I've been thinking about how ridiculous the Yunkish soldiers are and then it hit me: Yunkai and Astapor haven't been to war in centuries.
It's been a while since I've read ADWD part 2 but I know that the army had a rotating roster of enslavers and they all had a gimmick. Some kept their soldiers chained together, one guy had soldiers on stilts, and one had half-naked soldiers with erotic shields. It's a ridiculous pageant that would quickly fall apart when faced with real combat. I kept wondering if the Yunkai'i and Astapori were that stupid until it hit me that they've been letting the Unsullied do most of their fighting for the past few centuries and probably use enslaved Unsullied generals who went with Dany. Yes, they have a few thousand enslaved soldiers defending their walls but I don't think they've been on the offensive since Valyria conquered them. They have no real experience with how combatants should dress or be equipped and since they're entitled slavers, they're not gonna stoop to asking one of their enslaved soldiers if they're waging war correctly. The sellsword companies they hired to fight for them must be annoyed as hell cuz they're professional killers being dictated to by squabbling rich idiots who are dressing their enslaved soldiers in the Essos equivalent of clown costumes. Which brings me to how I think Barristan Selmy will win the battle outside of Meereen. The slavers' army is a mix of mercenaries and gimmicky slave soldiers that are definitely going to trip up the sellswords, assuming they don't say "Screw it" and start cleaving their way through their own allies so they can fight without fools underfoot. Predictably, the Wise Masters will bemoan their "destroyed property" and demand reparations but the sellswords will all switch to Dany's side once she returns cuz their current employers are fucking ridiculous.
She is coming. Her host is on the march. She is racing south to Yunkai, to put the city to the torch and its people to the sword, and we are going north to meet her.
Frog had it from Dick Straw who had it from Old Bill Bone who had it from a Pentoshi named Myrio Myrakis, who had a cousin who served as cupbearer to the Tattered Prince. "Coz heard it in the command tent, from Caggo's own lips," Dick Straw insisted. "We'll march before the day is out, see if we don't."
+.+.+
"We'll get provisions in Yunkai, maybe fresh horses, then it will be on to Meereen to dance with the dragon queen. So hop quick, Frog, and put a nice edge on your master's sword. Might be he'll need it soon."
In Dorne Quentyn Martell had been a prince, in Volantis a merchant's man, but on the shores of Slaver's Bay he was only Frog, squire to the big bald Dornish knight the sellswords called Greenguts. The men of the Windblown used what names they would, and changed them at a whim. They'd fastened Frog on him because he hopped so fast when the big man shouted a command.
Frog prince, she's not going to kiss you, please go home.
He refers to himself as Frog throughout this chapter. Oh, Quentyn.
+.+.+
The Windblown went back thirty years, and had known but one commander, the soft-spoken, sad-eyed Pentoshi nobleman called the Tattered Prince. His hair and mail were silver-grey, but his ragged cloak was made of twists of cloth of many colors, blue and grey and purple, red and gold and green, magenta and vermilion and cerulean, all faded by the sun. When the Tattered Prince was three-and-twenty, as Dick Straw told the story, the magisters of Pentos had chosen him to be their new prince, hours after beheading their old prince. Instead he'd buckled on a sword, mounted his favorite horse, and fled to the Disputed Lands, never to return. He had ridden with the Second Sons, the Iron Shields, and the Maiden's Men, then joined with five brothers-in-arms to form the Windblown. Of those six founders, only he survived.
[...]
An old man he was, past sixty, yet he still sat straight and tall in the high saddle, and his voice was strong enough to carry to every corner of the field.
There are old sellswords and bold sellswords, but no old bold sellswords. - Daenerys V, ASOS
The Tattered Prince was selected to be Prince of Pentos, and refused. It's giving Jon Snow.
For those thinking that might also be hinting at a volunteered exile, we'll later learn the Tattered Prince does want Pentos. So no, I don't think so.
"What I want," said the Tattered Prince, "is Pentos." - The Spurned Suitor, ADWD
+.+.+
But Gerris had the right of it; he and Arch were here to protect Quentyn, and that meant keeping him by the big man's side. "Arch is the best fighter of the three of us," Drinkwater had pointed out, "but only you can hope to wed the dragon queen."
Wed her or fight her; either way, I will face her soon.
Boy, you don't know how right you are.
+.+.+
The more Quentyn heard of Daenerys Targaryen, the more he feared that meeting.
[...]
And Books, the clever Volantene swordsman who always seemed to have his nose poked in some crumbly scroll, thought the dragon queen both murderous and mad. "Her khal killed her brother to make her queen. Then she killed her khal to make herself khaleesi. She practices blood sacrifice, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against her own on a whim. She's broken truces, tortured envoys … her father was mad too. It runs in the blood."
And the best lies contain within them nuggets of truth, enough to give a listener pause. - Tyrion III, ACOK
+.+.+
It runs in the blood. King Aerys II had been mad, all of Westeros knew that. He had exiled two of his Hands and burned a third. If Daenerys is as murderous as her father, must I still marry her? Prince Doran had never spoken of that possibility.
That's the problem with marriage pacts, you might get a Viserys or Daenerys.
He had exiled two of his Hands and burned a third.
I never considered this might be foreshadowing. She exiles Jorah.
+.+.+
Frog would be glad to put Astapor behind him. The Red City was the closest thing to hell he ever hoped to know. The Yunkai'i had sealed the broken gates to keep the dead and dying inside the city, but the sights that he had seen riding down those red brick streets would haunt Quentyn Martell forever. A river choked with corpses. The priestess in her torn robes, impaled upon a stake and attended by a cloud of glistening green flies. Dying men staggering through the streets, bloody and befouled. Children fighting over half-cooked puppies. The last free king of Astapor, screaming naked in the pit as he was set on by a score of starving dogs. And fires, fires everywhere. He could close his eyes and see them still: flames whirling from brick pyramids larger than any castle he had ever seen, plumes of greasy smoke coiling upward like great black snakes.
Good lord.
"What's the point of Quentyn Martell's POV?" This. This is the point. POVs in Slaver's Bay that aren't Daenerys.
+.+.+
When the wind blew from the south, the air smelled of smoke even here, three miles from the city. Behind its crumbling red brick walls, Astapor was still asmolder, though by now most of the great fires had burned out. Ashes floated lazy on the breeze like fat grey snowflakes.
+.+.+
The Yunkai'i did not lack for commanders. An old hero named Yurkhaz zo Yunzak had the supreme command, though the men of the Windblown glimpsed him only at a distance, coming and going in a palanquin so huge it required forty slaves to carry it.
They could not help but see his underlings, however. The Yunkish lordlings scuttled everywhere, like roaches. Half of them seemed to be named Ghazdan, Grazdan, Mazdhan, or Ghaznak; telling one Ghiscari name from another was an art few of the Windblown had mastered, so they gave them mocking styles of their own devising.
Ha ha, funny author. Almost as funny as introducing three new characters, then changing their names the next chapter.
Yurkhaz zo Yunzak will be an important character, but I don't remember enough to have an opinion of him.
+.+.+
Foremost amongst them was the Yellow Whale, an obscenely fat man who always wore yellow silk tokars with golden fringes. Too heavy even to stand unassisted, he could not hold his water, so he always smelled of piss, a stench so sharp that even heavy perfumes could not conceal it. But he was said to be the richest man in Yunkai, and he had a passion for grotesques; his slaves included a boy with the legs and hooves of a goat, a bearded woman, a two-headed monster from Mantarys, and a hermaphrodite who warmed his bed at night. "Cock and cunny both," Dick Straw told them. "The Whale used to own a giant too, liked to watch him fuck his slave girls. Then he died. I hear the Whale'd give a sack o' gold for a new one."
Guess who buys Tyrion in a slave market.
Is every character morbidly obese in this book? He's probably supposed to remind me of Illyrio. Couldn't tell you why.
+.+.+
Then there was the Girl General, who rode about on a white horse with a red mane and commanded a hundred strapping slave soldiers that she had bred and trained herself, all of them young, lean, rippling with muscle, and naked but for breechclouts, yellow cloaks, and long bronze shields with erotic inlays. Their mistress could not have been more than sixteen and fancied herself Yunkai's own Daenerys Targaryen.
Is the horse named Drogal? Does she call her slaves freedmen?
+.+.+
The Little Pigeon was not quite a dwarf, but he might have passed for one in a bad light. Yet he strutted about as if he were a giant, with his plump little legs spread wide and his plump little chest puffed out. His soldiers were the tallest that any of the Windblown had ever seen; the shortest stood seven feet tall, the tallest close to eight. All were long-faced and long-legged, and the stilts built into the legs of their ornate armor made them longer still. Pink-enameled scales covered their torsos; on their heads were perched elongated helms complete with pointed steel beaks and crests of bobbing pink feathers. Each man wore a long curved sword upon his hip, and each clasped a spear as tall as he was, with a leaf-shaped blade at either end.
"The Little Pigeon breeds them," Dick Straw informed them. "He buys tall slaves from all over the world, mates the men to the women, and keeps their tallest offspring for the Herons. One day he hopes to be able to dispense with the stilts."
The giant dwarf is a nod to Tyrion, but I don't know what the hell the rest of it means.
+.+.+
"Some say that herons are majestic," said Old Bill Bone.
"If your king eats frogs while standing on one leg."
"Herons are craven," the big man put in. "One time me and Drink and Cletus were hunting, and we came on these herons wading in the shallows, feasting on tadpoles and small fish. They made a pretty sight, aye, but then a hawk passed overhead, and they all took to the wing like they'd seen a dragon. Kicked up so much wind it blew me off my horse, but Cletus nocked an arrow to his string and brought one down. Tasted like duck, but not so greasy."
We've got an arrow taking down a massive bird, but it's the hawk that's the dragon in this scenario.
Herons fleeing once they see a dragon is probably a sign of things to come.
