Those Who Ride

by Mitch H

The Choke-point

Someone had lied to Sunset. The two days' ride a bloodrider had told her laid between them and the Dothraki home ranges, stretched into three days' journey, then four, then another week and a half. And at the end of all that, she found herself looking out of the end of a long, meandering canyon at not the vast Dothraki grasslands but rather endless golden tree-tops swaying in the breeze.

A line of sandstone bluffs rose over the heads of the carts and remount herds of the main body of the khalasar, and they were by necessity crowded together flank-to-nose as the rearmost elements pressed forward on the foremost. These were, for such a great host, very tight quarters indeed.

Just beyond the shelf of level ground in front of the bluffs was a steep drop-off and, at the foot of that rocky slope, a racing river like a flood in miniature. This harsh, wild little river and the bluffs overhead marked the frontier in a quite emphatic fashion, drawing a sharp border between the Norvos confederacy and their neighboring city-state, the easternmost of the Free Cities, sinister, mysterious Qohor and her dependencies.

This river was as dangerous and narrow as the previous three had been wide and fat. The boulder-strewn slopes below the shelf upon which the horde crowded and milled, were barely anchored on their upper slope by the typical scrub of the Norvosi highlands. Down among the rocks and racing waters, greener vegetation grew lush and wild. Beyond the white-water demarcation of nature’s fury, though, was a slight rise, drained into the water-shed of the rushing river. Growing on that slight rise and spreading eastward in an impressive vista as the land slowly fell away into the distance, were endless stands of amber-leaved deciduous trees, their canopies closing together until they formed a single, golden horizon of forest. A forest that, for all of its golden highlights, still looked to Sunset like any other a dark forest she had seen in her short life. Memories of home.

The river was unfordable by any beast born of equine dam, and the negotiations to cross the trade-bridges were tense and full of threat and bluster, or so Sunset heard. The khal and his khas chose to keep Sunset away from the Qohorik border-fortresses and their whip-thin slave-captains and the guards those mercenaries led. Sunset and the other handmaidens peered from a distance at the black-armored Unsullied in their stone-walled posts above the high bridges that crossed the unfordable waters below.

"They say," said Jhoqui with a sneer, "the Qohorik purchase their soldiers from the Astapori training-colleges because they cannot trust their own men with the interests of each others' family fortunes. The Qohorik are all witches, and sneak-thieves, and are treacherous like the changeable moon. They hire coaster sell-swords as well, but the Unsullied, they're owned by the people as a whole, not the individual merchants, not the families, not the witches' covens, or their priestly cults. The sell-swords fall too easily into alliance with this ambitious man, or that pestilent priest, or that sly old witch, and become their patrons' horse-tail, to be twitched and whipped for the sake of the horse's ass, and not the horse itself."

Sometimes, Sunset thought, Jhoqui's past rose up out of her conversation like hidden ruins rising out of a flooded plain. The brusque handmaiden had once been the pampered daughter of a great khal, not quite as mighty and all-conquering as the unassailable Khal Drogo, but once in his time a leader of a respectable khalasar. He had fallen to old age, or perhaps treachery - Sunset was not sure - and the bloodriders and lesser Dothraki she'd asked had not been as interested in the subject as she had been. But Jhoqui was a font of information on the politics of the road, if you could get her going.

"Their slave-trainers, the Astapori, they carefully time the cutting of their trainees. Just old enough that it doesn't make them run to fat. There's nothing so lean and wiry as an Unsullied. Look at them. Harder than any of ours, except perhaps the bloodriders. And the khal, of course."

"Cut?" asked Sunset, confused. "Cut how?"

Doreah, who was struggling through her still-poor grasp of Dothraki to learn from Jhoqui's wisdom, laughed to hear the unicorn fail to understand something so basic. "The horse has not heard of castrated slaves! There is something Sunset Horse does not know!"

"Gelding!" exclaimed Sunset. "They actually cut the peckers off of their Guard! Why, it destroys their aggression, their ambition, does it not? Everypony knows that you tame a stallion by cutting off his balls."

The angriest she'd ever seen Celestia had been that time they'd overheard some nobles chortling about the old rumor that the princess had her personal guards gelded. Sunset had gotten an earful of fury from the usually unflappable Celestia, an impassioned litany of every reason why gelding was an abomination, an evil practice. The princess had ranted about the six attempts in the last five centuries she'd made to have the practice banned, only to fail in her attempts to convince the Stables that gelding wasn't the natural punishment for certain great outrages against the moral order, certain terrible crimes. Crimes! Celestia had raged, punish one atrocity with another? Fools!

"The Astapori say, that ambition is a curse in soldiers, and that training and brutal discipline provides what balls take away with them," said Jhoqui.

"The Unsullied can't have children, can't build up families, have no interests of their own," sighed Doreah. "The Lysene magisters' council hires a lot of them. More of them come into the houses than you'd think."

