SBMS125
The southern wall of the main complex at Dance Hall was a quilt of scaffolding and half-repaired stonework, encasing that hole in the fortress where the Spirit had burst out of the great hall. Despite the absence of our late engineer, work under his successors had advanced rapidly, and the weather and the curious eyes of the crowd were both kept out by the new repairs.
Below, the southern sally port was open and inviting, decorated heavily with improvised seasonal bunting and sprigs of holly and mistletoe. The Company's strange and foreign holiday had been re-purposed as a (very late) celebration of the successful season of reconstruction and reclamation in the central districts. Several fair weeks of bison summer in the very last days of fall had given the adventurers and returnees enough time to clear over three thousand abandoned acres in the fields of the dead hamlets along the Road towards the river, and winter seed had been planted in half of those acres.
The shacks and heavy tents of the shanty-town west of the ramparts were full of exhausted but giddy farmer-ponies. Their leaders had been terrified and alarmed when they had been caught up in the Marklaird's sudden assault upon the Company, but none of the civilians had been killed or even seriously hurt in the fighting, which from their point of view simply reinforced the impression that the 'night haunts' were here to protect the peace and their interests. We had stood up to the killing dead, and drove them off with heavy losses.
Dance Hall's grotesque bonework displays had been hung with boughs of holly, from the main gate along the fighting-platforms to Trolllbridge itself, mostly courtesy of the returning ponies of Pepin. Their winter solstice celebrations weren't quite Hearth's Warming, but our captive baker was there to explain the relevant details to the oddly enthusiastic farmers outside the gates and the towns-folk inside.
This was probably the last year that all of the apprentices would be young enough to participate in the pageant. Even if her injuries hadn't kept Rye Daughter from participating, her almost-full growth and height would have made her an increasingly risible 'Smart Cookie', and that role was taken over by Jagged Tooth. Charleyhorse likewise was too old for the pageantry, and sat in the audience with the carters and cooks.
One of the string bands from Mondovi was playing accompaniment to the play, enthusiastically if somewhat erratically following the general tone of the traditional music. Cup Cake had again intervened, spending some time with the musicians trying to explain the actual orchestration of the performance as it was done in Equestria proper. I rather missed the old polyphonal choral chants, but I grant you the new music was more appropriate to the theme.
Brass Tones himself had joined the band, and was playing his trumpet somewhat erratically; he had been sampling Cup Cake's holiday-themed 'egg nog' earlier, and was clearly at least a few sheets to the wind. He had much to celebrate; several of his shafts had been opened, and if you stood in the high tower of the fortress and stared west against the sunset, you could see the smoke from the newly-lit hearths rising from the slopes of the Deep Mines where a mining village had been reopened. Life was returning to every abandoned corner of Pepin.
They kept the old wingblade percussion for the thestral dance-fights and romance-scenes, of course. Cherie played Pansy like she was born to the role, and one of Obscured Blade's colony-pegasus recruits was a suitably brash Commander Hurricane. The hidden colonies occasionally staged the play, although their audiences were never so sprawling and enthusiastic as the thousand or more that teemed upon the Baneway.
That crowd of miners and farmers and townsfolk watched the foals and younglings as they performed upon a cheerfully re-decorated fighting platform beside the open sally-port, the raised surface acting as a perfect stage to the roadway it protected immediately below. Torches mounted above the ramparts provided some lighting as the sun's last rays faded from the twilit clouds above; more indirect light was provided by a sleepy Otonashi laying beneath the edge of the platform, listening with her eyes closed.
Feufollet performed a pitch-perfect Princess Platinum, while at the same time quietly maintaining the illusions overlaying the other performers, and the threatening windigos above. Said windigos bore strong resemblance to the late barrow-gasts, which enough members of the audience had seen at a distance to create an enthusiastic communal shudder at our very close shave with true monsters.
Cup Cake had insisted on re-writing the script, outside of the old thestral sections, and I couldn't object too loudly. There was a bit more music, a bit more optimism to her version of the story. References to bloody war and hate had been softened to struggle and greed; the sharp-bladed edges of the story as Company history had told it were softened and smoothed out. But the audience had seen death and loss and the selfishness of hateful rulers. Perhaps something happier and less bitter was better for poor, battered Pepin in the third year of the Company's service to the Bride of Tambelon.
In the back of the audience was a cluster of well-fed donkeys, dressed down for the occasion. They crowded around a roan mother and her two dusky foals, the foals sitting upon their mother's and step-father's backs, the better to watch the pageant. I have no idea what the little ones made of the whole thing. The duc and the duchesse's procession had arrived at Dance Hall two days before Hearth's Warming; the Captain invited them to stay for the celebration. Their attendants were staying in tents outside of the gates of Mondovi; the ducal family were being hosted in the mayor's rather modest 'mansion'.
Bonforte had named the foals Bonneterre and Vibrant. Fear and trembling. Who said le Duchesse had no sense of humour? They looked happy, they looked good. Vibrant didn't look like she had scarred from the blade.
I kept my distance. But I think Bonforte spotted me; she kept looking into the shadows beside the stage where I lurked.
It might have been my imagination.
I returned my attention to the pageant, as they approached their climax, the night-chill adding a shiver of authenticity to the phantasmic ice. The dread barrow-windigoes were truly unsettling in that moment – Bonforte's jennies started wailing as the illusions flew overhead. And then a translucent black wing folded over their crying heads, and they stopped in surprise.
The Spirit in her grim aspect stood over the ducal party, and they crouched in astonishment and terror. But you could hear the jennies burbling in delight, and the Spirit mumbled something to the duc and duchesse which might have been reassuring.
The interruption silenced, the apprentices completed their scene, and sang their conclusion:
The fire of friendship lives in our hearts
As long as it burns, we cannot drift apart
Though quarrels arise, their numbers are few
Laughter and singing will see us through
We are a union of loving friendship
And friends we'll be to the very end
They repeated the stanza three times, and by the third, the entire crowd was singing along with the performers. It was, after all, what it was designed to evoke. Unity, tolerance, compromise, community.
Even if at the centre of that community stood a towering horror, murmuring reassuring nonsense to a pair of wondering jenny-foals.