Free The Marquis by Michael O'Neill

organized that the lighter Samrian ponies be trained as Sagittari, and led by Brys and Wystan, they waited hidden, to follow the Cataphracts into battle.
    The Ancuman cavalry, all lancers, streamed through the pass and into Subari. They didn’t pause as they continued their charge down the valley. Their target appeared to be the settlement and they clearly intended to destroy it. Unfortunately for them, it had been moved, and as they headed down in a gallop, it was too late when they realized that instead of the village they expected, they were heading headlong into a pike wall of over five hundred men.
    These were Conn’s classically inspired Tercio military units, pikemen with long bamboo and hardwood pikes with long yari type blades at the end, supported by bowmen equipped with bamboo yumi or longbows. They wore a long padded gambeson under their tabard, and a lacquered jingasa to protect them from the sun as much as anything. Their tabard wore the half gold sun symbol of Conn’s. The bowmen were similarly attired, except for the short sleeved gambeson, long silk undershirt and leather and metal vambraces. For functionality in the hot weather they all wore three quarter pants and leggings and a military sandal based on the heavy soled and hobnailed Roman caligae as footwear.
    The Ancuman lancers, finding that the twenty five foot pikes were more than a match for their lances, tried immediately to take evasive action by unceremoniously screaming to a halt, not something easy to do with 500 horses at the gallop. In the melee and confusion caused by the clashing of horses and wiga falling off and getting trampled, Conn’s bowmen started firing; their arrows finding targets amongst the disorder, firing over the top of the crouched pikemen.
    Not being able to go through, the Lancers tried to avoid pikes by turning east, up an incline. Before they had a chance, their advance was truncated by the sudden arrival at a gallop of Conn and his hundred Cataphracts. Although outnumbered five to one, the Cataphracts easily cut a swathe through the Ancuman cavalry who were in no real position to properly defend themselves against Conn’s larger and heavily armoured Cataphracts on one side and a pike wall on another. The first two hundred riders died quickly; those that could turn around, tried to escape west ahead of Conn’s charge but ran into the Sagittari. More men fell from horses.
    The only ones able to escape, less than a hundred riders, turned north and went back the way they came; up the hill and back through the pass. They caused further chaos by coming directly into contact with their own troops; now trying to make their way down the valley in support.
    It was not a good day for the Ancuman lancers.
    Leaving the bowmen to gather the wounded, Conn went after the Ancuman; followed by the pikemen. Ten minutes later he arrived in sight of the gates and in full view of the Samrian fyrd now in disarray, with the cavalry having created discord by forcing their way through.
    It took twenty minutes for Conn’s riders to be clearly visible to the waiting Samrian fyrd and its wiga still under their shields. Conn’s wiga reformed into a formidable line; the Cataphracts at the front supported by two companies of Sagittari; the horses snorting and stomping as they waited, and with the arrival of four companies of pikemen, they formed two columns, one on either side of the cavalry. Just over a thousand men, the uniformity of uniform from helmet to tabard over armour, made them seem larger in number then reality. The Cataphracts, resplendent in the head, neck and chest padded armour, were the first horses they had ever seen so presented and being bigger than any horse they had ever seen, they may well have looked like monsters.
    Everyone in place, the drummers started a different tune, and Conn’s Cataphracts commenced its charge on the visible dispirited Samrian fyrd, with the Sagittari in close support.
    The retreat of their own