SBMS031
The pegasi took full advantage of the break in the weather; all intact chariot frames were put into the daylight air, with Otonashi deadheading to draw a glamour of clear blue sky around the formation. They returned later that morning with the better part of the first battalion of the III Verdebaie Regiment, a mixed donkey and earth pony militia outfit. The charioteers landed in shifts in the marshaling yards, and the mlitiaponies were led into a cleared, drained field which days before had still been brush and scrub. Their efficient non-coms directed the erection of aged but solid squad tents in nice neat rows. I supervised the digging of additional latrines across the back of the field, properly configured to drain into our existing pond and leechfield. When the charioteers finished unloading their militiaponies, they immediately surged into the air, and returned to the distant rendezvous with the rest of the regiment we were shipping into the province.
The convoy lasted well into the evening, with the support companies landing behind exhausted pegasi long after the autumn sun had set. Our griffin sections had been posted around the aerial bridge corridor, to watch for enemy movement, or signs that civilian observers were moving to report the daytime transfer of an entire militia regiment over the hopefully unsuspecting heads of the rebels. Nopony saw anything, and the four regiments bivouacked in and around the fortifications outside of Lait Blanc showed no signs of stirring.
Night brought another shift of pegasi into the air, and they moved out to new cloudborne observation posts around Lait Blanc and its approaches, as well as the other rebel concentrations along the scarce all-weather roads across the province. There were also a pair of observation posts placed in the air above the approaches to Radspur Keep, the seat of the exiled counts of Benoit on the northern fringes of the province. It was an oddity in the region, which was not otherwise castellated aside from regimental castra near the major market towns. There was perhaps a company of rebel troops in the old border-fortress, but it was in supporting distance of a pair of regiments in nearby Benoit proper.
The excitement in camp was about the sudden influx of outsiders into Company territory, but command was occupied with the Marklaird and his local liaison, and the Verdebaie militia officers who had flown in with the regiment. There was much argument over the goals of the late-fall campaign. The consensus of the militia officers was that the means and goals supplied to them were completely divergent. The plan as offered would do terrible damage to the rebel, who still hadn't figured out that they were badly outmatched by our capacity for vertical envelopment. But the militiaponies would be returning to their home cantons in less than forty days. It simply wasn't possible to occupy any positions taken in the campaign with militiaponies, and the Company certainly wasn't the sort of organization which was designed to hold fixed posts.
The Marklaird came the legate at the militiaponies, and told them to mind their rows, and leave the strategy to the ‘laird. If I had been told to stuff it in those terms, I'd have given him what-for, but I suppose that's why I'm a surgeon and those ponies were officers, because they got all shirty and stiff, but left to follow orders, such as they were. Some of them were local politicians in barding, but the militia in these parts was heavily salted with junior officers from the imperial academies, like my friend in Pythia's Fell. It was how the Bride kept a handle on militias outside of her standing armies, at least in theory. The system had badly fallen apart in the provinces infested by White Rose caribou, who had hung or driven off the imperial academy graduates as part of how they introduced themselves to the locals.
The next morning was cold and drizzling, and our schedule was postponed by the inclement weather. Aerial couriers kept the militia main body in contact with those of us in the Company compound, and everypony settled back to wait for clear weather. We could move on the roads if needed, but we had plans which required at least some dry land beside roadbed. The next day, and the day after that were both sufficiently dry, if overcast and inclement. Everypony watched the clouds with anxiety, except the supply ponies. They eyed our foodstocks, and re-counted the surpluses to make sure we wouldn't be overstrained by all the extra mouths. I toured the militia tent-field with my apprentice, and we evaluated them for any infections or sickness that might crop up in the damp and cold. Nothing immediately jumped out at me, but I figured it was only a matter of time until something swept the camp. Masses of ponies strange to each other in close proximity almost always exchanged some sort of crud, especially when they were chilled and wet.
The fourth day dawned cold but clear, and the fields tested a little soggy but firm. The couriers set out for the militia main body, and quickly returned with word that they were setting out of camp. The delay had brought rebel and militia patrols into contact along the provincial border in the last day, and our observation posts reported that two of the other rebel encampments elsewhere in the province had showed activity. As we got reports of the militia main body advancing on the rebel encampment at Lait Blanc, there were also reports of two battalion-size forces leaving the other rebel camps, and moving rapidly to reinforce Lait Blanc. I stood in the operations room and watched Broken Sigil fiddle with his calipers and a marching-table slide-rule, as the Lieutenant, the Marklaird, and the commanding officer of the III Verdebaie waited impatiently. The colonel of the III Verdebaie was an aging earth-pony, brown-coated and with an impressive bristling set of burnsides. Just his whiskers made me want to salute him.
