Vaes Dothrak

City of the horselords

The Dothraki's only city ÔÇö no walls, no buildings but stolen monuments, watched over by the Mother of Mountains.

The fuller tale

Vaes Dothrak is the only city of a people who despise cities, and it is built accordingly: no walls, no gates, no streets in any ordered sense ÔÇö a vast sprawl of grass palaces, horse-hide tents and open sky beneath the Mother of Mountains, entered between two colossal bronze stallions whose hooves meet in an arch. Along its godsway stand the stolen gods of every people the khalasars have ever broken, monuments dragged across a continent as trophies. The Dothraki raze cities; this one they keep, because prophecy says the khal of khals, the Stallion Who Mounts the World, will one day be proclaimed here. Under the Mother of Mountains no blade may be drawn and no free manÔÇÖs blood spilled, which does not make the city safe ÔÇö merely inventive.

The city is ruled, insofar as it is ruled, by the dosh khaleen: the widows of dead khals, who read omens in smoke and burning grass and speak for the Dothraki past. Between raids, the khalasars come to Vaes Dothrak to trade ÔÇö its market is the one ground where the caravans of the far east and the merchants of the west meet under truce ÔÇö and to lay their plunder before the crones. Every khaleesi is bound to the place twice: she must come there to eat the raw stallionÔÇÖs heart before the dosh khaleen while they prophesy over her unborn child, and when her khal dies, custom demands she return and live out her days among the widows. The city is the promise and the prison folded into one address.

DaenerysÔÇÖs time there delivers the story two of its founding scenes. She eats the stallionÔÇÖs heart and keeps it down, and the crones proclaim her son the Stallion Who Mounts the World ÔÇö a prophecy the story then spends years bending toward a daughter instead. And it is in the sacred city that her brother finally forces the issue, drunk, sword drawn where no blade may be, demanding his crown with steel at his sisterÔÇÖs belly. DrogoÔÇÖs solution honors the letter of the law with molten gold, and Daenerys watches without looking away: no blade, no drop of blood spilled, and the last obstacle between her and her own story removed by the very customs meant to bind her.

The show sends her back. A widowed khaleesi twice over by the sixth season, Daenerys is hauled to Vaes Dothrak to join the dosh khaleen as tradition requires ÔÇö and instead locks the gathered khals in the temple, tips the braziers, and walks out of the fire unburnt for the second time in her life, taking every khalasar on the grass as her own. The city built to hold widowed queens becomes the place a widow claims the whole horde; the books, which leave her at the edge of the grass sea with a khalasar closing in as the published story pauses, seem to be steering toward the same appointment by a darker road.

The page and the screen

The second visit is the showÔÇÖs invention ÔÇö a screen answer to a book question still open. In the novels, Daenerys ends the fifth volume alone on the Dothraki sea with Drogon, the ashes of MeereenÔÇÖs peace behind her and Khal JhaqoÔÇÖs riders arriving; her return to Vaes Dothrak and the judgment of the dosh khaleen is where the story is plainly headed, but how it goes remains unwritten. The temple fire, the burning of the khals and the wholesale winning of the horde are televisionÔÇÖs bold guess at that chapter.

The chronicle here

In Vaes Dothrak, Daenerys eats the stallion's heart; the crones name her son the Stallion Who Mounts the World. (S1┬ÀE6)
In Vaes Dothrak the khals debate Dany's fate; she burns the temple with them in it and walks out unburnt. Again. (S6┬ÀE4)
In Vaes Dothrak Daenerys eats the stallion's heart and the crones name her son the stallion who mounts the world; Jorah stops Viserys stealing her eggs. (AGOT 37)
In the market of Vaes Dothrak a wineseller pours poison for the dragon's daughter; Jorah's suspicion saves her, and Drogo promises his son the iron chair. (AGOT 47)