The Dothraki worship strength and make light of life and death—whether it is someone else's or their own. With no real forms of entertainment, brawls and fights are an everyday occurrence for them.
Often, over the smallest, most trivial matters, blades are drawn and lives are decided.
"In Westeros, do knights have competitions or duels?" Dany asked Jorah.
Jorah nodded. "We wear armor, so even in group melees, deaths are rare. We could teach them the kind of sword practice used during a knight's apprenticeship—have them wear full leather armor and spar with unsharpened, blunt swords."
This kind of contest was obviously far less fair than real blades. Many of the horselords favored agility; their ideal was killing with a single strike.
Blunt swords and leather armor placed much higher demands on strength and stamina.
But in order to avoid deaths, Dany could only accept Jorah's suggestion.
By evening, a newly painted black banner fluttered in the wind as her khalasar slowly began moving south.
They navigated by the sun and the stars.
Before leaving, Dany also had people go to the funeral pyre and dig out the melted gold from the ashes.
"This is what Drogo didn't use," she told the hesitant horselords. "He's taken everything he needs to the Night Lands. What's left is our reward." She said this with complete confidence.
Drogo's dragonbone bow was also retrieved.
The "dragonbone" of the dragonbone bow was not a metaphor—it was truly dragon bone.
Not to mention the dozens of dragon corpses left behind by the Targaryen dynasty, the ancient Valyrian civilization itself had only fallen three hundred years ago. At its peak, the Valyrian Freehold could deploy an army of three hundred dragons for conquest.
Dragons had lifespans too. They died, and after death they left behind dragon bones that were nearly impossible to destroy. As a result, many dragon bones still circulated in the world.
Dragon bone was rich in iron, and as the iron content increased, its color deepened until it turned pitch-black.
Ordinary flames could not damage it. Even a young dragon could withstand the heat of burning firewood—how much more so the bones of a fully grown dragon?
Besides the gold and dragon bone, several horselords also discovered a pile of cracked stones in the ashes—fossilized dragon eggs.
When the stones were pieced back together, they astonishingly reformed into three complete stone eggs!
"Dragons don't come out of stone eggs…" The horselords stared at one another, then suddenly seemed to realize something. They cried out in terror, "The Khaleesi has given birth to three dragons! The prophecy of the Dosh Khaleen has come true—the Khaleesi has borne the Stallion Who Mounts the World!"
Even Dany herself was shocked after seeing the stone eggs.
What kind of existence are dragons, really? doubt crept into her heart.
Regardless of how the dragons had come into the world, they had to leave now. The remaining charred bones from the pyre were gathered together and buried in a deep pit, and the caravan set out.
On the first night, Dany's khalasar traveled only ten kilometers.
Five kilometers after leaving their former camp, they reached the stream where Drogo's khalasar had once drawn water. After four or five days of use by more than a hundred thousand people and tens of thousands of animals, the babbling stream had been reduced to a layer of muddy sludge.
Dany altered their route and decided to follow the wetlands along the stream.
After another five kilometers, they found a new shallow pool. Dany ordered the khalasar to stop and rest there for a day or two.
"All eighty-seven head of cattle and sheep must be slaughtered," Dany told her people. "The deeper we go into the wasteland, the scarcer water and fodder will become. We can't keep them to compete with the horses for resources."
After Dany reorganized the khalasar, manpower was allocated more efficiently, and overall effectiveness improved significantly.
The mutton was made into jerky. The sheepskins, with the wool still attached and untreated, were air-dried by the Dothraki women and sewn into hooded cloaks.
The wasteland was unbearably hot. Wearing a cloak during the day helped shield against the sun and reduced the body's loss of moisture. At night, it could also be wrapped around the body for warmth.
The Dothraki were nomads, yes—but even nomads could not guarantee that everyone owned fur coats or cloaks. Dany's original hundred or so people from her own khas naturally lacked for nothing.
But now she had nearly two hundred more people, eighty percent of whom were elderly or weak folk abandoned by others. Many of them didn't even have a spare Dothraki vest to change into.
Dany herself had a fur cloak.
When Daenerys first came to the Dothraki Sea with Drogo, he had personally hunted a white lion for her—a massive male, taller than her silver mare. The terrifying lion's head formed a hood that covered her own head, while the lion's hide became a natural cloak that draped down her back from her shoulders.
On the evening of the third day, the khalasar set out again. This time, they traveled through the night, stopping only when the sun rose over the horizon the next day.
Ten hours—roughly a hundred kilometers.
It was then that Dany ran into trouble. More than ten scouts searched a five-kilometer radius, yet still found no clean water source.
Following the dry, bone-like riverbed, they occasionally came across shallow, stagnant pools exposed to the blazing sun.
But these were pools of death that even animals refused to drink from—filled with all kinds of bacteria, sludge, rotting animal carcasses, and even a strong sulfuric stench.
Dany grew increasingly curious about this world. Surrounded by mountains, with grasslands to the north and the sea to the south, this vast plain was somehow a barren desert.
A desert was one thing—but where did the sulfur in the water come from?
This wasn't a hot spring.
At the thought of hot springs, a sudden idea flashed through Dany's mind. She asked Ser Jorah, "I've heard that ancient Valyria was built atop fourteen volcanoes. Was that continent near the Summer Sea once an infernal landscape like this as well?"
"You mean…?" Jorah asked, puzzled.
"Could there be volcanoes hidden beneath the Red Waste we're standing on now?" she speculated. "That would explain why rivers evaporate, and why the pools smell of sulfur."
