A eunuch bred and trained a slave in Meereen and set to fight in the pits of that city, where he won the name Strong Belwas and, by his own account, never once lost. He is a huge man of nut brown skin, bald and gap toothed, smooth cheeked after the manner of eunuchs, with a great belly and arms that Daenerys Targaryen has likened to tree trunks. He goes near bare above the waist in a little studded leather vest and a yellow silk bellyband, which leaves the pale old scars on his arms and chest and belly plain to see, and those scars are his reckoning: it is his custom to let each man he faces cut him once before he kills him, so that any who doubts the count may number the cuts and learn how many he has slain. He fights with a curved arakh and a shield no larger than a pie plate, gripped in the hand rather than strapped to the forearm as a knight would wear it. He is loud and boisterous and something of a child, prouder of his scars than of anything else he owns, fond above all of liver and onions, and he has no love at all for riding horses.
He was sold out of Meereen to Qohor and from Qohor to Pentos, into the keeping of the magister Illyrio Mopatis, whom he remembers as a fat man with sweet stink in his hair. It was Illyrio who sent him east with an aged squire called Arstan Whitebeard to guard the young queen and bring her back across the narrow sea, and it was on the docks of Qarth that Belwas found her, and took a brass platter over the head from Ser Jorah Mormont for his pains. Thereafter he kept at her side as one of her Queensguard. He cut down Good Masters at the Plaza of Punishment when Astapor fell, offered to take the tongue of a Stormcrow captain who spoke insolently of her before Yunkai, and at the walls of Meereen went out as her champion against Oznak zo Pahl, taking the cut he always takes before he killed the man and struck off his head, after which he squatted and made water and worse toward the city, wiped himself upon the dead man's cloak, and looted the corpse. It was that same day that Arstan confessed himself Ser Barristan Selmy. Later he led men up through the sewers of Meereen, biting a rat in half to shame the freedmen who feared them, and raised the pit fighters in revolt to win the queen her city. When the pits were opened once more he sat beside her at Daznak's and named the fighters for her, and there he ate the honeyed locusts that had been set before her hand. The poison in them would have killed a lesser man, but his bulk carried him through, though it left his strength and his weight much reduced. He sits now upon the council Ser Barristan raised to govern Meereen while the queen is lost to it, and has offered to settle the siege of the city as he has always preferred to settle things, one champion against another.