SBMS061
I woke up hurting from the tip of my dock to the hairs on my upper lip. I could barely move. When Rye Daughter came round to check on me, I almost asked her to break out the laudanum, but restrained myself. Salicin, and a start on a course of antibiotics. We'd have to start new colonies of paintbrush mould, the current draw on our supplies would exhaust our safety margin before the campaign season closed out.
I was stuck in bed for the next two days, so I missed it when they displaced Mad Jack and his caribou construction crew to the site of the planned fortress. But I got a look at the trickle of heavy wagons heading down the Road into the gorge, carrying the necessary supplies. The majority of the Company deployed forward to protect the construction ponies as they dug out the heavy ramparts down there in the bottomlands across the bypass from mad little Mondovi.
The plans weren't for a simple castra, but rather, a spacious star-fortress at the centre of a rampart, extending a mile along the bypass, and another mile refused in parallel on the far side of the Bride's Road heading up into the gorge. Beside the fortress, a heavy boom-gate with a pair of towers were to be thrown up between the drainage ditches and the surface of the Road itself. A third tower was emplaced at the end of the rampart extending down the bypass to Le Coppice, across that road from a dead hamlet. Another boom would be extended across the bypass.
We had been stockpiling materials and supplies for weeks in expectation of the project. Our sweeps had been aimed at clearing the woods and fields behind the position, and mapping out the possible approaches and byways that the dead might find around us. We had found that the ghouls did, indeed, continuously exfiltrate from the ruins, and that cleared slopes did not remain so on subsequent nights. The same nesting sites were repeatedly occupied by bands of shambling undead. One particular cave complex at the base of a ridgeline two coves southeast from the Road had to be burned out four times in as many weeks.
After the second sweep of that cave, the witches started making up detection charms and stacking them on the Crow's remote-entangled apparatuses. There was now a sand-table in the Plateau Palisades with a quartz-studded map of the operations area, that was checked periodically to see if any of the alerts had been tripped. There were three charms tripped during my week of convalescence. Even as almost the entire Company fought to hold the line in front of the bypass and keep the ghouls from moving into the cleared region in their rear, the undead still found a way around.
The broken limbs which had characterized the fight for control of the slopes and cliffs of the ridges-and-gorges region had mostly tailed off in this period, but we started to see more and more heavy lacerations and bites. Rye Daughter got more experience cleaning and stitching these sorts of wounds, although after the first three days I was well enough to start taking up the slack. Some of the maneuver sections began to suffer from being shorthoofed. The sergeants started consolidating units. We weren't losing too many ponies outright, really, far few that we deserved given the conditions, but the wounded and exhausted started to accumulate.
We lost three ponies in this period to blood loss during evacuation. Port Doux, a jenny with the first cohort, during the night of the construction of the first third of the bypass ramparts, caught in a rush of ghouls running for the caribou labourers. Something got teeth into her brachial, and she bled out in the chariot before it got up the plateau to the surgery. Far Horizons, a zebra mare with the second cohort, died similarly three nights later, when a band of ghouls came over the partially-completed ramparts on her sector and caught her out of range of her supports. Her sectionmates came to her aid, but the many bites had done too much damage, and the trip up the plateau took too long. To be honest, she probably wouldn't have survived if my surgery was right on the bypass. But the pony who died the following morning was almost certainly the fault of the long round-trip between the construction zone and the Palisades.
Chestnut Shell was leading a sweep in front of the defensive lines, three sections in echelon, when they came across an abandoned hamlet full of hibernating undead. He got too far out in front of his ponies, and he was overrun. His subordinate took over, they retrieved Chestnut Shell, and they burned out the hamlet along with the bulk of the ghouls. But the tourniquet on his ruined left hind leg wasn't tight enough, and by the time they had signaled a chariot and brought him back up to my surgery, there wasn't enough left in him to save. He went into systemic shock and died on the table.
That afternoon, I went out onto the palisades, and watched Cherie play in the updrafts over the ripening corn in the fields around the walls. She dipped down over the golden kernels, and danced through a cloud of butterflies that startled out of the stalks where they had been hiding. The rest of the foals were bringing in laundry from the drying-racks or bustling about preparing the evening chuckwagons for haulage down into the gorges. The two apprentice-witches, who were out with the pegasi doing their daily sweeps, were due back any moment. It was almost idyllic.
I could leave Rye Daughter up here, along with a couple of the oxen to keep herd over the recovery wards, and take the rest down into the valley of death. Set up a forward surgical unit where I could do good, and keep more brothers from dying from lack of trauma care.
That's where I was, and what I was thinking, when a party approached the walls from the north-west, along the side-road whose crossroads with the Road had been the main reason we'd planted the palisades and blockhouse here, rather than closer to the plateau's edge, or elsewhere. I recognized Dancing - no, Dior Enfant, her charge Compte Coup, and their escort of Company armsponies. They had been making the rounds of the Plateau, taking a census for the Duc and re-establishing connections between the farmers of the northeastern districts and their nominal sovereign.
I leaned forward onto the valli jutting out of the rampart, and shouted down across the fossa, "Hoy! Dior! How goes it out there? Are they growing fat and happy?"
"Sawbones! You look less chewed-upon! They're less lean than they were this spring, I'll say that much for them. Not as many returnees as we had hoped, sad to say."
"Food! Tell me they're going to be harvesting something worth the milling? I mean, look at all this! I've never seen wheat this tall this time of year! I swear we could feed the Company for a year just from the fields within eyeshot of these walls."
The Duc's arms-pony spoke up, saying "I'm not sure if anypony with any sense would come out here to harvest this close to the slopes, sir. There's plenty of grain as tall as this or taller back that way a mile or two, and not nearly enough hooves to go around. But they should have a surplus this time, and more than that. It's so… open up here."
"We're going to make a run up into Rennet after this, I want to talk to the grange representatives up there, and maybe the Duchesse's new administrators," Dior Enfant shouted up at me. "They still have plenty of hooves to spare in Rennet, and even more over in Verdebaie. And supplies! Do you have any idea what Mad Jack's burnrate has been down in the valley? We need credit, and badly. Hopefully the duc's name is still good in the northlands."
"Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go, young jenny! Whatever will fill our storehouses. But should you be taking this jack with you out of the province? The villages up here are almost OK, but it's a mess down there in the bottomlands. Some of the hamlets are gone, and some are holding on by the horn of their hooves. Those who husbanded the golden grain are like to be flung to the winds like rain if we get another good blow before harvest. Somepony needs to do some morale building down thataways."
She eyed her charge, and was quiet. He snorted, clearly challenged by the insinuation. The party turned aside, and made for the gate into the fortification, and I resumed my contemplation of summer dressed in her new bloom.
The next morning, the Duc's jack marched with me as my ambulance heavy with surgical gear and supplies rolled behind Tiny and Sack. Once more into the valley of death, strolled the medical corps of the Company.