The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire)

by George R. R. Martin

  Travelers name these the Haunted Lands for the many ruined cities that dot them, or the Great Desolation for their emptiness, but it is as the Dothraki sea that these grasslands are best known today. That usage is comparatively recent, however, for the Dothraki are a young race, and it was only since the Doom destroyed Valyria that their khalasars came to dominate these lands, sweeping out of the east with fire and steel to conquer and destroy the ancient cities that once thrived here and carrying off their peoples into bondage.

  The fall of the great Sarnori kingdoms took less than a century. Even as the Free Cities of the west became locked in a savage struggle for domination during what became known as the Century of Blood, the grasslands, too, exploded into war. During the years that followed the Doom, the riders of the eastern steppes, hitherto divided into threescore quarrelsome tribes at perpetual war with one another, had finally been united under a single leader, a Dothraki khal called Mengo. Counseled by his mother, the purported witch queen Doshi, Khal Mengo compelled the other nomads to accept his rule, extinguishing or enslaving those who refused.

  The Old Empire of Ghis fought five wars against the rising Freehold of Valyria, history tells us. In the Second and Third Ghiscari Wars, the Tall Men took up their swords as allies of Valyria. In the Fourth War, rival kings took opposite sides, some joining the Ghiscari and others the Valyrians. Lomas Longstrider wrote of a fallen obelisk carved about with the figures of Ghis’s allies in that fourth war, and noted that the tallest warriors depicted—made taller by high helms—were the Sarnori. The obelisk was raised by Ghis, but the carvings were Valyrian, for all the warriors were captured and enslaved.

  Then, in his old age, he turned his eyes westward.

  Contemptuous of the horselords, who had been no more than a nuisance to them for centuries, the Tall Men ignored the threat from the east for far too long, even as the khalasars began to raid across their eastern marches. Some of their kings even sought to use the Dothraki in their own wars, offering them gold and slaves and other gifts to fight against their rivals. Khal Mengo took these gifts gladly … then took the conquered lands as well, burning fields and farms and towns to return the grasslands to their wild state (for the Dothraki consider the earth to be their mother and think it sinful to cut her flesh with plows and spades and axes).

  Not until Mengo’s son Khal Moro brought his khalasar to the very gates of Sathar, the fabled Waterfall City, did the Tall Men seem to realize their peril. Broken in battle, the men of Sathar were put to the sword, their women and children carried off as slaves; three-quarters of them died on the grueling march south to slave marts at the Ghiscari hill city Hazdahn Mo. Sathar, loveliest of the cities of the grasslands, was burned to ash and rubble. It is written that it was Khal Moro himself who gave the ruins their new name: Yalli Qamayi, the place of Wailing Children.

  Even then, the kings of Sarnor proved unable to unite. As Sathar burned, the kings of Kasath to the west and Gornath to the north sent forth their armies, not to aid their neighbors but to lay claim to a share of the plunder. In their greed for land, Kasath and Gornath even came into conflict with one another and fought a pitched battle three days’ ride west of Sathar, as plumes of black smoke rose in the eastern sky.

  This is not the place to chronicle the events of the years and wars that followed, as the great cities of the Kingdoms of Sarnor fell piecemeal to the Dothraki. Those who wish a more detailed account are directed to Bello’s The End of the Tall Men, Maester Illister’s Horse Tribes, Being a Study of the Nomads of the Eastern Plains of Essos, the eastern chapters and appendices of Maester Joseth’s Battles and Sieges of the Century of Blood, and Vaggoro’s definitive Ruined Cities, Stolen Gods.

  Let it suffice to say that of all the proud Sarnori cities, only Saath remains unruined today, and that port city is a sad place, much diminished from what it once was, surviving largely because of support from Ib and Lorath (whose colony of Morosh is nearby). Only in Saath do men still name themselves Tagaez Fen; fewer than twenty thousand remain, when once the Tall Men numbered in the millions. Only there are the hundred gods of the Kingdom of Sarnor still worshipped. The bronze and marble likenesses that once adorned the streets and temples of the Tall Men now lean crookedly, overgrown by weeds, along the grassy ways of Vaes Dothrak, the sacred city of the horselords.

