The Dothraki revered the strong and held life cheap—whether it was their own or someone else’s.
With no forms of entertainment, brawling was a common occurrence.
They would often draw their blades and fight to the death over the most trivial of matters.
“Are there jousting tournaments among knights in Westeros?” Dany asked Jorah.
Jorah nodded.
“We all wear armor, so even in a grand melee, deaths are rare.
We could adopt the sword-fighting practices of knight squires, having them wear full leather armor and spar with unsharpened, blunt swords.” This kind of sparring certainly wouldn’t be as fair as fighting with real weapons, as many horsemen relied on agility, seeking a one-strike kill.
Blunt swords and leather armor demanded much more strength and stamina.
But to prevent unnecessary deaths, Dany had no choice but to accept Jorah’s suggestion.
At dusk, the newly painted black banners fluttered in the wind as her khalasar began to slowly move south.
They used the sun and stars to guide their way.
Before leaving, Dany had her people dig through the funeral pyre to retrieve the melted gold.
“This is what Drogo left behind.
He took what he needed to the Night Lands, and the rest is a reward for us,” Dany bluffed to the hesitant horsemen.
Drogo’s dragonbone bow was also recovered.
The ‘dragonbone’ in the bow was not a metaphor; it was actual dragon bone.
Setting aside the dozens of dragon corpses from the Targaryen dynasty, the ancient Valyrian civilization had only perished three hundred years ago, and at its peak, the Valyrian Freehold could field an army of three hundred dragons for conquest.
Dragons also had a natural lifespan.
They would die, leaving behind indestructible dragonbone, which was why so much of it circulated throughout the world.
Dragonbone was rich in iron.
As the iron content increased, its color deepened, eventually turning pitch black.
Ordinary fire could not damage it.
Even hatchlings could withstand the intense heat of burning wood, let alone the bones of an adult dragon.
Aside from the gold and dragonbone, a few horsemen also found a pile of cracked stones in the ashes—the fossilized dragon eggs.
When they pieced the fragments together, they perfectly reconstructed three stone eggs!
“Dragons don’t come from stone eggs,” the horsemen murmured, exchanging bewildered glances before a sudden realization hit them.
They cried out in awe, “The Khaleesi gave birth to three dragons!
The prophecy of the dosh khaleen has come true!
The Khaleesi has birthed the Stallion Who Mounts the World!” Startled by their shouts, Dany inspected the stone eggs and was equally astonished.
‘What kind of existence are dragons?’ she wondered with a hint of doubt.
Regardless of how the dragons were born, they had to leave.
The remaining charred bones from the pyre were gathered and buried in a deep pit before the procession set out.
On the first night, Dany’s khalasar only traveled ten kilometers.
Five kilometers from their camp, they came across the stream where Drogo’s khalasar had drawn water.
After being trampled and drained by over a hundred thousand people and hundreds of thousands of livestock for four or five days, the babbling brook had been reduced to a layer of thin mud.
Dany altered their route, deciding to follow the wetlands.
After another five kilometers, they found a new shallow watering hole, and Dany ordered the khalasar to halt.
They would rest here for a day or two.
“Those eighty-seven cattle and sheep must all be slaughtered,” Dany told her people.
“The deeper we go into the wasteland, the scarcer water and forage will become.
We cannot keep them to compete with the horses for resources.” Following Dany’s reorganization of the khalasar, the allocation of manpower was much more rational, vastly improving their efficiency.
The mutton was made into jerky.
The sheepskins, with their outer wool left completely intact, were dried in the shade by the Dothraki women and sewn into hooded cloaks.
The wasteland was unbearably hot.
Wearing the cloaks during the day provided shade from the sun and reduced water loss from sweat, while at night, they could be wrapped around the body for warmth.
The Dothraki were a nomadic people, true, but even nomads couldn’t guarantee that everyone had a leather coat or cloak.
Dany’s original hundred or so khas members naturally didn’t lack clothing.
