Episode 61: A GAME OF THRONES, DAENERYS VII: "Paying the Iron Price"

Hello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish. 

And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn. 

Welcome to the sixty-first episode of the Not A Cast, entitled: “Paying the Iron Price: An Analysis of AGOT, Daenerys VII,” in which Dany faces the sheer human misery that fuels the game of thrones, and sets out to save the innocents...one of whom will change Dany’s life forever. 

This episode is brought to you by our Small Council: 

• Hand of the King WolfmanZack 
• Grand Maester Timothy W
• Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Mark N. 
• Lord Travis, Master of Ships and Warden of the Waves
• Ser Keith J, Master of Whisperers
• Lord Philip the Merciful, Master of Laws
• Jancy O, Lady Commander of the Night’s Watch
• Lord Gene Master of Coin
• Archmaester June, Healer of the Lesser Poxes
• Ragged Michael, Warden of the North
• Nelson the Hammer, Prince of Dragonstone
• Scarlett the Other Red Woman and Mistress of Whisperers
• Lord Baby the Onion Baby
• Lord Blackheart the Defiant, Master of Zorse 
• Lord Micah Warden of the West and the Kraken’s Bane
• Lord James: the Jim that was Promised

And our TWO newest Small Council Members:

• The High Bearded Priest
• And The Blue-Ringed Octoling

Thank you councillors very much!

Spoiler warning: All published books - 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!

Question

Ser James the Jim that was Promised, one of our small council patrons asks:

I would like to hear some tinfoil on Targaryen babies with wings please.  Daeny has one and Meagor had one.  What the hell is going on?

The moon turned and turned again, and in the black of night Queen Elinor too was delivered of a malformed and stillborn child, an eyeless boy born with rudimentary wings.

And a note from the iBooks GOT -“Monstrous stillbirths seem to have plagued the Targaryen women in the past. It is said that three of Maegor the Cruel’s wives gave birth to infants that had small wings or scaled tails, and that Princess Rhaenyra, who fought for the Iron Throne during the Dance of the Dragons, was similarly afflicted.”

Synopsis

You all know me and know I like joke around in these synopses, but this chapter … it’s a hard one to get through. And I just want to say before I get started on this synopsis that there will be frank descriptions of rape, sexual assault and violence against children. If that’s not for you, absolutely no judgment from either of us.

The battle is done, but the horror and violence are only getting started. Daenerys Targaryen rides her silver through the torn-up fields with her handmaids and khas. And the ground? Well, it’s littered with arrows and the tell-tale signs of Dothraki arakhs: namely, dead and dying human and horse bodies and blood everywhere. The Jaqqa Rhan, or mercy men, were moving through the field of death, armed with gigantic axes and hacking the heads off the dead and dying alike. And behind them came small girls who gathered arrows from the field into baskets. And behind  them, the feral dogs.

This is how AGOT, Dany VII opens, and it’s only going to get worse from here on out. 

The sheep had been the first to die, but Drogo’s khalasar hadn’t done that. That was Khal Ogo’s Khalasar. Drogo’s riders would work to kill the shepherds before killing any sheep. And on up ahead, the town was on fire with smoke rising into the sky. All the while, Khal Drogo’s bloodriders herded prisoners of war with whips away from the town itself. But these weren’t the Lhazarene: their much-worse fate is coming next. These were the survivors of Khal Ogo’s khalasar which Drogo’s had defeated in battle outside of the town.

Dany sees the Lhazareen, thinking that the Dothraki called them “the Lamb Men.” And where once she had cultural blinders on and would have thought them to be the same as the Dothraki, now they looked much different than the Dothraki with their squat bodies, flat faces and short hair. And beyond the physical differences, the Lhazareen also beared another striking difference: they were herders of sheep and ate vegetables. And they were conquerable.

Dany sees a boy make a run for the river. Drogo’s Dothraki riders box the boy in, cracking whips in his face, forcing him to run around in a circle. They whip his thighs, turning them red with blood, then hit his thighs with a whip. When the boy could only crawl, they put an arrow in his back.

