“It was not by choice that she sought the waterfront. She was fleeing again. Her whole life had been one long flight, it seemed.”

Synopsis: Dany gets the hell out of Qarth and meets some people along the way.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.

Political Analysis:

As I’ve discussed a bit before, I think Dany V is a bit of a weird place for her prophet’s narrative to end. Having survived the ordeal of the desert, passed the test of worldly temptation, and undergone a dream quest in the House of the Undying, she now….dickers around a bit with Xaro Xhoan Daxos, gets in her own head a bit, survives an assassination attempt, and meets some new people down by the docks. It’s a bit all over the place and nakedly stage-setting for the new paradigm in ASOS, but there are some interesting things going on despite the lack of narrative momentum.

Failing to Assimilate in Qarth

Continuing my obsession with Dany’s story as cultural politics, the chapter starts with a check-in on the new state of affairs, post-House of the Undying. To begin with, we can see that, after every group in Qarth has tried to bamboozle her, has given up on assimilating and is re-establishing her identity as a Dothraki (by marriage):

If the Milk Men thought her such a savage, she would dress the part for them. When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest, and a curved dagger hung from her medallion belt. Jhiqui had braided her hair Dothraki fashion, and fastened a silver bell to the end of the braid. “I have won no victories,” she tried telling her handmaid when the bell tinkled softly. Jhiqui disagreed. “You burned the maegi in their house of dust and sent their souls to hell.” That was Drogon’s victory, not mine.

While Dany is still ambivalent about her relationship to her dragons – she’ll feel very different in the Plaza of Punishment – braiding her hair and putting a silver bell on her braid is a bold statement that not only is Daenerys Targaryen a Dothraki but a khal. (Another moment of flipping gender-signalling that might foreshadow how she relates with the horselords in TWOW) And if Dany has given up on a rapprochement with Qarth, it very much is in response to Qarth collectively turning against an outsider who’s changed from curiosity to danger:

Pale men in dusty linen skirts stood beneath arched doorways to watch them pass. They know who I am, and they do not love me. Dany could tell from the way they looked at her… But it was run or die. Xaro had learned that Pyat Pree was gathering the surviving warlocks together to work ill on her. Dany had laughed when he told her. “Was it not you who told me warlocks were no more than old soldiers, vainly boasting of forgotten deeds and lost prowess?” “…these are strange times in Qarth. And strange times are bad for trade. It grieves me to say so, yet it might be best if you left Qarth entirely, and sooner rather than later.”

There’s a couple things going on here that need to be teased out. First, the warlocks of Qarth are something of a strange threat from this point on – yes, we hear that they want to “work ill on her,” but they never come in contact with her again, which makes them a bit remote as a threat. And them being captured and tortured by Euron Crowseye doesn’t exactly make them seem powerful and dangerous. Second, this contributes the lack sense of urgency for Dany to leave Qarth other than there’s nothing for her to do anymore, a bit like the feeling you get when you hang around an early zone in an RPG where all the quests are done, so nothing happens anymore.

Third, and here’s where things get more interesting, we already see Xaro Xhoan Daxos beginning to act more coolly towards Dany as he realizes she’s becoming less useful to him. Which is a bit of an odd attitude to take right before he makes his final proposal of marriage:

“You need not go alone, though. You have seen dark visions in the Palace of Dust, but Xaro has dreamed brighter dreams. I see you happily abed, with our child at your breast. Sail with me around the Jade Sea, and we can yet make it so! It is not too late. Give me a son, my sweet song of joy!” Give you a dragon, you mean. “I will not wed you, Xaro.” His face had grown cold at that. “Then go…” Xaro Xhoan Daxos would be no help to her, she knew that now. For all his professions of devotion, he was playing his own game, not unlike Pyat Pree. The night he asked her to leave, Dany had begged one last favor of him. “An army, is it?” Xaro asked. “A kettle of gold? A galley, perhaps?” Dany blushed. She hated begging. “A ship, yes.” Xaro’s eyes had glittered as brightly as the jewels in his nose. “I am a trader, Khaleesi. So perhaps we should speak no more of giving, but rather of trade. For one of your dragons, you shall have ten of the finest ships in my fleet. You need only say that one sweet word.” “No,” she said.

