In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


Foals In A Haunted Wood

SBMS155

As much as our casualties had strained my medical corps, it was as nothing to what the enemy had suffered. After a few days, the chaos in the recovery wards – scattered across ten acres of farm and homestead, in buildings, under canvas, whatever we could do to keep them out of the sun and weather, and sanitary – had subsided. Not that I was there to relax and bask in the job well-done.

As soon as we could, Rye Daughter and I passed the recovering patients into the ranking hooves of our most reliable doctors. I had made sure they were both ranking, and reliable, by handing out brevets with an utter disregard for military and professional protocol. The Middle Division's medical section was currently being run by a brevet-major apothecary, and the Reserve, a likewise brevetted former junior-captain jenny right out of the University of Rime. The rest of them were sufficient to their responsibilities, and so I left them all to the task of keeping our many wounded from succumbing to wound-fever or bloodloss.

Rye and I had a more pressing medical task. Not even a punishing, brutal battle like that which had torn apart the Clearances slaughters everypony, annihilates the losing army. I can't speak to mythical battles like that great envelopment-slaughter at Canntae, but every big fight I've ever had reliable testimony about or been witness to, have been a matter of slaughter to the breaking-point, of butchery until nerve fails for one side or the other, and sometimes, both at the same time. And thus was the case of the second battle of the Clearances. The White Rose fought, until they ran out of nerve. They left thousands dead upon the field, but they had been many thousands in number when they still had banners to march proudly beneath.

The balance of that shattered army now lay scattered across at least three districts that we could find, and those beaten ponies who had surrendered so far to our threats and blandishments. The rebels captured in Leveetown were now joined in their expanding stockades by first hundreds, then thousands of half-starveling prisoners, more than a few wounded or ill in one way or the other.

It was a recipe for epidemics, a threat to the guards as well as the prisoners. So Rye and I packed up and hoofed it over to the empty town northwest of the sprawling depots which had sprung up overnight in the fields and farmyards west of the Clearances. Rye wondered where all the civilians had gone, but I'd been mostly happy to not have to deal with civic affairs in the midst of a cascading series of medical crises. We took the opportunity to re-bond after a period of separation. Her studies were coming along nicely, and she'd already proven her ability to bully pedigreed doctors with vastly more extensive experience than she possessed. Temperament and skill had a lot to do with it, but the fact that she was beginning to outweigh your average donkey by about 1.8 to 1 certainly didn't take anything away from her ability to dominate a room. Height and bulk breeds a physical sort of respect at an instinctual level, even among the over-educated.

I had a pair of orderlies following us with supply carts, heavy on the antiseptics and salicin. I knew that we'd need them when we worked our way through the prisoner-of-war cages, and I was right. The guards from the Right Division were doing their best to remove the deceased prisoners from the stockades, and make sure that everypony got enough food, but the battalion assigned to guard duty had begun to be overstretched by the unceasing stream of captures marching westward from the front. I frowned, and put in a request through the Lieutenant on the 'Radio' for a second battalion to reinforce the overloaded guards detachment, and set to evaluating the survivors for obvious problems.

There was far too much for Rye and I to take care of ourselves, but all the true problem cases had died on the road before ever getting to the stockades. I eyed the unsheltered conditions of the prisoners, who didn't have any building supplies, and ordered the guards to supervise supply-gathering expeditions as soon as they could identify reliable prisoners. There was a lot of potential pony-power penned up in those stockades, and we might as well get some work out of them.

The guards knew how to beat down a recalcitrant or rebellious… rebel. Hrm. We probably needed to develop better insults for the western ponies.

The prisoners were largely farm-ponies from the districts of southern Traverse, not much different than, say, western Verdebaie or eastern Rennet, although from things some of them said, I think their weather and soils were much more friendly to agriculture. These were the flower of a rich farming culture, and for many of them, their parents and older siblings were so capable of working the ancestral family farm that there was no need for, well, them. Those fruitful western plains produced an unending stream of surplus younger sons and daughters, and almost all of them poured directly into the holding-weirs of the armies of the White Rose.
All of them were heavily indoctrinated into the ideology of the White Rose, the… religion of it all. It had a pack of devils, a once and future messiah, books of prophesy, ethical dictums and taboos, a sort of priesthood – they might not call it a religion, but as a confessed cultist, I knew another cult when I saw one.

The prisoners were almost entirely rank and file. I didn't find a single pony that would admit to a higher commission than small-L lieutenant, and precious few ranking noncoms. I couldn't tell if this was because the officers and sergeants had led from the front, and died there, or if some of the dead prisoners dragged out of the stockades had been particularly unpopular martinets. In some armies, defeat and capture was the signal for the slaughter of hated officers. I hadn't had the impression that this was the case for the usually quite disciplined White Rose, but in all honesty, this was my first direct contact with White Rose captives since that scattering of prisoners we took in Rennet a few years back, most of whom were recruited into the Company proper.

You couldn't even tell which of our current caribou Brethren were former prisoners, and which were recruits from the provincial militias, unless you went and asked one directly. Which I don't recommend, it shows a certain lack of communal trust to talk about such matters.

