The Horse Gate of Vaes Dothrak was made of two gigantic bronze stallions, rearing, their hoovesmeeting a hundred feet above the roadway to form a pointed arch.
Dany could not have said why the city needed a gate when it had no walls … and no buildings thatshe could see. Yet there it stood, immense and beautiful, the great horses framing the distant purplemountain beyond. The bronze stallions threw long shadows across the waving grasses as Khal Drogoled the khalasar under their hooves and down the godsway, his bloodriders beside him.
Dany followed on her silver, escorted by Ser Jorah Mormont and her brother Viserys, mountedonce more. After the day in the grass when she had left him to walk back to the khalasar, theDothraki had laughingly called him Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. Khal Drogo had offered hima place in a cart the next day, and Viserys had accepted. In his stubborn ignorance, he had not evenknown he was being mocked; the carts were for eunuchs, cripples, women giving birth, the veryyoung and the very old. That won him yet another name: Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King. Her brotherhad thought it was the khal’s way of apologizing for the wrong Dany had done him. She had beggedSer Jorah not to tell him the truth, lest he be shamed. The knight had replied that the king could welldo with a bit of shame … yet he had done as she bid. It had taken much pleading, and all the pillowtricks Doreah had taught her, before Dany had been able to make Drogo relent and allow Viserys torejoin them at the head of the column.
“Where is the city?” she asked as they passed beneath the bronze arch. There were no buildings tobe seen, no people, only the grass and the road, lined with ancient monuments from all the lands theDothraki had sacked over the centuries.
“Ahead,” Ser Jorah answered. “Under the mountain.”
Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. Theforgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silverpast their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained,even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped onlyin flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black irondragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, andother beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, othersso misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, hadlikely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.
“So many,” she said as her silver stepped slowly onward, “and from so many lands.”
Viserys was less impressed. “The trash of dead cities,” he sneered. He was careful to speak in theCommon Tongue, which few Dothraki could understand, yet even so Dany found herself glancingback at the men of her khas, to make certain he had not been overheard. He went on blithely. “Allthese savages know how to do is steal the things better men have built … and kill.” He laughed.
“They do know how to kill. Otherwise I’d have no use for them at all.”
“They are my people now,” Dany said. “You should not call them savages, brother.”
“The dragon speaks as he likes,” Viserys said … in the Common Tongue. He glanced over hisshoulder at Aggo and Rakharo, riding behind them, and favored them with a mocking smile. “See, thesavages lack the wit to understand the speech of civilized men.” A moss-eaten stone monolith loomedover the road, fifty feet tall. Viserys gazed at it with boredom in his eyes. “How long must we linger amidst these ruins before Drogo gives me my army? I grow tired of waiting.”
“The princess must be presented to the dosh khaleen …”
“The crones, yes,” her brother interrupted, “and there’s to be some mummer’s show of a prophecyfor the whelp in her belly, you told me. What is that to me? I’m tired of eating horsemeat and I’m sickof the stink of these savages.” He sniffed at the wide, floppy sleeve of his tunic, where it was hiscustom to keep a sachet. It could not have helped much. The tunic was filthy. All the silk and heavywools that Viserys had worn out of Pentos were stained by hard travel and rotted from sweat.
Ser Jorah Mormont said, “The Western Market will have food more to your taste, Your Grace. Thetraders from the Free Cities come there to sell their wares. The khal will honor his promise in his owntime.”
“He had better,” Viserys said grimly. “I was promised a crown, and I mean to have it. The dragonis not mocked.” Spying an obscene likeness of a woman with six breasts and a ferret’s head, he rodeoff to inspect it more closely.
Dany was relieved, yet no less anxious. “I pray that my sun-and-stars will not keep him waiting toolong,” she told Ser Jorah when her brother was out of earshot.
The knight looked after Viserys doubtfully. “Your brother should have bided his time in Pentos.
There is no place for him in a khalasar. Illyrio tried to warn him.”
“He will go as soon as he has his ten thousand. My lord husband promised a golden crown.”
Ser Jorah grunted. “Yes, Khaleesi, but … the Dothraki look on these things differently than we doin the west. I have told him as much, as Illyrio told him, but your brother does not listen. Thehorselords are no traders. Viserys thinks he sold you, and now he wants his price. Yet Khal Drogowould say he had you as a gift. He will give Viserys a gift in return, yes … in his own time. You donot demand a gift, not of a khal. You do not demand anything of a khal.”
