Rhaegar
Faint and far away the light burned, low on the horizon, shining through the sea mists.
"It looks like a star," said Rhaegar.
"The star of home," said Denyo, the envoy sent from the Iron Bank as a honor guard to meet him.
His captain was shouting orders. Sailors scrambled up and down the three tall masts and moved along the rigging, reefing the heavy black and red sails. Below, oarsmen heaved and strained over two great banks of oars. The decks tilted, creaking, as the Targaryen flagship, Balerion heeled to starboard and began to come about.
The star of home. Rhaegar stood at the prow, one hand resting on the iron figurehead, a roaring dragon head of black iron. For half a heartbeat he remembered how Arthur Dayne had once claimed Starfall as the Home of gods and stars. He wondered which star was lurking here now that the Daynes were dealt with. Arthur and Ashara Dayne, both had glown too much for his liking that he had to finally drown them in darkness.
Braavos might not be so bad as his visit to Starfall was. Denyo said that everything had been already prepared for his visit. It would take one day at the most for me to stay here. Then he would return back to his kingdom and family. The Braavosi also told him about how hard they were searching for Viserys' killer. Maybe he would even get to see the man and deliver his own justice.
The last of the night's stars still peered from the sky through the first light . . . all along with the pair dead ahead. "It's two stars now."
"Two eyes," said Denyo. "The Titan sees us, King Rhaegar."
The Titan of Braavos. One of the splendors in the modern world made by men. A giant of a statue as tall as a mountain, which stood guard in the entrance of Braavos. Just like Arthur Dayne had stood to guard his sister and her husband at Starfall.
Starfall is done and fallen, Rhaegar reminded himself. Eddard Stark, Ashara Dayne and Arthur Dayne were all dead. It did no good to think of them. Even their ghosts never bothered to trouble him in Westeros, and there was no way that they were lurking all the way to haunt him here in Braavos. In Westeros, legends marks the Daynes as the descendants of gods. The gods never die, septons of the Seven preached, still the Daynes died when a blade was put through them. Gods or men the Targaryens answered to no one.
"Do the Braavosi worship the Titan as a god, Denyo?" Rhaegar asked.
"All gods are honored in Braavos." The Braavosi banker loved to talk about his city almost as much as he loved to talk about his home. "Your Seven have a sept here, the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea, but only Westerosi sailors worship there."
"The Moonsingers led us to this place of refuge, where the dragons of Valyria could not find us," Denyo said. "Theirs is the greatest temple. We esteem the Father of Waters as well, but his house is built anew whenever he takes his bride. The rest of the gods dwell together on an isle in the center of the city. That is where you will find the smaller gods."
The Titan's eyes seemed brighter now, and farther apart. Rhaegar never cared about the gods, he barely sought out for the help of gods. He had never wanted their help.
The mists gave way before them, ragged grey curtains parted by their prow. Balerion cleaved through the grey-green waters on billowing black wings. Rhaegar could hear the cries of seabirds overhead. There, in front of them, a line of stony ridges rose sudden from the sea, their steep slopes covered with soldier pines and black spruce. But dead ahead the sea had broken through, and there above the open water the Titan towered, with his eyes blazing and his long green hair blowing in the wind.
His legs bestrode the gap, one foot planted on each mountain, his shoulders looming tall above the jagged crests. His legs were carved of solid stone, the same black granite as the sea monts on which he stood, though around his hips he wore an armored skirt of greenish bronze. His breastplate was bronze as well, and his head in his crested halfhelm. His blowing hair was made of hempen ropes dyed green, and huge fires burned in the caves that were his eyes. One hand rested atop the ridge to his left, bronze fingers coiled about a knob of stone; the other thrust up into the air, clasping the hilt of a broken sword.
He is only a little bigger than King Baelor's statue in King's Landing, he told himself when they were still well off to sea. As the galleas drove closer to where the breakers smashed against the ridgeline, however, the Titan grew larger still. He could hear Balerion's captain bellowing commands in his deep voice, and up in the rigging men were bringing in the sails. We are going to row beneath the Titan's legs. Rhaegar could see the arrow slits in the great bronze breastplate, and stains and speckles on the Titan's arms and shoulders where the seabirds nested. His neck craned upward. Baelor the Blessed would not reach his knee. He could step right over the walls of Red Keep.
Then the Titan gave a mighty roar.