Feufollet's friend, the Lord of the Patrol, showed up on the second day of our work in the stockades. Night Watch and a collection of civilians came down with the daily caravan of food supplies, which Cup Cake and Dancing Shadows and their contacts up in New Equestria were dutifully sending southward as required. These food supplies were the reason why our vulnerable prisoners of war were not expiring where they slumped in the increasingly pan-hardened and grassless confines of the cages. Good food can address many shortcomings in campaign-hardened ponies, even if they have been recently starved, exposed, and beaten from pillar to post as these had been.

Night Watch and his collection of civilians were there, I believe, to look over our captures. When I was notified that they were here, I wrapped up my rounds, and hoofed my way over to that side of the stockades. I found them outside the fence, staring through the slats at the mostly immobile rebels, only a few of whom were working on erecting shelters from some canvass we'd given them and what little the scavenging work-parties had returned with the evening before. Those work-parties had been reinforced, and sent out early that day, in hope that they'd bring back a great deal more to work with than what they'd brought that first listless day.

I looked over the civilian delegation, and tried to find a leader, since Night Watch's entire purpose in life was to obscure his importance and authority behind an impressive thicket of pretense and slight of hoof. I chose the best-dressed pony in the lot, a foppish mare with a drooping fascinator on her sun-hat and a mud-splattered stole over her withers.

"G'day, ladies, gentlecolts. Come down to see our new zoo? It's still under construction, but we have high hopes for it in coming days. We're not quite ready for visitors, yet, unless there's any of you with medical training? Most of my staff are tied up with our own wounded closer to the front. We could use civilian support in dealing with… well, all these."

Fascinator and Stole turned to look at the pony who was talking at her, and looked me up and down as if I had just crawled out of the nearest sump. "Why are you crowding them all into this single cage? The conditions are appalling! And there's so many of them!"

"This isn't the only cage, there are three more over on the other side of this one, and we've got two more under construction. We're starting to run short of materials, actually. Some of this lot are out tearing down fences and unclaimed outbuildings for the wood and the nails. We're expecting, hrm, maybe another eight hundred to a thousand later today, given the reports I read with breakfast. It's part of why yon food-caravan is so long today; with every group of prisoners, the ones that make it here are hungrier and hungrier. I wouldn't put my hoof through that fence, sir," I cautioned one thin-faced idiot. "They're still rebels, and some of them might shake off the doldrums enough to rattle your brain-pan a bit for the fun of it. Or who knows? Even ponies have been known to develop a taste for flesh when they're hungry enough."

I resisted the urge to show off my sharp incisors. I like to think that I've grown past that sort of cheap theatrics, and anyways, far as we could tell, the rebel rank and file hadn't descended yet to that level of desperate starvation which births unspeakable horrors of that stripe. But let's encourage them not to poke the prisoners with sticks, yes?

"And you want our precious physicians down here to mingle with these… rebel savages?" sniffed Lady Fascinator. "It hardly sounds safe."

"Well, we do have armed guards here, an entire battalion. And more on the way. My young apprentice is in there, working through a sick ward we have going up on the far side of this cage, I can take you folks around that way. Not actually inside, of course, we don't want to encourage unnecessary contact between the prisoners and the civilian population. Starving, stressed, defeated troops are prime timber for epidemic outbreaks, and if they do break, it's for the best if it stays inside the cages. Might I ask to whom I am speaking?"

She blinked, and remembered her manners. "Fair Prospect, at your service, sir. And you?"

"Sawbones, doctor of the Black Company, and director of the medical corps of the Army of the North. We're a bit understaffed here, as I said. Our actual doctors are mostly dealing with the loyal wounded for the nonce."

I gave them the grand tour, and left them, one hopes, suitably impressed. A fair fraction of the army which had been laying waste to the lands of the Housa, and had threatened the Queen City of that proud river, was now laying listless and dead-eyed behind crowded fences. Luckily, we weren't yet in those stages of an epidemic outbreak which looks like tartarus, and these western districts had largely been spared the heavy rains of the pegasi storms to the east. If anything, this portion of the Baronies were over-dry for this part of the season, and sun-parched.

I cautioned them that there were still thousands of rebels unaccounted for to the east, and we weren't at all sure how many were simply dead, and how many were still a military threat. Personally, I was starting to suspect that they were breaking up into bands and halfway towards banditry. When I got a moment to separate Night Watch from his delegation, I passed along these fears, and he nodded in acknowledgement, and confirmed that the Patrol was likewise wary, and would be keeping an eye out for such tomfoolery.

Night Watch took his herd of civilians with him northwards to take shelter for the night, up where there were still populated districts. As evening gathered to the east, I looked at the empty-eyed homes and shops of this nameless town which was playing host to our prisoners of war, and wondered what happened to the ponies of the Baronies. Were they killed by the White Rose? Fled north into exile? Hiding somewhere?

Then I turned to look at the miserable, listless rebels, slowly chewing their way through their evening meal. These broken ponies, who had not long ago been a terror and a brand upon the flanks of a tormented countryside. Now, look at them - lost in a haunted wood, foals afraid of the night, who have never been happy or good.