SBMS096
"You're the saboteurs I've been hearing about, then?" I asked the mares and cows standing in the crossroads, with their ambush at their backs. "The rebels and wreckers, who've been breaking and burning? Who are you? Give me your names."
"I'm Billie Joe, and that's Annie. These are our friends Short Brief and Fire-Brand. And we're just… trying to make things right. Things haven't been right for a long time, you know?" Their desperation dragged them down like gravity, making the four of them sag with weariness.
I looked to my left and right, towards the unspoken participants in the conversation hidden in the brush beyond the drainage ditches along the side-roads.
"Can we bring the rest of your group out of their hiding places? You're making my escort nervous. You're making me nervous. And this isn't about a hoof-full of mares, is it? Time to drag it into the open."
She looked… defeated. She turned to her fellows, and they bellowed to the north and south. The brush shook in both directions, and the hidden came out of their hiding places. A dozen along the southern road, nearly twenty along the northern, their horns in various states of development, their bodies themselves those of calves, of younglings, and of bulls in the first flush of adulthood. All of them were painfully thin and ragged. Some looked as scared as the cows and mares, some looked pissed, and some looked that special sort of desperate that does crazy things without any fair warning. Only a couple were armed, holding pikes which must have been scavenged off of the battle-fields we had left behind. They clearly had no idea how to hold them.
"Codex!" I yelled. "Get your plot up here, and bring Skinflint with you! We need both of you."
The crowd of young bulls and bull-calves stood stolidly along the side-roads, staring at us. They… weren't what I was expecting. I'd yet to lay eyes on an actual functioning cow-herd, to be honest, and had only been listening to the political descriptions given to me by the Duchesse and her court. The situation was entirely a horror of the air as far as I was concerned, built of equal parts of empathy and imagination. This was flesh and blood standing glowering and defeated before me.
Bound Codex and Skinflint approached us, and the ox was the first to speak. "Damn, boss, that's the most bulls I've ever seen in one place. What's going on up here?"
"Volunteers. Or rebels, hard to say. What's your colts' story, Billie Joe? Runaways?"
"N-no, not quite. Our mothers have been… hiding calves from the bulls. For a long time. We had a place we called Sanctuary, where we raised some of them. Tried to raise 'em right, and now and again send 'em out to take down the worst of the worst. Proper duels, right? But none of 'em ever seemed to win against the old bulls. Two years ago the authorities tracked down Sanctuary, and burned us out. Killed my mother, seized the rest of the cows. This is what we were able to escape with. We've been running ever since then."
"All of em' uncut?" asked the ox. "How'd you get them to stand so close to each other without kicking each other's heads in? I've seen a meeting or two between bulls, you couldn't get 'em closer than the two sides of a paddock without them bellowing and charging for each other."
"Never really came up," said Billie Joe, with a tired grimace. "The young 'uns act up, we cuff 'em, they settle down. I dunno, how do ponies or donkeys do it? Like that."
"You're out of doors?" I asked. "How have you been staying alive? Stealing?"
"Some, sir. Breaking into sheds, for the most part. Winter's been terrible."
Codex was staring at the two earth ponies. "So," she barked. "That's where you ended up. I knew you'd come to no good in the end. Your mother's dead, Brief. You broke her heart. And your brother took over your practice."
She turned to me. "This idiot is a distant cousin of mine. I don't know the other idiot, but I can imagine. Short Brief was a poor solicitor who thought she could become a barrister. Lost a bunch of cases, dropped off the face of the Chain with a hoof-full of citations for contempt of court. I'm guessing Fire-Brand over there is one of her fellow renegade court advocates."
"So, desperadoes and fugitives all around, then. I don't think this is going to get settled in the middle of winter, here on a crossroads. Where's a warm place we can take our…" I turned to the crowd of bulls and their spokesmares. "Prisoners, I guess? You're all under arrest, by my duly constituted authority as an agent of the Imperium and the Phalactery. We'll figure out charges and legalities later. Easier to handle all of you if nobody else tries to 'arrest' you while we're talking."
I turned to the bulls awkwardly holding their scavenged pikes. "And hoof those damn pig-stickers over to Skinflint here, before one of you trips and stabs one of your friends."
The rest of the recruiting-detail came up, and we set out for the nearest large, heated public building. Which turned out to be the Company's old hidden base, now converted into the local militia regiment's training facilities. The bulls' hooves clopping across Mad Jack's sprawling planking was a nostalgic music, reminding me of our distant brothers and the many recruits already crowding another fortification in another province. The scattering of local militia-ponies gathered for the muster stared in astonishment at our procession. The muster wasn't due for several days, which meant that the fort had plenty of space for my escort and my prisoners. We dug up some grain and hay, and fed the starveling fugitives while we started up a space-heater in one of the empty, cobwebbed barracks.