“It is not right to make him wait.” Dany did not know why she was defending her brother, yet shewas. “Viserys says he could sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Viserys could not sweep a stable with ten thousand brooms.”
Dany could not pretend to surprise at the disdain in his tone. “What … what if it were notViserys?” she asked. “If it were someone else who led them? Someone stronger? Could the Dothrakitruly conquer the Seven Kingdoms?”
Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. “When I firstwent into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If youhad asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have notrouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.”
“But if I asked you now?”
“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain. They are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless,and their bows outrange ours. In the Seven Kingdoms, most archers fight on foot, from behind ashieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki fire from horseback, charging orretreating, it makes no matter, they are full as deadly … and there are so many of them, my lady. Yourlord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his khalasar.”
“Is that truly so many?”
“Your brother Rhaegar brought as many men to the Trident,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but of thatnumber, no more than a tenth were knights. The rest were archers, freeriders, and foot soldiers armedwith spears and pikes. When Rhaegar fell, many threw down their weapons and fled the field. Howlong do you imagine such a rabble would stand against the charge of forty thousand screamershowling for blood? How well would boiled leather jerkins and mailed shirts protect them when thearrows fall like rain?”
“Not long,” she said, “not well.”
He nodded. “Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven Kingdoms have the wit the gods gave agoose, it will never come to that. The riders have no taste for siegecraft. I doubt they could take eventhe weakest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, but if Robert Baratheon were fool enough to give thembattle …”
“Is he?” Dany asked. “A fool, I mean?”
Ser Jorah considered that for a moment. “Robert should have been born Dothraki,” he said at last.
“Your khal would tell you that only a coward hides behind stone walls instead of facing his enemywith a blade in hand. The Usurper would agree. He is a strong man, brave … and rash enough to meet a Dothraki horde in the open field. But the men around him, well, their pipers play a different tune.
His brother Stannis, Lord Tywin Lannister, Eddard Stark …” He spat.
“You hate this Lord Stark,” Dany said.
“He took from me all I loved, for the sake of a few lice-ridden poachers and his precious honor,”
Ser Jorah said bitterly. From his tone, she could tell the loss still pained him. He changed the subjectquickly. “There,” he announced, pointing. “Vaes Dothrak. The city of the horselords.”
Khal Drogo and his bloodriders led them through the great bazaar of the Western Market, down thebroad ways beyond. Dany followed close on her silver, staring at the strangeness about her. VaesDothrak was at once the largest city and the smallest that she had ever known. She thought it must beten times as large as Pentos, a vastness without walls or limits, its broad windswept streets paved ingrass and mud and carpeted with wildflowers. In the Free Cities of the west, towers and manses andhovels and bridges and shops and halls all crowded in on one another, but Vaes Dothrak sprawledlanguorously, baking in the warm sun, ancient, arrogant, and empty.
Even the buildings were so queer to her eyes. She saw carved stone pavilions, manses of wovengrass as large as castles, rickety wooden towers, stepped pyramids faced with marble, log halls opento the sky. In place of walls, some palaces were surrounded by thorny hedges. “None of them arealike,” she said.
“Your brother had part of the truth,” Ser Jorah admitted. “The Dothraki do not build. A thousandyears ago, to make a house, they would dig a hole in the earth and cover it with a woven grass roof.
The buildings you see were made by slaves brought here from lands they’ve plundered, and they builteach after the fashion of their own peoples.”
Most of the halls, even the largest, seemed deserted. “Where are the people who live here?” Danyasked. The bazaar had been full of running children and men shouting, but elsewhere she had seenonly a few eunuchs going about their business.
“Only the crones of the dosh khaleen dwell permanently in the sacred city, them and their slavesand servants,” Ser Jorah replied, “yet Vaes Dothrak is large enough to house every man of everykhalasar, should all the khals return to the Mother at once. The crones have prophesied that one daythat will come to pass, and so Vaes Dothrak must be ready to embrace all its children.”
Khal Drogo finally called a halt near the Eastern Market where the caravans from Yi Ti and Asshaiand the Shadow Lands came to trade, with the Mother of Mountains looming overhead. Dany smiledas she recalled Magister Illyrio’s slave girl and her talk of a palace with two hundred rooms and doorsof solid silver. The “palace” was a cavernous wooden feasting hall, its rough-hewn timbered wallsrising forty feet, its roof sewn silk, a vast billowing tent that could be raised to keep out the rare rains,or lowered to admit the endless sky. Around the hall were broad grassy horse yards fenced with highhedges, firepits, and hundreds of round earthen houses that bulged from the ground like miniaturehills, covered with grass.
