Fire & Blood, Volume I: Jaehaerys and Alysanne

Happy 2019, everyone! Buckle up, this is going to be another long one…

• The chapter starts with an accomplishment that speaks to why Jaehaerys, more than anyone else than Aegon the Conqueror, is responsible for the Targaryen dynasty lasting as long as it did:
  • “long periods of peace and prosperity that marked his time upon the Iron Throne. It cannot be said Jaehaerys avoided conflict entirely, for that would be beyond the power of any earthly king, but such wars as he fought were short, victorious, and contested largely at sea or on distant soil… Archmaesters can and do quibble about the numbers, but most agree that the population of Westeros north of Dorne doubled during the Conciliator’s reign.”
• I fully understand the narrative purpose of this figure, and I think GRRM does a good job of explaining the factors behind it – more labor and more land means higher agricultural production and productivity, that means lower prices, which means spare cash for increased investment and spending on non-essential goods, which means expansion of trade and manufacturing, many of the same forces that were responsible for the “Renaissance of the 12th Century,” as medievalists describe it – but this is a bit implausible. This is not to say that there were no periods of population growth in the Middle Ages, but it took three hundred years to double the population of Europe before the Black Death reversed those trends. Jaehaerys was king for 55 years, which is only two (maybe close to three) generations…that’s not enough time for a doubling to happen.
• I would also add that the doubling creates some long-term narrative problems: if population doubled, army sizes should be bigger, not smaller, during the Dance. Even if we buy the argument that the advent of dragons meant that the Westerosi shifted to smaller armies, then we should be seeing many, many more armies in the Dance than we do see. For example, how can the Westerlands be effectively stripped of its military resources and thus left completely open to the Red Kraken’s raids, if Jason Lannister’s army only numbered eight thousand men? Why is Cregan Stark’s army of 8,000-20,000 made up of “old men, younger sons, the unwed, the childless, the homeless, and the hopeless,” when Roddy the Ruin only brought 2,000 men south and Torrhen Stark had been able to pull together 30,000 men before the North’s population doubled? (And if the doubling did take place, why haven’t we seen any sign of it in Northern army figures in any of the wars since the reign of Jaehaerys?) I can go on and on.
• So I have to conclude that this is another case of GRRM Can’t Math. I sympathize; I am, after all, a historian whose decision of where to go to college was based on which schools didn’t require math courses. But there’s just too big a contradiction here: either the Dance’s armies and casualties should be much, much bigger (to explain why the war was seen as so destructive by contemporaries), or Westeros’ population cannot have grown that much, that fast.

 

• It is ironic that Rhaena is far more sympathetic in search of her runaway daughter than she ever was when the two were united. The family dynamics here really remind me of Graves’ portrait of the Julio-Claudians…
• I do like the way that GRRM gradually builds up the mystery of where Aerea could have gone through process of elimination, ticking off all the possible places in Westeros
• A rare (and lengthy) Septon Barth quote, which raises an interesting question about the nature of dracocracy: how far away from the blunt force of the dragons can the Targaryens get? To the extent that Barth acts as a mouthpiece for GRRM himself, there seems to be an argument that the first face of power is necessary but not sufficient and that subtlety is necessary for gaining compliance.
• I also like the signs of Barth’s fascination with dragons that will lead to the Unnatural History, that well before Aerea’s return, Barth is the one who correctly guesses that Balerion, having been one of the dragons brought from Valyria by the Targaryens, would have returned to his birthplace.
• Aerea’s disappearance has the unlikely outcome of bringing Lucamore the Lusty to the Kingsguard, which is an oddly realistic touch.
• Unsurprisingly, my favorite part of the chapter is the return of Balerion to King’s Landing. You can see GRRM drawing on a lifelong love of Lovecraftiania, positioning Septon Barth as your classic Lovecraftian protagonist: simultaneously drawn to and repelled by forbidden knowledge (his “own abiding sin”), linking body horror to the cosmic horror of “monstrous evil gods…against whose malice the kings of men and the gods of men are naught but flies.” One definitely gets the sense that Aerea’s autopsy was the moment at which Septon Barth ceased to become a believing (albeit worldly) septon and started becoming an occulist…which led to the Unnatural History,
• Aerea’s horrific death, “cooking from within,” reminds me very much of Victarion’s arm – in both cases, the skin is described as dark and cracked, described as akin to “pork crackling,” and smoke issues forth from within the body. It does make one wonder about what kind of magic Moqorro used to heal his patsy…
• While we’ve certainly had suggestions of something demonic associated with Valyria, and by extension with fire magic, the “worms with faces…snakes with hands” are the first tangible proof of such. I wonder whether these are Valyrian bloodmagic experiments that have gone feral, or the result of magical “fallout” from the Doom, or something else entirely? And what’s even more frightening is the thought that these things are minor horrors compared to the kind of demon capable of leaving a nine-foot-long scar on the Black Dread himself.
• And with the death fo Aerea comes the end of Rhaena’s story, which ends with more of a whimper than a bang, although I like the idea of Rhaena’s unlikely friendship with the child named after her greatest enemy.
• Sidenote: I wonder if Jaehaerys’ edict against visiting Valyria was still in place when Gerion made his voyage?

 

• Alysanne gives birth a lot in this chapter. Interesting that Aemon is the only one of their kids mentioned to have a dragon egg in their cradle. This is an oddly inconsistent tradition of the Targaryens.
• I like how GRRM builds up the relationship between Aemon and Baelon, with Baelon the more martial and Aemon the more studious but neverthless an inseparable pair.
• We definitely get a taste of the Second Quarrel, with Jaehaerys and Alysanne dividing over whether Daenerys should be a queen regnant or consort.

