//------------------------------//
// The Prisoners 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

SBMS043

The prisoners taken on the Bride's Road west of Lait Blanc in the last days of autumn were mostly from the 1st and 5th Rennet Regiments of Volunteers, with a small leavening of the 9th Imperial Regiment of Regulars.  The 1st had been recruited from the County of Benoit, and the 5th mostly from du Pere and Lau Crosse districts, both by agitators brought into the province by White Rose sympathizers among the caribou clan heads in the province.  Those sympathizers had out-voted the Imperialists and ducal loyalists in the clan thengs, and the young and unmarried scions of the clans had flocked to the banners.  

The army of the White Rose in Rennet had driven the ducal levies from the province with hardly a fight.  Companies of the new rebellion had descended upon recruiting stations before the ponies of most districts were even aware that the militia was mobilizing.  The arms and officers of the militia in the province fell into rebel hooves without the mass of the militia ever making it to their standards.  This rousing success drove the morale which allowed the great victory in the fields outside of Menomenie over an Imperial army.

Well, that, and the treachery of the suborned caribou regiments within that army.  Like the 9th Imperial, who on the day of battle formed on the left flank and simply shredded their neighboring pony regiments as the opposing lines prepared their charge.  The chaos that ensued meant that the Imperial battle-line was never properly formed, and the Rennet phalanxes drove them from the field in a total, overwhelming rout.  

Menomenie and the minor skirmishes which followed left the caribou of Rennet with a distorted notion of how battle was fought, and the nature of war.  They had formed an elevated opinion of their own prowess, and a naïve conception of the honour of war and the manner in which it is fought.  The raids into neighboring provinces gave them the impression that war was profitable, and fed their egos and their families with the resulting plunder.  

The advent of the Company in their happy little world was a terrible shock.  Two entire battalions of the 1st had been among the elements ambushed on the Benoit road the night after the Ride of the Wild Hunt.  None of the survivors of that ambush were among those captured by the militia in the later ambushes on the Bride's Road – they had either died in the fighting, or had deserted beforehoof.  But their shock and defeatism had traveled through the remnants of regiment like a bow-wave through deep water – hidden, but incompressible.  It touched every caribou in the regiment, and primed them for failure.  The 5th saw much less of the Company, but was in cantonment with the 6th, which had lost heavily in the great flour ambush outside Lau Crosse.  The 5th had mostly been reduced by a bad flu season, and seen unusually high fatalities from that plague, if not from combat.  

The two regiments had been consolidated as a single maneuver unit when it got caught in the ambuscade of the Verdebaie III.  The shocking losses had left the survivors placid, malleable.  Which is how the militia was able to herd the one hundred and forty-five prisoners back to our encampment, and compel them to imprison themselves inside a stockade they themselves built around them.  They sat in the elements for a day or two after their capture, until Company ponies brought in tent halves and construction materials and encouraged them to shelter themselves.  It is entirely possible they may have simply laid out in the elements until they all died of exposure otherwise.

I perhaps am exaggerating for effect, but only slightly.  We lost ten prisoners to exposure and sickness in the first week of imprisonment.  At the time, it struck me as an unreasonably high mortality rate for such a small group, but I suppose I was underestimating the physical consequences of catastrophic morale failures.  As far as we could track of the caribou which escaped the Bride's Road ambuscade, and those who fled the Lait Blanc castra later on, very few ever re-surfaced.  The spring thaws would turn up bodies along road-sides and hedge-rows throughout the central districts, often just lying where they gave up in the darkness or fell, exhausted, and never got back up again.

Attempts to find somepony else's lap to dump our prisoners in came to nothing.  There was barely a provincial administration at all in Rennet that winter, let alone courts or gendarmes.  The occupation militia battalions certainly had neither the facilities nor the inclination to take our prisoners.  Some thought was given to massacre or release, but both were dismissed.  The former for fear of how it might rile up our Spirit, and the latter for how it might rile up the province, which was slowly settling back into a more stable and restful frame of mind.  And nopony in either Verdebaie or Hydromel was willing to give us the time of day when it came to accepting rebel prisoners of war.  In fact, some busybody in Hydromel tried to get us to take back the prisoners from the skirmish in Pythia's Fell when we mentioned it, and we barely weaseled out of that bad idea by escaping the meeting and disappearing before somepony could  show up with a prisoners' coffle.

After losing another five in the month after capture, we started rousting them out of their stockade for work details.   Mad Jack found himself the beneficiary of a sudden surfeit of unskilled labour, and his ambitions knew no bounds.  At first, we did not trust them with axes or other wood-working tools which might have been used by mutinous prisoners, but over time it became apparent that they were in no mood for escape or further rebellion.

