A Feast for Dragons

them any mind. They were just slaves fetching water for
their master. Wearing a collar conferred certain advantages, particularly a
gilded collar inscribed with the name of Yezzan zo Qaggaz. The chime of those
little bells proclaimed their value to anyone with ears. A slave was only as
important as his master; Yezzan was the richest man in the Yellow City and had brought
six hundred slave soldiers to the war, even if he did look like a monstrous
yellow slug and smell of piss. Their collars gave them leave to go anywhere
they might wish within the camp.
    Until Yezzan dies
.
    The Clanker Lords had their slave soldiers drilling in the
nearest field. The clatter of the chains that bound them made a harsh metallic
music as they marched across the sand in lockstep and formed up with their long
spears. Elsewhere teams of slaves were raising ramps of stone and sand beneath
their mangonels and scorpions, angling them upward at the sky, the better to
defend the camp should the black dragon return. It made the dwarf smile to see
them sweating and cursing as they wrestled the heavy machines onto the
inclines. Crossbows were much in evidence as well. Every other man seemed to be
clutching one, with a quiverfull of bolts hanging from his hip.
    If anyone had thought to ask him, Tyrion could have told
them not to bother. Unless one of those long iron scorpion bolts chanced to
find an eye, the queen’s pet monster was not like to be brought down by such
toys.
Dragons are not so easy to kill as that. Tickle him with these and
you’ll only make him angry
.
    The eyes were where a dragon was most vulnerable. The eyes,
and the brain behind them. Not the underbelly, as certain old tales would have
it. The scales there were just as tough as those along a dragon’s back and
flanks. And not down the gullet either. That was madness. These would-be
dragonslayers might as well try to quench a fire with a spear thrust. “Death
comes out of the dragon’s mouth,” Septon Barth had written in his
Unnatural
History
, “but death does not go in that way.”
    Farther on, two legions from New Ghis were facing off shield
wall to shield wall whilst serjeants in iron halfhelms with horsehair crests
screamed commands in their own incomprehensible dialect. To the naked eye the
Ghiscari looked more formidable than the Yunkish slave soldiers, but Tyrion
nursed doubts. The legionaries might be armed and organized in the same manner as
Unsullied … but the eunuchs knew no other life, whereas the Ghiscari
were free citizens who served for three-year terms.
    The line at the well stretched back a quarter mile.
    There were only a handful of wells within a day’s march of
Meereen, so the wait was always long. Most of the Yunkish host drew their
drinking water from the Skahazadhan, which Tyrion had known was a very bad idea
even before the healer’s warning. The clever ones took care to stay upstream of
the latrines, but they were still downstream of the city.
    The fact that there were any good wells at all within a
day’s march of the city only went to prove that Daenerys Targaryen was still an
innocent where siegecraft was concerned.
She should have poisoned every
well. Then all the Yunkishmen would be drinking from the river. See how long
their siege lasts then
. That was what his lord father would have done,
Tyrion did not doubt.
    Every time they shuffled forward another place, the bells on
their collars tinkled brightly.
Such a happy sound, it makes me want to
scoop out someone’s eyeballs with a spoon
. By now Griff and Duck and
Haldon Halfmaester should be in Westeros with their young prince.
I
should be with them … but no, I had to have a whore. Kinslaying was
not enough, I needed cunt and wine to seal my ruin, and here I am on the wrong
side of the world, wearing a slave collar with little golden bells to announce
my coming. If I dance just right, maybe I can ring “The Rains of Castamere.”
    There was no better place to hear the latest news and rumors
than around the well. “I know what I saw,” an old slave in a rusted iron collar
was saying, as Tyrion and Penny shuffled along in the queue, “and I saw that
dragon ripping off arms and legs, tearing men in half, burning them down to ash
and bones. People started running, trying to get out of that pit, but I come to
see a show, and by all the gods of Ghis, I saw one. I was up in the purple, so
I didn’t think the dragon was like to trouble me.”
    “The queen climbed onto the