The following is the Summerhall-related part of a large interview that Maester Y. conducted with "The Westerosi" Lyonel Caron in 295. Lord Caron was Master of Coin to King Aerys II from 268-277. King Aerys fired him in 277 and sentenced him to death in 278 for treason, athough Lyonel maintains the charges were Aerys' way of threatening Tywin Lannister. He fled to Essos, where he eventually became an influential executive at the Iron Bank.:
Do you remember when things began to change at the capital?
Indeed I can. And it is very rare in life to be able to point to a specific moment and say "this is when that period ended and the new period began," but in terms of what I saw as a golden age of King's Landing giving way to the corrupt and decayed period that followed, I can say with certainty - it was with Summerhall. If whatever happened at Summerhall hadn't happened, things would be very different today, I can assure you.
What did happen at Summerhall?
Your guess is as good as mine. It is one of those singular events in which temporal proximity seems to serve no advantage in terms of understanding what actually happened. Most of the people who were there died. Those that didn't die - they refused to talk about it, which I never understood. What horrors could possibly have happened that men who brag of participation in massacres refuse to speak of it? My own father died there and yet I could get no one to tell me about it. And, like Prince Jaehaerys, I was thrust into a world of immense responsibility on a sudden, and had little time to investigate the event.
Perhaps that is one reason so little is known. Immediately after the event came the war, and, shortly after that, the succession of a new king. And when Aerys took the throne, one thing we all agreed upon was that it was time to put Summerhall and the war behind us, and make a start at returning to the idyllic world of the 250's. And that left little room for asking questions. Frankly, it wasn't until Rhaegar came of age that I began to realize how little we knew of the actual events. He was always surprised at my apparent lack of curiosity as to Summerhall, given my personal connection to the tragedy. But it wasn't that I was uninterested. I was a man grown and had no time to write songs about my father's death, even if I had wanted to.
What do you think happened? Surely, you must have some personal theory?
[laughs] You sound like him [Rhaegar] now. Well, it almost certainly had something to with hatching new dragons. The king, King Aegon the Fifth, was worried that without dragons, the Targaryan dynasty was bound to fail, and, as a result, the realm would fracture and devolve into a vicious cycle of civil wars. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy, if I've ever heard one.
While I never met the king personally, I sat through many of his court sessions in the great hall as an apprentice for the Master of Coin's Office. I got to know the character of his court. My father wanted me to be prepared for public service and secured for me a position with Coin by his friendship with Ormund Baratheon. My memory of the period is that of a young man, infatuated by my first impressions of the rich and powerful, of the glamorous and scandalous. King Aegon's court was nothing if not exciting - the best educated, bright, young promising people were there advocating new theories and reformist doctrines, much to the chagrin of some of the stodgy old lords. The smallfolk loved him, as did the young and the intellectually inclined. But the old men regarded him as a tyrant, because he limited their abilities to tax their peasants without royal consent, or administer their own justice. But there was no threat of rebellion. The king may not have been universally loved - no one who is in charge of anything ever is, trust me - but he was universally respected.
However, the king realized that dragons were the only reason the Targaryens had taken control of Westeros. Furthermore, he believed that frequent reassessments and changes in policies were necessary to protect the kingdom from stagnation and dissolution, and that the Targaryens' chief virtue was their ability to force change on an obstinate aristocracy. And that dragons were the only way they did that. And, thus, without dragons, the Targaryens, and by extension all of Westeros, were doomed to failure. You see, the Targaryens were obsessed with the Doom of Valyria and the Century of Blood that followed. They were terrified of chaos and anarchy, and saw combating such bedlam as their dynasty's chief purpose. King Aegon's advisors were mostly maesters and legitimate people, but he did employ some Maegi and those sorts. My theory is that, in 259, some kind of threat appeared to him and the king decided that he needed to make haste in hatching his dragon eggs, so he turned to some Maegi. Their experiment failed and, in a moment, Westeros lost some of its greatest leaders and most beloved statesmen.
Do you think the threat was the Band of Nine?
They perhaps had some impact on the king's decision, but I doubt that the Band of Nine by itself drove King Aegon to such lengths. He had participated himself in an earlier Blackfyre war, and the Band of Nine wasn't the threat that the earlier ones had been. Maelys the Monstrous could have been a real danger, but he didn't have the kind of support the Blackfyres used to have. He was born too late, and I'm sure the king recognized that. I think King Aegon would have actually let the situation grow before intervening, unlike Jaehaerys. So although Maelys' threat may have been part of the king's concerns, I don't think it would have been enough. Honestly, I'm not sure. Prince Duncan's wife, Jenny of Oldstones, used to have a friend that was a witch, and I've heard the king placed an odd amount of stock in her prophecies. She may have had something to do with it. But I can't say what exactly would have driven the king to do something so reckless.
Where were you when you heard about it?
