The peoples who keep no kings

A khalasar is not a nation but a following — the whole moving mass of a khal's riders, wives, slaves, herds, and children, bound to him for as long as his strength commands their fear. It has no borders and no capital; it is wherever the horses are. Wealth is counted in horseflesh and in the plunder of raids, and a khal's power waxes and wanes with the number of screamers who ride at his back. When a khal grows weak or old, his people melt away to stronger men, and the khalasar breaks like a wave.

A Dothraki warrior wears his hair in a single oiled braid, hung with bells, and never cuts it while he lives undefeated — each bell, the tales say, marks a victory. To be beaten in battle is to have the braid shorn, that all the world may read a rider's shame at a glance. The longest, heaviest braids belong to the khals who have never lost, and the smallfolk of the grasslands step aside at the sound of their bells.

When a khal dies, his widow does not follow him to the night lands; she is brought to Vaes Dothrak to join the dosh khaleen, the council of crones who dwell beneath the Mother of Mountains. These widowed khaleesi are honoured as holy women and read omens for the whole of the horse-people — the movements of the herds, the fortunes of khalasars, and the fate of unborn children. No khal rules them; in the one city the Dothraki keep, it is the old women who hold what passes for authority.

Vaes Dothrak is the sole city of a people who despise cities — a vast, half-empty gathering place beneath the Mother of Mountains, entered between two great bronze stallions whose arched hooves meet far overhead. Within its bounds one iron law holds above all others: no man may carry a naked blade, and no free man's blood may be shed. Reavers who spend their lives at slaughter set aside their arakhs at the horse gate, for to draw steel under the Mother of Mountains is the gravest of sacrileges. The markets there — Western and Eastern — are said to hold every good and grotesquerie between the Sunset Sea and the lands of the dawn.

The free folk do not follow a man for the name of his father. A King-Beyond-the-Wall is not an heir but a victor — one who has bent the wild clans to his will by strength, cunning, or sheer force of person, and holds them only so long as they judge him worth the following. History remembers a handful who managed it: Raymun Redbeard, who led a host over the Wall and fell at Long Lake; Gendel and Gorne, brother-kings of the deep ages; and Joramun of the legends, who was said to have blown the Horn of Winter and woken giants from the earth. Most who claim the title die unfollowed.

To the free folk, the great insult is kneeler — their word for every southron who bends the knee to a lord and calls it honour. They reckon themselves free precisely because they kneel to no one and owe no man taxes, levies, or fealty. It is a hard freedom, bought with hunger and lived under the shadow of worse things in the dark; but the free folk hold it dearer than the warm halls and full granaries of the lands below the Wall, and they do not understand why any man would trade it away.

There is no single people beyond the Wall but a hundred quarrelling ones: cave-dwellers and Hornfoots, the cannibal clans of the ice rivers, the fisher-folk of the frozen shore with their chariots drawn by dogs, and the Nightrunners and the Weeper's raiders. Apart from all of them stand the Thenns, who dwell in a high hidden valley and are the nearest thing to an ordered folk the true north holds — they work bronze, obey a leader they name the Magnar, or 'lord' in the Old Tongue, and are counted the most disciplined and least trusting of all the free folk.

Once there stood on a sheltered northern bay the closest thing the free folk ever built to a town — Hardhome, a haven of some thousands. Six centuries past, by the reckoning of the chronicles, it died in a single night of horror: fires that burned the sky, screams carried leagues out to sea, ships of slavers waiting to carry off those who fled. What truly happened there no man knows, but the ruined shore has been shunned as a haunted place ever since, and the tales that cling to it are the darkest the north can tell.