A cryptic examination of Davos II, ADWD (updated)

[Alester Florent]

There's another thing to bear in mind with the lamprey, I think. Perhaps their most famous association is with Henry I of England, who died "of a surfeit of lampreys". Back in the days of more kings-and-battles-driven history, this was a well-known "fact" to the extent it became a running joke in the very popular 1066 and All That. Point being, lampreys kill kings.

Combining the bloodsucking, the pies, the regicide and for good measure the surfeit (there's a perpetual surfeit of Freys), it all points to the Freys and Boltons in Winterfell for me.

[Alester Florent]

15 hours ago, Sandy Clegg said:

That’s it, though, I think. Where would we find people acting on behalf of ‘wolves’? Or maybe even ‘claiming’ to be wolves?

I think there may be a double meaning on "customs men" too, i.e. men who hold to custom. Together with "wolf actors", this could well be White Harbor itself.

[Sandy Clegg]

2 hours ago, Alester Florent said:

I think there may be a double meaning on "customs men" too, i.e. men who hold to custom. Together with "wolf actors", this could well be White Harbor itself.

I was stuck on this too so I gave in and finally checked the wiki, which is of course cheating. So it looks like White Harbour men are a good match:

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“While at Winterfell for the harvest feast, Lord Wyman meets with Bran Stark,  …. He has appointed new customs officers at White Harbor, as the previous officials had held back silver for the Iron Throne...”

So in this case it appears George is just requiring readers to have a good memory to solve little bit of the puzzle.

Wolf actors and customs men are found at - yup, Winterfell. But White Harbour itself might be a possibility, as there is rumoured to be a cadet branch of Starks there.

I have to say, I’m really amazed yet pleased that people are playing along. These things really do feel like ‘mini-games’ within the game, as it were. And all credit to George for putting the time into weaving them into his books. 

Edited March 11, 2023 by Sandy Clegg

[LongRider]

23 hours ago, Sandy Clegg said:

Chickens and children were everywhere underfoot.

Another look at this brings, Whores and Varys's little birds were everywhere underfoot.  The 'underfoot' bothers me as it reminds me of Arya Underfoot, but I cannot see a connection. 

[Springwatch]

The devil is in the interpretation, isn't it? But I love the OP, there so much that feels right about it.

I get the same vibe off Brienne's wanderings, especially when the place where she bumps into Pod ('Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong turn. She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three pigs were rooting round a low stone well. One squealed at the sight of her, and an old woman drawing water looked her up and down suspiciously.[...]')

A wrong turn is an easy metaphor to take for Brienne's difficulties - so maybe the rest is metaphorical too?

And beyond that, Brienne sees shadows wherever she goes; she sees Arya in Willow (Brienne wondered whether Willow might be more than she appeared [...] she was of the right age to be the younger sister [...] could it be?), and Sansa in Long Jeyne (A man laughed. "She thinks you're Sansa Stark."). GRRM even goes so far as to match up the matriarchs Masha and Catelyn with a 'red smile'. Elsewhere, Hyle Hunt is a reflection of Jaime, and the Elder Brother stands in for Sandor with what looks very much like a proxy confession.

There's also the 'false' ending to her search - a castle of whispers, a young weirwood and a fool; a place where the Stark girls might wait for a ship that never comes. Sounds prophetic to me - which is a difficulty, because what prophecy gives is: what is, what has been, or what may be. This is way too broad to be possible to match up to events. Although - if Davos and Brienne are travelling through a prophetic landscape according to that definition, at least some of what they see should be in the past and easier to spot.

[Evolett]

On 3/10/2023 at 4:48 PM, Sandy Clegg said:

the washerwoman = Lady Stoneheart, hanging people near, or just ‘off’, the Trident (river).

This is my favourite. Stoneheart as a "washerwoman" is spot-on, I'm thinking. The Old Mint as the Wall is also convincing. Well done. 

The Lazy Eel as Asshai - perhaps, but I suggest the whole section on the inn has the Dreadfort written all over it. We've seen hardly anything of the Dreadfort so  this coded passage could be  telling us more about the place. 

Like the Lazy Eel, the great hall of the Dreadfort is dim, smoky and black with soot. I think the following sets the stage, intended for us to make the connection:

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The Lazy Eel

Some things never change. Inside the Eel, time stood still. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was stained black with soot, the floor was hard-packed earth, the air smelled of smoke and spoiled meat and stale vomit. The fat tallow candles on the tables gave off more smoke than light, and the wine that Davos ordered looked more brown than red in the gloom.

