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She is woken in the dead of night by one of Drogo’s bloodriders.
Cohollo, she thinks, a squat man of an age with her, his bald head shining in the firelight. He has a crooked nose; she had a brother with a crooked nose, once, and a father with broken teeth, like him. The Dothraki and the Lhazareen do not look so dissimilar, and they intermingle frequently.
Khals like Drogo sneer at the thought of any union save for rape and butchery between their peoples, but in truth, many Dothraki have taken Lhazareen wives, and many Lhazareen have taken Dothraki wives. In between that, all manners of whores, concubines, and mistresses.
Drogo like as not has as much Lhazareen running through his veins as she does Dothraki. As does Cohollo.
“Up,” he says, though he wrenches her from her drowsy state by the arm, and not the hair, as Jhaqo or Mago would have done. “The Khal has need of you, maegi.”
But he lets go of her arm as soon as he is on her feet; part of him fears her, or at least goes in dread of her. Men can still savage and kill what they dread, of course, from scorpions to snakes to those dying of disease, but they do take some care not to linger with it, nor get too close.
Mago did not show such caution when he raped her, of course, but Mago is young and foolish and she will give him many gifts before he dies. The last will be to writhe in agony, his insides turned to fire, purging him of his life’s evil. It will be a splendid act of healing on her part.
Mirri plods along, following Cohollo through the khalasar, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and grass from her hair. At this time of night, all should be quiet, save for the occasional laughter and shouts of the young warriors playing games and telling tales around the fires, or the weeping of slaves.
But it is not. People dart to and thro, babies wail, women pray aloud. Something is wrong. Someone is ill.
Her pace quickens; they halt outside the largest tent, layered with mats of dyed and woven grass. By day, it is colorful and regal, a clear marker of royalty. By night, it looks no different from the other tents, save for its massive size.
Mago and Jhaqo pace outside; both look frustrated and a little wary. Neither has their usual sneers or scowls for her; Mago ducks inside immediately, and Mirri tenses as Drogo himself steps out.
He looks exhausted; dark circles under his eyes, his braid and clothes rumpled. He glowers when he sees her, and she fights back the urge to flee like a cornered animal. What else does she have to fear from this man? She has already seen her family and friends slaughtered, her town laid to waste, her God desecrated and destroyed.
There is little else she could lose, save her life, and that is not worth so much. She would trade it a thousand times over to bring back the people Drogo massacred.
He towers over her; he is bigger than any of his kos, bigger than any man she has ever known.
The Lhazarene tend towards short and stocky, as a rule, and all the men she ever loved her were her height or smaller. The last, Esau, was coming to the temple to find her. She could tell from where he laid in the street, that he had been running to the house of the Great Shepherd.
He was not a devout man, Esau, but he loved her, and so he donated twice the usual amount every week during services in the temple.
He would tease her and say, Mirri, I thought godswives were supposed to be pure of mind and body. It was a joke between them because she had been widowed twice.
Her children had all died in her womb or shortly after, but her husbands had been good to her, and she had chosen to bring what wealthy they left her with to the Shepherd and devote what remained of her life to healing his flock.
Might she have left His service for Esau’s sake? She does not know. Esau was younger than her, and wanted sons and daughters. She could not have given them that, but he used to point out the orphans in the marketplace, with a wistful look in his eyes.
Sometimes she thinks of that, when she lays down at night on her mat, her body aching from bruises and scrapes, her clothes reduced to little more than rags.
A house built into the hillside with Esau, some goats, and several children. She would have been Mirri Ben Zaar, then, not Mirri Maz Duur, but she still would have been a godswife at heart.
“The Khaleesi is dying,” says Drogo. “That is what her handmaids say. She cries and wails from the pains, but the babe is not coming. It has been hours.”
“Great Khal, why did you not summon me sooner?” Mirri asks, dipping her head. Jhaqo makes to strike her for her insolence, but Drogo stops him with a look.
“I do not trust you, maegi,” he says. “But I spared you on account of the moon of my life. Heal her, and save my son.”
Drogo is a terrible man, a sinner and a murderer and a thief. Not even a good thief, at that, if he must announce himself with warbands, rather than stealing through subterfuge. The tricksters in the tales of her youth would dance circles around him without making a sound, and poke him full of holes in his sleep.
Still, it may be that even a foul man such as him, who has made a wife of a child, who has spent his short life raping and ravaging, can still bear some selfless love for another.
“My Khal,” says Mirri, peering up at him, squinting in the dark to make out the lines of his face, the slope of his broad shoulders, his hands clenched at his side, “and if I must choose between the mother and the child?”
He steps towards her, then, and she falls back with silent terror for an instant. But he does not seize her, only grinds out, “Save my son. He is the Stallion-Who-Mounts-the-World. He will rule the great Grass Sea and the stones of the West.”
