//------------------------------// // In The Muck // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS114 The Company settled back into garrison in an uncertain mood. We had been victorious in our limited fall campaign, and the losses had been acceptable by any reasonable standard. But it had been an odd sort of victory, the destruction of a physical object, and the termination of a season of skirmishing and raiding, more so than the annihilating demolition of the enemy that had become our accustomed conclusion to a campaign season. The White Rose re-occupied the position that had once been a formidable fortress, a stone stronghold that had survived every blow thrown against it in eleven centuries of intermittent warfare on the upper river. The shattered regiment which had held the fords against the loyalists of Pepin had been replaced by a fresh regiment of earth ponies, but they sensibly built a castra hiberna well back from the edge of the bluffs, and didn't challenge our ponies for the far side of the fords, or really, the draws below the bluffs themselves. They dug out a couple of posts in the ruins above the shattered sally ports, and if you were intrepid, you might spot a couple of pike-heads bobbing over those dugouts held by the ponies on outpost duty. They sat there, keeping an an eye on what had once been easy passages through the steep river-bluffs, but were now tumbledown draws full of boulders and wreckage. The autumn rains would no doubt complete the destruction began by our borrowed miners and continued with the aid of several tons of blasting powder. Over the course of the rainy season and the winter to come, we slowly reduced our commitment to the districts around Pepin City, and drew back into the fortifications around Dance Hall, the Deep Mines, and the Aerie. The northern door had been slammed shut, and welded into place. No matter how cheaply we got away from the fords in the abstract, in the tangible world, I still had to haul ambulances full of agony back to Dance Hall over not particularly good roads. We took them in easy stages, stopping twice to overnight outside of walled hamlets. The hardened ambulances, arranged in a laager and pegged in behind quickly-driven stades making a rudimentary fence-palisade, acted as our defensive walls. Tarps strung between the ambulance imperials kept off the nightly rains, but there was little to keep us out of the mud and muck. I roped together an improvised hammock for Rye Daughter, and slept in the muck with the oxen. This left Rye volunteered to tend to the wounded as the least-filthy member of the medical section. By the time we rolled over the newly-constructed drawbridge on the main Road bastion beside Dance Hall, we were all filthy enough that the ponies on guard looked at us like we were vagrants. Even Rye was mud-speckled and bedraggled. I snorted at the display, and borrowed two of the infuriatingly dry layabouts to come along with us to the main gate and help unload the ambulances into the wards. We gathered further 'volunteers' as we encountered them on the way, until I had a full section of formerly-dry-and-clean ponies to do our fetching and carrying. Once we got all of the wounded into their beds, I sent off the oxen and Rye to the baths, while I went from bed to bed to assess our cargo, and to make sure that nopony had developed bed fever or caught something on the road. The ones that had popped stitches had been re-stitched on the road, and would need additional courses of antibiotics for safety's sake. But I could hardly dose everypony on general principles - I just wasn't farming enough mold to make that work out. Not to mention that some of the texts warned about over-using that particular nostrum, claiming that overuse could lessen its effect in a given herd. I was checking the brace on a corporal's wing when a pony stepped out of the shadows in the back corner of the second ward. I turned around and raised my brow at the filly. Cherie had hit a growth spurt. The little thestral was starting to grow up. “Ey, you been good to your elders, pouliche? Long time no see." “Hello, Uncle Sawbones. Nice to see you again," she said, stiffly. “Huh. This you on your best behaviour, now? Or did a Changeling put you in a pod and come out to practice her courtesies?" I looked over her, wondering what was going on. Obscured Blade had been known to beat good manners into his students in the past, but that old mule had been up front at the fords, in the thick of it for that matter. He couldn't possibly have been back long enough to beat the cute out of Cherie. “Uncle Gibblets says I need to stop 'treating you like my chew-toy', and give you the respect of a 'nuncle'. Not exactly sure just yet what that means, but I guess? Stop calling you Monsieur, for one." She looked sad and a little miserable. My heart went out to her, but I was covered in filth, and didn't want to get any of it