A small army of slaves had gone ahead to prepare for Khal Drogo’s arrival. As each rider swungdown from his saddle, he unbelted his arakh and handed it to a waiting slave, and any other weaponshe carried as well. Even Khal Drogo himself was not exempt. Ser Jorah had explained that it wasforbidden to carry a blade in Vaes Dothrak, or to shed a free man’s blood. Even warring khalasars putaside their feuds and shared meat and mead together when they were in sight of the Mother ofMountains. In this place, the crones of the dosh khaleen had decreed, all Dothraki were one blood,one khalasar, one herd.
Cohollo came to Dany as Irri and Jhiqui were helping her down off her silver. He was the oldest ofDrogo’s three bloodriders, a squat bald man with a crooked nose and a mouth full of broken teeth,shattered by a mace twenty years before when he saved the young khalakka from sellswords whohoped to sell him to his father’s enemies. His life had been bound to Drogo’s the day her lord husbandwas born.
Every khal had his bloodriders. At first Dany had thought of them as a kind of DothrakiKingsguard, sworn to protect their lord, but it went further than that. Jhiqui had taught her that abloodrider was more than a guard; they were the khal’s brothers, his shadows, his fiercest friends.
“Blood of my blood,” Drogo called them, and so it was; they shared a single life. The ancienttraditions of the horselords demanded that when the khal died, his bloodriders died with him, to rideat his side in the night lands. If the khal died at the hands of some enemy, they lived only long enoughto avenge him, and then followed him joyfully into the grave. In some khalasars, Jhiqui said, the bloodriders shared the khal’s wine, his tent, and even his wives, though never his horses. A man’smount was his own.
loodriders shared the khal’s wine, his tent, and even his wives, though never his horses. A man’smount was his own.
Daenerys was glad that Khal Drogo did not hold to those ancient ways. She should not have likedbeing shared. And while old Cohollo treated her kindly enough, the others frightened her; Haggo,huge and silent, often glowered as if he had forgotten who she was, and Qotho had cruel eyes andquick hands that liked to hurt. He left bruises on Doreah’s soft white skin whenever he touched her,and sometimes made Irri sob in the night. Even his horses seemed to fear him.
Yet they were bound to Drogo for life and death, so Daenerys had no choice but to accept them.
And sometimes she found herself wishing her father had been protected by such men. In the songs,the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and true, and yet King Aerys had beenmurdered by one of them, the handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, SerBarristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if all men were as false in the SevenKingdoms. When her son sat the Iron Throne, she would see that he had bloodriders of his own toprotect him against treachery in his Kingsguard.
“Khaleesi,” Cohollo said to her, in Dothraki. “Drogo, who is blood of my blood, commands me totell you that he must ascend the Mother of Mountains this night, to sacrifice to the gods for his safereturn.”
Only men were allowed to set foot on the Mother, Dany knew. The khal’s bloodriders would gowith him, and return at dawn. “Tell my sun-and-stars that I dream of him, and wait anxious for hisreturn,” she replied, thankful. Dany tired more easily as the child grew within her; in truth, a night ofrest would be most welcome. Her pregnancy only seemed to have inflamed Drogo’s desire for her,and of late his embraces left her exhausted.
Doreah led her to the hollow hill that had been prepared for her and her khal. It was cool and dimwithin, like a tent made of earth. “Jhiqui, a bath, please,” she commanded, to wash the dust of travelfrom her skin and soak her weary bones. It was pleasant to know that they would linger here for awhile, that she would not need to climb back on her silver on the morrow.
The water was scalding hot, as she liked it. “I will give my brother his gifts tonight,” she decided asJhiqui was washing her hair. “He should look a king in the sacred city. Doreah, run and find him andinvite him to sup with me.” Viserys was nicer to the Lysene girl than to her Dothraki handmaids,perhaps because Magister Illyrio had let him bed her back in Pentos. “Irri, go to the bazaar and buyfruit and meat. Anything but horseflesh.”
“Horse is best,” Irri said. “Horse makes a man strong.”
“Viserys hates horsemeat.”
“As you say, Khaleesi.”