But now she had nearly two hundred more people, eighty percent of whom were the old and weak who had been abandoned.
Many of them didn’t even have a spare Dothraki vest to change into.
Dany also had her own leather cloak.
When Daenerys first came to the Dothraki Sea with Drogo, he had specifically hunted a white lion for her—a massive beast taller than her silver filly.
The terrifying lion’s head perfectly formed a hood to cover her head, while its pelt served as a natural cape, draping from her shoulders down her back.
On the evening of the third day, the khalasar resumed its march.
This time, they traveled through the night, only stopping when the sun rose above the horizon the next day.
In ten hours, they covered roughly a hundred kilometers.
It was then that Dany encountered a problem.
Over a dozen outriders scoured a five-kilometer radius but still couldn’t find a single clean water source.
Following the bone-dry riverbed, they occasionally came across shallow, stagnant pools of bitter water baking under the scorching sun.
But these were pools of death that even animals refused to drink from, filled with all sorts of diseases, sludge, rotting animal carcasses, and even a thick stench of sulfur.
Dany grew increasingly curious about this world.
It was baffling how a vast plain—surrounded by mountains to the east and west, the great plains to the north, and the sea to the south—could be a barren desert.
Being a desert was one thing, but where did the sulfur in the water come from?
It wasn’t as if these were hot springs.
At the thought of hot springs, a sudden idea flashed through Dany’s mind.
She asked Ser Jorah, “I heard that ancient Valyria was built on fourteen volcanoes.
Was that continent near the Summer Sea a purgatory like this place before?” “What do you mean?” Jorah asked, confused.
“Could there be volcanoes hidden beneath the Red Waste we’re in right now?
That would explain why the rivers evaporate and the pools smell of sulfur,” she guessed.
What Dany really wanted to say was that both ancient Valyria and the Red Waste shared a peculiar, thin-crust geographical environment, where the surface was simply too close to the underground magma layer.
“The sulfur smells because demons roam this place,” her handmaid Doreah chimed in.
Despite hiding in the tent, her face was flushed red from the heat, looking like a boiled prawn.
Sweat streamed down her neck in little rivulets, causing her thin silk garments to cling tightly and reveal her exquisite curves.
“Have you seen a demon?” Dany scoffed.
“I…
I think I’ve been possessed by one.
My whole body aches terribly,” she gasped, weakly rubbing her chest.
“It’s gnawing at my heart.
It won’t be long before it devours my soul!” The Lysene girl’s eyes were filled with terror, and she spoke with such absolute certainty that Dany almost believed her.
“You have heatstroke!” she declared.
“What is heatstroke?” Irri asked, fanning herself.
Dany wasn’t bothered by the heat, so her handmaids fanned themselves instead of attending to her.
“Princess, you mean a heat fever, right?” Jorah struggled to take off his vest, revealing a thick patch of black hair on his chest that resembled a bear’s.
“Close enough.” Saying that, Dany handed her own waterskin of mare’s milk to Doreah.
“Stop drinking water, the minerals in your body are all…” She paused.
“Never mind, just drink my mare’s milk.” “But this is your ration.” Doreah looked dazed.
She reached out to touch the skin but pulled her hand back as if shocked, shaking her head.
“I can still hold on.
I can just drink water.” Dany didn’t bother arguing and simply shoved the skin into her hands.
Due to their lack of supplies and uncertain future, Dany had established a rationing system before they even set out.
Water could be drunk freely, as they had been following the riverbed and could always find some.
Horse meat was also unrestricted; the jerky was so hard it could be used as a knife to cut wood, so even with an open supply, no one could eat much of it.
It was primarily mare’s milk, salt, wine, and fruit that required strict rationing.
Looking at the current situation, even water might…
No, that wouldn’t do!
There had to be enough water.
Otherwise, even if they managed to walk out of the wasteland, more than half of them would die.
At this thought, she couldn’t sit still.
She turned to her handmaids.
“I’m going to have the men and women camp separately.
Everyone will be allowed to strip naked in their own tents.
