Scene 1: The Glut
The Pavilion of Highgarden was not a tent; it was a canvas palace. Striped in green and gold, it sat in the center of the Ashford meadow like a fat, silk spider.
Inside, the air was thick enough to chew. It smelled of roasted boar, honeyed duck, spiced wine, and the sweat of five hundred lords and knights who were sweating in velvet doublets.
Mace Tyrell sat at the head of the high table. He was a large man, prematurely fleshy, with a face that was currently red with mirth and Arbor Gold.
"And then!" Mace boomed, slamming a jeweled goblet onto the table. "And then, they say he started weighing the sacks! Can you imagine? The Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, counting beans like a grocer!"
The table erupted in laughter. Lord Paxter Redwyne, flushed with his own vintage, wiped tears from his eyes.
"Perhaps he plans to bore us to death, my Lord!" Redwyne chuckled. "Or perhaps he intends to sell us grain rather than fight us!"
Mace tore a leg off a glazed heron. Grease ran down his chin.
"Let him count," Mace declared, waving the bone. "While he counts beans, we field thirty thousand swords. The might of the Reach is a tide, my lords! A tide of chivalry!"
At the far end of the table, Lord Randyll Tarly sat in stony silence.
He was not eating the heron. He was drinking water. He looked at the feast with the expression of a man watching a house burn down.
Tarly looked past the open flaps of the pavilion. Outside, the "Camp" was a disaster. It was a carnival.
Wagons blocked the main causeway, not because they were broken, but because a minor lordling's retinue had stopped to argue over right-of-way for their traveling singers.
Carts of fresh fruit from the Arbor were sitting in the mud, untouched, while the flies swarmed them.
Meanwhile, fifty yards away, the peasant levies were fighting over a spilled pot of brown pottage.
Abundance without Distribution.
Tarly turned back to Mace.
"My Lord," Tarly said, his voice cutting through the laughter like a file on steel.
Mace blinked. "Lord Randyll! You look grim. Have some wine! It's a '98, crisp as a maiden's—"
"Robert Baratheon is at Summerhall," Tarly said. "He defeated Grandison, Cafferen, and Fell in a single day."
"A skirmish," Mace dismissed, taking a bite of the heron. "Grandison was careless. He let himself be surprised. We are not Grandison."
"Reports say his army moved twenty miles in six hours," Tarly pressed. "In the rain."
"Impossible," Redwyne scoffed. "No army moves that fast with baggage. He must have abandoned his supplies."
"Or he carries them differently," Tarly muttered.
"And the other rumor?" Mace laughed, leaning in conspiratorially. "The spy told us Baratheon has stopped drinking. Not a drop of wine since Gulltown! Can you believe it?"
"It is true," Tarly said.
"He is broken," Mace decided, gesturing with his cup. "The stress has broken his mind. A Baratheon who doesn't drink? He's lost his joy. He's lost his fire. He's a shivering, sober wreck waiting for the butcher."
Mace stood up, raising his goblet. The pavilion went quiet.
"To the Reach!" Mace bellowed. "To the Rose! We will crush this sober beggar at Ashford. We will catch him in his little mud-holes and trample him under our hooves!"
"TO THE REACH!" the lords roared back.
Servants rushed forward to refill the cups. A servant carrying a tray of lamprey pies tripped on the uneven carpet. The pies went flying, splattering across the boots of a Fossoway knight.
The knight kicked the servant. The lords laughed. The food lay on the ground, wasted, ground into the expensive rugs.
Randyll Tarly stood up.
"My Lord Tarly?" Mace asked. "Leaving so soon? The singers are about to perform 'The Flower of Highgarden.'"
"I must inspect the pickets," Tarly said coldly. "Someone has to ensure the 'Beggar Army' doesn't walk into our camp while we are eating lampreys."
He walked out.
As he left the warmth of the pavilion, Tarly looked at the chaotic sprawl of the Reach camp. Torches burned everywhere, wasting oil. Drunken sentries dozed on their spears.
He looked North, toward the dark hills where the Stormlords were marching.
Tarly felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air.
Mace sees a grocer, Tarly thought. I see a man who has stopped drinking to focus on killing.
He gripped the hilt of Heartsbane.
