ATTENTION: the article does not contain spoilers neither on Beef – The clash nor on Game of Thrones, it is only an imaginative reworking of the Beef story set in the times of GOT.
The mount of Jaime Lannister she was nervous, agitated. The eldest son of Castelgranito galloped through the dirt roads of the Valley, away from the busiest King’s Road, the main artery that connected the Seven Kingdoms to the capital. Several hours had now passed since Sir Jaime had decided to detach the caravan following the queen and travel alone the last miles that separated him from King’s Landing. The journey had been exhausting. The proximity of Euron Greyjoy, the heir to the Iron Islands, itched him. Its stench of must, the hoarse and arrogant voice, the slimy looks that floated from one prey to another, caused him a physical discomfort in the stomach. If he’d had a hand of flesh in place of that stiff stump, he’d have banged them hard. But Jaime Lannister’s sword was no longer as swift as it once was, so the heir of Castelgranito was forced to assess the situation from time to time, curb the most violent impulses and breathe. Basically breathe. But sometimes – and lately it happened to him more and more frequently – his breath caught in his throat, the oxygen struggled to reach his brain and the risk of give in to anger became more and more concrete. The Beef is around the corner, the clash is around the corner. Always. Literally.
As he set off at a gallop, haunted by Cersei’s complaisant face smiling at Euron Greyjoy, Jaime didn’t realize that, just around the corner, a knight in armor was quenching his horse’s thirst. He grabbed the reins and tried to steer just before impact, but his wooden hand didn’t have the quickness of his old right arm, so the fight with the rider was inevitable. Traveling bag, sword and scabbard flew away. The horse nearly went lame and struggled to its feet, while the man riding it went straight into the mud, taken aback by Jaime’s unexpected arrival. The Kingslayer didn’t even have time to stop and realize what had happened. Partly to escape any kind of justification, partly because anger hadn’t completely left him yet, Jaime went straight and pushed his horse even faster, intending to run away and not look back. However, the knight, a moment after becoming aware of having been overwhelmed by a galloping madman, decided that the victim would not have gotten away with it. He grabbed his sword without even sheathing it, mounted his steed and he set off in pursuit of Sir Jaime. The rough roads that climbed to the edge of the Vale of Arryn were overwhelmed by the fury of the two riders who, one for one reason and another, felt the urgent need to vent your anger (e Beef in fact it is precisely the anger to recognize oneself alive). The man who had been run over took a shortcut to cut off Jaime’s path. He pounced on him suddenly, sending his horse off the trail. The Kingslayer slipped from his saddle and fell to the ground with a thud that they must have felt all the way to the shores of Essos. His pursuer leapt at him and began to strike him with the hilt of his sword. The two grabbed each other’s shoulders, rolling down a cliff, among overhanging roots and voluminous bushes. Finally, Jaime managed to free himself from the attacker’s grip, punched him in the side and pushed his helmet off: she was a woman.
A hideous woman, with straw-colored hair, teeth too big for a hollow face like hers, and jutting jaws.
– And you, who the hell are you?
– My name is Brienne of Tarth and I’m about to kill you.
From Jaime’s mouth came the biggest laugh he’d ever had in his life.
– I beg your pardon, my lady. I thought the giants had been extinct for thousands of years. I didn’t think there were still female specimens on this side of the Wall.
‘Where the hell do you look when you ride, Kingslayer?’
– Oh, not in your direction, that’s for sure.
The wild face of Brienne of Tarth took on a color dangerously tending to purplish. She kicked Jaime in the side and left his arrogant face momentarily breathless. What mannersyelled the Kingslayer, with the usual teasing grin that made him so detestable. The two brawled for a while longer, with Brienne of Tarth shouting expletives with her hands raised to the sky and Jaime Lannister trying more than once to pluck a strand of yellow hair from her head. There mess this went on for hours, until the Kingslayer received a blow to the back of his neck and fell unconscious to the ground. He awoke three days later in his bed in the Red Keep, with the contemptuous look of Cersei who teased him without saying a word. The anger that had driven him away from his sister and from Euron, all of a sudden returned, making the veins in his neck throb. As tender as the image of you lying passed out in the arms of a poor farmer from the Valley is, do you realize the shame this brings to our family? , Cersei asked him, a hint of pleasure in her voice. The Kingslayer put his butt in the dust by a fortune-seeking lout. Jaime didn’t even try to tell his sister his story.
Horrible days passed after those of the great one beef with Brienne of Tarth.
