Most infamous of all was Balon Blackskin, who fought with an axe in his left hand and a hammer in his right. No weapon made of man could harm him, it was said; swords glanced off and left no mark, and axes shattered against his skin.
Did such men ever truly walk the earth? It is hard to know since most supposedly lived and died thousands of years before the ironmen learned to write; literacy remains rare in the Iron Islands to this day, and those who have the skill are oft mocked as weaklings or feared as sorcerers. So much of what we know of these demigods of the dawn comes to us from the peoples they plundered and preyed upon, written in the Old Tongue and the runes of the First Men.
The lands the reavers plundered were densely wooded but thinly peopled in those days. Then as now, the ironborn were loath to go too far from the salt waters that sustained them, but they ruled the Sunset Sea from Bear Island and the Frozen Shore down to the Arbor. The feeble fishing boats and trading cogs of the First Men, which seldom ventured out of sight of land, were no match for the swift longships of the ironmen with their great sails and banks of oars. And when battle was joined upon the shores, mighty kings and famous warriors fell before the reavers like wheat before a scythe, in such numbers that the men of the green lands told each other that the ironborn were demons risen from some watery hell, protected by fell sorceries and possessed of foul black weapons that drank the very souls of those they slew.
Whenever autumn waned and winter threatened, the longships would come raiding after food. And so the Iron Islands ate, even in the depths of winter, whilst oft as not the men who had planted, tended, and harvested the crops starved. “We do not sow,” became the boast of the Greyjoys, whose rulers began to style themselves Lords Reaper of Pyke.
The reavers brought more than gold and grain back to the Iron Islands; they brought captives as well, who would henceforth serve their captors as thralls. Amongst the ironborn, only reaving and fishing were considered worthy work for free men. The endless stoop labor of farm and field was suitable only for thralls. The same was true for mining. Yet those thralls who were set to field work counted themselves fortunate, Haereg writes, for many and more of them lived to grow old and were even allowed to marry and have children. Such could not be said of those condemned to work the mines—those dark, dangerous pits beneath the hills where the masters were brutal, the air was dank and foul, and life was short.
Most of the male captives brought back to the Iron Islands spent the remainder of their lives at hard labor in the fields or mines. Some few, the sons of lords and knights and rich merchants, were ransomed for gold. Thralls who could read, write, and do sums served their masters as stewards, tutors, and scribes. Stonemasons, cordwainers, coopers, chandlers, carpenters, and other skilled craftsmen were even more valuable.
Thralldom was a common practice amongst the First Men during their long dominion over Westeros—further support for the ironborn having descended from the First Men.
Further, thralldom should not be conflated with chattel slavery as it exists in certain of the Free Cities and lands farther east. Unlike slaves, thralls retain certain important rights. A thrall belongs to his captor, and owes him service and obedience, but he is still a man, not property. Thralls cannot be bought or sold. They may own property, marry as they wish, have children. The children of slaves are born into bondage, but the children of thralls are born free; any babe born on one of the islands is considered ironborn, even when both his parents are thralls. Nor may such children be taken from their parents until the age of seven, when most begin an apprenticeship or join a ship’s crew.
An ironborn reaver takes his prize. (illustration credit 117)
It was young women the reavers prized most, however. Older women were sometimes carried off by those captains in need of scullions, cooks, seamstresses, weavers, midwives, and the like, but fair maids and girls near their first flowering were taken on every raid. Most ended their days upon the islands as serving girls, whores, household drudges, or wives to other thralls, but the fairest and strongest and most nubile would be kept as salt wives by their captors.
In their marriage customs, as in their gods, the ironborn differ from mainland Westeros. Wherever the Faith prevails in the Seven Kingdoms, a man joins himself for life to a single wife, and a maid to but one husband. On the Iron Islands, however, a man may have only one “rock wife” (unless she should die, whereupon he may take another), but any number of “salt wives.” A rock wife must be a freeborn woman of the Iron Islands. Her place is at her man’s side in board and bed, and her children come before all others. Salt wives are almost always women and girls captured during raids. The number of salt wives that a man can support speaks to his power, wealth, and virility.