  Sathar was the first of the cities of the grasslands to fall to the Dothraki, but by no means the last. Six years later, Khal Moro razed Kasath as well. In this attack his riders were aided, incredibly, by Gornath, whose king had made common cause with the Dothraki and taken one of Moro’s daughters to wife. Yet Gornath itself fell next, a dozen years afterward. Khal Horro had by that time slain Khal Moro, ending the line of the mighty Khal Mengo. The King of Gornath died at the hand of his own Dothraki wife, who despised him for his weakness, we are told. Afterward, Khal Horro took her for his own, as rats devoured the corpse of her late husband.

  Horro was the last of the great khals to command the allegiance of all Dothraki. When he was slain by a rival, only three years after the destruction of Gornath, his great khalasar splintered into a dozen lesser hordes, and the riders once again resumed their quarrelsome ways. Yet the reprieve this provided the Kingdom of Sarnor proved short-lived, for the Tall Men had shown their weakness, and the khals who followed Horro shared his taste for conquest. In the years that followed, they strove to outdo one another by conquering ever wider territories, destroying the cities of the grasslands, enslaving their peoples, and carrying their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak to testify to their victories.

  One by one, the remaining cities of the Tall Men were overwhelmed and destroyed, leaving only ruins and ashes to mark where their proud towers once stood. For scholars and students of history, the fall of Sallosh by the Silver Shore was especially tragic, for when that City of Scholars burned, its great library was not spared, and most of the history of the Tall Men and the peoples who had gone before them were lost for all time.

  Kyth and Hornoth soon followed, destroyed by rival khals, each of whom sought to outdo the other in savagery. The fortress city Mardosh the Unconquerable defied the horselands the longest. For close unto six years the city endured, cut off from its hinterlands, encircled by a succession of khalasars. Driven to starvation, the Mardoshi devoured their dogs and horses, then rats and mice and other vermin, and finally began to eat their own dead. When they could endure no longer, the surviving warriors of the city garrison slew their own wives and children to keep them from the khals, then opened the city gates and rushed forth for one final attack. They were cut down to a man. Afterward, the Dothraki named the ruins of Mardosh Vaes Gorqoyi, the City of the Blood Charge.

  The fall of Mardosh finally awakened the remaining Sarnori kings to the depth of their peril. Putting aside their own quarrels and rivalries at last, the Tall Men gathered from up and down the Sarne, assembling a great army beneath the walls of Sarnath, intent on breaking the power of the khals for good and all. Led by Mazor Alexi, last of the High Kings, they struck out boldly to the east. In the tall grass halfway between Sarnath and the ruins of Kasath, they met the assembled power of four khalasars on what forever after was known as the Field of Crows.

  The battle before the gates of Sathar. (illustration credit 181)

  Khal Haro, Khal Qano, Khal Loso (the Lame), and Khal Zhako commanded almost eighty thousand horsemen between them, we are told. The great host of the High King of Sarnor was led by six thousand scythed chariots, with ten thousand armored riders behind them, and another ten thousand light horsemen (many of them women) on the flanks. Behind them marched the Sarnori foot, close to a hundred thousand spearmen and slingers, giving the Tall Men a great advantage in numbers. On this all chroniclers agree.

  As battle was joined, the Sarnori chariots threatened to carry all before them. Their earth-shattering advance smashed through the center of the Dothraki horde, the spinning blades on the wheels of their chariots slicing through the legs of the Dothraki horses. When Khal Haro himself
went down before them, cut to pieces and trampled, his khalasar broke and fled. As the chariots thundered after the fleeing horsemen, the High King and his armored riders plunged in after them, followed by the Sarnori foot, waving their spears and screaming victory.

  Their elation was short-lived. The rout was feigned. When they had drawn the Tall Men deep into the trap, the fleeing Dothraki turned suddenly and unleashed a storm of arrows from their great bows. The khalasars of Khal Qano and Khal Zhako swept in from north and south, while Loso the Lame and his screamers circled round and attacked the Sarnori from the rear, cutting off their retreat. Completely encircled, the High King and his mighty host were cut to pieces. Some say a hundred thousand men died that day, amongst them Mazor Alexi, six lesser kings, and more than threescore lords and heroes. As the crows feasted on their corpses, the riders of the khalasars walked amongst the dead and squabbled over their valuables.

