FFMS001
In those days the Black Company was in the service of the Bride of Tambelon, the undead empress, the lich-queen. We had descended from the northlands with fire and lance, into the heart of a growing cancer upon the realm, a killing infection which had eaten out entire districts, more than half of the Duchy of Pepin, devoured by the undead. We built there a large and rambling fortress in the teeth of the slavering ghouls, and defended our own walls against the mindless dead, breaking them; our magics and our blades swept them from the fields and slopes of the tormented province.
We built Dance Hall, but we did not own her. My mentor, who is well-known for making decisions which he has no right to make, gave away the fortress to the Empress as a recruiting-gift, to ensure that we were in the proper employ of the Bride, the true sovereign of Tambelon. That act meant that Dance Hall would never be the Company's home. It was always a way-station, a lease.
And in this, the Company's third spring in Tambelon, our lease was expiring. As with previous resting-places, we were preparing to pull up stakes, and move the carnival down the road, to find some new farmer's field to trample flat and set up the rides and the games and the side-shows.
When I was very young, I remember one of these little carnivals passed through the ponies' town, down the way. My parents and kin, who never trusted the neighbors, wouldn't let us go see the carnival. It was a distraction of the Beast, a temptation and a lure. We would keep to the family and the clan and the holdfast, like good donkeys. Storms pass overhead, and we hold fast. Sunny days lure us out to play, and we hold fast. We were a holdfast clan.
So one night, when there was evil and wonder marching through the farmlanes and highways of rebel-occupied Rennet, I said 'se perdre' to my cringing family and kin, and followed the ghost-lights and chased the wild hunt. I never returned to the tiny holdfast and its small donkeys, hiding from the world turning over in its long sleep.
I am awake. And I am Feufollet, understudy to the Company Annalist and apprentice to the commander of the Third Cohort. I am a nearly full-grown jenny half-sworn to the Company; Sawbones and the Lieutenant both say that my peers and I will be properly sworn to the pikestaff in an adult sort of way later this summer, but that we're still children by the lights of the Company and its traditions.
And the Company has a fecking long list of traditions, a longer one every time I look at my notes. Oh, yes, I keep notes. It's important to keep track of what ponies and other people say, because nopony says all that they mean, nor do they mean all that they say.
Not even the Princess. Sawbones insists on calling her the Spirit, and has always been careful to draw this and that comparison and distinction within his Book. For us, the Princess has always been the Princess. She's apparently a New Thing in the Company-that-was. In the Company-that-is, she's just always… been there. Terrifying, dangerous, affectionate, protective.
Charleyhorse got into the liquor supplies one night when we were all up at the Palisades during the harrowing of the bottomlands, all of us foals kept safe and behind proper walls far from the butchery and the unimaginable stink. You could smell that horror forty miles away, and the smoke and miasma turned every sunset of that horrible hot summer black and red like the death of all things. Charleyhorse got drunk, and he told sickening stories, of how his knight and his knight's lady-love were pulled down by the ghouls of the trap in Menomenie the spring before, that rebel-gift which was the reason that we had been put into a nice safe box far from our Company while they took care of matters. Charleyhorse told how he would have been eaten, too, if the Princess hadn't taken him in his peril, and danced for him, danced a pavane of protection and escape. His aching limbs afterwards were an agony, but those impossible stretches, that mind-warping speed which the Princess found in him - that was why there was still a Charleyhorse to get drunk on medicinal corn-liquor and weep for his dead knight - and not just another name in the Annals.
So we have a certain… relationship with the Princess. She still has her moments where she looks at us and drools, and that's certainly unsettling. But she's never actually bitten down on anypony who wasn't already dead and deserving of it.
Far as we know, anyways.
We were terribly busy in the early days of this third spring, tearing things down, packing things up, finding that which could stay, that which must go, that which must come with. And the militia-officers of Pepin's established regiments descended in a group upon Dance Hall in the midst of this chaos, to be guided about by the officers and the officers' hangers-on, to be shown their new digs, their new responsibilities. Because we were leaving our beautiful Dance Hall to the natives, and heading out.
The II Pepin followed the officers down into the bottomlands from the plateau, and the Company spent a week of spare time showing the new ponies and donkeys the ropes in the great fortress. The defenses, the sally-ports, the war-engines we were leaving them. Drawbridges, watch-towers, fighting platforms. They'd need to figure out how to replace the Company's archers - it was certainly possible for non-unicorns to make archers of themselves, but that magical race's capacity for the arrow-storm was so pronounced that to compare a section of caribou or donkeys with bows to the bowmares with their staveless, unstringed constructs was to compare the toy hammer of a foal with the work-tools of an ironsmith.
