Village of the Lhazareen

Village of the lamb men

A mud-walled village of the peaceful Lhazareen, herders whom the Dothraki raid for slaves.

The fuller tale

The Lhazareen keep sheep on the dry lands south of the grass sea, worship the Great Shepherd who counts every soul his flock, and do not fight ÔÇö a theology the Dothraki have priced precisely. The horselords call them the lamb men, raid them for slaves the way other men shear wool, and consider the arrangement part of the natural order. Their villages are mud-walled and low, their god gentle, their history a ledger of other peopleÔÇÖs harvests. The story visits exactly one such village, and what happens there outweighs half the battles in the tale.

DrogoÔÇÖs khalasar falls on the village to take slaves for SlaverÔÇÖs Bay ÔÇö the promised crown must be bought in ships, and ships are bought with people. Riding through the aftermath, Daenerys does the first queenly thing of her life and the first that costs her: she claims the raped women as her own, among them Mirri Maz Duur, a godswife schooled in healing far beyond her village. When a raiderÔÇÖs wound festers and Drogo begins to die, Daenerys turns to MirriÔÇÖs deeper arts, and the godswife names the only price of the bloodmagic that follows: only death pays for life. The tent, the shadows, the songs ÔÇö and the bill, itemized with a healerÔÇÖs care: the khal returned as a breathing shell, the son in DaenerysÔÇÖs womb taken in trade, the khalasar scattered to new khals by morning.

Daenerys asks why, and Mirri Maz DuurÔÇÖs answer is the coldest arithmetic in the story ÔÇö saved for what, she asks, when her temple was burned and her flock butchered before the savior rode by. Daenerys binds her to the pyre even so, and walks into the fire with her three eggs; the dragons hatch out of a village womanÔÇÖs execution as much as out of any miracle. The tale never lets the trade fade: every chain Daenerys breaks afterward is partly an argument with the godswife of Lhazar, and the question of what a liberator owes the people her liberation arrives too late to save is asked here first, in mud walls, by the storyÔÇÖs smallest and most unyielding prophet.