//------------------------------// // Dothrakian Nights // Story: Those Who Ride // by Mitch H //------------------------------// Sunset found herself experiencing a peculiar blend of delight, shame, and anger as the khalasar left the scorched fields and terrorized citizens of Gyohan Byka behind them in a cloud of ash-flecked dust. Delight that they were leaving this terrible place, shame at how weak she had been in acting without understanding or comprehension, and anger that it had all come to this. The carts of the khaleesi's camp passed in front of the now-closed gates of the city in their course eastward, and the dead bodies continued to sway in the northern breezes, the bloody remains of the once-mayor of the city hanging next to the older of his two victims. Thankfully, the khaleesi had left earlier to ride with her husband, and wasn't here to see the rotting corpses with her handmaidens. Not that the others seemed to care about the display, not Jhiqui, not Irri, not even soft-handed, foreign Doreah. Sunset felt strangely alone as she stood, staring at the dead. She hated that man, the dead burgher whose decisions, whose greed, and whose cowardice had led him here, before her, a lesson in disgust and horror. She hated him with a purity which she never thought to find in herself. She hated what he'd shown her of that self. Of what foolishness she was capable of, of what she could tolerate, and for showing her that she could hate. She had never hated before like this. Most of all she hated what she had found in her heart, because she couldn't help but admire the khal's solution to the problem which the burgher had presented him. The fat man, whom the crows had found, and were now feasting upon, had brought the khalasar to his door. His insults to the great and terrible Khal Drogo had obliged the khal to direct his khalasar out of its intended eastward course, and to ride down this man's farmers, burn their fields, make play in the highway leading to his gates with their terrorized captives. If anyone in this had deserved to be hung by his steaming entrails as crows-food, it was this man. Sunset turned away from the carrion, and followed the khaleesi's camp-carts as they rolled eastwards. The khalasar crossed a wide river two days after the not-sack of Gyohan Byka, seizing the fords downstream from what had once, a great long time ago, been a mighty bridge for some long-lost empire. The great road which the Dothraki horde had been moving along - carts on the highway, naquikhalasari and outriders and bands of assorted riders swarming in the byways and fields for miles around - led up to the footings of that now-obliterated bridge. It must have been a mighty construction in its day, but this day, the carts and the other baggage were led down the new way which had been beaten into the soil by thousands before the Dothraki, and thousands today. It was a natural road, an unintended road, and Sunset found herself blessing the dry weather for the condition of the footing. It would be muddy enough as it was, from all the thousands of hooves and hundreds of wheels that would be churning the bottom of the fords as they went. Sunset had never had to ford a river with baggage-carts before, and she found herself struggling, helping push this cart and that through mud-holes with mud-slick hooves, side by side with equally mud-stained zafra. The hot sun in the sky baked the mud on her forelegs almost as soon as she took them out of the water, and she found, strangely, how close in height she was to these apes when she took herself off of four legs and stood to push with them. She thought about how determinedly four-legged she had been since coming here to this world of primate-bipeds. It was in part a reaction to having lost her magic, if she was going to be honest with herself. She didn't feel quite stable on her back hooves without horn-magic to keep her balance. She knew that earth ponies were fully capable of tottering around two-hooved, almost like these apes, these men, but in general, without her magic, she didn't feel like a horned earth pony, she felt like a crippled unicorn. So it was, so it went, and so she had stuck to her four steady hooves, cautious, careful. It was impossible to be cautious or careful in the middle of a sullen, stubborn, muddy river-ford like this. So, she got up on two legs, and pushed like the rest of them. After the khaleesi's baggage was safely on the other side of the river, Sunset went upstream to find someplace with clean water, to try and wash the dirt off of her coat and hooves, out of her frogs, before it all set like concrete. She looked up from the washing, to find the khaleesi kneeling beside her, washing river-mud out of her own leathers. "Never tell me some fool let you get out and push, Your Highness?" Sunset objected, in mixed Dothraki and Equuish. "If they can, see them try!" chirped the khaleesi. "Had fun! Why Sunset Horse deny me my moment to play mud!" Sunset looked at the delicate little white-haired girl, mud in her platinum tresses, dirt staining the riding-leathers she was wearing these days. Had they ever let the little princess make mud-cakes in the back-yards of the magisters' mansions and palaces she'd grown up in? "Aren't you a little old to be playing in the mud, Your Highness?" "Oh, hope not, Sunset Horse!" The khaleesi grinned like… like the hoyden she was, Sunset realized. Then the princess-hoyden flung a fistful of mud at Sunset. Sunset gasped in outrage.  