“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.”
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