//------------------------------//
// The End Of A Campaign, or, Practicing Pageantry 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

SBMS037

With the rebel remnants falling back on Menomenie and abandoning the rest of the province, we were on a clock again.  The militia regiments had been called up on very short terms, and had chewed up more than a week in simply mobilizing.  They were due to demobilize in a few weeks more, and although their command were taking volunteers for extended tours of duty - and selling the idea hard with aggressive propaganda of "heroes of the imperium" and happy-talk about relationships built within Rennet for those who remained.   The first line of argument was foolish - who ever became a hero on occupation duty?  And the second argument was a thinly-disguised endorsement of petty or not-so-petty corruption.  But either way, they built occupation battalions from the expected remnants of the fully-mobilized Verdebaie militia regiments.

The Company itself was to be used to screen the White Rose remnant as it fell back on the golden road we were allowing them into the Riverlands.  Our main concern was not letting them get away with significant supplies in their retreat.  Nopony really had any good ideas, but the general inclination current at the time revolved around periodic bombardment of any rolling stock the rebel managed to shift down the road from Menomenie to the ruined remnants of Caribou City in the Riverlands.  

The problem was that the Company was overstretched in the last days of autumn, and didn't really have any infrastructure that far south-west in the province.  Between logistical support of the militias securing the town centres and surviving grain-mills, maintaining our existing compound in the east end of the central districts and converting it to a thriving logistical hub, scouting aggressively throughout the province, and cleaning up after our mess outside Benoit, there were precious few ponies available to do much more than observe the rebel remnants clinging to the Bride's Road in the southwest.

The winter snows swept down out of the north-west before we could accomplish much other than building a few strong hardpoints to observe the Road, and supply aerial observation posts over the secondary roadnets to the southeast and west of Menomenie.  The observation posts themselves blew away in the ferocious weather of that region, which came down out of the frozen north like it was being herded by vengeful windigos.  Several of the demobilizing militia regiments were caught on the road home, and we settled them into the half-burned castra outside Lait Blanc.  They tried strenuously to convince us to ferry them home by air-chariot, but Tickle Me was not about to lose charioteers to frostbite or blizzard whiteout conditions just to get some fat burghers back to their families in time for Winter Festivus or whatever tartarus-spawned local equivalent they celebrated with their spawn.

The Company celebrated some time-frosted obscurity called "Hearth's Warming" which nopony else in my experience had ever heard of, but which was a core tradition of the brotherhood.  It was centred around a heavily fictionalized variant on the diaspora traditions, blaming aggressive windigos for all the heartbreak and tribalist warfare that drove the early migrations across the Chain of Creation.  It was also very Equestria-centric, which when I was younger had been a point of puzzlement and confusion, since the Company had not set hoof in that fairyland in all the centuries of its known existence.  The advent of direct contact with our tutelary spirit and Gibblets' quiet confessions had explained much of the Company's more obscure traditions, that was to be sure.

The return of military apprenticeship to the Company also allowed us to revive an old sub-tradition associated with the general silliness of Hearth's Warming, which was, namely, making foals memorize and perform the traditional play.  The idea was that they'd first entertain the Company in its winter quarters, and then the snow-bound demobilized militiaponies in their temporary exile down the road in Lait Blanc.  The foals were actually quite into it when it was explained to them, and since we gave them license to slack off their usual apprenticely tasks while they were learning their lines and teaching themselves how to act, were having quite a lot of fun with it.

Rye took the role of Smart Cookie, and Bad Apple, Clover the Clever.  Since we hardly had any foals of the proper tribe, Gibblets and I put together fake horns and cloth-frame wings for the pageant. We worked on the costumes as they did their walk-throughs one cold afternoon, when the gates were closed against the blowing snow-drifts and bitter winds, and we were wasting lamp-oil in the infirmary anyways.  It was a free show for the convalescent ponies in the attached ward, who were many of them otherwise quite restless with the ache of healing wounds and imposed inactivity.

"I only wish t' know, m' luds, why't mud-ponies are hidin' all the food, when evert ourn tributaries comt for our fair shaire of t' loot!" squeaked the Dodger, having a terrible time with his alleged Pegolopolisian accent, which frankly sounded like no dialect I had ever heard spoken by mortal pony.

"Ve, ist it?  Ve hain't hoggin' der food, you thievin' bird-pones are the ones descendin' on our empty barns and cleanin' them right out!   And the only reason the granaries are so empty is that  you crazy pegasussues are making it snow like crazy!" shouted Tam Lane, at least sounding a little like a rural Chancellor Puddinhead.

I tuned out the rehearsal, and turned back to my conversation with our goblin about our common Mistress, and the dreams she had been invading.

"They've not been varying that much these last few nights.  Same song-and-dance, some different verses to the arias, sometimes there are different things in the audience, and we go through different memories depending on the night, but it's the same bipolar displays, night after night."

"That's certainly a different manifestation of the Company taint, I'll say that much of it.  At least your eyes don't glow in the dark, well, not without the charms.  We'll be keeping an eye on you to see if you start swishing about like a dockside streetwalker, in any case."

"I'm still working through the old alchemy texts, hoping for something to rebuild burned synapses.  The Captain's not getting better, and the colder it gets, the more I worry he won't wake up one of these mornings."

"There may not be any panaceas in those old books. The old zebras weren't miracle workers, and brain-damage is rarely reversible in my experience."

"Yes, your endless centuries experience in neither being a doctor, nor an alchemist."

The goblin gave me the old raspberry, and then turned to the rehearsal.  "No, BA, you're not supposed to  pull your cloak out from under Princess Platinum. There's enough slapstick in the story for Puddinhead to deal out, you don't need to gild the unicorn!"

We got up to separate the tussling Clover the Clever and her Princess, a somewhat bruised and irate Feufollet.  Sometimes winter garrison life could be worth the weather.