Another regiment of militia would be raised among the new settlers and miners of resettled Pepin, and the other districts of the province would be passing along a third, semi-established regiment when the Company cleared the roads, but as soon as the II Pepin had settled into Dance Hall as her new garrison, the Company was ready for departure. They could rattle around like a pea in a tin-can until the rest of their peers could find their way down into the bottomlands.
The aerial cohort had departed a week ahead of the rest of the Company, and while we had been busy playing host to the new leasors of the Hall, the pegasi and the griffins were spread across the length and breadth of the southern fringes of the northlands, from the Palisades to the crossroads at Charred Horton, along the Bride's Road into Vallee du Pierre, and along the various byways and highways stringing that minor province into the road-nets of the western lake-provinces and great Rime herself and the remnants of the riverlands. They were the scouts, the eyes of the Company. There were fewer than there were in the old days, I'm told, but we still have enough winged arms-ponies to make us something special in Tambelon, beyond the magic and the Princess and all that. The ancient first is always, first in, last out, all-knowing, all-seeing. Without them, we would be lost.
Most of the milita regiments of the north would be heading for the lake-ports to the east, and would be transshipped into Rime. There was no reason why either the northlands or the Imperium would want to or need to feed all those mouths on a long road-march through the inland routes. But somepony needed to cover the movements of the grand army of the north, and that somepony was the mercenaries of the Company, along with a pair of regiments, one from Hydromel, and Vallee du Pierre's own slight contribution to our crusade.
The Company could hack it, the Company was professionalism incarnate. We were mostly worried about the damn green militia-ponies. Much of the Company's work in the southern movement would be cleaning up after the militia, keeping them on the road, patching them together as they inevitably fell apart on the way.
But all that awaited the Company's actual arrival at the rendezvous. There was no reason for us to sneak out of Dance Hall as if we were thieves slipping out a rear window. We marched in formation, proud with banners. Each cohort formed outside the main gates of Dance Hall, saluted the trophies over the gate, and headed out behind their commanders, guidons flying. Fuller Falchion, that slate-grey unicorn stallion with his machete cutie mark, let the second cohort as it emerged from the Rennet Gate, as my own knight, Octavius, brown and plain with his half-tipped bloody-chalice mark, formed up the proud third cohort and started down the Road beside those familiar ramparts.
Asparagus, Sawbones, Obscured Blade, Broken Sigil, and the rest of the support, headquarters, and administrative sections formed up behind the third, and their long train of carts and heavy wagons filled the whole of the Road between the main gates and the Rennet Gate and then some before there came an end of it.
The Captain and the standard-bearer stood beside the gate, and awaited Smooth Draw and the newest cohort as they filed out of the grand fortress. I watched from the rear of the support train as the fourth came into formation before the pike-staff, as the standard-bearer dipped it three times, and the Captain led the cohort in a bellowed farewell to Mondovi and the new owners of Dance Hall.
That little ceremony completed, they followed us as we went, slowly rolling past the long ramparts of the great walls of Dance Hall. The Company's night-horror banner streamed over my head, carried by the prevailing westerlies out of the rebel provinces, and the fourth cohort marched slowly, calmly behind the swaying carts. It seemed to take only a moment before we reached the Rennet Gate, and I watched each section pass under the heavily-reinforced portcullis which had replaced the simple bar that once had defined the northern end of the ramparts. As the last section and Smooth Draw, goldenrod-brilliant with a blur of steel-grey as her mark, herself passed under the portcullis, the militia-ponies holding the tower at Rennet's Gate let the gate drop, with a heavy thump. Then they returned us our three cheers, weak and reedy as a half-section might be in the face of an entire legion on the move.
Our returning bellows shook the new shoots of the brush and trees all around us, but I have no idea if anypony else heard.
But they would hear soon enough. The Black Company was on the march.
Not bad for a first try, Feufollet. Maybe tighten it up a bit next time? And don't forget to mention things like what happened to our convalescents in Mondovi, and that spy we had to leave for the Duc's new spymaster to deal with. Can't leave dangling threads without at least mentioning them in the Annals, not if they're gonna come up again. Ponies will forgive being lied to, but they won't forgive being kept entirely in the dark. At least make allusions to whatever you're planning on hiding. But good first pass, jenny. That'll do. - Sawbones