While it’s hardly unusual in this world for marriage negotiations to include questions of wealth and property, it is surprising how quickly XXD moves from professions of love and promises of children to naked commercial transaction. It takes very little for Dany to uncover a man who offhandedly mentions mothers selling their children, and who reacts to being told no by sending her messages “each cooler than the last. She must quit his house. He was done feeding her and her people. He demanded the return of his gifts…” I think their entire relationship can be summed up by XXD asking for a dragon “for all my kindnesses,” and then balking when Dany asks for “one third of all the ships in the world” instead.

Daxos’ motives here, as in previous chapters, are somewhat vague. He doesn’t want Dany for her person, he doesn’t seem to want the dragons to take over Qarth (as in the show) or the world for that matter, nor to vanquish his enemies, nor to gain magical power. He simply wants them because they’re something he doesn’t have. And while I wouldn’t generally recommend this as a literary technique, this vagueness works here. XXD’s greed parallels the unfulfilled hunger that fuels commerce and capitalism itself (indeed, one of the fundamental principles of human behavior as economics sees it is that demand is un-ending), because he is the purest embodiment of the merchant class there is in ASOIAF. Thus when he reappears in ADWD it’s quite effective – he’s equally happy to negotiate or war with the Breaker of Chains, because at the end of the day, he doesn’t care about the glory of Old Ghis or whether Dany broke any of the laws of war. All he cares about is that the spice slave trade flows once more.

The Metaphysical and the Metatextual

Moving from the material to the metaphysical, in the aftermath of Dany’s ordeal in the House of the Undying, we see that, far from the House’s destruction putting an end to magic in Qarth, it has only become more potent:

“It is said that the glass candles are burning in the house of Urrathon Night-Walker, that have not burned in a hundred years. Ghost grass grows in the Garden of Gehane, phantom tortoises have been seen carrying messages between the windowless houses on Warlock’s Way, and all the rats in the city are chewing off their tails. The wife of Mathos Mallarawan, who once mocked a warlock’s drab moth-eaten robe, has gone mad and will wear no clothes at all. Even fresh-washed silks make her feel as though a thousand insects were crawling on her skin. And Blind Sybassion the Eater of Eyes can see again, or so his slaves do swear. A man must wonder.” He sighed.

This is some damn fine world-building. On the one hand, there are a number of things in here that repeat throughout the series and give us a sense of connections beginning to be made – the glass candles, for example, will play an important role in the Oldtown plot in AFFC, and it’s interesting that this sorcerous means of communication extends so far outside the orbit of the former Valyrian Empire. The ghost grass reaches back to Dany III of AGOT and the Dothraki version of the apocalypse, and may extend forward through Mirri Maz Duur’s prophecy and the state of the Dothraki sea in Dany’s last chapter in ADWD.

On the other hand, there’s a lot here that works because GRRM allows things to remain mysterious – Urrathon Night-Walker, the Garden of Gehane, Mathos Mallarawan’s widow, and Blind Sybassion the Eater of Eyes are incredibly evocative names. However, the fact that GRRM doesn’t go on to describe them means that our imaginations are free to run wild. And this is a tendency I would love to see become more prevalent in the fantasy genre, where especially in more recent years our love of Tolkien-esque world-building leads us to describe too much, leaving no blank spaces or “there be dragons” on the map. And to GRRM’s credit, both the World of Ice and Fire and the Lands of Ice and Fire (the map book) do a wonderful job of providing evocative details while still leaving room for wonder.

The importance of the magical isn’t limited to worldbuilding, however. In what is one of the major redeeming virtues of Dany V, we get one of the most meta moments in the entire series, as Dany and her crew sit down to analyze the prophecies of the House of the Undying…just like ASOIAF fans have been doing since 1998. It starts with Dany beginning to react to the prophecy she’s been given, letting it color to how she sees the people around her (possibly necessary for the self-fulfillment to take place):

The warlocks whispered of three treasons…once for blood and once for gold and once for love. The first traitor was surely Mirri Maz Duur, who had murdered Khal Drogo and their unborn son to avenge her people. Could Pyat Pree and Xaro Xhoan Daxos be the second and the third? She did not think so. What Pyat did was not for gold, and Xaro had never truly loved her.