The Rose is fat, Tarly realized. And the Stag is hungry.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 7: The Feast of Fools
Scene 2: The Blindness
The dawn was grey and cloying. Randyll Tarly sat on his horse at the edge of the Tyrell picket lines, watching the road that led east toward the Stormlands.
He was waiting for his scouts. Instead, he found a wine merchant.
The merchant's wagon was trundling toward the Tyrell camp, heavy with casks of Arbor Gold. Tarly's men blocked the road, halting the wagon.
"You," Tarly barked, riding up to the driver's bench.
The merchant, a fat man named Belwas (no relation to the Strong), bowed as best he could while sitting. "My Lord! Fine vintage for the table? I come from the east, I have—"
"You came from the east?" Tarly cut him off. "From the Boneway? From Summerhall?"
"Aye, my Lord. Traveling to Ashford to serve the Flower of Highgarden!"
Tarly leaned forward. "If you came from Summerhall, you passed Robert Baratheon's army. Twenty thousand men. Marching this way."
The merchant blinked, looking genuinely confused.
"Army? My Lord, I saw no army."
Tarly stared at him. "Do not play games with me. You cannot miss a host that size. The smoke alone would blacken the sky. The baggage train would stretch for miles."
"I swear by the Seven!" the merchant stammered. "The road was clear! I was terrified I would run into them. I kept waiting for the outriders to steal my wine. I waited for the smell of the latrines. I waited to see the burnt farmhouses."
The merchant gestured to the empty road behind him.
"But... nothing. The villages were whole. The smallfolk were working in the fields. No corpses hanging from trees. No smoke. It was... silent."
Tarly frowned. This made no sense. The reports were confirmed: Robert had won at Summerhall. He had to be marching.
"You saw nothing?" Tarly pressed. "Think, man. The road itself—what did it look like?"
The merchant scratched his beard. "Well... that was the strange part. The road was destroyed, my Lord. Churned deep. Ruts as deep as my knee. As if ten thousand men had passed."
"And the trash?" Tarly asked. "The broken wheels? The dead horses?"
"None," the merchant shrugged. "Just the mud. And... these strange mounds. Every mile or so. Fresh earth, packed down tight. Like giant graves, but too small for mass burials. I didn't stop to look."
Tarly sat back in his saddle.
The pieces didn't fit.
Deep ruts meant a heavy army.
No trash meant... what? That they stopped to clean up? Impossible. No army cleans up.
No stragglers meant... what? That no one was sick? That no one was deserting?
Villages intact meant they weren't foraging.
It defied every rule of warfare Tarly knew. An army of that size was a beast. It ate, it shat, it shed equipment. It did not tiptoe.
"Did they turn back?" Hyle Hunt asked, echoing Tarly's confusion. "Maybe they marched out, saw our numbers, and retreated to Storm's End?"
"If they retreated, the ruts would go both ways," Tarly muttered. "The merchant says the mud is churned towards us."
He looked at the merchant, then at the horizon.
It felt like a magic trick. The enemy was massive, yet invisible. They were heavy enough to crush the road, yet light enough to leave no sign of their passing.
"Is it a trap?" Hunt asked nervously. "Are they hiding in the woods?"
"Twenty thousand men cannot hide in the woods, Hunt," Tarly snapped. "They would starve in a day."
He looked back at the Tyrell camp—the noise, the smoke, the chaos. That was what an army looked like. That was reality.
What was out there on the road was... wrong.
"My Lord?" the merchant asked. "Can I pass? The wine..."
"Go," Tarly waved him away, distracted.
As the wagon rumbled off, Tarly stared at the grey mist covering the eastern road. He felt the unease of a predator that suddenly realizes the jungle has gone quiet.
He was a master of the battlefield. Give him a line of infantry and a hill, and he would break any man in Westeros.
But he couldn't fight what he couldn't see.
"Where are you?" Tarly whispered to the empty road. "Are you ghosts? Or are you just lying in the mud, waiting?"
He turned his horse.
"Double the scouts," Tarly ordered, his voice tight. "Send them ten miles out. I want to know where the tail of that dragon is."
"And if they find nothing?" Hunt asked.
Tarly looked at him, his eyes hard and confused.
"Then we are blind, Hunt. And if we are blind, we are dead."
