The sea wind set the flags snapping.
Drogo stood on the shore, staring out at the gray-black stretch of the strait.
“Across the Narrow Sea lies Westeros.
The home of my betrothed.”
His bloodriders said nothing.
They only listened.
“Seven Kingdoms sit over there.
The Usurper, Robert Baratheon, murdered her family and seized the Iron Throne…”
Cohollo studied the Khal and found himself looking at a stranger.
The man was short and broad, his hair shot through with gray, his mouth full of broken teeth.
Drogo had been kidnapped as a boy and sold to his father’s enemies.
It was Cohollo who had dragged him free from those vicious sellswords, at the cost of every tooth in his jaw smashed to pieces by an iron hammer.
He had watched Drogo grow from boyhood.
He had never known him to care so much about what lay on the other side of that water.
Qotho’s chest rose and fell.
He could not hold it in.
He had no interest in Westeros whatsoever.
“The Khal intends to hold his wedding inside a stone house?” He fought to keep his voice down and failed.
“The Dothraki have no such custom.”
Cohollo followed, his tone gentler than Qotho’s, though the words were not gentle.
“The khalasar is already talking.
The Khal taking a foreign wife is one thing.
But following her people’s customs too?”
“I am not following her people’s customs,” Drogo said.
“Then why hold it in a castle?” Qotho pushed a step closer.
“Which Khal has ever wed under a roof?
The sky must watch over it.
That is what makes it real.
Put a stone ceiling between the ceremony and the heavens and does the marriage even count?”
Haggo, who rarely spoke, spoke.
“The Khal should lead by upholding Dothraki tradition.”
Silence fell over them.
Drogo had no wish to stoke a broader anger, so he gave ground.
“The wedding will be held on the grasslands outside Pentos.”
The words left his mouth and the tension with them.
“Send word,” he continued.
“I am calling the entire khalasar to my wedding.”
They came.
First the scouts, then the riders, then the women and children and slaves, and finally the horses blanketing every hill and hollow as far as the eye could reach.
40,000 Dothraki warriors, plus those hauling tents, herding sheep, carrying children on their backs, and dragging captives on ropes.
100,000 strong, surging up to the walls of Pentos like a tide cresting a dike.
There was no stopping it.
The camp was pure chaos.
A banner on this hilltop, a cookfire lit in that hollow.
Sheep and horses bleated and screamed over one another.
Columns of cooking smoke rose from a dozen directions at once.
Children ran wild.
Slaves lugged sacks looking for any open patch of ground.
Women dropped pots where they stood and started boiling horsemeat.
The guards on Pentos’s walls doubled.
A spearman posted every five paces, all of them staring down.
The city gates were bolted shut.
The drawbridge cranked to its highest point.
The magisters stood in their towers with faces drawn tight.
“We must see Princess Daenerys married off as quickly as possible,” one tall, gaunt magister said, mopping his brow, “before the wealth of Pentos bleeds away into sellswords and scoundrels.”
“This is all Illyrio’s fault.
If he had not arranged this match for Khal Drogo, none of these Dothraki would be gathered here.”
“Let us hope,” a third magister said uneasily, “that once they have finished eating, they do not decide to come over the walls.”
Drogo stood on the slope and watched the chaos without his brow unfurrowing once.
The crowd surged and shoved.
Someone would finish staking a tent only to have the ropes trampled loose by the next wave coming in behind them.
Two groups squared off over a patch of ground, screaming curses you could hear from a mile away.
A horse spooked and charged wildly through the crowd.
Women screamed and scattered.
A freshly hung pot went over, boiling water hitting the earth and erupting in a plume of white steam.
Nobody stepped in.
Nobody listened to anyone.
Cohollo read Drogo’s expression and drew closer.
“We are the mightiest khalasar on the Dothraki Sea.
What is there to worry about?” (The Dothraki Sea is a vast grassland, so named for the way the wind moves through the grass like waves across water.)