I examined the bulls and bull-calves while they ate, looking for major medical problems. Exposure, malnutrition, and neglect had probably stunted all of their growth, but nothing that would put them seriously out of commission. The ones who couldn't go on had probably fallen behind, and been captured by pursuers. Or possibly just taken by the first passer-by. The fugitive fleeth where no pony pursueth.
"So," I asked the big cow, who was scarfing down as much hay as she could get into her hooves, "What's the plan? Volunteer for the mercenary Company full of big scary ponies, get you out from under the hammer? You realize you'd just be shipping out to the Riverlands with the rest of us. Things might be terrible up here, but there isn't anypony trying to eat you."
"Me, no, but if we surrendered to the authorities up here, they'd castrate all of my brothers, and ship them south in chains, unarmed and untrained. At least with you folk we can learn to fight, defend ourselves. More or less intact."
Couldn't argue with that. A stallion'll do an awful lot to stay one. Although if somepony had cut my junk off when I was a colt, I might not have gotten the Duchesse in such a mess…
But there was something wrong with Billie Joe's solution to their dilemma, and I needed to sleep on it.
I dreamed of green hills over a grey firth, the leaden clouded skies rushing overhead at the whip's behest of a fierce north-easterly gale. The wind-wounded waves rushed against the outgoing tide, water pushed by air up-stream against its natural courses. Over the breaking waters hung flights of fowl, floating on the strong winds. Large grey and black birds, black-beaked and hard-eyed, they stared inland, something invisible keeping them from the course that they and the weather would take if all were right with the world.
Her great and terrible voice sang to me from behind, on the hill over my head.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Wealth Wreathlock died,
And Storied Fame and Long Fang,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Holstein's dead and gone,
It's with Calfherd in the grave.
"Nopony remembers now the brave bulls of that dead world, who came to our call and our banners again and again. Their heavy hooves, their broad backs. When the battles turned against us, they always fell in the rear-guard, and fell for their guarding, as often as not. Hot-blooded, yes, but the blood bent against the fire, if trained properly to the fight. There is discipline in bulls beyond what you might find among this world's crabbed and grasping slave-tyrants. We have seen it, in our service."
"Would that mean that you would have these calves in your Company, Mistress?" I asked, half-hypnotized by the geese in their arrested flight.
"Oh, heavens, no. Look at those poor things. They hang forever over the waves, but a wing-flap from the shores of their home. Nothing in this world or any other will bring them that last yard, that last hoof, that last inch. The wild geese fly, never to return."
"Holstein's dead and gone, and I killed it, at Sister's behest. I would not drag more bulls from their homes to die in a foreign land. The rest of you, I care not, you've given yourselves to me. But these calves? Their Holstein's not yet dead and gone."
And with that, the world broke, and the wind blew the geese over the hills and away to their distant destination.
In the morning, I woke the corporals, and had them feed the calves, and set them out to put them through some quick morning training. And I pulled Bound Codex, Billie Joe, and Short Brief into the old infirmary, covered in dust like most everything else in this neglected pocket-fortress.
"I've consulted with my conscience, and you're not coming south with us. The herds of Rennet are sick, sick unto death, but shipping bull-calves into foreign service isn't a cure, or even much of a palliative. Rennet needs some-pony, and some solution which doesn't just disappear problem children in industrial lots."
"What are we going to do with them, though? They're still outlaw, fugitives. We can't let them walk around free without breaking the back of the law," objected Bound Codex. "We need a legal out. Recruitment to the Company was actually a quite deft solution, now that I've slept on it. Judges have been sending scofflaws into military service for millennia, and they'll probably be doing it for millennia to come, until the Chain crumbles under our hooves."
"The calves aren't the problem to be solved, it's the herds that are broken," I corrected her. "It's the institution which needs to be torn down, gutted. It's a sickness, and all you're doing by getting rid of the excess bull-calves is bleeding and cupping. Take it from a working physician, bleeding and cupping doesn't cure the patient, it just makes her sicker while the doctor gets fat on his fees."
"So…" drawled Short Brief, "What does that leave us? Where do the calves go?"
"Service is a good idea, but not with the Company. I'm thinking that the excess bull-calves are a resource, and a trainable one at that. Military, or industrial, I don't give a damn. That's the Duchesse's problem. Ponies are never a problem, they're a solution looking for a problem to fix. If the herds don't want their bull-calves, seize them for the sovereign. I'm a hammer, I find nails. This batch will get trained up for the Duchesse's personal guard. I needed a reason to hang around Rennet City this winter anyways. As for you lot, that's up to the Duchesse."
I went back out to the marshaling yards, and watched the corporals putting the bull-calves through their paces as militia-ponies drifted through the gates in small groups, gathering for the muster. I pictured great bulls in ducal livery and barding, guarding an older, wiser roan jenny, her children around her hooves.
And in my heart I heard the sound of wind-swept waves breaking on an imagined and distant shore.