Ah, she thinks. And such hope I had for you, Drogo. But there is nothing. You are no shepherd, not even to a single lamb. You are the wolf, or better yet, the wild dog, and there is nothing in you but howling greed.
She bows her head again, and goes inside the tent.
Mirri has attended hundreds of births since she was little older than the Khaleesi herself, though most of the mothers, thankfully, were at least a few years older than this. The child Daenerys tosses to and thro, unable to get comfortable, curled on her side, naked and clutching her belly.
There is blood and wetness on the blankets underneath her, and she is straining and trembling, but when Mirri checks between her legs, she can see the child is not forthcoming anytime soon, though she is ready for it.
With the aid of the handmaidens, she feels at Daenerys’ back and belly, then frowns.
“The babe is the wrong way around,” she says.
The blonde girl, Doreah, moans aloud in despair, while the other two, Irri and Jhiqui, go silent and stoic. They know what is coming.
“I will try to turn him,” says Mirri, “but there is no guarantee.”
“What does that mean?” The child-khaleesi’s voice is cracking in fear and frustration.
Mirri flashes between pity and sorrow and rage. The girl can be no more than fourteen.
She was like as not sold to Drogo, a slave bound in silk and golden chains, rather than iron fetters and filthy leathers.
But even now, in mortal peril, she is alive, and everyone Mirri has loved and longed for is dead and rotting under the sun, the flies swarming their swollen, wet faces.
“It means,” she says, “that if the babe is the wrong way, he cannot be born. And if he cannot be born, he will die in your womb, and the rot may take you with him.”
Terror flashes in those violet-star eyes. Mirri has known pallid people before, with fair hair and eyes. She is a townswoman, not a country bumpkin. They saw traders frequently from the Free Cities. But this girl is alien, a far cry from such exotic paleness. She is the blood of Valyria, and, Mirri supposes, its slaves.
It certainly cannot be said that Valyrians never laid with their beasts of burden, and never brought those halfbreed children into their household, and never married them back into their own kin.
Every people waxes poetic about its lineage and many more about their supposed purity, but Mirri is willing to bargain that even she, a so-called lowly Lhazarene, a lamb-wife, has a little of the blood of the dragons and the witches and the slavers and the slaves inside her.
Daenerys grits her little pearly white teeth, but her gums are bloodied from pregnancy. Mirri has seen it many times. It makes you bleed more. All over. Pink speckles the ivory.
Her tongue darts across them, and then she says, “No. No. I will not die like this. I-,” she grunts, and closes her strange eyes, and says, “I will not. Help me. Please.”
“Lie back,” says Mirri. “I will try to push him with my hands on your belly. He is feet-first, Khaleesi. He wants to run and fight already.” It is the sort of nonsense thing one says to nervous young mothers who have good cause to fear.
But she cannot hide the bitterness underneath it. Run and fight and pillage and rape. She should draw the knife hidden against her thick waist, put this poor girl out of her misery, and slit her wrists before the bloodriders are on her.
Instead she massages and presses down, hard, on the distended abdomen, attempting to rotate the babe. Irri and Jhiqui chatter and argue about her practices in the Dothraki tongue, which Mirri understands loosely enough from decades of trade with them.
Not every khalasaar came to raid. Some simply forced them to pay a high tax of protection, but profited their merchants all the same. Her friends and neighbors disliked them, but a man blinds and deafens himself if he will let his wives and children starve for the sake of pride.
Daenerys bears it well at first, but when she begins to gasp and moan from the pain, she hears Drogo cursing outside, and Mago comes in to clout her.
“LEAVE HER!” Daenerys screams, with surprising ferocity for one so young and delicate, and Mirri’s eyes sting with ungrateful tears of pain.
The humiliation is almost as bad. The wild dogs called off by someone young enough to be her granddaughter. Mirri had power, among her community. She was no princess nor queen, but she was a godswife, a priestess, a healer.
She lived a simple but comfortable life by her own choice, she was given honor and regard in the market and the forums, she could read and write and give orders. Now all of that is gone. The temple is an empty husk; God has been cast out like the bees from a burning hive. Her beloveds are dead.
Her words and her writings and her belongings are dust on the wind. No one will remember her besides the slaves sold to the Cities, and they will remember her with pain and agony, not fond affection. She will live on in the squalor and the misery and the terror of their lives.
The babe will not turn. She stops the squeezing and massaging and has Daenerys rock back and forth on her hands and knees, hoping that might draw it around. When that fails, she has the girl lie on the floor, raise her hips as high as she can manage, and bend her knees. Mirri force her to remain like that for half an hour, but it does little.
“I want to push,” Daenerys grinds out, lying on her side, legs apart. “Please. I want to push him out now, Godswife.”
