Dangerous Women. Джордж Р. Р. Мартин

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      At Harrenhal, Aemond Targaryen and Criston Cole debated how best to answer the queen’s attacks. Though Black Harren’s seat was too strong to be taken by storm, and the river lords dared not lay siege for fear of Vhagar, the king’s men were running short of food and fodder, and losing men and horses to hunger and sickness. Only blackened fields and burned villages remained within sight of the castle’s massive walls, and those foraging parties that ventured further did not return. Ser Criston urged a withdrawal to the south, where Aegon’s support was strongest, but the prince refused, saying “Only a craven runs from traitors.” The loss of King’s Landing and the Iron Throne had enraged him, and when word of the Fishfeed reached Harrenhal, the Lord Protector had almost strangled the squire who delivered the news. Only the incession of his bedmate, Alys Rivers, had saved the boy’s life. Prince Aemond favored an immediate attack upon King’s Landing. None of the queen’s dragons were a match for Vhagar, he insisted.

      Ser Criston called that folly. “One against six is a fight for fools, my prince,” he declared. Let them march south, he urged once more, and join their strength to Lord Hightower’s. Prince Aemond could reunite with his brother Daeron and his dragon. King Aegon had escaped Rhaenyra’s grasp, this they knew, surely he would reclaim Sunfyre and join his brothers. And perhaps their friends inside the city might find a way to free Queen Helaena as well, so she could bring Dreamfyre to the battle. Four dragons could perhaps prevail against six, if one was Vhagar.

      Prince Aemond refused to consider this “craven course.”

      Ser Criston and Prince Aemond decided to part ways. Cole would take command of their host and lead them south to join Ormund Hightower and Prince Daeron, but the Prince Regent would not accompany them. Instead he meant to fight his own war, raining fire on the traitors from the air. Soon or late, “the bitch queen” would send a dragon or two out to stop him, and Vhagar would destroy them. “She dare not send all her dragons,” Aemond insisted. “That would leave King’s Landing naked and vulnerable. Nor will she risk Syrax, or that last sweet son of hers. Rhaenyra may call herself a queen, but she has a woman’s parts, a woman’s faint heart, and a mother’s fears.”

      And thus did the Kingmaker and the Kinslayer part, each to their own fate, whilst at the Red Keep, Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen set about rewarding her friends and inflicting savage punishments on those who had served her half brother.

      Huge rewards were posted for information leading to the capture of “the usurper styling himself Aegon II,” his daughter Jaehaera, his son Maelor, the “false knights” Willis Fell and Rickard Thorne, and Larys Strong, the Clubfoot. When that failed to produce the desired result, Her Grace sent forth hunting parties of “knights inquisitor” to seek after the “traitors and villains” who had escaped her, and punish any man found to have assisted them.

      Queen Alicent was fettered at wrist and ankle with golden chains, though her stepdaughter spared her life “for the sake of our father, who loved you once.” Her own father was less fortunate. Ser Otto Hightower, who had served three kings as Hand, was the first traitor to be beheaded. Ironrod followed him to the block, still insisting that by law a king’s son must come before his daughter. Ser Tyland Lannister was given to the torturers instead, in hopes of recovering some of the crown’s treasure.

      Neither Aegon nor his brother Aemond had ever been much loved by the people of the city, and many kingslanders had welcomed the queen’s return … but love and hate are two faces of the same coin, as fresh heads began appearing daily upon the spikes above the city gates, accompanied by ever more exacting taxes, the coin turned. The girl that they once cheered as the Realm’s Delight had grown into a grasping and vindictive woman, men said, a queen as cruel as any king before her. One wit named Rhaenyra “King Maegor with teats,” and for a hundred years thereafter “Maegor’s Teats” was a common curse amongst kingslanders.