The sound was as huge as he was, a terrible groaning and grinding, so loud it drowned out even the captain's voice and the crash of the waves against those pine-clad ridges. A thousand seabirds took to the air at once. "The Titan warns the Arsenal of our coming, King Rhaegar," Denyo shouted. "We should reach the port soon enough."
Rhaegar nodded in approval.
Wind and wave had Balerion hard in hand now, driving her swiftly toward the channel. Her double bank of oars stroked smoothly, lashing the sea to white foam as the Titan's shadow fell upon them. For a moment it seemed as though they must surely smash up against the stones beneath his legs. Flanked by his Kingsguard at the prow, Rhaegar could taste salt where the spray had touched his face. He had to look straight up to see the Titan's head.
Rhaegar put his hand to the hilt of his sword as they slipped between his legs. More arrow slits dotted the insides of those great stone thighs, and when Rhaegar craned his neck around to watch the crow's nest slip through with a good ten yards to spare, he spied murder holes beneath the Titan's armored skirts, and pale faces staring down at them from behind the iron bars.
And then they were past.
The shadow lifted, the pine-clad ridges fell away to either side, the winds dwindled, and they found themselves moving through a great lagoon. Ahead rose another sea mount, a knob of rock that pushed up from the water like a spiked fist, its stony battlements bristling with scorpions, spitfires, and trebuchets. "The Arsenal of Braavos," Denyo named it, as proud as if he'd built it. "They can build a war galley there in a day. Maybe we could even join both our fleets together and rule the seas together. You see King Rhaegar when two huge forces combine the third one will overcome both the others." Rhaegar could see dozens of galleys tied up at quays and perched on launching slips. The painted prows of others poked from innumerable wooden sheds along the stony shores, like hounds in a kennel, lean and mean and hungry, waiting for a hunter's horn to call them forth. He tried to count them, but there were too many, certainly more than what his own royal fleet numbered and more docks and sheds and quays where the shoreline curved away.
Two galleys had come out to meet them. They seemed to skim upon the water like dragonflies, their pale oars flashing. Rhaegar heard Denyo and the captains of the Braavosi ship he had brought as the honor guard shouting to them and their own captains shouting back, but he did not understand the words. A great horn sounded. The galleys passed to either side of them, so close that he could hear the muffled sound of drums from within their purple hulls, bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom, like the beat of living hearts.
Then the galleys were behind them, and the Arsenal as well. Ahead stretched a broad expanse of pea-green water rippled like a sheet of colored glass. From its wet heart arose the city proper, a great sprawl of domes and towers and bridges, grey and gold and red. The hundred isles of Braavos in the sea.
It was a flat city, he could see that even from afar, not like King's Landing on its three high hills. The only hills here were the ones that men had raised of brick and granite, bronze and marble. Something else was missing as well, though it took him a few moments to realize what it was. The city has no walls. Not that it needed one. The Braavosi depended on their ships for everything. Trade, war, food, drinks, wealth . . . name anything their ships were connected with it. Unlike the castles in Westeros the walls of Braavos were made of wood and painted purple. Their galleys were their walls. A strong fleet like the Braavosi fleet would protect a lagoon city like Braavos better than any other wall would.
The deck creaked behind them. Rhaegar turned to find the captain of Balerion looming over them in his long captain's coat of purple wool. Tradesman turned Captain Ternesio Terys wore no whiskers and kept his grey hair cut short and neat, framing his square, windburnt face. The Braavosi captain was a man born and grown to man a ship. He was a proven sailor who'd lead his own trading galleas and the Iron Bank's war galleys. A man with a great skill and vast experience worthy enough to be the captain of Balerion, the pride of the royal Targaryen fleet. "Your Grace we are here," he told Rhaegar. "We make for the Chequy Port, where the Sealord's customs officers will come aboard to inspect our holds. They will be half a day at it, they always are, but there is no need for you to wait upon their pleasure. I shall lower the boats, Your Grace, for you and the men. The crew will take you ashore to save the time of your journey."
Rhaegar nodded. He turned to Ser Gerold beside him. "Are the men ready, Lord Commander?" he asked the Lord Commander of his Kingsguard.
The White Bull stepped forward. "The men have already sent to the positions as you've commanded, Your Grace."
"Good," Rhaegar told him. "Nothing should go wrong."
The Lord Commander bowed his head. Rhaegar turned to his ship's captain. "Captain Terys, lower the boats."
His men were already loading the boats when he came to the deck. His boat was already made ready with two men from Balerion's crew at the oars. Rhaegar climbed on the boat and his kingsguard followed him. The boat he was on set forth first and the others with his men followed it.