 

• It is curious to me that, despite the fate of Elissa’s voyage, the design of the ships she had built at Braavos didn’t proliferate in the same way that the Portuguese caravels became so ubiquitous during the Age of Sail.
• (Also, “served her herring, beer, and caution” is a great line.)
• GRRM’s touch of having Rhaena and Elissa almost literally on ships passing in the night between Estermont and Tyorsh is a tad dramatic, but I liked it.
• As someone who’s read his share of nautical fiction in the past, GRRM’s account of Elissa’s Magellan-like voyage draws on some pretty old-fashioned adventure literature, but it’s still fun. He does manage to avoid the myth that pre-Columbian Europeans thought the world was flat, and instead points to the conflict being over the measurement of the circumference of the globe.
• I do find it curious that Elissa decided there must be a continent west of Westeros – her dream is too well-detailed to not be an indication by GRRM that El Dorado is out there, but there’s no source of this belief.
• A small moment of personal vindication: as I had guessed before, Brandon the Shipwright and Brandon the Burner were not recent! (Which suggests that we shouldn’t take the ordering of the statues in the crypts at Winterfell as necessararily authoritative.) Instead, they lived at least two thousand years before the Conquest, and a thousand years before the Farwynds settled the Lonely Light!
• I’m astonished that Donnel let his grandsons go on a voyage that was not only dangerous but arguably treasonous.

 

• Let’s talk about Jaehaerys’ recodification of the law. This is clearly inspired by Justinian’s creation of the Codex Justinianus, and it’s far more plausible that such a monumental task is done by a “smaller council” committee (with Barth as the Hamilton of the Federalist Papers), rather than just two men.
• However, while the broader framework of this story is quite good – the consolidation and rationalization of up to 132 legal traditions into one – I am really frustrated at the lack of specificity of content. What were the main divergences between the different legal traditions of Westeros? How was the Great Code enforced? What does the Master of Laws do? It feels like if we were ever going to get answers to these questions, this would have been the time and place. Such a missed opportunity.
• Nevertheless, we get Barth replacing Myles Smallwood in 57 AC, and immediately diving into to international trade and diplomatic talks with the Sealords of Braavos over the three eggs. I really like the exchange of “veiled threats” between Barth and the Sealord, with the Faceless Men and dragons as Mutually Assured Destruction.
• What in the seven hells did the Sealord give the Iron Bank in return for wiping out the entire principal of the Targaryens’ debt?

 

• Barths’ loan forgiveness gets straight in to the other side of Jaehaerys’ public works: the “drains and sewers” and “drinking water” of King’s Landing. Not content with writing the Kingdom’s legal code, Barth apparently invented public health in Westeros.
• Nice crib from Erin Brockovich on Alysanne’s part there.
• What I find peculiar, however, is why King’s Landing is still described as a dirtier and more odiferous city than, say, Oldtown despite having these massive investments in public health infrastructure. I would have advised some inserted material during the Storming of the Dragonpit (and even during the Sack in WOIAF) describing how the water systems were badly damaged during various fires or riots and not repaired after Jaehaerys’ time, similar to how a lot of the public works of Justinian were badly damaged by earthquakes later on.

 

• We move from there to the bit from this chapter that was excerpted ahead of time; you can read what I talked about there, but I’ll add in some context as it comes up.
• Alaric’s coldness to the King (and initially, the Queen) makes more sense now, since Jaehaerys’ mercy towards Maegor’s followers and his Reconciliation led to the death of his brother.
• For the casual brutality of the whole first-offense-ears thing, it’s quite a bit more lenient than the pre-Jon Snow policy of the Night’s Watch. My guess is that it’s because it’s been a while since the last King-Beyond-the-Wall and things got more militant after Raymun Redbeard.
• More “thin place” feels from the Nightfort; interesting that Alysanne was the one who recommended shuttering the place.
• The sort-of retcon around how the Starks felt about the New Gift doesn’t bother me that much, although I do feel like if this chapter had given us more of a sense of who Ellard and [Ellard’s unnamed brother] were as people, it would have worked better as a nice parallel to the conflict between Torrhen and his sons.
• So let’s talk about the First Night and Mole’s Town. I agree with @goodqueenaly that it’s a very well-written section, where we see Alysanne really mounting an argument in the teeth of resistance from King and Small Council both, and how their relationship functions in a moment of conflict. However, there are some things that kind of bug me about it.
  • The visit to the Mole’s Town is already coming close to GRRM’s line about historical shows not working within historical mores; even for Alysanne, visiting sex workers in a brothel is starting to strain disbelief, given the prevailing morality of her time and her religion.
  • I’m not a fan of the idea that the First Night is a mostly Northern/First Man phenomenon – unless challenged somewhere as based on inaccurate information – since we know it happened a lot on Dragonstone with the Targaryens, who would have had the least exposure to First Men culture than even the Andals.
  • Why didn’t this come up during any of Alysanne’s previous women’s courts? The text says that Alysanne already knew about the practice, so why wasn’t this an issue when she toured the Riverlands et al? It reminded me oddly of a West Wing episode where the First Ladys interview makes it look like she hadn’t heard of child slavery before a kid told her about it.
• It as at least consistent with Jaehaerys’ views on gender that he initially takes the conventionally patriarchal view.
• Also, “lost the use of their hands” was funny.

 

• Minor notes:
  • Good to see that Alysanne uses marriage alliances to reward her friends as well as for good policy. It’s a bit more of a human touch to a character who can often come as goodness personified.
  • The Dragonpit Tourney seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to give Ryam Redwyne more of a presence in this manuscript. Nevertheless, I did like “Harry the Ham” and the introduction of Ser Lucamore Strong.
  • The Tenth Anniversary Tourney is an improvement, however.