SBMS065
Day by day we dug ourselves out of the muck, while the wreckage of what once were ponies accumulated in the wasted fields and brush about us, and rotted into the desecrated, broiling earth under the high summer sun. We fell far, far behind in burning the dead, and the stench was immeasurable. Pegasi flying into Dance Hall had to exercise all of their Company discipline to keep from flying right back out again; convoy teamsters arrived looking pole-axed, crosseyed and green from the smell. Ponies took to wearing passably-clean cloth rags around their muzzles in an attempt to filter out the bad air.
The does and mares of Mondovi emerged one morning in force, and with some of their stallionfolk in attendance, demanded my attention.
“Escort? To the Withies River?“ It was the nearest open stream to the battle-zone, about a half-mile south of the tower rising over the ramparts extending down towards Le Coppice, a spritely stream with high grasses and herbs growing along its more sedate outer curves. Especially sweetgrass.
“Yeah, de closest incense-‘erbs we can cut down ‘ere. Iffen we could get up on de palier, all sorts a sages we could use, no prob'm. But here? Only real choice, de herbe douce.“ The jenny wasn't actually old as seasons followed years in a calendar fashion, but life ran quick down there in those days, and she'd seen every day since the liches came and tore down the walls of Caribou City and let in the end of days. “And de voyageurs, dey sicken'. We need hexe, we need incens' to ward off de miasma, dis horrible puanteur. We need encensoirs.“
And that was that. The latest load of evacuated wounded was winding its way back up the Road from Dance Hall to the Palisades with the morning return-convoy, and the forward patrols and logging parties were out, and would not return with their latest crop of cuts, minor breaks and contusions until late in the afternoon. Mad Jack and the drilling-party was raising a great tumult in the center of the construction site, and everypony was feeling expansive and cheery at the prospect of fresh-water wells inside the rising walls. I could do for a stroll.
A spare section was assigned to the harvesting-party, and we set off down the bypass, a good-sized herd of wary mares, does and jennies, a half-dozen skitterish armed Mondovi stallions, and my patrol of armsponies, fully armed and barded. Only one of our ponies carried a Feufollet hide'em amulet, and she trotted out in advance of the expedition, to reconnoiter the riverbank and the vicinity. Patrols swept the area every night and every morning, and we were especially careful of the verges in the immediate mile or so on each flank of our earthworks - this was the most active route for undead passing around us and into the rear area.
The foundations of dead little Grande Cave passed by on our left, but we were dead certain that nothing was lurking in those cellars open to the air. There was a work-party harvesting cut stone from the stripped bones of those once-homes, and the work was well-advanced. Soon the stone which had held up the walls of homes and storehouses would be found only in the curtain-wall of Dance Hall, in the walls of its barracks, headquarters, its hospital rising into the foul miasma we breathed every morning.
We passed by the base of the tower, its cupola empty in the day-light. The defending sections were all far in advance of the rampart this morning, but for a reaction-force crouched in the shifting shade of the tower, awaiting the alarm to charge into action, to retrieve any unfortunates from the danger they might have stumbled into, however far out from the walls. They would be our saviors if it proved that ghouls liked the smell of sweet-grass as much as they loved the smell of living flesh.
The little watershed that held the Withies was just over a slight rise to the southeast, which put it out of the sight of the ponies lounging at the foot of the tower. I clipped the corporal of the guard with a hoof as I passed, and I gave an eye to the top of the tower. She groaned in irritation, looked about, and started climbing the ladder herself.
“Happy, Sawbones?“
“Always, Stewpot. You get one free stitch the next time something opens up your shoulder, maybe even half-off the next time I have to reattach your ear. Get a better chamfron, one that isn't a bigger threat to your scalp than the enemy's blades or teeth!“
“Next time we get paid for this horrorshow. We do still get paid, right?“
“That's the rumor.“
I had fallen behind the ladies of Mondovi, and their sickles and scythes. I trotted to catch up. The reeds and grasses of the long curve of the Withies came into view, and I frowned. You couldn't see everything, everywhere. There were too many dead spots, too many places for ghouls to hide, to pull down some little old jenny intent on cutting herbs.
I turned to my own section's corporal, a unicorn swords-stallion named Tang Shoulder. “Where's the nearest honeypot? I don't like the look of this, there's too many options for any pony-eater to play ant-lion down there.“
He was frowning at the prospect himself, if it was obvious to me, it had to be screaming bloody vengeance at a veteran like Tang. “There are two on this side of the arc this morning. Nearest, about two-thirds of a mile over that way. Other side of the river from here. Next one, a full mile west of here on our side of the stream. I have a cryfoal tamped down and shielded, but it's almost exhausted. I could give it one more charge, but somepony else would have to run with it, that's about all the juice I have in me. I'd have to play defense with my lance until the evening, I'd be too tapped out to swing this bloody big bar o' pig-iron.“ He gestured at the great claymore he wore strapped across his back.