Jorah meets up with Dany just outside of the shattered gate in his knightly armor. And while the Dothraki had mocked him for wearing armor, he’d insulted them back. A sword and arakh had been drawn, and the Dothraki who had insulted Jorah the most had been left bleeding out. But Jorah’s not here to reminisce on killing Dothraki rando #8. Instead, he tells Dany that Drogo awaits her in the town, and that he’s only been ever-so-slightly wounded in the battle. No need to worry, Dany! Besides, how fucking cool is it that Drogo killed both Khal Ogo and his son Fogo, amirite? 

Dany provides the backstory. Ogo’s khalasar was besieging the Lhazareen town when Drogo arrived. The Lhazareen had thought Drogo to be their deliverance. They were wrong. Across from where Dany is speaking with Jorah, a girl Dany’s age is thrown onto a pile of bodies and raped by a Dothraki rider. 

I am the blood of the dragon, Daenerys Targaryen reminded herself as she turned her face away.

Jorah tells Dany that most of Ogo’s khalasar had fled, but Drogo now had 10,000 captives. 

Slaves, Dany thought.

Most likely, Drogo would take the slaves down to Slaver’s Bay to sell them.

She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.

Jorah told Drogo to make for Meereen where he’d get a good price for the slaves. With all the human suffering at work in Essos, Drogo would get a good price for selling his captives into sex slavery -- boys and girls alike. Besides, enough children would survive to get a good price … And man, this doesn’t get nearly enough mention about how casual Jorah is about selling children, CHILDREN into fucking slavery. No matter what happens to Jorah in S08E03 (And I’m writing this on Saturday night, the night before the episode airs), I won’t be that sad if Slavebear bites it.

But behind Dany, the girl being raped, sobs. Dany turns her horse around and tells Jorah to make them stop. Jorah, a perplexed war criminal, asks what she means. She wants them to fucking stop, you monster. She tells her Dothraki khas to aid Jorah in stopping the rape. Jorah protests that Dany doesn’t understand, that this is the way of war. Her khas agree as a second rider begins raping the Lhazareen girl. But if it’s the wailing that offends Dany, her khas will cut her tongue out.

I will not have her harmed. I claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why, Dany says.

And her bloodriders spring into motion. She tells Jorah to go with them.

As you command. The knight gave her a curious look. You are your brother’s sister, in truth.

Viserys?

No. Rhaegar, Jorah answers before spurring off to join Dany’s khas.

At first the rapers laugh at the orders of Dany’s khas, but then the laughter stops when Aggo points to Dany behind them. They bug out, but the one rider currently raping the girl is so intent on his pleasure that he doesn’t hear them. Jorah pulls him off the girl, and the man bounds to his feet, knife in hand. Aggo’s arrow takes him at his throat. Good riddance.

They return the girl to Daenerys and ask her what now. Bind her wounds, heal her. Treat her like a human being. The same goes for the rest of the people that Dany encounters as she enters the burning town. She stops rapes, claims women for herself and proceeds forward to Drogo. But Dany is a little hurt that no one besides one woman thanks her. Shouldn’t they be more grateful? Mmmmm, I don’t know about all that, Dany.

Jorah tries his best to ensure that Dany doesn’t stop all the evil occurring in the city, because he would. He tells Dany that she can’t claim them all, and Dany says, “Fuck you, scrub. I’ll do what I want.” Yeah, look it up guys. Dany calls Jorah a fucking scrub in AGOT, Dany VII. But all the same, the town is surrounded by the noise of screaming and wailing children. It’s, um, disturbing to imagine.

Daenerys finds Drogo in front of Lhazareen temple with a pile of heads rising next to him. But Drogo’s victory had come at some personal cost as an arrow is sticking out of his arm with blood covering the left side of his body. Dany dismounts and preggo-runs to Drogo. When she gets up to him, she sees that Jorah hadn’t been precisely honest with her about the extent of Drogo’s wounds. Hm, seems like a trend with Jorah. Drogo had taken an arakh wound, and his left nipple was gone with a bit of flesh hanging out of the side of his body.

Is scratch, moon of life, from arakh of one bloodrider to Khal Ogo. I kill him for it, and Ogo too.

