When the battle was done, Dany rode her silver
through the fields of the dead. Her handmaids and the men of her
khas came after, smiling and jesting among themselves.
Dothraki hooves had torn the earth and trampled the rye and
lentils into the ground, while arakhs and arrows had sown a
terrible new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted
their heads and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men
moaned and prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved among them, the mercy men with
their heavy axes, taking a harvest of heads from the dead and dying
alike. After them would scurry a flock of small girls, pulling
arrows from the corpses to fill their baskets. Last of all the dogs
would come sniffing, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never
far behind the khalasar.
The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands of
them, black with flies, arrow shafts bristling from each carcass.
Khal Ogo’s riders had done that, Dany knew; no man of
Drogo’s khalasar would be such a fool as to waste his arrows
on sheep when there were shepherds yet to kill.
The town was afire, black plumes of smoke roiling and tumbling
as they rose into a hard blue sky. Beneath broken walls of dried
mud, riders galloped back and forth, swinging their long whips as
they herded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and
children of Ogo’s khalasar walked with a sullen pride, even
in defeat and bondage; they were slaves now, but they seemed not to
fear it. It was different with the townsfolk. Dany pitied them; she
remembered what terror felt like. Mothers stumbled along with
blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hand. There were
only a few men among them, cripples and cowards and
grandfathers.
Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the
Lhazareen, but the Dothraki called them haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men.
Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had the same
copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien to her,
squat and flat-faced, their black hair cropped unnaturally short.
They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and Khal Drogo
said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of the
Dothraki sea was not meant for sheep.
Dany saw one boy bolt and run for the river. A rider cut him off
and turned him, and the others boxed him in, cracking their whips
in his face, running him this way and that. One galloped behind
him, lashing him across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with
blood. Another snared his ankle with a lash and sent him sprawling.
Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored of the
sport and put an arrow through his back.
Ser Jorah met her outside the shattered gate. He wore a dark
green surcoat over his mail. His gauntlets, greaves, and greathelm
were dark grey steel. The Dothraki had mocked him for a coward when
he donned his armor, but the knight had spit insults right back in
their teeth, tempers had flared, longsword had clashed with arakh,
and the rider whose taunts had been loudest had been left behind to
bleed to death.
Ser Jorah lifted the visor of his flat-topped greathelm as he
rode up. “Your lord husband awaits you within the
town.”
“Drogo took no harm?”
“A few cuts,” Ser Jorah answered, “nothing of
consequence. He slew two khals this day. Khal Ogo first, and then
the son, Fogo, who became khal when Ogo fell. His bloodriders cut
the bells from their hair, and now Khal Drogo’s every step
rings louder than before.”
Ogo and his son had shared the high bench with her lord husband
at the naming feast where Viserys had been crowned, but that was in
Vaes Dothrak, beneath the Mother of Mountains, where every rider
was a brother and all quarrels were put aside. It was different out
in the grass. Ogo’s khalasar had been attacking the town when
Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the Lamb Men had thought,
when they first saw the dust of their horses from atop those
cracked-mud walls. Perhaps a few, the younger and more foolish who
still believed that the gods heard the prayers of desperate men,
took it for deliverance.
Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high
thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown,
and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take
their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought
the Lamb Men. I am the blood of the dragon, Daenerys Targaryen reminded
herself as she turned her face away. She pressed her lips together
and hardened her heart and rode on toward the gate.
“Most of Ogo’s riders fled,” Ser Jorah was
saying. “Still, there may be as many as ten thousand
captives.” Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to
one of the towns on Slaver’s Bay. She wanted to cry, but she
told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it
looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.
“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for
Meereen,” Ser Jorah said. “They’ll pay a better
price than he’d get from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes
that they had a plague last year, so the brothels are paying double
for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough
children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the ships we
need, and hire men to sail them.”
Behind them, the girl being raped made a heartrending sound, a
long sobbing wail that went on and on and on. Dany’s hand
clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s
head. “Make them stop,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“Khaleesi?” The knight sounded perplexed.
“You heard my words,” she said. “Stop
them.” She spoke to her khas in the harsh accents of
Dothraki. “Jhogo, Quaro, you will aid Ser Jorah. I want no
rape.”
The warriors exchanged a baffled look.
Jorah Mormont spurred his horse closer. “Princess,”
he said, “you have a gentle heart, but you do not understand.
This is how it has always been. Those men have shed blood for the
khal. Now they claim their reward.”
Across the road, the girl was still crying, her high singsong
tongue strange to Dany’s ears. The first man was done with
her now, and a second had taken his place.
