Moving past the encampment of Jhaqo’s khas, Dany led Jorah, Aggo, and her other three riders to the outskirts of the khalasar.
A group of women wearing painted Dothraki vests were weaving grass mats.
Their rough, cracked fingers moved with incredible dexterity.
They snapped the heads off the wheat stalks, tossing them into a nearby winnowing basket, and wove the remaining half-green, half-yellow stalks into long mats as easily as if they were knitting a sweater.
The Dothraki yurts were mostly built from these woven grass mats.
Cloth for clothing was pitifully scarce, so they all wore leather vests and coats.
The vast majority of the horse lords had no fabric for their tents.
Seeing the Khaleesi arrive, the women and nearby children remained expressionless.
They offered no respectful greetings, nor did they look at her with resentment.
“These are all slaves captured from Ogo’s khalasar,” Jorah whispered from the side.
The ‘ecosystem’ of the Dothraki was brutally unforgiving.
About a month ago in Vaes Dothrak, when the elderly dosh khaleen prophesied that Daenerys would give birth to ‘the Stallion Who Mounts the World’, Khal Ogo and Drogo had been drinking and making merry in the same tent, acting like the dearest of brothers.
Roughly nine days ago, thousands of miles away from Vaes Dothrak on the banks of a Lhazareen river, the two met again.
At the time, Khal Ogo was leading his khalasar in a siege against a town of the Lhazareen, and Khal Drogo happened to be passing by.
Without a word, Drogo led his screamers into the fray immediately.
He didn’t help Ogo attack the city; instead, he took advantage of Khal Ogo’s preoccupation with the siege to strike the rear of his forces.
After sweeping through Khal Ogo’s tribe, Drogo took the opportunity to conquer the collapsing Lhazareen town.
In that battle, Drogo personally killed Ogo and his son, and even chopped off the head of one of Khal Ogo’s bloodriders.
Fighting one against three, he paid a minuscule price—only a patch of skin sliced from his pectoral muscle.
Drogo’s martial prowess aside, his actions perfectly illustrated the cold-blooded survival rules of the Dothraki.
There was a scene at the beginning of the movie *Kung Fu Hustle* where the boss of the Crocodile Gang said to the Axe Gang boss who was about to hack him to death: “Wait a minute, you forgot, I even treated you to a meal!” Drogo and Ogo had done far more than just share a meal.
Unfortunately, all friendship and peace only existed within the city of the horse lords.
Beneath the shadow of the Mother of Mountains, every horseman of the plains in Vaes Dothrak was a brother, and all disputes were set aside.
But once they left the sacred grounds, the Dothraki Sea was governed solely by the naked truth of ‘survival of the fittest’.
Drogo not only killed Ogo and his son but also reduced all the women and children of his khalasar to slaves.
Right now, they were heading west along the river, intending to sell them to the Ghiscari slavers of Slaver’s Bay.
A burst of clamor and the cracking of whips snapped Dany back to reality.
Without realizing it, their group had already ridden past the outermost edge of the khalasar.
Under the murky yellow evening sky, several Lhazareen estates struggled amidst billowing black smoke.
The raging fires roared and crackled.
Beneath the crumbling dried mud walls, warriors in painted vests galloped back and forth, cracking their long whips like thunder as they shouted, driving the survivors away from the smoking ruins.
Dany saw many mothers with numb, lifeless expressions, stumbling as they led their sobbing children.
Driven by the whips, they marched toward the slave pens of Drogo’s khalasar.
There were very few males among them, and most of those were either crippled or elderly grandfathers.
The adult men had been almost entirely wiped out.
The Dothraki warriors consciously made way for Dany’s group.
This caught the attention of someone resting at the base of a mud wall.
Soon, Haggo, his face smeared with blood, rode over to them.
“Khaleesi, are you trying to steal someone else’s slaves again?” Haggo mocked.
Suddenly, an idea seemed to strike him.
He flashed a jackal-like grin at Dany and abruptly hoisted a hemp rope hanging from his saddle high into the air.
“Ah—” Just as he expected, a nauseatingly sweet and foul stench of blood washed over her.
Dany’s pupils shrank to pinpricks in terror, and an involuntary, breathless gasp escaped her lips.
It was a string of human heads.
Young ones, old ones, some wearing expressions of terror, others still bearing looks of furious anger even in death.
Thick, dark red blood dripped slowly down the hemp rope binding their hair, soaking into Haggo’s thigh where it rested against the saddle.
Some heads had been severed cleanly with a single strike, leaving neat cuts.
Others had jagged necks, looking as though it took several chops to decapitate them.
Dany even saw one head with a stark white segment of spine dangling from its blood-matted neck.
*Had the blade chipped, forcing Haggo to tear the half-severed head from the shoulders with brute force?* Their eyes were all wide open, mouths agape.
Dany felt as if the screams of their accusations and curses were echoing in her ears.
Seeing such a gruesome scene for the first time, Dany was unsurprisingly shocked into a near stupor.
For heaven’s sake, just this morning she had been standing in the sunny plaza of her medical school, receiving her master’s degree in surgery!
Ser Jorah quickly rode to Dany’s side, supporting her so she wouldn’t tumble from her swaying saddle.
