Джордж Мартин - Fire & Blood

For a brief while in 44 AC, it seemed as if the king might soon have that son he desired so desperately. Queen Alys announced she was with child, and the court rejoiced. Grand Maester Desmond confined Her Grace to her bed as she grew great with child, and took charge of her care, assisted by two septas, a midwife, and the queen’s sisters Jeyne and Hanna. Maegor insisted that his other wives serve his pregnant queen as well.

During the third moon of her confinement, however, Lady Alys began to bleed heavily from the womb and lost the child. When King Maegor came to see the stillbirth, he was horrified to find the boy a monster, with twisted limbs, a huge head, and no eyes. “This cannot be my son!” he roared in anguish. Then his grief turned to fury, and he ordered the immediate execution of the midwife and septas who had charge of the queen’s care, and Grand Maester Desmond as well, sparing only Alys’s sisters.

It is said that Maegor was seated on the Iron Throne with the head of the Grand Maester in his hands when Queen Tyanna came to tell him he had been deceived. The child was not his seed. Seeing Queen Ceryse return to court, old and bitter and childless, Alys Harroway had begun to fear that the same fate awaited her unless she gave the king a son, so she had turned to her lord father, the Hand of the King. On the nights when the king was sharing a bed with Queen Ceryse or Queen Tyanna, Lucas Harroway sent men to his daughter’s bed to get her with child. Maegor refused to believe. He told Tyanna she was a jealous witch, and barren, throwing the Grand Maester’s head at her. “Spiders do not lie,” the mistress of the whisperers replied. She handed the king a list.

Written there were the names of twenty men alleged to have given their seed to Queen Alys. Old men and young, handsome men and homely ones, knights and squires, lords and servants, even grooms and smiths and singers; the King’s Hand had cast a wide net, it seemed. The men had only one thing in common: all were men of proven potency known to have fathered healthy children.

Under torture, all but two confessed. One, a father of twelve, still had the gold paid him by Lord Harroway for his services. The questioning was carried out swiftly and secretly, so Lord Harroway and Queen Alys had no inkling of the king’s suspicions until the Kingsguard burst in on them. Dragged from her bed, Queen Alys saw her sisters killed before her eyes as they tried to protect her. Her father, inspecting the Tower of the Hand, was flung from its roof to smash upon the stones below. Harroway’s sons, brothers, and nephews were taken as well. Thrown onto the spikes that lined the dry moat around Maegor’s Holdfast, some took hours to die; the simpleminded Horas Harroway lingered for days. The twenty names on Queen Tyanna’s list soon joined them, and then another dozen men, named by the first twenty.

The worst death was reserved for Queen Alys herself, who was given over to her sister-wife Tyanna for torment. Of her death we will not speak, for some things are best buried and forgotten. Suffice it to say that her dying took the best part of a fortnight, and that Maegor himself was present for all of it, a witness to her agony. After her death, the queen’s body was cut into seven parts, and her pieces mounted on spikes above the seven gates of the city, where they remained until they rotted.

King Maegor himself departed King’s Landing, assembling a strong force of knights and men-at-arms and marching on Harrenhal to complete the destruction of House Harroway. The great castle on the Gods Eye was lightly held, and its castellan, a nephew of Lord Lucas and cousin to the late queen, opened his gates at the king’s approach. Surrender did not save him; His Grace put the entire garrison to the sword, along with every man, woman, and child he found to have any drop of Harroway blood. Then he marched to Lord Harroway’s Town on the Trident and did the same there.

In the aftermath of the bloodletting, men began to say that Harrenhal was cursed, for every lordly house to hold it had come to a bad and bloody end. Nonetheless, many ambitious king’s men coveted Black Harren’s mighty seat, with its broad and fertile lands…so many that King Maegor grew weary of their entreaties, and decreed that Harrenhal should go to the strongest of them. Thus did twenty-three knights of the king’s household fight with sword and mace and lance amidst the blood-soaked streets of Lord Harroway’s Town. Ser Walton Towers emerged victorious, and Maegor named him Lord of Harrenhal…but the melee had been a savage affray, and Ser Walton did not live long enough to enjoy his lordship, dying of his wounds within the fortnight. Harrenhal passed to his eldest son, though its domains were much diminished, as the king granted Lord Harroway’s Town to Lord Alton Butterwell, and the rest of the Harroway holdings to Lord Darnold Darry.

When at last Maegor returned to King’s Landing to seat himself again upon the Iron Throne, he was greeted with the news that his mother, Queen Visenya, had died. Moreover, in the confusion that followed the death of the Queen Dowager, Queen Alyssa and her children had made their escape from Dragonstone, with the dragons Vermithor and Silverwing…to where, no man could say. They had even gone so far as to steal Dark Sister as they fled.

His Grace ordered his mother’s body burned, her bones and ashes interred beside those of the Conqueror. Then he sent his Kingsguard to seize his squire, Prince Viserys. “Chain him in a black cell and question him sharply,” Maegor commanded. “Ask him where his mother has gone.”

“He may not know,” protested Ser Owen Bush, a knight of Maegor’s Kingsguard. “Then let him die,” the king answered famously. “Perhaps the bitch will turn up for his funeral.”

Prince Viserys did not know where his mother had gone, not even when Tyanna of Pentos plied him with her dark arts. After nine days of questioning, he died. His body was left out in the ward of the Red Keep for a fortnight, at the king’s command. “Let his mother come and claim him,” Maegor said. But Queen Alyssa never appeared, and at last His Grace consigned his nephew to the fire. The prince was fifteen years old when he was killed, and had been much loved by smallfolk and lords alike. The realm wept for him.

In 45 AC, construction finally came to an end on the Red Keep. King Maegor celebrated its completion by feasting the builders and workmen who had labored on the castle, sending them wagonloads of strongwine and sweetmeats, and whores from the city’s finest brothels. The revels lasted for three days. Afterward, the king’s knights moved in and put all the workmen to the sword, to prevent them from ever revealing the Red Keep’s secrets. Their bones were interred beneath the castle that they had built.

Not long after the completion of the castle, Queen Ceryse was stricken with a sudden illness and passed away. A rumor went around the court that Her Grace had given offense to the king with a shrewish remark, so he had commanded Ser Owen to remove her tongue. As the tale went, the queen had struggled, Ser Owen’s knife had slipped, and the queen’s throat had been slit. Though never proven, this story was widely believed at the time; today, however, most maesters believe it to be a slander concocted by the king’s enemies to further blacken his repute. Whatever the truth, the death of his first wife left Maegor with but a single queen, the black-haired, black-hearted Pentoshi woman Tyanna, mistress of the spiders, who was hated and feared by all.

Hardly had the last stone been set on the Red Keep when Maegor commanded that the ruins of the Sept of Remembrance be cleared from the top of Rhaenys’s Hill, and with them the bones and ashes of the Warrior’s Sons who had perished there. In their place, he decreed, a great stone “stable for dragons” would be erected, a lair worthy of Balerion, Vhagar, and their get. Thus commenced the building of the Dragonpit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it proved difficult to find builders, stonemasons, and laborers to work on the project. So many men ran off that the king was finally forced to use prisoners from the city’s dungeons as his workforce, under the supervision of builders brought in from Myr and Volantis.