Ned stands in a brothel, a pillar of chastity in a sea of debauchery; one of his men seems to be playing strip-checker with a girl and a squire was apparently having sex while waiting for Ned and Littlefinger to finish their business. Ned exchanges his high horse for a real horse and ruminates on his findings during the ride back.
The brothel — it’s the one run by Chataya, therefore a set that will be well-used in the other books — is the one that Ned’s been looking for, the one visited by Jon Arryn and Stannis Baratheon. It houses another one of Robert’s illegitimate children, a newborn girl who looks just like him and whose mother is a very young redhead. The girl, the mother not the child, is apparently in love with Robert, very young and naive. It all makes Ned think about Jon. Verbatim: “If the gods frowned so on bastards, why did they fill men with such lusts?” Ned, the gods don’t frown on bastards, people do. Specifically, people like your wife. So why don’t you fuck off with your existential woe and do something about it if you really find it unjust. Ned also whines about making various vows he’s honour-bound to keep, like taking care of various bastards, Stark and Baratheon ones, and remembers how perceptive Lyanna was about Robert’s skirt-chasing nature. Hey, do the illegitimate children born in and around King’s Landing have a designated surname? A Wiki of Ice and Fire helpfully answers that yes, they do: Waters; and the lands around King’s Landing are called Crownlands. Ned is so disgusted with Robert’s sexual escapades and the number of resulting progeny that he actually thinks favourably of Rhaegar in comparison.
Unexpected ambush is unexpected! (Redundantly and by definition.) Unexpected ambush is also be-lioned and otherwise Lannisterly, not the least because it’s spearheaded by Jaime. It’s about Catelyn and Tyrion. Jaime loves is little brother, you see, not quite as much as he loves his sister (I hope), but enough to roar off after Ned and start a fight. Littlefinger swiftly departs, promising to bring the City Watch. I don’t know that I’d count on it getting there in time to be of any help. There’s some back-and-forth and Ned thinks he’s diffused the situation when Jaime turns around and starts riding away, but then Jaime decides to be a bastard in our sense of the word and orders his men to kill Ned’s and gallops off. This is the man who threw a little boy out of a window, should we be surprised?
There’s a short fight the result of which is sad: Ned is wounded, everyone else (specifically, Jory Cassel, the only person with enough of a presence in the book for us to give a damn) is dead. Littlefinger arrives with some guards who act as medical transportation, getting Ned back to King’s Landing where Pycelle plies him with opium, and then Ned and this chapter fade to black.
Dany is wondering at the practicality of having a gate when there’s no wall to put it in. Now, Dany, don’t be silly, they don’t need walls in the steppes, but you need a gate or people won’t know they’re in the city. Said city is of course Vaes Dothrak, the end point of this grand pilgrimage across the Dothraki Sea. Over forty thousand people, to say nothing of the horses, trooping across half a continent so that Drogo can show off his pretty new wife to the Dothraki Exalted Widowhood Committee. Now that’s commitment to tradition. In the time since the last chapter, Dany has been using all of Doreah’s training to sexually extort forgiveness for Viserys from Drogo, so now the slimiest Targaryen is again on horseback at the head of the column. Oh, Dany…
There isn’t much of a city to speak of beyond the gate. No city at all, just a statue garden populated with monuments the Dothraki took as war trophies. That’s surprisingly normal and un-gruesome. Viserys is being as snotty and tiresome as ever, sadly no one delivers a good beating this time. He keeps on referring to himself in the third person as “the dragon.” I bet he calls his penis “the dragon” when forcing unfortunate prostitutes to sleep with him. Until this reread, I didn’t appreciate what a great job Harry Lloyd did with the part in the HBO show. He was still an asshole, yes, but he was an asshole I could enjoy as the villain of the piece. (IMDB informs me that Harry Lloyd is the great-to-the-nth-power-grandson of Charles Dickens. It’s not relevant, I just have a ton of Firefox tabs open when I write these entries and it takes me two hours per because I get sidetracked by wikis and trivia sites.)
When Viserys does everyone a favour and rides out of earshot so that Dany and Jorah can discuss the viability of a Dothraki invasion, assuming someone with his head not up his ass was leading it. Jorah confesses to an initial prejudice that led him to scoff at the idea, but being less racist and more culturally enlightened he now realizes that the Dothraki are a military power to be feared. And the Council called Robert paranoid. This actually is pretty amusing as a second-time-around, because the first time, I bet I was going, “Oh shit, Robert is right, the Dothraki are coming! Why is no one listening to their fat, whoring, booze hound king!?!” Now I’m just, “Oh, you men and mice and your best laid plans.”
Counteracting the Dothraki’s superiority of numbers and deadly power on the field is the fact that the Westerosi lords can simply weather the invading storm in their castles, and the Dothraki warfare isn’t tailored to sieges. This leads to a conversation about military strategy to be expected from Robert and his lords, segueing into Jorah’s hatred for Ned. I think Jorah is a fairly popular character, but I personally could never stand him. I hate people who whine about being punished for crimes they don’t even deny they committed. It’s not like it was even some law we as readers would find immoral so that we could sympathize with Jorah for breaking it, no, the jackass old people into slavery. He didn’t even do it for greed, he was overspending to pamper his harpy wife, who left him the moment he got exiled, and somehow it’s still all Ned’s fault. Shut up, Jorah, is what I’m saying.
When they get to the city itself, its architecture turns out to be as varied as the styles of monuments around the gate, and of similar origin: all the buildings were built by slaves who followed the traditions of their respective cultures. As a result, Vaes Dothrak has buildings of marble, wood, and grass. Most of them are empty, the city’s permanent population is very small, comprising only the Exalted Widowhood Committee and I’m guessing their attendants. Dothraki tradition, however, dictates that the city should be large enough to house all of the khalasars at once should such an apocalyptic event ever happen. Drogo’s home is a large wooden convertible (that is, the hall has a silk roof which can be raised or lowered according to the weather). His people’s domiciles that surround the hall are “round earthen houses that bulged from the ground like miniature hills, covered with grass.”
And the truth is finally revealed — the Dothraki are actually Hobbits. You think this is the only evidence? Prepare to have your minds blown: in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s father’s name was Drogo.
You’d think GRRM would end the chapter here so we could recover somewhat from this mind-boggling revelation, but no, there’s more. Drogo and his bloodriders hand in their weapons, there’s a law against shedding blood in Vaes Dothrak. The three bloodriders finally get names and personalities: Cohollo, the kindly old one; Haggo, the huge, silently glowering one; Qotho, the one who rapes Dany’s slavegirls. Well then.
For all that two of three of them scare her, Dany appreciates their unwavering loyalty to Drogo, in light of Jaime’s killing of her father. She thinks it would be prudent for her son to have bloodriders when he’s king of the Seven Kingdoms to protect him from treachery among his Kingsguard. I have so many reactions to that: 1) the irony-and-sadness-filled spoiler reaction; 2) the analytic non-spoiler reaction; and 3) the “by the way, Ned & Co, Robert is right” reaction.
Dany has dinner and gifts prepared for Viserys. As one expects with Viserys, things go downhill spectacularly and immediately. First he’s angry about being told to join her for supper, then he’s angry about the very thoughtful, practical and beautiful clothes she had made for him. He winds himself up into his usual frenzy, starts transitioning from emotional abuse to his usual assault and threats of further violence, and Dany finally, finally snaps out of her Stockholm Syndrome and bitchslaps him with the heavy medallion belt that was going to be his gift. Viserys slinks away with his tail between his legs, spewing vitriol, and Dany — sad and tired — settles in to cuddle her dragon eggs for comfort.