The Butcher's Ball

The man who engineered the whole green war walked his army into open country with no dragon, and the riverlands closed on it.

Why it came to this

Ser Criston Cole is the closest thing the green cause had to an architect. He had crowned Aegon II, he had led the field army, and he had conceived the trap at RookÔÇÖs Rest that killed the first dragon of the war. He was called the Kingmaker and he had earned it. He was also, by the second year of the war, a man whose luck and judgement had both started to leave him at the same time, which is the most dangerous condition a successful commander can be in, because his confidence has not yet been told.

After the fighting turned ugly and the riverlands became the warÔÇÖs open wound, Criston took a green host out from the capital to campaign in that country. The riverlands were black-leaning, hostile, and ÔÇö this is the part that undid him ÔÇö full of dragons. RhaenyraÔÇÖs partisans there had riders, and CristonÔÇÖs host had none. He was marching a large body of men on foot and horse through open country that the enemy could watch from the air whenever it chose.

The black riverlords, gathering their strength, did the obvious thing, which Criston appears not to have believed they would do in time. They converged on him while he was on the march, strung out along a road with his baggage and his order of march exactly as vulnerable as an army in column always is. He was caught in the open, in country that suited the enemy, with no way to answer what was above him.

The ground and the hosts

The battle takes its grim name from the field it was fought on, which is open riverlands country of no particular note except that a green army died there. There was no river crossing to hold, no ridge to anchor on, no castle to put a back against ÔÇö just ground, and an army caught on it in the wrong formation.

CristonÔÇÖs host was a conventional green field army, decent troops badly placed. An army on the march is not an army in a battle line; it is a long thin thing optimised for moving, and turning it into a fighting formation takes time and space and, above all, warning. Criston got very little of any of them.

The black force was a coalition of riverlords who had come together specifically to catch him, and its decisive component was not the men but the dragons over them. Two black dragons were on the field. That single fact settles the character of what followed: this was not a battle between two hosts so much as the destruction of a host that had no answer to the enemyÔÇÖs principal weapon, on ground where it could not hide from it.

How it was fought

It was less a battle than an interception. The black riverlords closed on CristonÔÇÖs column and pinned it before it could get itself into a proper line, and the dragons worked it from above while the riverland horse and foot came in on the ground. An army that is being burned from the air cannot form up to meet the enemy on the ground, and an army that is being pressed on the ground cannot scatter to escape the dragons; the two threats together left CristonÔÇÖs host with no formation it could adopt that answered either one.

The green host was broken and then slaughtered. The name the field acquired ÔÇö the ButcherÔÇÖs Ball ÔÇö is the plainest description any battle in this war was given, and it was given by people who saw it. This was not a fight decided by manoeuvre and resolved by a rout with a few casualties; it was a killing. A large green army marched into that country and did not march out of it.

What became of the man who had made the whole green war is a matter for the fold below, and it is kept there. What can be said in the open is that the destruction was total: a large green army marched into that country and did not march out of it, and the commander who had crowned a king and conceived the trap that killed the blacksÔÇÖ first dragon got, for all of it, no victory to carry away from the last field he took the field on. There was no clever stroke, no trap, no last stand that turned anything. He had walked into open country without a dragon in a war that had become about dragons, and the country did to his host exactly what he had arranged for the blacks at RookÔÇÖs Rest.

What it cost

The greens lost a field army and their most capable commander in the same afternoon, at a point in the war when they could replace neither. His loss took from the green side the one man who had consistently understood how to use its advantages, and the vacuum it left was filled ÔÇö as vacuums in this war always were ÔÇö by people with more dragon than judgement.

The riverlands were confirmed as black country, held by black lords, and lethal to any green army that entered them without air cover. That lesson cost the greens an army to learn and they did not entirely act on it.

The man made by the ButcherÔÇÖs Ball was, in a sense, nobody ÔÇö it was a battle that destroyed a reputation rather than building one. The black riverlords who won it are not much remembered as individuals, because the warÔÇÖs memory attaches to riders and their dragons, and the men who ground down Criston ColeÔÇÖs host were, for the most part, ordinary lords doing ordinary lethal work on their own ground.

What it changed

It ended the green field army as a coherent instrument for a crucial stretch of the war and it removed the green causeÔÇÖs ablest strategist. Everything the greens did afterward on land in the riverlands was improvised, and it showed.

It also confirmed the warÔÇÖs central, ruinous logic one more time: that on any given field, the side with a dragon beats the side without one, almost regardless of numbers or ground or skill, and that the only reliable answer to a dragon had turned out to be another dragon. Criston Cole had understood this better than anyone alive and it beat him anyway, because understanding a rule and having the means to obey it are different things.

For the shape of the whole Dance, the ButcherÔÇÖs Ball is one of the battles that pushed both sides past restraint. The green council had now lost a king to injury, its architect to the riverlands, and its patience entirely; what it reached for next were the dragonseeds and the mad gambles of the warÔÇÖs final year.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Ser Criston Cole, the Kingmaker, Hand of the King and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, died at the ButcherÔÇÖs Ball. The accounts have him refusing to flee and offering himself to be shot down where he stood, or cut down in the general destruction of his host; the versions differ and none is certain, but they agree he did not run and did not survive. He had crowned a king, led an army, and killed a dragon, and he died in a field named for slaughter with none of it having been enough. Whatever one makes of the man ÔÇö and opinions of Criston Cole were violent in every direction even at the time ÔÇö he did not outlive the war he had done more than anyone to start.

The green cause never replaced him. The commanders who inherited his war were braver, less careful, and worse, and the disasters of the warÔÇÖs last year owe a good deal to the absence of the one man who might have talked the green council out of them.

The riverlords who destroyed his army went on fighting a war that, from this point, neither side could win in any way that left much standing. The ButcherÔÇÖs Ball is one of the fields where the Dance stops being a contest and starts being an act of mutual exhaustion.