In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


Moving Day, or, Trading In The Old Shell

SBMS048

The remnants of the White Rose had abandoned their last foot-hold in Rennet by mid-winter. In between blizzards, we displaced our observation posts forward and put a detachment into the abandoned castra outside Menomenie. They rattled about in that large fortified camp like peas in a canteen, and the hoof-full of sections re-fortified a corner of the camp as a defensible position. There were a cluster of burial pits from the big battle the Imperials had lost two years ago in the near-by fields, and even with the rebels gone, that district was by no means safe. The locals reported ponies missing on a weekly basis.

The White Rose had allowed the barrow-priests to sanctify the mass graves, and stake out their confines as proper burial-grounds, but the rituals sometimes didn't work for the battle-dead. And something kept digging up the pits when nopony was looking.

With the advent of spring and the Company's new leadership, we started shifting base into Menomenie castra. The carters and Mad Jack had been working on an improvement to the Company's rolling stock, and the wagons that rolled down the Bride's Road from Rennet City to our new forward base were much heavier and more defensible than the old light rigs. We left a lot of carts behind us when the time came to displace entirely, but until then, we kept the roads busy. A half-year in one place accumulates a lot of clutter, and it is always a struggle to keep the Company's tail light and portable. My ambulances should not have been especially over-burdened, but my supply wagon was beyond overloaded, and I had to use one of the ambulances to pack up all the additional materials and supplies that Rye Daughter and I had spent the long winter nights grinding, compounding, and distilling into flasks, jars, and sacks. Not to mention the surgical supplies and equipment. The carters looked at my request to load up the ward furniture we had brought in and then subsequently built, and laughed at me. That filled up my "supplyā€¯ ambulance entirely, and a second ambulance on top of that. The third ambulance would now be crowded with non-ambulatory convalescents, and I had to stop and re-think that.

I discussed the matter with Dancing Shadows and the Captain, and we came to a decision about the long-term convalescent. The Riverlands was not a good place to bring those that couldn't defend themselves or run away from danger, and the nature of the threat made it difficult to guarantee true defended perimeters. We had rented facilities in some of the lesser towns in Hyromel, whose leases were coming due, but one could be used as as a convalescent-house easily enough. So we loaded our half-dozen or so immobile cases onto chariots, and shipped them to safety, and effectively out of Company control. One of my patients, still getting used to her prosthetic peg leg, was volunteered as a minder and general nurse for the retirement home.

We had made different arrangements back in Backwater Bay, but nopony really knew the long-term prospects for the Company in this new world. The subject of how to deal with medical discharges in a mercenary Company with theoretically life-time membership has always been a challenge that we've struggled with. In practice, the worlds upon which the Company has served usually harbor small and discrete colonies of former-Company ponies, some medical discharges, some couples that went on detached duty to raise a family and never quite made it back to the standard. For centuries, this is how the Company maintained the thestral presence in its ranks, but eventually the trait bred out, breaking our hearts in the process.

If there are any thestrals born in the old colonies these days, the word has not trickled back to the Company-at-arms.

The new Lieutenant had made establishing a relationship with our neighbors at the old compound, such as it was, a priority in the later half of our winter in Rennet. They had been less than enthused to be dealing pony-to-pony with the Tartarus-beasts which had turned their world upside down and rattled it until all the wickedness shook loose, but were generally polite. The peasantry doesn't mouth off to armed ponies, not when they'd been disarmed and left vulnerable as these ponies and donkeys generally had. The Company had struck up a mutual trade in those months, exchanging road-work and haulage for food and supplies. We helped get the local district's grain hauled into the now-operational mills around du Pere and other nearby market-towns, and took a share of the flour. A vigorous exchange in carts and wagons ensued, with the Company upgrading its equipage, leaving behind some of our lighter rigs and taking up the sturdy earth-pony-built wagons you could find in that region.

In the end, we left the district-ponies an empty, idiosyncratic castra in their back-yards. It paid no obeisance to the standards or expectations of proper military engineering, and it was located far away from the original road-nets and most productive farms of the district. But it was sturdy, well-built, professionally drained and built to the most modern of sanitary standards. Whether it became a retreat for rich and aristocratic ponies, or a new town, or some sort of grange-owned establishment for district fairs and militia training, was entirely up to the ponies of Rennet.

