This was very much my experience in reading this, the first volume in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. As hard as I tried, I could not help but see the actors from the TV show in my mind’s eye as I progressed through its pages -- and just that created a kind of alternate experience because in the book, for example, Sansa is 11 years old -- and there ain’t no way that the actress that played her in Season 1 of Game of Thrones is that young. Indeed, Sophie Turner was 15 at the time.
But one thing that is the same in the TV show and the book -- and one of the best things about them both, in my opinion -- is that, at least in the first book and the first season, the bad guys win.
And they don’t just win, they win because the honor and morality of the good guys is ill-suited to their environment, and it fails them. It’s not just that the bad guys win. The good guys lose … because they are good.
Okay, now, before you think I’m some kind of monster, let me say clearly that this is not what I wish happened in the real world -- but in the realm of fantasy literature, it is such a refreshing change. You may have read my post on Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind. If so, you know I have been thirsty for something in the fantasy genre in which characters are treated like real people, and that trauma is treated like trauma. Well, I guess I should’ve looked at A Game of Thrones earlier. It was hiding there right under my nose.
Martin does a phenomenal job putting his anti-morality play together. It’s no accident that he places the reader on the side of the Starks, not the Lannisters. It makes the Lannister triumph all the more galling, but there are clues throughout that it is not just the Lannister cunning that rules the day -- it is actually the Stark honor that causes them to fall.
It didn’t dogear any pages as I read this, but I know there is that scene between Eddard (Ned) Stark and Cersei Lannister, after he has discovered the truth of the king’s bloodline and how it had been usurped by the incestuous coupling of Cersei and his brother Jaime. In the scene, he lays his cards on the table in front of Cersei, and tells her to flee King’s Landing or be destroyed.
“You would do well to listen, my lady. I shall say this only once. When the king returns from his hunt, I intend to lay the truth before him. You must be gone by then. You and your children, all three, and not to Casterly Rock. If I were you, I should take ship for the Free Cities, or even farther, to the Summer Isles or the Port of Ibben. As far as the winds blow.”
“Exile,” she said. “A bitter cup to drink from.”
“A sweeter cup than your father served Rhaegar’s children,” Ned said, “and kinder than you deserve. Your father and your brothers would do well to go with you. Lord Tywin’s gold will buy you comfort and hire swords to keep you safe. You shall need them. I promise you, no matter where you flee, Robert’s wrath will follow you, to the back of beyond if need be.”
The queen stood. “And what of my wrath, Lord Stark?” she asked softly. Her eyes searched his face. “You should have taken the realm for yourself. It was there for the taking. Jamie told me how you found him on the Iron Throne the day King’s Landing fell, and made him yield it up. That was your moment. All you needed to do was climb those steps, and sit. Such a sad mistake.”
“I have made more mistakes than you can possibly imagine,” Ned said, “but that was not one of them.”
“Oh, but it was, my lord,” Cersei insisted. “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.”
When you play the game of thrones. It’s important that Martin chose that as his title, because it emphasizes that this is a game, a game with its own rules that don’t align with a traditional understanding of fantasy genre honor and morality.
Ned is so focused on his honor and the knightly rules of regal succession, that he can’t see that they are his undoing when beset by enemies who have no such allegiance. This theme emerges again in the scene between Varys and Ned, on the eve of Ned’s downfall and beheading. Ned asks Varys to deliver a message, and Varys says he will only if it serves his own ends.
“Your own ends. What ends are those, Lord Varys?”
“Peace,” Varys replied without hesitation. “If there was one soul in King’s Landing who was truly desperate to keep Robert Baratheon alive, it was me.” He sighed. “For fifteen years I protected him from his enemies, but I could not protect him from his friends. What strange fit of madness led you to tell the queen you had learned the truth of Joffrey’s birth?”
“The madness of mercy,” Ned admitted.
“Ah,” said Varys. “To be sure. You are an honest and honorable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty and honor have won you, I understand why.”
There it is again. It is Ned’s honor that has caused his downfall.
Ned Stark laid his head back against the damp stone wall and closed his eyes. His leg was throbbing. “The king’s wine … did you question Lancel?”
