A Dance With Dragons. Part 2 After The Feast

But that was hardly possible unless he abandoned Penny. She’d want to take the dog and the pig along.

“It won’t be so terrible, will it?” Penny whispered. “He paid so much for us. He’ll be kind, won’t he?”

So long as we amuse him. “We’re too valuable to mistreat,” he reassured her, with blood still trickling down his back from those last two lashes. When our show grows stale, however … and it does, it does grow stale …

Their master’s overseer was waiting to take charge of them, with a mule cart and two soldiers. He had a long narrow face and a chin beard bound about with golden wire, and his stiff red-black hair swept out from his temples to form a pair of taloned hands. “What darling little creatures you are,” he said. “You remind me of my own children … or would, if my little ones were not dead. I shall take good care of you. Tell me your names.”

“Penny.” Her voice was a whisper, small and scared.

Tyrion, of House Lannister, rightful lord of Casterly Rock, you sniveling worm. “Yollo.”

“Bold Yollo. Bright Penny. You are the property of the noble and valorous Yezzan zo Qaggaz, scholar and warrior, revered amongst the Wise Masters of Yunkai. Count yourselves fortunate, for Yezzan is a kindly and benevolent master. Think of him as you would your father.”

Gladly, thought Tyrion, but this time he held his tongue. They would have to perform for their new master soon enough, he did not doubt, and he could not take another lash.

“Your father loves his special treasures best of all, and he will cherish you,” the overseer was saying. “And me, think of me as you would the nurse who cared for you when you were small. Nurse is what all my children call me.”

“Lot ninety-nine,” the auctioneer called. “A warrior.”

The girl had sold quickly and was being bundled off to her new owner, clutching her clothing to small, pink-tipped breasts. Two slavers dragged Jorah Mormont onto the block to take her place. The knight was naked but for a breechclout, his back raw from the whip, his face so swollen as to be almost unrecognizable. Chains bound his wrists and ankles. A little taste of the meal he cooked for me, Tyrion thought, yet he found that he could take no pleasure from the big knight’s miseries.

Even in chains, Mormont looked dangerous, a hulking brute with big, thick arms and sloped shoulders. All that coarse dark hair on his chest made him look more beast than man. Both his eyes were blackened, two dark pits in that grotesquely swollen face. Upon one cheek he bore a brand: a demon’s mask.

When the slavers had swarmed aboard the Selaesori Qhoran, Ser Jorah had met them with longsword in hand, slaying three before they overwhelmed him. Their shipmates would gladly have killed him, but the captain forbade it; a fighter was always worth good silver. So Mormont had been chained to an oar, beaten within an inch of his life, starved, and branded.

“Big and strong, this one,” the auctioneer declared. “Plenty of piss in him. He’ll give a good show in the fighting pits. Who will start me out at three hundred?”

No one would.

Mormont paid no mind to the mongrel crowd; his eyes were fixed beyond the siege lines, on the distant city with its ancient walls of many-colored brick. Tyrion could read that look as easy as a book: so near and yet so distant. The poor wretch had returned too late. Daenerys Targaryen was wed, the guards on the pens had told them, laughing. She had taken a Meereenese slaver as her king, as wealthy as he was noble, and when the peace was signed and sealed the fighting pits of Meereen would open once again. Other slaves insisted that the guards were lying, that Daenerys Targaryen would never make peace with slavers. Mhysa, they called her. Someone told him that meant Mother. Soon the silver queen would come forth from her city, smash the Yunkai’i, and break their chains, they whispered to one another.

And then she’ll bake us all a lemon pie and kiss our widdle wounds and make them better, the dwarf thought. He had no faith in royal rescues. If need be, he would see to their deliverance himself. The mushrooms jammed into the toe of his boot should be sufficient for both him and Penny. Crunch and Pretty Pig would need to fend for themselves.

Nurse was still lecturing his master’s new prizes. “Do all you are told and nothing more, and you shall live like little lords, pampered and adored,” he promised. “Disobey … but you would never do that, would you? Not my sweetlings.” He reached down and pinched Penny on her cheek.

“Two hundred, then,” the auctioneer said. “A big brute like this, he’s worth three times as much. What a bodyguard he will make! No enemy will dare molest you!”

“Come, my little friends,” Nurse said, “I will show you to your new home. In Yunkai you will dwell in the golden pyramid of Qaggaz and dine off silver plates, but here we live simply, in the humble tents of soldiers.”

“Who will give me one hundred?” cried the auctioneer.

That drew a bid at last, though it was only fifty silvers. The bidder was a thin man in a leather apron.

“And one,” said the crone in the violet tokar.

One of the soldiers lifted Penny onto the back of the mule cart. “Who is the old woman?” the dwarf asked him.

“Zahrina,” the man said. “Cheap fighters, hers. Meat for heroes. Your friend dead soon.”

He was no friend to me. Yet Tyrion Lannister found himself turning to Nurse and saying, “You cannot let her have him.”

Nurse squinted at him. “What is this noise you make?”

Tyrion pointed. “That one is part of our show. The bear and the maiden fair. Jorah is the bear, Penny is the maiden, I am the brave knight who rescues her. I dance about and hit him in the balls. Very funny.”