The Company shed its conch-shell, and moved on.


Menomenie was a small crossroads-city, really more of an overgrown market-town like Lait Blanc, crouched on the provincial border between Rennet and Pepin, squatting on the Bride's Road. Unlike the Road up to Tonnerre, this highway was ancient, and the Bride's engineering corps had simply followed the route laid out by over a millennium of trade-ponies before them. This was the natural front door of Rennet, its entrance into the rich Riverlands and the trade that had moved by flatboat and canalage up and down the spine of the continent. Rime in the east was the junction between the traffic of the lake districts and the Riverlands, which threw out a navigable tributary almost to the gates of that fat almost-crossroads. The majority of the Imperial forces deployed in the Riverlands these days were positioned to preserve the communications between Rime and the loyalist districts in the southeast and south central provinces of the Riverlands.

On the far side of the great river itself, was supposed to be the heart of the rebellion, the long-lost, fabulously wealthy province of Traverses. Nopony but the more deathless and fearless legates had laid eyes on this lost territory in a generation. Rumor holds that its vastly productive earth and redoubtable farmers continue to feed and support the White Rose's teeming armies. The Bride's generals have been unable to break the power of the rebellion, fighting a series of inconclusive campaigns over the past fifteen years in what once was rich and productive agricultural districts in the provinces between Rime, the great river, and all the way up to Caribou City and Menomenie itself.

Caribou City had been the centre of one of the most senseless campaigns of the war. An Imperial Army under the joint command of two of the Bride's lich-generals, Walker and the Stump, had followed a defeated White Rose force northwards until the rebels holed up in the walled river-port. Instead of making a demonstration and returning to the main theatre in the south, the two legates invested Caribou City, bringing a flotilla north along the river to seal off the riverside, digging siege trenches and making regular approaches. It was a completely meaningless waste of resources and time. Several Imperial posts fell in the far south during the siege, as well as the failure of the season's main push in the provinces to Rime's west. None of the Imperium's goals were met that year, but Walker and the Stump breached the White Rose's defenses around Caribou City in the last week before the rainy season shut things down. The embittered and battered Imperial regulars poured through the breaches, and gave no quarter. The inhabitants of the city proper had no connection with the White Rose who had seized their fortified walls; the rebels were, almost to a pony, donkeys and earth ponies from west of the great river, mostly Traversei. The city was largely caribou, who had been neutral or Imperial-friendly up to that point. Nopony was spared, ten thousand mostly-civilian caribou and eleven-hundred rebel ponies were slaughtered. The proverbial streets ran with proverbial blood.

The actual fighting ebbed south towards its natural venues, the approaches to Rime and Traverses respectively, but the damage was done. Caribou City became a ghoul-infested wasteland. The caribou in the north never forgave the atrocity. And the White Rose found recruits in caribou communities all over Tambelon.

The rest of the province of Pepin struggles on, working around the hellhole blasted through the heart of otherwise rich lands, and severing the natural trade-routes of the region. By necessity, the neighboring countryside was hamletized, with farmers sheltering behind strong walls and operating in teams in the exposed fields. All the surviving towns were well-fortified, although their defenders were mostly town watch sorts, not organized or inclined to leave their immediate districts. Some towns weren't even willing to sally forth and aid their own hamlets in times of danger. Those towns suffered notably from dearth and hunger, and would serve as cautionary examples of the value of cooperation and mutual defense, if only ponies were wise enough to profit from the example of others.

As the Company settled into the Menomenie castra, the aerial cohort began to extend their patrols and reconnaissance into Pepin. We did not propose to go rushing into danger, but rather, to move with all deliberate speed. If Rennet had taught the rebels of Tambelon to fear the Company's ghost, to always be looking over their shoulder - then we would exploit that in Pepin. We would give them a big fat target, and let them tie themselves in knots looking for the trick.

Not that there wouldn't be tricks, of course.