  Bereft of defenders, Sarnath of the Tall Towers fell to Loso the Lame less than a fortnight later. Not even the Palace With a Thousand Rooms was spared when Khal Loso put the city to the torch.

  The remaining cities of the grasslands followed one by one, as the Century of Blood drew to its close. Sarys, at the mouth of the Sarne, was the last to fall but yielded little in the way of slaves or plunder, for the people of the city had largely fled by the time that Khal Zeggo descended upon it.

  It must not be thought that the Kingdom of Sarnor was the only victim of the horselords. The Valyrian colony Essaria, sometimes remembered as the Lost Free City, was similarly overwhelmed. Today its ruins are known to the Dothraki as Vaes Khadokh, the City of Corpses. In the north, Khal Dhako sacked and burned Ibbish, reclaiming most of the small foothold the men of Ib had carved out on the northern coast of Essos (a much smaller Ibbenese colony survives in the dense forests beside the Shivering Sea, huddled around the town they have named New Ibbish). In the south, other khals led their hordes into the Red Waste, destroying the Qaathi towns and cities that once dotted that desert, until only the great city of Qarth remained, protected by its towering triple wall.

  Despite their long history, little can be said with any certainty of the Qaathi—a people now gone from the world save for a remnant in Qarth.

  What can be said is that the Qaathi arose in the grasslands and established towns there, coming into contact and occasional conflict with the Sarnori. They would oft have the worse of these wars, and so began to drift farther south, creating new city-states. One such, Qarth, was founded on the coast of the Summer Sea. Yet the lands in the south of Essos proved more inhospitable than those the Qaathi had vacated, turning to desert even as they established their foothold there. The Qaathi people were already well on their way to collapse when the Doom struck, and any hopes of using the chaos in the Summer Sea to their advantage vanished when the Dothraki attacked, destroying all the remaining Qaathi cities save for Qarth itself.

  Yet in a way, the Dothraki destruction led to a resurgence for Qarth. Forced to look instead to the sea, the Pureborn who ruled Qarth swiftly constructed a fleet and took control of the Jade Gates—the strait between Qarth and Great Moraq, which joins the Summer Sea to the Jade Sea. With the Valyrian fleet destroyed, and Volantis’s attention turned west, there were none to oppose them as they established control over the most direct route between east and west, and so gained immeasurably in both trade and levied tolls for safe passage.

  Many in the Free Cities believe that the westward thrust of the horselords was turned back at Qohor, when Khal Temmo’s attempt to take that city was defeated by the valor of three thousand Unsullied slave soldiers who stood fast against eighteen charges of his screamers. To believe that the stand of the Three Thousand of Qohor put an end to Dothraki dreams of conquest, however, suggests a complacency akin to that of the High King of Sarnor’s when the horselords first came boiling out of the east. Wiser men know that it is only a matter of time until the khalasars unite again under some great khal and turn west once more in search of new conquests.

  The Dothraki have oft attempted to extend their power eastward as well, but there they have found the Bone Mountains to be an almost insurmountable obstacle. Those bleak, inhospitable peaks form an immense stone wall between the horselords and the riches of the Further East. Only three passes exist large enough to bring an army through, and athwart those stand the mighty fortress cities Bayasabhad, Samyriana, and Kayakayanaya, defended by tens of thousands of redoubtable female warriors, the last remnants of the great kingdom of Hyrkoon, which once flourished beyond the Bones in what is now known as the Great Sand Sea. Many a khal has died beneath their walls, and still those walls stand inviolate.

  West of the Bones, however, from the Shivering Sea in the north to the Painted Mountains and Skahazadhan in the south, the vast expanse of grass where civilization first flowered remains a windswept desolation where no man dares plow a furrow, plant a seed, or raise a house for fear of the khalasars that wander freely there to this very day, exacting gifts from any man who seeks to cross their lands and making war upon each other.