What Dany really wanted to say was that both ancient Valyria and the Red Waste seemed to be strange regions with thin crusts, where the surface lay dangerously close to underground magma.
"It's because demons roam this land, so there's a sulfur stench," her handmaid Doreah interjected.
Even hiding inside the tent, she was flushed red from the heat, like a steamed shrimp. Sweat ran down her neck in thin streams, and her curvy figure was fully outlined beneath her thin silk garment.
"You've seen demons?" Dany snorted.
"I—I think I'm possessed by a demon," Doreah said weakly, rubbing her chest as she gasped for breath. "It's gnawing at my heart. Before long, it'll devour my soul!"
The Lysene girl's eyes were filled with fear, and she spoke with such conviction that Dany almost believed her.
"You have heatstroke," Dany said flatly.
"What's heatstroke?" Irri asked, fanning herself.
Dany wasn't afraid of heat. The handmaids fanned themselves and didn't need to attend to her.
"Princess, do you mean heat sickness?" Jorah said as he struggled out of his vest, revealing a chest covered in thick, bear-like black hair.
"More or less," Dany said, handing her mare's milk skin to Doreah. "Stop drinking water. Your body's minerals are already—"
"Forget it. Drink my mare's milk."
"But this is your ration…" Doreah said dazedly. She reached for the skin, then recoiled as if shocked, shaking her head. "I can still hold on. I can drink water…"
Dany didn't try to persuade her. She stuffed the skin directly into Doreah's hands.
Because supplies were scarce and the future uncertain, Dany had established a rationing system before setting out.
Water could be drunk freely. They had been following riverbeds, and water was always available.
Horse meat could also be eaten freely. The hard, dry jerky—tough enough to cut wood like a knife—even if supplied openly, no one could eat much of it.
The real rationed items were mare's milk, salt, wine, and fruit.
But now, at this rate, even water…
No. That wouldn't do!
Water had to be supplied without restriction. Otherwise, even if they made it out of the wasteland, more than half of them would die.
Unable to sit still any longer, she said to her handmaids, "I'll separate the men and women into different camps. Everyone can go naked in their own tents. Later, you should take off your clothes as well."
"The tents are like ovens. Taking off clothes won't help much," Irri sighed. "Back on the grasslands, even with two layers of sheepskins on the ground, we'd freeze awake at night. Now the ground burns our feet."
Dany joked, "You can shovel away the top layer of sand—"
Mid-sentence, inspiration struck. She burst out laughing. "How did I only think of such a simple method now?"
"What method?" Jorah asked curiously.
Dany waved her hand. "Come out and take a look."
She lifted the tent flap. Instantly, her vision went white—the sun was practically right in her face. A pillar of blinding light plunged down, plunging her into a dazzling white world.
She lowered her head and rubbed her eyes. When her vision finally returned, she felt as though she had truly arrived in hell.
The glaring white sunlight reflected off the flat red sandstone ground, producing an equally intense crimson glare—like flames. Vast, dense swathes of red light merged into a sea of fire, making anyone walking across the wasteland seem as though they were strolling through an inferno.
Gods… and the sulfur smell lingering at her nose—
Indeed, there were no wrong nicknames, only wrong names. This place truly deserved to be called the "Red Inferno."
She quickly pulled up the white lion hood and looked around her camp. All the tents were silent, like dozens of grave mounds piled across a flat plain.
She walked to the nearest tent, intending to remind everyone to separate men and women so they could undress to escape the heat.
But just as she reached the entrance of the large tent—patched together from cowhide, sheepskin, and horsehide—she heard suppressed panting.
The kind that came from both men and women.
Dany's mouth fell open in disbelief.
Only when she quietly stepped closer and lifted a corner of the tent flap did she realize—
Looks like I overthought it. The horselords don't care about separating men and women at all.
And unlike Doreah, they seemed to be extremely adaptable—tough, resilient, and very good at enduring… exertion.
Quietly retreating a few steps, Dany didn't disturb the passionate horselords. She stepped across the scorching sandstone and walked to the edge of the riverbed.
Forty or fifty strong horses, their saddles removed, drooped their ears beneath the blazing sun. They were scattered across an open area, struggling to chew on yellow-brown, tough "devil grass" that grew beneath rocks and dead trees.
"Khaleesi, you're here?" A small old man appeared out of nowhere, suddenly standing before Dany.
"Avanti, can the horses recover their strength before nightfall?" Dany asked a question she herself didn't really believe.
This little old man, who tended the khalasar's horses, had served twelve khals before. Dany was the thirteenth.
Uh… not exactly an auspicious number.
Avanti was short and thin, slightly hunched. Balding, with graying hair barely tied into a braid behind his head—shorter than his second son. His reddish-brown face was covered in shriveled, cracked wrinkles carved by time, like a dried orange.
Only his deformed, no-longer-almond-shaped eyes still shone with a life-filled glow.
He opened his toothless mouth and smiled ingratiatingly at Dany—an ugly smile.
"Khaleesi, if there's enough clean water, and with the devil grass unique to this wasteland, they can last at least half a month."
Dany let out a sigh of relief. If her group didn't stray off course, half a month should be enough to cross this desert.
"But," Avanti added worriedly, "most of the animals here aren't good horses. Aside from the hundred or so young warriors riding strong mounts, the majority are old, skinny, sickly, lame, weak, or ill-tempered beasts.
"Even in the Great Grass Sea, with plentiful fodder, they wouldn't last long. Everyone knows that such horses should have been slaughtered for meat long ago. Our previous khalasar lived on them."
"I understand," Dany said calmly. "There will be other arrangements when the time comes."
...
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(End Chapter)