Chapter 55: Concrete!

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Dacey required about five minutes to compose herself. After that, she and her husband left the maester's chambers.

Word spread quickly through the moat that its lady was with child. Luckily, Gregor and Dacey were able to partly control how the news travelled.

The ten members of the secret council were told first. Then the top officers of the Legion without Banners. After that, the common soldiers, the retainers of House Clegane, and the residents of the adjoining towns were informed.

The overall response to the news was one of ecstasy. Gregor and Dacey wrote to their families, apprising them of the news. Lady Maege Mormont and Lady Daliah Clegane were both delighted that they would soon be grandmothers.

Ser Tarrence Clegane was proud of his son for starting his line of succession so soon after his marriage.

Sandor was happy that he would be an uncle, as were Ellyn, Alysane, Lyra, and Jorelle happy that they would become aunts.

At the behest of his fellow Legionnaires, a small feast was held to celebrate the looming arrival of Gregor's heir.

Gregor made sure to keep it a small feast. He had no desire to needlessly waste food, even on a joyous occasion such as this one.

Proper management of provisions was critical to maintaining the integrity of the Legion. Aside from that, Westeros would soon face another winter, and no one could afford to have insufficient stores then.

This last summer had been a short one. Hopefully, the subsequent winter would be no longer.

Gregor had seen about six or seven winters throughout his childhood in the Westerlands. All of those had been relatively mild, and House Clegane of Clegane's Keep had gotten through them without any substantial loss.

But these last two winters in the North… they had been something else entirely.

Although he had never entered the southern half of the United States until he started college, Gregory Welch's childhood had not been confined to the northern half of the country. He had an aunt and an uncle who lived in Canada.

On several occasions, Gregory, his parents, and his siblings had paid them a visit. As it happened, his aunt and uncle liked to travel.

Every time Gregory's family visited them, they met up in a different city. Among the cities they had seen were Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, and Toronto.

Whichever town he went to, Gregory had always enjoyed his vacations in Canada.

With one minor exception.

When he was thirteen, he and his family had travelled to Winnipeg. There had been no wrong with the city itself or its occupants. The true problem was the climate, as they had gone there in the middle of January.

During winter, Winnipeg was supposedly the coldest perpetually inhabitable point on Earth in the Western Hemisphere. Gregory had discovered firsthand that that allegation was quite true.

His family had stayed there for a week, but they spent a total of eleven hours of that interval outside. The temperature rarely rose above zero, and there was always at least eighteen inches of snow on the ground.

Often the roads were too icy for vehicular transportation, so they were usually forced to walk whenever they went somewhere.

That had to be the roughest winter of Gregory's first life.

But in spite of how lousy that experience had been, Gregor felt that winter in Winnipeg was still preferable to winter in the North. At least in Winnipeg, snowstorms generally only lasted a few hours, and there were days when no fresh snow fell at all.

This reprieve was not to be found anywhere in the North. There seemed to be a blizzard every day. On a merciful day, there was two feet of snow on the ground. On a harsh day (and those outnumbered merciful ones three times over), there was four feet.

The average temperature was usually five to fifteen degrees colder than that of what the average had been in Winnipeg.

Gregor had already survived two winters in the North, but that did not make the prospect of facing a third one any more appealing.

There was also the painful reminder that the Legion had not emerged unscathed from either of the first two winters.

During the first winter, the renovations to Moat Cailin were still underway. There was too little room in the towers that had been built to house all of the Legion's members.

Even when every inch of free indoor space was allocated, many of them were forced to sleep outside.

To keep warm, they camped around large bonfires which were refueled with ironwood every hour. Despite these efforts, fifty-eight Legionnaires had perished in the snows.

The second winter had been even more catastrophic. Although Moat Cailin was by then large enough for the entire Legion, it was not large enough to include the smallfolk in the newly-built adjoining towns.

The houses in those villages were strong and firm in the summer, but against the full fury of Northern snows in wintertime, they provided inadequate shelter.

Only eleven Legionnaires had died, but nearly a hundred smallfolk had been lost, as well. In Gregor's mind, civilian casualties were always far worse than martial casualties.

Naturally, he would not allow the people of Moat Cailin to suffer these hardships a third time. He would take measures to ensure they did not.

Nearly all of the losses on both occasions were attributed to poor or insufficient housing. Gregor had noticed that, and he had taken steps to rectify that predicament. The houses in the villages were reinforced, and more towers had been erected in the moat.

Now, every house in the villages could withstand even the fiercest of blizzards.

And even if they could not, the fourteen towers of the provided enough rooms so that the Legionnaires and the townspeople could live together comfortably.

Interestingly, they would still have enough space that the living conditions would not be overcrowded.

Gregor was pleased by these breakthroughs. Not only would he guarantee the well-being of all the people staying at Moat Cailin, but there would also be no need to seek a safer haven elsewhere.

Gregor would not have forced his people to brave another brutal winter at Moat Cailin unprepared. If he had been unable to give his people suitable living quarters when the winter snows came, the only option would have been for the Legion and the smallfolk to relocate south until summer returned.

Gregor was determined to keep the Legion without Banners in the North as much as possible. That was one of the main reasons why the Mountain had chosen Moat Cailin as its base of operations: its location.

Actually, the location of the moat accounted for two of the reasons for picking Moat Cailin as his new stronghold and the headquarters for the Legion without Banners

The first reason was because of its surroundings. From the south, it was protected by miles of marshland and bog. They formed a natural barrier from anything that came up the Kingsroad.

Of course, the true threats would come from the north. However, from that direction, the moat had no barricades, natural or otherwise.

To be precise, it had nothing of the sort before Gregor came along. That was another of the amendments he had imposed upon the moat.

After the villages and the new towers had been raised, Gregor had seen to the construction of a wall that bordered the lands immediately north of Moat Cailin.

The wall was not made of stone, wood, metal, or any traditional type of foundation. It was made of something that had not even existed in the world before Gregor came along.

When the Essosi architects first arrived at Moat Cailin, Gregor had presented them with a compound he had put together himself. The compound was a batch of homemade concrete.

The architects were greatly impressed by the concrete and its uses. They asked to know how this compound had been created, and Gregor obliged them with a summary of the smelting process.

In order to make concrete, Gregor needed cement, which also had yet to be invented.

Luckily, he had the means to create that, as well. He had put together large amounts of clay and calcite-rich limestone, and he combined them with equal portions of water and sand. His blacksmiths heated the ingredients together in the forges of Moat Cailin.

The resulting mixture was a little crude, but it was sturdy and malleable enough to accomplish its intended use.

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