On the third day after the city gates fell, every pyramid had come under Daenerys's control.
Excluding the strange, dome-topped pyramid that housed the Temple of Divine Grace, there were eighteen pyramids in total.
The tallest belonged to the great slave master Grazdan, standing one hundred meters high. The shortest was barely over fifty meters.
Eight of the ruling families were wiped out completely.
Another four were reduced to only a handful of children under the age of five.
Three more lost every adult in the family, leaving only children under fourteen alive.
The final three families were spared entirely after the Green Grace personally intervened, and Daenerys ordered that none of them be executed.
Another week passed before the Unsullied completed a thorough sweep of the entire city.
Between the newly freedmen and the original Ghiscari civilians, the total population reached 123,000.
The eighteen pyramids and their attached fighting pits also contributed several tens of thousands of additional slaves.
The ratio of freed slaves to native Ghiscari civilians was close to twenty to one.
Astapor now lay completely under Daenerys's control.
As the clerks registered every freedman, they divided the population into five social classes:
Soldiers, Scholars, Farmers, Artisans, and Merchants.
To put it simply, skilled craftsmen were classified as artisans.
Someone like Lisa, the textile worker, could also choose to become self-employed and open a small business, becoming a merchant instead.
Honest people without skills or literacy—or those tied down by family responsibilities—would receive several dozen acres of fertile land from Daenerys and settle as farmers on the plains along the Worm River outside the city.
Those who lacked skills but weren't exactly law-abiding—former slave soldiers or gladiators, for example—were organized into militia units.
Ser Jorah would be responsible for training them into regular troops.
This would naturally become a process of selection.
The elite militiamen would later be transferred into another, more professional force.
Those who failed to meet the standard would instead become local guards, serving roles similar to police officers or constables.
For the time being, the Unsullied still acted as the city's police force.
But their greatest value lay in campaigning with armies in the field.
Keeping them inside the city as guards was simply a waste.
Anyone who could read and write was classified as a Scholar.
But the "scholars" under Daenerys were an entirely different concept from the scholar-officials of imperial China.
Real authority belonged to the nobles who held swords in their hands—those who could kill.
In this world...
Scholar-officials would never emerge.
Because the social structure here was fundamentally open.
Unlike imperial China, kingdoms could never simply close their doors and live in isolation.
There was no question that scholar-officials benefited imperial rule.
If an emperor wanted genuine centralization and absolute authority, they were the best assistants he could ask for.
But history had shown something else as well.
No matter the dynasty, once scholar-officials came to dominate government, national strength inevitably declined.
Military men governing the state might provoke unrest...
...but their armies were undeniably powerful.
In China's comparatively closed environment, even declining unified dynasties generally remained stronger than the surrounding "barbarian" states.
As long as officialdom remained reasonably clean, they could comfortably play the role of regional hegemon most of the time.
This world, however, was open.
If your military was weak...
You simply wouldn't survive.
That was why, despite the Citadel existing in Westeros for thousands of years, despite nearly every noble house employing a maester as tutor, counselor, and advisor...
Despite those maesters possessing knowledge and experience many times greater than that of traditional Chinese scholars...
They still had never developed into a powerful scholar-official class.
To be clear, this wasn't meant to belittle the scholars of ancient China or exaggerate the status of maesters.
The maesters in A Song of Ice and Fire were genuinely extraordinary.
Art, literature, mathematics, and agriculture were merely their basic training.
They also had to study philosophy, archaeology, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, magic, mysticism, and countless other fields.
Nor were they mere bookworms.
Every maester underwent extraordinarily rigorous training, and their practical abilities were exceptional.
They could serve as physicians.
They could educate children.
They could act as noble lords' advisers, secretaries, or stewards.
During wartime, they could even function as military strategists.
If one could think of a profession...
A maester could probably perform it.
They were also astonishingly fearless.
Many traveled across the known world in pursuit of new knowledge.
Take Marwyn the Mage, teacher of Mirri Maz Duur.
