Kraznys mo Nakloz

A Good Master of Astapor, a cruel and casually obscene slaver who breeds and sells the Unsullied by the thousand.

The fuller tale

Kraznys mo Nakloz was one of the Good Masters of Astapor — the slavers’ aristocracy of the red-brick city, grown rich beyond shame on the one commodity Astapor makes better than anywhere in the world: the Unsullied, eunuch spear-slaves drilled from boyhood into perfect, feelingless infantry. Kraznys is the trade’s frontman and true believer, conducting sales from beneath the harpy’s plaza with a connoisseur’s pride in his product’s manufacture — the cuttings, the cullings, the puppy given to each boy and the order that ends it, the infant killed before its mother’s eyes as a graduation fee. He recites the atrocities as selling points. That is the entire man.

His scenes run on a single, superb dramatic engine: contempt in translation. Assuming the Westerosi girl before him speaks no Valyrian, Kraznys conducts her tour of the Unsullied in a stream of leering obscenity — appraising her body, mocking her people, calling her a whore and worse — while the child-scribe Missandei renders it all into diplomatic silk. The audience is in on half the joke; the other half is waiting. When Daenerys offers a dragon for the full eight thousand — plus the untrained boys, plus the translator — Kraznys’s greed outruns the one thing his trade should have taught him: the wariness of a man handing a whip to someone he has spent a week insulting.

He functions in the tale as the perfect first target — slavery with a face so loathsome that Daenerys’s revolution gets to open on a note of pure moral clarity, before Yunkai and Meereen complicate the arithmetic. The plaza of Astapor is the last place in the saga where fire and justice point the same direction and nobody argues; Kraznys, in his brocaded tokar with the dragon’s chain in his hand, is the man the whole scene was built to unmake.

The page and the screen

The two tellings stage Kraznys almost identically — the obscene sales patter, the mistranslations, the dragon-for-an-army bargain — which is itself a sign of how well the books’ scene worked; the show’s changes are cosmetic. On the page his interpreter is a slave girl of about ten and the price is Drogon plus ships and goods, haggled over days; on screen Missandei is grown and the bargain compressed. One structural difference: in the books Daenerys’s deception runs deeper — she has hidden her Valyrian from everyone for weeks, and her command word to the Unsullied is accompanied by the formal transfer of the harpy’s-fingers whip, which she then throws down, freeing the army in the same breath she looses it. In both tellings his death is the pivot of her legend; the books simply let the reader hear, one beat earlier, how completely he never saw it coming.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• In Astapor Kraznys mo Nakloz shows off his Unsullied in Valyrian obscenities that his translator softens; Daenerys pretends not to understand a word. (ASOS 24)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Undone by his own sale (S3·E4)

The books: Undone by the sale of an army (ASOS, ch. 27)

The Good Master of Astapor traded eight thousand Unsullied for a dragon, sneering in Valyrian at the queen he assumed could not understand him. She understood every word. Dracarys.

Kraznys dies in the Plaza of Punishment at Astapor in both tellings, and in both the instrument is the merchandise. The sale complete — eight thousand Unsullied for the black dragon — Kraznys discovers that Drogon will not answer his tugging on the chain, and the barbarian girl explains why in flawless High Valyrian: a dragon is not a slave, and she has understood every word he ever said in front of her. Then, to the master holding her dragon’s leash: Dracarys. Drogon’s fire takes Kraznys in the face and chest, burning him alive in his tokar in front of the army he made, while the Unsullied — freed and commanded in the same minute — turn on Astapor’s masters at large. The Good Master’s last transaction stands as the saga’s most complete piece of poetic accounting: he sold the whip, the army, and the translator, and each of the three was in the plaza to watch what his contempt had failed to price.