+.+.+
The last time the slave soldiers of Yunkai'i had faced the dragon queen's Unsullied, they broke and ran. The Clanker Lords had devised a stratagem to prevent that; they chained their troops together in groups of ten, wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle. "None of the poor bastards can run unless they all run," Dick Straw explained, laughing. "And if they do all run, they won't run very fast."
Something to keep in mind when Daenerys returns to Meereen in TWOW, and decimates the Yunkish slave army.
Game of Thrones didn't do a great job at conveying those were slaves she was burning.
+.+.+
"A pack of stinking yellow fools," Beans complained. "They still ain't managed to puzzle out why the Stormcrows and the Second Sons went over to the dragon queen."
"For gold, they believe," said Books. "Why do you think they're paying us so well?"
"Gold is sweet, but life is sweeter," said Beans. "We were dancing with cripples at Astapor. Do you want to face real Unsullied with that lot on your side?"
Daenerys better not lose battles in Westeros.
+.+.+
A real fight, thought Frog. The words stuck in his craw. The fight beneath the walls of Astapor had seemed real enough to him, though he knew the sellswords felt otherwise. "That was butchery, not battle," the warrior bard Denzo D'han had been heard to declare afterward.
[...]
Dead or alive, the Butcher King still took the Wise Masters unawares. The Yunkishmen were still running about in fluttering tokars trying to get their half-trained slave soldiers into some semblance of order as Unsullied spears came crashing through their siege lines. If not for their allies and their despised hirelings they might well have been overwhelmed, but the Windblown and the Company of the Cat were ahorse in minutes and came thundering down on the Astapori flanks even as a legion from New Ghis pushed through the Yunkish camp from the other side and met the Unsullied spear to spear and shield to shield.
A whole chapter dedicated to telling me Yunkai doesn't have a hope in hell.
+.+.+
The rest was butchery, but this time it was the Butcher King on the wrong end of the cleaver. Caggo was the one who finally cut him down, fighting through the king's protectors on his monstrous warhorse and opening Cleon the Great from shoulder to hip with one blow of his curved Valyrian arakh. Frog did not see it, but those who did claimed Cleon's copper armor rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.
Dead Cleon's fall wrote an end to that. The new Unsullied threw down their spears and shields and ran, only to find the gates of Astapor shut behind them.
What the hell?
I'm instantly reminded of Roose Bolton's decoy, but I doubt he'll be a dead guy.
+.+.+
Yet that was no real fight, he thought. The real fight will be on us soon, and we must be away before it comes, or we'll find ourselves fighting on the wrong side.
[...]
Those were hardships to be endured, the stuff of all adventures.
But what must come next was plain betrayal. The Yunkai'i had brought them from Old Volantis to fight for the Yellow City, but now the Dornishmen meant to turn their cloaks and go over to the other side. That meant abandoning their new brothers-in-arms as well. The Windblown were not the sort of companions Quentyn would have chosen, but he had crossed the sea with them, shared their meat and mead, fought beside them, traded tales with those few whose talk he understood.
Aww, he's made wildling friends.
Nice for the sellswords, but I wish more Yunkai were humanized. We're getting nothing but evil one-dimensional caricatures right now.
Oops, sorry, am I being a slavery apologist again?
+.+.+
It was the Tattered Prince himself who did the speaking. "Orders have come down from Yurkhaz," he said. "What Astapori still survive have come creeping from their hidey-holes, it seems. There's nothing left in Astapor but corpses, so they're pouring out into the countryside, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all starved and sick. The Yunkai'i don't want them near their Yellow City. We've been commanded to hunt them down and turn them, drive them back to Astapor or north to Meereen. If the dragon queen wants to take them in, she's welcome to them. Half of them have the bloody flux, and even the healthy ones are mouths to feed."
And it begins.
Just when she thinks Astapor is behind her, someone rides in on a pale mare.
+.+.+
"A fair question. You're to ride east, deep into the hills, then swing wide about Yunkai, making for Meereen. Should you come on any Astapori, drive them north or kill them … but know that is not the purpose of your mission. Beyond the Yellow City, you're like to come up against the dragon queen's patrols. Second Sons or Stormcrows. Either will serve. Go over to them."
"Go over to them?" said the bastard knight, Ser Orson Stone. "You'd have us turn our cloaks?"
"I would," said the Tattered Prince.
Quentyn Martell almost laughed aloud. The gods are mad.
Now he doesn't have to defect! This is like the only good thing to ever happen to Quentyn Martell.
+.+.+
Hugh Hungerford frowned. "You think Queen Daenerys will take us in …"
"I do."
"… but if she does, what then? Are we spies? Assassins? Envoys? Are you thinking to change sides?"
[...]
"Let us be frank," said Denzo D'han, the warrior bard. "The Yunkai'i do not inspire confidence. Whatever the outcome of this war, the Windblown should share in the spoils of victory. Our prince is wise to keep all roads open."
Hedging his bets. Now we know how he made it to sixty.
I'm a little cloudy on the details, but I believe Daenerys doesn't take the Windblown sellswords in at first, because she doesn't trust them. Then Barristan Selmy is put in charge, and agrees to do business. Is that correct?
More relying on the wrong people basically.
+.+.+
"Every one of you has ample reason for wanting to abandon me. And Daenerys Targaryen knows that sellswords are a fickle lot. Her own Second Sons and Stormcrows took Yunkish gold but did not hesitate to join her when the tide of battle began to flow her way."
It only now occurred to me that Taena Merryweather and Daario Naharis might be playing the same role in each queen's story. Other than the sexual attraction, I mean.
Cersei knows Taena is playing both sides, but seems to forget that as the story develops. Daenerys knows she shouldn't trust sellswords, but. . .
+.+.+
The three Dornishmen were silent as they left the command tent. Twenty riders, all speaking the Common Tongue, thought Quentyn. Whispering has just gotten a deal more dangerous.
The big man slapped him hard across the back. "So. This is sweet, Frog. A dragon hunt."
A dragon hunt?
Final thoughts:
That was one of the hardest chapters to read in the entire series. Not gruesome, I mean I didn't understand anything.
Men’s Lives Have Meaning, Part 5: The Hour of Ghosts
Series so far here
“There’s a tipping point in every tragedy where inevitability locks the exit doors on free will and you know that after this, there is no turning back.”
-- @racefortheironthrone
Hello everyone. My name is Emmett, and I could have been imagined, designed, constructed, and sold as a consumer for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. I had just turned twelve when the first one came out at the end of 2001, I’d read the books that summer, and the infusion of swelling Hollywood orchestras and Peter Jackson’s beloved action schlock was perfectly calibrated to take my love for the material and shoot it into the stratosphere. I still look back on those movies with love...mostly. There are moments, especially in Return of the King, where the tone tips overboard:
On one level, that’s what we want our heroes to say, right? We’re up against the odds, we might not be rewarded for our efforts, but let’s do it anyway; that’s the lesson a lot of great genre fiction is meant to leave us with, in one form or another. The problem with that clip is the knowing wink, the sly acknowledgement that after they’ve escaped so many other hair-raising disasters, this is just another day at work. I get the joke, but it would make more sense for (say) a Bond or Indy movie, where it really is just another day at work and part of the enjoyment comes from how what’s over-the-top for us is normal for them. In the context of LOTR, it’s tonally off, because this is not supposed to feel episodic. It’s supposed to feel climactic, like our heroes are genuinely in danger as everything comes to a head, and that’s marred when you expose the plot armor so blatantly. If this is just another day, why are we supposed to be invested in their risk?
Of course, Peter Jackson didn’t invent that problem. It’s a storytelling problem. And that is why GRRM created Quentyn Martell. It’s why he tries to tame a dragon and why he fails: to reclaim the stakes and re-sensitize us to the risk. It’s not just that he dies, it’s how and why he dies. What does it mean to not have plot armor? What does it say about quest narratives that they can collapse so completely and yet the quester clings to tropes as if they’ll save him? How are we to live if Story fails as an organizing principle? “The Spurned Suitor” brings these questions to the forefront, right before “The Dragontamer” sets it all on fire. It’s the most reflective and dialogue-heavy of Quent’s chapters, the most thematically explicit; it’s the one that cuts through the hellish imagery dominating this storyline right to what it all means. In genre terms, where previous Quent chapters soaked the fantasy tropes in blood-red horror, this chapter has a distinctly noirish feel to it, in terms of both imagery and theme.
“The Merchant’s Man” introduced Quent reeling from his friends’ deaths; “The Windblown” caught up with him in the wake of the Sack of Astapor. In both chapters, as I said in the essays in question, GRRM’s focus is less the traumatic event itself than the psychological impact on Quent--both are about how one processes these existential challenges to the hero’s journey, and why one would keep going in the face of them. “The Spurned Suitor” pulls the same trick, but with a twist. In this case, the pre-chapter trauma that shapes the chapter isn’t an obstacle to the quest. It’s the outright failure of it. Quent reached the beautiful princess, proved himself willing (though not exactly eager) to transform from a frog back into a prince...but she said no.
To be clear, chapter title aside, the horror here is not getting rejected by a pretty girl. (Like I said last time, Dany doesn’t reject Quent in favor of the dark dashing Daario and his lust for open war, but in favor of the dishwater-dull Hizdahr and the peace he ostensibly brings; as she tells herself upon agreeing to marry the latter, she’s trying to act on behalf of her people.) The horror here is getting rejected after losing your friends and killing screaming teenagers along the way; the horror is selling your soul to live a life you didn’t want to live, only to find you’re not even going to get that. The horror is that it wasn’t worth it. It all meant nothing. Story is a lie. Of course, if that’s all there was to Quent’s story, it would be tired and boring. What grounds it emotionally is that laserlike focus on the aftermath of that revelation, as it hits home harder with each step of the descent. What do you do when your easy narrative falls apart and you’re left with no good options?
