//------------------------------// // Rainy Season // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS027 The weather had definitely turned. Uncontrolled rain-storm after rain-storm lashed the woods and empty fields across Rennet, and temperatures plummeted under darkened skies. A couple ponies started sniffling one evening returning from observation duty off of some damp dark cloud, and then it seemed like half the Company was hacking away, sneezing, spraying infection everywhere. Contrary to what some ponies asked of me, I locked down my convalescents' ward and quarantined the rest of the camp away from my wounded. I showed Roggentochter how to make a dilute alcoholic rinse, and we wiped down all non-cloth surfaces on a twice-daily schedule, and kept the laundry-fire running during every waking hour, boiling cloth bandages and our rags. The Company's operational tempo dropped into the latrine, and it took us a week and a half to fish it out of the muck and rinse it down. We were damn lucky that the first autumn outbreak of the flu caught the enemy as badly or worse than it got us. I had a copious supply of willow's bark extract that I had the sergeants distribute with a free hoof, and we made sure that the sick stayed in doors and under roof as soon as they started showing symptoms. I resolved to take my apprentice out into the woods as soon as the sickness passed, and show her how to mark young willow trees for harvest in the spring. If we had more than one wave of the flu come through the camp, it would drain even my generous supply of that wonder-drug. Speaking of my apprentice, she had decided to Equuify her name, and started telling us to call her Rye Daughter. Her Equuish was coming along nicely; they're very quick to pick up languages at that age. She and the other apprentices didn't exactly form a gang - we kept them far too busy for that, this is how you keep apprentices in line and virtuous, work them until they drop - but they did keep running with each other whenever two of their masters had any reason to cross paths. Octavius had mostly recovered from his bout of hornburn when the flu caught him something fierce. I'm told that Feufollet took excellent care of him in his delirium. I never really saw much of the other three, who had apprenticed to a cook and two ground-cohort non-coms. I believe the Dodger and Tam Lane were the two who joined the cohorts, and they were training them up as runners and couriers. Charleyhorse went into the kitchens, and seemed happy enough the few times I laid eyes on him. Bad Apple, we saw considerably more of, and so did the rest of the camp. Gibblets' training methods were direct, shockingly careless, and more than a little spectacular. Seeing a little earth pony launch herself skyward on a fiery force-bubble while giggling her head off was something everypony ought to see once in their lives. The tidal wave of backflow from the latrine he had her "cleaning" on the other hand was less amusing. We made Gibblets help her clean that one up, and the Lieutenant gave him a very public tongue-lashing. As the apprentices began to shed their respective accents and take on the "Company tongue", the Lieutenant's accent degenerated, and got stronger and stronger as command wore more heavily on her. At times she sounded like some mob enforcers I had known as an apprentice in the old country. I kept a close eye on her when our paths crossed, looking for "thestral eye" or other signs. Nothing other than the accent thing surfaced. The Captain grew clear-eyed and active, but he still didn't make an awful lot of sense. Half his symptoms resembled that of a pony who had suffered a stroke or an aneurysm, but the others didn't match the pattern. He had no asymmetric dysphoria. His speech wasn't slurred, and he didn't show any muscle weakness. It was just that his words were scrambled, and there didn't seem to be much meaning behind what he said. It wasn't exactly aphasia, because that usually has some frustrated intent or confusion underlying it. He simply babbled. We had him helping around the camp, doing basic chores, if only to keep him active and healthy. But it was heart-rending that our leader for dozens of years was now so vacant. The rains marked the end of the campaign season. The frequent storms made it difficult and unhealthy to maintain the aerial scouts in their observation posts, and most of the roads turned into bottomless muddy sloughs. Only the Bride's Roads remained firm, but we could not use those as the rebel posted them heavily, and they barely covered any of the province if we could even get to them across the byways between us and the highway pavement. The Bride's Roads were more useful for travelling between provinces than within them, anyways. There was some debate about whether or not to use the chariots to mount strikes against the rebel posts along the Bride's Roads. The onset of the flu scotched that plan for the time being, as we couldn't spare the ponies to scout out an attack, or fly in a strike-force in sufficient strength. We relied more and more on our local contacts as the capacity of our scouts to maintain nightly observation posts waned. That produced some good news. Rebel control over districts away from the Bride's Roads had basically collapsed. Even before the rains, the outlying farming communities had begun to refuse to make deliveries without a squad or two of caribou sitting in front of their front stoops enforcing the edicts of the White Rose. We'd even heard of some interspecies feuding breaking out, and at least one serious massacre of a caribou clan isolated and alone on their homestead surrounded by irate earth pony and donkey neighbors. One source suggested that they had given over the homestead to the clan's enslaved cattle, who were more than willing to keep it going on the same terms as their exterminated masters had offered. I wasn't sure how much credence to give this story, it had the aroma of wishful thinking on the part of that particular informant. Stories mostly agreed on the subject of deserters in the woods and roads headed south, though. In places where they couldn't have been false reports based on our movements, and always moving south. The White Rose rebellion in Rennet was a… aspirational emulation of the great wave of White Rose rebellion that had been wracking the Riverland provinces for a generation. The stories and our own briefings from our long-missing employer's people all agreed, the Riverlands were a seething wreck, more than half-depopulated and hopelessly out of Imperial control. But the White Rose was strong along the great River, and from all accounts their armies paid well. Nopony could agree on exactly who was bankrolling the rebellion; the rebelled provinces couldn't possibly have been self-funding given the imploded state of their economies. A compelling theory was that there was a sponsoring state lurking on the far side of some newly-discovered portal somewhere along the River, that they felt threatened by Tambelon, and they were destabilizing the Bride's empire. Our information advantage had shriveled with the rains, and as a result we turtled up, going dormant. Let the rebels run their troops ragged trying to find us, let them kill their soldiers with exposure, let them drown in the rivers of mud which were once and would once again be roads, but currently were bottomless and frigid. It was too much to hope for that they were also hungry, but we had only managed to steal their reserves and surplus. They wouldn't burn through their supplies on hoof until sometime early in the new year, in the very worst case. More likely, the rebel would start confiscating civilian food supplies to make up their deficits. They'd be as popular as the cholera by spring, and if they played their cards exactly wrong, even the caribou civilians would be willing to throw over the White Rose. Hunger breaks the back of insurgencies faster than steel; it's just a damn ugly way to win. Nopony ever accused the Black Company of being pretty. The Captain in his lucid days had committed us to waging war against a rebellion many, many times our number, one that had crushed a conventional army five times our size in open battle. And even with the aid of King Hunger and General Influenza, the Company would not be able to face the reduced rebel in the open field come spring without the support of allies. We needed to mobilize the Bride's militias in neighboring provinces, or conjure a local army out of the muck and melt of runny rained-under Rennet.