Chapter 213: Junior Officer's Handbook
"So how's everything going?" Ian leaned back in his newly claimed study at the top of the pyramid, looking up as Celia came in to report.
"Isn't everything I do already under your eye?" Celia shot back, pulling her orange cat closer to her chest.
"Sure, but I don't know which problems you've already handled and which ones actually need me involved." Ian set down his quill. "So you'd better brief me in person."
"What are you writing?" Celia didn't launch into her report. Instead she nodded toward the book on the desk.
"Junior Officer's Handbook. Written in both the Common Tongue and High Valyrian." Ian held it out to her. "Honestly, High Valyrian gives me headaches sometimes. Concepts that take one sentence to explain take half a paragraph in Valyrian. The language wasn't built for this kind of thinking."
He handed her the unfinished manuscript and stretched his arms above his head, suddenly free of the task.
For the past two weeks, Ian had divided his time between observing troop training at the Unsullied camp and reading in his study. He had quietly raided the Astapor library of every military text it held and moved them all upstairs. The quality of the material was uneven — military theory in this world lagged behind what he was used to — but there was always something to be learned, even from a mediocre source.
The book that had been sitting heaviest in his mind lately wasn't Westerosi. It was older, sharper, and had been written by a man who understood something that most commanders in this world had never been forced to reckon with.
Two lines in particular kept coming back to him — not the famous ones everyone quoted, but a pair that most readers skipped right past: "Advantage is seized through flexibility, not formula," and "The secrets of victory cannot be worked out in advance."
Taken together, they pointed at something Ian thought was genuinely important: reading military history and military theory was not the same as memorizing answers. If you approached a book of tactics looking for formulas to copy, you were going to get yourself killed the first time the battlefield stopped cooperating with your expectations.
An exam question has maybe four or five variables. A battle has dozens — the size and quality of your forces, the training and morale of your men, how long they've been marching, how hungry they are, the terrain, the weather, the reputation of the opposing commander, and a hundred other things that shift by the hour. Any approach that pretended you could strip those variables away and apply a clean solution from a textbook was about as reliable as ignoring friction in a physics problem.
It was fatal thinking.
So if you couldn't treat military history as a formula sheet, what was the point of reading it at all?
Ian's answer was simple: it was practice. Not copying answers — building pattern recognition.
You'd never face the exact same battle twice. But a commander who had studied a hundred engagements would see the shape of a new situation faster than one who hadn't. He'd recognize the pressure point. He'd know what had worked in roughly similar terrain, roughly similar conditions. He'd have more threads to pull.
That was the real value. Not memorization. Volume and depth — so that when something new appeared, you had more to draw on.
Of course, someone could always bring up Baelor the Blessed's tourney — or closer to home, the stories of commanders who'd never cracked a book in their lives and won anyway on pure instinct and nerve. Ian had no clean counter to that. Some people were just built differently. Natural gifts existed. They always had.
But in the long run of history, how many of those were there? One in a generation? One in a century?
Ian didn't count himself among them. His answer was to do the work — read the books, run the drills, build the foundation. It might never make him a legendary battlefield commander. But in this world, at this moment in history, it didn't need to. The bar wasn't that high.
The handbook he was writing now was adapted for that purpose: a practical guide for lower-ranking officers, built from what he'd read and from two weeks of close observation at the Unsullied training camp.
The twenty thousand Ghiscari soldiers Astapor had promised were nowhere near sufficient for what Ian was planning. He needed other types of troops, which meant he needed officers capable of training and leading them. That was the bottleneck. Fix the officer problem and the rest became manageable.
So far he had drafted sections covering three areas: selection, organization, and training.
Selection came first. You couldn't build a good army out of poor material, and you couldn't fix that problem downstream. Ian had drawn on a simple principle here — different men were suited for different roles, and the selection process needed to account for that from the beginning.
He flatly refused to adopt Astapor's traditional approach: buy slaves indiscriminately, run them through brutal training, kill the ones who washed out. Population was a resource. At this stage Ian needed workers, farmers, and craftsmen as much as he needed soldiers. Every man killed in training for failing a test he was never suited for was a waste Ian couldn't afford. The selection process needed to route men toward the roles they could actually fill — and the ones cut from military service needed to go somewhere useful, not into a mass grave.
Both Ian's new forces and the Ghiscari slave soldiers being trained under Astapor's program would follow his selection protocols going forward. The men who didn't make the cut as soldiers would be redirected, not discarded.
Organization came second, and Ian had spent more time thinking about this than almost anything else.
There was a persistent fantasy in the stories people told about great commanders — the idea that a brilliant general could walk onto a battlefield and rearrange his forces in the moment, improvising a devastating formation out of thin air. Ian had believed some version of that once. He didn't anymore.
How an army could be deployed on a battlefield wasn't determined on the battlefield. It was determined weeks or months earlier, in how the units were organized and drilled. You could only command what had been trained to respond to commands. If your men had spent months operating as squads and companies, learning to move and hold and retreat as units, you could direct them in the field. If they hadn't, you were just pointing at a crowd and hoping.
Without that foundation, even the most gifted commander was reduced to deciding where to place his troops before the fighting started. Once contact was made, control evaporated. At that point a famous name was worth something for morale and not much else.
Ian's vision for his new infantry was built around small-unit formations — flexible enough for broken terrain, street fighting, and the kind of close-quarters situations where larger formations became a liability.
The Ghiscari legion, meanwhile, needed a different approach. The Unsullied model was effective but narrow. Ian intended to introduce halberd training and work toward a combined-arms phalanx — spears providing reach and formation integrity, halberds giving the unit genuine hitting power against heavily armored opponents. The Swiss had proved the concept. It translated.
That was the theory, anyway. Now came the harder part: making it work with the men and time he actually had.
(End of Chapter)
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