Siege of Astapor

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Siege of Astapor
Date 300 AC ish ?
Place Astapor
Result Astapor falls
Combatants
Astapori Freedmen Yunkai
New Ghis
Commanders
Cleon the Butcher King
King Cleon the Second
King Cutthroat
Queen Whore
Yunkai generals
Tattered Prince
Bloodbeard
Strength
Unsullied defenders Windblown company

Company of the Cat

Legions from New Ghis

The Siege of Astapor takes place prior to the Yunkish march to Yunkai for provisions and fresh horses and thence to lay siege to Meereen, the city ruled by Queen Daenerys Targaryen.

Prelude

The Yunkai, in their fight against Daenerys Targaryen, contract the Windblown mercenary company from Volantis; their first task was to travel east to Slaver's Bay and take over Astapor from the freedman salves.


By the time the Windblown scramble from the ships that have brought them from Old Volantis they hear the news that King Cleon the Butcher King is dead, King Cleon the Second is also dead and the Astapori are now ruled by King Cutthroat and Queen Whore.


Meanwhile the forces of Yunkai and its allies and sellswords have besieged Astapor. They devour the Astapori crops and slaughter their herds. Inside the Astapori starve, eating cats and rats and leather, a horsehide was a feast. King Cutthroat and Queen Whore accused each other of feasting on the flesh of the slain. Men and women gathered in secret to draw lots and gorge upon the flesh of him who drew the black stone.


The pyramid of Nakloz was despoiled and set aflame by those who claimed that Kraznys mo Nakloz was to blame for all their woes. Others blamed Daenerys but more still loved her. There were rumours that King Cleon had sent for Daenerys Targaryen and she was coming. Every day the citizens told each other that Daenerys was on her way, at the head of a great host, with food for all, there were other rumours that she had been seen mounted on a dragon flying high above the camps of the Yunkai’i. Every day the citizens looked for her.


Inside the desperate city the Green Grace has a vision that dead King Cleon will deliver Astapor from the Yunkai. The despairing Astapori heed this vision and attempt to break the siege, making the disastrous decision to have dead Cleon’s corpse disinterred and strapped onto the back of a starving horse to lead Astapor's new and vastly inferior Unsullied on a sortie outside the city’s gates.


Battle begins when the new Unsullied march out the city’s gates on the sortie against the forces of Yunkai and its allies and sellswords. The sortie immediately proves to be a disaster, the new Unsullied march right into the iron teeth of a legion from New Ghis and are cut down to a man by the legion, and the sellswords, who quickly join the battle and finish the massacre.

Battle

The battle began at dawn. It is told from Quentyn Martell's point of view, as a recollection.

Some of the Windblown were asleep when the battle commenced so had to quickly don their armour. Three hundred yards away Astapor’s Unsullied were pouring through the gates and forming up in ranks beneath Astapor’s crumbling red brick walls. Quentyn Martell, Ser Archibald Yronwood and Ser Gerris Drinkwater joined the Windblown horse line as drums beat in the distance. Gerris pointed out the Butcher King to Quentyn, the Butcher King sat tall upon an armoured horse in a suit of copper scale that flashed brilliantly in the sun.


As the Astapori advanced the Yunkishmen were still running about in fluttering tokars trying to get their half-trained slave soldiers into some semblance of order as Unsullied spears came crashing through Windblown siege lines. The Windblown and the Company of the Cat were ahorse in minutes and came thundering down on the Astapori flanks even as a legion from New Ghis pushed through the Yunkish camp from the other side and met the Unsullied spear to spear and shield to shield. The rest of the battle was butchery.


It was Caggo who finally cut the Butcher King down, fighting through the King's protectors on his monstrous warhorse and opening Cleon the Great from shoulder to hip with one blow of his curved Valyrian arakh, it is claimed that Cleon’s copper armour rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all - the desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armour, and tied him onto a horse in the hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied. The act of cutting the Butcher King down earned Caggo the name Corpsekiller.


Dead Cleon’s fall broke the Unsullied; they threw down their spears and shields and ran, only to find the gates of Astapor shut behind them. Slaughter followed, the Windblown rode down the frightened eunuchs, slashing right and left their wedge went through the Unsullied like a spear point.


When the Windblown burst out the other side, the Tattered Prince wheeled them round and led them through again. It was only on coming back that Quentyn got a good look at the faces beneath the spiked bronze caps and realised that most were not older than he – green boys screaming for their mothers, but he killed them all the same. By the time he left the field his sword was running red with blood and his arm was so tired he could hardly lift it.


Quentyn Martell later thinks to himself that the fight beneath the walls of Astapor seemed real enough to him but according to Denzo D'han, the veteran of a hundred battles, it was butchery, not battle.

Fall and Aftermath

After the defeat of the Unsullied the Green Grace was impaled upon a stake in the Plaza of Punishment and left until she died. In the pyramid of Ullhor, the survivors had a great feast that lasted half the night, and washed the last of their food down with poison wine so none need wake in the morning.


Soon after came the sickness, the bloody flux that killed three men in every four, until healthy men slew the guards at the main gate. The guards were torn apart and the gates thrown open. The legions of New Ghis came pouring into Astapor, followed by the Yunkai’i and the sellswords on their horses.


When the city fell the butchery began.


The Temple of Graces was full of the sick who had come to ask the gods to heal them. The legions sealed the doors and set the temple ablaze with torches. Within the hour fires were beginning in every corner of the city. As they spread they joined with one another. The streets were full of mobs, running this way and that to escape the flames, but there was no way out, the Yunkai’i held the gates.


Riding through the city Quentyn Martell saw a river chocked with corpses and the Green Grace in her torn robes impaled upon a stake and attended by a cloud of glistening flies. Dying men staggered through the streets, bloody and befouled, children fought over half-cooked puppies. There were flames and fires everywhere. Flames whirling from brick pyramids larger than any castle Quentyn had ever seen, plums of greasy smoke, coiling upward like great black snakes. The Yunkai sealed the broken gates to keep the dead and dying inside the city.


Soon there is nothing left in Astapor but corpses. What Astapori that still survive creep out of their hidey-holes and pour out into the countryside, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all starved and sick – many have the bloody flux. The Yunkai command the sellswords to hunt them down and turn them, driving them back to Astapor or north to Meereen to prevent the Astapori from going near the Yellow City.


Daenerys Targaryen receives the news of the fall from three escaped Astapori: a brickmaker, a weaver and a cobbler. Afterwards she goes out to her terrace and it seems to her that the sky was darker to the southwest, smudged and hazy with the smoke of the Red City’s passing.


The Tattered Prince took the lion’s share of the Windblown's Astapori plunder.


Quentyn Martell reflects to himself that the sights he saw riding down the red brick streets of Astapor would haunt him forever and that the Red City was closest thing to hell he ever hoped to know.

Quotes

We were dancing with the cripples at Astapor

Beans, on the Siege of Astapor


References and Notes