Asshai and Ghost Grass

[John Suburbs]

Yup, Ghost Grass is light, snow is white.  GG grows in the cold.  Ice and Cold are bad.  They represent death.   Fire and warmth are good, life-giving. 

Why am I getting such deja vu on this thread? I swear this has been brought up before. Yes, fire and warmth are life-giving, until you catch on fire and it kills you. And as Maester A says, ice preserves, as in preserves life. So I think it misses the mark to say ice is bad and = death while fire is good and = life.

 

 

[Durran Durrandon]

Why am I getting such deja vu on this thread? I swear this has been brought up before. Yes, fire and warmth are life-giving, until you catch on fire and it kills you. And as Maester A says, ice preserves, as in preserves life. So I think it misses the mark to say ice is bad and = death while fire is good and = life.

 

 

Truth.

[aryagonnakill#2]

So my issue with all this hybrid talk is that it is pretty clear from the text that humans caught even properly bed with the Ibinese much less the brindled men of Sothyros, so interfering giants, Squishers, and CotF outside of the context of Valyrian blood magic seems suspect.

But humans can interbreed with Ibenese, Brown Ben tells us so, as does a guy Manderly meets in White Harbor, its just not always successfull.

[The Lord of the Crossing]

1. Why would people stay in such an inhospitable and inconvenient place?  The same reason for most people.  For wealth, power, knowledge, and a long life.  Asshai is far from the centers of power.  The wealth is just a means to an end, to purchase food and water.  If I have to guess, it's for knowledge and for immortality. 
2. Ghost Grass is some kind of cold-weather invasive weed that feeds off of something besides sunlight.  It doesn't need to photosynthesize.  I'm guessing it lives similar to weirwoods, via someone's generous blood donations.  It grows from the soil produced by decaying corpses. 
3. The environmental toxins read like hydrogen sulfide to me.  Created from decomposition.  Perhaps too many dead bodies buried in the soil, in the marshes, and with more added each time someone dies. 
4. The black stones are volcanic in origin.  It's not earth so the composition of the stones are not exactly the same as ours. 

[Walda]

Why do people stay in Asshai if the waters and the lands are toxic?  Any ideas what caused the toxicity?
The toxicity is caused by Magic. Maesters hate magic and everything to do with it so much that they poison anyone that they think has anything to do with it. When they can't poison the person or the place, they poison their accounts of it to deter people venturing there. They want the monopoly on knowledge, and Asshai appears to have records that are more reliable than their own, and contradict them.
 
It is unlikely that Asshai would have become such a large port if there was no fresh water there - it is too far from anywhere else to sail to and from without water.  The idea that the Asshai'i depend on water brought in by ships seems even more unlikely, as those ships have a fair way to go after they leave Asshai, before they can take more water on for their crews. It is an ancient port, so there must be and have been reliable fresh water at it, otherwise the port would have been abandoned and some other city would grow around the place that had potable water (a la Valyria after the Doom, or Ghis and New Ghis). 

It is possible that volcanic activity poisons the air and the water and the land from time to time. (or maybe there was a big eruption once, but everyone remembers the aftermath, how the drinking water turned to acid, whole villages in the valleys going to sleep at night, never to wake again because hydrogen sulphide heavier than air silently slid down upon them in the night, the whole country suddenly in famine, the new crop failing to grow. More gradual and less well remembered is how, after the sulphur and brimstone subsided, the next spring, or the one after that, the vegetation grew back lusher than ever, and the water and the air again became as pure as they had been before).

Melisandre of Asshai wears a poison-absorbing ruby at her throat. Or maybe she has acquired immunity from poison from living in Asshai. Maybe the ability to detoxify poison is what makes Assahai rubies so exquisitly rare. Or maybe the maesters overstate the air and water and food as toxic to deter travellers.
 
    Do they wear mask to protect themselves from the air or hide disfigurement?
"The shadow men covered their arms and legs and chests with tattoos, and hid their faces behind masks", so maybe the masks are to identify themselves as shadow binders (although Melisandre is identified as a shadow binder, yet wears no mask).

 It is possible that women mask themselves for cultural modesty in Asshai, from the account in TWoIaF. (Although, I get the feeling that this report was made by someone we only know is not Lomas Longstrider,  who came off a merchant ship during siesta time and took a quick stroll around Asshai for a couple of hours before reboarding and sailing off again.
 It is entirely possible that he totally misunderstood the place. For example, he saw a city built for many, but apparently empty. If you stopped off in the centre of my city on Christmas day, you would see pretty much the same thing.