A man from Westeros...
...who had journeyed tens of thousands of miles to study in the Shadow Lands.
Everyone who could read and perform basic arithmetic was placed into Daenerys's Scholar class.
In other words—
Scholars existed to serve everyone else.
Daenerys herself established a staff of two hundred advisers, all of them scholarly slaves who had chosen not to become freedmen.
She didn't mistreat them.
They continued living in the Great Pyramid.
Each was attended by two maidservants.
Their three daily meals ranked only one or two levels below Daenerys's own.
The maidservants, of course, were no longer slaves.
They signed labor contracts.
They received wages.
They had pensions.
They even enjoyed medical insurance—
The genuine, completely free kind.
Even so, it was still cheaper than hiring those scholars as paid clerks.
If the scholars abandoned their slave status and instead signed employment contracts with Daenerys, the salaries they would command would far exceed what it currently cost her to support them.
"I really don't know what they're thinking," Daenerys complained to Whitebeard.
Whitebeard merely smiled and explained that this was perfectly normal.
In Westeros, maesters were much the same.
They received no salary and served their lord free of charge for life.
In return, the noble family was responsible for supporting them for the rest of their lives.
Moreover, the lord was obligated to provide them with a dignified standard of living.
Should any noble dare insult, abuse, mistreat, or dismiss a maester without cause, the Citadel would intervene.
Besides threatening never to assign another maester to that house, the Citadel could also ask the Grand Maester in King's Landing to advise the king to punish the offending noble.
Without a maester...
A noble house couldn't even manage its ravens.
Communication with the outside world would become impossible.
And as one of the king's principal councillors, the Grand Maester held a seat on the Small Council.
Although Daenerys had formally divided society into five classes, they were far from evenly balanced.
Including the service industry, artisans made up well over half the population—more than fifty thousand people, most of them women.
There were thirty thousand soldiers.
Some were fifty or sixty years old.
Others were only eight or nine.
Only a few thousand Ghiscari chose to register as merchants, despite owning little more than empty storefronts and almost no active businesses.
Very few people chose farming.
Nearly all of them came from traditionally agricultural peoples like the Lhazareen and Naathi—the "meek" nations.
During these days, aside from Ghiscari who already possessed homes and businesses, every newly freed citizen in the city depended entirely on Daenerys for food.
Although the pyramids held abundant supplies, such communal dining could not continue indefinitely.
She had to restore normal civic order as quickly as possible.
The first priority of the new society under the new system...
...was establishing clear laws.
On the tenth day after Astapor's conquest—
The morning mist dissolved like an illusion.
The crimson sun resembled an egg yolk, still below the summit of the Great Pyramid.
Even so, the red brick plaza had already begun to warm beneath its rays.
"Whoooo—"
A deep, resonant horn sounded from the top of the Great Pyramid.
The city rapidly awakened beneath its strange call.
Since the Dragon Queen had ruled Astapor, similar summons had already occurred several times.
The citizens all understood.
She was calling everyone to gather in People's Square.
"I heard that's the Dragon Horn," one newly freed man whispered to his companion as they walked.
"They say it can control dragons."
He was a wiry, middle-aged black man from the Summer Isles.
Less than one and a half meters tall, thin and agile, he had once served a Good Master's household as an acrobat.
Now he belonged to the artisan class.
"Perhaps."
His companion was a freed scholar.
A white man in his forties with an average build.
His education was mediocre, and his literary talents unremarkable.
He had never belonged to the privileged class of educated household slaves.
Still, he knew more than the acrobat.
Looking worried, he said,
"I just hope the slave masters from Yunkai haven't attacked."
"What are you afraid of?"
The skinny acrobat laughed.
"Never mind the newly organized thirty-thousand-man city guard—the Queen still has over ten thousand Unsullied!
I'd love to join the Queen's Guard myself.
Then I'd finally get my revenge on those slave traders!
