The forest did not begin in a single slash across the road, but in dribs and drabs. Little copses of scrubby golden-leaved brush grew wider, thicker, and taller as the terrain rolled away from the border-river and the Norvosi river-bluffs beyond the river. Modest meadows alternated with narrow farmed fields, with no farm-houses or buildings to be seen anywhere near the highway. As the khalasar swarmed along the road, they made what was in any objective analysis a wide and capacious highway seem like a badly overcrowded Canterlot alley.
Sunset looked down at the cut-stone pavement of the road under her hooves. This was the same highway that had come down the centralmost of the canyon draws that the khalasar had squeezed through on the Norvosi side of the border, but in Norvosi territory the pavement had been left hidden under what must have been decades or even centuries of dust and dirt. Here in Qohorik country, someone had set out to maintain the old Valyrian road with a fanaticism that spoke to… a peculiar, even alien set of priorities, at least to her mind. She imagined that her hooves would have clopped loudly on those ancient stones - still so closely fitted that she couldn't see a single weed anywhere in sight - but for the fact that she was surrounded on every side by rolling carts, and trotting horses, and chattering Dothraki and zafra and all the chaos of a city on hooves and wheels.
Hooves and wheels that drew out of those cut-stone pavers a veritable, echoing world of ear-ringing noise. Sunset thought she could understand why the Norvosi let the roads grow their coats of sound-deadening dirt. She looked around at the near and distant yellow-leaved foliage, and wondered how deep the mounds of fallen leaves must get after the Running of the Leaves.
Then Sunsect considered that pony tradition, and mentally smacked herself for thinking such a thing might have arisen here in this new world, this world without ponies to regulate the seasons. It looked like autumn was almost upon them - what did these people do to clear the limbs, bring down the leaves? Did they even try to control the seasons like civilized ponies?
Sunset looked up at the baking late-afternoon sun, still shining hotly upon the crowded Dothraki, bunched up after the long crossing, and preparing to go into camp in this relatively open terrain. They had no princesses here; who told the sun to rise, the moon to set? To listen to the khal and his love-talk about his pale bride, he did, and his Daenerys was that moon, reflective of his glory. Sunset thought it safe to assume this was simply swagger, poetry - metaphor. For one, she'd never seen the khal do anything that even remotely looked like her former mentor's routine, her twice-daily ritual regulation of the heavenly spheres. Even great prodigies of ineffable, world-shaking power had to use some sort of ritual or preparatory act to move the heavens by will alone.
The Dothraki talked of a Great Stallion, and occasionally spoke of the sun in the sky as that self-same Stallion. Sunset was not sure this was metaphor, or religion, or actual literal truth. Looking at her fellow equines, so dead between the ears, so very much not-people, she could not imagine a god in this world walking on four hooves, however fiery those hooves, however bright the mane. She pondered the irony of the world she had come from, where an immortal pony with a mane like the auroras of the northern skies directed the sun in the sky like her own personal spotlight, and compared that bedrock fact of pony existence with this ape-world and its fever-dreams of figurative sun-stallions. Celestia had loathed it when the nobles made fun of her and called her the cake-goddess, or hinted at ironic worship of her alleged divinity, but she was real, she was tangible - you could reach out with a hoof, and slap her on her monumental flanks. If one was so inclined.
Celestia had been the closest thing Sunset had ever met to a god, and yet - no mare is a god to the pony who empties her chamber-pot.
Sunset looked up as the khaleesi kneed her grey back against the flow of traffic, and thought about the chamber-pot packed away in one of the carts. The little princess had used it extensively in the first several weeks, and it had been one of Sunset's jobs to clean it, had been her self-selected duty, if only to emphasize Sunset's personhood in the display of hoof dexterity. Then one day, Sunset had seen the khal squat at one of the public latrines, with his delicate flower of a khaleesi in plain view. She'd seen the little platinum-haired bride blink, and get an evil look in her eye. Then Sunset had seen her mistress, her little ape-echo of her all-but-goddess-in-this-world mentor, pull down her drawers, squat like a barbarian by the side of her savage husband, and made water while he voided his bowels, with all the world to watch.
From then on, the khaleesi used the very-public latrines like everyone else, and the fancy porcelain chamber-pot found a spot at the very back of the baggage, beneath the worn-to-rags silks and fine clothes which had lasted so very briefly in the saddle and on the road.
As they went into camp, they passed a detail of zafra digging away at the night's latrines under the bored eyes of a very junior camp-captain.
