AN: Somewhere off screen the alchemists are about to try tossing dragon's eggs into their breeder reactor...

ooOoo

The four week siege was nothing like any siege Brynden had experienced before. Our armies camped out next to the city but did nothing to obstruct the coming and going of farmers and tradesmen. Hells, we even bought fresh spices from the market we were "besieging" when our own supplies ran short. The only real military problem I faced during that time was keeping my men from going stir crazy, and that was easy enough to solve with the traditional remedy of marching drill and physical training. Even without those efforts my men probably would have been fine, but they were young and impressionable and I didn't want them to think that the laid back habits of the Windblown represented proper soldiering. Instead I hoped to build up their sense of the Sunset Legion as an elite unit with its own set of standards. Keeping the men too tired to grumble was a happy side effect.

One bit of welcome news arrived in a message from Tyrosh several weeks into the siege. They had initially negotiated to retain our services for three months. I had given them the option to extend our contract for a year. Their message notified me that they were exercising the option and expressed interest in increasing their commitment should I secure more men to serve under my banner. The monthly payment for the year long commitment was not nearly as high as what I had secured for each month of the three month contract, but it was still enough to put us on a sound financial footing.

Depending on how much money we could secure from looting and taking cities, we might actually show a profit for our first year of operations. While the men were not particularly invested in the details of the legion's finances, they still cheered the announcement of the contract extension. They welcomed the chance to keep campaigning in the Disputed Lands. They'd experienced their first taste of victory here and the climate was, in Brynden's experience, relatively hospitable for an active army.

Our smith was kept busy during the "siege" hammering the less impressive specimens of captured weaponry into a set of halberd heads. I had settled on the alternate weapon of choice for prying enemies out of our formations. The halberd was the swiss army knife of polearms. The pointed tip allowed it to be used as a spear, the axe blade on the front was obviously useful, and the hook and spike apparatus on the back was dead useful against mounted and armored opponents.

We had between five and ten men in each century trade out their pikes for halberds. I wanted to have enough halberdiers to be useful without having so many that we diluted our basic strength of stabbing people with pikes. Time and experience would help us strike the proper balance. Brynden had enough experience using the halberd as an individual weapon to tutor the legionnaires in the basics.

Four weeks to the day after we had arrived the city surrendered. The city guard brought us an iron-bound chest filled with three thousand golden Myrish honors. This also represented a formal commitment to pay their taxes to Tyrosh until they were "besieged" once more. We split the proceeds two to one, as the Tattered Prince had said, with the Windblown as the larger company holding on to the coins destined for Tyrosh.

The march to the next city was uneventful, as was the following siege. Running a sellsword company was starting to feel like pretty easy work. I knew it couldn't hold-there were only three more cities between us and Myr itself-but the next bout of violence still managed to catch me by surprise.

ooOoo

We were marching in our usual order. The Windblown took the lead. As the senior partners of our little group they had the privilege of marching through clear air rather than a cloud of dust. That privilege was rather hypothetical for anybody not marching in the van, but I'm sure they all treasured it nonetheless. Groups of Windblown scouts ranged out ahead and to the sides, keeping an eye out for trouble. The remainder of their cavalry marched in the van, leaving their foot soldiers to trail behind.

I rode at the head of the Sunset Legion, a fair distance behind the Windblown stragglers. Yes, rode. Marching from place to place and fighting when you get there is a young man's game. And, of course, rank has its privileges. I had secured a mount for myself when we had kitted out the baggage train. It was no great warhorse, but it could plod along at a walking pace all day long. Hey, why walk when you can ride?

Rodrik walked next to me. From time to time we would make conversation, but during a full day of travel there was a lot of time for comfortable silences. The rest of the legion behind us were organized into their centuries, marching ten abreast. They carried their pikes held vertically and wore their travel packs on their backs. With their matching armor and helmets I thought they made for a rather impressive sight. They also seemed to be in decent spirits, judging by the snatches of cadence calls that sometimes came drifting up from the marching body of men.