As we will see in ASOS and ADWD, the three treasons will be the lodestone to which Dany’s mind will gravitate toward again and again, coloring his interactions with Jorah, Ser Barristan, Dario Naharis, and others. This suggests in turn that one of the major elements of her arc in TWOW and ADOS will be how she will learn to trust others, especially Jon and Tyrion. At the same time, it is interesting that Dany gravitates to the three treasons, as opposed to the three fires she has to light or the three mounts she will ride.

But before she sinks into paranoia and mistrust, Dany extends her trust to Ser Jorah long enough to bring him into her close-reading group. So let’s see how Dany and Jorah do as ASOIAF fans:

The streets grew emptier as they passed through a district given over to gloomy stone warehouses. Aggo went before her and Jhogo behind, leaving Ser Jorah Mormont at her side. Her bell rang softly, and Dany found her thoughts returning to the Palace of Dust once more, as the tongue returns to a space left by a missing tooth. Child of three, they had called her, daughter of death, slayer of lies, bride of fire. So many threes. Three fires, three mounts to ride, three treasons. “The dragon has three heads,” she sighed. “Do you know what that means, Jorah?” “…the sigil of House Targaryen is a three headed dragon…the three heads were Aegon and his sisters.” “…A dead man in the prow of a ship, a blue rose, a banquet of blood…what does any of it mean, Khaleesi? A mummer’s dragon, you said. What is a mummer’s dragon, pray?” “A cloth dragon on poles,” Dany explained. “Mummers use them in their follies, to give the heroes something to fight.” …Dany could not let it go. “His is the song of ice and fire, my brother said. I’m certain it was my brother. Not Viserys, Rhaegar. He had a harp with silver strings.” “…but if [Aegon] was this prince that was promised, the promise was broken along with his skull…” “I remember,” Dany said sadly. “They murdered Rhaegar’s daughter as well, the little princess. Rhaenys, she was named, like Aegon’s sister. There was no Visenya, but he said the dragon has three heads. What is the song of ice and fire?” “It’s no song I’ve ever heard.” “I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they’ve left me with a hundred new questions.”

There’s a lot going on here, so let’s tease out some themes. First of all, the three heads of the dragon being Aegon and his sisters plays into the whole misgendered translation thing that Aemon brings up in AFFC, which suggests that if Dany is the Princess Who Was Promised, the other two heads should be male to complete the gender-flip. Second, Dany’s focus on the baby Aegon and the mummer’s dragon should be all the refutation we need to those who say that dropping Aegon VI into ADWD was an example of poor writing leading to a too-late revelation. Aegon VI was clearly part of the plan since 1998, hence the focus on Aegon being murdered here, and his role in the story could not be clearer: “mummer’s dragon…mummers use them in their follies, to give the heroes something to fight.” Aegon is Dany’s penultimate antagonist in the same way that the Boltons are the penultimate antagonists for the North, which is one of the reasons why I think the second Dance of the Dragons is going to be over very quickly, because at the end of the day Aegon is there to be a roadbump on the way to fight the White Walkers (as well as a thematic device for Dany to finally and decisively claim her mantle as *the* Targaryen). Third, there is an enormous amount of withholding here. We still don’t know what the title-dropping “song of ice and fire” is, and GRRM never brings it up again, whereas he does elaborate on other aspects of the HOTU prophecy. Likewise, there’s a huge amount we still don’t know about Rhaegar’s motivations – fans have guessed that his fixation on Lyanna Stark was part of a plan to breed a Lyanna to go along with his Aegon and Rhaenys, but other than the story of the Knight of the Laughing Tree, we don’t get much more about Rhaegar and the prophecy after this.