“She is a lamb girl,” Quaro said in Dothraki.
“She is nothing, Khaleesi. The riders do her honor. The Lamb
Men lay with sheep, it is known.”
“It is known,” her handmaid Irri echoed.
“It is known,” agreed Jhogo, astride the tall grey
stallion that Drogo had given him. “If her wailing offends
your ears, Khaleesi, Jhogo will bring you her tongue.” He
drew his arakh.
“I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I
claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason
why.”
“Ai, Khaleesi,” Jhogo replied, kicking his horse.
Quaro and the others followed his lead, the bells in their hair
chiming.
“Go with them,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“As you command.” The knight gave her a curious
look. “You are your brother’s sister, in
truth.”
“Viserys?” She did not understand.
“No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” He
galloped off.
Dany heard Jhogo shout. The rapers laughed at him. One man
shouted back. Jhogo’s arakh flashed, and the man’s head
went tumbling from his shoulders. Laughter turned to curses as the
horsemen reached for weapons, but by then Quaro and Aggo and
Rakharo were there. She saw Aggo point across the road to where she
sat upon her silver. The riders looked at her with cold black eyes.
One spat. The others scattered to their mounts, muttering.
All the while the man atop the lamb girl continued to plunge in
and out of her, so intent on his pleasure that he seemed unaware of
what was going on around him. Ser Jorah dismounted and wrenched him
off with a mailed hand. The Dothraki went sprawling in the mud,
bounced up with a knife in hand, and died with Aggo’s arrow
through his throat. Mormont pulled the girl off the pile of corpses
and wrapped her in his blood-spattered cloak. He led her across the
road to Dany. “What do you want done with her?”
The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and vague. Her hair was
matted with blood. “Doreah, see to her hurts. You do not have
a rider’s look, perhaps she will not fear you. The rest, with
me.” She urged the silver through the broken wooden gate.
It was worse inside the town. Many of the houses were afire, and
the jaqqa rhan had been about their grisly work. Headless corpses
filled the narrow, twisty lanes. They passed other women being
raped. Each time Dany reined up, sent her khas to make an end to
it, and claimed the victim as slave. One of them, a thick-bodied,
flat-nosed woman of forty years, blessed Dany haltingly in the
Common Tongue, but from the others she got only flat black stares.
They were suspicious of her, she realized with sadness; afraid that
she had saved them for some worse fate.
“You cannot claim them all, child,” Ser Jorah said,
the fourth time they stopped, while the warriors of her khas herded
her new slaves behind her.
“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of
the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to
tell me what I cannot do.” Across the city, a building
collapsed in a great gout of fire and smoke, and she heard distant
screams and the wailing of frightened children.
They found Khal Drogo seated before a square windowless temple
with thick mud walls and a bulbous dome like some immense brown
onion. Beside him was a pile of heads taller than he was. One of
the short arrows of the Lamb Men stuck through the meat of his
upper arm, and blood covered the left side of his bare chest like a
splash of paint. His three bloodriders were with him.
Jhiqui helped Dany dismount; she had grown clumsy as her belly
grew larger and heavier. She knelt before the khal. “My
sun-and-stars is wounded.” The arakh cut was wide but
shallow; his left nipple was gone, and a flap of bloody flesh and
skin dangled from his chest like a wet rag.
“Is scratch, moon of life, from arakh of one bloodrider to
Khal Ogo,” Khal Drogo said in the Common Tongue. “I
kill him for it, and Ogo too.” He turned his head, the bells
in his braid ringing softly. “Is Ogo you hear, and Fogo his
khalakka, who was khal when I slew him.”
“No man can stand before the sun of my life,” Dany
said, “the father of the stallion who mounts the
world.”
A mounted warrior rode up and vaulted from his saddle. He spoke
to Haggo, a stream of angry Dothraki too fast for Dany to
understand. The huge bloodrider gave her a heavy look before he
turned to his khal “This one is Mago, who rides in the khas
of Ko Jhaqo. He says the khaleesi has taken his spoils, a daughter
of the lambs who was his to mount.”
Khal Drogo’s face was still and hard, but his black eyes
were curious as they went to Dany. “Tell me the truth of
this, moon of my life,” he commanded in Dothraki.
Dany told him what she had done, in his own tongue so the khal
would understand her better, her words simple and direct.
When she was done, Drogo was frowning. “This is the way of
war. These women are our slaves now, to do with as we
please.”
