Sunset had never run as fast as she did in that sprint from the gates of the surrendered city. The sound of her own hooves thudding into the gravel of the road, then the packed dirt, echoed in syncopation with the percussive thumping of her struggling heart, and the rising thunder of both drowned out every thought, every quibble, every feeling that was not run, run, faster, faster, faster.
The world was throbbing behind her eyes when he found the khal's cavalcade. They were a leisurely hour's walk from the previous night's encampment, and his bloodriders surrounded him in full panoply. A corps of axe-men trailed behind them, a host of archers rode ahead. The whole gave an impression of force, of aggression coiled and ready for the leap.
The khaleesi was nowhere to be seen, nor any of the women of the camp.
Sunset came up behind the khal's fighting khas, running at a dead gallop in a cloud of ash-tainted dust. The khal himself was not painted in his colors, but his eyes were sharp and his arakh was ready to hand in a sheath strapped along the saddle of his best horse, the great chestnut stallion with the vast chest and the powerful shoulders.
She gathered her remaining wind, and slowed to a stop within five strides of the now-still horse-lord on his mount.
"What news have you, Sunset Horse?" The words were aimed at her, but he turned from side to side, projecting them across the attentive crowd of lajaki, of warriors. "Am I today to break my betrothal peace, and sally with my blood and my lajasar to tear down another pile of unnatural stone and mud raised over the earth in rejection of the Stallion and his ordering of the galloping plain? Shall my arakh drink deep of the blood of stone-men fit for naught but the slaughter-herd and the collar?"
"No, my liege, my khal," Sunset forced out of her aching lungs, her coat twitching with all of the blood-thirsty eyes upon her. "They have given you their gates. Gyohan Byka surrenders to your, to your might!"
The adrenaline had been burned out of her by the long gallop, and she felt that rider's high that comes after the second wind, the third wind - a sort of floating grace, entirely physical in essence. She didn’t think of the sacking of the farms, the rapes, the riders playing with prisoners like cats teasing at captured mice. She didn’t even think of that meaty thunk and the weight of the weeks-dead magister’s head as it landed on her back for that brief, terrifying instant. All she did was await a gap in the predatory roar of the assembled lajaki as they shook their weapons at her.
Then she continued.
"They have opened their gates wide to your naquikhasari! There are two hanged men greeting us, one on each side of the main gate. As I left, Adrahko and Rakharo were taking command of the town."
The khal half bowed, smiling beneficently, "Then today is a day of peace. My men, think you today is a good day for a gentle ride? Let us go down to the stone houses, and gather our due from the stone-men who bend their heads to those that ride!"
And the lajasar roared with approval, and dissolved into its component clots, Dothraki cheerfully trotting past the still unicorn as they broke away from the road, and swarmed around her, heading for the town which had given itself to them.
Riders spread out from the self-disassembling war-host, searching out the components of the greater khalasar in motion, to apprise them all of the changes occasioned by the surrender of the little city. There had been two plans for the next night's encampment, and one had been for a war-footing sited so that the khal and his lajaki could be supported in what had been expected to be a brief but vigorous siege.
They would be moving into camp, instead, around the surrendered city, taking their due from the subjugated Gyohani, but otherwise an encampment as any other Sunset had seen in her brief time with the Dothraki. She had expected to be sent out as one of the messengers, as she had on previous occasions, but the khal, rolling loosely on his great war-mount as the beast moved along, waved his khaleesi's witch-horse to his side instead.
"Stay, stay, Sunset Horse. These stone-men, they still speak the coastal-tongue, and I would have someone to speak my words for me. It will confuse them! That will be jolly. And I find I am in a jolly mood. They sound fearful enough for today, I do not need them shitting themselves before me, I do not think."
Sunset moved at a slightly faster pace than a trot, to keep up with the vast strides of the khal's great beast, gathering her thoughts from the morass of her morning and her ride, slowly coming back to herself, and coming down from the hypnotic effects of that mad gallop.
"You do not wish them terrified, Great Khal?"
"Ha! Of course I want them scared! Fear! Fear is the sinews of command, Sunset Horse. Fear drives men. Fear breaks men! But fear breaks them into pieces that can't be picked up, if you put too much fear in them. If they're hanging men to calm me, then that, my strange little horse, is scared enough for today."
"What about… respect?” What in Tartarus was coming out of her mouth? “Loyalty?” Was she mad? “...Love?"
"Listen to you! Where did you learn to speak the real tongue, so quickly, so well? Is it witchery, or did that fat fool I cut down teach you more than I'm told he claimed? He didn't speak the real tongue himself, did he?"
"No, Great Khal,” said the madpony, thinking of that meaty impact, the splater… “I am… a very quick study. Faster than I thought myself to be, it turns out. I don't think it is magic, or if it is, it's nothing I do… consciously. Uh, 'mindfully'?"
"Ha! You are certainly faster to pick it up than the moon of my life." The great bipedal beast upon his enormous steed leaned down, whispering theatrically. "Tell no one, but you are both much faster than I. I will always be quicker in knowing how to gut a man, than how to speak his degenerate words!"