At the end of the day, Dany decides that prophecies are completely useless, because all they do is provoke more questions. If only we’d listened back then…

Getting Out of Town

On a completely different note, one of the actual events in Dany V is that the khaleesi acquires a new mission: get out of Qarth. And that means hiring a ship:

Dany would get no help from the Thirteen, the Tourmaline Brotherhood, or the Ancient Guild of Spicers. She rode her silver past several miles of their quays, docks, and storehouses, all the way out to the far end of the horseshoe-shaped harbor where the ships from the Summer Islands, Westeros, and the Nine Free Cities were permitted to dock. …neither her beauty nor his size and strength would serve with the men whose ships they needed. “You require passage for a hundred Dothraki, all their horses, yourself and this knight, and three dragons?” said the captain of the great cog Ardent Friend before he walked away laughing. When she told a Lyseni on the Trumpeteer that she was Daenerys Stormborn, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, he gave her a deadface look and said, “Aye, and I’m Lord Tywin Lannister and shit gold every night.” The cargomaster of the Myrish galley Silken Spirit opined that dragons were too dangerous at sea, where any stray breath of flame might set the rigging afire. The owner of Lord Faro’s Belly would risk dragons, but not Dothraki. “I’ll have no such godless savages in my Belly, I’ll not.” The two brothers who captained the sister ships Quicksilver and Greyhound seemed sympathetic and invited them into the cabin for a glass of Arbor red. They were so courteous that Dany was hopeful for a time, but in the end the price they asked was far beyond her means, and might have been beyond Xaro’s. Pinchbottom Petto and Sloe-Eyed Maid were too small for her needs, Bravo was bound for the Jade Sea, and Magister Manolo scarce looked seaworthy.

Having now thoroughly burned her bridges with the Qartheen, Dany turns instead to the outside world. And what she gets from the outside world is essentially a condensed version of Viserys’ life experience: she gets laughed off in disbelief, she gets refused both for pragmatic and bigoted reasons, and she gets people trying to overcharge and otherwise scam her. It’s an interesting moment of regression for Dany, and the pull quote for this essay suggests that it’s enough to give her a moment of empathy for her otherwise shitty brother.

Unfortunately, now that she’s down in the docks and no longer protected by XXD’s manse’s high walls, this brings us to the part of the chapter that doesn’t really work – the Sorrowful Man’s attempted assassination:

A Qartheen stepped into her path. “Mother of Dragons, for you.” He knelt and thrust a jewel box into her face. Dany took it almost by reflex. The box was carved wood, its mother-of-pearl lid inlaid with jasper and chalcedony. “You are too generous.” She opened it. Within was a glittering green scarab carved from onyx and emerald. Beautiful, she thought. This will help pay for our passage. As she reached inside the box, the man said, “I am so sorry,” but she hardly heard. Dany took it almost by reflex. The box was carved wood, its mother-of-pearl lid inlaid with jasper and chalcedony. “You are too generous.” She opened it. Within was a glittering green scarab carved from onyx and emerald. Beautiful, she thought. This will help pay for our passage. As she reached inside the box, the man said, “I am so sorry,” but she hardly heard. The scarab unfolded with a hiss. Dany caught a glimpse of a malign black face, almost human, and an arched tail dripping venom…and then the box flew from her hand in pieces, turning end over end. Sudden pain twisted her fingers. As she cried out and clutched her hand, the brass merchant let out a shriek, a woman screamed, and suddenly the Qartheen were shouting and pushing each other aside. Ser Jorah slammed past her, and Dany stumbled to one knee. She heard the hiss again. The old man drove the butt of his staff into the ground, Aggo came riding through an eggseller’s stall and vaulted from his saddle, Jhogo’s whip cracked overhead, Ser Jorah slammed the eunuch over the head with the brass platter, sailors and whores and merchants were fleeing or shouting or both . . .

On a pure plot basis, I can see why GRRM needed this to happen. First, Dany needs a compelling reason to get out of Qarth right now, because she’s finished her primary quest chain and she needs to move on to the Slaver’s Bay zone and keep levelling up. Second, Dany needs a reason to trust Arstan Whitebeard and Strong Belwas so that she’ll add them to her party, and having them save her from an attempted hit is as good a reason as any.