She brought back a haunch of goat and a basket of fruits and vegetables. Jhiqui roasted the meatwith sweetgrass and firepods, basting it with honey as it cooked, and there were melons andpomegranates and plums and some queer eastern fruit Dany did not know. While her handmaidsprepared the meal, Dany laid out the clothing she’d had made to her brother’s measure: a tunic andleggings of crisp white linen, leather sandals that laced up to the knee, a bronze medallion belt, aleather vest painted with fire-breathing dragons. The Dothraki would respect him more if he lookedless a beggar, she hoped, and perhaps he would forgive her for shaming him that day in the grass. Hewas still her king, after all, and her brother. They were both blood of the dragon.
She was arranging the last of his gifts—a sandsilk cloak, green as grass, with a pale grey borderthat would bring out the silver in his hair—when Viserys arrived, dragging Doreah by the arm. Hereye was red where he’d hit her. “How dare you send this whore to give me commands,” he said. Heshoved the handmaid roughly to the carpet.
The anger took Dany utterly by surprise. “I only wanted … Doreah, what did you say?”
“Khaleesi, pardons, forgive me. I went to him, as you bid, and told him you commanded him tojoin you for supper.”
“No one commands the dragon,” Viserys snarled. “I am your king! I should have sent you backher head!”
The Lysene girl quailed, but Dany calmed her with a touch. “Don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you.
Sweet brother, please, forgive her, the girl misspoke herself, I told her to ask you to sup with me, if itpleases Your Grace.” She took him by the hand and drew him across the room. “Look. These are foryou.”
Viserys frowned suspiciously. “What is all this?”
“New raiment. I had it made for you.” Dany smiled shyly.
He looked at her and sneered. “Dothraki rags. Do you presume to dress me now?”
“Please … you’ll be cooler and more comfortable, and I thought … maybe if you dressed likethem, the Dothraki …” Dany did not know how to say it without waking his dragon.
“Next you’ll want to braid my hair.”
“I’d never …” Why was he always so cruel? She had only wanted to help. “You have no right to abraid, you have won no victories yet.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Fury shone from his lilac eyes, yet he dared not strike her, not withher handmaids watching and the warriors of her khas outside. Viserys picked up the cloak and sniffedat it. “This stinks of manure. Perhaps I shall use it as a horse blanket.”
“I had Doreah sew it specially for you,” she told him, wounded. “These are garments fit for akhal.”
“I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not some grass-stained savage with bells in his hair,”
Viserys spat back at her. He grabbed her arm. “You forget yourself, slut. Do you think that big bellywill protect you if you wake the dragon?”
His fingers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt like a child again, quailing in theface of his rage. She reached out with her other hand and grabbed the first thing she touched, the beltshe’d hoped to give him, a heavy chain of ornate bronze medallions. She swung it with all herstrength.
It caught him full in the face. Viserys let go of her. Blood ran down his cheek where the edge ofone of the medallions had sliced it open. “You are the one who forgets himself,” Dany said to him.
“Didn’t you learn anything that day in the grass? Leave me now, before I summon my khas to dragyou out. And pray that Khal Drogo does not hear of this, or he will cut open your belly and feed youyour own entrails.”
Viserys scrambled back to his feet. “When I come into my kingdom, you will rue this day, slut.”
He walked off, holding his torn face, leaving her gifts behind him.
Drops of his blood had spattered the beautiful sandsilk cloak. Dany clutched the soft cloth to hercheek and sat cross-legged on her sleeping mats.
“Your supper is ready, Khaleesi,” Jhiqui announced.
“I’m not hungry,” Dany said sadly. She was suddenly very tired. “Share the food amongyourselves, and send some to Ser Jorah, if you would.” After a moment she added, “Please, bring meone of the dragon’s eggs.”
Irri fetched the egg with the deep green shell, bronze flecks shining amid its scales as she turned itin her small hands. Dany curled up on her side, pulling the sandsilk cloak across her and cradling theegg in the hollow between her swollen belly and small, tender breasts. She liked to hold them. Theywere so beautiful, and sometimes just being close to them made her feel stronger, braver, as ifsomehow she were drawing strength from the stone dragons locked inside.
She was lying there, holding the egg, when she felt the child move within her … as if he werereaching out, brother to brother, blood to blood. “You are the dragon,” Dany whispered to him, “thetrue dragon. I know it. I know it.” And she smiled, and went to sleep dreaming of home.
