A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle
Page 89
The Targaryens are the blood of the dragon, descended from the high lords of the ancient Freehold of Valyria, their heritage proclaimed in a striking (some say inhuman) beauty, with lilac or indigo or violet eyes and hair of silver-gold or platinum white.
Aegon the Dragon’s ancestors escaped the Doom of Valyria and the chaos and slaughter that followed to settle on Dragonstone, a rocky island in the narrow sea. It was from there that Aegon and his sisters Visenya and Rhaenys sailed to conquer the Seven Kingdoms. To preserve the blood royal and keep it pure, House Targaryen has often followed the Valyrian custom of wedding brother to sister. Aegon himself took both his sisters to wife, and fathered sons on each. The Targaryen banner is a three-headed dragon, red on black, the three heads representing Aegon and his sisters. The Targaryen words are Fire and Blood.
THE TARGARYEN SUCCESSION
dated by years after Aegon’s Landing
1–37 Aegon I Aegon the Conquerer, Aegon the Dragon,
37–42 Aenys I son of Aegon and Rhaenys,
42–48 Maegor I Maegor the Cruel, son of Aegon and Visenya,
48–103 Jaehaerys I the Old King, the Conciliator, Aenys’ son,
103–129 Viserys I grandson to Jaehaerys,
129–131 Aegon II eldest son of Viserys,
[Aegon II’s ascent was disputed by his sister Rhaenyra, a year his elder. Both perished in the war between them, called by singers the Dance of the Dragons.]
131–157 Aegon III the Dragonbane, Rhaenyra’s son,
[The last of the Targaryen dragons died during the reign of Aegon III.]
157–161 Daeron I the Young Dragon, the Boy King, eldest son of Aegon III, [Daeron conquered Dorne, but was unable to hold it, and died young.]
161–171 Baelor I the Beloved, the Blessed, septon and king, second son of Aegon III,
171–172 Viserys II younger brother of Aegon III,
172–184 Aegon IV the Unworthy, eldest son of Viserys,
[His younger brother, Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, was champion and some say lover to Queen Naerys.]
184–209 Daeron II Queen Naerys’ son, by Aegon or Aemon, [Daeron brought Dorne into the realm by wedding the Dornish princess Myriah.]
209–221 Aerys I second son to Daeron II (left no issue),
221–233 Maekar I fourth son of Daeron II,
233–259 Aegon V the Unlikely, Maekar’s fourth
259–262 Jaehaerys II second son of Aegon the Unlikely,
262–283 Aerys II the Mad King, only son to Jaehaerys,
Therein the line of the dragon kings ended, when Aerys II was dethroned and killed, along with his heir, the crown prince Rhaegar Targaryen, slain by Robert Baratheon on the Trident.
THE LAST TARGARYENS
{KING AERYS TARGARYEN}, the Second of His Name, slain by Jaime Lannister during the Sack of King’s Landing,
— his sister and wife, {QUEEN RHAELLA} of House
Targaryen, died in childbed on Dragonstone,
— their children: —{PRINCE RHAEGAR}, heir to the Iron Throne, slain
by Robert Baratheon on the Trident,
— his wife, {PRINCESS ELIA} of House Martell, slain
during the Sack of King’s Landing,
— their children:
—{PRINCESS RHAENYS}, a young girl, slain during the
Sack of King’s Landing,
—{PRINCE AEGON}, a babe, slain during the Sack of
King’s Landing,
— PRINCE VISERYS, styling himself Viserys, the Third of
His Name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, called the Beggar King,
— PRINCESS DAENERYS, called Daenerys Stormborn, a maid
of thirteen years.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The devil is in the details, they say.
A book this size has a lot of devils, any one of which will bite you if you don’t watch out. Fortunately, I know a lot of angels.
Thanks and appreciation, therefore, to all those good folks who so kindly lent me their ears and their expertise (and in some cases their books) so I could get all those little details right—to Sage Walker, Martin Wright, Melinda Snodgrass, Carl Keim, Bruce Baugh, Tim O’Brien, Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold, and Laura J. Mixon, and of course to Parris.
And a special thanks to Jennifer Hershey, for labors above and beyond the call …
About the Author
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN sold his first story in 1971 and has been writing professionally since then. He spent ten years in Hollywood as a writer-producer, working on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and television pilots that were never made. In the mid ’90s he returned to prose, his first love, and began work on his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. He has been in the Seven Kingdoms ever since. Whenever he’s allowed to leave, he returns to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives with the lovely Parris, a big white dog called Mischa, and two cats named Augustus and Caligula, who think they run the place.
George R. R. Martin is full of surprises!
In
A CLASH OF KINGS
the riveting sequel to
A GAME OF THRONES
George not only continues the tales of characters we have come to know and love, but also adds some new stories to the mix.
