Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago (19 page)

Given the aura of unreliability surrounding the subject, it should not be a surprise, then, to learn that the maesters, who are some of the most educated and learned characters in Westeros, have a conflicted relationship with magic. They acknowledge it existed at one time, but few look upon it favorably. Not many study magic enough to gain a Valyrian steel link in their chain, and those who do are often regarded as strange. Still others, like House Stark’s Maester Luwin, seem almost jaded and bitter to find no substance in magic.

There is some indication that the maesters, or a conspiratorial subset of them, may have worked to suppress magic in the world. It is unclear how the last dragons died, and while the first legends we learn say Aegon III poisoned them, Archmaester Marwyn tells Sam Tarly a different tale: “‘Who do you think killed all the dragons the last time around? Gallant dragonslayers with swords?’ He spat. ‘The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles, much less for dragons’” (
A Feast for Crows
). It’s not hard to guess that most maesters would prefer a knowable world of science and logic to a capricious one of magic and glamor. And, of course, magic would certainly be a challenge to the maesters’ established positions of power.

All acolytes of the Citadel must stand a final night’s vigil in a pitch-black vault before donning their maester’s chains. They are permitted no torch or lamp but only a candle of obsidian; they must spend the night in darkness unless they find some way to light the candle. Armen explains, “Even after he has said his vow and donned his chain and gone forth to serve, a maester will think back on the darkness of his vigil and remember how nothing that he did could make the candle burn . . . for even with knowledge, some things are not possible” (
A Feast for Crows
).

But this is not the lesson all take from the vigil. While most of the candles remain unlit, the acolytes holding them left brooding in the dark, there are others, like the one Leo Tyrell describes seeing in Marwyn’s chambers in the Citadel, that burns with an unearthly flame. Slowly, despite the weight of history and the maesters’ hope that magic is dead, the fantastic intrudes upon the mundane in ways that even the most logic-bound cannot deny.

In still other parts of the world, magic holds an even greater sway.

Stories of magic and potent superstition are especially prevalent, and far more accepted, in the desolate lands north of the Wall. This is where we first see tangible magic in the story, both in the book’s opening pages and later, once Jon Snow takes the black. When two brothers of the Night’s Watch, Jafer Flowers and Othor, return as undead wights to kill their sworn brothers, it takes Snow and his direwolf, Ghost, to save Lord Commander Mormont—an important scene because it is another early hint that magic is bubbling up at the edges of the world. Jon has seen the Wall and may understand logically that such an architectural marvel could only have been built with magic, but that’s ancient history. Facing down a dead man that struggles long after his arm has been severed makes magic, and the supernatural, real.

Wildlings in the north speak freely of giants, wargs, greenseers, and the old gods. Wargs—or skinchangers—are more understood here, as we see in the wildlings Orell and Varamyr Sixskins. So, too, is knowledge of the Others. Mance Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall, seeks a safe haven for his people from their predations, while the Night’s Watch suspects the wildling Craster of sacrificing his male offspring to the cold to keep the Others at bay.

The reasons for the power of magic north of the Wall remain unclear, at least in the story so far. Perhaps the Wall does not quench magic in the far north, or more is retained in the weir-woods of the children of the forest; another theory is that the dark magic of the Others is not as dependent on dragons as the magic practiced south of the Wall. Whatever the cause, though, there’s no denying that magic holds a greater sway over the lands beyond the Wall.

Stories of magic are also much more prominent in the exotic east, in Essos, than they are in Westeros. But it takes one who is part of both lands, yet also not fully of either, to unlock magic across the world. Beautiful Daenerys Targaryen, of the ancient and powerful lineage of Valyria, clings to the stories of her family’s grandeur and their magic-rich history. Her ancestral homeland, long since destroyed, is closer geographically and culturally to Essos than to Westeros, and it is said that the Targaryens have features that reflect their links to the magical, what they refer to as “blood of the dragon.” Dany never flinches from heat, and she dreams of dragons taking wing and breathing fire. When her patron, Illyrio Mopatis, gives her three petrified dragon eggs as a wedding gift, we can be certain something will hatch from them, either figuratively or literally. As the playwright Anton Chekhov wrote, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” So, too, must Martin utilize the dragon eggs. To leave them unexplored, unfired, would be to play a cruel trick upon the reader.

