Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,137

herself to her sister Alyssa in much the same way that Prince Baelon had attached himself to Prince Aemon, though not entirely as happily. Now it was Alyssa’s turn to bristle at having “the baby” clinging to her skirts. She evaded her as best she could, and Baelon laughed at her fury.

We have already touched upon several of Jaehaerys’s achievements. As 62 AC drew near its end, the king looked ahead to the year dawning, and all the years beyond, and began to make plans for a project that would transform the Seven Kingdoms. He had given King’s Landing cobblestones, cisterns, and fountains. Now he lifted his eyes beyond the city walls, to the fields and hills and bogs that stretched from the Dornish Marches to the Gift.

“My lords,” he told the council, “when the queen and I go forth on our progresses, we go on Vermithor and Silverwing. When we look down from the clouds, we see cities and castles, hills and swamps, rivers and streams and lakes. We see market towns and fishing villages, old forests, mountains, moors, and meadows, flocks of sheep and fields of grain, old battlefields, ruined towers, lichyards and septs. There is much and more to see in these Seven Kingdoms of ours. Do you know what I do not see?” The king slapped the table hard. “Roads, my lord. I do not see roads. I see some ruts, if I fly low enough. I see some game trails, and here and there a footpath by a stream. But I do not see any proper roads. My lords, I will have roads!”

The building of so many leagues of road would continue throughout the rest of Jaehaerys’s reign and into the reign of his successor, but it started that day in the council chambers of the Red Keep. Let it not be thought that there were no roads in Westeros before his reign; hundreds of roads crisscrossed the land, many dating back thousands of years to the days of the First Men. Even the children of the forest had paths they followed, when they moved from place to place beneath their trees.

Yet the roads as they existed were abysmal. Narrow, muddy, rutted, crooked, they wandered through hills and woods and over streams without plan or purpose. Only a handful of those streams were bridged. River fords were often guarded by men-at-arms who demanded coin or kind for the right to cross. Some of the lords whose lands the roads passed through maintained them after a fashion, but many more did not. A rainstorm would wash them out. Robber knights and broken men preyed upon the travelers who used them. Before Maegor, the Poor Fellows would provide a certain amount of protection to common folk upon the roads (when they were not robbing them themselves). After the destruction of the Stars, the realm’s byways became more dangerous than ever. Even great lords traveled with an escort.

To correct all these ills in a single reign would have been impossible, but Jaehaerys was determined to make a start. King’s Landing, it must be remembered, was very young as cities go. Before Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters had come ashore from Dragonstone, only a modest fishing village stood on the three hills where the Blackwater Rush flowed into Blackwater Bay. Not surprisingly, few roads of any note begin or end in modest fishing villages. The city had grown quickly in the sixty-two years since Aegon’s Conquest, and a few rude roads had sprung up with it, narrow dusty tracks that followed the shore up to Stokeworth, Rosby, and Duskendale, or cut through the hills to Maidenpool. Aside from that, there was nothing. No roads connected the king’s seat with the great castles and cities of the land. King’s Landing was a port, far more accessible by sea than land.

That was where Jaehaerys would begin. The wood south of the river was old forest, dense and overgrown; fine for hunting, poor for travel. He commanded that a road be cut through it, to connect King’s Landing with Storm’s End. The same road should be continued north of the city, from the Rush to the Trident and beyond, straight along the Green Fork and through the Neck, then across the wild trackless North to Winterfell and the Wall. The kingsroad, the smallfolk named it—the longest and most costly of Jaehaerys’s roads, the first begun, the first completed.

Others followed: the roseroad, the ocean road, the river road, the goldroad. Some