Chapter 219: A Miracle
More than two thousand Dothraki slaves gathered on the beach in confused clusters, waiting. Their new master had given orders: they were here to witness something. What exactly, nobody had told them.
Celia had purchased them from Meereen and from several Dothraki khalasars passing through the region. Every one of them was a young man in his prime — warriors captured in defeat and sold south into slavery by the victors who'd beaten them.
The beach was crowded. The miracle, whatever it was, had been advertised widely enough that the audience extended well beyond its intended subjects. A significant number of Astapori nobles had made the trip out, along with Lord Fehmar and several of the senior Unsullied instructors who had recently been elevated to head their respective families following the restructuring.
Everyone on the beach was puzzling over the same thing: the enormous iron cauldron sitting near the waterline, the pipes extending from its sealed lid, and the series of water tanks connected to those pipes by channels that nobody could quite follow to their conclusion.
"Why did she buy Dothraki?" Lysio, one of the Unsullied instructors who'd come to observe, kept his voice low as he leaned toward Fehmar. "They're a headache in any slave operation. Children are manageable — young enough to shape, and after training they're no different from any other slave. Women too, whatever their origin, can be controlled. But they bought only young men. Dothraki men."
He shook his head. "You can't farm them. You can't put them to skilled labor. You can beat them half to death and they'll look you in the eye while they bleed. They'll fight, but not the way an arena crowd wants to see — they're warriors, not performers. Buying them for the pits is money thrown into the sea."
"And they're expensive," said the other instructor beside him, a man named Varrix. "The Khals price them as though Dothraki blood is worth more than anyone else's. Every buyer swallows the markup and calls it the cost of not having a khalesar ride through your city. The only reason it's bearable is that conquest is how the Dothraki grow — they need living captives to swell their numbers, so they don't sell defeated warriors unless the khalesar is already beyond carrying capacity. If that weren't true, every slave trader on the road would have gone broke by now."
Lysio glanced toward where Ian and Daenerys stood at the water's edge, and a thin smile crossed his face. "They're actually paying those prices. I'd wager every merchant in Slaver's Bay is using this moment to clear out their Dothraki stock at top coin."
"You're not seeing it." Fehmar cut across the conversation without raising his voice, his eyes still fixed on Ian rather than Daenerys. "He wants cavalry. The Dothraki ride before they walk — they're the best natural horsemen in the world. His Queen already commands the finest infantry alive. Add a cavalry force to that and what do you have?"
Lysio laughed outright. "Cavalry from Dothraki slaves? If it were that simple, they'd have been the most sought-after slaves on the market for a hundred years. Everyone would be doing it. Instead they sit in holding pens until someone desperate buys them at a loss."
"He's right," Varrix added. "There's the custom to account for. A Dothraki who's been defeated and sold — his Khal didn't grant him the right to ride again. Unless the victorious Khal accepts him back and lets him take a horse to wash away the shame, he won't touch one. They believe it curses them. Bars them from the Night Lands after death." He nodded toward the slaves sprawled on the sand. "Those men were sold. Their Khal didn't want them back. They won't go near a horse, let alone ride one into battle. What exactly is the silver-haired queen going to do about that?"
"He has a dragon." Fehmar said it quietly, still watching Ian.
Lysio snorted. "A hatchling. Put it in a pen with my hunting dogs and I'd give the dogs ten minutes. That's not going to make a defeated Dothraki forget his gods."
Fehmar was quiet for a moment. Then: "Do you know why I brought you here today?"
The laughter stopped. Something in Fehmar's tone killed it.
"Not to embarrass us, I'd imagine," Lysio said carefully.
The other instructor shook his head. "I couldn't say."
"Do you know," Fehmar said, still not answering, "what that woman in the red dress said to convince me?"
Lysio and Varrix glanced at each other. They knew that Celia had offered them the headships of two great families — that had been the offer on the table. But Fehmar had already been persuaded before either of them was approached, and they'd never gotten the full account of how. Based on everything they knew of the man, a lordship and a family name shouldn't have been enough. Fehmar's ambitions had never seemed to fit inside Astapor.
"She asked me a question," Fehmar said. His voice had dropped to something quieter and more controlled than his usual register, as though he was keeping something compressed. "She asked me: Are you satisfied?"
Neither instructor spoke.
"She laid it out plainly. To spend your whole life in a city of fewer than a hundred thousand people. To wield a whip over slaves as the summit of your authority. To put on gilded Ghiscari armor during festivals and ride a decorated chariot into the fighting pits — to play the part of a general for a crowd of smallfolk, while leaving every actual battle to men you've trained but will never command in a real war." He paused. "And then she asked again. Are you satisfied with this?"
Fehmar looked at the beach, at the water, at nothing in particular.
"I told her no. Immediately. I didn't consider lying — I didn't want to. Even before I knew what she was leading toward, I couldn't deceive myself on that particular question."
He turned to look at his instructors.
"Everyone else in Slaver's Bay is satisfied. Every Good Master, every Wise Master, every Great Master. Every Khal who rides through and takes his cut. Every captain who anchors here for a week and moves on. They are all satisfied with exactly what this place is." His voice tightened. "But we aren't. You and I — we have spent our lives studying military texts that no one else in this city has touched in a generation. Books the Good Masters threw into storage because what use does a slave trader have for tactics and command structure? We learned how to train soldiers, how to form ranks, how to read a battlefield, how to lead. We were taught as though we were the inheritors of the Old Empire."
The quiet broke.
"And we are slave traders." The words came out with a force that surprised even Lysio. "How am I supposed to accept that? How are either of you?"
Lysio stared at him. "You think the Silver Queen can change it?"
"I think her Hand can." Fehmar's gaze moved back to Ian, and something in his expression was harder to read than usual — close to conviction, or the beginning of it. "Lord Darry. I think he can help us become what we were trained to be. I think he can give us back what this city wasted."
"Darry." Lysio said the name as though testing it. "You rate him that highly? He looks like he's barely seen twenty years."
"I have spoken with him six times about tactics in the past month. Six conversations." Fehmar let that land. "I have not won one of them." A beat. "Did you see him in the tokar? He understands what Old Ghis was. He understands what we were. I don't know where that knowledge came from, but it's real." He looked toward the beach, toward the iron cauldron and the pipes and the water tanks that nobody had yet explained. "He told me to come here today and watch. So I am watching."
"Watch what, exactly?" Varrix asked.
"A miracle," Fehmar said. "That's what he called it."
On the beach below, Ian stepped forward toward the gathered Dothraki slaves, and the morning got very quiet.
(End of Chapter)
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