Chapter 204: The World's Greatest Sales Pitch
"What we can conclude from both of those facts," Ian continued, "is that Temmo's khalasar was essentially out of arrows by the time the Unsullied arrived.
Think about it — anyone who's ever used a bow knows that shooting arrowheads against iron plate wrecks them fast. Against Qohor steel? Even worse. The Dothraki, already running low, burned through what little they had left fighting Qohor's heavy cavalry. That's the critical factor that forced them into pure shock charges against the Unsullied pike wall."
"Even charging without arrows, the Unsullied still beat twenty thousand Dothraki with three thousand men — that's never been done before or since!" Instructor Fehmar's voice had risen a notch. Ian could hear the strain in it.
"It was a genuine victory. But it wasn't won by the Unsullied alone, and it wasn't an open field engagement. We've already established that the defense of Qohor didn't happen on the city's last day — the garrison was still functional when the Unsullied arrived."
Who exactly is 'we' in that sentence? Fehmar thought furiously, but kept his mouth shut.
"So when the Unsullied reached Qohor, they weren't thrown straight into combat. They had time to prepare. They dressed their ranks with their backs to the city walls and built defensive works specifically designed to counter the two biggest threats a cavalry charge poses against infantry — the raw momentum of the impact, and the ability of cavalry to exploit gaps in a formation.
The first problem is impact force. Even a light Dothraki rider — horse and man together — weighs somewhere around half a ton. A row of spear points alone can't absorb that. Kill the rider on contact, and the horse's corpse still hits your line at a full gallop. Dead weight at speed will scatter men, knock gaps in your formation, and the riders coming in behind pour through those gaps before you can close them. No amount of courage patches that hole fast enough.
That's why the Unsullied must have planted obstacles — sharpened stakes, caltrops, some form of field fortification — out in front of their line. Something to bleed off the momentum and force the horses to slow before they hit the spears. That's the only way three thousand men absorb eighteen consecutive charges without the formation simply disintegrating."
"Eighteen charges," Ian repeated, glancing at Fehmar. "That's the number you cited. Think about what that actually means tactically. No army regroups for eighteen major assaults after getting broken each time. That's not eighteen all-out charges — that's wave attacks. Controlled rotations. Which tells us something crucial about the ground.
The Unsullied were backed against the city walls, and they clearly anchored their flanks as well — fieldworks on both sides, forcing the Dothraki to abandon any attempt at encirclement. Which meant Temmo could only attack on a front equal to the width of the Unsullied formation itself. That caps his effective assault force at maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred riders per wave, regardless of how many tens of thousands he had behind them. He'd turned a twenty-to-one numerical advantage into something close to parity at the point of contact.
And the whole time, Qohor's own archers were up on those walls behind the Unsullied, shooting down into the khalasar at their leisure."
Ian ticked the factors off methodically.
"Dothraki nearly out of arrows — can't attrit the Unsullied from range. Unsullied anchored against the city — can't be flanked or encircled. Obstacles in front of the line — cavalry momentum neutralized before contact. Archers on the walls — continuous fire support from a protected position. Strip all of that out of the story, ignore every advantage the defenders had, and what you're left with is a legend. A myth. A perfect marketing advertisement that slave traders have been polishing and embellishing for four hundred years to justify charging twenty gold dragons for a single soldier."
Ian paused.
"Am I wrong?"
Before he'd actually studied the Unsullied — before he'd heard Fehmar's breakdown of their three weapons and three formations — Ian wouldn't have made this argument. He would have assumed the television version was all there was: decent infantry with good discipline. But what Fehmar had described was something genuinely closer to Alexander's hypaspists, and once Ian understood what they actually were, the Battle of Qohor suddenly made perfect sense.
The Unsullied were real. Their capability was real. The story built around them was just... improved upon. Extensively.
Though the single most important factor in the whole engagement, Ian thought privately, was Dothraki tactical stupidity. Heavy shock cavalry charging a prepared pike wall head-on is a death sentence — every serious student of warfare knows it. Infantry victories against cavalry in open field engagements almost always relied on ranged weapons, not spears. The Dothraki had managed to stumble into the one scenario where their greatest strength became irrelevant and kept throwing themselves at it eighteen times.
That wasn't the Unsullied's legend. That was a gift.
