El año 2014 no tiene pinta de ser el año que vea la luz Winds of Winter, pero los seguidores de Canción de Hielo y Fuego podremos esperar el sexto volumen de la saga con algún otro material salido de la pluma de George R. R. Martin. Probablemente el que más expectación despierta es The World of Ice and Fire, una especie de enciclopedia histórica de los Siete Reinos de Poniente de la que ya he hablado en alguna que otra ocasión en este blog. Según las últimas informaciones el libro saldrá a la venta en los EE. UU. este próximo otoño, muy posiblemente en el mes de octubre, y será fruto del trabajo del propio George Martin con los webmasters de Westeros.org (la página web más importante de Canción de Hielo y Fuego en inglés) Elio García y Linda Antonsson.
Durante el último año hemos tenido algún atisbo de The World of Ice and Fire a través de lecturas realizadas por George Martin en diversas convenciones, pero esta misma mañana el escritor americano ha colgado un adelanto de la enciclopedia en su página web (aquí). El texto es un fragmento de la historia de Aegon el Conquistador, el mismo que ya leyó hace un tiempo Martin en un acto con fans y que sirvió de base al resumen que hizo un asistente al acto y que compartí en el blog hace poco (aquí). Ahora ya podemos leerlo completo en inglés, aunque solo es fragmento de una historia bastante mayor.
The maesters of the Citadel who keep the histories of Westeros have
used Aegon’s Conquest as their touchstone for the past three hundred
years. Birth, deaths, battles, and other events are dated either AC
(After the Conquest) or BC (Before the Conquest).
True scholars know that such dating is far from precise. Aegon
Targaryen’s conquest of the Seven Kingdoms did not take place in a
single day. More than two years passed between Aegon’s landing and his
Oldtown coronation . . . and even then the Conquest remained incomplete
since Dorne remained unsubdued. Sporadic attempts to bring the
Dornishmen into the realm continued all through King Aegon’s reign and
well into the reigns of his sons, making it impossible to fix a precise
end date for the Wars of Conquest.
Even the start date is a matter of some misconception. Many assume,
wrongly, that the reign of King Aegon I Targaryen began on the day he
landed at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush, beneath the three hills
where the city of King’s Landing eventually stood. Not so. The day of
Aegon’s Landing was celebrated by the king and his descendants, but the
Conqueror actually dated the start of his reign from the day he was
crowned and anointed in the Starry Sept of Oldtown by the High Septon of
the Faith. This coronation took place two years after Aegon’s Landing,
well after all three of the major battles of the Wars of Conquest had
been fought and won. Thus it can be seen that most of Aegon’s actual
conquering took place from 2-1 BC, Before the Conquest.
The Targaryens were of pure Valyrian blood, dragonlords of ancient
lineage. Twelve years before the Doom of Valyria (114 BC), Aenar
Targaryen sold his holdings in the Freehold and the Lands of the Long
Summer and moved with all his wives, wealth, slaves, dragons, siblings,
kin, and children to Dragonstone, a bleak island citadel beneath a
smoking mountain in the narrow sea.
At its apex Valyria was the greatest city in the known world, the
center of civilization. Within its shining walls, twoscore rival houses
vied for power and glory in court and council, rising and falling in an
endless, subtle, oft-savage struggle for dominance. The Targaryens were
far from the most powerful of the dragonlords, and their rivals saw
their flight to Dragonstone as an act of surrender, as cowardice. But
Lord Aenar’s maiden daughter Daenys, known forever afterward as Daenys
the Dreamer, had foreseen the destruction of Valyria by fire. And when
the Doom came twelve years later, the Targaryens were the only
dragonlords to survive.
Dragonstone had been the westernmost outpost of Valyrian power for
two centuries. Its location athwart the Gullet gave its lords a
stranglehold on Blackwater Bay, and enabled both the Targaryens and
their close allies, the Velaryons of Driftmark (a lesser house of
Valyrian descent) to fill their coffers off the passing trade. Velaryon
ships, along with those of another allied Valyrian house, the Celtigars
of Claw Isle, dominated the middle reaches of the narrow sea, whilst the
Targaryens ruled the skies with their dragons.
Yet even so, for the best part of a hundred years after the Doom of
Valyria (the rightly named Century of Blood), House Targaryen looked
east, not west, and took little interest in the affairs of Westeros.
Gaemon Targaryen, brother and husband to Daenys the Dreamer, followed
Aenar the Exile as Lord of Dragonstone, and became known as Gaemon the
Glorious. Gaemon’s son Aegon and his daughter Elaena ruled together
after his death. After them the lordship passed to their son Maegon, his
brother Aerys, and Aerys’s sons, Aelyx, Baelon, and Daemion. The last
of the three brothers was Daemion, whose son Aerion then succeeded to
Dragonstone.
The Aegon who is known to history as Aegon the Conqueror and Aegon
the Dragon was born on Dragonstone in 27 BC. He was the only son, and
second child, of Aerion, Lord of Dragonstone, and Lady Valaena of House
Velaryon, herself half-Targaryen on her mother’s side.
Aegon had two trueborn siblings; an elder sister, Visenya, and a
younger sister, Rhaenys. It had long been the custom amongst the
dragonlords of Valyria to wed brother to sister, to keep the bloodlines
pure, but Aegon took both his sisters to bride. By tradition, he was
expected to wed only his older sister, Visenya; the inclusion of Rhaenys
as a second wife was unusual though not without precedent. It was said
by some that Aegon wed Visenya out of duty and Rhaenys out of desire.