The overseer squinted at the auction block. “Him?” The bidding for Jorah Mormont had reached two hundred silvers.

“And one,” said the crone in the violet tokar.

“Your bear. I see.” Nurse went scuttling off through the crowd, bent over the huge yellow Yunkishman in his litter, whispered in his ear. His master nodded, chins wobbling, then raised his fan. “Three hundred,” he called out in a wheezy voice.

The crone sniffed and turned away.

“Why did you do that?” Penny asked, in the Common Tongue.

A fair question, thought Tyrion. Why did I? “Your show was growing dull. Every mummer needs a dancing bear.”

She gave him a reproachful look, then retreated to the back of the cart and sat with her arms around Crunch, as if the dog was her last true friend in the world. Perhaps he is.

Nurse returned with Jorah Mormont. Two of their master’s slave soldiers flung him into the back of the mule cart between the dwarfs. The knight did not struggle. All the fight went out of him when he heard that his queen had wed, Tyrion realized. One whispered word had done what fists and whips and clubs could not; it had broken him. I should have let the crone have him. He’s going to be as useful as nipples on a breastplate.

Nurse climbed onto the front of the mule cart and took up the reins, and they set off through the siege camp to the compound of their new master, the noble Yezzan zo Qaggaz. Four slave soldiers marched beside them, two on either side of the cart.

Penny did not weep, but her eyes were red and miserable, and she never lifted them from Crunch. Does she think all this might fade away if she does not look at it? Ser Jorah Mormont looked at no one and nothing. He sat huddled, brooding in his chains.

Tyrion looked at everything and everyone.

The Yunkish encampment was not one camp but a hundred camps raised up cheek by jowl in a crescent around the walls of Meereen, a city of silk and canvas with its own avenues and alleys, taverns and trollops, good districts and bad. Between the siege lines and the bay, tents had sprouted up like yellow mushrooms. Some were small and mean, no more than a flap of old stained canvas to keep off the rain and sun, but beside them stood barracks tents large enough to sleep a hundred men and silken pavilions as big as palaces with harpies gleaming atop their roof poles. Some camps were orderly, with the tents arrayed around a fire pit in concentric circles, weapons and armor stacked around the inner ring, horse lines outside. Elsewhere, pure chaos seemed to reign.

The dry, scorched plains around Meereen were flat and bare and treeless for long leagues, but the Yunkish ships had brought lumber and hides up from the south, enough to raise six huge trebuchets. They were arrayed on three sides of the city, all but the river side, surrounded by piles of broken stone and casks of pitch and resin just waiting for a torch. One of the soldiers walking along beside the cart saw where Tyrion was looking and proudly told him that each of the trebuchets had been given a name: Dragonbreaker, Harridan, Harpy’s Daughter, Wicked Sister, Ghost of Astapor, Mazdhan’s Fist. Towering above the tents to a height of forty feet, the trebuchets were the siege camp’s chief landmarks. “Just the sight of them drove the dragon queen to her knees,” he boasted. “And there she will stay, sucking Hizdahr’s noble cock, else we smash her walls to rubble.”

Tyrion saw a slave being whipped, blow after blow, until his back was nothing but blood and raw meat. A file of men marched past in irons, clanking with every step; they carried spears and wore short swords, but chains linked them wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle. The air smelled of roasting meat, and he saw one man skinning a dog for his stewpot.

He saw the dead as well, and heard the dying. Under the drifting smoke, the smell of horses, and the sharp salt tang of the bay was a stink of blood and shit. Some flux, he realized, as he watched two sellswords carry the corpse of a third from one of the tents. That made his fingers twitch. Disease could wipe out an army quicker than any battle, he had heard his father say once.

All the more reason to escape, and soon.

A quarter mile on, he found good reason to reconsider. A crowd had formed around three slaves taken whilst trying to escape. “I know my little treasures will be sweet and obedient,” Nurse said. “See what befalls ones who try to run.”

The captives had been tied to a row of crossbeams, and a pair of slingers were using them to test their skills. “Tolosi,” one of the guards told them. “The best slingers in the world. They throw soft lead balls in place of stones.”

Tyrion had never seen the point of slings, when bows had so much better range … but he had never seen Tolosi at work before. Their lead balls did vastly more damage then the smooth stones other slingers used, and more than any bow as well. One struck the knee of one of the captives, and it burst apart in a gout of blood and bone that left the man’s lower leg dangling by a rope of dark red tendon. Well, he won’t run again, Tyrion allowed, as the man began to scream. His shrieks mingled in the morning air with the laughter of camp followers and the curses of those who’d wagered good coin that the slinger would miss. Penny looked away, but Nurse grasped her under the chin and twisted her head back around. “Watch,” he commanded. “You too, bear.”

Jorah Mormont raised his head and stared at Nurse. Tyrion could see the tightness in his arms. He’s going to throttle him, and that will be the end for all of us. But the knight only grimaced, then turned to watch the bloody show.

To the east the massive brick walls of Meereen shimmered through the morning heat. That was the refuge these poor fools had hoped to reach. How long will it remain a refuge, though?

All three of the would-be escapees were dead before Nurse gathered up the reins again. The mule cart rumbled on.