Original subtitles

JORAH MORMONT: Between the Free Cities and the Bones,

between the Shivering Sea and Slaver's Bay,

spreads the Dothraki Sea.

Named not for its waters but for how freely its conquerors roam upon it.

A traveler on the Dothraki Sea will find few villages and no farms.

Because the Dothraki view it as a sin to cut into their Mother Earth

with plows and shovels.

And the Dothraki know only one punishment.

The closest the Dothraki approach to civilization

is Vaes Dothrak.

Though to outsiders, it doesn't look like a city.

There are no walls,

because the Dothraki believe only cowards hide behind them,

instead of facing an enemy blade in hand.

But the Dothraki couldn't do that here either.

Within the bounds of the city,

no one, not even the mightiest khal, may carry a blade,

by order of the priestesses of the Dosh Khaleen.

Not that any enemy would be foolish enough

to attack the sacred city of the Dothraki in the first place.

Two giant bronze stallions rear over the entrance to the city,

their hooves meeting in the air to form an arch.

The famous Horse Gate.

Through it is the godsway,

where the Dothraki drag the sacred idols of the cities and peoples they've broken.

Along one side, stone gods look down on you from cracked thrones

with chipped and stained faces,

their names lost to time.

Across the road, monsters watch you pass.

Black iron dragons with jewels for eyes,

roaring griffins, manticores with barbed tails poised to strike,

and other terrible beasts from every corner of Essos.

But there is nothing to fear.

lf these gods and devils had any power,

they would never have ended here.

Not all foreign gods in Vaes Dothrak are broken.

ln the famous Eastern and Western Markets,

merchants worship their god of trade with the sufferance of the Dothraki,

who themselves don't understand buying and selling.

The Western Market is a great square of beaten earth filled with animal pens,

drinking halls and a maze of stalls and crooked aisles.

Even goods from Westeros find their way here.

Though the merchants who sell them wouldn't know a Lannister from a Frey.

The Eastern Market is, fittingly, a stranger place.

The elders of the Dosh Khaleen view it with suspicion

and most Dothrakis stay away.

They aren't wrong.

The great elephants, the basilisks in silver cages

and the striped black-and-white horses of the Jogos Nhai

are harmless enough.

But l can see how the elders wouldn't want their younger members

to see the warrior maids of Hyrkoon,

who wear iron rings in their nipples and rubies in their cheeks.

Or listen to the Shadow Men, who cover their bodies with tattoos

and hide their faces behind masks and whisper dark secrets for a price.

This is all of Vaes Dothrak that foreigners ever know.

For only Dothraki are permitted into the inner city

where the Dosh Khaleen live out their lives.

A bloodrider, drunk on fermented mare's milk,

once told me that the Dosh Khaleen are stewards.

They prepare for the day when every rider of every khalasar

shall return to the city.

And the Dothraki truly will be one blood and one khalasar again,

under the greatest khal of all,

the stallion who mounts the world.

He will ride to the ends of the earth and grind nations into dust

and take the whole world as his herd.

Or so the prophecy goes.

Yet the world is vast,

with many places a horse can't go.

The stallion who mounts the world couldn't rear above a mountain range.

Or leap across the sea.

Still, the world has been conquered before.

Just not with stallions.