All three siblings had shown themselves to be dragonlords before they
wed. Of the five dragons who had flown with Aenar the Exile from
Valyria, only one survived to Aegon’s day: the great beast called
Balerion, the Black Dread. The remaining two dragons — Vhagar and
Meraxes — were younger, hatched on Dragonstone itself.
A common myth, oft heard amongst the ignorant, claims that Aegon
Targaryen had never set foot upon the soil of Westeros until the day he
set sail to conquer it, but this cannot be true. Years before that
voyage, the Painted Table had been carved and decorated at Lord Aegon’s
command: a massive slab of wood, some fifty feet long, carved in the
shape of Westeros and painted to show all the woods and rivers and towns
and castles of the Seven Kingdoms. Plainly, Aegon’s interest in
Westeros long predated the events that drove him to war. As well, there
are reliable reports of Aegon and his sister Visenya visiting the
Citadel of Oldtown in their youth, and hawking on the Arbor as guests of
Lord Redwyne. He may have visited Lannisport as well; accounts differ.
The Westeros of Aegon’s youth was divided into seven quarrelsome
kingdoms, and there was hardly a time when two or three of these
kingdoms were not at war with one another. The vast, cold, stony North
was ruled by the Starks of Winterfell. In the deserts of Dorne, the
Martell princes held sway. The gold-rich westerlands were ruled by the
Lannisters of Casterly Rock, the fertile Reach by the Gardeners of
Highgarden. The Vale, the Fingers, and the Mountains of the Moon
belonged to House Arryn . . . but the most belligerent kings of Aegon’s
time were the two whose realms lay closest to Dragonstone, Harren the
Black and Argilac the Arrogant.
From their great citadel Storm’s End, the Storm Kings of House
Durrandon had once ruled the eastern half of Westeros from Cape Wrath to
the Bay of Crabs, but their power had been dwindling for centuries.
The Kings of the Reach had nibbled at their domains from the west, the
Dornishmen harassed them from the south, and Harren the Black and his
ironmen had pushed them from the Trident and the lands north of the
Blackwater Rush. King Argilac, last of the Durrandon, had arrested this
decline for a time, turning back a Dornish invasion whilst still a boy,
crossing the narrow sea to join the great alliance against the
imperialist “tigers” of Volantis, and slaying Garse VII Gardener, King
of the Reach, in the Battle of Summerfield twenty years later. But
Argilac had grown older; his famous mane of black hair had gone grey,
and his prowess at arms had faded.
North of the Blackwater, the riverlands were ruled by the bloody hand
of Harren the Black of House Hoare, King of the Isles and the Rivers.
Harren’s ironborn grandsire, Harwyn Hardhand, had taken the Trident from
Argilac’s grandsire, Arrec, whose own forebears had thrown down the
last of the river kings centuries earlier. Harren’s father had extended
his domains east to Duskendale and Rosby. Harren himself had devoted
most of his long reign, close on forty years, to building a gigantic
castle beside the Gods Eye, but with Harrenhal at last nearing
completion, the ironborn were soon free to seek fresh conquests.
No king in Westeros was more feared than Black Harren, whose cruelty
had become legendary all through the Seven Kingdoms. And no king in
Westeros felt more threatened than Argilac the Storm King, last of the
Durrandon — an aging warrior whose only heir was his maiden daughter.
Thus it was that King Argilac reached out to the Targaryens on
Dragonstone, offering Lord Aegon his daughter in marriage, with all the
lands east of the Gods Eye from the Trident to the Blackwater Rush as
her dowry.
Aegon Targaryen spurned the Storm King’s proposal. He had two wives,
he pointed out; he did not need a third. And the dower lands being
offered had belonged to Harrenhal for more than a generation. They were
not Argilac’s to give. Plainly, the aging Storm King meant to establish
the Targaryens along the Blackwater as a buffer between his own lands
and those of Harren the Black.
The Lord of Dragonstone countered with an offer of his own. He would
take the dower lands being offered if Argilac would also cede Massey’s
Hook and the woods and plains from the Blackwater south to the river
Wendwater and the headwaters of the Mander. The pact would be sealed by
the marriage of King Argilac’s daughter to Orys Baratheon, Lord Aegon’s
childhood friend and champion.
These terms Argilac the Arrogant rejected angrily. Orys Baratheon was
a baseborn half brother to Lord Aegon, it was whispered, and the Storm
King would not dishonor his daughter by giving her hand to a bastard.
The very suggestion enraged him. Argilac had the hands of Aegon’s envoy
cut off and returned to Dragonstone in a box. “These are the only hands
your bastard shall have of me,” he wrote.
Aegon made no reply. Instead he summoned his friends, bannermen, and
principal allies to attend him on Dragonstone. Their numbers were small.
The Velaryons on Driftmark were sworn to House Targaryen, as were the
Celtigars of Claw Isle. From Massey’s Hook came Lord Bar Emmon of Sharp
Point and Lord Massey of Stonedance, both sworn to Storm’s End, but with
closer ties to Dragonstone. Lord Aegon and his sisters took counsel
with them and visited the castle sept to pray to the Seven of Westeros
as well though he had never before been accounted a pious man.
On the seventh day, a cloud of ravens burst from the towers of
Dragonstone to bring Lord Aegon’s word to the Seven Kingdoms of
Westeros. To the seven kings they flew, to the Citadel of Oldtown, to
lords both great and small. All carried the same message: from this day
forth there would be but one king in Westeros. Those who bent the knee
to Aegon of House Targaryen would keep their lands and titles. Those who
took up arms against him would be thrown down, humbled, and destroyed.
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