The khal swayed back in his saddle, and continued, loudly. "If men conquered with their tongue, and with their words, then this khalasar would ride to another's command."
Sunset looked up, screaming inside, and yet… She narrowed her eyes. "And yet it rides to your command, Great Khal, and not at the edge of your arakh."
Mad!
"Ha! True enough, Sunset Horse! But my command is to Dothraki warriors, in Dothraki words, to Dothraki deeds! If I could only command stone-house men in stone-house words, I would only be able to extract from them stone-house deeds! No, no. Look at my light of the moon, her weedy little brother, who thinks to command me like a seller of sold stone-house steel! To cross his poison water and sack his distant lands… I will figure him out, some other day. But he would command me in stone house words, to his poison-water deeds. Harumph!"
"You do not,” Her long mentorship under the gentle Princess had utterly unfitted her for interacting with the great and powerful. Her instincts! Her lunatic instincts! “You do no intend to give King Viserys his promised…"
"No! Never that! I have promised him! I have given my word! A khal's promises are like the packed earth beneath your horses' hooves! If they are not firm, the herd struggles, falls, fails! No, a khal's words must be solid footing, that much is true. And I have given him my words. If he understands them. And it is his problem if he does not understand exactly what I have said, exactly what I have promised. And nothing more! But enough of the foolish steel-shirt khalakka. This is not a day for him. Today is a day for managing the fear of terrified stone-house men!"
The khal sat back in his saddle, thinking over what he had said. Then he said something else, quietly, almost as much to himself as to the little orange unicorn riding by his side, as if he didn't think what he had said was quite all there was to it.
"Reputation, Sunset Horse, is an arakh," said the khal, stroking the sheathed weapon beside his saddle. "Fear is a blade, a sharpened piece of steel. You can cut with it, kill with it, but if you take a sharpened blade by the naked tang, you cut yourself as well. Bleed out, die of blood poisoning, look the fool. Only fools fight with naked steel. Honor, honor is the haft - your word. Your word is the handle, the thing that lets you grip the blade without gashing open your own palm with your fear.
"And once you've mastered your arakh, you've mastered your enemy. You can kill his heart, before your blade ever touches his skin. Open doors, with the promise of the arakh alone. Tear down cities, with the weight of your word. When you master their fear with your words, you have made yourself an arakh. An arakh that can cut through walls, cut through stone houses, cut through worlds."
The khal and his men were greeted by Rakharo inside the gates of Gyohan Byka and a pair of riders, who stood watch over a crowd of bare-headed Gyohani. The crowd laid down in the dirt of the square behind the gates, laid prone as the great khal passed between the two hanging corpses, his attention on the dead rather than the living.
The cavalcade came to a stop beside the young bloodrider, and Khal Drogo turned to his man.
"Have they been compliant, Rakharo?"
"Yes, Great Khal. They do not speak the real tongue, so it has been slow riding, but they've started bringing out the gifts owed, and I think I got across to them that they owe much more on top of that, for making us come to them."
"They speak the tongue of the coastal stone house men, do they not?"
"Sort of, Great Khal? In a sense."
"Then you should not have sent your magic horse away, with her talent for words! Sunset Horse, come forward, we would have words with these cowards!"
Sunset trotted forward, obedient. The fires in the countryside had died away, and they had not returned along the back-trail upon which all the destruction and death had been; if not for the smoke, it would have been a blue-skied day of perfect, sunny weather. But the hanging offal outside of the gate had gotten her back up again, and she was struggling to, as the khal had put it, manage her fear. And her guilt.
"Speak my Dothraki words to these stone-house zafra in stone-house words!"
"The Great Khal speaks! Listen, you slaves!"
"Good! Good! Tell them that it is good that zafra know their zafra places. And I see from the bloody curds they've hung on their stone walls, that they know how to put me in a good mood. Who speaks for them?"
"It is good that slaves know that they are slaves. Khal Drogo sees the men you have hanged from your walls, and is pleased. Who speaks for the town?"
A well-fed man, grey-pelted and almost as tall as he was wide, got creakingly to his knees, looking up like a clever pony trying to be humble. Sunset could see the confusion in his eyes when he looked up to find before him not a woman, but herself. He held a rich cloth in his hands, wringing the fabric - Sunset thought it was perhaps some sort of hat. She could see him gathering his wits, and dismissing the orange specter before him. He offered up his speech to the khal:
"Greetings, Great Drogo, and we welcome your benevolence to our humble city. We were led astray by evil men, who told us false things, and led us into wicked disobedience to your commands. When your men came to our lands, we realized our errors, and as you see, we punished them for their wickedness, that led us to disrespect you and your commands!"
Khal Drogo turned to Sunset, his eyebrow arched questioningly.
"Ah, he says that the dead men beside the gate are those that led the city to disobey your commands, Great Khal. They killed them to show remorse."
"Hmph. They would murder their own khals, simply to avoid our wrath? Are we that frightening, Rakharo?"