Fehmar had gone pale. As the man who had trained Unsullied for decades, he understood their true capabilities better than anyone in Astapor. And because of that, the outcome of the Battle of Qohor had always nagged at him. He'd run the engagement on a sand table more times than he could count, commanding the Unsullied with every tactical approach he knew — and every simulation ended the same way. Defeat.
Ian's breakdown had just answered a question Fehmar had been sitting with for years. The Good Masters had revised the story so many times, for so many generations, that they'd eventually started believing their own version of it.
Fehmar's expression, when he looked at Ian now, was mostly wary — but there was something underneath it that he couldn't quite suppress. Something that looked a lot like respect.
Kraznys's expression was considerably less complicated. Missandei had translated Ian's words to him faithfully, and while Kraznys had lost the thread somewhere in the middle, the ending had landed clearly enough — Ian had just accused the Good Masters of inflating their prices through selective storytelling. And the infuriating part was that Kraznys knew it was true.
The price of an Unsullied had been climbing steadily for centuries while the cost of everything else in Slaver's Bay had barely moved. A silver coin bought four to six healthy boys on the open market. A trained Unsullied went for twelve to twenty gold dragons depending on how well you could hold your ground in negotiation. The markup was astronomical, and the Battle of Qohor was the justification that made buyers accept it without flinching.
"Ask this Westerosi pain in my backside whether he's actually here to buy something," Kraznys said tightly, "or just to hear himself talk."
But before Missandei could relay the message, Ian spoke again.
"All right. Continue the introduction."
Missandei paused, then translated for Kraznys.
Kraznys reined himself in. His people had already confirmed what was in those chests — enough gold to make this the largest single transaction in the history of Astapor. That was worth enduring a lecture.
He nudged Missandei with the handle of his whip. "Tell the barbarian this: those soldiers have been standing in that plaza for a full day and night. They will stand there until they drop dead unless I personally order them to stand down. If nine hundred and ninety-nine of them collapse and die on those bricks, the last one will hold his position until he stops breathing. They know no fear. They know no will but their master's. Tell him."
Missandei translated, then continued the introduction herself.
"The Unsullied before you are the ones who survived enough trials to earn the spiked helmet. On average, it takes twenty castrated boys to produce a single Unsullied.
Those who cannot march at full load from dawn to dusk are cut. Those who cannot scale a cliff face in the dead of winter are cut. Those who cannot cross a field of burning coals are cut. And those who cannot kill an infant are cut."
Daenerys went very still. "Kill an infant?"
Her hand, which had been resting at her side, found Ian's sleeve and held on.
"Before earning his spiked helmet," Missandei continued, her voice carefully neutral, "each Unsullied must take a silver coin to the slave market, choose a newborn who is crying, and kill it in front of its mother. This is how the masters confirm that nothing soft remains in him."
Daenerys's grip on Ian's sleeve slipped. She caught his hand instead and held it tightly.
"They take a baby from its mother's arms," she said quietly, "kill it in front of her, and then pay for the privilege?"
"The coin goes to the child's owner, not the mother," Fehmar said. "The Unsullied are not permitted to steal. You're too gentle-hearted for this business, Your Grace." He glanced at Ian, as if hoping the man with the military mind would help move things along. "I'll tell you something that surprises most buyers — more Unsullied fail the infant test than fail the dog test."
"The dog test," Daenerys repeated flatly.
"On the day each boy is cut, he's given a puppy. He raises it for a year. At the end of the year, he strangles it with his own hands. Those who refuse are killed immediately — their bodies fed to the other dogs. In our experience, it's the single most important lesson in the entire training. It determines everything that comes after."
"Stop." Daenerys's voice was quiet but firm. She tugged at Ian's hand and pulled him to the far end of the platform, out of earshot of the slavers.
"Please." She kept her voice low, her eyes searching his face. "Let's walk away. If we buy these men, we're not just buying soldiers — we're buying every infant and every dog they killed to become what they are. We'd be paying for all of it."
Without the hardening she'd undergone in the original story — the betrayals, the losses, the slow and brutal education the world had given her — Daenerys was still capable of being broken by what she was seeing. In the original timeline, she had arrived in Astapor already forged by grief. Here, she was still herself.
Her first instinct wasn't to free the slaves. It was to get as far away from this plaza as possible.
But Ian's expression hadn't changed. Not even slightly.
Daenerys looked at him for a long moment.
"You already knew," she said. It wasn't quite a question. "You knew all of this before we ever left the ship."
(End of Chapter)
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