Ah, how reassuring. But then a rider reins up. It’s Mago, the Horseshit eater. He’s pissed. He wanted his spoils of war -- namely women. Drogo asks Dany whether this is true, and she says as much. Drogo frowns and says this is the way of war, and it’s up to the Dothraki to do what they will with captive slaves. Well, Dany will do just that. She’ll claim all of them and hold them safe. She advises Drogo that if the Dothraki want to mount the Lhazareen women, they should take them as wives. 

Does the horse breed with the sheep, Qotho, Drogo’s worst bloodrider, asks.

The dragon feeds on horse and sheep alike, Dany spits back at him.

Drogo is all pleased at Daenerys and her ferocity. He tells Mago, the horseshit eater, to shut up, that these women belong to the khaleesi, but then Drogo grimaces in pain. Dany asks where the healers are, and well, Drogo sent them to his wounded riders. And then a voice rises behind Dany and Drogo:

Silver Lady, I can help the Great Rider with his hurts.

Oh boy, it’s the moment Emmett was pining after last week. QUAITHE has entered the game! What, Emmett? Was it something I said?

Ah yes, it’s not Quaith. It’s Mirri Maz Duur, and at long last, Daenerys has a side character who isn’t an NPC! Well, the Dothraki immediately want to cut her tongue out, but Dany says to let her speak. So, she introduces herself as Mirri Maz Duur, a godswife.

A Maegi Qotho corrects. 

And PS, can we super kill her, Drogo and wait for the eunuchs? You cannot. Dany asks where Mirri learned her skill. Why she learned her skills in healing and birthing from her mom who was a godswife. She also learned at Asshai from the mages. And finally, she learned it from a maester of the Citadel. A maester, Jorah says inquisitively. Yup, a maester.

Marwyn, he named himself. From the sea. Beyond the Sea. The Seven Lands, he said. Sunset Lands. Where men are iron and dragons rule. He taught me this speech.

Well, that is very silly to Jorah. A maester in Asshai. What was around his neck? Why a chain so tight Mirri thought it would choke him. Well, that’s evidence enough for Jorah. But Dany still has a question:

Why should want to help my khal?

Good question. As for that, Mirri has a good line to feed Dany:

All men are one flock, or so we are taught. The Great Shepherd sent me to earth to heal his lambs, wherever I might find them.

Nice line, Mirri. But is that precisely true? Are you really interested in ensuring Drogo’s recovery? We will have more to say on this. But Qotho slaps Mirri up, saying the Dothraki are not sheep. Dany tells him to quit being an asshole. She’s claimed Mirri, and she’s not to be harmed. Mirri says the arrow needs to come out, directs everyone back to her temple, and then they’re off. 

Drogo leans on Dany to get into the temple itself. The party passes through numerous rooms in the temple, and then Mirri directs them to a room with an altar in it. She asks for Drogo to be carried to it. Hmmm … laying Drogo on an altar as all men are part of the Great Shepherd’s flock? I’m Tabernacle in the Sinai passover lamb vibes here. I don’t know what to make of this Mirri Maz Duur character.

Mirri then tells everyone to leave, but Drogo’s bloodriders say “not so fast.” They’re blood of Drogo’s blood. They’ll wait with him. Qotho draws near to Mirri:

Know this, wife of the Lamb God. Harm the khal and you suffer the same.

Dany again instructs Qotho that Mirri is not to be harmed, and that Mirri will do no harm to Drogo.

Dany felt she could trust this old, plainfaced woman with her flat nose; she had saved her from the hard hands of her rapers, after all.

Oh boy, Dany. Oh boy. Mirri tells the bloodriders to help hold Drogo down while she grabs her box of murder, uh, healing instruments. She grabs the arrow, sings a Lhazareen song, heats a flagon of wine, pours it over the wounds. She pushes a mound of wet leaves over the wound, smears it with a pale green paste and then pulls the skin back over place. She then stitches the wound together with thread, tells Dany that there will be fever, itching and a great scar.

I sing of my scars, sheep woman, Drogo says, flexing his arms.

Oh and Drogo is not to drink wine or milk of the poppy -- nothing to make the pain go away! Gotta fight those “poison spirits.”

