Read the next entry in this series here.
“The Ice Dragon”
Orson Scott Card’s Dragons
of Light, 1980
“The Ice Dragon” is
frequently mistaken for an A Song of Ice and Fire story, and the reasons
for that mistake are clear. The setting and thematic material are very similar
to A Song of Ice and Fire, even if closer reading reveals that this is
not Westeros and these are not the Targaryen dragons.
In this unnamed land,
two kings—one north, one south—are at war, and appear to have been for years,
if not decades. Both sides have dragons as well as ground-based armies, and
Adara’s uncle, Hal, is a dragonrider in service of the southern king. Adara has
a special relationship with winter; she was born in the dead of the worst
winter in living memory, her skin is cold to the touch, and she’s friends with
the ice dragon that accompanies winter every year. This isn’t the Game of
Thrones wight-dragon that breathes fire/ice that Viserion turns into, but a
true dragon made of ice that breathes cold and chills everything around it.
There are also ice lizards, which only Adara can play with because her hands
aren’t as hot as everyone else’s, so she doesn’t kill them just by handling
them.
~*~
Ice formed when it
breathed. Warmth fled. Fires guttered and went out, shriven by the chill. Trees
froze through to their slow secret souls, and their limbs turned brittle and
cracked from their own weight. Animals turned blue and whimpered and died,
their eyes bulging and their skin covered with frost.
~*~
“The Ice Dragon” reads
very much like practice for A Song of Ice and Fire, with
not-insignificant thematic similarities: dragons, winters, war, rape, and ice
vs. fire. As in ASOIAF, the dragons are weapons of mass destruction,
forces of nature barely controlled by their riders, not really characters in
their own right. Even the ice dragon is more of a prop for Adara’s story than a
character in it, a representation of winter and the thing that allows Adara to
be a hero at the end of the story. It represents her difference from everyone
else, as well, and the change she undergoes at the end of the story—becoming
warm-blooded, losing her affinity with cold and winter and growing closer to
her family—is a physical representation of her growing up after the traumatic
experience just before the end of the story. Adara’s affinity with cold also
represents her loss—her mother died when she was born, so unlike everyone else
in the story who love summer and had Beth in their lives, even if only for a
little while, Adara grows up cold, a loner, different than everyone else.
This story also sees
Martin developing his ideas about medieval warfare and the plight of the common
folk who just want to farm their land and live their lives. Hal brings them
news of how the war is going, urging them to leave when it turns bad. At the
beginning of winter, he warns them that in the spring, the opposing king is
going to break through their lines and they won’t be able to stop him. Then the
retreat begins, right past the farm, a steadily degenerating stream of men that
lasts a month; one of the last groups through robs a neighboring farm and rapes
the woman who lives there. Martin makes a point of remarking on the color of the
rapist’s uniform, which marks him as one of “their” people, not the enemy. The
enemy, when they arrive, also perpetrates horrors, nailing John to the wall and
forcing him to watch them rape Teri. Martin has a slightly disturbing habit of
assuming that rape is inevitable, that given the chance and the excuse and the
low likelihood of punishment, men will assault
women. I understand that he uses it as one of the many horrors of war and
believes that depiction of war without rape would be dishonest, but it shows up
in too many other contexts in his writing to ignore.
Adara bears striking
similarities to both Arya and Sansa. She’s young, different than everyone else,
a loner, and a bit selfish in the way little kids can be selfish. This is most
evident toward the end of the story, when John decides he’s not leaving the
farm, but he can at least save Adara by sending her with Hal. Adara refuses to
go with Hal, instead running away into the forest. Her refusal to leave costs
Hal his life. She tries to run away with the ice dragon—in the heat of
summer—but chooses to go back to save her family. The ice dragon helps, killing
the enemy dragons and riders, but it dies, too, both because it’s summer and
because it’s fighting fire-dragons. So there are really two ways of looking at
the climax of the story: Adara’s a hero, or Adara’s a thoughtless little kid
who gets her uncle and a majestic and innocent beast killed because of her
thoughtlessness. Not to mention her father’s injuries and her sister’s rape,
though it’s doubtful she would have been able to stop that even if she hadn’t
run away.
~*~
When the first frost came, all the ice lizards
came out, just as they had always done. Adara watched them with a little smile
on her face, remembering the way it had been. But she did not try to touch
them. They were cold and fragile little things, and the warmth of her hands
would hurt them.
~*~
The ending, in true
Martin fashion, is bittersweet. The family leaves their farm behind but finds
somewhere else to live for three years while the war rages on. It’s eventually
won and they get to go home, but Adara has lost her coldness and can’t play with
the ice lizards anymore. She also seems happier and closer to her family
instead of her only companion being an ice dragon. Her family recovers from
their ordeal and goes on to be happy.
Ice and fire, hard
winters, war, family—is it any wonder this story is frequently mistaken for
part of the Song of Ice and Fire
universe? I don’t think so.
Next week, Martin
takes on be-careful-what-you-wish-for in “In the Lost Lands.”
It's always a pleasure to read your work, Shiloh, both because the writing reads well and because it points out useful notions. I am not up enough on Martin scholarship to know if there have been treatments of rapine as a theme in his corpus, but I have to think it is a study worth doing.
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