Balerion dwindled in their wake, while the city grew larger with every stroke of the boat's oars. A harbor was visible off to his right, a tangle of piers and quays crowded with big-bellied whalers out of Ibben, swan ships from the Summer Isles, and more galleys than he could count. Another harbor, more distant, was off to his left, beyond a sinking point of land where the tops of half-drowned buildings thrust themselves above the water. Rhaegar had never seen so many big buildings all together in one place. King's Landing had the Red Keep and the Great Sept of Baelor and the Dragonpit, but Braavos seemed to boast a score of temples and towers and palaces that were as large or even larger.
The city had seemed like one big island from where the Titan stood, but as the men rowed them closer he saw that it was many small islands close together, linked by arched stone bridges that spanned innumerable canals. Beyond the harbor he glimpsed streets of grey stone houses, built so close they leaned one upon the other. To Rhaegar's eyes they were queer-looking, four and five stories tall and very skinny, with sharp-peaked tile roofs like pointed hats. He saw no thatch, and only a few timbered houses of the sort he knew in Westeros. They have no trees, he realized. Braavos is all stone, a grey city in a green sea.
Terys' crewmen swung them north of the docks and down the gullet of a great canal, a broad green waterway that ran straight into the heart of the city. They passed under the arches of a carved stone bridge, decorated with half a hundred kinds of fish and crabs and squids. A second bridge appeared ahead, this one carved in lacy leafy vines, and beyond that a third, gazing down on them from a thousand painted eyes. The mouths of lesser canals opened to either side, and others still smaller off of those. Some of the houses were built above the waterways, he saw, turning the canals into a sort of tunnel. Slender boats slid in and out among them, wrought in the shapes of water serpents with painted heads and upraised tails. Those were not rowed but poled, he saw, by men who stood at their sterns in cloaks of grey and brown and deep moss green. He saw huge flat-bottomed barges too, heaped high with crates and barrels and pushed along by twenty polemen to a side, and fancy floating houses with lanterns of colored glass, velvet drapes, and brazen figureheads. Off in the far distance, looming above canals and houses both, was a massive grey stone roadway of some kind, supported by three tiers of mighty arches marching away south into the haze. "What's that?" Rhaegar asked Denyo, pointing.
"The sweetwater river," the Braavosi told him. "It brings fresh water from the mainland, across the mudflats and the briny shallows. Good sweet water for the fountains."
When he looked behind him, the harbor and lagoon were lost to sight. A small canal ran through the big harbor and their boat streamed through it, cleaving through the collection of ships, galleys, whaler, barges and floating vessels of other kinds. There the oarsmen swung them right. They passed through a tunnel and out again into the light. More shrines loomed up to either side.
They went around a bend and beneath another bridge. On their left appeared a wooden dock covered with half a dozen colored clothes tied to poles which were sunk into the sea ground. Rhaegar wondered how long the poles originally were and how deep they were in the water. Beneath the canopy of colored clothes stood men of all ranges, from tall to short, from fat to lean, from old to young . . . all clothed in rich clothes of hundred colors which shamed the colored roof over their heads.
The oarsmen backed the oars, and the boat bumped gently against stone pilings. They grasped an iron ring set to hold them for a moment. Ser Gerold and Ser Oswell climbed out of the boat onto the wooden dock. Rhaegar stepped onto the wooden dock and his other two kingsguard flanked him.
A large old man in a red satin robe lined with rubies, opals, pearls, sapphires, onyx and other gemstones stepped forward with the others trailing behind him. From the way he was walking it seemed that it was hard for him to even walk with that cloth he was wearing. Rhaegar was sure that the old man would fall down even before he reached him but somehow he managed to walk to him without falling down.
"King Rhaegar," the old man said when he reached him, "I am Ferrego Antaryon, the Sealord of Braavos."
Rhaegar stepped forward. He nodded to the Sealord. There were more people than he had expected. Men of high status covered in their colored clothes, their guards whose weapons were as much different as their masters' dresses. He even saw a dothraki with a curved arakh and a long braid with ringing bells. Even the common folk gathered together in the higher grounds though it was still dark with only the faintest light of the dawn keeping the world alive.
"King Rhaegar," Tycho Nestoris followed the Sealord of Braavos with a grey man with a long beard reaching his neck beside him. "Welcome to Braavos. I hope you'll enjoy your stay here."
Rhaegar smiled at him. "I will."