But Dany has something else to bring to Mirri’s attention.

Before, I heard you speak of birthing songs.

Dany’s time to give birth is near, and she wants Mirri to be present when she goes into labor. Drogo laughs at her, telling her that you don’t ask slaves to do something. You tell them. Drogo hops down from the altar, all arrogance, saying:

The stallions call, this place is ashes. It is time to ride.

The bloodriders file out, but Qotho reminds Mirri that her fate is tied up in Drogo’s.

As you say rider. The Great Shepherd guards the flock.

And that is AGOT, Daenerys VII. 

I’m not the squeamish type, but this chapter on initial read, re-read and its portrayal in Game of Thrones, Season 1 gets under my skin in major ways. The rapes, the violence against children, the horrors of war: it’s Martin’s very successful attempt to show both sides of the war -- in this case, it’s the horror, the stomach-churning violence and innocents dying. That’s a crucial part of the depiction of war. But the Dothraki sack of the Lhazareen town turns that message to 11.

But more than anything, this chapter vaults Daenerys Targaryen’s story towards that weird, amazing magical weirdness that vaults Dany’s story into hyperdrive. 

Depth

This is really where Dany’s storyline, already one of the better ones in AGOT, is injected with rocket fuel and blasts off. While her final three chapters in book one have more iconic memorable scenes than this one, none of those would work as well as they do without this chapter setting the stage, and introducing this palpable tone of dread and chaos that only ramps up when blood magic gets involved. There’s no magic in this chapter, but the the focus is already on sacrifice, bloodshed, and how to stay true to yourself as innocents suffer and die. 

Moreover, Dany VII acts as a commentary on the civil war building to a head over in Westeros. Our next two episodes will be on Tyrion VIII and Catelyn X, the Battles of the Green Fork and Whispering Wood respectively, the first large-scale conflicts in the series. Both of those chapters are exciting in their own way: the Green Fork is all grounded minutiae, the Whispering Wood all arty abstraction, both of them attempts on GRRM’s part to enthrall you with his cinematic depictions of the battlefield. 

This chapter is the opposite: the author forcing us to stare the bleak bone-chilling atrocities of war straight in the face, and denying us the comforts of rousing imagery or an investment in one side winning. As Dany says, this is the price to be paid for the Iron Throne, and as she’ll say in her next chapter, the price is too high. As the War of Five Kings really begins, GRRM wants us to keep in mind what a nightmare it looks like to the ordinary people who get caught up in its gears, and emphasize that it’s our heroes’ responsibility to do something about that. 