In “The Merchant’s Man” and “The Windblown,” Quent’s reaction to this trauma and disillusionment was to repress what he’d gone through and done, soldiering on with the Windblown repeatedly intervening (as if sent by some sinister observing God-Author) to allow him to do so. Now that he’s faced with the failure of his quest, all the kid wants to do is to go home, but he can’t bring himself to face the shame of failure and (even more so) his survivor’s guilt...
“We should be heeding Selmy. When Barristan the Bold tells you to run, a wise man laces up his boots. We should find a ship for Volantis whilst the port is still open.”
Just the mention turned Ser Archibald’s cheeks green. “No more ships. I’d sooner hop back to Volantis on one foot.”
Volantis, Quentyn thought. Then Lys, then home. Back the way I came, empty-handed. Three brave men dead, for what?
It would be sweet to see the Greenblood again, to visit Sunspear and the Water Gardens and breathe the clean sweet mountain air of Yronwood in place of the hot, wet, filthy humors of Slaver’s Bay. His father would speak no word of rebuke, Quentyn knew, but the disappointment would be there in his eyes. His sister would be scornful, the Sand Snakes would mock him with smiles sharp as swords, and Lord Yronwood, his second father, who had sent his own son along to keep him safe…
“I will not keep you here,” Quentyn told his friends. “My father laid this task on me, not you. Go home, if that is what you want. By whatever means you like. I am staying.”
...and so instead, he reaches out to the Windblown in the hopes that they’ll once again keep his quest going, even as their actions and attitudes continue to undercut the ostensibly righteous and hopeful nature of said quest. We see that right from the beginning of Quent’s penultimate POV chapter:
The hour of ghosts was almost upon them when Ser Gerris Drinkwater returned to the pyramid to report that he had found Beans, Books, and Old Bill Bone in one of Meereen’s less savory cellars, drinking yellow wine and watching naked slaves kill one another with bare hands and filed teeth.
This fighting pit, an unofficial but not-so-secret alternative to Daznak’s, is a glimpse of the Meereen outside the rarified domain of the Masters. The black market sprang up as the sanctioned one shut down, and that the Windblown are taking part reminds us of the sellswords’ own analogous role in The System, straddling the line between a standard part of Essosi military coalitions and a wild card constantly in the position to upset the applecart.
That backdrop provides the thematic and emotional context for the decision Quent makes in this chapter. The hour of ghosts, indeed; the shadow city of alleys and cellars into which Team Quentyn descends in “The Spurned Suitor” is haunted, not only by those already dead but also by the deaths to come. As has been the case throughout Quent’s storyline, his personal struggles dovetail with (and are influenced by) the big picture of the Meereenese Knot. Just as Dany’s refusal obliterated the remnants of the “tale to tell our grandchildren” veneer, leading to Quent betting his life on a wild roll of the dice, so has her departure at Daznak’s shattered the pretense of peace, leading to the whole pot boiling over as ADWD comes to a close. Indeed, I’d argue that Quent’s quest and Hizdahr’s peace are analogous. They sound good on the surface, appealing to values we instinctively support, but quickly prove rotten underneath the gild, enabling the worst actors in the Meereenese Knot instead of righteous causes, before they both finally come crashing down at the same place and time in the Kingbreaker/Dragontamer two-sided setpiece. It’s all approaching the tipping point, personally and politically.
But as I said, what makes Quent’s chapters more than glum grim deconstruction is the extent to which the characters are aware of this tipping point, that the story is falling apart around them, and that’s made explicit in “The Spurned Suitor.” On their way to their fateful meeting with the Tattered Prince, Quent and Drink argue about the former’s plans, and IMO it’s one of the most important and profound passages in the series. Let’s break it down.
“ ‘The dragon has three heads,’ she said to me. ‘My marriage need not be the end of all your hopes,’ she said. ‘I know why you are here. For fire and blood.’ I have Targaryen blood in me, you know that. I can trace my lineage back —”
“Fuck your lineage,” said Gerris. “The dragons won’t care about your blood, except maybe how it tastes. You cannot tame a dragon with a history lesson. They’re monsters, not maesters. Quent, is this truly what you want to do?”
“This is what I have to do. For Dorne. For my father. For Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry.”
“They’re dead,” said Gerris. “They won’t care.”
“All dead,” Quentyn agreed. “For what? To bring me here, so I might wed the dragon queen. A grand adventure, Cletus called it. Demon roads and stormy seas, and at the end of it the most beautiful woman in the world. A tale to tell our grandchildren. But Cletus will never father a child, unless he left a bastard in the belly of that tavern wench he liked. Will will never have his wedding. Their deaths should have some meaning.”
Gerris pointed to where a corpse slumped against a brick wall, attended by a cloud of glistening green flies. “Did his death have meaning?”
Quentyn looked at the body with distaste. “He died of the flux. Stay well away from him.” The pale mare was inside the city walls. Small wonder that the streets seemed so empty. “The Unsullied will send a corpse cart for him.”
“No doubt. But that was not my question. Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths. I loved Will and Cletus too, but this will not bring them back to us. This is a mistake, Quent. You cannot trust in sellswords.”
“They are men like any other men. They want gold, glory, power. That’s all I am trusting in.” That, and my own destiny. I am a prince of Dorne, and the blood of dragons is in my veins.
We see here that Quent’s sunk cost fallacy has completely taken over his decision-making process. Because his quest has already gotten people killed, it must continue, or in his mind, they died for nothing. This is, of course, extremely relatable. We’ve all made decisions like this, albeit usually on a much smaller scale. No one likes to admit failure, everyone wants to attach some meaning to their losses, and we’re meant to understand why Quent is so helplessly mired in panicked desperation. I can fix this, I will fix this, oh gods please I have to fix this...
GRRM makes this decision easy to empathize with in order to sucker punch us with the larger revelation: the basic mechanics of the genre are designed to create precisely such a sunk cost fallacy. You are supposed to lose companions--that raises the stakes, heightens our emotional involvement, and challenges the protagonist both externally (how do I logistically complete the quest without that companion?) and internally (how do I soldier on in the face of that loss?) You are supposed to have a low point where you question everything that’s led you to this moment. You are supposed to take an enormous risk. You are supposed to, literally or metaphorically, tame a dragon.
In Quent’s case, however, we’re dealing with a Last Hero who never finds the Children of the Forest--or perhaps, a Last Hero whom the Children pitilessly watch die. As such, when looking at his arc as a whole, those losses and low points don’t serve to allow our hero to prove himself and us to revel in victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Instead, they are warning signs that our hero ignores. Quentyn’s story interrogates reader assumptions about quest narratives: why do we embrace such a narrative? What are we overlooking when we do so? What if the quest in question rips those assumptions limb from limb and leaves them to bleed out on the deck of the Meadowlark, in the ashes of Astapor, in that hellish pit beneath the Great Pyramid?
As far as what all this looks like to Quent himself, it’s made clear that what he’s relying on to save his quest (and his soul) isn’t anything intrinsic to his actions. He’s not counting on courage or ingenuity. He’s not even counting, first and foremost, on the Windblown. He’s counting on the story itself to save him, the elements of his narrative that would seem to demand he succeed: his princely heritage, his lost companions, the fact that he’s taking a big foolish romantic risk.
But as I said a few essays back, the story is in fact out to kill Quentyn Martell, and so Drink does what good friends have to do sometimes: tell you that you’re spouting BS. “Fuck your lineage” is GRRM speaking through Drink, launching a deconstructive nuke at the idea that your bloodline is what makes you The Hero. That holds true with the *actual* heroes as well, of course--one of the major themes of Jon’s story is that everything he’s learned and struggled with is what makes him a worthy savior figure, not R+L=J in and of itself. But it’s different with Quent because he doesn’t have a grand destiny, earned or otherwise. As such, he’s left alone in an existentialist void, trying to create meaning out of what’s befallen his quest.
And just as I wrote my series on Davos’s ADWD arc in order to talk about his letter to Marya, I wrote this series in order to talk about Drink’s response to Quent’s desperate plea to the gods that “their deaths should have some meaning.” This is a bold statement, I know, but: “Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths” is the closest we’ve gotten to an overarching thesis statement for ASOIAF. It reaches all the way back to the first book, to Ned (who, like Quent, turns out to not be the protagonist after all) and his shocking demise. So many readers have interpreted that moment, as well as the Red Wedding two books later, as being indicative of nihilism on GRRM’s part. Everything is chaos, honor gets you killed and is therefore worthless, “power is power.” But this is not so. Ned’s legacy is not his death, it is his life. The children determined to find each other again because Dad taught them to stick together and be brave, the vassals who have set out to rescue and restore those children in his name, the memory both in-universe and IRL of a decent man who treated his servants like human beings worth listening to and who was determined to protect the young and innocent...all of this is the meaning of Ned Stark, not that he ended up as a head on a spike. By the same token, the meaning of Tywin Lannister isn’t that he died on the can. It’s why he died on the can, and that is because he lived a terrible life. His legacy is his family tearing itself apart, his hoped-for Lannister regime falling to pieces across Westeros, and his oh-so-symbolic reeking corpse. One of these men, for all his mistakes, found and spread a worthy meaning in his brief time on Terros, and the other, for all his triumphs, did not. We are all mortal; all of us, “from the highest lord to the lowest gutter rat,” are ultimately helpless before the abyss that Quent leaps into in his final chapter. No one (not even Euron, try as he might) can change that. What matters, what makes us who are, what means something, is how we live our lives knowing that in the end, the house always wins.
“Men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths” is also the first arrow in my quiver when it comes to defending the worth of the new characters and storylines in the Feastdance. Why should we care about the Martells or the “Griffs” if they’re just showing up now and will probably die before endgame? Because moving the plot along to book seven is not actually what makes a story meaningful. Lives lived make stories meaningful:
The door to the roof of the tower was stuck so fast that it was plain no one had opened it in years. He had to put his shoulder to it to force it open. But when Jon Connington stepped out onto the high battlements, the view was just as intoxicating as he remembered: the crag with its wind-carved rocks and jagged spires, the sea below growling and worrying at the foot of the castle like some restless beast, endless leagues of sky and cloud, the wood with its autumnal colors. “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” Prince Rhaegar had said, standing right where Jon was standing now. And the boy he’d been had replied, “One day they will all be mine.” As if that could impress a prince who was heir to the entire realm, from the Arbor to the Wall.