"It seems to be the case, my khal. What else could it be?"
"I know what I would do, if I were a worm, and a stone-house man, and a terrible khalasar came to my gates with blood in their eyes and fire at their heels. And it would not be to let my little stone-house children overthrow me and hang me by my heels or my neck from my own walls!"
The khal thought, looking down at the man who was almost as huge as he, himself, although the bulk of the kneeling man was more in fat than the khal's sleek muscle. This tableau of thought and obedience was brief in duration, as a shriek of fury cut the air, startling both the Dothraki in their saddles, and the Gyohani upon the dirty cobblestones.
A woman emerged from a building to Sunset's right, her face warped with rage and grief, tears streaking her dark cheeks under burning eyes. Two younger women pulled at her arms, tugging ineffectually at their elder, who was both much larger than them, and apparently, stronger as well.
"Liar! Coward! Monster! Fools, that you let him do this! Fools, that you let the savages into our city! Doom! Doom! You've killed us all! Damn you, damn you, damn you!"
With each damnation, she pulled her attendants forward, striding like a farmer cutting new sod for the first time, jerking left and right, as if pulling a plow through stony ground. Shaking them off with one last 'damn you!', she moved quickly forward to the riders and the crowd.
Two of the khal's men brought their horses around, keeping the shrieking woman from approaching Khal Drogo.
"Sunset Horse! What does the vikeesi want?"
Sunset listened to the shrieking woman, and feared to translate the profanities, the incoherent obscenities - wait, was that right? The woman's accent, but she had to say something - "My khal, she disapproves. She thinks you'll kill them all."
"Well, it is an option, if I am to be screamed at by vikeesi. Find out what has made her so willing to court my arakh."
The fat man on his knees had half-risen, screaming imprecations at the almost-as-fat woman in that same bastardization of proper Pentoshi Valyrian, and Sunset had difficulty making out their mutual accusations through the thick local accent. No, not an accent - a different dialect? The khal was waiting!
"My khal, I think she's the leader of - no, the mother of the local opposition party, the, uh, er. The fat man's enemies, I think? She's accusing him of judicial murder of, er, using you, Great Khal."
"USING ME? Rakharo, silence that vikeesi! Someone, shut up that stone-house worm on the ground!"
The two apes were beaten to the ground, whip-ends used to interrupt the semi-suicidal argument that had broken out between the Gyohani.
"Now," continued the khal. "More calmly, before I really do lose my patience and kill every stone-house imbecile here. What does she say?"
"Uh, my khal, I think she's saying that the dead by the gate are her sons or - I think a son and a husband? - Son and husband?"
The fat woman shook her head, furiously, eyes burning. She jabbered something in ever-more-incoherent not-really-Valyrian.
"She says that they were not the party who denied you your gifts and your respect, but were -" Sunset turned to the fat woman, and prompted her again, getting a rush of rapid-fire hill-Valyrian that she mostly understood. "Vulnerable and on the outs with the town council. My khal, the leaders of the city hanged someone at random to appease your fury. I think? This man, he used their fear of you to rid him of enemies. She says he was the one who disrespected you."
The khal kicked his horse forward, looming over the fat man who was being held to the ground, an arakh against the back of his neck by a silent Dothraki. He stared down at the quivering fat man, as if he could kill the man with nothing but a look.
"No, Sunset Horse, I think you're right. Leader, not leaders. This is the sort of thing a man who has control over his people would do, could do. Kill intimate enemies, to stave off distant ones? Clever man. Wise man. To use another's reputation as his blade. To make fear of me his ally."
The khal sat tall in his saddle. "Dangerous man. Rakharo, have the fat man hung beside his victims. Use his entrails. Make sure he lives while he hangs."
Khal Drogo rode away from the screaming fat man as Rakharo and two others dragged him away, no doubt to look for - Sunset stopped that thought-process before it led to imagining what the khal had ordered. She watched the khal instead, as he kneed his horse over to where the two riders were restraining the angry widow. He summoned her to join him.
"Sunset Horse, ask her how she thought this would end."
Sunset relayed the question.
"Great Khal, she thinks you will kill them both. Expects it."
"Ha! I like her. Is she my enemy?"
Sunset asked her.
"Not if you kill the fat man, my khal."
"Ha! Another dangerous one. If she were any younger, and I were not a married man, I'd steal her away. Those two - her daughters?"
"So it appears, Great Khal."
"Qotho, take them. If this is what the women of that family are like, I want to see what brats they'll give us, if I give them to my bloodriders. Cohollo, Haggo, take the town, get our offerings." The khal looked down at the older woman. "Don't sack the town. Sunset Horse, tell her we're taking her daughters. Does she have a problem with that?"
"She says… she can have more. Can she?"
"I don't know, Sunset Horse. She's fat enough. But good enough for today. I'm feeling generous! Like the Lamb-Men, we'll only shear the sheep! We'll take just one."
And the Dothraki set out throughout the town. To harvest the fleece.