• Drogo v. Ogo
  • We start the chapter off with this stream of nightmarish imagery: crops replaced with corpses, horses screaming as they die, a young boy being tormented and murdered as Dany watches...it’s some heavy shit
  • It’s very easy for such imagery to come off as exploitative, shock value for its own sake, and there are moments in ASOIAF/GoT that feel that way to me
  • However, GRRM is overall very good at using these horrors for a sound narrative purpose, to reveal something about both culture and character
  • Let’s start with culture, the ongoing examination of Dothraki mores through Dany’s eyes
  • As the chapter goes along, we keep seeing this “Khal Ogo” mentioned, and we gradually realize that Drogo has taken down not only this Lhazarene town, but another khalasar that was in the midst of attacking the town themselves
  • As Dany notes, this is in spite of them sharing meat and mead beneath the Mother of Mountains, back in Vaes Dothrak
  • But out on the grass plains, they’re at war once again, because the manifest-destiny drive for empire swallows up everyone alike
  • See also: the Ghiscari slave cities, which both enslave their own people and go out into the world hunting for slaves in other cultures
  • But Dany notes how the Dothraki prisoners are generally calmer and prouder than the Lhazarene
  • That’s because this is the soup they swim in; they’re used to it, more or less, just as Dany’s khas are smiling and joking as they ride through the killing fields
  • The Lhazarene by contrast are not in a laughing mood, and rereading this chapter in context with the ramp-up to the War of Five Kings, the Lhazarene felt to me like stand-ins for the common folk of Westeros during the war
  • In particular, this passage is devastating:
    • Ogo’s khalasar had been attacking the town when Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the Lamb Men had thought, when they first saw the dust of their horses from atop those cracked-mud walls. Perhaps a few, the younger and more foolish who still believed that the gods heard the prayers of desperate men, took it for deliverance.
  • So Ogo is Tywin, burning his way through the Riverlands, and Robb? Well, he’s Drogo, riding to the rescue at Riverrun...but in practice, he’s also unleashing another wave of hell on the helpless noncombatants in his path
  • Don’t get me wrong, Robb isn’t personally like Drogo, but GRRM shows us his men committing atrocities just like the Lannisters. Bracken men hang women for “laying with lions,” Karstark men rape and murder people as they hunt for Jaime, and most tellingly, Roose hires the Bloody Mummers after they abandon Tywin
  • So I think that is in part what GRRM is going for with the repulsive horrors in Dany VII: commenting on the war in Westeros by stripping away all distinctions and motivations, leaving the reader with the raw bloody consequences
• Saving the children
  • We’ll talk more about cultural divides in a bit, but let’s first establish where Dany is coming from in this chapter, because The Discourse around it is...heated
  • On one level, she’s gotten closer and closer to the Dothraki way of seeing things:
    • Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the Lhazareen, but the Dothraki called them haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men. Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had the same copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien to her, squat and flat-faced, their black hair cropped unnaturally short. They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and Khal Drogo said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of the Dothraki sea was not meant for sheep.
  • On another, like Tywin vis-a-vis Masha Heddle, the Dothraki don’t see the Lhazarene as equal human beings like them…
    • “She is a lamb girl,” Quaro said in Dothraki. “She is nothing, Khaleesi. The riders do her honor. The Lamb Men lay with sheep, it is known.”
      
      “It is known,” her handmaid Irri echoed.
      
      “It is known,” agreed Jhogo, astride the tall grey stallion that Drogo had given him. “If her wailing offends your ears, Khaleesi, Jhogo will bring you her tongue.” 
  • ...whereas Dany can’t strangle her empathy:
    • Dany pitied them; she remembered what terror felt like.
  • This is all further complicated by the fact that her empathy is rooted in her initial treatment by Drogo. Sure, that relationship has changed, but she can’t forget it
  • So we see the cracks forming in Dany’s newfound identity as Drogo’s khaleesi
  • The flipside of the coin is her Targaryen identity, which is more aspirational, as opposed to the day-to-day lived reality of the khalasar
  • Unlike Viserys, born and raised in Westeros, this identity is not a mantle she can wear at will. She has to actively build it, and this chapter is about her realizing that the foundation for that identity (as with the Red Keep itself) is a sea of blood
  • As she says: 
    • This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.
  • “This is what it looks like” feels very meta to me--it’s GRRM confronting his audience with the blunt realities of war and how little they resemble the shining vision in the songs that Sansa loves so well
  • Nor does it resemble Westeros as the place of smiles and contentment and home that Dany wistfully envisions throughout the series
  • This is the contradiction Dany faces, one faced by leaders not only in ASOIAF but in the real world: do the ends justify the means? Is it possible to build a genuine peace out of bones? Or will such an endeavor always eat itself alive?
  • GRRM comes down pretty firmly on the latter. That’s why Dany’s reward for blood magic is a comatose husband she winds up mercy-killing, that’s why Tywin’s post-Red Wedding “peace” immediately turns to ashes, and that’s why Stannis burning Shireen will not grant him the power needed to save the world
  • Keep in mind that the puppetmaster behind so much of what happens in Dany’s arc is Varys; no one believes the ends justify the means more than him, but it’s all going to go wrong, in large part because he assumes he can control Dany
  • Dany doesn’t exactly articulate all of this, but she feels it all at once when she sees poor Eroeh being raped. No, no, it’s not worth it, I can’t be a part of this!
  • It’s meant to repulse us as well: she’s so young, and she’s screaming, and more and more men show up...just hideous. it’s designed to evoke Tysha’s fate IMO
  • As such, we cheer Dany on when she saves these women; she’s doing the Ned Stark thing of insisting on saving the innocents amidst brutal bloodshed
  • Jorah makes another telling comparison:
    • The knight gave her a curious look. “You are your brother’s sister, in truth.”
      
