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Bang, bang, bang.
The motley weapons in the front ranks of the Brotherhood uprising army hammered constantly against the sturdy kite shields of the first line of the defensive circle.
Spears thrust. Arrows hissed.
The second-rank spearmen of the allied northern and riverlander army stabbed again and again with bloodied spears. The front ranks of the uprising soldiers surrounding them sprayed blood and fell in great numbers.
Archers inside the allied formation began firing freely. With so many enemies surrounding the circle, they did not need to worry about finding targets.
Before long, bodies had begun piling outside the defensive circle. Yet the allied army's round formation remained stable, still looking almost impossible to break.
This kind of defensive circle sacrificed offense for survival. Even against enemies several times their number, it could hold for a long time.
In Robb's previous life, he remembered accounts of small cavalry groups using tight defensive circles to hold against forces many times their size, then breaking out when the chance came.
Of course, such a special case could not be used directly as a reference.
But the difference between the allied army and the uprising army in weapons, equipment, physical condition, and training was very real.
So the vanguard commander's first idea, to use his advantage in numbers to find gaps in the formation, collapsed almost immediately. Now that the two sides were fully engaged, the uprising army could only wear the allied army down by force.
On a battlefield, however, the situation could change in an instant. Weather, terrain, and many other factors could alter the course of a fight.
This time, the factor that favored the uprising army turned out to be the corpses of their own men.
In a short time after the battle began, at least a thousand uprising soldiers had fallen forever outside the defensive circle.
For an ordinary army, those would already be serious losses. For an uprising army that had not yet lost even one-fortieth of its number, they were little more than an itch.
These soldiers, whether maddened by the taste of plunder or washed clean of fear by faith, threw themselves madly against the defensive circle.
The corpses piling higher and higher outside the formation began to serve as steps for the next wave of attackers.
An uprising soldier in worn armor stepped onto his comrades' bodies, luckily avoided a spear thrust, and leapt straight into the allied army's defensive circle.
He had barely landed before he raised his polished axe and hacked at the back of a spearman's neck before the man could react.
Blood splashed. The unlucky spearman's head was nearly split off from back to front.
But the uprising soldier did not have time to swing a second time. An allied soldier behind him drove a longsword into the back of his neck.
After killing the enemy, that soldier immediately threw away his own weapon, picked up the fallen spear, and filled the gap.
Yet from that first uprising soldier onward, more and more men began stepping on the piled bodies and jumping into the defensive circle.
Although these uprising soldiers did not cause great damage, the allied army's defensive circle had begun to buckle in places.
In the center of the circle, Lord Tytos sat high on his warhorse and watched the battlefield. From time to time, he gave orders to the heralds beside him, shifting men to fill gaps.
Around Lord Tytos, more than a dozen household guards also mounted on warhorses held up shields to protect him layer by layer from stray arrows.
One shield-bearing captain moved his shield aside slightly and looked at the growing number of uprising soldiers who had jumped into the formation and were fighting the allied soldiers up close.
Worried, he asked, "Lord Tytos, should we send the signal?"
Lord Tytos turned and glanced east, where a great many figures were already faintly visible. Then he shook his head decisively.
"No. We must hold until then."
The battle on the Crossroads plain continued.
The flowers and grass in this area, fed by so much blood and so many bodies, would bloom more brilliantly next year.
At the front of the defensive circle, shieldmen gritted their teeth and struggled to hold their kite shields, which seemed to grow heavier and heavier. Behind them, the frequency of the spearmen's thrusts had clearly slowed.
By the feel of their weapons, the spearmen knew each thrust landed. What they did not know was that most of the time, they were striking corpses.
This was the vanguard commander's small trick. After seeing his men use piled bodies to jump into the enemy formation, inspiration had struck him. He ordered a large number of soldiers to use corpses specifically to block the spearmen's thrusts.
When a spearman in the defensive circle felt his spear hit flesh, he would usually withdraw it for the next thrust rather than drive it all the way through.
After all, on such a battlefield, any enemy struck by a spear would generally lose the ability to fight.
Large numbers of uprising soldiers took advantage of the corpses blocking the spear attacks, stepped onto the corpse-steps, and jumped into the circle.
