SBMS024
Two days later, I was still nursing a monster hangover, which really, was more than I deserved. Going on a bender after a bad day in surgery wasn't worthy of a physician of the Company. The old unicorn I'd replaced would have been disappointed in me. She had been dying of a cancer when the brethren had foalnapped me from my master, her body in rebellion against itself, squamous masses and carbuncles growing uncontrolled across her barrel and flank. Nothing she or I knew how to combat, but at least my library of palliatives made Silver Glow's last days painless and lucid. I had nearly a month under her rather light-hearted tutelage, the laudanum in the potions leaving her euphoric and playful. But then, we hadn't had any serious battles in her month of dying, she was the only addition to the Annals in my first six months of service. Twelve in a night…
I should not have let it take me that way. Other eras have seen the Company weather truly terrible battle-lists; Bitter Ambrosia's volumes aren't actually half lists of the dead, but it certainly reads that way at times. The Company was much larger in those days, as it grew to absorb the remnants of the other units they had been brigaded with, volunteer and other mercenary outfits, and then the remnant of the division in which that bled-dry brigade had itself been brigaded. By the end of that terrible war, the Company had taken up the remnant slivers of half an army, two entire corps, whose parent battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, had washed out of service on a tide of blood and sickness, disablement and desertion. The other mercenary companies, mayfly bands held together by the charisma of one pony or another, fell apart first, then the trained militias, then the volunteer legions, then the drafted battalions that replaced them – those came apart the quickest. No unit's morale could withstand conditions in which the regiments fed into the woodchipper reeled back after a half-hour's battle with half their number dead or dying on the field. None but the Company.
Ambrosia's Company survived by the simple expedient of being useful elsewhere other than in the assault, and never allowing the whole Company to be fed into the woodchipper by any given glory-mad general. But many a day saw one of the Company's battalions in skirmish formation lead a battle-line into the killing zone of one of that era's dread great warlocks. The honor of the day allowed skirmishers to scatter and avoid total annihilation by the blooming death-globes the witch-ponies of Mauga specialized in, those soul-pumped vacuums that obliterated everything they touched, ground, soil, air, trees, weapons and ponies. Even scattered in thin skirmish-lines, the Company would still lose dozens on a good day. Especially if their allied witch-ponies managed to blow similar grey-dusted holes in the defending enemy lines, through which the skirmishers would pour, and stab their lances through the corrupted heart of the exhausted, overwhelmed enemy warlock.
Page after page of nothing but names and simple details, the same details, paragraphs of names with the cause of death the header. Can you wonder why he was called Bitter? A dozen dead, and twice that wounded enough to be taken out of commission, and we celebrate a grand victory. I worried that we were in a place where Ambrosia would recognize us, that we were marching his road.
With so many wounded, the odds were against me, and sure enough, I found two of my patients with spiking fevers. I opened up an earth pony and a pegasus the day after that, not wanting to operate hung over. I cleaned out their wounds again, rinsing the infected region heavily with alcohol and debriding the dead and swollen tissues around the wounds, while Roggentochter hoofed me my tools and the alcohol. Thankfully, the raiding columns had found entire distilleries in more than one of the granaries, and the carts full of loot were many of them piled heavy with casks of barely-aged rotgut. I preferred my distilled alcohol as white as possible, too much weirdness soaked in with aging. Sanitizing with whiskey and brandy was a mook's game. I settled back after re-stitching the last pony's wounds, satisfied that I probably would not have to amputate; it would have been far too much of the limb, even with prosthetics, the earth pony would never have fought again.
The Lieutenant looked up as I wiped my table down, and directed my ‘prentice to run my tools through the boil-bath. We had knocked a vent into the roof of the surgery, and set up a hearth in the corner to do small-batch laundry and boil water for cleaning surgical tools. She had arrived partway through my work with the feverish earth pony. The Captain had awakened, but he was rarely lucid, and command had devolved upon the Lieutenant until the Captain was capable of following an entire conversation without drifting off in a fog.
"We need to talk about what happened the other night in the mess hall. I've gotten very little from the other participants, but I think I've pieced together that something, some haunt or another, interrupted the ceremony? You and your little pets you've half-inducted into our thing? About the same time that the Captain decides to lose his damn mind?"
"Something like that. You talked to Gibblets? It was more his bailiwick than mine. I'm just the Company barber and note-taker. Spooks and witchery is his department."
She looked disgusted by my aw-shucks routine. "Oh, right, you're the alicorns' gift to military and magical theory and practice when it suits your purpose and ego, but once it's something you might have actual experience or information on the situation, you're all 'nobody but us crickets in this here field, padron!' Gibblets pretty much said the same damn thing, except he directed me at you!"
"He say that in plain Equuish, or did he quote obscure poetry at you?"
"As plain as his Equuish ever gets, the little green smartass. No different than usual. Why?"
"It's his story to tell, and he hasn't told it to me, not yet. Promised to spill at some point, but I'm in no hurry to talk to the little three-faced frog-prince. Whatever our spectral visitor actually was, it claimed to be our tutelary spirit, the blood-thirsty thing that lives in the war-lance and makes the Company The Company. And then it had its own little magic aneurysm and things got really weird. Greeted Gibblets like he was her long-lost pet uncle, and they both talked iambic pentameter at each other. After it went away, he kept talking like a play, and was still doing it last time I laid eyes on his slippery hide."
She blinked her exasperated disbelief at me like she was trying to communicate her disgust in semaphore, and then asked, "Has that happened before? Magic shows and ghosts appearing at induction ceremonies? I can't recall anything like that at mine, but you know I don't go in for the pageantry."
I certainly did know. The Lieutenant didn't really believe in the Company as the Black Company, the mystical brotherhood of war that carries a magic lance and its memory in a bottomless chest full of the names of dead ponies. From things she's said, I think she conceives of us as a sort of mafia, an outgrowth of anti-unicorn peasant conspiracies or subrosa militias, like the field-gangs of the restive boondocks of her youth. It doesn't help that she tends to call the Company "our thing".
"If it has happened before, I haven't noticed it in my time with the Company or with the Annals. I'll have to read through the books and see if there isn't something I missed. But there's a whomping great lot of Annals to read through, if I'm going to read the actual text and not the summaries and abridgments. Nearly five hundred years' worth of steady chronicling can amount to tens of millions of words, Lieutenant. We rely mostly on summaries and our predecessors' notes, and those specific volumes which we've been taught to use specifically. Have I read Fatinah's middle volumes, or those books of the Annalists whose Company sat on its fat behind in garrison for decades at a time with nothing but age and soft living to record in the death-lists? No, not really."
She eyed me, now puzzled. "OK, I've never been able to read Gibblets and his bizarre face, but you, you mamalucca, you've always been an open book. You're pissed at him, and I'd swear you're pissed at your books, whatever il' nfernu that means. I don' care what merda is between you two, you picciriddi talk it out."
I hoofed my eyes at this display in front of Roggentochter. "Lieutenant, I'm trying to make a good example for my very-not-fluent-in-Equuish apprentice here. Please don't fill her ears with your Sicari gutter-talk."
She blushed right through her purple coat, and made herself scarce. Right, time to beard the goblin in his hole.