“It pleases me to hold them safe,” Dany said,
wondering if she had dared too much. “If your warriors would
mount these women, let them take them gently and keep them for
wives. Give them places in the khalasar and let them bear you
sons.”
Qotho was ever the cruelest of the bloodriders. It was he who
laughed. “Does the horse breed with the sheep?”
Something in his tone reminded her of Viserys. Dany turned on
him angrily. “The dragon feeds on horse and sheep
alike.”
Khal Drogo smiled. “See how fierce she grows!” he
said. “It is my son inside her, the stallion who mounts the
world, filling her with his fire. Ride slowly, Qotho . . . if the
mother does not burn you where you sit, the son will trample you
into the mud. And you, Mago, hold your tongue and find another lamb
to mount. These belong to my khaleesi.” He started to reach
out a hand to Daenerys, but as he lifted his arm Drogo grimaced in
sudden pain and turned his head.
Dany could almost feel his agony. The wounds were worse than Ser
Jorah had led her to believe. “Where are the healers?”
she demanded. The khalasar had two sorts: barren women and eunuch
slaves. The herbwomen dealt in potions and spells, the eunuchs in
knife, needle, and fire. “Why do they not attend the
khal?”
“The khal sent the hairless men away, Khaleesi,” old
Cohollo assured her. Dany saw the bloodrider had taken a wound
himself; a deep gash in his left shoulder.
“Many riders are hurt,” Khal Drogo said stubbornly.
“Let them be healed first. This arrow is no more than the
bite of a fly, this little cut only a new scar to boast of to my
son.”
Dany could see the muscles in his chest where the skin had been
cut away. A trickle of blood ran from the arrow that pierced his
arm. “It is not for Khal Drogo to wait,” she
proclaimed. “Jhogo, seek out these eunuchs and bring them
here at once.”
“Silver Lady,” a woman’s voice said behind
her, “I can help the Great Rider with his hurts.”
Dany turned her head. The speaker was one of the slaves she had
claimed, the heavy, flat-nosed woman who had blessed her.
“The khal needs no help from women who lie with
sheep,” barked Qotho. “Aggo, cut out her
tongue.”
Aggo grabbed her hair and pressed a knife to her throat.
Dany lifted a hand. “No. She is mine. Let her
speak.”
Aggo looked from her to Qotho. He lowered his knife.
“I meant no wrong, fierce riders.” The woman spoke
Dothraki well. The robes she wore had once been the lightest and
finest of woolens, rich with embroidery, but now they were
mud-caked and bloody and ripped. She clutched the torn cloth of her
bodice to her heavy breasts. “I have some small skill in the
healing arts.”
“Who are you?” Dany asked her.
“I am named Mirri Maz Duur. I am godswife of this
temple.”
“Maegi,” grunted Haggo, fingering his arakh. His
look was dark. Dany remembered the word from a terrifying story
that Jhiqui had told her one night by the cookfire. A maegi was a
woman who lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries,
a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of
night and sucked life and strength from their bodies.
“I am a healer,” Mirri Maz Duur said.
“A healer of sheeps,” sneered Qotho. “Blood of
my blood, I say kill this maegi and wait for the hairless
men.”
Dany ignored the bloodrider’s outburst. This old, homely,
thickbodied woman did not look like a maegi to her. “Where
did you learn your healing, Mirri Maz Duur?”
“My mother was godswife before me, and taught me all the
songs and spells most pleasing to the Great Shepherd, and how to
make the sacred smokes and ointments from leaf and root and berry.
When I was younger and more fair, I went in caravan to Asshai by
the Shadow, to learn from their mages. Ships from many lands come
to Asshai, so I lingered long to study the healing ways of distant
peoples. A moonsinger of the Jogos Nhai gifted me with her birthing
songs, a woman of your own riding people taught me the magics of
grass and corn and horse, and a maester from the Sunset Lands
opened a body for me and showed me all the secrets that hide
beneath the skin.”
Ser Jorah Mormont spoke up. “A maester?”
“Marwyn, he named himself,” the woman replied in the
Common Tongue. “From the sea. Beyond the sea. The Seven
Lands, he said. Sunset Lands. Where men are iron and dragons rule.
He taught me this speech.”
“A maester in Asshai,” Ser Jorah mused. “Tell
me, Godswife, what did this Marwyn wear about his neck?”
“A chain so tight it was like to choke him, Iron Lord,
with links of many metals.”
The knight looked at Dany. “Only a man trained in the
Citadel of Oldtown wears such a chain,” he said, “and
such men do know much of healing.”