"What!" exclaimed Irri, drawn in despite herself. "What use does an eunuch have for a prostitute!"

"What use does a woman have for a prostitute, Irri? More than you'd think, more than you'd think. I like the Unsullied, they can be fun, even sweet. More than the other type of sellsword. Those can be mean. You never wanted to be caught alone with one of the Brave Companions, those bastards tore a bloody furrow through the pleasure-houses, just before I… left." Speaking of pasts lurking under flood-waters - Doreah refused to say how she had ended up enslaved and in the possession of a khalasar.

The carts and the herds of the vast khalasar queued in the narrow open spaces that curled around the last foot-hills of the Norvosi highlands. The rear of the horde was hidden, no doubt curling this way and that, waiting in the deep hollows and draws they'd come down in that last descent. The fighting naquikhalasars stood their horses in clots here and there on the heights overlooking the stalled horde, armed and watchful. Rakharo, who was up there with half of the other bloodriders and the picked men, had told Sunset that this was the most deadly dangerous spot they'd been in for seasons, perhaps years. Other, lesser khalasars had been trapped and destroyed by vengeful western armies here or in similar terrain to the northeast or southwest, caught fat and full of stolen valuables, burdened with captive slaves, and careless in the tight quarters.

Khal Drogo was too wide-awake to be taken here like that. His men were prepared to smash through the small contingent of Unsullied and seize the passage if the Qohorik thought to betray another Dothraki khalasar.

Sunset sat beside the khaleesi and the handmaidens, and they watched the endless parade of the wealth of a nation across the high bridge, and she thought of how she would have destroyed it all, if she were a sly and ruthless Free City warlord. Pegasi outposts in the clouds above - Sunset looked up at the brutal blue sky, free of any blemish or scrap of vapor. Perhaps not. Unicorn choruses to seal off the upriver and downriver passages on the western bank of the river? She supposed that humans without thaumic resources could wrest some sort of sealing magic from earth and stone and constructed works. Like earth ponies. Although she'd need the earth ponies to hold the bridge, or bring it down, trapping the khalasar half on one bank, half on the other. Or entirely behind the unfordable river - to cast about, uncertain, thirsty, exposed, in hill country where their horses had limited forage and the fresh water was dear. Was that how the warlords of old had tamed past Dothraki hordes?

"I can see you thinking, Sunset Horse.You have your plotting face on," laughed Jhoqui. "What are you planning?"

"This makes me nervous, Jhoqui. I can see too many ways this ends badly for us all if the Qohorik want to betray the khal."

The khaleesi turned, her attention caught by the turn in the conversation and she listened to Jhoqui lecture her other handmaidens.

"And they could, if they cared to, Sunset Horse. It has happened before. They say that there are groves deep in the Forests of Qohor, that no living Dothraki has ever seen, where in the old days, the Qohorik rangers dragged their half-starved, helpless prisoners, never to be heard from again. For it takes starvation, and great thirst, to weaken Dothraki enough for these weak stone-house woods-men to take in battle, that or ambush and treachery. They say that there is a grove deep in the hidden heart of the forests where every tree has the flayed skin of some fallen khal's bloodrider wrapped around it, nailed in place as a spell, as a ritual. And there was a time that the Qohorik set out to expand that grove, and waged war against the khalasars as they passed through their lands.

"But every time a khalasar was ambushed, every time they pulled down this lesser khal or that, or trapped some handful of naquikhalasari away from their brothers, it drew the attention of the rest of us. And they say Qohor burned every season, for seven years. Outlying stone-house fortresses, every farmer, every ranger who couldn't hide from the vengeance of the Dothraki - Qohor burned, and as much of their forests as we could burn, that burned too.

"Eventually, they stopped setting out to take their Dothraki hides. Out here in the open, at any rate. Don't get caught away from the horde, Sunset Horse. I think the Qohorik would greatly prize an orange-furred hide they could wrap around some sacred tree in the depths of the unknown forest."

And the horde continued to creep through the narrows, and that high bridge over the unfordable river.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.

Comments

[Neece]

I had forgotten how sinister was the magic of the GoT world

[FanOfMostEverything]

Capital-S Stables? I'd probably be less confused if I weren't also reading a Fallout: Equestria story at the moment, but that has me scratching my head regardless.

In any case, wonderful work in cranking up the tension. This could go very badly indeed. Also, I love how Sunset's fellow handmaidens have gotten to know her well enough to recongize her scheming face.

[Mitch H]

8966396
The Stables of Parliament, of course.

[Anachronon]

Gelded slaves? Slaughtered prostitutes? Evil witches and mad nobles? Sounds to me like a typical Tuesday in the universe of GoT.

[ponygrad]

convince the Stables

Celestia-tier pun world building. It makes me downright angry when people take the easy way out and call it parliament.

Sunset is going to prove herself in battle soon some way or another. She has the mind for it.