Here’s a preview:
THEON
There was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to look on his father’s castle from the sea, to see it as he had seen it last, ten years before, when Robert Baratheon’s war galley had borne him from the island to be a ward of Eddard Stark. On that day he had stood beside the rail, listening to the stroke of the oars and the pounding of the master’s drum while he watched Pyke grow smaller and smaller in the distance, until it vanished beneath a green horizon. Now he wanted to see it grow larger, to rise from the sea before him.
Obedient to his wishes, the Myraham beat her way past the point with her sails snapping and her captain cursing the wind and his crew and the follies of highborn lordlings. Theon drew the hood of his cloak up against the spray, and looked for home.
The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green moss, speckled by the droppings of the same sea birds. The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the great waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past. All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and crashed around them.
Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and pillars, almost a part of them, its curtain walls closing off the headland to guard the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from the clifftop to the largest islet, dominated by massive bulk of the Great Keep, whose walls still bore the scars of Robert Baratheon’s assault. Further out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep, each on its own stony island at the end of a high, vaulting bridge. Towers and outbuildings clung to the stacks beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the pillars stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when they did not. The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the sheer-sided pillar on which it stood half eaten through by the endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the moss that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown black with soot from its nightly watchfire.
Above the Sea Tower snapped his father’s sigil on a long banner with three tails. The Myraham was too far off for Theon to see more than the cloth itself, but he knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House Greyjoy, arms writhing and reaching against the black field. The banne
r streamed from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the wind gusted, like a bird struggling to take flight. Best of all, the direwolf of Stark did not fly above, casting its shadow down upon the Greyjoy kraken.
Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind the castle, the fine red tail of the comet was visible through thin, scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the Mallisters had argued about its meaning. It is my comet, Theon told himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the oilskin pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark had given him, paper as good as a crown.
“Does the castle look as you remember it, milord?” the captain’s daughter asked as she pressed herself against his arm.
“It looks smaller,” Theon confessed, “though perhaps that is only the distance.” The Myraham was a fat-bellied southron merchanter up from Oldtown, carrying wine and spice and seed to trade for iron ore. Her captain was a fat-bellied southron merchanter as well, and the stony sea that foamed at the feet of the castle made his plump lips quiver, so he stayed well out, further than Theon would have liked. An ironborn captain in a longship would have taken them along the cliffs and under the high bridge that spanned the gap between the gatehouse and the Great Keep, but this plump Oldtowner had neither the craft, the crew, nor the courage to attempt such a thing. So they sailed past at a safe distance, and Theon must content himself with seeing Pyke from afar. Even so, the Myraham had to struggle mightily to keep itself off those rocks.
“It must be windy there,” the captain’s daughter observed.
He laughed. “Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard place, in truth … but my lord father once told me that hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the world.”
The captain’s face was as green as the sea when he came bowing up to Theon and asked, “May we make for port now, milord?”
“You may,” Theon said, a faint smile playing about his lips. The promise of gold had turned the Oldtowner into a shameless lickspittle. It would have been a much different voyage if a longship from the islands had been waiting at Seagard, as he’d hoped. Ironborn captains were proud and wilful, and did not go in awe of a man’s blood. The islands were too small for awe, and a longship smaller still. If every captain was a king aboard his own ship, as was often said, it was small wonder they named the islands the land of ten thousand kings. And when you have seen your kings shit over the rail and turn green in a storm, it was hard to bend the knee and pretend they were a god. “The Drowned God makes men,” old King Urron Redhand had once said, thousands of years ago, “but it’s men who make crowns.”
The Myraham was rounding a wooded point. Below the pine-clad bluffs, a dozen fishing boats were pulling in their nets. The big merchanter stayed well out from them, tacking. Theon moved to the bow for a better view. He saw the castle first, the stronghold of the Botleys, a lesser house sworn to his father. When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but Robert Baratheon had razed that structure to the ground. Lord Sawane had rebuilt in stone, for now a small square keep crowned the hill. Pale green flags drooped from the squat corner towers; the Botley banner, he knew, emblazoned with a shoal of silvery fish.
Beneath the dubious protection of the fish-ridden little castle lay the village of Lordsport, its harbor aswarm with ships. When last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland, the skeletons of burnt galleys lying black on the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes. After ten years, few traces of the war remained. The smallfolk had built new hovels with the stones of the old, and cut fresh sod for their roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing, twice the size of the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and two upper stories of timber. The sept beyond had never been rebuilt, though; only a seven-sided foundation remained to show where it had stood. Robert Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste for the new gods, it would seem.
Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts of countless fishing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley offloading beside a lumbering Ibbanese cog with her black-tarred hull. A great number of longships, fifty or sixty at the least, stood out to sea or lay beached on the pebbled shore to the north. So many, he thought, uneasy. Theon could not recall ever seeing this many longships in Lordsport before, save on the eve of his father’s ill-fated rebellion. And some of the sails bore devices from the other islands; the blood moon of Wynch, Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn, Harlaw’s silver scythe. He searched for a glimpse of his uncle Euron’s Silence. Of that lean and terrible red ship he saw no sign, but his father’s Great Kraken was there, looming over the lesser craft, her bow ornamented with a grey iron ram in the shape of its namesake.