This observer expects to see women gathered around the well, chatting...maybe Asshai has aqueducts, water on tap, and what he took for their water source was their sewer system. The things he tells us of what he didn't see, suggest he was looking for and not finding things that would be in certain places in his own culture  - notably, women. His failure to find what he was looking for suggests to me a certain lack of cultural understanding, rather than a lack of women per se.
 
We know that Asshai has night markets, and a trade in dragon eggs, amythests and its own famous wines (which suggests there are grapes grown not far from Asshai), as well as potions and silk thread.  
As for the great riches, the people of Asshai might well believe that the streets of Lannisport are paved with gold, based on their seeing only the work of the goldsmiths of Lannisport, and knowing nothing of the poverty of its stews, or even its humble but thriving fishing trade.

    What is ghost grass?  A type of invasive, noxious weed?
 From what the Dothraki claim, Ghost Grass does seem to get into disturbed soil and out-grow the other grasses. But if all the Dothraki claim is the gospel truth, the tracks they make through the Dothraki sea would be lined with ghost grass already - a Kalassar of horses riding and grazing really does cut up the soil, and the hair and mud on horses legs make a great travelling medium for grass seeds they won't eat. So I think there must be at least some kind of climatic or geographical barrier between the Shadowlands and the mountains, that gives the other grasses a chance, in spite of the trade routes etc. Ghost grass seems to be indigenous to the Shadowlands, and not invading aggressively elsewhere.

I'm not sure about its toxicity, either. It could be toxic for horses, but edible if prepared properly, or by some other species. It might not be toxic at all - all we have heard is that it 'murders' other grasses, and that the world will end with it everywhere. You could say the same about couch, or golf courses (people do).

Bioluminescense does not make foods inedible (although, as it is usually caused by bacteria growing on the food, and is a good sign that the food it is growing on has other, more toxic, less luminescent bacteria growing on it as well. IRL, Seafood is more likely to be bioluminescent - so if your prawn cocktail glows a faint green in the dark, it is probably past its useby date.)

Ghost Grass might love highly acidic volcanic soils, or even act as a filter for toxins, making the water it grows in/around potable. Or  water might be poisoned by natural leaching of Ghost Grass, or by Shadowlanders leaching the toxins out of their otherwise edible Ghost Grass. The fact that Ghost Grass is known by the Dothraki, in spite of there being none in the Dothraki sea, makes me suspect that it is not an agressive invader, without its apocalyptic catalyst.

When Xaro talks of Ghost Grass, it is associated with magic - glass candles, phantom tortises, so maybe Ghost Grass flourishes around the sort of magic the Dothraki distrust, and associate with the end of the world.

    What sorts of black magic are practiced in Asshai?
All sorts. Blood magic, daemon summoning, shadow binding, dead raising, the magic of grass and corn and horse, moon magic, fireworks...pick a type of magic, and there will be someone in Asshai who knows how its done.

Everyone who returns from Asshai knows more about magic than when they left. If we compare learning magic in Asshai with learning medicine in Oldtown, not everyone who trained in medicine in Oldtown shows great skill in the healing arts (Pycelle,Colemon,Myles) ...those we know that have come back from Asshai (Melisandre, Mirri Maz Duur, Marwyn, Wildling wisewoman) have all demonstrated a certain competence in Magic.
According to Euron, there are wonders and terrors beyond imagining.

We also know that Asshai has ancient records. A city so inhospitable that children can't survive in it, does not survive with an unbroken historical record. Daenarys was able to identify the Asshai'i at the Eastern market by their 'dark' appearance, which kills the idea that Asshai is a city without natives. (Although, as her description of the men from the Shadowlands included tattoes, it is possible that they were some cult  of mixed race men, rather than the male part of a tribe of natives)

Quaithe assures Daenarys that she can find 'truth' in Asshai. Mirri Maz Duur lingered long to study the healing ways of distant peoples, and learnt her birthing songs and midwifery skills there...so I am thinking that there is nothing to discourage women from travelling to Asshai to learn the magics of birthing, and children are more likely to be born in Asshai than in the Citidel of Oldtown.

Problem is, we get most of our information about Asshai by the Shadow from the maesters of Oldtown, and everything we observe through the eyes of Daenarys or from the Dothraki, or Melisandre (or even from Jorah the Andal), conflicts with it.