The King of Winters

Chapter 52

Tyrion

In the Throne room of the Red Keep King Rhaegar took his morning meal with his son and chief knights and all his lords bannermen who had come to King's Landing for his son's wedding. He found the king having a good morning surrounded by his allies, the Iron throne loomed up behind him, the dragons watching from the red walls. 

Tyrion arrived late, saddlesore, and sour, all too vividly aware of how amusing he must look as he waddled up the grand room amidst the dragons. It was a long ride from the inn to the Red Keep. The skulls of dead dragons looked down from its walls. He could feel the empty eyes of the dragon skulls watching him as soon as he entered with Bronn and his men.

Right from the door they hung and reached to the other end of the room where the iron throne sat. The skull of Balerion, the Black Dread, the dragon's fire which forged the Iron Throne from the thousand swords of Aegon the Conqueror's fallen foes hung right next to the throne itself.

Tyrion always had a morbid fascination with dragons. When he had got his first chance to come to King's Landing by his father, he had made it a point to seek out the theree dragons Daenerys Targaryen had brought forth into this world. When he could not see any of them In the capital he had been disappointed. They again he could atleast see the dragon skulls that hanged on the walls of Targaryen's throne room. 

He had expected to find them impressive, perhaps even frightening. He had not thought to find them beautiful. Yet they were. As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer in the light of the torches on the wall. Dragonbone was black because of its high iron content, he had read that in a book once. It was strong as steel, yet lighter and far more flexible, and of course utterly impervious to fire. Dragonbone bows are greatly prized by the Dothraki, and small wonder. An archer so armed can outrange any wooden bow. 

They liked the fire, he sensed. Their mouth stayed open as if they were waiting to get anyone who is foolish enough to come near. The teeth were long, curving knives of black diamond. The flames of the torch were nothing to them; they had bathed in the heat of far greater fires.

There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest a mere century and a half. The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger than mastiff's skulls hung near the doors, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born on Dragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, and they had not lived very long.

From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great monsters of song and story, the dragons that Aegon Targaryen and his sisters had unleashed on the Seven Kingdoms of old. The singers had given them the names of gods: Balerion, Meraxes, Vhaghar. Tyrion watched their gaping jaws, wordless and awed. You could have ridden a horse down Vhaghar's gullet, although you would not have ridden it out again. Meraxes was even bigger. And the greatest of them, Balerion, the Black Dread, could have swallowed an aurochs whole, or even one of the hairy mammoths said to roam the cold wastes beyond the Port of Ibben.

He tried to grasp the size of the living animal, to imagine how it must have looked when it spread its great black wings and swept across the skies, breathing fire.

His own remote ancestor, King Loren of the Rock, had tried to stand against the fire when he joined with King Mern of the Reach to oppose the Targaryen conquest. That was close on three hundred years ago, when the Seven Kingdoms were kingdoms, and not mere provinces of a greater realm. Between them, the Two Kings had six hundred banners flying, five thousand mounted knights, and ten times as many freeriders and men-at-arms. Aegon Dragonlord had perhaps a fifth that number, the chroniclers said, and most of those were conscripts from the ranks of the last king he had slain, their loyalties uncertain.

The hosts met on the broad plains of the Reach, amidst golden fields of wheat ripe for harvest. When the Two Kings charged, the Targaryen army shivered and shattered and began to run. For a few moments, the chroniclers wrote, the conquest was at an end . . . but only for those few moments, before Aegon Targaryen and his sisters joined the battle.

It was the only time that Vhaghar, Meraxes, and Balerion were all unleashed at once. The singers called it the Field of Fire.

Near four thousand men had burned that day, among them King Mern of the Reach. King Loren had escaped, and lived long enough to surrender, pledge his fealty to the Targaryens, and beget a son, for which Tyrion was duly grateful.