//------------------------------// // The Little Stone Fort At The Fords // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS107 The Captain ordered my presence in operations a few days later, for an officers' meeting. When I arrived, Obscured Blade was sitting in Gibblets' place. We sneered at each other while waiting on the remaining cohort commanders. Smooth Draw and Fuller Falchion were muttering to each other in a corner, while the Captain and Broken Sigil were fiddling with a new sand-table. I walked over to look at their work. It was a representation of the upper river, laying out Pepin Castle and its opposite number facing each other across that contested ford in the centre of the table's display, with each fortress's back-country filled out as well as they could, given our knowledge of the current situation. The fortress held by the White Rose was an old bison construction, with an old Bison name, something long and impossible like Teke'o'ho'honahke o'he'emenie, but the local name for it was usually abbreviated to Hohonahkemenie, which is still one tartarus of a mouthful. The best we knew of its situation was that the White Rose held it in strength. Scouts couldn't get close without being pelted by projectiles, and chased by sally parties of caribou. Our best guess was that at least some of the refugees from the shattered White Rose rebellion in Rennet had washed up here in garrison. They certainly weren't anywhere else - the crews of the destroyed flotilla and the small army concentrated around Falaises du Conseil had been mostly earth pony and donkey. We had found no living caribou in central Pepin, although there had been ghouls and bones a plenty. I frowned at the vagueness of the features sketched out on the table behind Hohonahkemenie, we just didn't have much information about the status of the White Rose lands, that was for certain. The Lieutenant had made vague plans to extend deep penetration recon parties into the region in the aftermath of the raid on Falaises du Conseil, but that was before we got our teat caught in the wringer, and the aerial cohort had been battered. Octavius stumped into the conference room with the Lieutenant and a sombre Gerlach trailing behind him. Octavius was a bit wind-burned, and he must have come straight off a chariot ride from Pepin City. He had been sent along with a fair number of sections from third cohort to reinforce the Duc's castle garrison and resist the White Rose's continued probing across the ford. The Captain called the council to order. "OK, paisans, first order of business, we need that report on the situation at the ford, Octavius. What's it look like from the castle wall?" "Hit-" Octavius cleared his throat, and coughed. "It's both not as bad as they said, and it's worse than they'll admit. First thing is, the caribou coming across the fords aren't all that aggressive, they slip through in twos and threes, disappear, maybe burn a hayrick or scare a farmer, then they come galloping back for the fords and freedom. It's diffuse enough that it might just be bucks counting coup if it weren't for how often it's happening. That's the not-bad part. The bad part is-" and he reached forward and drew his hoof across the sand-table, drawing three slight furrows across the sand-river, one below the ford and two above. "There isn't one ford, there's two to four, depending on the height of the river and the season. Right now, the river's low, and all four are open. We would need an entire cohort to post all four of the crossings, along with a reaction force and the main reserve. "Hohonahkemenie is just better positioned to cover all the fords than Pepin Castle. It's an artifact of how the bluffs are situated, and where the fords open up. And those walls scare me, they're alarmingly solid for something built over a thousand years ago, and they look like the sort of thing that eats storming parties for breakfast. You couldn't crack that nut with an army of ten thousand unless it was practically undefended, not from the ground at any rate. The bluffs are just the right height, too steep to rush, not too steep for sally parties to come thundering down on interlopers. You can barely tell where the bluffs end and the walls start. "As far as sapping goes, I'd want to have Mad Jack's professional opinion, but the damn thing looks like it's sitting right on bedrock. You're not going to undermine their walls, not unless there's a vulnerability around the back end of the position I couldn't see, what with the rain of ballista bolts, rocks, and bloodthirsty bucks looking to ventilate my scouts' caparisons. I'm guessing at least three full batteries of artillery just to suppress return fire and two battalions of siege engines to make a breach. Their sally ports look like they only have shallow ravelins, but at that angle, you don't need much protection. It would be easier to blast a new breach on this slope -" he gestured along the northern limb of the fortress, "and hope that you'd not lose too many of your storming party. It's no better of an assaulting position, but at least there's room for the artillery park to set up along that approach, you might be able to emplace enough gambions to keep the White Rose from butchering your engineers en masse. "In short, just order everypony to slit their own throats. It'd be quicker, and less drawn out. The Company can't take this fortress from the ground. Five Companies operating in concert would have problems taking it, especially in the season we have left." "We're full of recruits, on top of that," interjected Smooth Draw. "We need