The problem to me is one of execution – this is just weak tea. The attempted murder of our protagonist should feel a lot bigger than that, an omnipresent threat coming at her from every angle as an entire ancient and corrupt city seeks to drive out the foreign element within. There should be teams of assassins jumping out from every dark corner and alleyway, driving Dany’s party to the very end of the docks, only for the Millenium Falcon Seduleon, Summer Son, and Joso’s Prank to show up just at the nick of time so that they can dramatically leap aboard, arrows falling just short. One guy with a manticore scarab just doesn’t provide enough of a sense of urgency or much of a reason for Arstan and Belwas to be there – after all, there really isn’t anything they do that couldn’t be done by Jorah and Jhogo.

Speaking of our newest additions to the group, Dany V also gives us the first secret identity in ASOIAF, but not the last, as Arstan Whitebeard introduces himself:

“…You owe me nothing, Your Grace. I am called Arstan, though Belwas named me Whitebeard on the voyage here.” Though Jhogo had released him, the old man remained on one knee. Aggo picked up his staff, turned it over, cursed softly in Dothraki, scraped the remains of the manticore off on a stone, and handed it back. “…I am. I was born on the Dornish Marches, Your Grace. As a boy I squired for a knight of Lord Swann’s household.” He held the tall staff upright beside him like a lance in need of a banner. “Now I squire for Belwas.”

I like how Ser Barristan handles the whole secret identity business. As we might expect from the living embodiment of the best of the Kingsguard, he never actually lies to Dany apart from a name that’s clearly just a shortened version of bARrriSTAN. He really was born on the Dornish Marches, as House Selmy are marcher lords, and it makes sense that he would have squired for his powerful neighbors in House Swann. It’s a very in-character way of showing how someone who is basically Lawful Good (and Lawful Neutral at the very worst reading) doesn’t have to be Lawful Stupid and can actually be just as sneaky and underhanded as the most Chaotic Neutral of rogues.

Checking In With the Varys/Illyrio Conspiracy

Finally we get to the genuinely political section of this chapter, where we get to see what Illyrio’s been up to since he met with Varys in the crypts under the Red Keep back in AGOT. Now, as we know from ASOS, Ser Jorah’s been sending regular updates to the Pentoshi merchant prince about Dany throughout AGOT, but it’s really only his letter from Qarth (his very last missive, as a matter of fact) which stirs Illyrio into action. Formerly a semi-disposable Targaryen who potentially could complicate Aegon’s claim to the Iron Throne, Dany is now the Mother of Dragons and the Varys/Illyrio Conspiracy is the only group in Westeros that knows of her existence. And so Illyrio shows his characteristic flexibility (or vacillation, according to Tristan Rivers of the Golden Company) and reaches out to her:

“Illyrio?” she said. “You were sent by Magister Illyrio?” “We were, Your Grace,” old Whitebeard replied. “The Magister begs your kind indulgence for sending us in his stead, but he cannot sit a horse as he did in his youth, and sea travel upsets his digestion.” Earlier he had spoken in the Valyrian of the Free Cities, but now he changed to the Common Tongue. “I regret if we caused you alarm. If truth be told, we were not certain, we expected someone more…more…”

Now, as we have seen before, Illyrio uses his supposed immobility strategically, hoping to bring people to him and keep them in his orbit until he can re-direct their energies in the direction before. Before, he attempted to keep Viserys in hand, so that he could be used in conjunction with the Golden Company (and probably disposed of later): “Viserys Targaryen was to join us with fifty thousand Dothraki screamers at his back. ” Here, Illyrio attempts to use his three ships as the perfect lure to get Dany to Pentos.

As we learn in ADWD, this was his plan B after Viserys got himself killed: “then the Beggar King was dead, and it was to be the sister, a pliable young child queen who was on her way to Pentos with three new-hatched dragons.” My guess is that, since Young Griff and co. were in the general vicinity of Pentos before they traveled on the Shy Maid to Volantis (the fact that they sail south through Ny Sar is highly suggestive that they had started on the far western fork of the Rhoyne that comes closest to Pentos), Illyrio wanted to get Dany to meet Young Griff right away so the young widow could meet her miraculously alive cousin, know that she was not an orphan for the first time since Viserys died, and marry him, uniting the two claims in a thoroughly Tudor fashion. And what better way for Young Griff to prove his Targaryen bonafides by bonding with one of her three dragons?