And then she dipped her free left frog into the river-bank, and standing on her rear hooves returned volley. Things degenerated from there, and the other handmaidens descended up on the two of them, choosing sides seemingly at random. A great deal of mud rearranged itself across the khaleesi's retinue, and afterwards, they bathed a bit further upstream from where they'd churned up the river-bank. All the while, the khalasar continued to cross the wide fords of that great and lazy river that drained the Norvosi highlands to the north and east. The night after the baths, they curled in the great tent, the handmaidens keeping their mistress's company. Sunset could think of little in her experience like that closeness, that crowded cheerfulness, and she laughed along with the rest as they listened to Doreah and her story of the maid of the Summer Isle and her grand-romance with the river-snake.However salacious and disgusting the story might have been if you sat back and thought about it. The khaleesi tried and failed to sing some Andalese song about what she'd been told was a bear and a maiden fair, but she'd heard it as a very young child, from a nurse long-gone from her brother's service, and had apparently forgotten most of the words, except that she'd been told it was likely filthy in implication. "Sunset Horse!" laughed the khaleesi, giving up on her cracked-voice failure to sing. "Spare me from this mortification!" "Khaleesi!" scolded Jhiqui. "You must only speak in the real tongue, or you will never retain what you have learned. In Dothraki, please." "Bah, yes, in Dothraki, yes. Sunset Horse! A story, so that I forget that I forget my Andalese!" "What kind of story should I tell Your Highness? Something dirty, like Doreah's snake? My people have many of these, but they never told me, because my ears were too young and tender for such filth. Of romance, to honor your honeymoon here among the hills and the wild pigs?" "That sounds nice, Sunset Horse, but the night is dark, and warm, and I would something… wild. My sun and stars, he has given me all I could wish of romance." "Wild! Wild, she asks. Khaleesi, Your Highness, you ride among the wildest, and most savage of any creatures in these two worlds." "Two worlds! What, is there more than this?" "I'm told you grew to marrying age in the stone-house kingdoms of the Free Cities. Further, they say that you were born in storm and thunder in some distant salt-wracked stone on the other side of the Narrow Seas. What are those but two different worlds from this, we lay in tonight? I, like you, have crossed worlds, to lay my hooves in the soil of this new and dangerous world I ride through. And behind me, are many ponies who traveled the far abroad, and worlds I know not, but the tales they told us." Sunset thought, and rearranged her memories, and drew from them something suitably exotic. "I met a great bird in the court of the Forever Princess, who came to pay his respects to the monarch of the heavens and sun and moon, for in this world, she who was named after her own heavens controlled all that rose and all that fell, and when she said rise! The sun greeted the dawn, and when she said fall! The moon kissed the horizon and glided away into the jewel-box of the skies." "A bird! Are all animals alike, where you came from, Sunset Horse, that a horse talks to us, and a bird to you?" asked Jhiqui, drawn in despite herself. "No, not in the least, but the peoples were many, and their shapes as many as their magics, Jhiqui of the Dothraki. And this great bird was what we called a griffon, for his people were feathered about his head and shoulders, and he had talons upon his forelegs, but the rest of him was furred and clawed and tailed like a great beast, like a leopard or a lion!" "Like the carvings of the harpies of the Slaver cities down in the Slaver Coast?" "I do not know these harpies, Irri. What do they look like?" "They have the heads and busts of women, but the wings of birds of prey, or scavenger-beasts like vultures." "Interesting! But no, though I have seen griffons with heads so scabrous and naked of feather that one would think their ancestors consorted with turkey-vultures, and that hen was so hideous that I could not think how other griffons could stand to look up on her, let alone romance her. And yet, I'm told she was reckoned a great beauty among her kind! "But no, this ambassador-bird was a male, and a mighty specimen, with fur like a amber plains-lion, and white feathers like a sharp-eyed eagle. And though the princess rejected his embassy as not properly credentialed, the stories he told were marvelous and, I thought at the time, barbaric and full of splendor." Sunset used the Valyrian words barbaric and splendor, for Dothraki had no such terms, being themselves, unconsciously and reflexively, the very definition of barbaric and splendid. "He bragged of the ancestry of his noble lord, and of the deeds of those ancestors, their steadfastness in the service of the lost King of Griffonstone, and their right to that monarch's throne." "Griffoonwhoohun?" tried Irri, failing to replicate Sunset's Equuish. "It meant ‘Stone of the griffons, and