Check the arrows, check the bowstave. Check the arrows, check the bowstave.

That occupied part of Red Harry's brain as he looked out over a bleak, sandy vista of all that the Disputed Lands had to offer. Others, less used to the condition of campaigning here, were sweating profusely and were red from exposure to the sun, but Harry managed to weather it from under a red and white checked scarf wrapped over his head, a trick learned from a Dornishman some years back. Them that had water had some, finding it warm and tinged with something that gave it a slightly metallic taste. It came from a watering hole in the Disputed Lands, something their local guides knew about, and the best that could be said for it was that it was wet.

It'd taste like the purest, coldest stream fifteen seconds into the fight, and they had barrels of it ready for after. There'd be less of them by then.

There was a centennar giving direction to the longbowmen in the Knot, but Harry knew the sort of orders by rote. The man was a boor, but he'd learned some time ago the value of holding one's tongue, even if one did know better, when confronted with someone that would not hear. The rest of the longbows were of the same mind; there were enough experienced men about the company to know how to space themselves to give room not long to draw the bows, but for the runners to deliver more arrows. They marched, but the carts hauled arrows and the means to make more, which they spent the night doing.

He'd drawn the bow, as a boy and man both, for enough years to know what the work was about. He was illiterate and had no math training, but he could mark out a desiccated tree here, a hill there, to mark the range and how much to adjust the angle of his bowshot. He knew, by long practice, where the arrows would reach and where they wouldn't.

Occasionally, he nudged a man alongside him and pointed out these landmarks. There was a mutual interest among longbowmen to survive the day, because no one loved them much and the Sers might ransom each other, but the peasant scum without money were enslaved at best, if not outright executed. Harry figured that a slaver would take one look at him and know that he'd never make an obedient slave. Worse, the bastard might decide he'd be more docile without a cock...

The deliberations on Harry's part and the conversations in the scattered line of longbowmen ended abruptly as the enemy decided to start the advance. In the way of things, they thought they could sweep the line and be done with the fight, which was expected to be a tentative affair of carefully managed expectations and performative, choreographed advances matched by performative, choreographed, carefully-timed defending that would look stout enough to satisfy an employer.

That, after all, was the way mercenaries fought. You couldn't be paid if you were dead. And your company didn't get hired if it didn't have men.

He bent the bowstave and put the string in the grooves cut into the wood for the purpose, making sure the loops were settled in behind the pieces of horn that held them in place when bent. Then, figuring that there was no time like the present, he had himself a piss right out on the sand, aiming for a nearby rock. He made sure he wasn't hitting anyone with it, but that was it as far as concern went. He'd seen worse, many of them had, after a diseased-wracked march, men fighting ankle-deep in their own watery shit, but there was a younger lad looking on with disbelief at the shamelessly public display.

As he told the younger man, wryly, "Now or in your pants boy, your choice!"