“Oh, indeed. Cersei gave him the wineskins, and told him it was Robert’s favorite vintage.” The eunuch shrugged. “A hunter lives a perilous life. If the boar had not done for Robert, it would have been a fall from a horse, the bite of a wood adder, an arrow gone astray … the forest is the abattoir of the gods. It was not wine that killed the king. It was your mercy.”
Ned had feared as much. “Gods forgive me.”
“If there are gods,” Varys said, “I expect they will. The queen would not have waited long in any case. Robert was becoming unruly, and she needed to be rid of him to free her hands to deal with his brothers. They are quite a pair, Stannis and Renly. The iron gauntlet and the silk glove.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You have been foolish, my lord. You ought to have heeded Littlefinger when he urged you to support Joffrey’s succession.”
“How … how could you know of that?”
Varys smiled. “I know, that’s all that need concern you. I also know that on the morrow the queen will pay you a visit.”
Slowly Ned raised his eyes. “Why?”
“Cersei is frightened of you, my lord … but she has other enemies she fears even more. Her beloved Jaime is fighting the river lords even now. Lysa Arryn sits in the Eyrie, ringed in stone and steel, and there is no love lost between her and the queen. In Dorne, the Martells still brood on the murder of Princess Elia and her babes. And now your son marches down the Neck with a northern host at his back.”
“Robb is only a boy,” Ned said, aghast.
“A boy with an army,” Varys said. “Yet only a boy, as you say. The king’s brothers are the ones giving Cersei sleepless nights … Lord Stannis in particular. His claim is the true one, he is known for his prowess as a battle commander, and he is utterly without mercy. There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man. No one knows what Stannis has been doing on Dragonstone, but I will wager you that he’s gathered more swords than seashells. So here is Cersei’s nightmare: while her father and brother spend their power battling Starks and Tullys, Lord Stannis will land, proclaim himself king, and lop off her son’s curly blond head … and her own in the bargain, though I truly believe she cares more about the boy.”
“Stannis Baratheon is Robert’s true heir,” Ned said. “The throne is his by rights. I would welcome his ascent.”
This is plainly nonsensical, and Varys knows it. The only reason Robert was king is because he stole the throne from Aerys Targaryen. And Ned helped him do it.
Varys tsked. “Cersei will not want to hear that, I promise you. Stannis may win the throne, but only your rotting head will remain to cheer unless you guard that tongue of yours. Sansa begged so sweetly, it would be a shame if you threw it all away. You are being given your life back, if you’ll take it. Cersei is no fool. She knows a tame wolf is of more use than a dead one.”
“You want me to serve the woman who murdered my king, butchered my men, and crippled my son?” Ned’s voice was thick with disbelief.
“I want you to serve the realm,” Varys said. “Tell the queen that you will confess your vile treason, command your son to lay down his sword, and proclaim Joffrey as the true heir. Offer to denounce Stannis and Renly as faithless usurpers. Our green-eyed lioness knows you are a man of honor. If you will give her the peace she needs and the time to deal with Stannis, and pledge to carry her secret to your grave, I believe she will allow you to take the black and live out the rest of your days on the Wall, with your brother and that baseborn son of yours.”
The thought of Jon filled Ned with a sense of shame, and a sorrow too deep for words. If only he could see the boy again, sit and talk with him … pain shot through his broken leg, beneath the filthy grey plaster of his cast. He winced, his fingers opening and closing helplessly. “Is this your own scheme,” he gasped out at Varys, “or are you in league with Littlefinger?”
That seemed to amuse the eunuch. “I would sooner wed the Black Goat of Qohor. Littlefinger is the second most devious man in the Seven Kingdoms. Oh, I feed him choice whispers, sufficient so that he thinks I am his … just as I allow Cersei to believe I am hers.”
“And just as you let me believe that you were mine. Tell me, Lord Varys, who do you truly serve?”
Varys smiled thinly. “Why, the realm, my good lord, how ever could you doubt that? I swear it by my lost manhood. I serve the realm, and the realm needs peace.” He finished the last swallow of wine, and tossed the empty skin aside. “So what is your answer, Lord Eddard? Give me your word that you’ll tell the queen what she wants to hear when she comes calling.”
