The Field of Fire

Fifty-five thousand men against ten thousand and three dragons. The dragons won in an afternoon.

Why it came to this

Aegon Targaryen had landed with a small household, three dragons and a claim nobody in Westeros had asked for. His first year went better than it had any right to: the Crownlands lords came over one by one, Harrenhal was burned out of the war in a night, and the riverlords changed sides so gratefully that the whole middle of the continent fell into his hands without a proper campaign. What he had won, though, was a strip. The two richest and most populous kingdoms of the south were still intact, still independent, and had begun to notice that the problem was not going to solve itself.

Mern IX Gardener, King of the Reach, and Loren I Lannister, King of the Rock, had spent generations glaring at one another across the marches. The dragons made them allies inside a single summer. Their calculation was not stupid. Dragons were terrifying and few; men were countable. Between them they could put more armed men in one place than had ever been assembled in Westeros, and the accepted wisdom of the age was that a beast, however large, is still one target and can be shot. Nobody living had seen dragons used properly in a field battle. Neither had Aegon.

So the two kings joined their hosts and marched north to find him, and Aegon rode south to be found. He had perhaps a fifth of their numbers, most of it borrowed from lords who had knelt within the past year and could unkneel just as quickly if the day went badly. If he lost, the Conquest ended there and the story of the Targaryens in Westeros became a footnote about an ambitious exile from a dead empire. If he won, there was nothing left in the south to stop him.

The ground and the hosts

The field was open country in the northern Reach, at the end of a long dry summer, with the grass high and yellow and the wind moving through it. The exact spot is argued over by maesters who were not there and has since been ploughed and grazed for three centuries. What every account agrees on is the state of the ground: it was tinder, and nobody thought to consider that a factor when choosing where to stand.

The allied host was the largest ever mustered on the continent to that date ÔÇö the figure that has come down is around fifty-five thousand, and while such numbers always flatter, the disparity was real and enormous. Mern brought the whole strength of the Reach, his sons and grandsons and brothers and cousins riding with him, a house so thick with heirs that its extinction seemed a mathematical impossibility. Loren brought the west. The two kings were not fools and their army was not a rabble: it was a conventional Westerosi host of the best quality, with a very heavy armoured centre and a great deal of horse.

Aegon had something near ten thousand and no illusions about them. His line was there to hold ground and to keep the enemy from simply walking around the problem. His actual army was three animals. Balerion he rode himself; Visenya had Vhagar and Rhaenys had Meraxes. They had been used before, singly, mostly for burning gates and making a point. They had never all three been committed to a battle at once, and after this day they never would be again.

How it was fought

The opening was ordinary and went badly for Aegon. The allied host came on in strength and the Targaryen line, outnumbered five to one, did what outnumbered lines do ÔÇö it bent, it gave ground, and it began to look like a formality. This mattered more than it appears. The whole point of the allied plan was mass, and mass takes time to bring to bear; the deeper the enemy committed, the tighter they packed themselves into the space in front of them.

Then the three dragons came in together, low, from behind their own line. There is no earlier engagement anywhere in the histories to compare it with, and the men on the ground had no drill for it. Dragonfire in a field battle is not a weapon that kills the men it touches so much as one that destroys the shape of an army. Formations exist because men stand where they are told; they stop existing the moment the men will not.

The particular thing that decided the day was not the fire on the soldiers. It was the fire in the grass. The dry summer growth caught, the wind took it, and within a short time the allied host was inside a burning field rather than beneath a burning sky. Fire on open dry ground moves faster than armoured men on foot and considerably faster than horses that have gone out of their ridersÔÇÖ control. The centre could not go forward, could not go back through its own rear ranks, and could not go sideways into the flames. The dragons had not so much broken the army as fenced it.

The horses went first, as horses always do. A destrier will carry a man into a hedge of spears because it has been trained to, but nothing trains it to walk into a grass fire, and the heavy cavalry that was supposed to be the allied armyÔÇÖs hammer became several thousand panicking animals moving in random directions through their own infantry. After that the collapse was not a decision anybody made. The rear ranks broke away and ran; the front ranks discovered they had nowhere to run to.