When the centurion of the allied spearmen commanding the front realized more and more enemies were jumping into their formation, he saw the problem.
He immediately ordered all spearmen to change their flat thrusts through the gaps in the shield line into upward thrusts over the shieldmen's shoulders at a forty-five-degree angle.
The allied spearmen's attack changed abruptly. Many uprising soldiers who tried to step on bodies and jump into the formation were caught unprepared and pierced by the angled spears.
But in their death throes, the momentum of their leaps still carried their blood-spurting bodies forward. They crashed into the spearmen, whose spears were hard to hold under the added weight, and knocked them down inside the circle, causing small disturbances.
Once enough small disturbances appeared, they became a major breach.
More uprising soldiers either jumped directly through gaps in the spearmen's line or attacked the front shieldmen while no spears guarded them.
This was battle.
The spearman centurion had changed tactics after noticing the enemy's trick, only to create an even larger weakness than before.
The defensive circle that had previously maintained its shape now looked ragged, with gaps opening all around it.
The entire allied formation seemed to be on the verge of collapse.
"Ha ha! Reinforcements! Our main force has arrived. Brothers, give it everything!"
The vanguard commander saw the main force drawing very close and shouted in excitement.
Of course, the seventy thousand-plus uprising soldiers who remained could not possibly hear his voice. But aside from the soldiers fighting fiercely at the front, the others had all seen the rapidly approaching main force.
Their morale, which had been dropping quickly against the allied army's hard bones, suddenly surged.
"Kill! We are breaking in!"
The allied army, already near its limit, could not endure the sudden rise in the uprising soldiers' morale. The distorted defensive circle was torn open, and large numbers of uprising soldiers shouted as they rushed in.
Then a high, drawn-out horn call suddenly rang across the whole battlefield. From the sound of it, the soldier blowing the horn must have been using every bit of strength he had.
A thunderous rumble came from the west.
The heavy sound of at least ten thousand warhorses galloping together brought a crushing pressure, as if the air over the battlefield had suddenly congealed.
"Damn it, after holding back for so long, I am going to butcher these bastards!"
After this period of recovery, Smalljon, whose body had mostly healed, wore full heavy armor and carried a steel lance. He roared at the enemies ahead.
"Hey, fool. You are not fully recovered yet. Do not overdo it."
Edd, who had replaced his father Lord Rickard in guarding the Golden Tooth after Rickard left with his men, could not help laughing as he scolded this friend he regarded like a brother.
'Being alive is good.'
Feeling that familiar scolding from Edd, Smalljon, who had once walked along death's edge, sighed inwardly and laughed aloud.
"Both of you, focus. We are still at a disadvantage.
"Proceed according to the plan."
Brynden, his expression stern, rebuked Smalljon and Edd for relaxing too much before battle. His eyes stayed fixed on Lord Tytos's force, whose formation had already been broken by the enemy.
Smalljon and Edd exchanged a glance, immediately straightened their expressions, and led their cavalry forces apart to left and right.
The allied cavalry force launching the surprise attack from the west numbered roughly eleven thousand.
It consisted of the eight thousand northern riders Robb had left at Lannisport, the thousand riders Edd had stationed at the Golden Tooth, and two thousand Riverrun riders gathered after Brynden joined Lord Tytos.
Among them, Brynden led three thousand heavy cavalry as the decisive force in a frontal charge. Smalljon and Edd each led four thousand light cavalry to strike from the flanks.
When the heavy cavalry approached with the force to crush everything in its path, the first to flee was the vanguard commander, who had been directing from the rear all along.
Before becoming a refugee, he had been an officer from the Stormlands. Naturally, he understood what would happen if this mob under him faced a charge of nearly ten thousand cavalry.
So without any hesitation, he led his own trusted soldiers and fled toward the rear. Their only chance of survival now lay with the main force of more than a hundred thousand that was about to reach the battlefield.
Seeing their commander flee without fighting, the uprising soldiers at the rear immediately snapped out of the fear brought by the overwhelming cavalry and fled after him.
The uprising army that had already torn open the allied army's defensive circle seemed to split in two.
At the front, uprising soldiers fought fiercely with the allied infantry. At the rear, the rest collapsed into a flood of flight.