I was in King's Landing with my brother Bryan. We were living in an apartment in the Red Keep, about the size of a broom closet. I was up with a candle working on a contract I'd been assigned, when Steffon came in - Steffon Baratheon I mean - and told me our father was dead, and that basically everyone else was too. It is not a memory I revisit often. I had to wake Bryan and tell him. The capital was shaken. The whole country was.
You might think that with all of the horrible things that have happened since that night, Summerhall would seem less significant to me. But, in my mind, it's still the epoch-marking event of my lifetime. Without Summerhall, I would have continued as an apprentice for another year or so, probably ended up working for my father and succeeding him as lord after the passing of a reasonable amount of time. Aerys would never have been king. But instead, the tragedy of Summerhall occurred and seemed to infect all of time that followed. Horror started to become commonplace. But at that time, people weren't used to tragedy the way we are today. The shock was palpable.
As a young man I couldn't imagine a king other King Aegon. He was "The King," in my mind. In some way, he still is. None of his successors commanded the kind of legitimacy that he did. I am not sure anyone ever will.
Forgive my tangent. As I was saying, that night my brother and our friends - there was kind of a set of us - gathered in Lord Baratheon's chamber. That was Steffon's father, Ormund, a close friend of my father's. He was kind of the mentor to all of us. Since most of the court was with the king on holiday, he was the senior man in the capital. If he had been at Summerhall, I'd hate to see how it would have all turned out. We were very lucky to have him that night. He was the one everyone, young and old, was turning to. Back then, there wasn't the kind of divisiveness after a tragedy the way there is now. Aerys' behavior in the 70s did a lot to create distrust for power, you see.
When Steffon and I arrived, Tywin and Kevan were already there with some of the other notable young men. They were all standing around in the antechamber, I remember. Tywin was cursing the foolishness of the "dragon dreamers," while Mace was just sitting there pale. Aerys was there too, he was running back and forth from the ravens, really upset. His wife had been there [at Summerhall], about as pregnant as a person could get, and we didn't know yet that she and the baby were okay. Inside, Lord Baratheon was talking with Jaehaerys, and I think he was telling him that he was going to have to be king. They ended up crowning him at dawn the next day. It was a frenzied night. Eventually, Lord Baratheon called me in and told me I had to be Lord of Nightsong, which I already knew of course. Before the week was out, I was on my way back to Nightsong. And before the month was out, I was in the Stepstones fighting a war. As I said, time itself seemed to begin a different course after Summerhall.
What did Tywin mean, the "dragon dreamers"?
Tywin did not agree that dragons were necessary for continued stability in Westeros. Unlike me, he thought he understood what happened at Summerhall: foolish men chasing a foolish dream and causing devastation in the process. For Tywin, there was no use dreaming about dragons - or anything else for that matter. Life requires men to use the tools on hand and to deal with a situation as it is, rather than how it ought to be. I can't really disagree with him. But Tywin's lack of understanding for mens' dreams sometimes works to his disadvantage - especially the older he has become. But at this time he was really just a young man reacting in anger. Don't take me wrong about Tywin. I think he should have been the greatest statesman of our time, but circumstances conspired against him.
Why do you think Prince Rhaegar was so infatuated with the tragedy?
He was born there, which I imagine would have an impact on anyone. In addition, many of the most famous members of his family were lost that day. Throughout his youth, Rhaegar was told fantastic stories about King Aegon, Prince Duncan, Duncan the Tall, and others. He thirsted for some window into that lost world. He wanted to understand Summerhall to understand himself, but, I think, more so to understand his father. He craved Aerys' approval when he was young.
He thought Aerys turned dark after Summerhall. I tried to tell him that it wasn't so. Aerys turned dark after becoming king. He was affected by Summerhall, yes, but no more than the rest of us. When Aerys found out his wife and new baby were okay, I'd never seen him so relieved. We were all happy. Aerys was our friend in those days. It was good to see how happy he was to be a father. If only Rhaegar had been able to see him that night. But the Aerys that Rhaeger came to know was a different man. A monster, really. In my mind it is almost as though they are completely different people. It is strange to think that they were not.
Was there ever an official investigation into the events?
I do not believe so. Although, well, actually - yes, in 272 Aerys launched an investigation. But, like so much else Aerys did during that time, the investigation was ridiculous. Some ambitious pyromancer told Aerys that the king had almost hatched a dragon that day, and that if only one or two things had been done properly, that the Targaryens would be up to their necks in dragons by now. Of course, Aerys was taken in. But I had nothing to do with the investigation, and ultimately the pyromancer and the people who had been assigned to the project all turned up dead. Tywin later told me that Aerys found out that "King Aegon died of a sudden attack of stupidity," and had the investigators killed to hide his shame. Lord Tywin may not have been the best source for unbiased information on our friend King Aerys at that point, but it certainly sounds like something Aerys would do.