 

The Dreadfort

The great hall was dim and smoky. Rows of torches burned to left and right, grasped by skeletal human hands jutting from the walls. High overhead were wooden rafters black from smoke, and a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. The air was heavy with the smells of wine and ale and roasted meat.

 The inn is underneath a warehouse full of sheepskins, bringing to mind the room at the Dreadfort which people imagine contains the flayed skins of the Bolton's enemies. The sheepskins are interesting also because shortly before the killing begins at the Red Wedding, lamb is served. Wyman Manderly is digging into a leg of lamb and later, in Daenerys' vision in the HotU, she sees the man with a wolf's head at the feast of the dead holding a leg of lamb like a sceptre. 

 

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He strolled across the yard and down a flight of steps, to a winesink called the Lazy Eel, underneath a warehouse full of sheepskins. Back in his smuggling days, the Eel had been renowned for offering the oldest whores and vilest wine in White Harbor, along with meat pies full of lard and gristle that were inedible on their best days and poisonous on their worst. With fare like that, most locals shunned the place, leaving it for sailors who did not know any better. You never saw a city guardsman down in the Lazy Eel, or a customs officer.

What really goes on at the Dreadfort is a mystery. Through Theon's Reek POV we gather there are more prisoners in the dungeons. The above may be revealing what went on there in the past, back in the day. With Ramsay reinstating the practice of flaying, and otherwise engaging in hunting and killing women, it would not surprise me if the Boltons captured and tortured women at their castle in days gone by, turning them into whores against their will. Ramsay did marry the old Lady Hornwood and I can't help connecting the oldest whores / Lady Hornwood with the meat pies full of lard and gristle. Cannibalism? What happened to the women of Winterfell who were carried off to the Dreadfort? Do they have to work as whores? 
It get's even darker when we consider the next reference to the meat pies in this light:

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“You want food?” the man asked. “We got meat pies.” “What kind of meat is in them?” “The usual kind. It’s good.” The whores laughed. “It’s grey, he means,” one said. “Shut your bloody yap. You eat them.” “I eat all kinds o’ shit. Don’t mean I like it.” 

Meat pies full of grey meat. Grey is a colour linked to the Starks. It is said the Bolton's flayed and wore the skins of Starks as cloaks. Did they also  eat of their flesh? 

On another level, the Eel and the indigestible meat pies could be a reference to the "bad blood" of Roose and Ramsay. A consultation of the Wiki tells me that eel blood is poisonous and must be prepared to become safe to eat. Poisoned blood = bad blood, fitting well with Roose and Ramsay. Lampreys then would be equivalent to leeches that suck the "bad blood" away. There's a lot we can do with the word "lamprey".

Lord Manderly is "Lord Lamprey" because he enjoys eating this type of fish. There's definitely a connection to the Frey Pies as noted already above. I would say the Lamprey eliminates the bad blooded Bolton eels. There's more wordplay here. Wendel Manderly was killed at the Red Wedding while eating a leg of lamb. Symbolically, like Robb and the rest of the Northerners, he was a "lamb" who was preyed upon by the Boltons and Freys. Wyman is a "lamprey" who turns the tables on the enemy. "Lamprey" may also be a hint at "lamp" and "ray," a ray emitting from a lamp - and might tie into what readers expect Stannis' strategy against the Boltons at the Crofter's village will be - with Manderly taking center stage as a symbolic "lamp ray" to overcome the Bolton force. 

 

On 3/10/2023 at 4:48 PM, Sandy Clegg said:

A man was selling apples from a barrow,

Apples being sold from a barrow. Another angle here would be apples being sold from a grave. The apple was neither fresh nor tasty, Davos considered it a bad apple but the seller wanted the core back because the seeds were good. So, I wonder what that's telling us. I'm thinking of the aFfC POV with Alleras bringing down apples with her bow here and the wormy apple that split in two. Perhaps there's a connection to that. 

[Sandy Clegg]

4 hours ago, Springwatch said:

I get the same vibe off Brienne's wanderings, especially when the place where she bumps into Pod ('Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong turn. She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three pigs were rooting round a low stone well. One squealed at the sight of her, and an old woman drawing water looked her up and down suspiciously.[...]')