The Kingslayer always felt the mocking gaze of Cersei and all the Royal Guard upon him. And as if that weren’t enough, the snooty Euron Greyjoy had begun to make irony about Jaime’s misadventure in front of the diners at the court banquets. In the weeks that followed, the heir of Castle Granite devised the most imaginative and heinous expedients to make Brienne of Tarth pay. Every time his anger attacked him, he imagined the woman’s face in front of him and punched Sir Meryn Trant to vent his frustration. Still, Jaime he didn’t have to wait long to follow up on his plans for revenge. On the occasion of her uncle Kevan’s wedding to one of Walder Frey’s daughters, the blond whore of Tarth – as she had come to call her – appeared at court to deliver a message to her queen. Dressed in trimmed armor and ladylike bearing, the woman was even more silly. Cersei of course made fun of her all the time. He looked her up and down, with that air of superiority that Jaime loved – or maybe he hated? – until he writhed in his own guts. The more she stared at the back of Brienne of Tarth’s neck, the more she wanted to stick a dagger into it, gently, very slowly. Still, there was something about this woman that held back Jaime’s impulses. Was it just that naive air? The uncertain movement of her jaw when her most venomous comments threw her off balance? The blush on that big bruised face when she was embarrassed?
Faster than the sympathy though was the searing heat of hers desire for revenge. While the woman in armor walked with a wounded gaze the vast corridor that separated her from the throne, under the amused gaze of those present, what today we would call the spirit of the most ignorant pitch bomber took possession of Jaime Lannister for a moment and pushed him to commit the most practiced of improprieties – the one which, from the third category stadiums to the Wimbledon lawn, always registers 100% effectiveness -: lo tripped. The muscular body of Brienne of Tarth fell to the ground in the most ungraceful way possible, under the coarse laughter of the lords who witnessed the scene. A shiver of euphoria ran up Jaime’s spine. But the feeling of satisfaction lasted just an instant, just long enough to witness the rain of insults that fell on the girl’s flushed face, and then gave way to a sense of unease barely perceptible, but still incisive. Jaime waited for the great hubbub of the Throne Room to die down, remained dumbfounded for a moment longer and finally decided to go towards Brienne, just at the moment in which the woman, getting up from the icy floor of the room, was throwing a football in the so-called family jewels. Jaime couldn’t help it and the excruciating pain that forced him to double over on the floor, reflexively urged him to jump down the woman’s throat. The fight resumed right where it had last stopped, with the two squabbling each other with slaps, insults, punches, knees and shoves amidst the most imaginative insults.
– But aren’t you tired?
The question suddenly rose in Jaime’s throat, for no reason. Brienne pushed him away, but this time she did it less vigorously than a moment before, as if by some sort of automaticity.
– I’m tired.
A long moment of silence followed, during which the two knights laid down their weapons and remained motionless, with their backs resting on the icy floor of the Throne Room. Both felt that consistent emptiness of their lives (which Beef the series made tangible). Brienne was thinking back to the fool of a moment before her, Cersei’s slashing gaze, the insults of those men, all the times she had felt horrible, graceless, inadequate, awkward, awkward. Her life had been a long attempt to prove to all those people that she was worth more than they believed. The armor she wore was meant to make the insults slide better, but those managed to penetrate even the strongest iron and settle where they hurt the most, where they left open scars that no serum could ever fully heal. Jaime finally felt like being able to sneak into the woman’s thoughts. She saw them distinctly, felt their shame, yet she felt no joy whatsoever in knowing her sad and bewildered. A strange disturbance floated over their restless, empty heads. Jaime’s throbbing discomfort reminded him of all the reasons he hated his sister Cersei. From that perspective, with his lower back smeared at the foot of the imposing throne on which sovereigns and tyrants had sat, he seemed to clearly distinguish what was killing him, the obsessions that kept him nailed to a life as a supporting actor, unsatisfactory, inadequate , stressful.
You can’t choose who to love, she reminded him of Brienne of Tarthbut you can choose who to ask for help. Jaime was tired. Exhausted. And maybe it was just help that he was looking for. But he didn’t have the courage to admit it, not there, not now. And then he bit his lip, pulled himself up, fished that sarcastic grin out of the fog of murky thoughts in which he had just lost his way and so, almost for fun, he gave another push to the giant woman who towered over him with her warning gaze.
– I kill you, Jaime Lannister!
*** Beefthe real one, is available on Netflix with all its episodes!