In the buildup to that revelation, Martin introduces us, and Dany, to Mirri Maz Duur, a Lhazareen victim of the rape and pillage of her village, who only survives due to Daenerys’s direct intervention. Mirri describes herself as a godswife to the Great Shepherd, and says she learned magic in Asshai-by-the-Shadow to the far east, and healing arts from a maester of the west. The Dothraki have another word for her:
maegi
, a woman who, according to their tales, “lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked life and strength from their bodies” (
A Game of Thrones
).

Dany turns to Mirri Maz Duur in desperation when Khal Drogo falls to fever and a festering wound. She believes Mirri can save him with her magic. But the reader cannot be sure. Martin’s description of Mirri’s actions as she begins the ritual to save Drogo grants them an air of mystery: “Mirri Maz Duur chanted words in a tongue that Dany did not know, and a knife appeared in her hand [. . .]. It looked old; hammered red bronze, leaf-shaped, its blade covered with ancient glyphs” (
A Game of Thrones
). Something important is clearly happening here. “Once I begin to sing,” the woman notes, “no one must enter this tent. My song will wake powers old and dark. The dead will dance here this night. No living man must look on them” (
A Game of Thrones
).

Mirri begins the spell with a splash of blood from Drogo’s horse and essentially ends it with the blood of childbirth as Dany goes into labor. However, Dany’s son is stillborn and monstrous. Drogo survives, but he is only preserved at death’s door, leaving him a husk of the man he once was.

Is Mirri’s magic real? Dany believes that it is—and that Mirri used it to take revenge on Drogo and his
khalasar
for the pain they had inflicted upon her and her village. Certainly something horrific happened to Dany’s child, born dead, reptilian, filled with maggots, and described as “dead for years.” Following Mirri’s equation of blood and sacrifice, Dany builds up Drogo’s funeral pyre with his treasure, his body, the dragon eggs, and the bound Mirri Maz Duur, sentencing the woman to a fiery death. Then she, too, walks into the flames. By however such things are measured, the sacrifice is deemed a high enough price to pay to awaken the dragon eggs.

And whatever doubts Dany—and the reader—might have had about the reality of magic are swept away.

By the time
A Clash of Kings
begins, other fantastical things we’ve only heard about through legends begin to appear: wargs, greenseers, pyromancers. There can now be no doubt: this is a world in which magic is real, if not commonplace. The birth of Dany’s dragons may seem to herald its arrival, but magic has been there all along, if only diminished or slumbering.

In an April 2011 interview with the
New York Times
, Martin described the process of adding magic to his story as akin to turning up the fire underneath a crab in a pot: “You put a crab in hot water, he’ll jump right out. But you put him in cold water and you gradually heat it up—the hot water is fantasy and magic, and the crab is the audience.”

From the beginning of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin broadcasts the existence of magic in the world. By opening with the Others, he shows us that there are supernatural monsters that prowl the night, forcing us to ask ourselves: What else might be out there? But by keeping the fantastic rare and mysterious, he also allows us to be surprised when we encounter it—and allows the reader who does not usually enjoy fantasy to become swept up in the story.

This slow boil, this insistence on mystery, does more than that, however. It lends the magic a greater sense of importance and power. It also keeps both characters and readers guessing as to the true nature of magic in the world. The aura of mystery heightens the sense that magic is dangerous, though in this case, that’s not just an illusion. Magic comes at a high price. It is dangerous, often incredibly so.