Still, it must not be thought that salt wives of the ironborn are no more than concubines, whores, or bed slaves. Salt marriages, like rock marriages, were customarily performed by priests of the Drowned God (albeit in ceremonies considerably less solemn than those that bind a man to his rock wife), and the children of such unions were considered legitimate. “Salt sons” may even inherit, when a man has no trueborn sons by his rock wife.
Salt marriage has declined notably on the Iron Islands since the Conquest, for Aegon the Dragon made the stealing of women a crime throughout the Seven Kingdoms (at the urging of Queen Rhaenys, it is said). The Conqueror also forbade the reavers to prey upon his own domains. These prohibitions have only been sporadically enforced under his successors, however, and many ironborn still yearn to return to what they call the Old Way.
DRIFTWOOD CROWNS
In the Age of Heroes, the legends say, the ironborn were ruled by a mighty monarch known simply as the Grey King. The Grey King ruled the sea itself and took a mermaid to wife, so his sons and daughters might live above the waves or beneath them as they chose. His hair and beard and eyes were as grey as a winter sea, and from these he took his name. The crown he wore was made of driftwood, so all who knelt before him might know that his kingship came from the sea and the Drowned God who dwells beneath it.
The deeds attributed to the Grey King by the priests and singers of the Iron Islands are many and marvelous. It was the Grey King who brought fire to the earth by taunting the Storm God until he lashed down with a thunderbolt, setting a tree ablaze. The Grey King also taught men to weave nets and sails and carved the first longship from the hard pale wood of Ygg, a demon tree who fed on human flesh.
The Grey King’s greatest feat, however, was the slaying of Nagga, largest of the sea dragons, a beast so colossal that she was said to feed on leviathans and giant krakens and drown whole islands in her wroth. The Grey King built a mighty longhall about her bones, using her ribs as beams and rafters. From there he ruled the Iron Islands for a thousand years, until his very skin had turned as grey as his hair and beard. Only then did he cast aside his driftwood crown and walk into the sea, descending to the Drowned God’s watery halls to take his rightful place at his right hand.
The Grey King was king over all the Iron Islands, but he left a hundred sons behind him, and upon his death they began to quarrel over who would succeed him. Brother killed brother in an orgy of kinslaying until only sixteen remained. These last survivors divided up the islands between them. All the great houses of the ironborn claim descent from the Grey King and his sons save, curiously, the Goodbrothers of Old Wyk and Great Wyk, who supposedly derive from the Grey King’s leal eldest brother.
The petrified bones of some gigantic sea creature do indeed stand on Nagga’s Hill on Old Wyk, but whether they are actually the bones of a sea dragon remains open to dispute. The ribs are huge, but nowise near large enough to have belonged to a dragon capable of feasting on leviathans and giant krakens. In truth, the very existence of sea dragons has been called into question by some. If such monsters do exist, they must surely dwell in the deepest, darkest reaches of the Sunset Sea, for none has been seen in the known world for thousands of years.
So say the legends and the priests of the Drowned God.
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History tells a different tale. The oldest surviving records at the Citadel reveal that each of the Iron Islands was once a separate kingdom, ruled by not one but two kings, a rock king and a salt king. The former ruled the island itself, dispensing justice, making laws, and settling disputes. The latter commanded at sea, whenever and wherever the island’s longships sailed.
Surviving records suggest that the rock kings were almost always older than the salt kings; in some cases the two were father and son, which has led some to argue that the salt kings were no more than heirs, crown princes to their fathers. Yet there are other instances known to us where the rock king and salt king were of different houses, sometimes even rival houses known to be inimical to one another.
Elsewhere in Westeros, petty kings claimed crowns of gold by virtue of their birth and blood, but the driftwood crowns of the ironborn were not so easily won. Here alone in all of Westeros men made their own kings, assembling in great councils called kingsmoots to choose the rock kings and salt kings who would rule over them. Whenever a king died, the priests of the Drowned God would call a kingsmoot to choose his successor. Every man who owned and captained a boat was allowed a voice at these unruly gatherings, which oft went on for days, and in a few instances far longer. The ironborn also tell of occasions when the priests called “the captains and the kings” together to remove an unworthy ruler.