Griffin’s Roost had been his, eventually, if only for a few short years. From here, Jon Connington had ruled broad lands extending many leagues to the west, north, and south, just as his father and his father’s father had before him. But his father and his father’s father had never lost their lands. He had. I rose too high, loved too hard, dared too much. I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.
And of course, Drink’s powerful words are GRRM’s message to us about how to think about Quent. Do not think that he meant nothing because he failed and died or because he was never going to be the protagonist, the author is saying. What matters is his life, the POV we have experienced and come to understand. He lived, he tried, he died. It is for us to remember him. I only wish he had heeded the lesson Drink was trying to teach him, before it was far too late.
Only with that why firmly established does GRRM move onto the what, knowing that the former will lend resonance to the latter. The plot of “The Spurned Suitor” concerns Quent turning in desperation to the Tattered Prince and his Windblown for help taming one of Dany’s captive children, despite having betrayed them. As the city simmers and seethes around them, the princes meet in secret.
The sun had sunk below the city wall by the time they found the purple lotus, painted on the weathered wooden door of a low brick hovel squatting amidst a row of similar hovels in the shadow of the great yellow-and-green pyramid of Rhazdar. Quentyn knocked twice, as instructed. A gruff voice answered through the door, growling something unintelligible in the mongrel tongue of Slaver’s Bay, an ugly blend of Old Ghiscari and High Valyrian. The prince answered in the same tongue. “Freedom.”
The door opened. Gerris entered first, for caution’s sake, with Quentyn close behind him and the big man bringing up the rear. Within, the air was hazy with bluish smoke, whose sweet smell could not quite cover up the deeper stinks of piss and sour wine and rotting meat. The space was much larger than it had seemed from without, stretching off to right and left into the adjoining hovels. What had appeared to be a dozen structures from the street turned into one long hall inside.
At this hour the house was less than half full. A few of the patrons favored the Dornishmen with looks bored or hostile or curious. The rest were crowded around the pit at the far end of the room, where a pair of naked men were slashing at each other with knives whilst the watchers cheered them on.
Quentyn saw no sign of the men they had come to meet. Then a door he had not seen before swung open, and an old woman emerged, a shriveled thing in a dark red tokar fringed with tiny golden skulls. Her skin was white as mare’s milk, her hair so thin that he could see the scalp beneath.
“Dorne,” she said, “I be Zahrina. Purple Lotus. Go down here, you find them.” She held the door and gestured them through.
Team Quent is going underground and behind the curtain in “The Spurned Suitor.” In terms of the big picture, we’re seeing a Meereen that Dany never even glimpsed from atop the pyramid. On a more intimate scale, this imagery reflects the scales falling from Quent’s eyes about how the world works. He never thought his quest would involve cutting ethically murky deals in back-alley parlors (again, it’s suddenly a noir story), but if he wants to keep going for his fallen friends’ sake, it’s the only avenue he has left. It’s worth noting here how Quent contrasts with his fellow Questers for Dany. Where Quent wonders why Dany would ever choose him “among all the princes of the world,” Aegon has never even considered that she would reject him, because he was raised in a Perfect Prince bubble while Quent was told out of nowhere to Go West East, Young Man at age 18. Tyrion, too, wanders the shifting political sands of Essos in the wake of Dany’s crusade, but at this point in his storyline, he finds it hard to care about most of it, so his bitter detached cynicism makes for another illuminating contrast with Quent’s grief and desperation. And Victarion...well, as I’ve argued before, his story is the black comedy to Quent’s tragedy. Vic’s doom is presented as a huge joke on him by his puppetmasters: Euron, Moqorro, and George R.R. Martin. There’s no tragedy there because Vic keeps rejecting the possibility for growth or change. He’s there to be laughed at, by us as well as the monkeys. But with Quent, there really was a worthy life he could’ve lived (as I’ll get into next time). It’s just not this one, this one-way ride into fiery oblivion, escorted and enabled by the Satan of Slaver’s Bay and his motley crew. Speaking of which:
An undercellar. It was a long way down, and so dark that Quentyn had to feel his way to keep from slipping. Near the bottom Ser Archibald pulled his dagger.
They emerged in a brick vault thrice the size of the winesink above. Huge wooden vats lined the walls as far as the prince could see. A red lantern hung on a hook just inside the door, and a greasy black candle flickered on an overturned barrel serving as a table. That was the only light.
Caggo Corpsekiller was pacing by the wine vats, his black arakh hanging at his hip. Pretty Meris stood cradling a crossbow, her eyes as cold and dead as two grey stones. Denzo D’han barred the door once the Dornishmen were inside, then took up a position in front of it, arms crossed against his chest.
One too many, Quentyn thought.
The Tattered Prince himself was seated at the table, nursing a cup of wine. In the yellow candlelight his silver-grey hair seemed almost golden, though the pouches underneath his eyes were etched as large as saddlebags. He wore a brown wool traveler’s cloak, with silvery chain mail glimmering underneath. Did that betoken treachery or simple prudence? An old sellsword is a cautious sellsword. Quentyn approached his table. “My lord. You look different without your cloak.”
“My ragged raiment?” The Pentoshi gave a shrug. “A poor thing…yet those tatters fill my foes with fear, and on the battlefield the sight of my rags blowing in the wind emboldens my men more than any banner. And if I want to move unseen, I need only slip it off to become plain and unremarkable.” He gestured at the bench across from him. “Sit. I understand you are a prince. Would that I had known. Will you drink? Zahrina offers food as well. Her bread is stale and her stew is unspeakable. Grease and salt, with a morsel or two of meat. Dog, she says, but I think rat is more likely. It will not kill you, though. I have found that it is only when the food is tempting that one must beware. Poisoners invariably choose the choicest dishes.”
“You brought three men,” Ser Gerris pointed out, with an edge in his voice. “We agreed on two apiece.”
“Meris is no man. Meris, sweet, undo your shirt, show him.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Quentyn. If the talk he had heard was true, beneath that shirt Pretty Meris had only the scars left by the men who’d cut her breasts off. “Meris is a woman, I agree. You’ve still twisted the terms.”
“Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am. Three to two is not much of an advantage, it must be admitted, but it counts for something. In this world, a man must learn to seize whatever gifts the gods chose to send him. That was a lesson I learned at some cost. I offer it to you as a sign of my good faith.”
We’ve got a literal descent matching the emotional/thematic one, to make a foolish risky deal that will end up claiming our protagonist body and soul, with someone who’s lying and spinning right off the bat, his deceptively simple appearance hiding a cruel sardonic heart...so yeah, like I said, the Tattered Prince is the devil of the Meereenese Knot, the tempter-corrupter figure luring Quent into hell. “Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am” is precisely the sort of way Satan and characters similar to him talk; they lie to you, and then they make fun of you for believing them. After all, Quent, you only got into Meereen in the first place because of the Tattered Prince’s deceitfulness...and because of your own.
The Pentoshi gave a shrug. “One thing I am certain of. Someone will have need of our swords.”
“I have need of those swords. Dorne will hire you.”
The Tattered Prince glanced at Pretty Meris. “He does not lack for gall, this Frog. Must I remind him? My dear prince, the last contract we signed you used to wipe your pretty pink bottom.”
“I will double whatever the Yunkishmen are paying you.”
“And pay in gold upon the signing of our contract, yes?”
“I will pay you part when we reach Volantis, the rest when I am back in Sunspear. We brought gold with us when we set sail, but it would have been hard to conceal once we joined the company, so we gave it over to the banks. I can show you papers.”
“Ah. Papers. But we will be paid double.”
“Twice as many papers,” said Pretty Meris.
“The rest you’ll have in Dorne,” Quentyn insisted. “My father is a man of honor. If I put my seal to an agreement, he will fulfill its terms. You have my word on that.”
The Tattered Prince finished his wine, turned the cup over, and set it down between them. “So. Let me see if I understand. A proven liar and oathbreaker wishes to contract with us and pay in promises. And for what services? I wonder. Are my Windblown to smash the Yunkai’i and sack the Yellow City? Defeat a Dothraki khalasar in the field? Escort you home to your father? Or will you be content if we deliver Queen Daenerys to your bed wet and willing? Tell me true, Prince Frog. What would you have of me and mine?”
You’ve been lying this whole way, to the world and yourself. What’s one more piece of wood on that fire? Again, though, it’s precisely that sunk-cost fallacy, the panicked certainty that it’s too late to turn back, that gets Quent killed. In so much of genre fiction, that “I started this, I have to finish it” drive is celebrated, even cast as the thing that makes you the hero. Here, it is revealed as a sad self-delusion that only serves to throw another body on the pile of the dead. Quent needs so badly to make his friends’ sacrifice worth it that he’s willing to sell out an *entire city* (namely, Pentos) to make it happen. The cynical world-weary Windblown are here to cut through that fragile narrative, telling Quent that neither he nor his story is special:
“I ask your pardon for our deception. The only ships sailing for Slaver’s Bay were those that had been hired to bring you to the wars.”
The Tattered Prince gave a shrug. “Every turncloak has his tale. You are not the first to swear me your swords, take my coin, and run. All of them have reasons. ‘My little son is sick,’ or ‘My wife is putting horns on me,’ or ‘The other men all make me suck their cocks.’ Such a charming boy, the last, but I did not excuse his desertion. Another fellow told me our food was so wretched that he had to flee before it made him sick, so I had his foot cut off, roasted it up, and fed it to him. Then I made him our camp cook. Our meals improved markedly, and when his contract was fulfilled he signed another. You, though…several of my best are locked up in the queen’s dungeons thanks to that lying tongue of yours, and I doubt that you can even cook.”