I don't know but I've been told
Tywin Lannister shits out gold

I believe I've mentioned that selective deafness can be a valuable skill.

The first sign of trouble was a cry of alarm that carried over the normal sounds of an army at the march. I turned back to see several of the men looking off to the right. Following their gaze up to the summit of one of the Disputed Lands' many low rolling hills, I saw a smudge. The smudge grew broader and taller as I watched. Even before the smudge resolved itself into individual figures I had fished my whistle from beneath my armor and blew a warning note.

Enemy cavalry! Whether through Windblown incompetence, their own skill, or sheer good fortune, the enemy had managed to remain undetected until the very last minute. They were set to charge downhill at us and looked likely to hit the middle of our marching column, perhaps a smidge closer to the rear than the front.

I was gratified once again by my men's quick reaction to the whistle. What had been a somewhat loosely connected column of men quickly separated into ten blocks of one hundred men, and then into ten enormous pincushions as the men on the outside of the formation braced their pikes to receive an enemy charge. This time the order had not been given merely to keep the men together. Their lives could very well depend on their ability to stick together over the next few minutes.

I rode back along the length of the column checking everything over. I certainly didn't see a spot that I would care to charge myself. I looked back at the oncoming cavalry one more time to judge their approach, then picked the square I thought they were most likely to hit.

"Oi! Budge over, your captain's too old to take on that many men at once any more."

That got a few chuckles as the men on the perimeter shuffled to the side to allow me to walk my horse into their protection, then shuffled back into place. The interior of the formation was not exactly roomy, but there was space for the crossbowmen to operate even with me, my horse, and their commander sharing the space. I dismounted and came face to face with the century's commander. It was Petyr Baelish. Our marching order was randomly determined each morning. While Petyr's earlier opportunity to be the first of the legion into combat had been by design, this was sheer chance.

"Nice of you to join us, captain."

"Just have your men ready to stand aside when it's time for the counter charge."

Petyr's expression looked a little more green than amused at the joke. I couldn't blame him. The individual enemy riders were clearly visible now. The sound of their approach had shifted from a rumble you heard with your ears to a rumble you felt in your chest. The enemy formation was easily forty riders wide and had some serious depth to it. It felt more like a natural disaster than a work of man, and standing still in front of it was the very last place anybody would want to be.

"Remember," I said, pitching my voice to carry to the men, "horses won't charge a line of spears. They're smarter than men that way."

Weathering a cavalry charge is all about holding your ground. It's another one of those things that is simple but not easy. When hundreds of riders are bearing down on you like an angry landslide even the bravest of men's guts will turn to water. It was all too easy to give in that fear and run away, hoping to buy your own survival at the cost of breaking ranks with your comrades.

The hedgehog formation was designed to fight that temptation. First of all, it was comforting to be packed in so close together behind a veritable forest of pikes. Second of all, there was simply nowhere to run. Making the easy way out a little more difficult to accomplish helped shore up the men's morale. Even so, it was nervous business.

The oncoming cavalry were close enough now for the crossbowmen to go to work. I could hear the snap and hiss of bolts being loosed, but to no visible effect. Then one of the horses in the front line stumbled and fell, brutally rolling over its rider and tripping up the horse next to it before the formation spread out and flowed around the downed men.

"Aim for the horses!" Petyr called out, and I echoed him, trying to make my voice heard up and down the column. Trying to take down an armored man with a crossbow-and from this distance, I could see that our attackers were heavily armored-was a tricky shot until they were quite close. I had noticed, though, that the local fighters didn't armor their horses to the level of the medieval tanks I recalled seeing illustrated in history books. It was like all things a question of tradeoffs, in this case weight against protection.

The crossbowmen had time for two, sometimes three shots. A few more horses went tumbling, but our attackers still made up a nearly solid mass as they fell upon four of our formations nearly simultaneously.