“Pushing will do nothing,” Mirri says.
She takes no pleasure in the child’s agony. It will crush Drogo to lose his son, but he will kill Mirri before she has a chance to take her vengeance. And his young wife? She will be a half-remembered legend of a moth that danced around a flame for a time, before the fire suffocated it, and its wings crumpled and burned. In the end, just another dead bedslave with a fine pedigree.
“Then we must do something,” Daenerys’ teeth are chattering now, while her face beads with sweat. “Please. They say you know magic. Mirri Maz Duur, help me, please. I will see you freed. I will-,”
You will what? Mirri thinks. You will bring back Esau and all the rest? You think like a child. Because you are one. You think you can hold back the tide with your bare hands. You are a brave one, but you are alone, and you are dying. We both are, only you faster than me, Khaleesi. They say the beautiful burn brighter.
“There are spells that could save a child’s life,” says Mirri, dispassionate now, academic, because this is true, it is documented, it is known, as the Dothraki might say. “But that is blood magic. The darkest shade of sorcery. You cannot defy nature to preserve one life, without sacrificing another.”
Daenerys stares at her. Mirri looks back, steadily. She knows what the girl will say. She will say, “Whatever happens, save my son. Kill me, and save my son. Let him live in my place.” It is a tale as old as time.
But instead this strange child growls, “I will not die. I will not die, not even to birth a child.” Furious tears stream like molten wax down her porcelain flacked, flecked with rageful color. “I cannot die like this!”
“Fetch me boiling water and cloths,” Mirri tells the handmaidens. They do not move, but Daenerys jerks her head, coughing, and they obey.
When they are gone, Mirri says, “I will tell you something, Khaleesi. Listen closely.”
She leans in, and whispers.
When she is done, Daenerys’ eyes seem more blue-black than violet, but perhaps that is just the darkness of the tent.
“He said that?” she whispers, and shakes her head weakly. “No. You have misunderstood him, Mirri. No, he is my sun-and-stars. He would not… He loves me. I am his Khaleesi. He is mine.”
But even as she speaks, Mirri can hear the rage crackling underneath.
“He is your stallion,” Mirri agrees calmly, “and you his broodmare.” She speaks barely above a murmur, drowned out by the clamor of horses and men outside. “So now you needs choose, as he did.”
“Choose?” Daenerys licks her lips, which are starting to crack from the dry air and her worrying at them with her perfect teeth.
It is not a true question, though. She already knows the answer, as does Mirri.
As the stars ripple over the grasses, Mirri returns to Drogo. He is drinking with his men, though not to excess.
Unlike some of his bloodriders, she has never seen him even tipsy. He is a careful, cautious man in some ways, Drogo, practical and controlled. In other ways, though, he believes himself half the god they have made of him.
“The Khaleesi and your son will both die,” she says, “unless I perform a wicked art, Khal. You must choose.”
Mago is watching her with hunger- not for rape, but for death. He wants to see her skull cracked open among the dried grass, he wants to see her corpse scorched by the fire crackling in front of them.
Mago is unsettled by her; that his brutality has not reduced her to a quivering worm, trembling before him, upsets him. It is not for a lowly godswife to make a bloodrider feel unease, and so he wants her rent in two.
“Choose which of us should kill her,” he urges Drogo, trading looks with Jhaqo. “This is some trick. She seeks your ruin. If the Khaleesi dies, there are other women who would be honored to be your wife.” He swallows, and adds, “My sister-,”
He has sisters? Mirri would slit her own throat before she suffered any relation to such a dog. His line is maggots and filth. Whatever sore in the ground spit him out will have him again, soon enough, and she hopes the worms digest him slowly, with greatest of care.
Drogo stands up, and Mago falls silent, realizing, perhaps, he has said too much.
“Leave me,” he says, to him and Jhaqo. He runs a hand through his luxuriant black hair, the bells jangling discordantly. “Leave me. What I choose for this maegi is my decision, and it is your place to defend my commands. Not to challenge them.”
When they are relatively alone, his bloodriders circling close by, he says, “You are a maegi. A godswife of the Lamb. You worship cowardice and you die like cowards, bleating and running.”
“The Great Shepherd, I called him,” says Mirri. “He came among us as a man with staff in hand, God made flesh. He teaches peace, not violence. Kindness, not conquest. Mercy, not hatred.”
And how quickly she has abandoned her faith. But he would understand. He would. Even lambs have teeth. Even an ewe will kick and bite and stomp to protect what is hers.
“Your people are cursed,” he says. “You are cursed. You are maegi and you practice dark arts. You fuck demons and beget abominations. Boys with horns and girls with the eyes of goats. My kos say that if we examine your feet, we will find them cloven.”