“I am a prince of Dorne,” said Quentyn. “I had a duty to my father and my people. There was a secret marriage pact.”
“So I heard. And when the silver queen saw your scrap of parchment she fell into your arms, yes?”
“No,” said Pretty Meris.
“No? Oh, I recall. Your bride flew off on a dragon. Well, when she returns, do be sure to invite us to your nuptials. The men of the company would love to drink to your happiness, and I do love a Westerosi wedding. The bedding part especially, only…oh, wait…” He turned to Denzo D’han. “Denzo, I thought you told me that the dragon queen had married some Ghiscari.”
“A Meereenese nobleman. Rich.”
The Tattered Prince turned back to Quentyn. “Could that be true? Surely not. What of your marriage pact?”
“She laughed at him,” said Pretty Meris.
Daenerys never laughed. The rest of Meereen might see him as an amusing curiosity, like the exiled Summer Islander King Robert used to keep at King’s Landing, but the queen had always spoken to him gently. “We came too late,” said Quentyn.
Interesting to note that Quent is pulling an UnKiss here, convincing himself that Dany did not laugh upon him revealing his identity and mission, when in truth, she did. That just goes to show how thoroughly he’s backed himself into a corner. “We came too late,” and so again, we have a Quent chapter ending with the Windblown enabling our hero’s descent. Of course, Quent is responsible for this decision--he came to them, not the other way around. I’m not trying to strip him of agency, as that would be a much less engaging story. But what I’m interested in here is how the failure of the quest, the shattering of the ideal, has led to Quent making this terrible decision. Here’s where GRRM’s existentialist-romantic take on the genre comes into play: Quent was taught to uphold and believe in certain norms because an ordered universe will reward him for it, not because following the rules is the right thing to do in itself. As such, when Quent’s quest proves over and over again that there is no inherent order to the universe, and as such no automatic reward, Quent loses all moorings; he doesn’t have that Davos/Brienne “no chance and no choice” ethos to keep him going in the face of the abyss.
And that’s why he makes a deal with the devil: it seems like his best option.
“I need you to help me steal a dragon.”
Caggo Corpsekiller chuckled. Pretty Meris curled her lip in a half-smile. Denzo D’han whistled.
The Tattered Prince only leaned back on his stool and said, “Double does not pay for dragons, princeling. Even a frog should know that much. Dragons come dear. And men who pay in promises should have at least the sense to promise more.”
“If you want me to triple—”
“What I want,” said the Tattered Prince, “is Pentos.”
And as always, making a deal with the devil lands our protagonist in fiery torment, condemned by his own folly. After Quent’s death, Barristan takes responsibility for delivering Pentos to Tatters, and come TWOW, I think Dany will fulfill the bargain after confronting Illyrio RE Aegon. Because a deal with the devil can’t be undone--it just transfers from person to person.
Indeed, it’s tonally appropriate that Quent’s quest climaxes not with him becoming the hero, but with him letting the devil back into paradise. One thing I noticed in this reread is how closely the form of “The Spurned Suitor” matches that of “The Dragontamer.” In both chapters, Quent trembles on the edge of the Void, wondering am I really going to go through with this, decides that he is, and this descent is promptly made literal. In his third chapter, he descends to the cellar to face the Tattered Prince and his cronies, sealing the doom that unfolds in his fourth chapter, in which he descends into the dank dark hell beneath the Great Pyramid to face Rhaegal and Viserion. One inextricably leads to the other; symbolically, the Tattered Prince is the dragonfire, the epitome of how Quent trying to “fix” his own story only serves to keep revealing how it cannot be fixed. This is your life, Quentyn Martell. You are not the hero. And just as with my second favorite character in ASOIAF, Stannis Baratheon, this revelation will be rendered in fire and blood.
I recently came across the theory that the Tattered Prince is Aerion's son Maegor. Being a true Targ, he would have dragon eggs, and when he fled Pentos, were left behind or stolen from him, which explains how Illyrio was in possession of dragon eggs - three, no less. The theory also mentioned that TTP's aim is still to steal Dany's dragons as they're essentially his. While this theory does sort of explain what happened to Prince Maegor, it still seems like a whole lot of speculation. Thoughts?
It seems like a whole ton of speculation. Cloud-castle-building theorizing of the worst kind, where instead of working with evidence to develop a theory, they start with a theory and twist the truth to match.
But let’s see the evidence.
Age. Maegor Brightflame was born in 232 AC. If he were still alive, he’d be 68. The Tattered Prince is “past sixty”, which is a match, but GRRM has a tendency to average up and would be more likely to call a 68-year-old man “near seventy”.
Appearance. Maegor was the child of two Targaryens. Aerion looked a classic Targ: pale skin, silver-gold hair, purple eyes. We don’t know what his cousin/wife Daenora looked like, but of the children of Mariah Martell only Baelor is mentioned as looking Dornish, not Rhaegel… and Daenora’s mother was an Arryn, who are generally blonde… so we can presume Maegor probably had the Targ traits. The Tattered Prince is old, with grey hair, so that’s no help, but he says all he needs to do is take off his tattered clothing to become “plain and unremarkable”. (Though note going incognito was something Maegor’s uncle Daeron could do.) But he evidently doesn’t have purple eyes, as that certainly would have been mentioned.
The Prince of Pentos is chosen from the forty families. (And greatly honored, until something bad happens and the Pentoshi believe the gods are angry at them, upon which he is sacrificed and the magisters choose a new prince.) Even if Maegor was living in Pentos (though I don’t know why, see below), he would not be of the forty families of Pentos, so why would they choose him to be their sacrificial prince?
The Tattered Prince was chosen by the magisters when he was twenty-three. Maegor was 23 in 255 AC, and this is the biggest fault in the theory, because TWOIAF has a date for when the Tattered Prince was elected, and it says it was in 262 AC.
But even assuming that Maester Yandel somehow got the records that wrong (and if you do that you open up wayyy too many cans of worms), 255 AC was four years before the Tragedy at Summerhall. Why would Maegor have left Westeros for Pentos during the rule of Aegon V, during a point when there wasn’t even any ongoing war with the Blackfyres? (The Band of Nine didn’t start doing their thing until 258.) Even if Maegor were exiled like Aerion briefly was, for similar reasons, why would he have been allowed to take dragon eggs with him? How would he have gotten three? A Targaryen prince is only given one each, in the cradle.
Illyrio says the dragon eggs he gives to Dany are from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, and are thousands of years old. If they were from Westeros via Maegor, why would he need to make up such an elaborate lie? Why not just say they were eggs acquired from Westeros, from the Targaryens back when they had dragons? Dany would have been even more kindly inclined to Illyrio to hear that, that perhaps someone in her family once held these eggs, that perhaps they were laid by one of the dragons she knows of from family stories. (Also, the fact that Dany’s eggs are eons old and petrified and from Asshai is a plot point re her miracle, goddamn it. They aren’t any of the known Targ eggs, which were probably all destroyed at Summerhall, anyway.)
The Tattered Prince doesn’t want Dany’s dragons. He wants Pentos. He says this clearly, more than once. When Pretty Meris fake-deserts the Windblown to tell Dany that the Tattered Prince wants to go over to her side, she says he says the price is Pentos. And when Quentyn comes to him asking for help stealing the dragons, again he says he wants Pentos in return for that help, and they sign a contract with this agreement. If the Tattered Prince wanted the dragons for himself, why doesn’t he even hint to this feeling? Why does he keep saying Pentos?
No, the Tattered Prince is a Pentoshi, from one of the forty families. He wants to be the Prince of Pentos for real, but on his own terms, one that doesn’t get sacrificed to appease the gods. He’s not a Targaryen, and he doesn’t want Dany’s dragons.
As for what happened to Maegor Brightflame, he’s only mentioned twice, re the Great Council of 233AC (once unnamed in ACOK, once with more details in TWOIAF), and then entirely disappears from the narrative. Personally, I believe that if Maegor didn’t die young, then he’ll be the thematic replacement for Aerion in the last D&E story, and I’d bet something he did is one of the reasons Aegon’s ceremony went wrong at Summerhall, and he died there.
At any rate, even excluding the notable contradiction of the dates… what with Maegor’s mad father, mad grandfather, and apparently mad aunt and uncle... I sincerely doubt Maegor would ever be the cold and rational devil-bargainer of ADWD, the twisty rogue called the Tattered Prince. Hope that helps!
The Windblown: The Tattered Prince, Pretty Meris,
Caggo Corpsekiller, Denzo D'han, Lucifer Long,
Dick Straw, Ginger Jack, Baqq 'Beans',
Webber, Books, Myrio Myrakis,
Orson Stone, Will of the Woods, Black Gerrold
Men’s Lives Have Meaning, Part 3: Fires Everywhere
Series so far here
“Oh, my sweet summer child. What do you know of fear?”
There are places in the world of ASOIAF where Metropolis is revealed as Moloch, where the horror takes on a hideous cosmic tinge, where curses are real. Harrenhal is one, of course, and the Nightfort is another.
But I feel there’s one often left off the list.
“Bricks and blood built Astapor,” Whitebeard murmured at her side, “and bricks and blood her people.”
“What is that?” Dany asked him, curious.
“An old rhyme a maester taught me, when I was a boy. I never knew how true it was. The bricks of Astapor are red with the blood of the slaves who make them.”
Astapor is hell. This is made nigh-explicit by the very first sentence set there:
In the center of the Plaza of Pride stood a red brick fountain whose waters smelled of brimstone, and in the center of the fountain a monstrous harpy made of hammered bronze.
Indeed, when we’re introduced to the Red City, it’s a sprawling charnel house dedicated to unspeakable abuses, GRRM framing its elites as human-shaped ticks grown fat on blood. Hell is a market in human suffering, in which pain is the core of the advertising.
