I'm trying to portray their confusion and disbelief as it slowly peels back into a new world view that allows for previously impossible things. But I take about 86 pages to identify the problem (not the cause, that won't happen till awhile later). You are seeing the fall-out of the problem, which seems effective to me because it is the unseen approaching threat that is more terrifying than the one that has already arrived, but some of my feedback has been that things aren't moving fast enough or after two chapters they still don't know what's going on...

I've learned this in a particular story of my own lately. It's not that that it's too long, it's that it needs to be more interesting. For that, you usually need to add details. There also the possibility that you need to be deeper in the head of the character. If the reader can move along with the MC trying tofigure things out, being fed little new discoveries of information, like breadcrumbs, they'll go along with you happily and not notice how long it is - hopefully.

However, if you suffer from too-many-words syndrome, that can have the same effect, of removing momentum. Cleaning up such prose restores pace and involvement.

Unfortunately I can't just come out and say "hey, these saddles don't have stirrups" because stirrups don't exist and if they did and people knew about them then they'd be using them. But it makes it awkward because how else do you explain the difficulties of riding without stirrups?

But the big problem with not having stirrups is that you don't have any leverage beyond the grip of your legs, which ain't all that much when clamped around an object the size of a horse's ribs. It'll hold you there, but it won't hold you PLUS an impact there. Get whacked, or even try to do a serious shoving, and over-side you go. A saddle with a high bow and cantle could keep you from being dumped fore and aft, but won't do a thing for side-to-side.

The other thing is, the harder you grip, the faster the horse wants to go (horses generally being trained to respond like that so they can be controlled with legs alone, and tending to move away from pressure) so as you're gripping with your legs trying not to get shoved to the ground, your horse is gonna become inclined to bolt out of there (barring training to the contrary).

Probably this is where we should unearth a SCAdian who actually does this sort of thing.

What most people think of as a knight is from the Middle Ages. The Bronze Age was roughly from 3,000 to 1,000 BCE. Stirrups seem to have been invented sometime during the 4th and 8th centuries.

In a bronze age, a soldier might wear a breast plate and greeves (shin guards). What we would consider a ranking officer might also wear a helm. Most soldiers wearing armor would be in leather or even wood, and most swords would be short so that the metal could hold up in combat.

I recently looked up bronze-age weaponry for my story. I wouldn't even come close to pretending to be knowledgeable, but it seems the famous leaf-bladed swords were determined to be the most durable way to shape bronze, usually only a foot and a half at most.