You should all take your clothes off in a bit.” “The tent is like an oven; taking off our clothes won’t help.
Back on the plains, we would wake up freezing in the night even with two layers of sheepskin rugs on the ground.
Now, just stepping on the dirt burns our feet,” Irri sighed.
Dany teased, “You could always shovel away the top layer of sand—” She suddenly stopped, a flash of inspiration hitting her, and burst into laughter.
“How did I only just think of such a simple solution?” “What solution?” Jorah asked curiously.
Dany waved her hand.
“Let’s go outside and take a look.” Pushing aside the tent flap, Dany’s vision immediately blurred.
The sun felt as if it were pressing its face right up against hers, casting down pillars of white light that instantly plunged her into a blindingly bright world.
She lowered her head and rubbed her eyes.
When she finally regained her sight, she had the illusion that she had truly stepped into purgatory.
The dazzling white light beat down on the flat, red sandstone ground, reflecting a crimson glare of almost equal intensity.
The fiery red light gathered into a dense sea of crimson flames, making anyone walking across this wasteland feel as if they were strolling through an inferno.
Gods, and with the stench of sulfur lingering at the tip of her nose…
It was true what they said: names could be wrong, but nicknames never were.
This place truly was a “Red Purgatory”!
Hurriedly pulling up her white lion hood, Dany surveyed her camp.
The tents were dead silent, looking like dozens of burial mounds piled upon the flat ground.
She walked toward the nearest one, intending to remind everyone to separate by gender so they could strip down and escape the heat.
But just as she reached the entrance of the large tent—stitched together from a patchwork of cowhide, sheepskin, and horsehide—she heard a series of muffled, heavy pants.
The kind made by a man and a woman together.
Dany’s mouth fell open in sheer disbelief.
She quietly took a step forward and lifted a corner of the tent flap…
‘It seems I was overthinking things.
Since when do the horse lords care about the separation of men and women?’ Moreover, unlike Doreah, they seemed incredibly adaptable, exceptionally resilient, and quite capable of enduring a rigorous workout.
Quietly stepping back, Dany decided not to disturb the passionate Dothraki.
She treaded across the scorching sandstone ground and made her way to the edge of the riverbed.
Forty or fifty unsaddled, sturdy horses stood with drooping ears under the blazing sun, scattered across an open area.
They were struggling to chew the tough, yellowish-brown devil’s grass growing from beneath the rocks and dead trees.
“Khaleesi, you’ve come?” A little old man seemed to pop out of nowhere, suddenly appearing in front of Dany.
“Effendi, will the horses be able to recover their strength before dark?” Dany asked, though she didn’t even believe it herself.
This little old man who helped herd the khalasar’s horses was the veteran of many reigns who had served twelve Khals.
Dany was now his thirteenth.
‘Ugh, that’s a bit unlucky!’ Effendi was short and skinny, with a slight hunchback.
His balding, grizzled hair was barely tied into a braid at the back of his head—one that was shorter than his manhood.
His reddish-brown face was covered in shriveled wrinkles carved by time, making him look exactly like a dried tangerine.
Only his misshapen eyes, which no longer resembled almonds, still brimmed with the divine light of life.
He opened his toothless mouth and offered Dany a fawning smile…
a very ugly smile.
“Khaleesi, if there is enough clean water, combined with the devil’s grass unique to this wasteland, they can hold out for at least half a month.” Dany breathed a sigh of relief.
If her group didn’t take any detours, half a month should be enough to cross this desert.
“But the ones I have here are all strong horses,” Effendi added, his voice laced with worry.
“Aside from the hundred or so fine steeds ridden by our warriors, the vast majority are just old, skinny, sick, lame, weak, and foul-tempered beasts.
“Even in the Great Grass Sea, with abundant forage, they wouldn’t last long…
Everyone knows that such horses should have been slaughtered for meat long ago.
Our previous khalasar fed on them.” “I understand.
When the time comes, other arrangements will be made,” Dany said, her expression calm.