“We give each boy a puppy on the day that he is cut. At the end of the first year, he is required to strangle it. Any who cannot are killed, and fed to the surviving dogs. It makes for a good strong lesson, we find.”
He stopped before a thickset man who had the look of Lhazar about him and brought his whip up sharply, laying a line of blood across one copper cheek. The eunuch blinked, and stood there, bleeding. “Would you like another?” asked Kraznys.
“If it please your worship.”
“To win his spiked cap, an Unsullied must go to the slave marts with a silver mark, find some wailing newborn, and kill it before its mother’s eyes. In this way, we make certain that there is no weakness left in them.”
Kraznys moved to the next eunuch in line, a towering youth with the blue eyes and flaxen hair of Lys. “Your sword,” he said. The eunuch knelt, unsheathed the blade, and offered it up hilt first. It was a shortsword, made more for stabbing than for slashing, but the edge looked razor sharp. “Stand,” Kraznys commanded.
“Your worship.” The eunuch stood, and Kraznys mo Nakloz slid the sword slowly up his torso, leaving a thin red line across his belly and between his ribs. Then he jabbed the swordpoint in beneath a wide pink nipple and began to work it back and forth.
“What is he doing?” Dany demanded of the girl, as the blood ran down the man’s chest.
“Tell the cow to stop her bleating,” said Kraznys, without waiting for the translation. “This will do him no great harm. Men have no need of nipples, eunuchs even less so.” The nipple hung by a thread of skin. He slashed, and sent it tumbling to the bricks, leaving behind a round red eye copiously weeping blood.
“Douquor’s Pit has a fine folly scheduled for the evening. A bear and three small boys. One boy will be rolled in honey, one in blood, and one in rotting fish, and she may wager on which the bear will eat first.”
Dany arrives intending to take part in the blood-soaked commerce, just as Jorah was urging her and Drogo to do back in AGOT. But after her religious arc in ACOK and her own experience with slavery in AGOT, she instead decides to overthrow the Underworld with fire and blood, thus merging her political and prophetic selves. Yet note how GRRM describes her first step in doing so:
A lance of swirling dark flame took Kraznys full in the face. His eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, and the oil in his hair and beard burst so fiercely into fire that for an instant the slaver wore a burning crown twice as tall as his head. The sudden stench of charred meat overwhelmed even his perfume, and his wail seemed to drown all other sound.
Even in liberation, Astapor is characterized by stomach-churning violence. It’s a city-wide butcher’s floor...and indeed, look who takes over next:
“Your Worship!” he cried. “My name is Ghael. I bring greetings to the Mother of Dragons from King Cleon of Astapor, Cleon the Great.”
Dany stiffened. “I left a council to rule Astapor. A healer, a scholar, and a priest.”
“Your Worship, those sly rogues betrayed your trust. It was revealed that they were scheming to restore the Good Masters to power and the people to chains. Great Cleon exposed their plots and hacked their heads off with a cleaver, and the grateful folk of Astapor have crowned him for his valor.”
“Noble Ghael,” said Missandei, in the dialect of Astapor, “is this the same Cleon once owned by Grazdan mo Ullhor?”
Her voice was guileless, yet the question plainly made the envoy anxious. “The same,” he admitted. “A great man.”
Missandei leaned close to Dany. “He was a butcher in Grazdan’s kitchen,” the girl whispered in her ear. “It was said he could slaughter a pig faster than any man in Astapor.”
I have given Astapor a butcher king.
The descent continues:
“The city bleeds. Dead men rot unburied in the streets, each pyramid is an armed camp, and the markets have neither food nor slaves for sale. And the poor children! King Cleaver’s thugs have seized every highborn boy in Astapor to make new Unsullied for the trade, though it will be years before they are trained.”
“We have heard that the Butcher King of Astapor is dead.”
“Slain by his own soldiers when he commanded them to march out and attack the Yunkai’i.” The words were bitter in her mouth. “He was hardly cold before another took his place, calling himself Cleon the Second. That one lasted eight days before his throat was opened. Then his killer claimed the crown. So did the first Cleon’s concubine. King Cutthroat and Queen Whore, the Astapori call them. Their followers are fighting battles in the streets, while the Yunkai’i and their sellswords wait outside the walls.”
And in “The Windblown,” GRRM drops the veil entirely:
Frog would be glad to put Astapor behind him. The Red City was the closest thing to hell he ever hoped to know.
“The Windblown” is about the reaper coming for Dany’s revolution...only to find that in Astapor at least, it was already dead:
Frog did not see it, but those who did claimed Cleon’s copper armor rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.
Again, it’s hell from the very first sentence:
The word passed through the camp like a hot wind.
The “hot wind” immediately goes for Dante’s Inferno to set the chapter’s tone. Specifically, the second circle of hell (fitting, as this is Quent’s second chapter) inflicts such a wind on the lustful. As @goodqueenaly noted, this is tearfully ironic given that Quentyn ain’t lustful at all. He does not desire Dany for himself; he is acting out of a sense of obligation to his father, to his dead companions, and to Story itself.
Wed her or fight her; either way, I will face her soon. The more Quentyn heard of Daenerys Targaryen, the more he feared that meeting. The Yunkai’i claimed that she fed her dragons on human flesh and bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her skin smooth and supple. Beans laughed at that but relished the tales of the silver queen’s promiscuity. “One of her captains comes of a line where the men have foot-long members,” he told them, “but even he’s not big enough for her. She rode with the Dothraki and grew accustomed to being fucked by stallions, so now no man can fill her.” And Books, the clever Volantene swordsman who always seemed to have his nose poked in some crumbly scroll, thought the dragon queen both murderous and mad. “Her khal killed her brother to make her queen. Then she killed her khal to make herself khaleesi. She practices blood sacrifice, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against her own on a whim. She’s broken truces, tortured envoys…her father was mad too. It runs in the blood.”
It runs in the blood. King Aerys II had been mad, all of Westeros knew that. He had exiled two of his Hands and burned a third. If Daenerys is as murdeous as her father, must I still marry her? Prince Doran had never spoken of that possibility.
Quent, as I’ve said ad nauseam, doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to be the hero. Every new twist of the plot, every bit of information he comes across, only makes that more plain. If “The Merchant’s Man” dealt with Quent reckoning with that after the loss of his friends and soldiering forward anyway, “The Windblown” tunes into Quent having just been faced with the ghastly, unshakable horror of riding with this particular motley crew, and what that says about his quest and the environment in which it’s taking place...only to have said crew continue to be the enablers of his quest. This is increasingly the Windblown’s story now, as they come to dominate and then hijack Quent’s adventure, and so flavor it with themselves.
From ASOS to ADWD, the fall of Astapor is rendered as a series of hallucinogenic horror tableaux. The imagery is baroque and cinematic, contrasting with the more blunt, stripped-down presentation of atrocities that we see (for example) throughout Arya’s time in the Riverlands. The latter’s story found GRRM cutting through romantic presentations of war in favor of the learned hopelessness of being powerless, of having no rules to live by. But in Slaver’s Bay, he’s after something else: a war story shot through with lush, vivid horror, all to emphasize how horribly wrong Quent’s quest has gone. The shadows come to dance in Astapor, my prince, they come to stay.
The Yunkai’i had sealed the broken gates to keep the dead and dying inside the city, but the sights that he had seen riding down those red brick streets would haunt Quentyn Martell forever. A river choked with corpses. The priestess in her torn robes, impaled upon a stake and attended by a cloud of glistening green flies. Dying men staggering through the streets, bloody and befouled. Children fighting over half-cooked puppies. The last free king of Astapor, screaming naked in the pit as he was set on by a score of starving dogs. And fires, fires everywhere. He could close his eyes and see them still: flames whirling from brick pyramids larger than any castle he had ever seen, plumes of greasy smoke coiling upward like great black snakes.
As Quentyn himself said in his first chapter: this is not how a fantasy adventure is supposed to go, following the white rabbit to Wonderland only to find he’s stranded you in hell. GRRM performs a delicate dance throughout Quent’s arc, providing us with the recognizable framework of a Hero’s Journey while the actual content is an endless nightmare. For example, our hero is now called “Frog,” because of course he is. As I’ll get into next time, it’s a carefully chosen pseudonym on GRRM’s part in terms of both the upended fairytale logic in Quent’s arc and his self-consciousness regarding looks and charisma. In-universe, though, he earned “Frog” by playing his role: the eager squire (the Podrick to the big man’s Brienne) and the bona fide sellsword, even as they secretly plan their next move.
(Because apparently I need to reference Wizard of Oz in every series?)
Team Quent has joined the Windblown under false pretenses, using them to get to Slaver’s Bay with the intention of abandoning them in order to infiltrate Meereen and bring the marriage contract to Dany. As I said last time, Quentyn really doesn’t like lying (“I’d sooner pose as poor than evil,” such an irreducibly Quentyn line), and GRRM ties this into the lie that is his quest. His dead companions never got their longed-for story to tell, because Drink had to lie about “who they were and why they’d come,” and we find a similar dynamic at work in “The Windblown.” There’s nothing exciting or roguish about this extended deception and disguise. It’s alienating. It’s dishonorable. It makes them feel shitty.
“The big man’s made too many friends. He knows the plan was always to steal off and make our way to Daenerys, but he’s not going to feel good about abandoning men he’s fought with. If we wait too long, it’s going to feel as if we’re deserting them on the eve of battle. He will never do that. You know him as well as I do.”
There was much and more about this Quentyn did not like himself. Sailing on an overcrowded ship tossed by wind and sea, eating hard-bread crawling with weevils and drinking black tar rum to sweet oblivion, sleeping on piles of moldy straw with the stench of strangers in his nostrils … all that he had expected when he made his mark on that scrap of parchment in Volantis, pledging the Tattered Prince his sword and service for a year. Those were hardships to be endured, the stuff of all adventures.
