In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


Once A Slave, or, Leaving The Jenny Behind

FFMS032

Feufollet wasn't supposed to be accompanying the slave-coffers down into Coriolanus, so she didn't. Instead, a young mare named Marsh Wisp was bound among her fellow prisoners. I was tied by the neck, haltered with the pony in front, the pony behind, the rest of my row to my right and my left. I was loosely hobbled so that I could move along at an easy, shuffling pace, but no further, no faster.

My coat was yellow, my mane was orange. It was a strange feeling, having a cutie mark. And it was real in its way, as real as any other magical destiny mark. It was the sort of thing Feufollet would have had, if she had been born a pony, a wisp of blue-green flame like our namesake. I felt it like a draw, like a purpose – like I had been put here on Tambelon to lead others through the darkness, over dangerous ground. It was up to me whether I led them to damnation or to dry land. But the ears were definitely weird. I felt the lack of them, the lightness upon my head, the way the wind blew over my head in a way that just continually reinforced to me, that I was different, I had changed.

I was in some strange, permeating sense, a pony that day. No longer a Company jenny, but, for a moment, for a day, for the duration – an earth pony, formerly of the Army of the White Rose, today of the Order of the Black Rose.

Don't tell anypony about that last part. Kidding.

As we shuffled across the re-built bridge east of Beech Grove, some of the ponies in the coffer nearby struck up a dirge, and it helped me forget the White Rose we had slaughtered a half-mile to the south, oh so long ago, that we had ambushed and killed to a mare. I joined in with the song, singing:

Barrowlord, he thought he'd make a ghoul
These bones never rise again
Make 'em out of you or me, fool
These bones never rise again

I know it
Indeed I know it, mare
I know it
These bones never rise again

Thought he'd raise a mare too
Those dead know damn right how to do

Took a rib outa dead stallion's side
Make to rise an alicorn for to be his bride
Pull down this garden fine and fair
Gon' burn and butcher, eat anything with hair…

That old song had a million verses, and I swear we sang half of them on the long road beside the winding Hayfriend. This land had never seen the torch and the spear, had been spared the lance and the axe. Rich land, happy land, I was astonished when I felt the soil sing through my transformed hooves, felt the tang of the crops in my blood. Too much, too damn much pony!

I tried to work it back, my traitor body's over-committal to its new semblance. Neither the Company nor the Order needed another earth pony to carry her burdens, to push a spear, to hold her place in line. I needed to look and act like Marsh Wisp, but the mission needed someone to pull the illusory strings, make the magic sing and dance, paper over the flaws and the gaps in the façade. They need Feufollet around, even if they couldn't have her be seen or known. So while I sang, I remembered the northern jenny, mostly by drawing on the dried blood painted on the timberlings hiding like rats In our supply train.

I had convinced a number of our smaller timberlings to bud, to divide themselves. These smaller timberlings split themselves apart under the ministrations of Throat-Kicker and I, and re-formed themselves as smaller, tinier versions of their earlier selves. Smaller than wolves, smaller than weasels, these were mice-like, rat-like flora, as small as we could get them, without losing the magic. I pricked myself on each timber-rat's thorns, and marked them once again as our own, and now they hid, secret, within the sacks and barrels which supposedly carried food. And they did carry food, alongside of the spears, axes, and lances hidden beneath the top layers.

Most of my headquarters platoon surrounded me, haltered together in a block. First Company and a platoon of Third were included in the rest of the immediate column within which we shuffled. But Second and Fourth, and the rest of Third were scattered all up and down the line, intermixed with the endless platoons of haltered slaves being so slowly whipped towards the gates of Coriolanus in the distance. The 'guards' had done their best to assemble the various units into the same columns, but the time had been insufficient, and the urgency too pressing.

As we all shuffled and sang, day-dream images of the Filly flitted about in my mind's eye, some carrying word from my distant squads and platoons, others merely spotted by myself as they carried the messages of other ponies, for other likewise scattered units.

We encamped a quarter-day's march from the gates of the city, taking advantage of the darkness to shift this body of ponies and that among the untied, unhaltered mass. I was still getting to know the bulk of those ponies who had claimed me as their commander, and when full darkness came, we all slept in a carpet of breathing, sighing equinity, curled up against the cooling air of the last day of the season, the night-winds of autumn carving away at the congealed heat of dying summer.

Many of the other officers of the other battalions were unable to likewise cuddle with their troops, having still to maintain their stance as 'guards', as still-free ponies and loyalist troops of the distant Bride. Some few hard-chargers among the former-Company cadre had switched places with this pony or that in their destined commands, marching small groups of prisoners past my spot near the Road, commanding my illusory services so that they could put their decoys to bed with the rest of the 'guards', while they, in their ensorcelled caparisons, laid down with their battalions to learn into the night.