The power wielded by these prophets of the Drowned God over the ironborn should not be underestimated. Only they could summon kingsmoots, and woe to the man, be he lord or king, who dared defy them. The greatest of the priests was the towering prophet Galon Whitestaff, so-called for the tall carved staff he carried everywhere to smite the ungodly. (In some tales his staff was made of weirwood, in others from one of Nagga’s bones.)
It was Galon who decreed that ironborn must not make war on other ironborn, who forbade them to carry off each other’s women or raid each other’s shores, and who forged the Iron Islands into a single kingdom, summoning the captains and the kings to Old Wyk to choose a high king to reign supreme over salt kings and rock kings alike. They chose Urras Greyiron, called Ironfoot, the salt king of Orkmont and most fearsome reaver of that age. Galon himself placed a driftwood crown upon the high king’s head, and Urras Ironfoot became the first man since the Grey King to rule over all the ironborn.
Many years later, when Urras Ironfoot died of wounds sustained whilst reaving, his eldest son seized his crown and proclaimed himself King Erich I. Though half-blind and feeble with age by that time, Galon nonetheless arose in fury at these tidings, declaring that only the kingsmoot could make a king. The “captains and the kings” assembled once more on Old Wyk and Erich the Ugly was unmade and condemned to death, a fate he avoided by breaking up his father’s crown and casting it into the sea as a sign of his submission to the Drowned God. In his place the kingsmoot raised up Regnar Drumm, called Raven-feeder, the rock king of Old Wyk.
The centuries that followed were a golden age for the Iron Islands, and a dark age for such First Men as lived beside the sea. Once the reavers had gone forth seeking food to sustain them during hard winters, wood to build their longships, salt wives to give them sons, and the riches the Iron Islands lacked, but they had always returned home with their plunder. Under the driftwood kings the practice gave way to something far more difficult and dangerous: conquest, colonization, and rule.
By tradition, the driftwood crown itself was broken up and returned to the sea upon the death of its wearer. His successor would don a new crown made from driftwood freshly washed up upon the shore of his home island. Thus every driftwood crown was different from those that had gone before. Some were small and simple, others huge, unwieldy, and magnificent.
Archmaester Haereg’s exhaustive History of the Ironborn lists 111 men who wore a driftwood crown as High King of the Iron Islands. The list is admittedly incomplete and rife with contradictions, yet none can doubt that the driftwood kings reached the zenith of their power under Qhored I Hoare (given as Greyiron in some accounts, and as Blacktyde in others), who wrote his name in blood in the histories of Westeros as Qhored the Cruel. King Qhored ruled over the ironborn for three-quarters of a century, living to the ripe old age of ninety. By his day, the First Men of the green lands had largely abandoned the shores of the Sunset Sea for fear of the reavers. And those who remained, chiefly lords in stout castles, paid tribute to the ironborn.
It was Qhored who famously boasted that his writ ran “wherever men could smell salt water or hear the crash of waves.” In his youth, he captured and sacked Oldtown, bringing thousands of women and girls back to the Iron Islands in chains. At thirty, he defeated the Lords of the Trident in battle, forcing the river king Bernarr II to bend the knee and yield up his three young sons as hostages. Three years later, he put the boys to death with his own hand, cutting out their hearts when their father’s annual tribute was late in coming. When their grieving sire went to war to avenge them, King Qhored and his ironmen destroyed Bernarr’s host and had him drowned as a sacrifice to the Drowned God, putting an end to House Justman and throwing the riverlands into bloody anarchy.
But after Qhored, a slow decline began. The kings who followed Qhored played a part in that, yet the men of the green lands were likewise growing stronger. The First Men were building longships of their own, their towns defended by stone walls in place of wooden palisades and spiked ditches.
The Gardeners and the Hightowers were the first to cease paying tribute. When King Theon III Greyjoy sailed against them, he was defeated and slain by Lord Lymond Hightower, the Sea Lion, who revived the practice of thralldom in Oldtown just long enough to set the ironmen captured during the battle to hard labor strengthening the city’s walls.