“Why should you want to help my khal?”
“All men are one flock, or so we are taught,”
replied Mirri Maz Duur. “The Great Shepherd sent me to earth
to heal his lambs, wherever I might find them.”
Qotho gave her a stinging slap. “We are no sheep,
maegi.”
“Stop it,” Dany said angrily. “She is mine. I
will not have her harmed.”
Khal Drogo grunted. “The arrow must come out,
Qotho.”
“Yes, Great Rider,” Mirri Maz Duur answered,
touching her bruised face. “And your breast must be washed
and sewn, lest the wound fester.”
“Do it, then,” Khal Drogo commanded.
“Great Rider,” the woman said, “my tools and
potions are inside the god’s house, where the healing powers
are strongest.”
“I will carry you, blood of my blood,” Haggo
offered.
Khal Drogo waved him away. “I need no man’s
help,” he said, in a voice proud and hard. He stood, unaided,
towering over them all. A fresh wave of blood ran down his breast,
from where Ogo’s arakh had cut off his nipple. Dany moved
quickly to his side. “I am no man,” she whispered,
“so you may lean on me.” Drogo put a huge hand on her
shoulder. She took some of his weight as they walked toward the
great mud temple. The three bloodriders followed. Dany commanded
Ser Jorah and the warriors of her khas to guard the entrance and
make certain no one set the building afire while they were still
inside.
They passed through a series of anterooms, into the high central
chamber under the onion. Faint light shone down through hidden
windows above. A few torches burnt smokily from sconces on the
walls. Sheepskins were scattered across the mud floor.
“There,” Mirri Maz Duur said, pointing to the altar, a
massive blue-veined stone carved with images of shepherds and their
flocks. Khal Drogo lay upon it. The old woman threw a handful of
dried leaves onto a brazier, filling the chamber with fragrant
smoke. “Best if you wait outside,” she told the rest of
them.
“We are blood of his blood,” Cohollo said.
“Here we wait.”
Qotho stepped close to Mirri Maz Duur. “Know this, wife of
the Lamb God. Harm the khal and you suffer the same.” He drew
his skinning knife and showed her the blade.
“She will do no harm.” Dany felt she could trust
this old, plainfaced woman with her flat nose; she had saved her
from the hard hands of her rapers, after all.
“If you must stay, then help,” Mirri told the
bloodriders. “The Great Rider is too strong for me. Hold him
still while I draw the arrow from his flesh.” She let the
rags of her gown fall to her waist as she opened a carved chest,
and busied herself with bottles and boxes, knives and needles. When
she was ready, she broke off the barbed arrowhead and pulled out
the shaft, chanting in the singsong tongue of the Lhazareen. She
heated a flagon of wine to boiling on the brazier, and poured it
over his wounds. Khal Drogo cursed her, but he did not move. She
bound the arrow wound with a plaster of wet leaves and turned to
the gash on his breast, smearing it with a pale green paste before
she pulled the flap of skin back in place. The khal ground his
teeth together and swallowed a scream. The godswife took out a
silver needle and a bobbin of silk thread and began to close the
flesh. When she was done she painted the skin with red ointment,
covered it with more leaves, and bound the breast in a ragged piece
of lambskin. “You must say the prayers I give you and keep
the lambskin in place for ten days and ten nights,” she said.
“There will be fever, and itching, and a great scar when the
healing is done.”
Khal Drogo sat, bells ringing. “I sing of my scars, sheep
woman.” He flexed his arm and scowled.
“Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy,” she
cautioned him. “Pain you will have, but you must keep your
body strong to fight the poison spirits.”
“I am khal,” Drogo said. “I spit on pain and
drink what I like. Cohollo, bring my vest.” The older man
hastened off.
“Before,” Dany said to the ugly Lhazareen woman,
“I heard you speak of birthing songs . . . ”
“I know every secret of the bloody bed, Silver Lady, nor
have I ever lost a babe,” Mirri Maz Duur replied.
“My time is near,” Dany said. “I would have
you attend me when he comes, if you would.”
Khal Drogo laughed. “Moon of my life, you do not ask a
slave, you tell her. She will do as you command.” He jumped
down from the altar. “Come, my blood. The stallions call,
this place is ashes. It is time to ride.”
Haggo followed the khal from the temple, but Qotho lingered long
enough to favor Mirri Maz Duur with a stare. “Remember,
maegi, as the khal fares, so shall you.”
“As you say, rider,” the woman answered him,
gathering up her jars and bottles. “The Great Shepherd guards
the flock.”