But what must come next was plain betrayal. The Yunkai’i had brought them from Old Volantis to fight for the Yellow City, but now the Dornishmen meant to turn their cloaks and go over to the other side. That meant abandoning their new brothers-in-arms as well. The Windblown were not the sort of companions Quentyn would have chosen, but he had crossed the sea with them, shared their meat and mead, fought beside them, traded tales with those few whose talk he understood. And if all his tales were lies, well, that was the cost of passage to Meereen.
It is not what you’d call honorable, Gerris had warned them, back at the Merchant’s House.
Once again, we see GRRM’s genre deconstruction at work. In your classic quest narrative, the protagonist often acquires unexpected new companions that are off-putting or even hostile at first, but gradually warm up to our hero and educate them (in a given skill or just about Life Itself), contributing to the self-actualization that is the guiding principle of said journey. Here, Quent’s new companions are terrible people, who teach him nothing but atrocities, and whose presence in his story (as I’ll get into in later entries) contributes not to self-actualization but his agonizing death...and yet he still feels bad selling them out. So nothing about “The Windblown” makes for the kind of memory one would record years later in one’s hobbit-hole, a wry nostalgic smile flitting across one’s face. It’s the kind of memory that makes you jolt awake in the night covered with sweat, the kind you try to forget but can’t. Like I said last time, this is a horror story disguised as a fantasy story.
But here it’s also a war story, one that draws its power in part from its context within ADWD as a whole. Up to this point, Essos has been but trembling on the edge of the abyss. In Dany and Tyrion’s chapters so far in the book, as in “The Merchant’s Man,” war is a rumor, a threat, a gathering storm. Dany sees it in a bloody glove; Tyrion hears it from another boat through the fog. In “The Windblown,” the bill comes due, and all the feints and bluffs and wheels within wheels are stripped away to reveal the oceans of blood at the heart of it all. It’s one of the most important Essos-set chapters in the series in that it grounds the war over slavery’s social and economic existence. The battle is joined.
And oh, it is a nightmare.
He remembered how his gut had clenched when he was kicked awake at dawn with the big man looming over him. “Into your armor, slugabed,” he’d boomed. “The Butcher’s coming out to give us battle. Up, unless you mean to be his meat.”
“The Butcher King is dead,” Frog had protested sleepily. That was the story all of them had heard as they scrambled from the ships that had brought them from Old Volantis. A second King Cleon had taken the crown and died in turn, supposedly, and now the Astapori were ruled by a whore and a mad barber whose followers were fighting with each other to control the city.
“Maybe they lied,” the big man had replied. “Or else this is some other butcher. Might be the first one come back screaming from his tomb to kill some Yunkishmen. Makes no bloody matter, Frog. Get your armor on.” The tent slept ten, and all of them had been on their feet by then, wriggling into breeches and boots, sliding long coats of ringmail down onto their shoulders, buckling breastplates, tightening the straps on greaves or vambraces, grabbing for helms and shields and sword belts. Gerris, quick as ever, was the first one fully clad, Arch close behind him. Together they helped Quentyn don his own harness.
Three hundred yards away, Astapor’s new Unsullied had been pouring through their gates and forming up in ranks beneath their city’s crumbling red brick walls, dawn light glinting off their spiked bronze helmets and the points of their long spears. The three Dornishmen spilled from the tent together to join the fighters sprinting for the horse lines.
Battle. Quentyn had trained with spear and sword and shield since he was old enough to walk, but that meant nothing now. Warrior, make me brave, Frog had prayed, as drums beat in the distance, BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM boom. The big man pointed out the Butcher King to him, sitting stiff and tall upon an armored horse in a suit of copper scale that flashed brilliantly in the morning sun. He remembered Gerris sidling up just before the fight began. “Stay close to Arch, whatever happens. Remember, you’re the only one of us who can get the girl.” By then the Astapori were advancing.
Dead or alive, the Butcher King still took the Wise Masters unawares. The Yunkishmen were still running about in fluttering tokars trying to get their half-trained slave soldiers into some semblance of order as Unsullied spears came crashing through their siege lines. If not for their allies and their despised hirelings they might well have been overwhelmed, but the Windblown and the Company of the Cat were ahorse in minutes and came thundering down on the Astapori flanks even as a legion from New Ghis pushed through the Yunkish camp from the other side and met the Unsullied spear to spear and shield to shield.
The rest was butchery, but this time it was the Butcher King on the wrong end of the cleaver. Caggo was the one who finally cut him down, fighting through the king’s protectors on his monstrous warhorse and opening Cleon the Great from shoulder to hip with one blow of his curved Valyrian arakh. Frog did not see it, but those who did claimed Cleon’s copper armor rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.
Dead Cleon’s fall wrote an end to that. The new Unsullied threw down their spears and shields and ran, only to find the gates of Astapor shut behind them. Frog had done his part in the slaughter that followed, riding down the frightened eunuchs with the other Windblown. Hard by the big man’s hip he rode, slashing right and left as their wedge went through the Unsullied like a spearpoint. When they burst through on the other side, the Tattered Prince had wheeled them round and led them through again. It was only coming back that Frog got a good look at the faces beneath the spiked bronze caps and realized that most were no older than he. Green boys screaming for their mothers, he’d thought, but he killed them all the same. By the time he’d left the field, his sword was running red with blood and his arm was so tired he could hardly lift it.
I don’t know that GRRM’s given us a more singularly horrific image of the battlefield; even the burning men on the Blackwater didn’t stop my heart quite like the massacre of mutilated teenagers as they scream. Again, it immediately ramps the war in Essos up from the rumor-mongering and alleyway assassinations we’ve seen so far in ADWD, and it plunges our POV deeper into a nightmare from which he’ll never recover.
Part of what makes this passage such a punch to the gut is how it’s framed--specifically, as a classic step on a fantasy quest. Quent’s First Big Battle! The buildup seems like a deliberate parallel to Tyrion’s experience in his own first battle, back on the Green Fork in AGOT. Except, of course, Tyrion became acting Hand in his next chapter, while Quent’s journey into the abyss has only begun. If “The Merchant’s Man” was all about Quent reeling from the loss of his friends in the corsair attack, “The Windblown” is about him staggering around in the wake of the sack of Astapor. Pursuing his father’s “heart’s desire” has made him not a hero, but a war criminal, and his war buddies dismiss the entire experience as forgettable, unworthy of story and song:
“We were dancing with cripples at Astapor. Do you want to face real Unsullied with that lot on your side?”
“We fought the Unsullied at Astapor,” the big man said.
“I said real Unsullied. Hacking off some boy’s stones with a butcher’s cleaver and handing him a pointy hat don’t make him Unsullied. That dragon queen’s got the real item, the kind that don’t break and run when you fart in their general direction.”
“Them, and dragons too.” Dick Straw glanced up at the sky as if he thought the mere mention of dragons might be enough to bring them down upon the company. “Keep your swords sharp, boys, we’ll have us a real fight soon.”
A real fight, thought Frog. The words stuck in his craw. The fight beneath the walls of Astapor had seemed real enough to him, though he knew the sellswords felt otherwise. “That was butchery, not battle,” the warrior bard Denzo D’han had been heard to declare afterward. Denzo was a captain, and veteran of a hundred battles. Frog’s experience was limited to practice yard and tourney ground, so he did not think it was his place to dispute the verdict of such a seasoned warrior.
It seemed like a battle when it first began, though.
Quent emerges from the battle not having learned courage and self-reliance, but with horrors flashing behind his eyelids every time he blinks, and it will turn out to have been for nothing. He has slaughtered innocents, and his own innocence; for who is Quentyn Martell in his final moments but a green boy screaming for his mother? Before his flesh melts, he sells his soul.
Ah, but who does he sell it to? Well, no hell worth its salt is complete without a devil.
(image by Diego Gisbert Llorens for Fantasy Flight Games)
An old man he was, past sixty, yet he still sat straight and tall in the high saddle, and his voice was strong enough to carry to every corner of the field. “Astapor was but a taste,” he said, “Meereen will be the feast,” and the sellswords sent up a wild cheer.
The Tattered Prince looms over Quentyn’s arc like the shadow of a gallows; he lures Quentyn into hell and then leaves him to the fires. He treats slaughter like a party, inflicts gruesome violence on his followers, and at every turn serves as the epitome of the hellscape that is the Meereenese Knot. He lies like Satan:
“You Dornish three, you think we lied to you. The plunder from Astapor was much less than you were promised in Volantis, and I took the lion’s share of it.”
“The last part’s true,” Ser Orson said.
“The best ruses always have some seed of truth,” said the Tattered Prince.
“You brought three men,” Ser Gerris pointed out, with an edge in his voice. “We agreed on two apiece.”
“Meris is no man. Meris, sweet, undo your shirt, show him.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Quentyn. If the talk he had heard was true, beneath that shirt Pretty Meris had only the scars left by the men who’d cut her breasts off. “Meris is a woman, I agree. You’ve still twisted the terms.”
He talks like Satan:
“Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am.”
And like any devil, what he seeks above all is a way back into paradise:
“What I want,” said the Tattered Prince, “is Pentos.”
All of this is reflected in his carnage-happy crew. I think it’s no accident that the chapter right before “The Windblown” is “The Lost Lord,” in which (via Jon Connington) we get a deep dive into the impressively advanced logistics and well-established ideological roots of the Golden Company. In Quent’s chapter, we get the flipside: the mercenary band as rampaging festering skin-crawling horrorshow, the Bloody Mummers as seen from the inside. They’re in Slaver’s Bay to “fuck the goddess slaughter up her arse,” which sure sounds like Rorge and Shagwell to me. The Windblown’s violence is flamboyant, performative, a declaration of identity; note that the Prince’s right-hand man Denzo D’han is a warrior-bard, and that the company is introduced singing. “The Windblown” is about them painting in red, Jackson Pollock-style.