      With the city, castle, and throne in her possession, defended by no fewer than six dragons, Rhaenyra felt secure enough to send for her sons. A dozen ships set sail from Dragonstone, carrying the queen’s ladies and her son Aegon the Younger. Rhaenyra made the boy her cupbearer, so he might never be far from her side. Another fleet set out from Gulltown with Prince Joffrey, the last of the queen’s three sons by Laenor Velaryon, together with his dragon Tyraxes. Her Grace began to make plans for a lavish celebration to mark Joffrey’s formal installation as Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne.

      In the fullness of her victory, Rhaenyra Targaryen did not suspect how few days remained to her. Yet every time she sat the Iron Throne, its cruel blades drew fresh blood from her hands and arms and legs, a sign that all could read.

      Beyond the city walls, fighting continued throughout the Seven Kingdoms. In the riverlands, Ser Criston Cole abandoned Harrenhal, striking south along the western shore of the Gods Eye, with thirty-six hundred men behind him (death, disease, and desertion had thinned the ranks that had ridden forth from King’s Landing). Prince Aemon had already departed, flying Vhagar. No longer tied to castle or host, the one-eyed prince was free to fly where he would. It was war as Aegon the Conquerer and his sisters had once waged it, fought with dragonflame, as Vhagar descended from the autumn sky again and again to lay waste to the lands and villages and castles of the river lords. House Darry was the first to know the prince’s wroth. The men bringing in the harvest burned or fled as the crops went up in flame, and Castle Darry was consumed in a firestorm. Lady Darry and her younger children survived by taking shelter in vaults under the keep, but her lord husband and his heir died on their battlements, together with two score of his sworn swords and bowmen. Three days later, it was Lord Harroway’s Town left smoking. Lord’s Mill, Blackbuckle, Buckle, Claypool, Swynford, Spiderwood … Vhagar’s fury fell on each in turn, until half the riverlands seemed ablaze.

      Ser Criston Cole faced fires as well. As he drove his men south through the riverlands, smoke rose up before him and behind him. Every village that he came to he found burned and abandoned. His column moved through forests of dead trees where living woods had been just days before, as the river lords set blazes all along his line of march. In every brook and pool and village well, he found death: dead horses, dead cows, dead men, swollen and stinking, befouling the waters. Elsewhere his scouts came across ghastly tableaux where armored corpses sat beneath the trees in rotting raiment, in a grotesque mockery of a feast. The feasters were men who had fallen in battle, skulls grinning under rusted helms as their green and rotted flesh sloughed off their bones.

      Four days out of Harrenhall, the attacks began. Archers hid amongst the trees, picking off outriders and stragglers with their longbows. Men died. Men fell behind the rearguard and were never seen again. Men fled, abandoning their shields and spears to fade into the woods. Men went over to the enemy. In the village commons at Crossed Elms, another of the ghastly feasts was found. Familiar with such sights by now, Ser Criston’s outriders grimaced and rode past, paying no heed to the rotting dead … until the corpses sprang up and fell upon them. A dozen died before they realized it had all been a ploy.

      All this was but prelude, for the Lords of the Trident had been gathering their forces. When Ser Criston left the lake behind, striking out overland for the Blackwater, he found them waiting atop a stony ridge; three hundred mounted knights in armor, as many longbowmen, three thousand archers, three thousand ragged rivermen with spears, hundreds of northmen brandishing axes, mauls, spiked maces, and ancient iron swords. Above their heads flew Queen Rhaenyra’s banners.

      The battle that followed was as one-sided as any in the Dance. Lord Roderick Dustin raised a warhorn to his lips and sounded the charge, and the queen’s men came screaming down the ridge, led by the Winter Wolves on their shaggy northern horses and the knights on their armored destriers. When Ser Criston was struck down and fell dead upon the ground, the men who had followed him from Harrenhal lost heart. They broke and fled, casting aside their shields as they ran. Their foes came after, cutting them down by the hundreds.

      On Maiden’s Day in the year 130 AC, the Citadel of Oldtown sent forth СКАЧАТЬ