A wrong turn is an easy metaphor to take for Brienne's difficulties - so maybe the rest is metaphorical too?

Oh, I've got a ton of notes from Brienne's chapters.  She encounters several locations which I think are cryptic metaphors, but of a much more sinister variety. There's something being alluded to in her story which just raises my hackles, a really strong sense of foreboding. 

4 hours ago, Springwatch said:

There's also the 'false' ending to her search - a castle of whispers, a young weirwood and a fool; a place where the Stark girls might wait for a ship that never comes. Sounds prophetic to me - which is a difficulty, because what prophecy gives is: what is, what has been, or what may be. This is way too broad to be possible to match up to events. Although - if Davos and Brienne are travelling through a prophetic landscape according to that definition, at least some of what they see should be in the past and easier to spot.

The castle of whispers as a false ending, yes. The brave companion survivors here are definitely proxies in some metaphor of George's, but I'm really hesitant to lay out my ideas until I finish the re-read fully. I would personally hesitate to use the word prophecy, as that's more of an in-world term. What George sets out in his scenes seems more like foreshadowing-by-metaphor. I use diorama to describe the Whte Harbour scenes because they are so static - there's no real 'action' as such. Cryptic shadow plays might be more apt for stuff like the Brienne scenes.

[Sandy Clegg]

3 hours ago, Evolett said:

Apples being sold from a barrow. Another angle here would be apples being sold from a grave. The apple was neither fresh nor tasty, Davos considered it a bad apple but the seller wanted the core back because the seeds were good. So, I wonder what that's telling us. I'm thinking of the aFfC POV with Alleras bringing down apples with her bow here and the wormy apple that split in two. Perhaps there's a connection to that. 

Hi @Evolett! Good to see you here  

I'm going to stick to my guns with my Lazy Eel view, just because the geography logic fits and  lot of the AWOIAF points.

But that is a very good catch about barrows being burial sites - as Ned and Robert encounter in the first book. I have to assume that this is what George means here. One thing about the brevity of each description in the dioramas - he has to kind of make words count, so there's a high degree of precision and 'wringing the most' out of the English language. 

If the apple-seller is LF (and I think he has to be, paired with Sansa), then what business does he have selling things from graves? This might just be one of those foreshadowing things that we will only find out in future books, and we'll see that LF has some schemes going on that George hasn't revealed yet. Which, to be honest, would be in keeping with LF's character. He has fingers in many pies, it seems.

Apples are one of the top big metaphors that George likes to use in the series, and someone really needs to do a deep-dive. We have the AFFC prologue for starters - the very scene that got me curious enough to start on my re-read, actually. I do find that they are often contrasted with onions, so that might be a good place to start ...

[Sandy Clegg]

OK it's been a while since the OP so I'll post what I think are the solutions to the three cryptic locations here.

Click to reveal.

Spoiler

The inn famous for lamprey pies: the Dreadfort. Theon begins his chapters there, and Roose Bolton's leeches are the bloodsucking lamprey stand-ins. Not much else to say; we don't spend long there in Dance.

The alehouse where the wool factors and the customs men did their drinking: We need Winterfell included really, and this just makes sense. The wool factors can be cryptically read as 'wolf actors' and the customs men are representative of White Harbour men, as I've mentioned in posts above. Wolf actors may seem to be a reference to Jeyne Poole as fake Arya, but as she is only one person, not plural, I'd go with an alternative meaning: those within the walls of Winterfell (such as the hooded man) who are acting 'on behalf of' the Starks, together with the Manderleys, to bring down the Frey/Bolton alliance. A northern conspiracy reference, essentially. 

A mummer's hall where bawdy entertainments could be had for a few pennies: a tour of Westeros is hardly complete without the '"unwashed whore" that is King's Landing, where brothels are taxed under Tyrion's recent "dwarf's penny" law. The mummery being referred to could be any number of things, what with all the lies, manipulation and deception going on there. The bastardy of Cersei's children chief among them, perhaps. George could be cluing us in to even more fakery afoot in KL than we realise, though.

