The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (71 page)

The streets had been largely deserted when they had set out from
the port that morning, and scarcely seemed more crowded now. An
elephant lumbered past with a lattice-work litter on its back. A naked
boy with peeling skin sat in a dry brick gutter, picking his nose and
staring sullenly at some ants in the street. He lifted his head at the
sound of hooves, and gaped as a column of mounted guards trotted by
in a cloud of red dust and brittle laughter. The copper discs sewn to
their cloaks of yellow silk glittered like so many suns, but their tunics
were embroidered linen, and below the waist they wore sandals and
pleated linen skirts. Bareheaded, each man had teased and oiled and
twisted his stiff red-black hair into fantastic shapes, horns and wings
and blades and even grasping hands, so they looked like some troupe
of demons escaped from the seventh hell. The naked boy watched
them for a bit, along with Dany, but soon enough they were gone, and
he went back to his ants, and a knuckle up his nose.

An old city, this,
she reflected,
but not so populous as it was in its
glory, nor near so crowded as Qarth or Pentos or Lys.

Her litter came to a sudden halt at the cross street, to allow a
coffle of slaves to shuffle across her path, urged along by the crack
of an overseer’s lash. These were no Unsullied, Dany noted, but a
more common sort of men, with pale brown skins and black hair.
There were women among them, but no children. All were naked.
Two Astapori rode behind them on white asses, a man in a red silk
tokar
and a veiled woman in sheer blue linen decorated with flakes of
lapis lazuli. In her red-black hair she wore an ivory comb. The man
laughed as he whispered to her, paying no more mind to Dany than
to his slaves, nor the overseer with his twisted five-thonged lash, a
squat broad Dothraki who had the harpy and chains tattooed proudly
across his muscular chest.

“Bricks and blood built Astapor,” Whitebeard murmured at her
side, “and bricks and blood her people.”

“What is that?” Dany asked him, curious.

“An old rhyme a maester taught me, when I was a boy. I never
knew how true it was. The bricks of Astapor are red with the blood of
the slaves who make them.”

“I can well believe that,” said Dany.

“Then leave this place before your heart turns to brick as well. Sail
this very night, on the evening tide.”

Would that I could,
thought Dany. “When I leave Astapor it must
be with an army, Ser Jorah says.”

“Ser Jorah was a slaver himself, Your Grace,” the old man reminded
her. “Hire sellswords to be your army, I beg of you. A man who fights
for coin has no honor, but at least they are no slaves. Buy your army
in Pentos, Braavos, or Myr.”

“My brother visited near all the Free Cities. The magisters and
archons fed him wine and promises, but his soul was starved to death.
A man cannot sup from the beggar’s bowl all his life and stay a man.
I had my taste in Qarth, that was enough. I will not come to Pentos
bowl in hand.”

“Better to come a beggar than a slaver,” Arstan said.

“There speaks one who has been neither.” Dany’s nostrils flared.
“Do you know what it is like to be
sold,
squire? I do. My brother sold
me to Khal Drogo for the promise of a golden crown. Well, Drogo
crowned him in gold, though not as he had wished, and I...my sun-
and-stars made a queen of me, but if he had been a different man, it
might have been much otherwise. Do you think I have forgotten how
it felt to be afraid?”

Whitebeard bowed his head. “Your Grace,” he said, “I did not
mean to give offense.”

“Only lies offend me, never honest counsel.” Dany patted Arstan’s
spotted hand to reassure him. “I have a dragon’s temper, that’s all.
You must not let it frighten you.”

“I shall try and remember,” Whitebeard said, with a smile.

He has a good face, and great strength to him,
Dany thought. She
could not understand why Ser Jorah mistrusted the old man so.
Could
he be jealous that I have found another man to talk to?
Unbidden, her
thoughts went back to the night on
Balerion
when the exile knight
had kissed her.
He should never have done that. He is thrice my age, and
of too low a birth for me, and I never gave him leave. No true knight would
ever kiss a queen without her leave.
She had taken care never to be
alone with Ser Jorah after that, keeping her handmaids Irri and Jhiqui
with her aboard ship, and sometimes her bloodriders as well.
He wants
to kiss me again, I can see it in his eyes.

What Dany wanted she could not begin to say, but Jorah’s kiss had
woken something in her, something that been sleeping since Drogo
died, who had been her sun-and-stars. Lying abed in her narrow
bunk, she found herself wondering how it would be to have a man
squeezed in beside her in place of her handmaid, and the thought
was more exciting than it should have been. Sometimes she would
close her eyes and dream of him, but it was never Jorah Mormont she
dreamed of; her lover was always younger and more comely, though
his face remained a shifting shadow.

Once, so tormented she could not sleep, Dany slid a hand down
between her legs, and gasped when she felt how wet she was. Scarce
daring to breathe, she moved her fingers back and forth between her
lower lips, slowly so as not to wake Irri beside her, until she found one
sweet spot and lingered there, touching herself lightly, timidly at first
and then faster, but still the relief she wanted seemed to recede before
her. Only then her dragons stirred, and one of them screamed out
across the cabin, and Irri woke and saw what she was doing.