[End of Scene]
Chapter 7: The Feast of Fools
Scene 3: The March
The road to Ashford was not a road anymore; it was a conveyor belt of iron and resolve.
The Stormlands host moved with a terrifying, rhythmic uniformity. Twenty thousand men—a mix of Storm's End regulars, levies, and conscripts from the defeated Royalist armies—marched as one entity. There were no songs. There was no banter. There was only the thud-thud-thud of boots hitting the mud in unison.
Robert rode at the front, but he wasn't idle.
He held a massive bow of recurved dragonbone and weirwood—a weapon he had found in the armory of Storm's End, likely a relic from a Storm King of old. It had a draw weight of one hundred and eighty pounds. A normal man couldn't even string it.
Robert pulled the string to his ear as easily as if it were a harp.
The world slowed. The "Eagle Vision" overlaid a trajectory arc on his retina, a glowing blue line connecting the arrow tip to the tree.
Twang.
The sound was like a whip crack. The heavy iron-tipped shaft screamed through the air. It didn't arc gracefully; it punched through the distance with brute kinetic force.
Thwack.
The arrow slammed into the trunk of the pine, burying itself a foot deep in the wood.
"Center mass," Robert muttered, lowering the bow.
Siro, the urchin-spy riding on a pony beside him, watched with wide eyes. "You don't aim like a hunter," the boy whispered.
"How do I aim?" Robert asked, nocking another arrow.
"Like a machine," Siro said. "You don't look at the arrow. You look at the death."
"Distance is just math, Siro," Robert said. "And war is just distance."
He looked at the horizon. The math was ugly.
Mace Tyrell and Randyll Tarly outnumbered him four to one. More importantly, they had more heavy cavalry than Robert had men. If Robert met them in the open field, the Reach knights would roll over his infantry like a landslide.
"Halt!" Robert bellowed.
The single horn blast sounded. Twenty thousand men froze instantly. The silence was absolute.
"Spears!" Robert roared, turning in his saddle.
Five thousand men—the core of his "new model" infantry—scrambled off the road and into the field. These were men who, a month ago, had been terrified of horses.
"Form the Wall!"
They moved. It wasn't pretty, but it was fast. Because every spear had been cut to exactly eight feet, and every man knew his place, the line formed instantly.
The first rank knelt, grounding the butts of their spears in the mud, angling the points up at 45 degrees.
The second rank stood, leveling theirs over the shoulders of the first.
The third rank held theirs high, ready to drop.
It was a hedge of iron points. A prickly, impenetrable geometric shape.
Robert rode his destrier toward them. He didn't slow down. He galloped straight at Hoke's squad.
The ground shook. A warhorse at full gallop is a terrifying thing—two thousand pounds of muscle and armor moving at thirty miles an hour. Instinct screamed at the men to run.
"HOLD!" Robert roared, spurring the destrier faster.
He pulled up at the last second, the horse's chest inches from the spear tips. The horse reared, hooves flailing, unwilling to impale itself.
Hoke didn't move. He squeezed his eyes shut, sweat pouring down his face, but he kept the spear planted. The man next to him trembled, but stayed.
Robert brought the horse down.
"Good!" Robert shouted. "Open your eyes, Hoke!"
Hoke blinked, looking at the giant horse looming over him.
"The Reach has twenty thousand horses like this!" Robert lectured the line, his voice carrying to the back ranks. "They think you are grass! They think they can ride over you!"
He pointed to the "Stag Standard" spears.
"But a horse is not a monster! A horse is a coward! It will not run onto a sharp point! If you run, you are prey! If you hold, you are a wall!"
He wheeled his horse around to face South again.
"Trust the wood! Trust the iron! Trust the man beside you! If the line holds, the knights die!"
"Recover!"
The formation dissolved back into marching columns within seconds. No wasted movement. No confusion.
Robert looked at Siro.
"Tarly is drilling his men in the camp," Robert said. "He is teaching them to march in step for the parade. He thinks his numbers make him invincible."
He looked at his dusty, silent, outnumbered army.
"They are dancing," Robert whispered, sliding the massive bow back into its saddle holster. "We are working."
He signaled the advance. The thud-thud-thud began again.
"Let them bring their horses," Robert muttered to himself. "I have a math problem for them."
[End of Chapter 7]