I'm inclined to suspect George of cryptic wordplay whenever I can these days - yes, my re-read has turned me into Mr. Suspicious  - and "bawdy entertainments" is just too good not to wonder about. First, we can think about the pronunciation of bawdy and get 'body'. Then if we consider the meaning of the word 'entertainment'  - if you 'entertain' guests, then you are hosting them. So bawdy entertainment may be a cryptic way to suggest 'bodily possession'. This might be an allusion to Qyburn's experiments (he does require women for them, it seems). Or  it could be something equally sinister, which we have yet to discover. Skinchanging afoot in the capital, perhaps? The Faceless Men are also known to use coins and masquerade as others. Or perhaps George is making a more general point about assuming another's identity through magical means - that there has to be a price - likely more than a few pennies - to be paid.

 

[Sandy Clegg]

A small update to the analysis in the OP (which is very much still subject to new interpretations) ...

Amid the recent discussion of the Wall originating as a wall of weirwoods, some of which may still be contained within, I thought I should re-examine this line from the cryptic diorama:

...  money changers had set up for business, along with a hedge wizard, an herb woman, and a very bad juggler.

- Davos II, ADWD

In the original post I had already earmarked Samwell Tarly as the purported hedge wizard (with Gilly as the 'herb woman' and Euron as the likely 'bad juggler' but perhaps Marwyn would be a good contender). But I was only imagining the idea of 'wizard' in its loosest sense, with Sam's arc perhaps leading to him learning arcane secrets at the Citadel. We also have this quote foreshadowing Sam and wizardy:

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Grenn whispered, "Sam did it," and Pyp said, "Sam did it!" Pyp had brought a wineskin with him, and he took a long drink and chanted, "Sam, Sam, Sam the wizard, Sam the wonder, Sam Sam the marvel man, he did it." - ASOS, Jon XII 

However, if we do conceive of the Wall as, in some sense, a 'wall of frozen weirwoods' then The Wall could equally be described as The Hedge. A flora-based barrier, rather than just a mineral-based one. Thus we can view Sam - a man of the Watch who is attempting to forge his chains - as a 'hedge wizard' of sorts. This makes the cryptic reading a little more fitting.

We actually have a further reference to this wall/hedge concept in the seat of House Bracken: Stone Hedge. House Bracken is constantly at loggerheads with House Blackwood, who reside in Raventree Hall - symbolised by the bare weirwood tree covered in ravens. A nice counterpoint which mirrors the Wall and Bloodraven's tree perhaps. I wonder - does this hint at a relationship between Bloodraven and The Watch which is characterised by enmity rather than alliance?

Edited September 7, 2023 by Sandy Clegg

[chrisdaw]

I'd think boy beating drum to time would be Bran and his story is going to get very time travelly.

I agree the lines are drawn from happenings or going to happenings in the story, but I think it's just a technique he's using to just flesh out White Harbor, I don't think there's any particular theme here or anything he's trying to convey.

I believe this passage

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The huge oak-and-iron doors of the Old Mint had always been closed when Davos had been in Fishfoot Yard before, but today they stood open. Inside he glimpsed hundreds of women, children, and old men, huddled on the floor on piles of furs. Some had little cookfires going.

is the same yet to come event that is foreseen by Mel in this passage

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Snowflakes swirled from a dark sky and ashes rose to meet them, the grey and the white whirling around each other as flaming arrows arced above a wooden wall and dead things shambled silent through the cold, beneath a great grey cliff where fires burned inside a hundred caves. Then the wind rose and the white mist came sweeping in, impossibly cold, and one by one the fires went out. Afterward only the skulls remained.

Which I believe is a hold out of humanity during TWFTD. Probably the civilians of KL having fled to the dried out seabed of the Narrow Sea.

[SaffronLady]

I wonder if the "barrow" reference may further point to House Dustin, which is of course Lady Barbrey in terms of characters.

[SaffronLady]

I wonder if the "barrow" reference may further point to House Dustin, which is of course Lady Barbrey in terms of characters.

[sweetsunray]

@Sandy Clegg and if BtB chose the tree at the Nightfort for his second life, resulting with his face being a gate, you could think of him as a "hedge wizard" as well

[Sandy Clegg]

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... the scribes and money changers had set up for business ...

Another thought, as I was writing about the Oldtown section of the diorama earlier.

Scribes contain, in their definition, the notion of copying ...

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A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. - Wikipedia

If we are taking money changers as cryptically coded Faceless Men then pairing them with scribes could be a nice doubling down of the motif.

So the copyists (mimics) and those who change (for money) = the Faceless Men, who have set up for business in Oldtown via their agent, the Alchemist.