A Dance With Dragons

they called to her, in the dialects of Astapor, Lys, and Old Volantis, in guttural Dothraki and the liquid syllables of Qarth, even in the Common Tongue of Westeros. “Mother, please … mother, help my sister, she is sick … give me food for my little ones … please, my old father … help him … help her … help me …”
    I have no more help to give, Dany thought, despairing. The Astapori had no place to go. Thousands remained outside Meereen’s thick walls— men and women and children, old men and little girls and newborn babes. Many were sick, most were starved, and all were doomed to die. Daenerys dare not open her gates to let them in. She had tried to do what she could for them. She had sent them healers, Blue Graces and spell-singers and barber-surgeons, but some of those had sickened as well, and none of their arts had slowed the galloping progression of the flux that had come on the pale mare. Separating the healthy from the sick had proved impractical as well. Her Stalwart Shields had tried, pulling husbands away from wives and children from their mothers, even as the Astapori wept and kicked and pelted them with stones. A few days later, the sick were dead and the healthy ones were sick. Dividing the one from the other had accomplished nothing.
    Even feeding them had grown difficult. Every day she sent them what she could, but every day there were more of them and less food to give them. It was growing harder to find drivers willing to deliver the food as well. Too many of the men they had sent into the camp had been stricken by the flux themselves. Others had been attacked on the way back to the city. Yesterday a wagon had been overturned and two of her soldiers killed, so today the queen had determined that she would bring the food herself. Every one of her advisors had argued fervently against it, from Reznak and the Shavepate to Ser Barristan, but Daenerys would not be moved. “I will not turn away from them,” she said stubbornly. “A queen must know the sufferings of her people.”
    Suffering was the only thing they did not lack. “There is scarcely a horse or mule left, though many rode from Astapor,” Marselen reported to her. “They’ve eaten every one, Your Grace, along with every rat and scavenger dog that they could catch. Now some have begun to eat their own dead.”
    “Man must not eat the flesh of man,” said Aggo.
    “It is known,” agreed Rahkaro. “They will be cursed.”
    “They’re past cursing,” said Symon Stripeback.
    Little children with swollen stomachs trailed after them, too weak or scared to beg. Gaunt men with sunken eyes squatted amidst sand and stones, shitting out their lives in stinking streams of brown and red. Many shat where they slept now, too feeble to crawl to the ditches she’d commanded them to dig. Two women fought over a charred bone. Nearby a boy of ten stood eating a rat. He ate one-handed, the other clutching a sharpened stick lest anyone try to wrest away his prize. Unburied dead lay everywhere. Dany saw one man sprawled in the dirt under a black cloak, but as she rode past his cloak dissolved into a thousand flies. Skeletal women sat upon the ground clutching dying infants. Their eyes followed her. Those who had the strength called out. “Mother … please, Mother … bless you, Mother …”
    Bless me, Dany thought bitterly. Your city is gone to ash and bone, your people are dying all around you. I have no shelter for you, no medicine, no hope. Only stale bread and wormy meat, hard cheese, a little milk. Bless me, bless me.
    What kind of mother has no milk to feed her children?
    “Too many dead,” Aggo said. “They should be burned.”
    “Who will burn them?” asked Ser Barristan. “The bloody flux is everywhere. A hundred die each night.”
    “It is not good to touch the dead,” said Jhogo.
    “This is known,” Aggo and Rakharo said, together.
    “That may be so,” said Dany, “but this thing must be done, all the same.” She thought a moment. “The Unsullied have no fear of corpses. I shall speak to Grey Worm.”
    “Your Grace,” said Ser Barristan, “the Unsullied are your best fighters. We dare not loose this plague amongst them. Let the Astapori bury their own dead.”
    “They are too feeble,” said Symon Stripeback.
    Dany said, “More food might make them stronger.”
    Symon shook his head. “Food should not be wasted on the dying, Your Worship. We do not have enough to feed the living.”
    He was not