The growing strength of the westerlands posed an even more acute threat to the dominion of the driftwood kings. Fair Isle was the first to fall, when its smallfolk rose up under Gylbert Farman to expel their ironborn overlords. A generation later, the Lannisters captured the town of Kayce when Herrock the Whoreson blew his great gold-banded horn and the town whores opened a postern gate to his men. Three successive ironborn kings attempted to retake the prize and failed, two of them dying on the point of Herrock’s sword.
The ultimate indignity came courtesy of Gerold Lannister, King of the Rock. Gerold the Great, as he is remembered in the west, sailed his own fleet to the Iron Islands themselves in a daring raid, taking a hundred ironborn hostages. He kept them in Casterly Rock thereafter, hanging one every time his shores were raided.
In the century that followed, a succession of weaker kings lost the Arbor, Bear Island, Flint’s Finger, and most of the ironborn enclaves along the Sunset Sea, until only a handful remained.
It must not be thought that the ironborn won no victories during these years. Balon V Greyjoy, called Coldwind, destroyed the feeble fleets of the King in the North. Erich V Harlaw retook Fair Isle in his youth, only to lose it again in his old age. His son Harron slew Gareth the Grim of Highgarden beneath the walls of Oldtown. Half a century later, Joron I Blacktyde captured Gyles II Gardener when their fleets clashed off the Misty Islands. After torturing him to death, Joron had his corpse cut into pieces so that he might bait his fishhooks with “a chunk of king.” Later in his reign, Joron swept across the Arbor with steel and fire, and supposedly carried off every woman on the island under thirty years of age, thereby earning himself the name Maidensbane, by which he is best remembered.
An ironborn longship at sea. (illustration credit 118)
Yet all these triumphs proved short-lived, along with many of the kings who won them. As the centuries passed, the kingdoms of the green lands grew stronger and the Iron Islands weaker. And late in the Age of Heroes, another crisis weakened and divided the ironborn further still.
Upon the death of King Urragon III Greyiron (Urragon the Bald), his younger sons hurriedly convened a kingsmoot whilst their elder brother Torgon was raiding up the Mander, thinking that one of them would be chosen to wear the drift
wood crown. To their dismay, the captains and kings chose Urrathon Goodbrother of Great Wyk instead. The first thing the new king did was command that the sons of the old king be put to death. For that, and for the savage cruelty he oft displayed during his two years as king, Urrathon IV Goodbrother is remembered in history as Badbrother.
When Torgon Greyiron returned at last to the Iron Islands, he declared the kingsmoot to be invalid because he had not been present to make a claim. The priests supported him in this, for they had grown weary of Badbrother’s arrogance and impiety. Smallfolk and great lords alike arose at their call, rallying to Torgon’s banners, until Urrathon’s own captains hacked Urrathon into pieces. Torgon the Latecomer became king in his stead, and ruled for forty years without ever having been chosen and proclaimed at a kingsmoot. He proved to be a strong king, just and wise and fair-minded … but he could do little to arrest the declining fortunes of the Iron Islands, for it was during Torgon’s reign that most of the Cape of Eagles was lost to the Mallisters of Seagard.
Torgon had struck one blow against the institution of the kingsmoot in his youth, by throwing over its chosen king. In his old age he struck another, calling upon his own son Urragon to help him rule. At court and council, in war and peace, the son remained at his father’s side for the best part of five years, so when Torgon finally died it seemed only natural for his chosen heir to succeed him as Urragon IV Greyiron. No kingsmoot was summoned, and this time no Galon Whitestaff arose in wroth to protest the succession.
The final, fatal blow against the power of the captains and the kings assembled was dealt when Urragon IV himself died, after a long but undistinguished reign. It had been the dying king’s wish that the high kingship pass to his great-nephew Urron Greyiron, salt king of Orkmont, known as Urron Redhand. The priests of the Drowned God were determined not to allow the power of kingmaking to be taken from them for a third time, so word went forth that the captains and kings should assemble on Old Wyk for a kingsmoot.
The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones Page 30