When the battle was done, Dany rode her silver
through the fields of the dead. Her handmaids and the men of her
khas came after, smiling and jesting among themselves.
Dothraki hooves had torn the earth and trampled the rye and
lentils into the ground, while arakhs and arrows had sown a
terrible new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted
their heads and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men
moaned and prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved among them, the mercy men with
their heavy axes, taking a harvest of heads from the dead and dying
alike. After them would scurry a flock of small girls, pulling
arrows from the corpses to fill their baskets. Last of all the dogs
would come sniffing, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never
far behind the khalasar.
The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands of
them, black with flies, arrow shafts bristling from each carcass.
Khal Ogo’s riders had done that, Dany knew; no man of
Drogo’s khalasar would be such a fool as to waste his arrows
on sheep when there were shepherds yet to kill.
The town was afire, black plumes of smoke roiling and tumbling
as they rose into a hard blue sky. Beneath broken walls of dried
mud, riders galloped back and forth, swinging their long whips as
they herded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and
children of Ogo’s khalasar walked with a sullen pride, even
in defeat and bondage; they were slaves now, but they seemed not to
fear it. It was different with the townsfolk. Dany pitied them; she
remembered what terror felt like. Mothers stumbled along with
blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hand. There were
only a few men among them, cripples and cowards and
grandfathers.
Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the
Lhazareen, but the Dothraki called them haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men.
Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had the same
copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien to her,
squat and flat-faced, their black hair cropped unnaturally short.
They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and Khal Drogo
said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of the
Dothraki sea was not meant for sheep.
Dany saw one boy bolt and run for the river. A rider cut him off
and turned him, and the others boxed him in, cracking their whips
in his face, running him this way and that. One galloped behind
him, lashing him across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with
blood. Another snared his ankle with a lash and sent him sprawling.
Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored of the
sport and put an arrow through his back.
Ser Jorah met her outside the shattered gate. He wore a dark
green surcoat over his mail. His gauntlets, greaves, and greathelm
were dark grey steel. The Dothraki had mocked him for a coward when
he donned his armor, but the knight had spit insults right back in
their teeth, tempers had flared, longsword had clashed with arakh,
and the rider whose taunts had been loudest had been left behind to
bleed to death.
Ser Jorah lifted the visor of his flat-topped greathelm as he
rode up. “Your lord husband awaits you within the
town.”
“Drogo took no harm?”
“A few cuts,” Ser Jorah answered, “nothing of
consequence. He slew two khals this day. Khal Ogo first, and then
the son, Fogo, who became khal when Ogo fell. His bloodriders cut
the bells from their hair, and now Khal Drogo’s every step
rings louder than before.”
Ogo and his son had shared the high bench with her lord husband
at the naming feast where Viserys had been crowned, but that was in
Vaes Dothrak, beneath the Mother of Mountains, where every rider
was a brother and all quarrels were put aside. It was different out
in the grass. Ogo’s khalasar had been attacking the town when
Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the Lamb Men had thought,
when they first saw the dust of their horses from atop those
cracked-mud walls. Perhaps a few, the younger and more foolish who
still believed that the gods heard the prayers of desperate men,
took it for deliverance.
Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high
thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, facedown,
and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take
their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought
the Lamb Men. I am the blood of the dragon, Daenerys Targaryen reminded
herself as she turned her face away. She pressed her lips together
and hardened her heart and rode on toward the gate.
“Most of Ogo’s riders fled,” Ser Jorah was
saying. “Still, there may be as many as ten thousand
captives.” Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to
one of the towns on Slaver’s Bay. She wanted to cry, but she
told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it
looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne.
“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for
Meereen,” Ser Jorah said. “They’ll pay a better
price than he’d get from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes
that they had a plague last year, so the brothels are paying double
for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough
children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the ships we
need, and hire men to sail them.”
Behind them, the girl being raped made a heartrending sound, a
long sobbing wail that went on and on and on. Dany’s hand
clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s
head. “Make them stop,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“Khaleesi?” The knight sounded perplexed.
“You heard my words,” she said. “Stop
them.” She spoke to her khas in the harsh accents of
Dothraki. “Jhogo, Quaro, you will aid Ser Jorah. I want no
rape.”
The warriors exchanged a baffled look.
Jorah Mormont spurred his horse closer. “Princess,”
he said, “you have a gentle heart, but you do not understand.
This is how it has always been. Those men have shed blood for the
khal. Now they claim their reward.”
Across the road, the girl was still crying, her high singsong
tongue strange to Dany’s ears. The first man was done with
her now, and a second had taken his place.