“If I did, my word would be as hollow as an empty suit of armor. My life is not so precious to me as that.”
His word and his life. As much as Varys tries to instruct him, Ned cannot see that the game afoot has little use for either. In his strange way, Varys understands that there is a higher calling than Ned’s word.
“Pity.” The eunuch stood. “And your daughter’s life, my lord? How precious is that?”
A chill pierced Ned’s heart. “My daughter … ”
“Surely you did not think I’d forgotten about your sweet innocent, my lord? The queen most certainly has not.”
“No,” Ned pleaded, his voice cracking. “Varys, gods have mercy, do as you like with me, but leave my daughter out of your schemes. Sansa’s no more than a child.”
“Rhaenys was a child too. Prince Rhaegar’s daughter. A precious little thing, younger than your girls. She had a small black kitten she called Balerion, did you know? I always wondered what happened to him. Rhaenys liked to pretend he was the true Balerion, the Black Dread of old, but I imagine the Lannisters taught her the difference between a kitten and a dragon quick enough, the day they broke down her door.” Varys gave a long weary sigh, the sigh of a man who carried all the sadness of the world in a sack upon his shoulders. “The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer. If that’s true, Lord Eddard, tell me … why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones? Ponder it, if you would, while you wait upon the queen. And spare a thought for this as well: The next visitor who calls on you could bring you bread and cheese and the milk of the poppy for your pain … or he could bring you Sansa’ head.
“The choice, my dear lord Hand, is entirely yours.”
It is. And that’s kind of the point. Is choosing to do good still good when it results in so much carnage and suffering. Isn’t that kind of good actually not good?
And it’s not just Ned. The earlier reference to Ned’s son Robb is a foreshadow. Later, after Ned has been killed, and with Jaime Lannister in their captive possession, Robb Stark and his bannermen receive word that Renly Baratheon has claimed the Iron Throne. Many urge Robb to pledge his northern forces to Renly’s claim. This scene is told from the perspective of Robb’s mother Catelyn.
“Renly is not the king,” Robb said. It was the first time her son had spoken. Like his father, he knew how to listen.
“You cannot mean to hold to Joffrey, my lord,” Galbert Glover said. “He put your father to death.”
“That makes him evil,” Robb replied. “I do not know that it makes Renly king. Joffrey is still Robert’s eldest trueborn son, so the throne is rightfully his by all the laws of the realm. Were he to die, and I mean to see that he does, he has a younger brother. Tommen is next in line after Joffrey.”
“Tommen is no less a Lannister,” Ser Marq Piper snapped.
“As you say,” said Robb, troubled. “Yet if neither one is king, still, how could it be Lord Renly? He’s Robert’s younger brother. Bran can’t be Lord of Winterfell before me, and Renly can’t be king before Lord Stannis.”
Lady Mormont agreed. “Lord Stannis has the better claim.”
“Renly is crowned,” said Marq Piper. “Highgarden and Storm’s End support his claim, and the Dornishmen will not be laggardly. If Winterfell and Riverrun add their strength to his, he will have five of the seven great houses behind him. Six, if the Arryns bestir themselves! Six against the Rock! My lords, within the year, we will have all their heads on pikes, the queen and the boy king, Lord Tywin, the Imp, the Kingslayer, Ser Kevan, all of them! That is what we shall win if we join with King Renly. What does Lord Stannis have against that, that we should cast it all aside?”
“The right,” said Robb stubbornly. Catelyn thought he sounded eerily like his father as he said it.
And so the cycle will continue. Those who hold to their honor lose in this fantasy -- and that’s what I like best about it.
And why, I suppose, I thought it was such a travesty that the good guys win at the end of the TV show. Will the books end that way? I’ve heard that the last book was not written when the TV show came to an end, and that the TV producers had to make up their own ending. I can only hope that Martin will stay true to his radical proposition. As the ultimate manifestation of the dark indifference to human honor and concern, the Night King simply has to win. Nothing else makes any thematic sense.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment