The First and Second Battles of Tumbleton

The largest green army of the war was betrayed into a town, and then the townÔÇÖs conquerors were betrayed in their turn.

Why it came to this

By the last stretch of the Dance both sides had run short of the one thing the war was actually decided by, which was reliable dragonriders. The greens had lost RhaenysÔÇÖs killer at RookÔÇÖs Rest to a crippled king, and their field commanders were dying. The blacks, desperate for riders, had done the reckless thing and put common-born people of suspected Targaryen blood ÔÇö the dragonseeds ÔÇö onto the riderless dragons of Dragonstone. Some of these people were loyal. Some were opportunists who had been handed the single most valuable thing in the world and had their own ideas about what to do with it. Two of them, Hugh Hammer and Ulf White, are the reason Tumbleton is remembered.

Ormund HightowerÔÇÖs green host ÔÇö the same army that had been saved on the Honeywine ÔÇö had marched up from the Reach growing as it went and was now the largest army in the war, driving toward KingÔÇÖs Landing along the roseroad. It had picked up dragons: young Daeron on Tessarion from the start, and then, extraordinarily, two black dragonseeds who deserted the black cause and brought their dragons over to the greens. Hugh Hammer rode Vermithor, the old Bronze Fury, once the mount of the Old King himself and one of the largest dragons then living. Ulf White rode Silverwing, another great old dragon. The greens had, by treachery, acquired an overwhelming advantage in the air, and they marched it at Tumbleton.

Tumbleton is a market town on the road to the capital, held for Rhaenyra, garrisoned and prepared to resist. It had walls of a sort and a large body of black-loyal men gathered to hold the road. What it did not have was any answer to four dragons, two of which had been on the enemyÔÇÖs own side the week before.

The town and the hosts

Tumbleton was a prosperous town rather than a fortress ÔÇö walls enough to matter against men, nothing at all against dragons. Its garrison was substantial, swollen by the levies of black-loyal lords who had come to hold the roseroad, and it was betrayed before the fighting even started. Two of the lords inside the town, seeing the size of what was coming, changed sides and opened the way. Treachery is the medium the whole battle is written in; it runs through every phase of it, in every direction, and no one who fought there comes out clean.

The green host was enormous by the standards of the war and its air power was, briefly, decisive: four dragons ÔÇö Tessarion, Vermithor, Silverwing, and the young DaeronÔÇÖs command of the whole ÔÇö against a town with none. On paper this was the most one-sided matchup of the entire Dance.

The trouble, invisible on paper, was that two of those four dragons were ridden by men with no loyalty to anyone, who had already betrayed one side and had learned that a dragon makes its rider a power in his own right. The greens had bought an overwhelming force and had not asked closely enough what they had bought it with.

How it was fought

The first battle was quick and horrible. The green dragons burned Tumbleton. With the town betrayed from within and four dragons overhead, the black defence never had a coherent shape to lose; the walls were irrelevant, the garrison was scattered and slaughtered, and the town itself was set alight and largely destroyed. As a military operation it was a total green success. As anything else it was a massacre, and the sack that followed ÔÇö the green host, and particularly its dragonseed riders and their followers, turning on the townÔÇÖs people ÔÇö was one of the worst atrocities of a war that had a great many.

And then the victory rotted where it stood, because the two dragonseeds had no reason to stop. Hugh Hammer and Ulf White had crossed to the greens for advantage, not for love of Aegon II, and with Vermithor and Silverwing under them they were now among the most powerful individuals in the realm and behaved accordingly. The green host halted at Tumbleton and dissolved into feasting, looting and intrigue, its two most dangerous members openly speculating about crowns of their own. The largest army in the war stopped being an army and became a mob with dragons camped in a burned town.

The Second Battle of Tumbleton is what happened when the blacks came back for it. A black host came up to retake the town, and the sequence of that day is genuinely tangled in the sources ÔÇö a night attack, confusion in the dark, dragons roused into a fight none of their riders had planned. What is clear is the outcome. Two dragons were lost at Tumbleton in that second fight, and the great green army that had rolled up from the Reach effectively destroyed itself there. The treachery that had won the town cut the other way in the end, as treachery tends to; men who had already changed sides once were trusted by no one, watched by everyone, and stood in as much danger from their own side as from the enemy.

The two battles have to be told together because the second is entirely the consequence of the first. The greens won Tumbleton so completely that winning it destroyed them: it stopped their army, corrupted it with plunder, and handed its fate to two men who could not be controlled. By the time the blacks came back, the thing that needed defeating had largely defeated itself.

What it cost

It cost the war two more of its dwindling dragons and it cost the greens their largest army, which arrived at Tumbleton as a war-winning instrument and left it as scattered survivors. The strategic momentum the Hightowers had built all the way from Oldtown ended in that burned town.

It cost Tumbleton itself everything. The town was destroyed and its people massacred, and the accounts of the sack are among the passages the chroniclers of the Dance write most plainly, because there is nothing to dress up. This is one of the battles that is remembered less for who won than for what was done to people who were not soldiers.

And it cost both causes any remaining pretence that the dragonseeds had been a good idea. Putting untrained, unloyal, common-born riders onto dragons to make up numbers had seemed clever when both sides were short of riders. Tumbleton is the bill for it: the seeds fought for themselves, betrayed whoever had them, and burned a town on the way to accomplishing nothing for anyone.

What it changed

Tumbleton broke the green war effort at the moment it should have been winning it. An army that size, with that many dragons, driving on a KingÔÇÖs Landing already starving and turning against its own rulers, should have ended the war. Instead it ate itself, and the capital fell to the blacks by other means while the greensÔÇÖ war-winning host lay wrecked in a burned market town.

It is also the clearest single verdict the Dance passes on the whole logic of the dragon war. Both sides had spent two years believing that the answer to the enemyÔÇÖs dragon was your own dragon, and that more dragons meant more victory. Tumbleton is the reductio: four dragons in one place, on the winning side, produced not a greater victory but a collapse, because the power the dragons gave their riders was greater than the loyalty anyone could command from them.

After Tumbleton the war has very few dragons left and no armies worth the name, and it grinds toward its end on hunger, murder and the exhaustion of everyone still standing.

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

Ser Ormund Hightower, who had commanded the great green host all the way up from Oldtown and won a string of battles with it, died at Tumbleton. The most successful green commander of the war on land did not survive his own greatest victory, which is as fair a summary of the Dance as any single fact provides.

Prince Daeron Targaryen, Daeron the Daring, the boy who had won the Honeywine, is one of the warÔÇÖs cruellest loose ends. The sources cannot agree on how or exactly when he died in the ruin of the green host at Tumbleton; some have him killed in the second battle, some in the disorder afterward, and his young blue dragon Tessarion did not long outlive him. A boy knighted for heroism at thirteen was dead not long after, in a burned town, with the army he had helped bring there destroying itself around him.

Hugh Hammer and Ulf White, the two dragonseeds whose treachery won the first battle, did not survive the aftermath. Hammer, who had begun openly styling himself a king, was murdered by green men who had had enough of him; White met a similarly ugly end amid the wreck of the army he had betrayed his way into. Neither man got the crown he had briefly imagined, and their dragons ÔÇö Vermithor the Bronze Fury and Silverwing ÔÇö passed out of the war, one killed and one flown wild.

Tumbleton the town was rebuilt, in time, as such places are. What was done there was not forgotten by the smallfolk of the Reach, and the two battles fought over it are among the reasons the Dance is remembered in that country as a calamity rather than a dynastic dispute.