“She is a lamb girl,” Quaro said in Dothraki.
“She is nothing, Khaleesi. The riders do her honor. The Lamb
Men lay with sheep, it is known.”
“It is known,” her handmaid Irri echoed.
“It is known,” agreed Jhogo, astride the tall grey
stallion that Drogo had given him. “If her wailing offends
your ears, Khaleesi, Jhogo will bring you her tongue.” He
drew his arakh.
“I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I
claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason
why.”
“Ai, Khaleesi,” Jhogo replied, kicking his horse.
Quaro and the others followed his lead, the bells in their hair
chiming.
“Go with them,” she commanded Ser Jorah.
“As you command.” The knight gave her a curious
look. “You are your brother’s sister, in
truth.”
“Viserys?” She did not understand.
“No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” He
galloped off.
Dany heard Jhogo shout. The rapers laughed at him. One man
shouted back. Jhogo’s arakh flashed, and the man’s head
went tumbling from his shoulders. Laughter turned to curses as the
horsemen reached for weapons, but by then Quaro and Aggo and
Rakharo were there. She saw Aggo point across the road to where she
sat upon her silver. The riders looked at her with cold black eyes.
One spat. The others scattered to their mounts, muttering.
All the while the man atop the lamb girl continued to plunge in
and out of her, so intent on his pleasure that he seemed unaware of
what was going on around him. Ser Jorah dismounted and wrenched him
off with a mailed hand. The Dothraki went sprawling in the mud,
bounced up with a knife in hand, and died with Aggo’s arrow
through his throat. Mormont pulled the girl off the pile of corpses
and wrapped her in his blood-spattered cloak. He led her across the
road to Dany. “What do you want done with her?”
The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and vague. Her hair was
matted with blood. “Doreah, see to her hurts. You do not have
a rider’s look, perhaps she will not fear you. The rest, with
me.” She urged the silver through the broken wooden gate.
It was worse inside the town. Many of the houses were afire, and
the jaqqa rhan had been about their grisly work. Headless corpses
filled the narrow, twisty lanes. They passed other women being
raped. Each time Dany reined up, sent her khas to make an end to
it, and claimed the victim as slave. One of them, a thick-bodied,
flat-nosed woman of forty years, blessed Dany haltingly in the
Common Tongue, but from the others she got only flat black stares.
They were suspicious of her, she realized with sadness; afraid that
she had saved them for some worse fate.
“You cannot claim them all, child,” Ser Jorah said,
the fourth time they stopped, while the warriors of her khas herded
her new slaves behind her.
“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of
the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to
tell me what I cannot do.” Across the city, a building
collapsed in a great gout of fire and smoke, and she heard distant
screams and the wailing of frightened children.
They found Khal Drogo seated before a square windowless temple
with thick mud walls and a bulbous dome like some immense brown
onion. Beside him was a pile of heads taller than he was. One of
the short arrows of the Lamb Men stuck through the meat of his
upper arm, and blood covered the left side of his bare chest like a
splash of paint. His three bloodriders were with him.
Jhiqui helped Dany dismount; she had grown clumsy as her belly
grew larger and heavier. She knelt before the khal. “My
sun-and-stars is wounded.” The arakh cut was wide but
shallow; his left nipple was gone, and a flap of bloody flesh and
skin dangled from his chest like a wet rag.
“Is scratch, moon of life, from arakh of one bloodrider to
Khal Ogo,” Khal Drogo said in the Common Tongue. “I
kill him for it, and Ogo too.” He turned his head, the bells
in his braid ringing softly. “Is Ogo you hear, and Fogo his
khalakka, who was khal when I slew him.”
“No man can stand before the sun of my life,” Dany
said, “the father of the stallion who mounts the
world.”
A mounted warrior rode up and vaulted from his saddle. He spoke
to Haggo, a stream of angry Dothraki too fast for Dany to
understand. The huge bloodrider gave her a heavy look before he
turned to his khal “This one is Mago, who rides in the khas
of Ko Jhaqo. He says the khaleesi has taken his spoils, a daughter
of the lambs who was his to mount.”
Khal Drogo’s face was still and hard, but his black eyes
were curious as they went to Dany. “Tell me the truth of
this, moon of my life,” he commanded in Dothraki.
Dany told him what she had done, in his own tongue so the khal
would understand her better, her words simple and direct.
When she was done, Drogo was frowning. “This is the way of
war. These women are our slaves now, to do with as we
please.”