When Dany asks her to save Drogo, for example, Mirri warns that the spell will have a high cost and require a great sacrifice. This is not something to be bargained for with gold or horseflesh, though it will be paid with that, too. Mirri tells us, “Only death may pay for life” (
A Game of Thrones
). Though the
maegi’s
bloodmagic has tragic results, it teaches Dany, and us, the most essential rules of magic in the series: it cannot be handled easily and always demands a high price.

A Clash of Kings
opens with another strong omen: the terrible red comet blazing across the sky. Unlike the stag and the direwolf, though, this event is much harder to interpret and most characters see what they want in it. King Joffrey sees the comet as a blessing of Lannister crimson; Edmure Tully sees Tully red and a sign of victory; Greatjon Umber sees a symbol of vengeance; Brynden Tully, Aeron Greyjoy, and Osha all see it as a portent of war and bloodshed; and to near-blind Old Nan, who claims she can smell it, the red comet means the coming of dragons. In a sense, what the fire portends to the reader is R’hllor, the Lord of Light, and his priestess, Melisandre.

Melisandre is one of the most adept magic-wielding characters in A Song of Ice and Fire. Previously, the only red priest of R’hllor we had seen was Thoros, who was more caricature than commanding; although a master of the tournaments with his flaming sword, he was bald, fat, and often drunk. Melisandre, in contrast, is sexy, sophisticated, and introduced in a scene where the stakes are life and death. Stannis Baratheon’s ancient maester, Cressen, is convinced Melisandre is a toxic influence on Stannis, so he tries to poison her. But Melisandre claims to have seen his feeble attempt in her fires and warns him that she knows his plot. When Cressen refuses to turn from his path, both drink from the poisoned wine, but only Cressen is killed. Melisandre’s sorcery keeps her safe.

In many ways, Melisandre is the embodiment of the lesson Dany learns—that magic comes at a tremendous cost. We are often not privy to how Melisandre is “paying” for her sorceries, but what we do learn indicates the payments are steep.

Melisandre has convinced Stannis that his path to kingship leads through the fires of R’hllor, that he is the legendary hero Azor Ahai, reborn, destined to wield the fabled sword Lightbringer and unite and protect Westeros from the Great Other. Whether Stannis himself believes that or not—and much evidence suggests that Melisandre is flat-out wrong here, despite her demonstrable power—he listens to her counsel, trusts her implicitly, and, if he is not a full convert to her religion, is willing to feed pretty much anything she suggests into the fire. To recreate Lightbringer, Stannis symbolically sacrifices idols of his old faith, the Seven, in a great bonfire, and then draws the blade out of the burning form of the Mother.

However, Stannis does not seem to have given up enough to create a new blade: his first weapon is a charred ruin, the second blazes with light but no heat. (It is unclear if he made another attempt, or if Melisandre just put a glamor on the burned blade.) The myths of Azor Ahai say that he ruined two swords in the making. The first he tempered in water after working thirty days and nights at the forge, and it shattered. The second took fifty days and nights, was plunged into the heart of a lion to cool, and still it broke. The third attempt took one hundred days and nights; he summoned his wife and asked her to bare her breast. He tempered it in her heart—the steepest of sacrifices—and her soul combined with the sword to make Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, used to defeat the Others during the Long Night.

Melisandre is constantly feeding sacrifices to her ever-hungry fires. It is said she burns a man to give Stannis fair winds for his ships. She places leeches on Edric Storm, bastard son of King Robert, and tosses the blood-engorged worms into the flames while reciting the names of Stannis’s foes—Joffrey, Balon, and Robb—to bring them to destruction (and soon enough, all three perish in terrible ways). She asks for more than a taste of Edric’s blood; there is power in royal blood, she says, power enough to wake a stone dragon, and she wants to feed him to the flames. Although Stannis relents, Davos had foreseen the danger and smuggled Edric away beyond their reach. Later, she asks to sacrifice the King-Beyond-the-Wall’s son, as well, though she is similarly thwarted by Jon Snow.