Broken Sigil looked up.
"We can catch them long before the militia main body approaches Lait Blanc. We're in a perfect position for an ambush."
And just like that, the operation was inverted. Couriers were sent back into the air to relay new orders, for the militia main body to approach the rebel at Lait Blanc slowly and cautiously, and to draw them out but not offer battle. They had shifted from one hinge of a pincer-movement to a diversion and pinning-force. Our battle-group would deploy against the enemy reinforcements, and destroy them.
The Company and the III Verdebaie marched out of our encampment at speed, deploying rapidly across the recently corduroyed access roads into the road-net leading back onto the Bride's Road. The aerial cohort swarmed the district, and quickly set up forward pickets along the possible approaches. They made contact with the scouts who had been ghosting the enemy columns, and reports flowed back to the operations room. The Lieutenant and the III Verdebaie colonel had led their ponies from the front, leaving Broken Sigil and the Marklaird and myself collecting the reports and returns. When the last of the ground-pounders cleared the compound, I set out with my ambulance-drivers and Rye Daughter to follow the rear-guard and set up a forward trauma post.
Our ground-pounders had churned the dubiously-dry dirt surface of the roads nearby the encampment. As we dragged our ambulances through the shallow muck, I noted a couple farmers standing by their gates as we passed. Our presence in the neighborhood was no longer a secret or even a mystery. It was clear from their blank faces that they now understood what had been lurking in their woods. None of them made a move towards or away from us. They just watched. There was a pair of earth-ponies by one gate, a middle-aged couple, staring as we approached the crossroads with the Bride's Road. They had the look of Apples – and I wondered if Gibblets' apprentice was with him today. I hadn't asked. Then I looked up at Rye Daughter perched on the ambulance beside my shoulder, and wondered if I should have left her in camp with the other military apprentices. Too late now.
As we rolled out of the muck and onto the gravel of the Bride's Road, a pair of griffins dropped out of the sky and stopped us. I was given directions to set up in a copse of woods three and a half miles west of the crossroads, hopefully within supporting distance of the expected ambush-zone, but not so close as to be caught up in any accidents of battle. The oxen helped me unload my portable surgical table and supply chests, and set a rack of cots where they could be easily knocked together. Then they got back in their traces and moved their ambulances forward. Depending on how the warlocks set up their usual glamours, we might be the first out-of-place thing the enemy columns sighted before stumbling into the kill-zone.
I was waiting impatiently beside my table with Rye Daughter dozing at my feet, when a rushing noise approached from the rear. I looked up, and discovered the Marklaird aloft on some sort of magic kite, a wooden and leather frame that it dangled from like a bat or, I don't know, a caterpillar chrysalis slung below a twig or leaf. It was far less stealthy than what I had come to expect from aerial troops. It was the flamboyant opposite of stealthy. But it was also a tartarus of a display by a pony without wings. Takes a lot of magic to loft a mage into the air and keep her there. Even the skilled ones could generally only manage a sort of parabola, like Bad Apple and her fiery magic pogo stick.
I hoofed my eyes, frowned, and waved the laird down, hoping against hope that it wasn't in view of any approaching rebels. It spiraled towards the roadbed, and then gently touched down like a seagull riding the dockside breeze over a mooring-post. I did my best not to yell at the scary, creepy faceless warlock who could boil me in my scrubs, but I finally got across to it that if it was floating above our ambush, we would hardly be able to lure the rebel into our clutches. We were good, but we weren't miracle workers. That was the Marklaird's department. I eventually convinced him to go find the III Verdebaie. On the ground, and hopefully out of sight. I didn't say, "imbecile", but I was thinking it pretty loudly. It might have heard my thoughts. Do wizards around these parts read minds?
As the little gimp dragged its magic kite into the brush on the far side of the road, the sound of marching hooves rose up over the Road. It took them fifteen minutes after they marched into sight to reach the kill-zone, and all that time I stood there beside my table, in plain damn view. I didn't wake Rye Daughter, I let her sleep until the noise woke her. It wasn't marching hooves that broke her cat-nap.
The Company's hedge-wizards had done their job that day, and the enemy almost ran into the braced spearheads of the III Verdebaie, the rebel still in march order with their pikes slung over their antlered heads. One minute, there was a battalion of caribou marching at the route step close enough I could almost see the whites of their eyes, and then next, there was an entire regiment of militia ponies facing away from me, and a screaming clamor rising over the road where the enemy had been. It was marvelous overkill. The militia-ponies reflexively wrapped around each flank of the column, and their formation compacted almost as quickly as it had appeared. The noises were stomach-wrenching. It was over quickly, and the Company barely had to debouche from their ambuscade to catch the few rebel who escaped the trap. We may have not taken prisoners as a matter of policy, but the militia-ponies weren't exactly hardened to our extent. They led the survivors aside into the brush and treeline behind my copse, and they herded some of the wounded survivors to my forward surgery. Rye Daughter looked up at me, and I looked down, hard-eyed.