Dany could not have said why the city needed a gate when it had no walls … and no buildings thatshe could see. Yet there it stood, immense and beautiful, the great horses framing the distant purplemountain beyond. The bronze stallions threw long shadows across the waving grasses as Khal Drogoled the khalasar under their hooves and down the godsway, his bloodriders beside him.
Dany followed on her silver, escorted by Ser Jorah Mormont and her brother Viserys, mountedonce more. After the day in the grass when she had left him to walk back to the khalasar, theDothraki had laughingly called him Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. Khal Drogo had offered hima place in a cart the next day, and Viserys had accepted. In his stubborn ignorance, he had not evenknown he was being mocked; the carts were for eunuchs, cripples, women giving birth, the veryyoung and the very old. That won him yet another name: Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King. Her brotherhad thought it was the khal’s way of apologizing for the wrong Dany had done him. She had beggedSer Jorah not to tell him the truth, lest he be shamed. The knight had replied that the king could welldo with a bit of shame … yet he had done as she bid. It had taken much pleading, and all the pillowtricks Doreah had taught her, before Dany had been able to make Drogo relent and allow Viserys torejoin them at the head of the column.
“Where is the city?” she asked as they passed beneath the bronze arch. There were no buildings tobe seen, no people, only the grass and the road, lined with ancient monuments from all the lands theDothraki had sacked over the centuries.
“Ahead,” Ser Jorah answered. “Under the mountain.”
Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. Theforgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silverpast their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained,even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped onlyin flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black irondragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, andother beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, othersso misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, hadlikely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.
“So many,” she said as her silver stepped slowly onward, “and from so many lands.”
Viserys was less impressed. “The trash of dead cities,” he sneered. He was careful to speak in theCommon Tongue, which few Dothraki could understand, yet even so Dany found herself glancingback at the men of her khas, to make certain he had not been overheard. He went on blithely. “Allthese savages know how to do is steal the things better men have built … and kill.” He laughed.
“They do know how to kill. Otherwise I’d have no use for them at all.”
“They are my people now,” Dany said. “You should not call them savages, brother.”
“The dragon speaks as he likes,” Viserys said … in the Common Tongue. He glanced over hisshoulder at Aggo and Rakharo, riding behind them, and favored them with a mocking smile. “See, thesavages lack the wit to understand the speech of civilized men.” A moss-eaten stone monolith loomedover the road, fifty feet tall. Viserys gazed at it with boredom in his eyes. “How long must we linger amidst these ruins before Drogo gives me my army? I grow tired of waiting.”
“The princess must be presented to the dosh khaleen …”
“The crones, yes,” her brother interrupted, “and there’s to be some mummer’s show of a prophecyfor the whelp in her belly, you told me. What is that to me? I’m tired of eating horsemeat and I’m sickof the stink of these savages.” He sniffed at the wide, floppy sleeve of his tunic, where it was hiscustom to keep a sachet. It could not have helped much. The tunic was filthy. All the silk and heavywools that Viserys had worn out of Pentos were stained by hard travel and rotted from sweat.
Ser Jorah Mormont said, “The Western Market will have food more to your taste, Your Grace. Thetraders from the Free Cities come there to sell their wares. The khal will honor his promise in his owntime.”
“He had better,” Viserys said grimly. “I was promised a crown, and I mean to have it. The dragonis not mocked.” Spying an obscene likeness of a woman with six breasts and a ferret’s head, he rodeoff to inspect it more closely.
Dany was relieved, yet no less anxious. “I pray that my sun-and-stars will not keep him waiting toolong,” she told Ser Jorah when her brother was out of earshot.
The knight looked after Viserys doubtfully. “Your brother should have bided his time in Pentos.
There is no place for him in a khalasar. Illyrio tried to warn him.”
“He will go as soon as he has his ten thousand. My lord husband promised a golden crown.”
Ser Jorah grunted. “Yes, Khaleesi, but … the Dothraki look on these things differently than we doin the west. I have told him as much, as Illyrio told him, but your brother does not listen. Thehorselords are no traders. Viserys thinks he sold you, and now he wants his price. Yet Khal Drogowould say he had you as a gift. He will give Viserys a gift in return, yes … in his own time. You donot demand a gift, not of a khal. You do not demand anything of a khal.”
“It is not right to make him wait.” Dany did not know why she was defending her brother, yet shewas. “Viserys says he could sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers.”
Ser Jorah snorted. “Viserys could not sweep a stable with ten thousand brooms.”