Mirri bends to remove her threadbare shoes- he stops her with a scoff.
“That is what I was taught, as a boy,” he says. “But if I had only obeyed the teachings of my tutors, I should not be as I am today. My healers have spells as well. They are not maegi women, they are blessed by the Moon Goddess. Under her sight, they can perform great miracles.”
He exhales, and says, “But they say there will be no moon tonight.”
“The moon is weak tonight,” Mirri agrees. She shrugs; it pains her, because her shoulders and back are covered in cuts and bruises.
“I tell you, your Khaleesi and your son will die. There is nothing I or your healers can do for them. You know this already. Your women saw her before I did. You may kill me either way. It will not stop her death, or his.”
“You know magic that might save them,” he grunts, gazing past her towards Daenerys’ tent.
“One of them,” she reminds him. “I asked you earlier, Khal, if you had to choose-,”
He clenches his jaw, and says, “And my answer is no different, woman. My son. She would understand. I will win back a throne for him, and show him where his mother was born, and then I will make it mine.”
She does understand, thinks Mirri. Better than you know.
“Your son,” she says. “Very well. I can perform a spell to save your son. But it will take a life.”
“Her life,” he accepts.
Mirri watches him steadily.
“And he will be whole? No demon?” His voice cracks a little; he sounds like a young man, for an instant, a first-time father, desperate for a happier future.
“He will be whole,” Mirri agrees.
She makes a potion of bloodroot and firepod; from Drogo she accepts three drops of blood, cut by his own blade, so as to avoid any chance of poison from her, and three black hairs, plucked from his own chest.
The potion she gives to Daenerys, who is growing fainter and more delirious with pain. The three of them sit inside the tent for hours, as night begins. Incense is burned; Mirri tosses herbs into the braziers, making the flames dance green and blue.
Shadows flicker and tremble on the walls. Drogo’s eyelids twitch and sag from the smoke and his own exhaustion. Daenerys is unconscious, now.
Mirri crouched behind her; the child-mother’s head is in her thick lap, that beautiful silver gold hair spilling across Mirri’s dirty smock. A small blade is in her hand, barely more than a sliver of steel. Drogo watches her, and says, “You will cut the child out, now?”
Mirri is silent, and watches his shadow behind him, on the wall of the tent. It has grown thrice his size; it makes even Drogo look small, child-like.
She begins to sing, softly, undulating, and slowly, the shadow dances in response. Drogo watches her, unimpressed and weary, and then in time, he turns.
He sees his shadow. He sees her shadow hand his the knife. He lets out a cry.
It sees him, too.
I am a heretic, Mirri thinks, as she watches the shadow converge on Drogo. My God will turn his back on me, now. He will abandon me as he did his temple. I am dancing with demons tonight.
Drogo scrambles to get away, he lunges for her, but he crashes into the burning brazier, blinded by the thick, billowing smoke. He lands on the silken carpets with a yowl, and she hears his bloodriders roar in alarm outside.
Fire begins to lick the walls of the tent from the toppled brazier. Her own face is shining with sweat. The shadow is licking the flesh from Drogo, licking the muscle, consuming the tissues, all of it, it is so hungry for life. When there is little left but a shell, it swirls around Mirri and the dying girl.
Offer up her and the babe as well, she thinks. End it all now.
But she gave Daenerys Targaryen a choice, and Daenerys chose her son over her husband.
She will raise another Drogo, Mirri thinks- wonders- but then, no. Drogo would raise another Drogo.
This strange princess from the West, she will raise something different. She would not die for her son. She may live for him, though, and make him live for her and her ambitions, not his father’s.
Mirri does not think it is Daenerys’ ambition to raze a thousand more Lhazarene and rape a thousand more godswives and little girls.
“No,” she says, aloud, in the tongue of her people. It is almost a question.
No?
The shadow flees into the night; horses and men scream in terror, the bloodriders will run like dogs from the wolves, and Daenerys’ belly begins to twitch and move. The child is fighting his way out; he is turning, head down.
The girl’s eyes flutter; she moans. Mirri leans down and feels. Blood and bone and all, a man devoured by himself, so that his son might live.
Drogo agreed to a life for a life, after all.
He will be whole, the boy. He may have horns or scales or a tail, but he will be whole, and no amount of monstrosity could make him any worse than his father and all those sires before him.
If he has horns, Mirri thinks- she has moved to the other side of Daenerys, she can see the head- we will put bells on them, for every khalasaar he grinds beneath his cloven foot.
“Push,” she whispers, the flames roaring around them, now, and Daenerys gasps, and says, “My eggs, bring them to me!” and pushes with a growl like a lioness.
Mirri sees the eggs, toppled onto the floor, glimmering in the flames, rocking steadily.
“Push,” she whispers again, and tears her eyes away.