Unfortunately for Illyrio, his major weakness as a conspirator is that he keeps using catspaws who have their own agendas – we’ll see Jorah’s agenda revealed in Dany I of ASOS, Jon Connington’s in ADWD, and here I think we see a little of Arstan and Belwas’:

“…Now tell me, what would Magister Illyrio have of me, that he would send you all the way from Pentos?” “He would have dragons,” said Belwas gruffly, “and the girl who makes them. He would have you.” “Belwas has the truth of us, Your Grace,” said Arstan. “We were told to find you and bring you back to Pentos. The Seven Kingdoms have need of you. Robert the Usurper is dead, and the realm bleeds. When we set sail from Pentos there were four kings in the land, and no justice to be had.” Joy bloomed in her heart, but Dany kept it from her face. “I have three dragons,” she said, “and more than a hundred in my khalasar, with all their goods and horses.” “It is no matter,” boomed Belwas. “We take all. The fat man hires three ships for his little silverhair queen.” “It is so, Your Grace,” Arstan Whitebeard said. “The great cog Saduleon is berthed at the end of the quay, and the galleys Summer Sun and Joso’s Prank are anchored beyond the breakwater.”

As one might expect, Belwas and Ser Barristan play their cards straight; the former frankly admitting that Illyrio wants Dany for himself, the latter beginning to plant the seeds of his later argument about the Targaryens as the coin with madness on one side and greatness on the other. What they don’t do is make any particularly persuasive argument for why they ought to take these ships to Pentos as opposed to Westeros itself (or indeed, to Slaver’s Bay). Nor do they do much in the way of bargaining, as both men hand Dany the three ships that represented the sum total of their leverage on a silver platter, rather than extracting any kind of oath to actually go to Pentos and meet with Illyrio.

Historical Analysis:

So let’s talk about manticores! To begin with, a brief caveat: yes, I know manticores aren’t actually historical creatures. But they were creatures that historical peoples and societies believed existed, so it totally counts. Manticores were creatures out of Persian mythology – although it’s a bit more accurate to say that they were probably a Greek mistranslation/misunderstanding of Persian mythology – which date back at least to the 4th century BCE.

According to these sources, manticores had the head of a man and the body of either a tiger or a leopard, and were incredibly fearsome. In addition to “three rows of teeth along each jaw” like a shark, manticores had “the tail of a Scorpion of the Earth,” that grew “sharp pointed quills” a “cubit long and sharp as thorns,” which it could fling like javelins at its enemies. In some version of the tales, these quills carried either a deadly poison or a paralytic agent that would immobilize its prey. In other versions, the manticore had a voice like “a pan-pipe blended with a trumpet” and large bat wings that it could use to fly. Notably, the manticore is always a man-eating animal (the original Persian name for the manticore literally means man-eater), and is associated with cruelty and hunger, based on its use of venom to either cause agonizing pain or paralyze its prey while it consumes them, and its habit of devouring humans alive, clothing and all.

So you can see the bare bones of GRRM’s manticore here – he kept the stinger tail with its deadly poison, especially Oberyn’s thickened venom to cause an agonizing slow death, and he kept the human face. But where he got the idea for it being an insect that can be folded up into a box, I don’t know.

What If?

I’m going to handle the What If? where Dany goes to Pentos instead of Slaver’s Bay in Dany I of ASOS, so we don’t have any hypotheticals this week. No way is Dany dying to the Sorrowful Man.

Book vs. Show:

I won’t say that the show handled this particular part in the story any better or any worse than the book did. It’s just an awkward transition, combining new characters and location changes, and there’s no way to get around that. Indeed, I actually found the creepy blue-lipped child assassin who disappears from view more effective than the Sorrowful Man in the text.

Regarding the Arstan persona, you can see right away why it is that Benioff and Weiss decided to side-step this entire plotline – secret identities are a device that works on the page, because GRRM has the complete power to decide what descriptive details he gives about this character. But the camera doesn’t have the same discretion – even if they had Ian McElhinney grow a beard and keep his hood up the whole time like Obi-Wan Kenobi, audiences are going to recognize who this character is almost immediately.

So chalk one up to adaptation making a virtue out of necessity.