The royal standards of the Reach were in the middle of that. Mern had placed himself where a king was expected to be, at the head of his household with his kin around him, which on any ordinary field is courage and on this one was the worst position on the ground. The Gardener banners went down and did not come up again. Loren Lannister, further along the line and with a clearer path to open country, got himself and part of the western horse out of the fire and away.

The pursuit was brief and there was very little of it, because there was very little left to pursue. AegonÔÇÖs ten thousand had barely fought. The dragons themselves did not come away clean ÔÇö the accounts speak of arrow wounds taken while they worked low over the ranks, and at least one of the riders was hurt, though the details vary from telling to telling and none of the injuries proved serious. When the fires burned out the field was a black plain with the shapes of men in it, and men have been calling it the Field of Fire ever since.

What it cost

The figure usually given is four thousand burned, with perhaps another thousand killed by ordinary weapons, and ten thousand or more carried off the field with burns of the kind that were mostly a slower sentence. Those numbers come to us through chroniclers who liked round figures and had every reason to make the dragons sound like the end of the world, and they should be held loosely. What is not in doubt is the proportion of the harm: the overwhelming majority of the casualties were on one side, and the overwhelming majority of those were caused by fire rather than by steel.

House Gardener was ruined absolutely, root and branch, in the space of an afternoon ÔÇö a dynasty that had ruled the Reach since the Age of Heroes and had survived every previous disaster by having too many sons to lose. House Lannister was not. Loren kept his life, his castle, his gold and, in time, his lands, and the west came out of the Conquest with its structure entirely intact, which is a large part of why the west spends the next three hundred years being the most dangerous of the great houses.

The house that was made was the one that did not fight. The Tyrells were the GardenersÔÇÖ hereditary stewards, holding Highgarden as administrators rather than as lords in their own right. With the royal line gone, the steward yielded the castle and the keys without a siege, and Aegon handed him the whole of the Reach for it. Three centuries of Tyrell wealth, Tyrell marriages and Tyrell ambition begin with one man deciding, correctly, that the war was over.

What it changed

Strategically it ended the war in the south in a single afternoon. There was no second allied army; there could not be, because the men who would have formed it were on that field. Aegon spent the rest of the Conquest dealing with the north and the Vale by negotiation and with Dorne by an expensive failure, but the question of whether Westeros would be unified had been answered in the grass.

Politically it set the terms of Targaryen rule for the next hundred and fifty years. The Field of Fire is the demonstration that made kneeling rational. Every lord who bent the knee afterwards did so with the arithmetic of that day in mind, and every Targaryen who sat the Iron Throne was obeyed partly because of a battle fought before any of them were born. The throne itself was forged from the swords surrendered on and after that field, which is either a piece of theatre or an unusually honest piece of furniture.

It also created the template. Every later attempt to use dragons against a Westerosi army ÔÇö and there are a small number of them, spread very thinly across three hundred years ÔÇö is measured against this one, usually by people who have not noticed that the grass did half the work.

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

King Mern IX Gardener died in the fire along with his sons, his grandsons, his brothers, his nephews and cousins ÔÇö every male of the main line who could have carried the name forward, and most of the cadet branches with them. The last surviving Gardener of any degree did not outlive the year. It is the most complete extinction of a great house in the recorded history of Westeros, and it happened in less time than it takes to eat a meal.

King Loren I Lannister escaped the field, was taken shortly afterwards, and knelt. Aegon confirmed him in Casterly Rock as Lord of the West, a mercy that cost the Targaryens nothing at the time and a great deal later.

Harlen Tyrell, steward of Highgarden, surrendered the castle and was raised to Lord Paramount of the Mander in his dead mastersÔÇÖ place ÔÇö a promotion the older houses of the Reach resented for the next three hundred years and never quite dared act on.