      “Viserys?” She did not understand.
      
      “No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” 
• Cultural difficulties
  • However, GRRM immediately complicates Dany’s crusade by putting it in context of Dothraki culture and her relationship to it
  • *heavy sigh* time to talk about colonialism, I will not be reading replies
  • Whenever the question of Dany as a colonialist or “white savior” character comes up, you see the response that SJWs are filtering everything through that lens, and you just hate white people, and they had slaves in Africa, etc.
  • And yes, the evil in man’s hearts was not born in a handful of European countries in the 15th century. We call them the Aztec and Inca Empires for a reason, there’s plenty of racism among Asian cultures, the colonization of Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East is not the only major atrocity in world history
  • But! It is the biggest one by far. It steamrolled a lot of the other ones into oblivion, and it’s had an incalculable impact on every level of the systems that followed it
  • That’s why we have to talk about it--because modern culture, including genre fiction, was forged in that crucible. Not because all white individuals are evil!
  • As such, it’s fair to criticize how authors write about these issues, not because they’re personally hateful or because I love censorship, but because they’re reifying ideas that are directly harmful
  • A system as nakedly exploitative as colonialism runs on stories--the images presented to the people back home about the natives had real political impact! They still do! We have to be conscious of that, history flows through us!
  • But as many people have noted, narrative flaws and character flaws are not the same thing, and unfortunately, the two are often conflated with Daenerys
  • I hesitate to call Dany a colonialist because she’s one lady with dragons, rather than a power structure. Moreover, in this world, Essos is the colonizing continent
  • That being said, she definitely does suffer from cultural blind spots despite her earnest desire to assimilate into the khalasar, and we see them here
  • The error is not in her saving these women from rape, but her assumption that she can personally reshape Dothraki culture to fit them in differently
  • That’s just not how it works, Dany! We’ll see this same dynamic in Slaver’s Bay, where her motives are good and her “dracarys” moment is heroic, but when it all boils down to governance, she finds that she can’t “make her people good” 
  • We get a little hint of how this cultural conflict will boil over in the blood shed about Jorah’s armor, mirroring Barristan v. Krazz in ADWD
  • Dany is also missing a larger moral point: yes, she saved these women from further harm, but she’s implicated in the war machine that brought them to harm in the first place, and she can neither change that nor protect them in the long run
• Introducing Mirri Maz Duur
  • That’s really where MMD comes into play, because her mission is to make those consequences clear, both to Dany and the reader
  • It works so well to have these issues not just floating in the background, but brought to the forefront by a character’s actions and beliefs
  • Her politics, the way she acts on them, and the sheer drama of her scenes in the next few Dany chapters make her my fave supporting character in Dany’s story
  • She’s morally ambiguous in an interesting way, whereas for me, someone like Quaithe is ambiguous in an uninteresting way
  • Just look at the reaction online when I said MMD was a fave of mine--some folks saying they hate her, others declaring “She did nothing wrong” a la Catelyn
  • She’s like Stannis that way...or, more to the point, she’s a lot like Melisandre
  • She’s an Essosi woman using blood magic in connection with a claimant to the Iron Throne, but she’s also more generally a herald of “wonder and terror”
  • So many characters like that turn up in ACOK and ASOS--not only Melisandre, but also Jojen and Jaqen and Thoros, characters who tempt heroes down the magical path for good or ill, exposing the cost every step of the way
  • MMD just shows up to the party a little early! This makes her the first human being (as opposed to vague otherworldly power) to use magic in the series, as I’ll talk a lot more about in Dany VIII and IX 
  • In this chapter, of course, MMD puts on an intentionally bland helpful face
  • In magic-trick terminology, this is the “pledge,” presenting something ordinary and banal to lure the audience in before the real trick takes place
  • As I said, Dany VII lays the groundwork for the trippy shenanigans to take place, it doesn’t directly get into them
  • But there are already hints of what lurks under MMD’s benign face: the mention of Asshai, the “bloody bed” symbolism linking her to Robert and Lyanna, and (what really stood out to me this time) her referring to Dany and Drogo as archetypal figures: the “great rider” and the “Silver Lady,” caps and all
  • These are not merely terms of respect and deference, they’re a hint to how MMD looks at the world
  • Dany and Drogo are part of a cosmic ballet in which MMD takes part, so while I think she’s not as willing to leave things up to the Great Shepherd as she says (again, shades of Melisandre), she is thinking of all of this in religious terms
  • That sense we get in the “bloody bed” of both death and rebirth (Lyanna dying for Jon to live, Robert dying and being replaced by his “ghost” Renly) perfectly fits MMD’s role in the story: Rhaego for Drogo, and arguably herself for the dragons
  • “Only death may pay for life,” after all, applies to not only blood magic, but the crusade for the Iron Throne; the political and magical dilemmas are linked