Had Lord Balon anticipated him and called the Greyjoy banners when he received Robb’s message from Riverrun? His hand went inside his cloak again, to the oilskin pouch. No one knew of his letter but Robb Stark; they were no fools, and only a fool entrusted his secrets to a bird. Still, Lord Balon was no fool either. He might well have guessed why his son was coming home at long last, and acted accordingly.
The thought did not please him. His father’s war was long done, and lost. This was Theon’s hour—his plan, his glory, and in time, his crown. Yet if the longships are hosting …
It might be only a caution, now that he thought on it. A defensive move, lest the war spill out across the sea. Old men were cautious by nature. His father was old now, and so too his uncle Victarion, who commanded the Iron Fleet. His uncle Euron was a different song, to be sure, but the Silence did not seem to be in port. It is for the good, Theon told himself. This way, I shall be able to strike all the more quickly.
As the Myraham made her way landward, Theon paced the deck restlessly, scanning the shore. He had not thought to find Lord Balon himself waiting at quayside, but surely his father would have sent someone to meet him. Old Sylas Sourmouth the steward, or perhaps Lord Botley or Dagmer Cleftjaw. They knew he was coming. Robb had sent word before Theon left Riverrun, and when they’d found no longship waiting at Seagard, Lord Jason Mallister had sent his own birds to Pyke, supposing that Robb’s were lost.
Yet he saw no familiar faces on the landing, no honor guard of riders to escort him from Lordsport to Pyke, only smallfolk going about their small business. Shorehands rolled casks of wine off the Tyroshi trader, fisherfolk cried the day’s catch, children ran and played. A priest in the seawater robes of the Drowned God was leading a pair of horses along the pebbled shore, while above him a slattern leaned out a window in the inn, calling out to some passing Ibbanese sailors.
A handful of Lordsport merchants had gathered to meet the ship. They shouted up questions as the Myraham was tying up. “We’re out of Oldtown,” the captain called down in reply, “bearing apples and oranges, wines from the Arbor, feathers from the Summer Isles. I have pepper, woven leathers, a bolt of Myrish lace, mirrors for milady, a pair of Oldtown woodharps sweet as any you ever heard.” The gangplank descended with a creak and a thud. “And I’ve brought your heir back to you.”
The Lordsport men gazed on Theon with blank, bovine eyes, and he realized that they did not know who he was. It made him angry. He pressed a golden dragon into the captain’s palm. “Have your men bring my things.” Without waiting for a reply, he strode down the gangplank. “Innkeep,” he barked, “I require a horse.”
“As you say, m’lord,” the man responded, without so much as a bow. He had forgotten how bold the ironborn could be. “Happens as I have one might do. Where would you be riding, m’lord?”
“Pyke,” Theon snapped curtly. The fool still did not know him. He should have worn his good doublet, with the kraken embroidered on the breast, that would have left no question.
“You’ll want to be off soon, to reach Pyke afore dark,” the innkeep said. “My boy will go with you and show you the way.”
“Your boy will not be needed,” a deep voice called, “nor your horse. I shall see my nephew bac
k to his father’s house.”
The speaker was the priest he had seen leading the horses along the shoreline. As the man approached, the smallfolk bent the knee, and Theon heard the innkeep murmur, “Damphair.”
Tall and thin, with fierce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the priest was garbed in mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the swirling colors of the Drowned God. A waterskin hung under his arm on a leather strap, and ropes of dried seaweed were braided through his waist-long black hair and untrimmed beard.
Theon frowned at the prod of memory. In one of his few curt letters, Lord Balon had written of his youngest brother going down in a storm, and turning holy when he washed up safe on shore. “Uncle Aeron?” he said, doubtfully.
“Nephew Theon,” the priest replied. “Your lord father bid me fetch you. Come.”
“In a moment, uncle.” He turned back to the Myraham. “My things,” he commanded the captain.
A sailor fetched him down his tall yew bow and quiver of arrows, but it was the captain’s daughter who brought the pack with his good clothing. “Milord.” Her eyes were red. When he took the pack, she made as if to embrace him, there in front of her own father and his priestly uncle and half the island.
Theon turned deftly aside. “You have my thanks.”
“Please,” she said, “I do love you well, milord.”
“I must go.” He hurried after his uncle, who was already well down the pier. Theon caught him with a dozen long strides. “I had not looked for you, uncle. After ten years, I thought perhaps my lord father and lady mother might come themselves, or send Dagmer with an honor guard.”
“It is not for you to question the commands of the Lord Reaper of Pyke.” The priest’s manner was chilly, most unlike the man Theon remembered. Aeron Greyjoy had been the most amiable of his uncles, feckless and quick to laugh, fond of songs, ale, and women. “As to Dagmer, the Cleftjaw is gone to Old Wyk at your father’s behest, to roust the Stonehouses and the Drumms.”