Dany could not pretend to surprise at the disdain in his tone. “What … what if it were notViserys?” she asked. “If it were someone else who led them? Someone stronger? Could the Dothrakitruly conquer the Seven Kingdoms?”
Ser Jorah’s face grew thoughtful as their horses trod together down the godsway. “When I firstwent into exile, I looked at the Dothraki and saw half-naked barbarians, as wild as their horses. If youhad asked me then, Princess, I should have told you that a thousand good knights would have notrouble putting to flight a hundred times as many Dothraki.”
“But if I asked you now?”
“Now,” the knight said, “I am less certain. They are better riders than any knight, utterly fearless,and their bows outrange ours. In the Seven Kingdoms, most archers fight on foot, from behind ashieldwall or a barricade of sharpened stakes. The Dothraki fire from horseback, charging orretreating, it makes no matter, they are full as deadly … and there are so many of them, my lady. Yourlord husband alone counts forty thousand mounted warriors in his khalasar.”
“Is that truly so many?”
“Your brother Rhaegar brought as many men to the Trident,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but of thatnumber, no more than a tenth were knights. The rest were archers, freeriders, and foot soldiers armedwith spears and pikes. When Rhaegar fell, many threw down their weapons and fled the field. Howlong do you imagine such a rabble would stand against the charge of forty thousand screamershowling for blood? How well would boiled leather jerkins and mailed shirts protect them when thearrows fall like rain?”
“Not long,” she said, “not well.”
He nodded. “Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven Kingdoms have the wit the gods gave agoose, it will never come to that. The riders have no taste for siegecraft. I doubt they could take eventhe weakest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, but if Robert Baratheon were fool enough to give thembattle …”
“Is he?” Dany asked. “A fool, I mean?”
Ser Jorah considered that for a moment. “Robert should have been born Dothraki,” he said at last.
“Your khal would tell you that only a coward hides behind stone walls instead of facing his enemywith a blade in hand. The Usurper would agree. He is a strong man, brave … and rash enough to meet a Dothraki horde in the open field. But the men around him, well, their pipers play a different tune.
His brother Stannis, Lord Tywin Lannister, Eddard Stark …” He spat.
“You hate this Lord Stark,” Dany said.
“He took from me all I loved, for the sake of a few lice-ridden poachers and his precious honor,”
Ser Jorah said bitterly. From his tone, she could tell the loss still pained him. He changed the subjectquickly. “There,” he announced, pointing. “Vaes Dothrak. The city of the horselords.”
Khal Drogo and his bloodriders led them through the great bazaar of the Western Market, down thebroad ways beyond. Dany followed close on her silver, staring at the strangeness about her. VaesDothrak was at once the largest city and the smallest that she had ever known. She thought it must beten times as large as Pentos, a vastness without walls or limits, its broad windswept streets paved ingrass and mud and carpeted with wildflowers. In the Free Cities of the west, towers and manses andhovels and bridges and shops and halls all crowded in on one another, but Vaes Dothrak sprawledlanguorously, baking in the warm sun, ancient, arrogant, and empty.
Even the buildings were so queer to her eyes. She saw carved stone pavilions, manses of wovengrass as large as castles, rickety wooden towers, stepped pyramids faced with marble, log halls opento the sky. In place of walls, some palaces were surrounded by thorny hedges. “None of them arealike,” she said.
“Your brother had part of the truth,” Ser Jorah admitted. “The Dothraki do not build. A thousandyears ago, to make a house, they would dig a hole in the earth and cover it with a woven grass roof.
The buildings you see were made by slaves brought here from lands they’ve plundered, and they builteach after the fashion of their own peoples.”
Most of the halls, even the largest, seemed deserted. “Where are the people who live here?” Danyasked. The bazaar had been full of running children and men shouting, but elsewhere she had seenonly a few eunuchs going about their business.
“Only the crones of the dosh khaleen dwell permanently in the sacred city, them and their slavesand servants,” Ser Jorah replied, “yet Vaes Dothrak is large enough to house every man of everykhalasar, should all the khals return to the Mother at once. The crones have prophesied that one daythat will come to pass, and so Vaes Dothrak must be ready to embrace all its children.”
