Aegon’s Conquest

In the space of two years a family of exiles from a drowned empire made themselves masters of a continent. The chronicle sets the tale down plainly, for the wonder needs no embellishing: it was done with fire, and with the good sense of men who had seen the fire and preferred to bend.

1. The dragonlords who waited

   For a hundred years after the Doom drowned Valyria, House Targaryen kept to a wet grey rock in Blackwater Bay and troubled no one greatly. They wed brother to sister in the old fashion, traded with the Free Cities, and let the last of their dragons grow fat and slow on the crags of Dragonstone. To the great lords of Westeros they were a curiosity: exiles with silver hair and one small castle, sitting on the doorstep of a continent that had forgotten them.

   Then Aegon, son of Aerion, had a table carved in the likeness of Westeros — every river and ridge upon it, and not one border drawn between the kingdoms. A maester notes the omission and lets it speak. Aegon was in no haste. He declined a crown offered him in a war among the Free Cities, answered the letters of Westerosi lords with courtesy, and studied a realm he had never set foot in. What moved him at last the chroniclers cannot agree upon — insult, ambition, or the prophecy his house has always claimed to carry. He moved.

2. The landing and the burning of Harrenhal

   Aegon Targaryen came ashore at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush with his two sister-wives, fewer than sixteen hundred swords, and three dragons. Against him stood seven kingdoms that could muster tens of thousands of spears between them. The arithmetic looks damning until one recalls the three dragons. On three hills above the water his men raised a wooden fort; those hills would in time bear King’s Landing, though on that first day they bore only mud and ambition.

   The first king to answer was Harren the Black, who had spent forty years and the lives of countless smallfolk raising Harrenhal, the largest castle ever built in Westeros. Its five towers were thick enough, Harren reckoned, to laugh at any host. Aegon rode beneath the walls and offered terms: “Dragons fly.” Harren trusted his stone. That night Balerion the Black Dread came down out of the dark, and the towers ran like tallow with Harren and his sons inside them. The castle has stood a ruin, and reputedly cursed, ever since — which is what a maester writes when he means that no lord who has held it has ever prospered.

3. The Field of Fire

   The Kings of the Rock and the Reach did not make Harren’s mistake of trusting walls; they made the older mistake of trusting numbers. Loren Lannister and Mern Gardener joined their hosts — fifty-five thousand men, the largest army Westeros had yet seen — and met the Targaryens in the open fields of the Reach. For the only time in the Conquest, all three dragons flew together: Balerion, Vhagar, and Meraxes, ridden by Aegon and his sisters.

   The tall golden grass caught, and the host burned in it. Four thousand men died by fire, and thousands more by the rout that followed. Mern of House Gardener perished with every heir of his body, ending three thousand years of Gardener kings; his steward Harlan Tyrell yielded Highgarden and was raised to lord of it, which is how stewards become great houses. Loren Lannister had the wit to flee, and the further wit to return and kneel, and so kept the Rock. The lesson of the Field of Fire was never the courage of men. It was distance from the flame.

4. The King Who Knelt

   In the North, Torrhen Stark called his banners and marched thirty thousand men to the Trident, meaning to do what the southrons had failed to do. There he sat with the river between his host and Aegon’s, and there word reached him of the Field of Fire — the number of the dead, and the manner of their dying. His bastard brother and his lords urged battle. Torrhen sent scouts across the water in the night, and they came back and told him what three dragons look like when they are waiting for you.

   He crossed the river alone at dawn and laid the crown of the Kings of Winter at Aegon’s feet, bending the knee to save his people a burning he had already seen priced out for him. For this the North named him the King Who Knelt, and has honored and resented him in equal measure for three hundred years, which is the North’s customary way of settling nothing. He rose Warden of the North and Lord of Winterfell, and his sons kept their heads, which the Gardeners could not say.

5. The crown, and the count of years

   One kingdom yielded without dragonfire and gained the most by it. Rather than see Oldtown and its Citadel put to the torch, the High Septon and Lord Hightower opened the city’s gates. In the Starry Sept the Father of the Faithful anointed Aegon with the seven oils and set a crown upon his head, declaring that the Seven themselves had blessed the conquest. It was a shrewd bargain: the Faith kept its seat, the Citadel kept its books, and Aegon gained the sanction of gods to go with the sanction of fire.

   From that anointing the maesters reckoned the first year After the Conquest — the reckoning by which this whole chronicle is ordered, so that every date you have read here bends around the day a Valyrian exile was crowned in Oldtown. Aegon styled himself King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, though the seventh had not truly bent. He ruled thereafter with a light hand, each kingdom keeping its own laws and customs, the king forever on progress among them — a realm held together less by iron than by the memory of what iron had done.

6. Dorne, unbowed

   Six kingdoms had knelt; the seventh would not. When Aegon’s armies marched into Dorne they found towns emptied, wells fouled, and lords vanished into the sands and the mountains. “Unbowed, unbent, unbroken,” said Meria Martell, the Yellow Toad of Dorne, eighty years old and blind and wholly unafraid. Dragons burn what they can find, and the Dornish had learned to be nowhere. The war curdled into nine years of raid and reprisal that gained the crown nothing but graves.

   It cost the Targaryens more than graves. At the Hellholt a scorpion bolt found the eye of Meraxes, and Rhaenys and her dragon fell together out of the sky — the first dragon slain in Westeros, and a queen with it. Aegon made peace in the end, not conquest. Dorne would not be joined to the Seven Kingdoms by a Targaryen for another two centuries, and then by marriage, not by fire. Every conqueror finds his limit somewhere. Aegon’s was made of sand and spite, and it held.

The shape of the realm after

Aegon ruled the realm he had burned together with a surprisingly light hand — each kingdom keeping its own laws and lords, the king forever on progress among them, the whole held less by the Iron Throne than by the memory of what the dragons had done at the Field of Fire. That memory would fade as the dragons dwindled, and every Targaryen king after him would learn, in his turn, that conquest is swift and rule is not. But the calendar he began has never once been reset, and every year in this chronicle is still counted from his crowning.