it was the aerie of aeries, a vast tree-like collection of mighty mansions perched upon a peak like a great tree, a tree so enormous that it might very well hold up the sky. And in ancient days, the Griffon-stone was the foundation-stone of an empire of griffons that spread around the shores of the Celestial Sea, which in those days was known as the Griffon Sea. But those are tales of long ago, and the great king of the griffons disappeared, or died, or was done away with - the stories are endless. This ambassador came prepared with one such story, that claimed that enemies of the clan he served had conspired with the wicked Aramaspi to do away with their liege, and the loyal clan, being loyal to the end, had the right to the empty throne." "So," snarled the khaleesi, looking somehow larger in the half-darkness and the fire-light glowing through their open tent-flap, "these griffons were either perfidious lions, or treacherous wolves, or some sort of useless southern sand-snake colony, useless to their sovereign when it mattered?" "Your Highness, I think those creatures mean more to you, than to me, or the griffon as he sold his stories. We should talk later, about what they signify, but in this story, the griffon's faction, let us call them the Eagles, they were at war with their enemies, whom we could call the Lions. Now, this was not a noble war of open clashes in the field, but rather murders in the darkness and the back-alleys, and the Forever Princess refused to let her ponies be drawn into the ugliness." "How wise must a ruler be, if she never dies, and learns forever, piling lesson upon lesson, experience on experience?" asked Daenerys, rolling over on her back, lolling in the sleeping-cushions, staring at the pattern the fire-shadows made on the roof of the tent. "What if Aegon was still with us today, together with his fierce sister-wives? Would the provinces have rebelled? Would he have been driven into exile?" "The immortality that mattered," observed Sunset, who had picked up some of the story here and there in Pentos, and from the khaleesi herself, "was that of the dragons, was it not?" The khaleesi looked drawn, and much, much older than such a young girl ought to have. "Enough of that. Continue the story of the eagle-cat lords and their perfidy!" "As I have told you, the Forever Princess turned away his embassy, and gave them safe passage back to their war-torn lands. But before he left, I heard him tell a story of the first griffon, in the dawn of the world. "For in the dawn of the world, wild magic stalked the land, and sparks of mystery and miracle struck here, there, everywhere. Thinking beasts rose up out of the soil, and descended from the skies above. And into the great world-tree of which the tree-dwellings of half-splendid Griffon-Stone are a distant memory, climbed a great cat, a lion like the father of all lions, into the lower boughs in search of a meal of eggs. "That great king of lions climbed, stalked, and on one wide branch, he found a large nest, full of enormous eggs, and he licked his whiskers, and crept closer, to eat his fill. But the king of lions was quick, and he was careful, and he flipped around like a flash, for the queen of the eagles had been keeping a watch over her clutch of eggs from a higher branch, and she stooped like lightning, to destroy the invader with her raptor-talons. "The two met with a mighty crash there in front of the egg-nest, and though the king was quick, and the queen was swift, and both were savage as the night and bold as the day, they fell from branch to branch, breaking this and that as they fell. "And as they hit a low, wide branch, their fall was arrested, and the two, battered but furious, resumed their battle in this lower chamber of the world-tree. The queen of the eagles embedded her talons deep in the vital core of the lion-king's guts, tearing them quite out, and the lion-king took the eagle-queen's throat with his mighty jaws, and ripped her throat out with a terrible roar. "And then, mortally wounded, the two expired in their bloody embrace, talons into innards, fangs into flesh, and that would have been that, and this would be a story for scavengers and the worms, but. But! But this was the morning of creation, and was this not Equestria, land of miracles and second chances? "And when the dawn came, so did magic. And the dead carrion that had fallen to the very foot of the world-tree stirred, and in the blessing-light of the sun, an egg fell out of its dead mother, and fell to be cupped in the furred legs of its dead father. The world gave those murders a second chance, and the sun warmed that impossible egg, and it cracked, and opened. And that is how the first griffon burst into the world, screaming out his defiance. "But where that first griffon found his wife, that, that was another story," finished Sunset with a bit of a hoof-flourish, and she looked over to see how her little tale had affected the khaleesi. She looked at Daenerys Stormborn, young bride of a savage brute, of a savage that was his own way as deadly as the doomed lion-king and his murder-wife the raptor-queen had been in their day. The last princess of the Targaryens looked at Sunset Shimmer with joy in her glittering amethyst eyes, half in darkness, half lit by the flickering firelight. "Tell me another!"