The “honeypot“ was an innovation some anonymous genius had figured out not long after I arrived at Dance Hall. Instead of having a mortal, exhaustable pony take a “come eat me, I'm delicious“ charm into the field, they mounted the amulet on a tall pole, or in the high crown of a good-sized tree. Leave it in place for long enough, and a pile of slavering, distracted ghouls could be found, tumbling over each other, trying like crabs in a pot to claw their way to the sweet, savoury pony-flesh that just must be hiding over their empty heads. As a tactic, it concentrated the enemy, drew them out of cover, and put them out in the open where they could be surrounded and wiped out to a ghoul. Tended to disrupt the infiltration-routes something fierce. This was the honey-pot, and it was turning around the campaign. It was a game-changer.
A cryfoal was the old pony-portable version. Nothing more delicious to a pony-eater than sweet, succulent foal wailing for its dam. Only problem was that an actual edible pony had to carry it into danger.
“Tartarus,“ I laughed, “I haven't had something try to eat me in almost two weeks. What the hay, why not? You see a good gallop-line for me to run? I don't want to lead anything back to the little old ladies.“
He eyed the open meadow in front of the grasses, the scattered tree-stumps and half-burnt brush that marked the depredations of the earlier logging-parties, and pointed a hoof along a proposed route. One that would take me around the northeastern side of the ruins of Grande Cave and the work-parties there.
“What, you think I ought to lead any possible ghouls up to the walls of Mondovi itself? You've an evil mind, Tang.“
“Stewpot ought to be able to see you well enough, those lazybones will meet you before you lead your charges into temptation.“
I pulled my own chamfron off its hook on my back, flipped it over my ears, and danced in place, making sure everything was settled, that my joints were loose and my legs were ready for a bit of a jog. Tang Shoulder's horn lit up like Hearths-Warming, and his cryfoal floated in front of him, glowing blood-red in his brown field. Suddenly it was charged, and he flicked it at me. I grabbed it with my teeth and tucked it inside my petryal, and took off in a dead run towards the western fringe of the proposed harvest-site.
I halloed as I galloped away from the bypass, but I couldn't keep up the pace in that half-brush, full of leg-breaking stumps and unmentionable messes. I was focused on the nearest shock of tall reeds, in anxious anticipation of their sudden movement, their bending and disturbance which would mark any things coming out of their daylight doze to sniff out the sweet smell cantering towards them. I made the stream-side, and turned to the left, trotting along the verge.
Nothing, but a light sweat starting under my caparison.
Then, finally, after I crossed the bypass where a low, wide bridge took it over the Withies, and I was half-convinced I was just making a spectacle of myself in front of the wry civilians of Mondovi, growls from underneath the bridge heralded actual undead to make this something other than a morning exercise in full barding.
Literal bridge-trolls. Gotta love the classics.
“Oh, no! pray don't take me. I'm too little, that I am!“ I trilled out, and took to my heels, continuing my passage along the grasses and the reeds, between the riverside and the overlogged brush. Two ghouls from under the bridge, and joined a little later by a third emergin in a hole beside the creekside a hundred yards further upstream, and a fourth three hundred further. That was enough for me, and I went uphill, putting on some speed. The ghouls might have had some natural speed advantage on me in my burdened, barded state, but they wouldn't catch me before the top of the rise, and I wanted to be in full sight before I turned on them. Maybe I wouldn't have tried to take them on my own in normal conditions, but hey - it was just the four of them, and the sun was shining, and my axe was light in my grip, and I was feeling alive.
For once, my foolishness was not punished by ruthless karma, and all I got was a bit of a bite on my dominant cannon, and some of my tail torn away. Eventually, two ponies from the escort section came up to help me make sure the carrion wasn't shamming, and to say later that I had been backed up properly if anypony asked about the affair.
I did two more passes along the side of the Withies, yelling like a damned fool, waving my bloodied fetlock, and taunting any dead hiding in the brush or the reeds. The expedition sat on the rise above, watching me caper and trot like a clown.
Eventually the ladies descended to the river-side, and their long blades swept through the grasses and reeds. They weaved their baskets right there in the meadow, and filled them with sweet, sweet cut grasses. We knocked together a small pyre on the rise for the four former ghouls, and sparked a fire, roasting the filth before it could stink up that slope.
That evening, the ponies of Mondovi set out great smoking smudge-pots, and sweetgrass incense clouds floated on a slight south-westerly breeze over the rising walls of Dance Hall.