“It pleases me to hold them safe,” Dany said,
wondering if she had dared too much. “If your warriors would
mount these women, let them take them gently and keep them for
wives. Give them places in the khalasar and let them bear you
sons.”
Qotho was ever the cruelest of the bloodriders. It was he who
laughed. “Does the horse breed with the sheep?”
Something in his tone reminded her of Viserys. Dany turned on
him angrily. “The dragon feeds on horse and sheep
alike.”
Khal Drogo smiled. “See how fierce she grows!” he
said. “It is my son inside her, the stallion who mounts the
world, filling her with his fire. Ride slowly, Qotho . . . if the
mother does not burn you where you sit, the son will trample you
into the mud. And you, Mago, hold your tongue and find another lamb
to mount. These belong to my khaleesi.” He started to reach
out a hand to Daenerys, but as he lifted his arm Drogo grimaced in
sudden pain and turned his head.
Dany could almost feel his agony. The wounds were worse than Ser
Jorah had led her to believe. “Where are the healers?”
she demanded. The khalasar had two sorts: barren women and eunuch
slaves. The herbwomen dealt in potions and spells, the eunuchs in
knife, needle, and fire. “Why do they not attend the
khal?”
“The khal sent the hairless men away, Khaleesi,” old
Cohollo assured her. Dany saw the bloodrider had taken a wound
himself; a deep gash in his left shoulder.
“Many riders are hurt,” Khal Drogo said stubbornly.
“Let them be healed first. This arrow is no more than the
bite of a fly, this little cut only a new scar to boast of to my
son.”
Dany could see the muscles in his chest where the skin had been
cut away. A trickle of blood ran from the arrow that pierced his
arm. “It is not for Khal Drogo to wait,” she
proclaimed. “Jhogo, seek out these eunuchs and bring them
here at once.”
“Silver Lady,” a woman’s voice said behind
her, “I can help the Great Rider with his hurts.”
Dany turned her head. The speaker was one of the slaves she had
claimed, the heavy, flat-nosed woman who had blessed her.
“The khal needs no help from women who lie with
sheep,” barked Qotho. “Aggo, cut out her
tongue.”
Aggo grabbed her hair and pressed a knife to her throat.
Dany lifted a hand. “No. She is mine. Let her
speak.”
Aggo looked from her to Qotho. He lowered his knife.
“I meant no wrong, fierce riders.” The woman spoke
Dothraki well. The robes she wore had once been the lightest and
finest of woolens, rich with embroidery, but now they were
mud-caked and bloody and ripped. She clutched the torn cloth of her
bodice to her heavy breasts. “I have some small skill in the
healing arts.”
“Who are you?” Dany asked her.
“I am named Mirri Maz Duur. I am godswife of this
temple.”
“Maegi,” grunted Haggo, fingering his arakh. His
look was dark. Dany remembered the word from a terrifying story
that Jhiqui had told her one night by the cookfire. A maegi was a
woman who lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries,
a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of
night and sucked life and strength from their bodies.
“I am a healer,” Mirri Maz Duur said.
“A healer of sheeps,” sneered Qotho. “Blood of
my blood, I say kill this maegi and wait for the hairless
men.”
Dany ignored the bloodrider’s outburst. This old, homely,
thickbodied woman did not look like a maegi to her. “Where
did you learn your healing, Mirri Maz Duur?”
“My mother was godswife before me, and taught me all the
songs and spells most pleasing to the Great Shepherd, and how to
make the sacred smokes and ointments from leaf and root and berry.
When I was younger and more fair, I went in caravan to Asshai by
the Shadow, to learn from their mages. Ships from many lands come
to Asshai, so I lingered long to study the healing ways of distant
peoples. A moonsinger of the Jogos Nhai gifted me with her birthing
songs, a woman of your own riding people taught me the magics of
grass and corn and horse, and a maester from the Sunset Lands
opened a body for me and showed me all the secrets that hide
beneath the skin.”
Ser Jorah Mormont spoke up. “A maester?”
“Marwyn, he named himself,” the woman replied in the
Common Tongue. “From the sea. Beyond the sea. The Seven
Lands, he said. Sunset Lands. Where men are iron and dragons rule.
He taught me this speech.”
“A maester in Asshai,” Ser Jorah mused. “Tell
me, Godswife, what did this Marwyn wear about his neck?”
“A chain so tight it was like to choke him, Iron Lord,
with links of many metals.”
The knight looked at Dany. “Only a man trained in the
Citadel of Oldtown wears such a chain,” he said, “and
such men do know much of healing.”
