The arithmetic problem turned out to be solvable.
Aggo could count to ten without difficulty — he had ten fingers, which helped. The gap was not intelligence but vocabulary: the Dothraki language had precise words for small quantities and approximate words for large ones, because large quantities of enemies were dealt with by fighting rather than counting, and large quantities of horses were managed by experienced herdsmen who didn't need numbers to know when a herd was short.
"Five tens," Daenerys said. "Not fifty. Five tens. How many hands is that?"
Aggo held up both hands, closed them, held them up again, closed them, held them up again, closed them, held them up, closed them, held them up, closed them.
He looked at the ten closed-and-opened actions he had performed.
"That's a hundred," he said, with the careful tone of a man arriving at something he suspects might be important.
"Yes. That's exactly what it is."
She could see him filing it. The concept wasn't absent — it was just untethered, floating without a system to anchor it to. The Dothraki had never needed a system because their military structure had only three levels: khal, ko, and everyone else. A khal managed his kos; a ko managed his warriors; the warriors managed themselves in combat. Simple, effective, and completely unable to function if you removed the khal from the equation.
Which was, she reflected, precisely the problem she was trying to solve.
Jorah had been listening with his arms folded. He cleared his throat. "Khaleesi. The words you're using — 'squad,' 'company,' 'battalion' — those are translations. They don't mean anything to your riders because they've never heard them. But your riders already have words for organised groups. They just don't know you're talking about the same thing."
"What words?"
"A hunting party is ten men. Always ten — fewer and you can't corner a lion, more and there's not enough meat to divide fairly." He glanced at Aggo. "Your riders grew up in hunting parties. Ten men, one leader. That's not a new idea to them."
Aggo's expression shifted — the particular shift of someone hearing a familiar thing in an unfamiliar frame and suddenly recognising it.
"And for the larger unit?" Daenerys asked.
"The banner-century. When a khalasar moves, its outriders ride in groups of roughly a hundred, each group under the same standard. Everyone can count standards. Everyone knows what a standard means." He paused. "You're not inventing something new. You're building on something that already exists."
Daenerys thought about this. It was a better approach than she had taken. She made a note to use it.
"Ten men under a decurion," she said. "A hundred men — ten squads — under a centurion. When we have the numbers, a thousand under a chiliarch, ten thousand under a myriarсh." She looked around the group. "The numbers are always ten times ten. You can count it on your hands. You can count it on other people's hands if you need more."
Aggo demonstrated to himself, silently, with his fingers.
"The names are new," she continued, "but the shape is familiar. Every ten men already know how to hunt together. Now they'll also know how to fight together."
She paused, because Jhogo was frowning with the expression of a man who has found a problem.
"If I am a decurion," he said slowly, "and you are my centurion — you are also my Khaleesi. So you are above me. But if Aggo is also a centurion, he is the same rank as you?"
"No. I am the chiliarch. My bloodriders and Quaro hold the rank of centurion beneath me. There is no one at my level. The structure only has one top."
Jhogo worked through this. Then he nodded, once, with the satisfied finality of a man who has checked a calculation and found it correct.
"Good," he said.
She spent the next two hours dividing two hundred and thirty people into categories.
The fighting force came first: every man between fifteen and fifty who could ride and carry a weapon. She distributed them among five centurion commands — her own direct hundred, and one each for her three bloodriders and Quaro's dragon-guard unit. Most commands ran under-strength; the framework mattered more than the numbers right now.
Then the civilians: the horse-handlers, the cooks, the women with infants, the elderly, the few among them with rudimentary healing knowledge. She assigned a centurion's title to a steady-tempered older woman named Dqo who had been organising the camp's domestic work since the first day without being asked or paid. Dqo received this appointment with the expression of a person who has been doing a job for years and has finally been given the authority that the job required.
The three dragons spent the meeting distributed between Quaro's arms and Daenerys's shoulders, occasionally hissing at people who moved too quickly nearby, and otherwise demonstrating the serene confidence of creatures who have not yet learned that anything in the world could threaten them.
The argument erupted while she was still working through the household assignments.
She heard it before she saw it — raised voices, the particular register of Dothraki disagreement, which was louder and faster than most cultures' active fighting. She rode the silver mare around the edge of the camp to find two of her riders squared off with drawn arakhs, three others between them trying to look neutral, and the rest of the nearby warriors watching with the appreciative attention of people at an entertainment they had not expected.
"What is this?" she asked.
Both men started talking at once. She waited.
The shorter account, extracted from the noise, was: both men believed they were the strongest warrior in their immediate group of ten. Both believed this meant they should be the decurion. The method for settling the question was obvious to both of them and to everyone watching.
"Sheathe your blades," Daenerys said.
Neither moved immediately. The silver mare stepped forward and they moved back, which was what she had expected.
"You want to know who leads your ten," she said, to both of them. "Fine. There will be trials — strength, riding, archery, close combat. The strongest fighter leads. But the trial happens on my schedule and with rules I set, and it does not happen by killing each other." She looked at the watching warriors. "We have two hundred people and a thousand miles of hostile ground ahead of us. I will not waste a single one of you on a fight among ourselves."
Silence.
"If you want to kill Dothraki," she said, "wait until someone else's Dothraki tries to kill you. Then I'll be very grateful."
One of the two men — the one who had spoken first — looked at the other with an expression of strained, competitive patience, as if postponing the violence rather than abandoning it.
The other one smiled.
"Fair," he said.
The first one didn't look happy about it. But he sheathed his arakh.
Daenerys turned the mare back toward the hill and made a mental note: trials before dusk. Set the rules tonight. Tomorrow, ranking begins.
She had wanted a khalasar.
She had one now. The work was just beginning.