Yezzan zo Qaggaz

One of the wealthiest and most grotesque slavers of Yunkai, collector of curiosities and freaks, who buys captives for his menagerie (book only).

The fuller tale

In the books, Yezzan zo Qaggaz is one of the wealthiest men in Yunkai and one of the most physically ruined in the entire saga: a slaver so vast he can barely stand, yellowed and reeking with the sickness that is killing him, borne everywhere by his slaves and known to his own with the awful affection of the owned as the Yellow Whale. His passion is his grotesquerie — a collection of human curiosities, freaks and marvels bought at any price — and it is as a collector, not a general, that he joins the masters’ war on Meereen. When a slaver’s block in Volantis offers a pair of Westerosi dwarfs who joust, mounted on a pig and a dog, Yezzan pays a fortune for the act; the male dwarf is Tyrion Lannister, and the tale’s most-wanted fugitive disappears into a sick man’s menagerie.

The strange, uncomfortable truth the books insist on is that Yezzan is — by the standards of the abattoir he belongs to — kind. His slaves are fed, valued, and shielded from the worst of the siege camps; his household mourns him honestly; Tyrion, who misses nothing, files him under the tale’s most corrosive category: the good master, the man whose decency operates entirely within an obscenity and thereby helps the obscenity run. Around him the Yunkish camp performs its lethal absurdities — lords in tokars commanding slave soldiers with parasols and chains — and Yezzan, wheezing over his treasures, is their honest emblem: appetite grown so vast it has replaced every other faculty.

His function in the story is to be the last cage. Tyrion’s descent — from Hand of the King to wineskin to auction block — bottoms out in Yezzan’s tent, and it is from Yezzan’s dying household, amid the plague and chaos of the siege, that the dwarf finally engineers his own escape into the Second Sons and back into history. The Yellow Whale never knows what he briefly owned; there is a version of the whole war in that.

The page and the screen

The show borrowed the name and discarded the man. Its Yezzan is a trim, unremarkable Meereenese-coalition slaver who appears in the sixth season’s negotiations — most memorably at the parley where the masters, told one of the delegation must die for breaking the peace, shove him forward as the expendable lowborn colleague; the show spares him to carry the message home. Nothing of the books’ Yezzan — the vastness, the collection, the purchase of Tyrion, the strange kindness, the pale mare — made it to the screen, because the show’s Tyrion sailed to Meereen as a free agent and skipped the slavery arc entirely. The two Yezzans share a name and a trade and not one scene.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Sold to Yezzan zo Qaggaz's grotesquerie, Tyrion and Penny joust on pig and dog for slavers' laughter while the pale mare rides the siege camps — and their master — down. (ADWD 48)

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

Before the tale: (book only)

The books: Taken by the pale mare (ADWD, ch. 52)

The grotesquely vast Yunkish lord who bought Tyrion at auction was carried off by the pale mare — the bloody flux that rode through the siege camps of Meereen faster than any Dothraki. His slaves wept; he had been, by slaver standards, kind.

The books’ Yezzan is killed by the pale mare — the bloody flux that sweeps the Yunkish siege camps outside Meereen, carried in with the war and moving faster through the slavers’ lines than any army. The dying is squalid and unheroic, as the flux always is, and the novels give it their characteristic twist: his slaves genuinely grieve, and with the Yellow Whale’s protection gone, his household scatters into a camp collapsing under plague and the coming battle — the chaos through which Tyrion, Penny and Jorah slip their chains. The show’s version of the character, a different man in all but name, is last seen alive, spared at the Meereen parley to deliver a message; it is the books’ Yezzan, dead of the pale mare in his silks, who counts as the character’s true ending on the page.