The heavy cavalry charged in a straight line and smashed into the mass of uprising soldiers. Large numbers of bodies, or parts of bodies, were hurled into the air.
The many uprising soldiers blocking the heavy cavalry fell like dominoes, knocked down in great swaths.
Inside the defensive circle, the uprising soldiers heard the noise and tried to turn and flee. But the allied infantry, whose morale had been reignited by the arrival of reinforcements, began counterattacking and bit into them hard.
Smalljon's force, circling around the left, reached the battlefield and found that most of the enemy was already fleeing.
He would never let such a chance slip away. Laughing loudly, he led his cavalry in pursuit, using his steel lance to cut down enemy soldiers again and again.
Edd's force on the right acted differently. He immediately chose to attack the uprising soldiers who wanted to flee outward but were still being held tight by Lord Tytos's men.
The battlefield changed again. Brynden and Smalljon pursued the many fleeing enemies, while Lord Tytos and Edd cleaned up the smaller number of enemies still trapped in the fighting.
The Brotherhood uprising army, which had originally numbered more than seventy thousand in its vanguard alone, was broken so easily by the allied army's ten thousand-plus cavalry.
"All forces, slow down!"
Then Brynden, charging at the very front, suddenly raised his hand and ordered the entire army to slow.
Heavy cavalry relied on speed to display their full power. On a battlefield, the moment heavy cavalry stopped was the moment they died.
But after Brynden's order was given, not only the heavy cavalry at the front, but even Smalljon's force killing excitedly behind them began to slow, as if watching to see what would happen.
"Run! Run quickly! The enemy has tens of thousands of elite cavalry. How can we beat that?"
After the vanguard commander approached the main force with his trusted soldiers, he loudly exaggerated the enemy's strength.
The soldiers of the main force at the very front, already battered by the flood of their own routed men, immediately turned and fled, afraid they might run slower than others.
Seeing the front ranks of the main force begin to flee, the vanguard commander smiled and nodded.
If everyone fled before battle, the law could not punish them all. The overseers could not possibly kill so many soldiers.
Brynden was smiling and nodding as well. Looking at the Brotherhood's main force, struck by its own routed soldiers and now beginning to collapse, a rare smile appeared on his face.
As a famous old commander whose name had first risen in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, Brynden had often heard Robb explain famous battles from his previous life in the form of stories. His understanding of planning and his vision for war had improved greatly.
In this battle against the rebel refugee army, he understood the terrifying weight of two or three hundred thousand men. At the same time, he also understood the fatal weakness of a refugee army that had not undergone strict training.
So in this battle on the Crossroads plain, he first had Lord Tytos lead the infantry into a defensive circle to draw the enemy vanguard into an attack.
Then, when the enemy main force approached, he led the nearly ten thousand cavalry entrusted with victory into a massed charge.
If the timing were wrong, or if the enemy main force had not been broken, then he would have had no choice but to abandon the allied infantry and retreat with the cavalry.
After that, aside from Riverrun, the Riverlands might have been left for the rebel refugee army to take at will, with almost no ability to resist.
Fortunately, faced with the allied army's iron flood of cavalry, the enemy troops fled just as he expected and smoothly crashed into their own main force.
"Charge! The enemy is beaten!"
"Kill them all! Put their heads on spearpoints!"
"Run if you want to live!"
Seeing the battlefield turn in their favor, Brynden and Edd's cavalry continued pressing forward, forcing the routed vanguard soldiers to keep crashing into their own main force.
At the same time, they shouted constantly behind the routed men, adding fuel to the fire.
The tens of thousands of vanguard soldiers heard the shouting and ran toward the main force with every bit of strength they had.
In the crowd, unlucky men were squeezed down by others or tripped and fell on their own. Once they fell, countless friendly feet trampled them heavily until they were crushed into bloody pulp.
After the front of the main force began to flee, the overseers behind them reacted quickly. They drew swords and tried to stop a larger rout.
The fleeing soldiers did not dare resist the sword-bearing overseers. But compared with tens of thousands of routed soldiers, fewer than a thousand overseers could not kill fast enough to matter.
In the end, the routed vanguard soldiers swept up the front ranks of the main force and formed a great collapse like an avalanche.
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