Then I did the right damn thing. We wasted our precious supplies and my time patching together wounded caribou. I triaged with a heavy hoof, and I had Sack drive away anypony trying to bring dying caribou into my post. Some of the militia-ponies started building a feeble-looking stockade to keep their prisoners, while the rest hauled the dead and dying off the roadbed and into the nearby drainage ditch.
It was at this point, when the militia was engaged in cleaning up after itself and I was fetlocks-deep in a screaming caribou, that a second battalion of rebel caribou appeared in the distance. I wasn't paying attention, but those that did said that the double-take of the rebel forward ranks was epic. They must have thought that they had hit the jack-pot, as they shook out into a dead run, dropping their pike into a loose-order charge from the column. It wasn't exactly an orthodox phalanx, but it was certainly enthusiastic. They covered the ground, that the previous battalion had marched across in fifteen minutes, in six minutes, yelling like ban sidhe the whole way. It was enough time for the militia still on the roadbed to fall back into a shaky spear-line, so it wasn't a simple reversal of the earlier fight, but our allies were wrong-hoofed, and their battle-line was disordered. The caribou pushed them back, and their superior weaponry and heavier individual weight told quickly on the III Verdebaie, despite their inferior total numbers.
The militia were damn lucky they weren't on that road alone. The second battalion's rush had pushed the battle out of the kill-zone proper, but the Company's cohorts were able scramble into position and eventually take their rear at the double-quick. A messier version of the ambush on the road to Beloit the month before ensued, with the Marklaird finally appearing overhead in the later stages of the slaughter, aimlessly bombarding the tangled lines with some sort of black flaming witchcraft. Once the jaws of the ambush belatedly closed, it was all over but for the screaming.
There was a fair amount of screaming; the laird's witchery was no joke, and it stuck like tar.
I continued working on my caribou patients as the battle-line wavered two hundred fifty yards from my copse, and the guards from the half-built stockade streamed past our position. When I looked up from my work, I noticed that the oxen had disappeared with the ambulances. I learned later that they had blocked the captured caribou inside the abandoned stockade-posts, intimidating the disarmed remnants of the first battalion into not trying to escape or join in the second stage of the fight. I guess angry oxen and big carts are more intimidating than you'd otherwise think? Rye Daughter tells me that their eyes went thestral just before they rushed away from the medical post, perhaps that had something to do with it. Or perhaps it had something to do with the two caribou Tiny reportedly crushed flat with single blows when they tried to rush past him.
By the time I was done with the first wave of rebel wounded, my cots were full of militia casualties. They hadn't caught it as bad as the first rebel battalion, but I was still busy all that afternoon and evening, as well as with the half-dozen Company wounded, mostly slashes across muzzles and flanks. Oh, and more caribou, but by that time I was pretty blown.
Fewer rebels from the second battalion survived to join their fellows in the stockade or my overflow triage field. More bled out in the half-cleared brush on the far side of the drainage ditch we were using as our triage-field before I was able to finish up with our brothers and allies. We left still-burning caribou corpses in our triage-field later that evening who had roasted as they lay, despite the best efforts of militia-ponies pouring buckets of swamp-water from the nearby drainage ditch over the flames.
The day was mostly lost to the destruction of the rebel reinforcement columns. Later interrogation of the prisoners revealed that they actually represented the remnants of regiments, the first battalion being a much-reduced single regiment, and the second being the consolidated scraps of two different regiments. We think the latter were maybe the survivors or detachments of the units savaged on the road to Benoit. But all of them had lost many, perhaps a majority of their pike-caribou to the flu or desertion.
The prisoners were marched back to camp by command of the III Verdebaie colonel, against our Lieutenant's strenuous objections. The secret was blown, but that didn't mean we wanted a herd of diseased rebels underhoof in camp.
The oxen made multiple trips back to the encampment with the ambulances, and we converted the barracks next to the infirmary into another ward room to hold the militia and prisoner casualties. The brethren that barracks belonged to got to join the militia under squad tents. The rear-guard followed me and my equipment as we rolled back to camp, having accomplished precious little except butchery and terror. Rye Daughter slept curled on my back as I marched with the Company. I worried about her dreams, she had been helping with the bucket-brigade trying to extinguish the victims of the Marklaird.
We only lost one pony that day, a donkey jack named Pur Malt, who caught a fatal cut across his right femoral artery in the closing of the ambush on the second rebel battalion.