Which shakes Quent to his very core. How can the planned endgame of his quest (which, again, secretly terrifies him) be noble if these are the means, these are the surroundings, these are his new companions in place of his dead friends? That he has to join them, become them, in order to succeed at his quest is, well, part of how you know that he won’t. The connection between what happens in “The Windblown” and what happens at the end of “The Dragontamer” works on a tonal level as well as thematic and aesthetic. This has the beats of a Hero’s Journey, but it doesn’t feel like one, which is GRRM setting the groundwork for the final revelation that Quentyn is not the hero.
Now, it might seem weird to label a sellsword, rather than one of the Masters, as the devil of this particular lake of fire. But the Masters are deliberately undercut in this chapter:
It was a hundred leagues from Astapor to Yunkai by the old Ghiscari coast road, and another fifty from Yunkai to Meereen. The free companies, well mounted, could reach Yunkai in six days of hard riding, or eight at a more leisurely pace. The legions from Old Ghis would take half again as long, marching afoot, and the Yunkai’i and their slave soldiers…“With their generals, it’s a wonder they don’t march into the sea,” Beans said.
The Yellow Whale and the Little Pigeon are vain pampered louts who are utterly useless on the march and even more so on the battlefield. And in between, as I said in my Tyrion-in-ADWD series, the sellswords increasingly run the show in the camp. There’s a broad satirical streak running through this chapter coexisting with and feeding off the horror elements, reflecting both the blunt, brutal cynicism with which the Windblown regard this war and the absurdity of the people they’re working for. This actually serves GRRM’s aims in Quent’s arc. It draws attention away from the Masters, letting them serve as bitter comic relief, while the tone and imagery of the chapter as a whole casts the danger as something more elemental, more intrinsic to the environment and the narrative itself. The walls are closing in; the fires are growing hotter and larger; the story itself wants you dead. Bricks and blood built Quentyn, and bricks and blood his story. The slavers themselves are buffoons, for all their pretensions to innate supremacy.
And indeed, what happens at chapter’s end inspires laughter in our protagonist.
“Wait. A few more days, that’s all. We have crossed half the world, be patient for a few more leagues. Somewhere north of Yunkai our chance will come.”
“If you say,” said Frog doubtfully…
…but for once the gods were listening, and their chance came much sooner than that.
It was two days later. Hugh Hungerford reined up by their cookfire, and said, “Dornish. You’re wanted in the command tent.”
“You’re to ride east, deep into the hills, then swing wide about Yunkai, making for Meereen. Should you come on any Astapori, drive them north or kill them…but know that is not the purpose of your mission. Beyond the Yellow City, you’re like to come up against the dragon queen’s patrols. Second Sons or Stormcrows. Either will serve. Go over to them.”
“Go over to them?” said the bastard knight, Ser Orson Stone. “You’d have us turn our cloaks?”
“I would,” said the Tattered Prince.
Quentyn Martell almost laughed aloud. The gods are mad.
“You are all Westerosi. Friends from home. You speak her same tongue, worship her same gods. As for motive, all of you have suffered wrongs at my hands.”
“Webber, you nurse claims to lands lost in Westeros. Lanster, I killed that boy you were so fond of. You Dornish three, you think we lied to you. The plunder from Astapor was much less than you were promised in Volantis, and I took the lion’s share of it.”
Which, sidebar: whatever you wanna say about the machinations of the Meereenese Knot (I have few complaints, personally), let’s give GRRM some credit for having his characters make fun of him for it.
Deliver me to the queen, he says. Aye, but which queen? He isn’t selling me to Cersei. He’s giving me to Daenerys Targaryen. That’s why he hasn’t hacked my head off. We’re going east, and Griff and his prince are going west, the bloody fools.
Oh, it was all too much. Plots within plots, but all roads lead down the dragon’s gullet. A guffaw burst from his lips, and suddenly Tyrion could not stop laughing.
“Your dwarf is having a fit,” the widow observed.
“My dwarf will be quiet, or I’ll see him gagged.”
Tyrion covered his mouth with his hands. Meereen!
As in “The Merchant’s Man,” Quentyn is only advancing his story by taking advantage of the general deceit and cynicism running through the entirety of the Meereenese Knot. In his last chapter, Quent and his companions lied to get to Slaver’s Bay; in this chapter, we learn the Windblown lied to them in turn, and are now betraying their Yunkish employers. Basically, Quentyn’s story is advancing not out of his own wit and cunning, but because the Prince is an amoral killer always looking for a back to stab. And the Prince trusts them only because he stabbed them in the back already, and he assumes they’re as into the whole devilish game as he is. Why wouldn’t he? That welcome-to-the-jungle logic works for everyone else in the gang.
“Dick, I’ve whipped you more than any man in the company, and you have the back to prove it. Hugh lost three fingers to my discipline. Meris was raped half round the company. Not this company, true, but we need not mention that. Will of the Woods, well, you’re just filth. [The possibilities!] Ser Orson blames me for dispatching his brother to the Sorrows and Ser Lucifer is still seething about that slave girl Caggo took from him.”
“He could have given her back when he’d had her,” Lucifer Long complained. “He had no cause to kill her.”
“She was ugly,” said Caggo. “That’s cause enough.”
The Tattered Prince went on as if no one had spoken.
This is your quest, Quentyn Martell! How do you like it? Does it get your heart fluttering like the singers promised? All tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary aside, there’s no shaking what Quent’s seen and taken part in, and in this way, “The Windblown” serves above all as an expansion of the trauma and desperation expressed in “The Merchant’s Man.” In that opening chapter, Quent was reeling from a very personal, intimate trauma: the violent death of his best friend. In this chapter, his entire environment is running on the same nightmare-logic. He’s surrounded by ghouls unleashing hell, and fears he may be joining them. The environment of Quent’s quest is deliberately at tonal odds with the tropes of that quest. The effect is that of a constant falling of scales from eyes, innocence burned away. This is what adventure looks like.
As in “The Merchant’s Man,” GRRM’s imagery is carefully sculpted to foreshadow our POV’s fate; upon reread, “fires, fires everywhere” leaps off the page and slaps you in the face. At every step, we catch glimpses of Quent’s death, ripples sent backwards in time. It’s as if the author is trying to warn him. There are fires everywhere, my boy, hint hint hint, turn back while you can! But he doesn’t. He can’t let himself, and the Prince (of Darkness) is always there to tempt him onward, to make his doom possible.
So as in Volantis, Quentyn succeeds in “The Windblown” in the continuation of his quest: he will make it to Meereen. But the chapter lingers so heavily on the costs incurred so as to leech away any triumph we might feel about that and replace it with sickening dread. The undercurrent is that, as we’ll see when we’re left alone with him and a candle in “The Dragontamer,” Quent does see all the foreshadowing, and knows exactly what it’s leading him toward. In this chapter, as in the last, we see survivor’s guilt haunting his every decision. His remaining companions are willing to die for him because “you’re the only one of us who can get the girl.” Again, we see the fantasy-quest imagery in Quent’s arc turned inward and weaponized. He’s being betrayed by his own genre.
And in the chapters to come, with the Windblown’s help, Quentyn will join the victims of the Meereenese Knot. He will walk into the fire, and he will do it in part because the trauma and grief and guilt and alienation and fear built up (like a debt to be paid) in these early chapters has driven him to a corner of his brain where that’s the only choice he can contemplate. Quentyn’s time in Astapor does not provide him with empowerment and enlightenment. Quent’s story grinds down his soul before it kills him, because every war story has a poor kid who just wants to go home and never will.
What are your opinion about Brown Ben Plumm and The Tattered Prince ? Do you think them well written characters and that their roles are really gonna get very big (though not like Tyrion's or Euron's for Dany)? What really is their endgame? I can't imagine that Ben is "only" working for the gold and lands that Tyrion promised him, nor that Tatt's only intends to rule Pentos... I think there's more to them that most people expect and that Daario is just a sellsword caricature compared to them...
Hiya! I agree they’re incredible characters both. I’ll save my thoughts on Brown Ben for an upcoming entry in my series on Tyrion in ADWD.
As for Tatters, I think he’s out for Pentos and Pentos alone, yes; that’s why he asks for it from Quentyn. But that doesn’t make him less compelling, nor less frightening; underneath his flashy coat and adorable nicknames is a man who regularly cuts off people’s feet.
Lbr, the Windblown are fucking terrifying, back to front. They add wonderfully to Quentyn’s arc, which is fundamentally and functionally a horror story. Tatters is a perfect “devil” character, one who lures Quentyn into the exquisitely rendered hell that is the Meereenese Knot on his own horrific terms, having Our Hero slaughter mutilated teenagers as they scream for their mothers. Astapor, after the fall, is drenched with classic Hell imagery. Tatters even talks (and lies) like Satan: “Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am.”
And while Quentyn certainly makes his own decisions regarding the dragontaming, he probably would’ve given up and gone home miserable and shamed but safe (my poor boy) had Tatters refused to help. Their meeting in “The Spurned Suitor” (thoroughly incredible chapter, btw, as is “The Windblown”) is in a classic subterranean lair, mirroring the pyramid where Quent will meet his doom with the sellswords’ help in his next chapter. Tatters, too, is a monster in the dark, waiting and knowing that Quent’s story will lead him nowhere else. And as always with deals with the devil, the devil agrees, but it backfires on our hero horrifically.
Quentyn’s debt is on the move now, by the way, because as a metaphysical and literary rule, a promise to a demon cannot be unmade. Barristan has offered in Dany’s name (and via Quent’s former companions) to give Pentos to the Windblown if they turn on the Yunkish, and we know from Tyrion’s released TWOW chapter that they take the deal. I think Dany will fulfill this promise even if (as I believe) Barristan doesn’t survive to tell her about it, as she will want to bring “fire and blood” to Pentos herself when she learns Illyrio had another Targaryen monarch in mind this whole time. So Tatters moves through our heroes’ lives, taking what he needs, moving ever closer to his goal. He’s a terrific tertiary character, and used exactly right.
