When the battle was done, Dany rode her silver through the fields of the dead. Her handmaids andthe 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 arakhsand arrows had sown a terrible new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted their headsand screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men moaned and prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved amongthem, 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 thekhalasar.

The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands of them, black with flies, arrowshafts bristling from each carcass. Khal Ogo’s riders had done that, Dany knew; no man of Drogo’skhalasar 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 theyherded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and children of Ogo’s khalasar walkedwith 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. Mothersstumbled along with blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hand. There were only a fewmen among them, cripples and cowards and grandfathers.

Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the Lhazareen, but the Dothraki calledthem haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men. Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had thesame copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien to her, squat and flat-faced, theirblack hair cropped unnaturally short. They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and KhalDrogo said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of the Dothraki sea was not meant forsheep.

Dany saw one boy bolt and run for the river. A rider cut him off and turned him, and the othersboxed him in, cracking their whips in his face, running him this way and that. One galloped behindhim, lashing him across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with blood. Another snared his ankle witha lash and sent him sprawling. Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored of the sportand put an arrow through his back.

Ser Jorah met her outside the shattered gate. He wore a dark green surcoat over his mail. Hisgauntlets, greaves, and greathelm were dark grey steel. The Dothraki had mocked him for a cowardwhen 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 behindto bleed to death.

Ser Jorah lifted the visor of his flat-topped greathelm as he rode up. “Your lord husband awaits youwithin the town.”

“Drogo took no harm?”

“A few cuts,” Ser Jorah answered, “nothing of consequence. He slew two khals this day. KhalOgo first, and then the son, Fogo, who became khal when Ogo fell. His bloodriders cut the bells fromtheir 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 whereViserys had been crowned, but that was in Vaes Dothrak, beneath the Mother of Mountains, whereevery rider was a brother and all quarrels were put aside. It was different out in the grass. Ogo’skhalasar had been attacking the town when Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the LambMen 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 ofdesperate men, took it for deliverance.

fdesperate 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 herover a pile of corpses, facedown, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take theirturns. 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 thousandcaptives.”

Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to one of the towns on Slaver’sBay. She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it lookslike, 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 thanhe’d get from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes that they had a plague last year, so the brothels arepaying double for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough children survive thejourney, 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 andon and on. Dany’s hand clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s head. “Make themstop,” 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 ofDothraki. “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 donot understand. This is how it has always been. Those men have shed blood for the khal. Now theyclaim their reward.”

Across the road, the girl was still crying, her high singsong tongue strange to Dany’s ears. The firstman 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 herwailing 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 willknow the reason why.”

“Ai, Khaleesi,” Jhogo replied, kicking his horse. Quaro and the others followed his lead, the bellsin 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 horsemenreached for weapons, but by then Quaro and Aggo and Rakharo were there. She saw Aggo pointacross the road to where she sat upon her silver. The riders looked at her with cold black eyes. Onespat. 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 hispleasure that he seemed unaware of what was going on around him. Ser Jorah dismounted andwrenched him off with a mailed hand. The Dothraki went sprawling in the mud, bounced up with aknife 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 doyou want done with her?”

d-spattered cloak. He led her across the road to Dany. “What doyou want done with her?”

The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and vague. Her hair was matted with blood. “Doreah, see toher hurts. You do not have a rider’s look, perhaps she will not fear you. The rest, with me.” She urgedthe silver through the broken wooden gate.

It was worse inside the town. Many of the houses were afire, and the jaqqa rhan had been abouttheir grisly work. Headless corpses filled the narrow, twisty lanes. They passed other women beingraped. 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 CommonTongue, but from the others she got only flat black stares. They were suspicious of her, she realizedwith 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 thewarriors 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 isnot for you to tell me what I cannot do.” Across the city, a building collapsed in a great gout of fireand 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 abulbous 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 coveredthe 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. Sheknelt before the khal. “My sun-and-stars is wounded.” The arakh cut was wide but shallow; his leftnipple 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 theCommon Tongue. “I kill him for it, and Ogo too.” He turned his head, the bells in his braid ringingsoftly. “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 mountsthe world.”

A mounted warrior rode up and vaulted from his saddle. He spoke to Haggo, a stream of angryDothraki too fast for Dany to understand. The huge bloodrider gave her a heavy look before he turnedto his khal............