“Why should you want to help my khal?”
“All men are one flock, or so we are taught,”
replied Mirri Maz Duur. “The Great Shepherd sent me to earth
to heal his lambs, wherever I might find them.”
Qotho gave her a stinging slap. “We are no sheep,
maegi.”
“Stop it,” Dany said angrily. “She is mine. I
will not have her harmed.”
Khal Drogo grunted. “The arrow must come out,
Qotho.”
“Yes, Great Rider,” Mirri Maz Duur answered,
touching her bruised face. “And your breast must be washed
and sewn, lest the wound fester.”
“Do it, then,” Khal Drogo commanded.
“Great Rider,” the woman said, “my tools and
potions are inside the god’s house, where the healing powers
are strongest.”
“I will carry you, blood of my blood,” Haggo
offered.
Khal Drogo waved him away. “I need no man’s
help,” he said, in a voice proud and hard. He stood, unaided,
towering over them all. A fresh wave of blood ran down his breast,
from where Ogo’s arakh had cut off his nipple. Dany moved
quickly to his side. “I am no man,” she whispered,
“so you may lean on me.” Drogo put a huge hand on her
shoulder. She took some of his weight as they walked toward the
great mud temple. The three bloodriders followed. Dany commanded
Ser Jorah and the warriors of her khas to guard the entrance and
make certain no one set the building afire while they were still
inside.
They passed through a series of anterooms, into the high central
chamber under the onion. Faint light shone down through hidden
windows above. A few torches burnt smokily from sconces on the
walls. Sheepskins were scattered across the mud floor.
“There,” Mirri Maz Duur said, pointing to the altar, a
massive blue-veined stone carved with images of shepherds and their
flocks. Khal Drogo lay upon it. The old woman threw a handful of
dried leaves onto a brazier, filling the chamber with fragrant
smoke. “Best if you wait outside,” she told the rest of
them.
“We are blood of his blood,” Cohollo said.
“Here we wait.”
Qotho stepped close to Mirri Maz Duur. “Know this, wife of
the Lamb God. Harm the khal and you suffer the same.” He drew
his skinning knife and showed her the blade.
“She will do no harm.” Dany felt she could trust
this old, plainfaced woman with her flat nose; she had saved her
from the hard hands of her rapers, after all.
“If you must stay, then help,” Mirri told the
bloodriders. “The Great Rider is too strong for me. Hold him
still while I draw the arrow from his flesh.” She let the
rags of her gown fall to her waist as she opened a carved chest,
and busied herself with bottles and boxes, knives and needles. When
she was ready, she broke off the barbed arrowhead and pulled out
the shaft, chanting in the singsong tongue of the Lhazareen. She
heated a flagon of wine to boiling on the brazier, and poured it
over his wounds. Khal Drogo cursed her, but he did not move. She
bound the arrow wound with a plaster of wet leaves and turned to
the gash on his breast, smearing it with a pale green paste before
she pulled the flap of skin back in place. The khal ground his
teeth together and swallowed a scream. The godswife took out a
silver needle and a bobbin of silk thread and began to close the
flesh. When she was done she painted the skin with red ointment,
covered it with more leaves, and bound the breast in a ragged piece
of lambskin. “You must say the prayers I give you and keep
the lambskin in place for ten days and ten nights,” she said.
“There will be fever, and itching, and a great scar when the
healing is done.”
Khal Drogo sat, bells ringing. “I sing of my scars, sheep
woman.” He flexed his arm and scowled.
“Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy,” she
cautioned him. “Pain you will have, but you must keep your
body strong to fight the poison spirits.”
“I am khal,” Drogo said. “I spit on pain and
drink what I like. Cohollo, bring my vest.” The older man
hastened off.
“Before,” Dany said to the ugly Lhazareen woman,
“I heard you speak of birthing songs . . . ”
“I know every secret of the bloody bed, Silver Lady, nor
have I ever lost a babe,” Mirri Maz Duur replied.
“My time is near,” Dany said. “I would have
you attend me when he comes, if you would.”
Khal Drogo laughed. “Moon of my life, you do not ask a
slave, you tell her. She will do as you command.” He jumped
down from the altar. “Come, my blood. The stallions call,
this place is ashes. It is time to ride.”
Haggo followed the khal from the temple, but Qotho lingered long
enough to favor Mirri Maz Duur with a stare. “Remember,
maegi, as the khal fares, so shall you.”
“As you say, rider,” the woman answered him,
gathering up her jars and bottles. “The Great Shepherd guards
the flock.”