Once the weather turned from sleet to regular snows, we moved the weekly assemblies outside into the main yard for the ambiance and the space.  Kept us out of the cooks' manes as well.  The fact that it placed our little weekly ritual just outside the prisoners' stockade had nothing to do with that decision, nor was the aerial cohort's decision to revive the old practice of wing-blade dueling interspersed with raqs al-saif demonstrations at the assemblies.  It made a nicely barbaric display, however, with the swirling sword-dancers drawing down snow-siroccos out of the unseen skies above while the oxen traded their heavy drum-beats with the clash and clang of the observers beating accompaniment on their wing-blades, flat to flat.

I made sure to choose my readings from those Annalists whose Company recruited most heavily in the field, from Esteem, Strange Voices, and Bitter Ambrosia.  And I may have emphasized the transience of the armies of Ambrosia's day, and the permanence of the Company through mass slaughter and the death of entire armies.

When the time came to send out the Company en masse to repair and rebuild the route from Pythia's Fell to Rennet City, the prisoners of war were turned out as well, and were worked harder than anypony.  There was an incident or two, of civilians coming across a work detail of prisoners working the road repairs, giving them grief.  Our guards sent the civilians on their way before anything could escalate, but the mood of the province was, I think, conveyed to the prisoners themselves. 

We posted the prisoners along the procession-route, with their guards concealed from the perspective of the procession-ponies themselves.  I don't know what the duchesse's entourage made of an array of over a hundred thin, ragged caribou of military age standing silently as they trotted past, but hopefully their escort of “Hydromel militia” kept them from panicking too terribly.  The duchesse had been briefed ahead of time, and came out of her travelling-coach to greet the silent crowd of caribou.  She said nothing to them, and they said nothing to her, but the statement had been made, by the Company to the duchesse and the prisoners alike.  To the duchesse, that the rebellion was truly broken and under control, and to the prisoners, that the Imperial authority was once more intact, in place, and anchored in blood and pony by a legitimate duchesse.

And the duchesse was made aware that we had her caribou, if she wanted them.  She never sent for her prisoners, and thus informed the Company by this omission that she wanted no more part of them than any other pony in the north.

Not long after that, the Lieutenant arrived at the stockade with a basket full of confiscated cheese and whiskey, and asked for the senior officer in the prisoners' camp.  This was not strictly speaking an officer, mind you.  There had been a surviving lieutenant among the prisoners from the 9th Imperial; he did not survive the first week of capture.  In fact, most of the caribou of the 9th among the prisoners did not survive that winter; there had only been six, and to my knowledge only two were present come spring.  This sort of coincidence is why civilized ponies separate their captured officers from their rank and file, and often, segregate units as well.  The Company has never been particularly civilized when it came to prisoners of war.

The Lieutenant refused to discuss with me either the subject or the drift of her conversation with Sergeant Mutigschubkarren of the 5th Rennet, senior non-com of the stockade.  But she emerged without her basket, and there was some activity in the prisoners' barracks after that mystery conversation.  Late the next afternoon,  the prisoners were called to ranks, and they were addressed by the Lieutenant.  She told them that the war was over in Rennet, and their parole would be taken at the encampment gates, beyond the yard, where the Company would be conducting its weekly assembly.  She turned on her heels, and marched out the stockade gates, which were left open and unguarded, excepting, of course, nearly the whole of the Company, gathered, as she had said, for our weekly assembly.

The Company turned its collective back on the prisoners and their stockade, and gave their attention to my reading for the night, yet another bloody passage from Bitter Ambrosia, detailing a terrible battlefield defeat of the army to which the Company was attached in those days, and the loss of almost an entire battalion of Company skirmishers in the slaughter and rout.  Ambrosia described the survival of the rest of the Company, noted how the whole of the Company was stronger than any detachment, and observed that so long as a fragment of the whole survived to remember the lost, the Company was whole.  The passaged went on to describe the duty of the brethren of the Company, to recover bodies, if at all possible, and the retrieval of the wounded.  The Company did not recover that battalion's dead for another campaign season, but when it returned to that cursed valley, they did dig up their brothers' bones, and said the service over them,  and recorded the circumstances of their passing, so far as could be determined.  Because this was the promise – not victory, not survival, but remembrance.

I turned to the banner and its battle-lance, and lifted it from its supports.  The rest of the Company did not see what was behind it, but my eyes had been upon the prisoners as they streamed out of their imprisonment.  Even in the darkness, I could see their faces as they watched.  A trickle of the caribou had cautiously walked past the rear of the Company in assembly, and made for the outer gates, where the evening guard stood watch, waiting with parole passes and the usual bureaucratic book-keeping that comes with that particular, foreign practice.   The Company parted and turned about-face as I marched forward to greet the remaining ponies among the former prisoners, those who remained.  And I read them the recruits' oath, and explained to them what it meant, what it signified, what its breaking would break, what its fulfillment would provide.

Not victory, not survival, – but remembrance.

And I swore seventy-two caribou to be ponies of the Black Company, and bid each to name themselves, and pay obeisance to the pike-staff.