Drogo did not answer right away.
He watched two groups across the camp shove each other over a patch of empty ground.
An old woman had been knocked down.
She was struggling to rise.
People walked around her.
Nobody offered a hand.
“Look at these hundred thousand people,” Drogo said.
“Every family pitches their own tent.
Every family lights their own fire.
They see open ground and they camp on it.
No paths.
No order.
Nothing.”
He let a moment pass.
“From last night until now, three people have been trampled to death.” His voice was flat saying it.
“One child.
Two elders.”
“We have always done things this way,” Qotho said.
“There is nothing wrong with it.”
Drogo turned to look at him.
“That is precisely why it must change.”
He turned back to the camp.
“I have thought on this.
Ten warriors form a squad.
One is chosen as squad leader, responsible for those ten households.
A hundred households gets a centurion.
A thousand gets a chiliarch.”
Nobody responded.
They were listening through a fog.
The Dothraki did not trade.
They did not keep tallies.
What they wanted, they took or bartered for.
Tents, sheep, women, children — you kept a rough count of your own household in your head and that was enough.
Many of them could barely count past ten.
Cohollo asked bluntly: “What good does that do?”
Drogo looked at him.
A weariness settled in his chest.
He shook his head.
“Each chiliarch manages his own thousand people.
Where to camp.
Who pitches tents, who stands watch, who hunts.
When something needs handling, I speak to forty men.
I don’t have to shout at forty thousand.”
“No one on the grasslands has ever done this.” Qotho’s voice dropped, but the defiance stayed in it.
“It goes against custom.”
Drogo’s patience frayed.
He pressed it down hard.
“And no khalasar on the grasslands has ever trampled three of its own to death just making camp.”
“Those who get trampled are weak,” Qotho shot back, still not reading the anger buried beneath Drogo’s words.
Cohollo was a generation older than all of them.
He saw where this was heading and stepped in.
“The Khal cares for his people.
He wants to govern the khalasar well.
This is a good thing.”
He spoke to both of them, but his eyes found Qotho and held there.
“It is just — you know us.
We are rough men.
We do not follow your meaning easily.
A change this large needs to be talked through slowly.”
Drogo considered that.
The man was right.
Reform had to come in steps.
He drew a breath and let it out.
Getting angry solved nothing.
He needed the right people to help put this in place.
His tone came down.
“If I had forty chiliarchs helping me manage the khalasar, order would improve greatly.”
Cohollo still was not entirely clear on what a chiliarch was.
But he nodded.
Haggo stood at the back, as always.
Silent.
Drogo did not press further.
For now, the wedding first.
Then the three dragon eggs Illyrio had pledged as gifts, and after that, everything else.
The wind shifted off the camp, carrying horse dung and cookfire smoke.
In the distance, a child started crying again, high and sharp.
Somewhere in the confusion, a few slaves had made a break for it, trying to slip inside the walls of Pentos.
The guards drove them back with arrows.
(Note: In both the original books and the TV series, Khal Drogo deeply respected Dothraki tradition and adhered to it strictly.
Here, the protagonist proposes reform and gets pushed back by his bloodriders.
Some readers feel a proud, powerful Khal would never concede — and might even cut down any bloodrider who dared talk back.
That instinct isn’t wrong.
Drogo is powerful, aloof, and confident to the bone.
But he now carries a soul from another world.
In this story, he is just as ruthless toward enemies; he simply extends more tolerance to his own people.
Remember the scene from the show where unequal distribution of spoils immediately drew a warrior’s blade against the Khal.
Drogo’s men are no cowards.
If he had forced a change on Dothraki tradition without bringing his bloodriders along, bloody internal strife would have followed.
He has taken the Khal’s body.
Now let him play the game, statecraft, patience, the slow manipulation of hearts and minds.
The methods and stratagems come later.
Please watch with patience.)
➤ Next: The Wedding — The Conversation
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Happy reading, everyone!