He rubbed her back to help her breathe and grabbed a waterskin to pour water into her mouth.
Like a ragdoll, Dany let Jorah and Aggo fuss over her for a good while before she finally caught her breath and regained her senses.
She fought to hold back the tears and terror in her eyes, striving to fill her gaze with murderous intent.
Then, she forced herself to look up and meet the eyes of Haggo, who was still holding the string of heads high.
Gradually, the cruel smile on Haggo’s face faded.
Looking bored, he lowered his hand and hung the heads back onto his saddle.
But just as he looked down, the quiet, heavy atmosphere around them seemed to irritate him again.
“Khaleesi, what are you looking at?” he couldn’t help but snap, glaring fiercely at Dany.
By now, all fear and bewilderment had vanished from Dany’s eyes.
Her violet irises were clear and icy, like a freezing spring.
“I am counting to see if you took the most heads.
Unfortunately, Ko Pono has two more than you.” “You—” The veins bulged on Haggo’s neck.
He was about to lash out at Dany but immediately snapped his mouth shut.
He nimbly dismounted, strode over to Pono, and began quietly counting the heads on Pono’s string.
After counting for a moment, he started ticking them off on his fingers with a look of utter confusion.
Dany’s icy facade almost cracked.
Bloodriders were indeed formidable, but *A Song of Ice and Fire* was a low-magic, low-power world.
Even the strongest individual fighter could only take on ten men at most.
A powerful warrior would begin to exhaust their strength after continuously hacking down seven or eight people.
Whether it was Haggo or the dozen or so kos in sight, not a single one had claimed more than twenty heads.
Yet Haggo was actually counting on his carrot-thick fingers for nearly a full minute.
Finally, he returned to his saddle, grabbed his own string of heads, and brought it over to compare with Ko Pono’s, one by one.
Well, the ‘top student’ Daenerys wasn’t wrong.
Haggo was indeed short by two.
*Thud!* The bloody heads rolled across the ground, picking up a thin layer of dust, much like fried chicken drumsticks being coated in breadcrumbs.
Fuming, Haggo threw his string of heads down.
He dragged a woman in her thirties out from the nearby line of ‘Lamb Men’ slaves.
Ignoring her shrill cries and struggles, and completely disregarding the Khaleesi standing right across from him, he unfastened his leather breeches and mounted her right there.
He seemed to take the woman’s wails as a badge of honor, even looking up to flash a smug smile at Daenerys.
His grin was hideous, cruel, and full of provocation.
Everyone knew the Khaleesi had previously broken Dothraki tradition by forcefully saving women who were being publicly assaulted.
Daenerys knew even better that this was a battle of wills between her and Haggo.
She needed to leave as if nothing had happened; that was the best choice for both her and the poor woman.
“Hyah!” Giving her mount a gentle kick in the ribs, the silver filly trotted away with light, graceful steps.
Haggo cursed a few times in Dothraki and quickly finished his vile deed.
Entering the battlefield, a dying horse was startled by Daenerys and lifted its head to whinny mournfully at her.
There were also groaning wounded men, licking their cracked lips and calling out, “Khaleesi, please give me some water.” But before Dany could act, a jaqqa rhan jogged over.
“Apologies, Khaleesi, for disturbing you.” Smiling apologetically at Daenerys, the young man flashed his blade, slitting the throat of the wounded soldier who had just begged for water.
With the hiss of spurting blood, the wounded man let out a gurgling sound as the light faded from his eyes.
There was no pain or fear on his face, only a faint trace of regret and confusion.
It seemed that in the final moments of his life, he was merely wondering: *Why couldn’t I have a sip of water before I died?* The jaqqa rhan were the Dothraki mercy men, tasked with delivering the wounded from their suffering.
They wove back and forth across the battlefield, harvesting strings of heads from the dead and dying.
There was also a group of little girls carrying baskets, skipping merrily behind the jaqqa rhan.
They stared curiously at Dany for a moment before giggling and walking over to the corpses.
Reaching out with small hands stained dark red with blood, they yanked the arrows from the bodies and tossed them into their baskets.
Intact arrows were kept for the next battle, while those with damaged fletching would be re-feathered.
Even for broken arrows, the metal arrowheads had to be retrieved so that slaves or women could mount them onto new wooden shafts later.
Finally, there was a pack of wild dogs—gaunt and starving, yet with fierce eyes.
They tentatively sniffed the corpses in front of Dany first.
Looking up and seeing that she made no move to stop them, they bared their fangs and began to tear into the flesh.
There was always a pack of wild dogs following the khalasar, seemingly forming a unique ecological chain on the Dothraki Sea.
Similar things had happened many times before.
The dog pack was used to it, and they assumed the ‘horse lord’ Dany in front of them was used to it, too.
“Ugh—” Dany slumped over her horse’s back and began to dry heave.
This startled the wild dogs into backing away repeatedly, not even bothering to chew the warm, pale chunks of flesh hanging from their jaws.
“Khaleesi, it is getting late.
Shall we leave?” Ser Jorah asked, holding her shoulder with a worried expression.
“Alright, let’s go back.” This cruel world had unreservedly torn away its veil before Dany.
In the shortest amount of time, she had gained a thorough understanding of the environment she now found herself in.