Khal Drogo finally called a halt near the Eastern Market where the caravans from Yi Ti and Asshaiand the Shadow Lands came to trade, with the Mother of Mountains looming overhead. Dany smiledas she recalled Magister Illyrio’s slave girl and her talk of a palace with two hundred rooms and doorsof solid silver. The “palace” was a cavernous wooden feasting hall, its rough-hewn timbered wallsrising forty feet, its roof sewn silk, a vast billowing tent that could be raised to keep out the rare rains,or lowered to admit the endless sky. Around the hall were broad grassy horse yards fenced with highhedges, firepits, and hundreds of round earthen houses that bulged from the ground like miniaturehills, covered with grass.
A small army of slaves had gone ahead to prepare for Khal Drogo’s arrival. As each rider swungdown from his saddle, he unbelted his arakh and handed it to a waiting slave, and any other weaponshe carried as well. Even Khal Drogo himself was not exempt. Ser Jorah had explained that it wasforbidden to carry a blade in Vaes Dothrak, or to shed a free man’s blood. Even warring khalasars putaside their feuds and shared meat and mead together when they were in sight of the Mother ofMountains. In this place, the crones of the dosh khaleen had decreed, all Dothraki were one blood,one khalasar, one herd.
Cohollo came to Dany as Irri and Jhiqui were helping her down off her silver. He was the oldest ofDrogo’s three bloodriders, a squat bald man with a crooked nose and a mouth full of broken teeth,shattered by a mace twenty years before when he saved the young khalakka from sellswords whohoped to sell him to his father’s enemies. His life had been bound to Drogo’s the day her lord husbandwas born.
Every khal had his bloodriders. At first Dany had thought of them as a kind of DothrakiKingsguard, sworn to protect their lord, but it went further than that. Jhiqui had taught her that abloodrider was more than a guard; they were the khal’s brothers, his shadows, his fiercest friends.
“Blood of my blood,” Drogo called them, and so it was; they shared a single life. The ancienttraditions of the horselords demanded that when the khal died, his bloodriders died with him, to rideat his side in the night lands. If the khal died at the hands of some enemy, they lived only long enoughto avenge him, and then followed him joyfully into the grave. In some khalasars, Jhiqui said, the bloodriders shared the khal’s wine, his tent, and even his wives, though never his horses. A man’smount was his own.
loodriders shared the khal’s wine, his tent, and even his wives, though never his horses. A man’smount was his own.
Daenerys was glad that Khal Drogo did not hold to those ancient ways. She should not have likedbeing shared. And while old Cohollo treated her kindly enough, the others frightened her; Haggo,huge and silent, often glowered as if he had forgotten who she was, and Qotho had cruel eyes andquick hands that liked to hurt. He left bruises on Doreah’s soft white skin whenever he touched her,and sometimes made Irri sob in the night. Even his horses seemed to fear him.
Yet they were bound to Drogo for life and death, so Daenerys had no choice but to accept them.
And sometimes she found herself wishing her father had been protected by such men. In the songs,the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and true, and yet King Aerys had beenmurdered by one of them, the handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, SerBarristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if all men were as false in the SevenKingdoms. When her son sat the Iron Throne, she would see that he had bloodriders of his own toprotect him against treachery in his Kingsguard.
“Khaleesi,” Cohollo said to her, in Dothraki. “Drogo, who is blood of my blood, commands me totell you that he must ascend the Mother of Mountains this night, to sacrifice to the gods for his safereturn.”
Only men were allowed to set foot on the Mother, Dany knew. The khal’s bloodriders would gowith him, and return at dawn. “Tell my sun-and-stars that I dream of him, and wait anxious for hisreturn,” she replied, thankful. Dany tired more easily as the child grew within her; in truth, a night ofrest would be most welcome. Her pregnancy only seemed to have inflamed Drogo’s desire for her,and of late his embraces left her exhausted.
Doreah led her to the hollow hill that had been prepared for her and her khal. It was cool and dimwithin, like a tent made of earth. “Jhiqui, a bath, please,” she commanded, to wash the dust of travelfrom her skin and soak her weary bones. It was pleasant to know that they would linger here for awhile, that she would not need to climb back on her silver on the morrow.
The water was scalding hot, as she liked it. “I will give my brother his gifts tonight,” she decided asJhiqui was washing her hair. “He should look a king in the sacred city. Doreah, run and find him andinvite him to sup with me.” Viserys was nicer to the Lysene girl than to her Dothraki handmaids,perhaps because Magister Illyrio had let him bed her back in Pentos. “Irri, go to the bazaar and buyfruit and meat. Anything but horseflesh.”
“Horse is best,” Irri said. “Horse makes a man strong.”
“Viserys hates horsemeat.”
“As you say, Khaleesi.”