the rest of the season to absorb them into the Company way of doing things. We could lose the majority of the recruits if we throw them into a proper siege, or, worse, an assault. You know they die like flies when they're wet-maned like this." The Captain fumed, not hearing what she wanted to hear. She demanded a report from the aerials. The Lieutenant made her report. "Almost a quarter of the cohort is out of commission. Four dead, thirty-eight wounded and in hospital. Some of those look like they're permanent convalescents. Sawbones?" "Eleven certain career-ending wounds. Not sure in three more cases, depends on how they heal and what the prosthetic-smith can do with them. Assuming we don't have any further medical emergencies in the interim. Expect the other twenty-four back to their sections in two to six weeks. Maybe faster if some of my new potions work as expected. Fifteen back in three weeks, solid." "Why can't they get a prosthetic wing working, damnit?" "Pull the other one, it has bells on. Or, rather, bother Uncle Blade. That sort of magic is witch business. And pure fiction as far as I know." I sighed. "Three of them aren't amputation losses, anyways. Those enemy witches and their fire-spells, nothing we can do when a pony's one-quarter third-degree burns. We're lucky they pulled through at all. Shock should have killed another six before they got back to me. I think the Spirit's been juicing our ponies a bit. Some things just aren't equinely possible, and I have at least eight cases recuperating in my wards that should have died." "So what you're telling me is?" prompted the Captain at her Lieutenant. "We're going to be flying understrength for most of the rest of the season, and there's no way to replenish losses. We got four recruits down with Uncle Blade, four. That doesn't even replace fatalities in the last three years, let alone our retirees. Until we get somewhere the Company can recruit from winged populations, the aerial cohort is a wasting and limited resource. Every battle reduces our numbers, every loss - we won't be part of the Company forever if you use us up like this." "So you're saying you can't take the keep at the fords from the air?" "By storm? Oh, tartarus, I don't know. I'd have to have it better-scouted from the air. Octavius, how big is the garrison?" "Difficult to tell from what we've seen so far. It's big enough to hold five hundred, if it's fully posted. Their sally parties are hearty enough, either they've got bucks to burn, or they're fronting pretty fiercely. If they have any witches behind those walls, they weren't showing themselves, I'll say that much." "Which brings up the magical approach. Uncle Blade?" "I'm not your uncle, you fool. You can't paste over your lack of resources with magery and hope your coven will satisfy your oversized ambitions by sheer magical puissance. The Company might once have had that sort of power, but it doesn't now, not yet. And certainly not while you refuse to let the Lady into your arid little clot of a heart! She is the hope and the heart of the Company's true power, and you continue to refuse her very existence, as if She was some sort of - shared delusion of your subordinates. Stop trying to distract yourself with irrelevant planning for the assault of strategically unimportant fortifications, and open your heart to Her presence!" The old warlock's eyes blazed with undiluted fury. Good to know he hated somepony more than me. The Captain blinked in confusion, and turned to me. "Sawbones, can you get your senile fanatic under control? He seems to be off his meds again." "How did Obscured Blade become 'my' fanatic? He's the head of the warlocks, not any property of mine." "Stop talking about me as if I weren't in the room, you insufferable young jackanapes!" "He certainly talks like you do when you're in an Annals-trance. It's your cult, isn't it?" "The Spirit isn't a 'cult'! I'll take this from our Equestrian prisoner, she's not one of us in the end, but I won't take it from the supposed Captain of the Black Bleeding Company!" "When I joined this thing of ours, it was a piscialetto compagnia di mercenari, non un cazzo di Equestrii incontro rinascita religiosa!" Things degenerated rapidly from there, as it usually does when her Equuish breaks down like that. The meeting ended just short of blows, but after the dust cleared, the Captain hadn't gotten her assault against the fortress over the fords. It continued to be a thorn in our sides, but a few more sections were deployed to Pepin City along with Octavius's existing garrison. A series of skirmishes in the open lands around the castle and before the fords would punctuate the rest of the summer and fall, producing a trickle of casualties, including the deaths of four recruits. Granola Crunch, an earth pony mare, drowned in the second month of summer during an otherwise typical skirmish at the lower ford. Oak Limb, an earth pony stallion, exsanguinated due to fumbling by the Duc's local physician over a wound which shouldn't have killed him. After that, I would spend a week in Pepin City, re-training that young fool of a jenny on basic wound treatment. Almost as soon as I returned to Dance Hall from this trip, two more recruits died in an ambush, a jack incongruously named Happy Feet, and a buck named Schlafrig. Nothing the hapless physician could have done about it, they died on the field. Octavius's ponies took a heavy toll on the White Rose in those skirmishes, but it was still a bloody business. Not as bloody as Hohonahkemenie would have been if the Captain had gotten her heart's desire.