SBMS033
The Company's ground sections hugged the treelines to the west of the fortified camps outside of Lait Blanc in the gloomy grey of a late fall morning. I had finished patching up my latest batch of patients, and trotted forward to find out what was going on. We certainly had not planned this nonsense, and you can be sure I was alarmed to observe a hasty siege-equipment manufacturing project springing up next to my field surgery.
I found the Lieutenant and the III Verdebaie colonel with a couple of our warlocks in a bashed-together forward observation post on the other side of the southern drainage ditches, watching a mixed flight of pegasi and griffins diving towards the walls in the distance. We were well out of catapult range, far enough that it made it kind of difficult to see details of the enemy's position. Shorthorn had a bit of witchery running, a sort of telescope-vision-and-illusion display. The focus was jumpily half-tuned to a section of compound wall, and a war-engine pivoted in the direction of the battle-flight descending above the enemy position. The illusion looked like it would give me a headache, it jerked and jittered all over the place.
"Does that look like a fully occupied wall to you?" asked the colonel. "The antlers don't seem to move with the ballistae. Look at that! They just stay where they are."
"I don' know, don Guillaume. This mess is herky-jerky as it is, we could just be losing the details that'd make them look like they are, caribou behind cover."
"Or just discarded antlers nailed to walls to bulk up numbers."
"Does it matter?" I interrupted. "If you don't think they're all in there, look where they be would be if they're not in the castra. Do we have pickets out on our flanks and the side-roads?"
"We're working on it," said the Lieutenant. "There's a good deal of mud out there on the side-roads, and nothing but bog in some of the woodland around us. I'd prefer to put out pegasi on clouds, but they've got their blood up, and I'm having difficulty getting them to land long enough to pass along orders to pull back. Those idiots out there aren't on orders, they've just been strafing the castra since the predawn. Basically on their own hook."
I gave the militia colonel the side-eye, and tried to divert the conversation away from our troops' apparent sudden blood-lust. "What's all that over there on the far side of the castra?"
"The rest of our regiments, coming up into position," he rose to my bait. "We're going to see if we can't intimidate them into staying inside their walls. They probably still have us outnumbered."
"Does the main body know to keep their distance?" I asked, and my stupid question was answered by a sudden tumult in the distance, as dark flecks lifted up off the far side of the enemy fortifications, and plummeted in the direction of the advancing militia. Distant thumps marked the impact of the catapult projectiles.
"If they didn't before, that certainly will remind them," snarked Shorthorn, who shifted his focus in the direction of the distant militia lines. They were clearly reversing ranks and falling back.
"Has anypony seen Tickle Me? We need to get a grasp on this situation, and that calls for couriers and scouts," grouched Gibblets, who had been sitting on his ass at the back of the position, leaning against a tree-trunk.
"I sent her to see if she couldn't get those sarvaggiu off whatever vendetta they think they're pursing."
We all turned as Colonel Guillaume gestured wildly behind us. Another flight of pegasi and griffins had swept the castra walls, and now a griffin was laboring into the distant air, dangling something large and four-legged with antlers as she rose.
"The pegasi-scorpion!" yelled Shorthorn, and spun his far-scryer back to the war-engine they had been observing. It was canted sideways, and we could see a few caribou struggling to pull it back into its embrasure.
"It plucked that rebel right off the rig," marveled the colonel. "That must have been the engine-master."
The griffin dropped her capture, or possibly lost her grip. The caribou's tiny screams could be heard as it plummeted.
"Well, that's one way to suppress a scorpion," chortled the Lieutenant.
I rolled my eyes. "Gentleponies, this is fun and all, but I haven't slept in days, and it doesn't look like you're currently generating casualties for me to stitch together. That's my ambulance coming over that little bridge over the ditch there. I'm going to go catch some rest before one of your stupid ideas gets any more ponies hurt. And try to remember – we aren't prepared for a siege. The militia have the numbers but not the time, and we don't have the numbers, and neither of us have the equipment or the logistics to supply either. For all we know, they have more food in there than we have out here, and the other rebel regiments will eventually send somepony to find out what happened to this garrison or the last batch of reinforcements. So I hope you'll figure out how to get them out from behind their walls and somewhere which ain't here."
I stalked out of the improvised conference, and stomped over to the ox drawing my ambulance up behind the nearby sections crouching behind a low breast-work just inside the treeline. I lept up into the ambulance and fell vindictively asleep.
I was woken by the sound of digging. The ground-pounders had started ditching out in front of the breastworks next to my ambulance. I guess they were planning on breaking down their earlier breastwork and using the materials to line a proper fortification? I stuck my head up over the side of the ambulance, and saw that Mad Jack had brought forward some of the mantlets he had been building. Nothing continuous or connected, but there were now some forward posts thrown out across the roadbed and between the drainage ditches. The rebel wouldn't be able to quickly push through our position and break out to the west. I laid back on my pallet, pondering whether I should go and see what was going on, but rationalized that if there had been trouble, they'd have come got me to patch together the inevitable wreckage.