I'd even settle for becoming Her Grace's horn blower."
"You don't understand."
The freed scholar shook his head.
"The Yunkish slave masters don't need to defeat the Unsullied.
If they burn the plantations outside the city first...
Supporting over a hundred thousand people inside Astapor will become a very serious problem."
No city could ever be completely self-sufficient.
Every one depended on surrounding farmland and livestock.
Astapor was no exception.
Besides the city's hundred thousand residents, the plains surrounding the Worm River were dotted with countless slave plantations, home to at least two hundred thousand people.
Roughly thirty thousand of them were Ghiscari.
Before she had time to deal with those plantation owners personally, Daenerys had already dispatched mounted Dothraki patrols to post notices in every village.
The proclamation contained Four Great Prohibitions:
Anyone who slaughtered large numbers of their own slaves—
Their entire household would be exterminated.
Anyone who burned granaries, wheat fields, olive groves, or slaughtered livestock on a large scale and left them to rot—
Their entire household would be exterminated.
Anyone who poisoned wells, filled them in, or destroyed irrigation systems and farmland—
Their entire household would be exterminated.
Anyone who conspired with others to organize armed resistance and attack Dothraki patrols—
Their entire household would be exterminated.
Daenerys wasn't relying solely on intimidation.
Following the four prohibitions came a Letter to the Ghiscari People, assuring them:
Queen Daenerys solemnly promised that any plantation owner who obeyed these four laws would have their family protected.
Within reasonable limits, their property—including farmland and stored grain—would also remain untouched.
Neither the freed scholar nor the skinny acrobat knew any of this.
Nor did they know that during the past ten days...
More than twenty plantation-owning families had already been exterminated.
If a few posted notices could frighten slave masters into submission...
They would never have become slave masters in the first place.
Some clever ones had deliberately set fire to their own granaries and olive groves, hoping to lure in Dothraki patrols before ambushing them.
Unfortunately for them...
Reality proved far crueler than their plans.
Registering household records for the newly freed population kept the clerical staff extremely busy.
Daenerys herself, however, remained surprisingly idle.
She practiced swordsmanship with Whitebeard, received visiting citizens...
...and enjoyed a remarkably comfortable life.
Which meant she also had plenty of time to serve as the Dothraki cavalry's aerial scout.
Before every operation, Drogon would fly over the troublesome estate.
The black dragon could clearly observe everything the Ghiscari were doing.
Sometimes he even landed inside the plantation and scratched detailed defensive maps into the earth with his claws.
After that...
The rest was easy.
One thousand Unsullied advanced head-on.
Two hundred Dothraki horsemen provided mounted archery support from outside.
Nearly every rebellious plantation was crushed in a single assault.
Afterward, the severed heads of the rebellious slave-owning families were mounted on Dothraki spears and paraded through nearby villages.
The remaining plantation owners quickly learned their lesson.
Of course, Daenerys's so-called extermination did not mean wiping out entire bloodlines.
Only the adults were executed.
Children under fourteen were imprisoned for the time being until she had time to decide their fate.
There were two reasons she hadn't simply sent the Unsullied to storm every plantation from the beginning.
First, she feared the owners would become desperate and destroy their food stores and agricultural infrastructure.
Second...
The casualties would have been far too high.
Even with Drogon's assistance, suppressing just those twenty-odd plantations had cost eighteen Unsullied and twenty-two Dothraki warriors their lives.
The enemy, meanwhile, had suffered only a little over one thousand Ghiscari casualties.
It should be noted that this was not a battle of one thousand Unsullied plus two hundred Dothraki against a thousand ordinary Ghiscari.
Of those roughly 1,700 Ghiscari spread across more than twenty plantations, only about half were adult men.
Each engagement usually involved fewer than a hundred Ghiscari alongside three to four hundred wavering slave farmers.
The greatest difficulty lay in the terrain itself.
Every plantation was practically a small fortress.
Easy to defend.
Very difficult to assault.
-----------------------
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