Dany knew her face was flushed, but in the darkness Irri surely
could not tell. Wordless, the handmaid put a hand on her breast,
then bent to take a nipple in her mouth. Her other hand drifted down
across the soft curve of belly, through the mound of fine silvery-gold
hair, and went to work between Dany’s thighs. It was no more than
a few moments until her legs twisted and her breasts heaved and
her whole body shuddered. She screamed then, or perhaps that was
Drogon. Irri never said a thing, only curled back up and went back to
sleep the instant the thing was done.

The next day, it all seemed a dream. And what did Ser Jorah have
to do with it, if anything?
It is Drogo I want, my sun-and-stars,
Dany
reminded herself.
Not Irri, and not Ser Jorah, only Drogo.
Drogo was
dead, though. She’d thought these feelings had died with him there in
the red waste, but one treacherous kiss had somehow brought them
back to life.
He should never have kissed me. He presumed too much, and
I permitted it. It must never happen again.
She set her mouth grimly and
gave her head a shake, and the bell in her braid chimed softly.

Closer to the bay, the city presented a fairer face. The great brick
pyramids lined the shore, the largest four hundred feet high. All
manner of trees and vines and flowers grew on their broad terraces,
and the winds that swirled around them smelled green and fragrant.
Another gigantic harpy stood atop the gate, this one made of baked
red clay and crumbling visibly, with no more than a stub of her
scorpion’s tail remaining. The chain she grasped in her clay claws was
old iron, rotten with rust. It was cooler down by the water, though.
The lapping of the waves against the rotting pilings made a curiously
soothing sound.

Aggo helped Dany down from her litter. Strong Belwas was seated
on a massive piling, eating a great haunch of brown roasted meat.
“Dog,” he said happily when he saw Dany. “Good dog in Astapor,
little queen. Eat?” He offered it with a greasy grin.

“That is kind of you, Belwas, but no.” Dany had eaten dog in other
places, at other times, but just now all she could think of was the
Unsullied and their stupid puppies. She swept past the huge eunuch
and up the plank onto the deck of
Balerion
.

Ser Jorah Mormont stood waiting for her. “Your Grace,” he said,
bowing his head. “The slavers have come and gone. Three of them,
with a dozen scribes and as many slaves to lift and fetch. They crawled
over every foot of our holds and made note of all we had.” He walked
her aft. “How many men do they have for sale?”

“None.” Was it Mormont she was angry with, or this city with its
sullen heat, its stinks and sweats and crumbling bricks? “They sell eu
nuchs, not men. Eunuchs made of brick, like the rest of Astapor. Shall
I buy eight thousand brick eunuchs with dead eyes that never move,
who kill suckling babes for the sake of a spiked hat and strangle their
own dogs? They don’t even have names. So don’t call them
men,
ser.”

“Khaleesi,”
he said, taken aback by her fury, “the Unsullied are
chosen as boys, and trained—”

“I have heard all I care to of their
training
.” Dany could feel tears
welling in her eyes, sudden and unwanted. Her hand flashed up, and
cracked Ser Jorah hard across the face. It was either that, or cry.

Mormont touched the cheek she’d slapped. “If I have displeased
my queen—”

“You
have
. You’ve displeased me greatly, ser. If you were my true
knight, you would never have brought me to this vile sty.”
If you were
my true knight, you would never have kissed me, or looked at my breasts
the way you did, or...

“As Your Grace commands. I shall tell Captain Groleo to make
ready to sail on the evening tide, for some sty less vile.”

“No.” Groleo watched them from the forecastle, and his crew was
watching too. Whitebeard, her bloodriders, Jhiqui, everyone had
stopped what they were doing at the sound of the slap. “I want to sail
now,
not on the tide, I want to sail far and fast and never look back.
But I can’t, can I? There are eight thousand brick eunuchs for sale,
and I must find some way to buy them.” And with that she left him,
and went below.

Behind the carved wooden door of the captain’s cabin, her
dragons were restless. Drogon raised his head and screamed, pale
smoke venting from his nostrils, and Viserion flapped at her and
tried to perch on her shoulder, as he had when he was smaller. “No,”
Dany said, trying to shrug him off gently. “You’re too big for that now,
sweetling.” But the dragon coiled his white and gold tail around one
arm and dug black claws into the fabric of her sleeve, clinging tightly.
Helpless, she sank into Groleo’s great leather chair, giggling.

“They have been wild while you were gone,
Khaleesi,
” Irri told her.
“Viserion clawed splinters from the door, do you see? And Drogon
made to escape when the slaver men came to see them. When I
grabbed his tail to hold him back, he turned and bit me.” She showed
Dany the marks of his teeth on her hand.

“Did any of them try to burn their way free?” That was the thing
that frightened Dany the most.

“No,
Khaleesi
. Drogon breathed his fire, but in the empty air. The
slaver men feared to come near him.”

She kissed Irri’s hand where Drogon had bitten it. “I’m sorry he hurt
you. Dragons are not meant to be locked up in a small ship’s cabin.”

“Dragons are like horses in this,” Irri said. “And riders, too. The
horses scream below,
Khaleesi,
and kick at the wooden walls. I hear
them. And Jhiqui says the old women and the little ones scream too,
when you are not here. They do not like this water cart. They do not
like the black salt sea.”