The khalasar was accompanied and somewhat preceded by a detachment of Unsullied infantry, long-speared and on foot. Sunset, accompanying the khaleesi in an expansive mood, eyed the strange not-men as they moved ahead of the slow-moving horde, and passed the slave-soldiers marching in the van. The archers from the khaleesi's khas parted around the Unsullied jogging in tight order, a half-dozen light-riding Dothraki enveloping on either side of the column of the armored eunuchs arrayed four to a row, ten deep. Sunset and the khaleesi rode to the left of the column, and Sunset got a close look at the gelded warriors with their spears and their round shields.
Their armor was made of thick, boiled leather, and they wore heavy caps with tails that protected their necks on both sides and the rear. The long spears - which were of a length longer than those used by Celestia's Royal Guard, and shorter than the pike she'd seen in an EUP museum once - looked like serious business, but she noticed a strange decoration hanging from each - what looked like braided hair, hanging long and tightly bound, from each weapon.
As they passed the detachment, Sunset kept herself between the khaleesi and Rahkaro, who had been assigned the command of the khaleesi's protective khas. Once they were out of ear-shot of the eunuchs Sunset slowed down a hair, and turned to ask the bloodrider a question.
"Yes, those were braids!" Rahkaro snarled, interrupting that question before she could even voice it. "Dothraki braids! Insolent worms.They'll never let us forget that, not as long as they can bind one true hair in a hundred, in a thousand plucked from some woman's wig. Slaves! I've met khals with less arrogance."
"When a Dothraki is defeated, they cut off their braids, right?" asked Sunset, trying to catch up to the rationale underlying Rakharo's ire.
"Yes, it is why Khal Drogo is so famed - he has never lost a fight, never been humbled, never felt the razor's-edge part his long hair." Rakharo felt at the base of his scalp, looking dark. "The elders say a bit of humbleness is good for a warrior. Makes him cautious, makes him keen to never lose a braid again. But every rider reveres and follows the long-braided ones, don't they? And then the damn Unsullied, they throw it in our faces."
"The braids they have on their spears - they're trophies? Are they real?" asked the khaleesi, who had fallen back to listen to their conversation.
"Yes, and sort of, khaleesi. They were once true trophies, from a day that is so long ago that it is only remembered in dirges and warning-songs. The reason that the Qohorik buy so many Unsullied. A fool of a khal, thought to run over a column of prepared Unsullied. Again and again, right in the face of their long sticks. Those Unsullied, those that survived - they're the reason there is a Qohor. And ever since, the gelded worms wave the braids they harvested from that field in our faces. Every time the Astapori deliver another batch of Unsullied, they break up a number of braids, and multiply them by mixing one hair into each new braid, one for each new Unsullied."
"It's a mockery. And damn them for being dangerous enough to not ride them down for that insult."
Sunset eyed the deflated demeanor of her young mistress, who had just wanted a nice gallop out in front of the day's advance. It was to have been a simple, joyous gallop along this beautiful highway, under the eaves of the forest closing canopy overhead. There were no leaves laying on the fitted cut-stones underneath their hooves for her to spook at, but the khaleesi's grey was even so starting to pick up their mutual mistress's dismay, and tossed her beautiful, empty head in agitation.
"Aw, Rakharo, those aren't your braids the geldings are brandishing! Don't be so down-mouthed. You know, I once heard a noblepony with a magnificent mustache tell a crowd of admiring colts how he grew such a glorious lip full of facial hair. He told them that when he was very young, a tiny colt no bigger than those that listened, he began shaving every morning. He stood up on a stool beside his father, and looked into the mirror with his sire. They shared the shaving-cream, and as his father trimmed his own whiskers, the then-colt scraped his naked lip, trying his best to cut what was at first not there at all. He did this from the day he first saw his father shave before the mirror, until the day he got his cutie mark. That noblepony said it was the razor that made the mustache, that cutting it fine is how you make it grow."
"What! A horse with a mustache!" laughed the khaleesi, diverted, and even Rakharo smiled, rubbing at his bare face, where a few straggling hairs struggled to suggest the fierce beards that graced the khal and his other bloodriders. "I cannot imagine such a wonder. Was it very long?"
"Very much so, Khaleesi. Almost as long as Khal Drogo's, and perhaps longer for having been cut so very many times in his youth."
And the khaleesi, cheered by the comic notion of little bearded horses, kicked her heels into the sides of her grey, and led Sunset and the riders of her khas on a merry chase down the long Valyrian highway under the spreading boughs of the tall golden trees closing in overhead.