She brought back a haunch of goat and a basket of fruits and vegetables. Jhiqui roasted the meatwith sweetgrass and firepods, basting it with honey as it cooked, and there were melons andpomegranates and plums and some queer eastern fruit Dany did not know. While her handmaidsprepared the meal, Dany laid out the clothing she’d had made to her brother’s measure: a tunic andleggings of crisp white linen, leather sandals that laced up to the knee, a bronze medallion belt, aleather vest painted with fire-breathing dragons. The Dothraki would respect him more if he lookedless a beggar, she hoped, and perhaps he would forgive her for shaming him that day in the grass. Hewas still her king, after all, and her brother. They were both blood of the dragon.
She was arranging the last of his gifts—a sandsilk cloak, green as grass, with a pale grey borderthat would bring out the silver in his hair—when Viserys arrived, dragging Doreah by the arm. Hereye was red where he’d hit her. “How dare you send this whore to give me commands,” he said. Heshoved the handmaid roughly to the carpet.
The anger took Dany utterly by surprise. “I only wanted … Doreah, what did you say?”
“Khaleesi, pardons, forgive me. I went to him, as you bid, and told him you commanded him tojoin you for supper.”
“No one commands the dragon,” Viserys snarled. “I am your king! I should have sent you backher head!”
The Lysene girl quailed, but Dany calmed her with a touch. “Don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you.
Sweet brother, please, forgive her, the girl misspoke herself, I told her to ask you to sup with me, if itpleases Your Grace.” She took him by the hand and drew him across the room. “Look. These are foryou.”
Viserys frowned suspiciously. “What is all this?”
“New raiment. I had it made for you.” Dany smiled shyly.
He looked at her and sneered. “Dothraki rags. Do you presume to dress me now?”
“Please … you’ll be cooler and more comfortable, and I thought … maybe if you dressed likethem, the Dothraki …” Dany did not know how to say it without waking his dragon.
“Next you’ll want to braid my hair.”
“I’d never …” Why was he always so cruel? She had only wanted to help. “You have no right to abraid, you have won no victories yet.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Fury shone from his lilac eyes, yet he dared not strike her, not withher handmaids watching and the warriors of her khas outside. Viserys picked up the cloak and sniffedat it. “This stinks of manure. Perhaps I shall use it as a horse blanket.”
“I had Doreah sew it specially for you,” she told him, wounded. “These are garments fit for akhal.”
“I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not some grass-stained savage with bells in his hair,”
Viserys spat back at her. He grabbed her arm. “You forget yourself, slut. Do you think that big bellywill protect you if you wake the dragon?”
His fingers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt like a child again, quailing in theface of his rage. She reached out with her other hand and grabbed the first thing she touched, the beltshe’d hoped to give him, a heavy chain of ornate bronze medallions. She swung it with all herstrength.
It caught him full in the face. Viserys let go of her. Blood ran down his cheek where the edge ofone of the medallions had sliced it open. “You are the one who forgets himself,” Dany said to him.
“Didn’t you learn anything that day in the grass? Leave me now, before I summon my khas to dragyou out. And pray that Khal Drogo does not hear of this, or he will cut open your belly and feed youyour own entrails.”
Viserys scrambled back to his feet. “When I come into my kingdom, you will rue this day, slut.”
He walked off, holding his torn face, leaving her gifts behind him.
Drops of his blood had spattered the beautiful sandsilk cloak. Dany clutched the soft cloth to hercheek and sat cross-legged on her sleeping mats.
“Your supper is ready, Khaleesi,” Jhiqui announced.
“I’m not hungry,” Dany said sadly. She was suddenly very tired. “Share the food amongyourselves, and send some to Ser Jorah, if you would.” After a moment she added, “Please, bring meone of the dragon’s eggs.”
Irri fetched the egg with the deep green shell, bronze flecks shining amid its scales as she turned itin her small hands. Dany curled up on her side, pulling the sandsilk cloak across her and cradling theegg in the hollow between her swollen belly and small, tender breasts. She liked to hold them. Theywere so beautiful, and sometimes just being close to them made her feel stronger, braver, as ifsomehow she were drawing strength from the stone dragons locked inside.
She was lying there, holding the egg, when she felt the child move within her … as if he werereaching out, brother to brother, blood to blood. “You are the dragon,” Dany whispered to him, “thetrue dragon. I know it. I know it.” And she smiled, and went to sleep dreaming of home.