I went back to sleep.
Tiny hoofed me awake. It was late afternoon, or possibly twilight. The field fortifications were now a couple paces out from under the tree-line, and there were Company ponies sleeping along the muddy ramparts. The skies had opened up at some point during the day, and it was cold and damp. There was a bit of a mist over the ground, which felt like it was getting ready to drizzle again.
"Boss, purple pony said to wake you when sun went down. Go find her at place before." Tiny wasn't the brightest member of the Brotherhood of Pony, but he could pass along a message like nopony's business. I went to go find the "purple pony", lightly squelching across the cold mud.
She was sleeping in her observation post, which was now a proper pair of mantlets between two trees, a series of reinforcing stakes and posts, and a tent-half draped overhead to keep off the mist. The Crow had replaced Shorthorn, and she was using the same farscrier device to scan the distant castra walls through the half-fog. I didn't see any movement on those walls, and the Crow's hoof was much steadier than Shorthorn's had been. It was pretty clear that those antlers over the battlements weren't moving this time. I kicked awake the napping Lieutenant.
"You asked for me, Lieutenant?"
"Hnf. Yeah, I did, you limaccia. Slept the whole day away, didn't you? I need somepon' to spell me for this evening while I get my own rest. With the commanders tied up with their cohorts and the Captain out of commission, you are it."
I sighed. "What do I need to know. Have they shown any signs of sallying out at us? Anything moving on the side roads or towards us on the main road?"
"All they've been doing is sniping with war-engines at anypony gets close. The pegasi and their idiot griffin sidekicks got tired, decided to come round for orders. The ones not sleeping back at the compound are out scouting in this muck. No news back, but I thin' they're gonna find a lot of deserters. We've seen clots of caribou leap the walls a couple times this afternoon, some of those were big groups. They ran for the side-roads, and just left. No tryin' to stop and offer a fight or anythin'. Half of them didn't even have their pikes wit' em."
"I still want to know how many rebels are inside those big damn walls. Have we seen them in the field? Are we in contact with the other militia regiments? They should have seen the enemy battle-line yesterday, right?"
"Yeah, they're in touch. And yeah, the caribou regiments formed line the other day, there's at least five battalions in there, or at least, there was. We think we wrecked one last night in that scramble on the main road. None of those got back inside the gates before our employer he blew the gates down."
"Fine, go use my ambulance, there's a pallet in there." I settled back and watched the Crow scan her farscrier across the walls of the castra. As the light failed, she tapped something on the side of the device, and it went into darksight mode.
The third hour of the night, clots of something started flowing over the back battlements of the enemy encampment. We didn't notice it at first, you expect to see what you've been seeing, it sometimes takes a few beats before novelty breaks through the tedium.
"Wait! Roll that back. Does that look like deserters making for the southern road?" I asked the Crow.
"If it is, there's a Grogar-damned lot of them." We watched some of the clots slip and fall, slowly getting back up. "There goes another bunch. And another. And… that's the wall going down."
"Set off a flare! It's a breakout!"
She touched off a firework, and it roared into the dark night, lighting up our neighboring entrenchments, and incidentally catching our roof on fire. As I pulled down the tent-half and stomped out the sparks, the glare threw long shadows behind me. I looked up and saw the muddied caribou scrambling about in the pitiless light like cockroaches caught by the scullery-maids in the larder. More flares rose along the Company and militia entrenchments. The muddy fields and lanes from our front to the southern tree-lines were covered by scrabbling caribou, many of them splashed in muck, all of them headed south.
Surprising pretty much everypony, the enemy didn't try to charge our field fortifications, or head towards our flanks, which they may or may not have known were properly refused and covered by full drainage ditches. They just ran for it, straight south. Fires had begun to raise dark pillars of smoke above the castra walls as the enemy fled us. I had only followed my instructions, which was to order the Company to defend their positions, cover the flanks, and prepare for a sally. After about twenty admittedly entertaining minutes of watching the caribou flailing about in the muck, the Lieutenant found us right where she had left us, and started yelling about how we'd missed our chance to catch them in the open.
"Lieutenant, why exactly do we want to catch them? They're running. They outnumber us, they're still mostly armed, and they're giving up the town and the road. They're running into an ugly muddy mess right now. We're mostly dry and clean, and they're going to look like mud-sculptures of ponies rather than ponies by the time morning dawns. If they manage to find the other rebel encampments, they're going to be spreading defeatism and panic like a virulent camp-disease. This… is what victory looks like."