  The Dothraki remain nomads still, a savage and wild people who prefer tents to palaces. Seldom still, the khals drive their great herds of horses and goats endlessly across their “sea,” fighting one another when they meet and occasionally moving beyond the borders of their own lands for slaves and plunder, or to claim the “gifts” that the magisters and triarchs of the Free Cities bestow upon them whenever they chance to wander too far west.

  It is said that the fortress cities of Bayasabhad, Samyriana, and Kayakayanaya are defended by women out of the belief that those who give birth are the only ones permitted to take life at will. The True Account of Addam of Duskendale’s Journeys, a merchant’s account of his alleged travels in eastern Essos, provides little further insight into these matters, or any others that scholars are interested in, and instead spends most of its time finding ways to remind readers that the warrior women walk about bare-breasted and decorate their cheeks and nipples with ruby studs and iron rings.

  The horselords have only one permanent settlement: the “city” they call Vaes Dothrak, which stands beneath the shadow of the lonely peak they call the Mother of Mountains, beside a bottomless lake they name the Womb of the World. It is here that the Dothraki believe their race was born. No true city, Vaes Dothrak has neither walls nor streets. Its grassy thoroughfares are lined with stolen gods, its palaces made of woven grass.

  This hollow shell of a city is ruled by women: the crones of the dosh khaleen, all widows of dead khals. The Dothraki esteem Vaes Dothrak as the holiest of cities. No blood may be shed there, for the riders believe this to be a place of peace and power, where one day all the khalasars shall gather together once more beneath the banners of the great khal who will conquer all, the “stallion who mounts the world.”

  For us, however, the only true importance of Vaes Dothrak is the trading that takes place there. The Dothraki themselves will neither buy nor sell, deeming it unmanly, but in their sacred city, by leave of the dosh khaleen, merchants and traders from beyond the Bones and the Free Cities come together, to haggle and exchange goods and gold. The caravans that feed the great Eastern and Western Markets of Vaes Dothrak give handsome gifts to the khals they meet crossing the Dothraki sea, and in return receive protection.

  So, strange to say, this empty “city” of the nomads has become the gateway between east and west (for those who travel by land). Many distant peoples who might not otherwise meet, or even know of one another, gather here in this queer bazaar beneath the Mother of Mountains, and trade in safety.

  Vaes Dothrak. (illustration credit 182)

  THE SHIVERING SEA

  The Shivering Sea is bounded to the west by Westeros, to the south by Essos, to the north by the vast frozen wilderness of ice and snow that seafarers call the White Waste, and to the east by lands and seas unknown.

  The true extent of this vast, chilly, inhospitable ocean may never be known, for no man of the Seven Kingdoms has ever sailed
farther east than the Thousand Islands, whilst those who venture too far north encounter howling winds, frozen seas, and mountains of ice that can crush even the strongest ship. Beyond them, sailors tell us, blizzards rage eternally and the very mountains themselves scream like madmen in the night.

  It has long been accepted amongst the wise that our world is round. If this is true, it ought to be possible to sail over the top of the world and down its far side, and there discover lands and seas undreamed of. Over the centuries, many a bold mariner has sought to find a way through the ice to whatever lies beyond. Most, alas, have perished in the attempt, or returned south again half-frozen and much chastened. Whilst it is true that the White Waste recedes during summer and expands again in winter, its very shorelines ever changing, no seafarer has succeeded in finding this fabled northern passage, nor the warm summer sea that Maester Heriston of White Harbor once suggested might lie hidden and entombed behind the icy cliffs of the far north.

  Sailors, by nature a gullible and superstitious lot, as fond of their fancies as singers, tell many tales of these frigid northern waters. They speak of queer lights shimmering in the sky, where the demon mother of the ice giants dances eternally through the night, seeking to lure men northward to their doom. They whisper of Cannibal Bay, where ships enter at their peril only to find themselves trapped forever when the sea freezes hard behind them.

  They tell of pale blue mists that move across the waters, mists so cold that any ship they pass over is frozen instantly; of drowned spirits who rise at night to drag the living down into the grey-green depths; of mermaids pale of flesh with black-scaled tails, far more malign than their sisters of the south.