Foreshadowing/Groundwork

While Drogo’s planned invasion falls apart over the course of Dany’s next chapter, the destruction we see the Dothraki inflict in this chapter may be a preview for what they do to Westeros when they do eventually invade...under Dany’s rule, not Drogo’s, and united as one

Of course, not all of the Dothraki are gonna be happy about that, in particular Mago, introduced in this chapter. GRRM has said he’ll play an antagonistic role toward Dany in TWOW

Speaking of things that will pay off after Dany takes charge, they do indeed go to Slaver’s Bay as Jorah urges, but Dany ends up making war on the system there rather than taking part in it

We mentioned earlier that MMD has some parallels to Melisandre, but the title of maegi connects her to another witch-like figure in the story: Maggy the Frog, who you could say is the equivalent character in Cersei’s storyline

And finally, Dany VII features our first mention of Marwyn the Mage, one of my favorite background characters in the story and one who is set up in AFFC as having an important role to play in Dany’s arc. We’ve only seen Marwyn in the flesh once so far (in Sam’s final chapter in AFFC), but he comes up multiple times in the way he does here: being spoken of with respect by someone familiar with his work, from MMD to Qyburn to Rodrik the Reader. 

Theory/Discussion

Does MMD deliberately lead Drogo to his death, or does she make a real attempt to heal him?

Team Heal

• This is what MMD says when she applies the poultice to Drogo’s wound
  • “You must say the prayers I give you and keep the lambskin in place for ten days and ten nights,” she said. “There will be fever, and itching, and a great scar when the healing is done.”
  • “Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy,” she cautioned him. “Pain you will have, but you must keep your body strong to fight the poison spirits.” 
• And this is what Drogo does with that information:
  • Beneath his painted vest, a plaster of fig leaves and caked blue mud covered the wound on his breast. The herbwomen had made it for him. Mirri Maz Duur’s poultice had itched and burned, and he had torn it off six days ago, cursing her for a maegi. The mud plaster was more soothing, and the herbwomen made him poppy wine as well. He’d been drinking it heavily these past three days; when it was not poppy wine, it was fermented mare’s milk or pepper beer.
• So on the surface, that seems pretty clear: Drogo fucked with MMD’s poultice, and so his wound festered beyond repair. MMD herself says as much in Dany’s next chapter
• It fits thematically for Drogo, the embodiment of sun-king manifest-destiny masculinity, to be brought down not only by a “fly’s bite” of a wound, but by his own swaggering insistence on doing whatever he wants (and his vulnerability to pain!)

Team Death

• This is how MMD talks about Drogo and his unborn son after zombifying the former and transforming the latter into a dead demon baby:
  • “It was wrong of them to burn my temple,” the heavy, flat-nosed woman said placidly. “That angered the Great Shepherd.” 
  • “The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust.”
• That sure doesn’t sound like she was ever interested in saving their lives!
• Moreover, it’s a motivation--and thus, potentially a strategy--that predates Drogo tearing off the poultice and drinking himself stupid
• And while Dany decides to summon MMD to save Drogo after he falls, and Jorah decides to bring Dany into the blood magic ceremony when childbirth begins, MMD claims that trading Rhaego for Drogo was always the plan
• After all, maegis can see the future...
• So GRRM definitely wants us to at least consider that she has manipulated events to produce this outcome from the moment she offered to heal Drogo

Conclusion

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