on her. “Well, does that keep you from helping me? We could use somepony with clean hooves to help change some bandages. Wanna help?" “Really? Yeah, sure!" she beamed at me. Then she shook her wings out, and repeated, more gravely, “Of course, Uncle. Please, let me be of service." But her eyes still sparkled. I got a good deal of enthusiastic assistance out of her before a ruddy-cheeked Rye Daughter returned to take over the work-load, and to manage the filly-volunteer. You have no idea how good a hot bath feels, after a slog through the fall rains and mud. What fields that were harvested that year, were insanely productive. The ponies of Mondovi had claimed most of the near-by abandoned homesteads to feed the multitude of empty bellies drawn into the central province by the removal of the ghoul threat. The construction of Dance Hall and her outlying works had swallowed up a lot of prime farmland, but on the plus side, almost none of it had been under cultivation at the time of construction. But the combination of the two seizures of farmland - by the Mondovi farming collective, and by the Company for its fortifications - created a political headache when the survivors and heirs started drifting into the central districts about halfway through the summer, increasing in intensity as fall approached and the time for the fall plantings charged us with lances couched. Everypony wanted to get their winter crops into the ground to prepare for the crowds of returnees expected the next spring. Many families had sent their youngest and most resilient down the Bride's Road from the upper districts and Rennet with cart-loads full of tents and sacks of seeds for this very purpose. Many of these young-bloods arrived with maps and letters of inheritance or proxies, but some of them came with only airy assurances and bald-faced claims of dubious authority. More than one hoof-fight broke out in the outer fields when returnees arrived in expectation of fallow wilderness, only to encounter a Mondovi donkey or earth-pony fetlock-deep in cultivated soil, harvesting a crop from rich bottomlands or worse, tending still-growing crops. From what I understand, only one fatality resulted from this rolling skirmish between the locals and the returning refugees, but the small town jail quickly filled to overcapacity with the bruised or broken losers of these little turf squabbles. And the losers were almost always the returnees. The Mondovans had grown hard and resilient under the pressure of six and a half years in a cauldron like central Pepin, but more importantly, the only justices of the peace in the central districts were, miracles of miracles, local notables. One returning worthy tried to regain his judicial seat, but found that the ruins of Durand were an inhospitable locale for a court session. His surviving peer from the judiciary of Durand, who had set up shop at the standing court in Guilliame's Ravin at the sufferance of the local judges, told him to pound sand, and go find a less prestigious line of work. This partiality on the part of the judiciary against the returnees nearly produced a riot in Mondovi while we were up at the fords seeing off the White Rose. Octavius and his ponies of the Third found it necessary to disperse the mob from in front of the little courthouse in town, and three sections of Company armsponies were needed to herd the malcontents back into their tent city outside the new Bride's Gate the engineer had carved out of the ramparts behind the previously-mentioned drawbridge. Dancing Shadows stepped into the political mess at this point, and negotiated with the judges and town council of Mondovi a compromise. A fund in the name of the absent Duc would claim as condemned property the lands once owned by the deceased caribou of the lost villages around the ruins of Caribou City, and assign equivalent lands to the claimants of lands built over by the new fortifications, or seized by the Mondovan farming collective. Actual proof of claims would be required for simple disbursement, and for those with only air and assertion to back their claims, they would find themselves in debt to the Duc for their rent, until such time as they were able to marshal testimony from established farming families of their district that they were the proper owners of their farmed land. The only question left unanswered by that alicornic display of even-hoofedness was the composition of the land-fund's board of trustees. I didn't like the look I caught from the jenny when she tracked me down in my office. Not even my claim that I was wanted for murder in the combined duchies brooked any mercy from Dancing Shadows. She smugly informed me that the administration of the two duchies would be entirely independent of each other, and I wasn't wanted for anything in Pepin. Do you have any idea how boring land disputes can be when you aren't materially involved in the argument?