what do you think bittersteel would name his horses?
We have ten thousand men in the company, as I am sure Lord Connington remembers from his years of service with us. Five hundred knights, each with three horses. Five hundred squires, with one mount apiece. And elephants, we must not forget the elephants. —ADWD The Lost Lord
You may laugh, but the matter of where the Golden Company was getting all these horses has bothered me for years, because they clearly don’t have any lands now. I eventually had to reverse my position on if the Golden Company ever did have lands and say yes; during Aegor Rivers’ time (though parts of it were lost in the departure of the Third Blackfyre and completely lost by the Fourth Blackfyre, hence why he spent his dying day in battle for Lys against Myr to recover some of the lands) he was holding part of the “Disputed Lands” as a charter-man for Tyrosh, much like the Catalan Company held the Duchy of Neopatras as vassals of the Aragonese crown for nearly 80 years. There was an influx of people into that territory, as the GC gave it security from bandits/pirates and being devout Sevenites neither had slavery on their land and didn’t permit slave catchers entry. That’s why the Golden Company was able to amass so many horses and people, despite their “never break a contract or switch sides” stance meaning they took heavy casualties in refusing to save themselves by switching sides.
Anyway, I posted that quote because the GC have a lot of horses; Aegor Rivers was their leader 212-241; knights are shown not naming their horses because so many of them die on campaign (but that’s so against my vision of Aegor at least that he did name them, even a standard name)…so it’s very possible the amount of horses he owned in his life was in the hundreds, or possibly a thousand.
I talk a little about horsecanons for Aegor and the Brackens, including the names and a little bit of the personalities for the horses he had in his youth. Due to the strict rules about no repeat names and the centuries-old lineage of certain horse breeds, the names of Bracken horses tended to be pretty elaborate (not like the names of other ASOIAF horses like Blood, Smiler, Dancer, etc) two/three word descriptions, but they tended to have themes: derived from local plants/animals, derived from legendary/prominent ancestors in song or story, physical description, and/or related to the dam’s name (because “bastards and horses get their names from their mothers” sounds like an ASOIAF phrase and would have significance for Aegor who is sort of both). For example, Aegor named his Red Mountain garron Saltspray Sage (nicknamed “Salty”) partly because of his flea-bitten color, partly because his Yronwood dam’s name was White Rose (salt spray being a hardy/naturalized variety of rose).
But then Aegor gets exiled and the close relationships he had with horses in his youth gets broken off, and as a military leader doesn’t really have the time to form new ones (plus being on the frontlso consequently the names get less elaborate and sometimes he reused them. I sort of played with the idea of the “Challenger” line, a family of gray, agile but powerful hotblooded horses who look like the archetypal noble white warhorse (very good for prebattle speeches, and if there was any art of Aegor) and are all named Challenger with a few distinguishing adjectives (Bold Challenger, Ardent Challenger, Challenger’s Heir etc), and if one is killed can be swapped out with the untrained eye not really noticing the difference (despite the Challenger family actually being slower to mature than most horses and taking longer to train). Tárg propaganda compared the Challengers to the way Aegor “”used”” the Blackfyres—as interchangeable disposable figureheads for his revenge campaign—but the Challengers were actually Aegor’s way for the Golden Company men to have a consistent image him as ageless (he also dyed his hair with walnuts when he started going gray, and trained relentlessly to stay in shape) and ever-defiant and ready to fight until he physically couldn’t anymore (yet he still wanted to be there with them postmortem). While Aegor grew to be associated with his “fearless steed Challenger”, they were not his preferred horse, having loved the smaller, less dramatically colored, more enduring and versatile River Dancer coursers from his youth and early military career as a scout.
I also think that—Aegor obviously not accepting slaves as gifts, and also not marrying a relative of one of the Essosi city state leaders (unlike Robert Guiscard and Roger leFlor marrying Italian and Byzantine noblewomen to solidify their holdings)—a lot of Essosi magisters gave him prized horses as gifts, which did help in creating new breeds within GC territory. He probably had a system for naming them—like the name/title of the gifter and a distinguishing physical description—something simple and easy to remember. Maybe like Jaime’s Honor and Glory, one of his more idealistic squires decided to name a horse and he opted to go with it. It seems like he had a lot of horses during his career, so as he progressed in notoriety he couldn’t put the same meaning into their names he did as a youth, mirroring the relationships with the horses becoming more impersonal.
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