As I'd expected, the horses refused to voluntarily impale themselves on our pikes. It's funny, the kind of things that can become a technological advantage in warfare. Our attackers were wielding lances that were about twelve feet long, while our men had pikes that were twenty feet long. That simple advantage meant that they could not effectively attack us so long as we held our ground.

Some of the horses shied off to the side, galloping through the corridors formed between centuries. Others simply slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt, creating confusion in their formation as the chain reaction generated a sort of traffic jam. A few of the horses were unable to stop in time. One such unfortunate crashed into Petyr's century, screaming in pain as its own momentum drove several pikes deep into its chest. The rider was trying to extricate himself from the forest of spears that surrounded him when one of Petyr's men stepped forward and used his halberd to pull the man from his saddle. He hit the ground with a great crash of armor. The halberd rose and then fell. The fallen rider's arms twitched once, then went still.

In the mean time, the crossbows had continued to fire. At this distance, they could hardly miss. A fair few bolts deflected harmlessly off armor, but not all. As I watched, a man in front of me reeled backwards and fell out of the saddle as a crossbow bolt speared through his visor.

Unable to press through our spears and unable to turn back, the attacking cavalry edged their way around and through the gaps that some of their comrades had already flowed through, eventually joining back together into a big blob of a formation on the opposite side of the road from where they started. They were harried by crossbow shots the entire way and left more than a few men behind on the open ground. Once they were out of effective crossbow range they milled around, apparently uncertain what to do next.

The Sunset Legion gave a cheer at having weathered the initial storm. I joined them, then laughed as I finally connected the banner I had seen with the name of the company.

"The Long Lances! I've had dinner with their commander."

"I suspect he'd turn down an invitation to lunch," Petyr said, his spirits buoyed by our success.

"He's a boring old drunk anyway."

That got a round of laughter from the men, all of whom looked much more cheerful now that they weren't staring into the face of a cavalry charge. The laughter trailed away to silence while we waited, watching carefully against the enemy's next move.

"What are they thinking, captain?" Petyr asked.

It was a good question. What were they thinking? The Long Lances were a heavy cavalry company. They commanded a premium rate, and with good reason. The kind of charge that they had unleashed on us would have had most foot soldiers running for their lives. A chill ran down my spine as I thought about it.

The Sunset Legion as it was now hadn't been my only option, back when I'd been thinking about starting a sellsword company. Brynden Tully was a name to conjure with in the Riverlands. I could have raised a thousand veterans from the Rebellion and gone into business almost immediately. That army wouldn't have been anything revolutionary, but it would have been perfectly competent. Thinking about what would have happened if that army-if the average levy Brynden had had the honor of leading in the past-had been subjected to the charge we had just experienced... it didn't bear thinking about.

By all rights, a cavalry company coming out of nowhere to sweep down on a marching group of foot soldiers should barely have had to slow down other than to line up killing blows on their victims. Instead, the Long Lances had found themselves charging into a veritable wall of pikes. It had to have been a shocking reversal.

"They're confused," I said, growing more sure as I spoke, "they expected to cut us down like grass but instead they've given themselves a bloody nose and have no good way of getting at us."

"Should we form up and chase them down?"

Well, look at the blood lust on Petyr. I glanced at his face and saw nothing but the pure desire to come to grips with the enemy. Apparently he'd taken some of that generalized anger at the world and turned it into a specific anger at anybody who tried to kill him. Good for him. Good attitude, at least. The tactics could use a little work.

"No, I don't think so," I said, shaking my head. "Best not to take any chances against heavy cavalry."

At that moment a horn sounded out as the Windblown cavalry finally made themselves known. I didn't begrudge them the wait. They had started a fair distance away, and it was perfectly reasonable for the Tattered Prince to wait to see how the initial charge fared before committing himself. It was also perfectly satisfying to watch now as the Long Lances finished losing their nerve and fled before the approaching Windblown. They were retreating in fairly good order, but I doubted they'd be troubling us again today. The only task left for us now was looting the bodies.

"Besides," I added, "it's not our job to chase down the defeated enemy."

ooOoo