It is hard to express just how necessary it is to breath the same air as those you would lead. So easy, to make mock of officers along with the cynics like Sawbones, so long as one did not have to be an officer oneself. I had never been trained for this, was not ready for the burden.
So I did what I had, to make myself ready. We spent a long night's dream-time in a version of my fortress, as we worked out how they and I would drill, what commands they would take, what commands they would not tolerate. I showed myself to them as Marsh Wisp, and as Feufollet, and demonstrated simulations of what magics I could offer, what I could and could not do with blood and night and illusion and reality and the timberlings.

The way they looked at me unsettled me in a way I find difficult to express. I've never been one for mixing with the troops. I found myself speaking very narrowly, very tersely. Every word I gave them seemed another opportunity for confusion and misunderstanding.

And I kept falling into idiot outbursts of Prench, as if that pest of a thestral, Cherie, had cursed me with la Tourettes.

Morning saw us organized more coherently, all my ponies haltered together, with myself and my sergeants all tied together within grunting distance of each other. The Filly and I were able to rope together a sort of daydream conference, that allowed me to extend my acquaintance with my noncoms. It was an interesting exercise, getting them to communicate in a dream-state while not tripping over their own hooves.

Not that I was expert in this exercise, either, as I had spent most of our campaign-time riding in a nice airborne gig-chair, flying over the marching ponies below. I was ever so glad that I'd stopped with the farriers to get a set of somewhat road-worn campaign horseshoes nailed into place; my hooves would have been cracked and bleeding by now without them, and while I was all for a convincing semblance of misery and woe, and I was never opposed to a certain amount of bleeding in the course of my duties – well, that was certainly more than what was necessary.

Although it gave me ideas about certain details I immediately incorporated into the low-level glamours I wove over the ponies of my command. We looked a little more road-worn, a little more pitiable when we shuffled through the gates and into the city of Coriolanus. We looked, in short, like enslaved criminals on our way to chained benches in the new river-fleet awaiting us on the docks.

I can't tell you too much about the grand city, the Queen Bitch of the Housa. Our heads were bowed with playacting, our eyes downcast, our tails dragging in the dust and worse filth that these great cities seemed to produce like pigsties make muck. It might be only this, that my view of that great city's streets was close-up and head-down over their cobblestones, but I found myself loathing that stinking mass of grunge and grue.

It seemed to take forever for us to reach the docks-district, and more than one of my troops caught a mane full of rotten produce or flung mud as we shuffled, thrown at us by enraged townsponies. They had suffered a long, anxious spring and summer, continually threatened with siege and desolation if the very ponies cringing before their wrath had ever managed to fight their way over the Hayfriend. No point in haranguing the crowd – especially if we wanted to maintain any degree of cover. So we took the abuse.

The slave-pens beside the great Arsenal had once been enlarged to take numbers such as we delivered to them that afternoon, but it had been a very long time since that had been the case. The barracks were nearly tumbledown in their neglect, and the slaves housed there were few and far between. We found it easy to muscle those hapless convicts and listless oxen into a series of small side-rooms, to claim the main galleries to ourselves.

The 'guards' ran interference for the newly-delivered 'slaves', and I was quietly unhaltered and let loose to bury the whole of the outer complex in careful illusions and glamours as the guards complement overwhelmed the actual guards of the Coriolanus slave-holding facility. True to their experience and their talents, our former-Company 'guards' subdued the unwitting Coriolanus ponies quickly, and many likewise-unhaltered Order ponies came swarming out of the barracks within which they had been waiting, to empty out our supply train, and to shuffle the bound and senseless bodies of the former dock-guard into the emptied-out wagons.

The tiny, rat-like timberlings scurried out of their wagon hidey-holes, and scurried into the slave-barracks. They would hunt their animal equivalents for us, track down and kill the disease-carrying pests which no doubt infested those disgusting hovels. I let them to their business, I had my own.

A portion of the guard detachments would haul out the replaced guards to a respectful captivity in distant Clear Creek. The rest of our overlarge guard contingent took the place of the kidnapped Coriolanians. I accompanied the outbound contingent of guards to provide illusion-cover for their march out of the city, to let onlookers believe that as many guards had left the city as had entered it. I covered them, so , until we reached a point just outside the view of the gates of the city. Here we rendezvoused with another of the Company's shrinking contingent of witches. In the cover of a convenient treeline, I traded off the glamour-cover to the thankfully silent Otonashi. Watching as those ponies of the Third Cohort left to rejoin whatever organization replaced the torn-apart unit it had once been, I waited until darkness, to slip back into the city under cover of darkness and illusion.

To rejoin my ponies as they prepared for their future career as slave-ponies, to pull oars along with the rest in the Bride's new Fleet of the Housa.