh during this grim march, she would wager—only the first to be discovered.

To the suffering of the Astapori reported back to Daenerys:

Suffering was the only thing they did not lack. “There is scarcely a horse or mule left, though many rode from Astapor,” Marselen reported to her. “They’ve eaten every one, Your Grace, along with every rat and scavenger dog that they could catch. Now some have begun to eat their own dead.”

“Man must not eat the flesh of man,” said Aggo.

“It is known,” agreed Rahkaro. “They will be cursed.”

(And, though not done out of desperation of course, the jolly vengeance of Wyman Manderly as he served the flesh of Rhaegar, Symond, and Jared Frey.)

Often starving and desperate, people have already turned to cannibalism to survive, and winter is only going to get worse in the last two books. Men will be lucky if, as Bowen Marsh gloomily predicted, they have to eat the flesh of their own horses. More likely, we’re going to see a lot more people feasting on their own dead.