FFMS033
Once I got back into the city, I let my pony semblance slip, and took up a certain subtle cantrip of disinterest instead. Coriolanus was a donkey city, full of little jennies just like little Feufollet. She stuck out much less than the broad-beamed and corn-fed Marsh Wisp. I took my time returning to my chains, eager to learn a little more about the stage upon which we were scheduled to perform. Coriolanus wasn't nearly as large as unfathomable Rime, but it still was a deeper pool than my lead and line could sound.
The main gates which let loose the traffic off of the Bride's north-eastern Road into the city, poured that rush of traffic into the city's many arteries. The rhythm of hoove and wagon, wheel and trace drove the life-blood of the city to a familiar beat, like the beating of a living heart. It was a good mile along one of these side-arteries, eastward from its intersection with the broad Road to the gates of the Arsenal complex, which laid along the eastern shore of the small sea or lake – called by the locals a Lagoon – upon which the city's waterfront rested. Along this artery – this long, broad boulevard – was a series of swiftly-shuttering marketplaces, interspersed with blocks of tall, officious-looking brownstone buildings. All the bureaucracy of the baronies seemed concentrated on those narrow frontages, block after block of solicitors' and barristers' offices, tax-collectors, doctors, accountancies, and other, less identifiable abominations in the eyes of the ancestors and the absent alicorns. By the bright and profligate lights blooming from the second stories of these prosperous-looking buildings, the professionals who did business during the day at street-level lived at night above their places of profession.
Once you got within a dozen blocks of the Arsenal – past that last, broad market-square – you walked then into the district which supported the industry of the docks and the construction-yards. Roperies, petty ironmongeries, oakum manufacturers, sail-weavers. Oh, my stars, the sail-makers – the inland rivers and byways of central Tambelon provided a lesser need for the vast expanses of sail than those the ocean-trawlers demanded, and yet, more ponies' labour went into those small squares and triangles of white sail than just about anything else I can think of. Shop after shop of weavers, sewers, stitchers - the alleys stretching out to the north and south from the main boulevard gave view of the endless ranks of the seamsters and the weavers at work under candle-light long into the night. During the day, you could see the naked masts of those ships – for whom the output of the sail-makers and all of their kin laboured – rising in the distance along the slips above the great lagoon. That first night, darkness obscured all but the nearest from my mortal sight. I could have, if I chose, have seen them – but a little jenny with glowing green demon-eyes would have drawn the gendarmes, and alarmed the neighborhood.
The slave-pens were tucked neatly and discretely away from the sight of the freeponies, down long and narrow passages around the back side of the Arsenal. I learned later that the Coriolanus Arsenal's long history was one of free labour, free ships and free sailors. They did not like to advertise how compromised and degraded those great principles had become in this degenerate era.
I had no excuse to tour the Arsenal at that late hour, not by my lonesome. I could have piled on the heavy illusions, and walked under cover of the Mistress's Night, but soon enough for the day, and legitimate explorations.
That night was less long than many we had spent in the weeks leading up to our arrival in the Order's new, if temporary home. A surprising number of ponies simply slept, dreaming their own, individual nights away. I slept alone, and somewhat lonely. I missed Whirlwind, and Bad Apple, and even, damn her, Cherie. I could have sought out the Filly and tried to connect over all of these miles to ponies of home, to home. But I decided, I resolved, to not lean so heavily on dream-walking, and the shortcuts it offered. I could see myself simply going to sleep one night, and never returning. There was something so liberating about the world offered by the Mistress, the Princess and the Filly. It was dangerously easy to ask why you should return to a world with edges, full of sharpness and gravity and dead things looking to recruit among the living.
That was a long night; I greeted the first morning of slaving under the whip of the masters of the Arsenal with my Marsh Wisp mask on straight, and a song of greeting to the rising sun in my heart.
You could see the dismay, the embarrassment on the faces of the donkeys and ponies in the retinue of the Master of the Arsenal when he visited us that morning. We were far, far more than he had expected. No single slave was in a position to hear the whole of the muttered conversation between the Master and his master-builders, his aides, and his factotums. But all of us together, were able to patch together the gist of the argument, and understand the dimensions of the problem we had provided them, and the potentials.
We were far more than they had expected, and they didn't have need for nearly as many oarsponies as we could provide. Yes, the slips and the waters of the great lagoon were full of unmared, mothballed galleys of all types, and most sizes – but they didn't have the marines to hold those ships in the face of our numbers! And even given enough armed loyalist troops to allow that, we still were too many. The great arsenal had been laying down and fitting out an average of a ship every six days for the past two seasons – operating at full capacity at the urgent demand of the authorities, driven by the fear of the situation, and the exigencies of the war. Twenty great war-galleys - triremes bristling with oars, seats enough for two hundred rowers each – and twenty smaller ships, some seating one hundred and twenty, some eighty or sixty.
The new ships would barely seat two-thirds of our numbers. Even if they put us into some of the hulks they'd been saving for fire-ships, that would only absorb another thousand, at most. And they already had over a thousand convicts and other slaves in the pens, destined for a galley seat and a chained oar.
It took time - precious time – to piece together their conversation, and develop their concerns, almost in tandem with the master shipwrights themselves, as they talked through the resource problem. Stomper, sitting on a cot towards the front of the barracks-complex, demonstrated a celerity of comprehension which amazes in retrospect - she drew her conclusions at lightning speed, and made an executive decision in the moment, on the spot. She yelled at me through the Filly, and I scrambled to make my part of the fix while other ponies hurriedly forged new delivery documents for the hovering 'guards' to swap out from under the hooves and eyes of the distracted, arguing clutch of shipwrights.
I made fifteen hundred ponies disappear from sight, chosen at random, based almost entirely on who was farthest from the arguing Coriolanian ponies and donkeys. The Filly and I herded our suddenly-obscured excess ponies back along the rear walls, slipping into gaps and holes opened up the night before by enterprising Order ponies under the smiling eyes of our complicit guards. The rest of the 'slaves' milled slightly about, doing their best to amble in a fashion which didn't attract attention.
Not that it didn't. But when a sharp-eyed jenny noticed the slaves shuffling about, that broke up the conclave, and caused them to look closer at the actual head-counts in the barracks. It took some time for them to bully the guards into locking down the buildings, and take a census, wherein they discovered the actual numbers, seated in regimented fashion at the foot of each inmate's cot, or at least, those who got cots. Too many of us had been obliged to sleep on the dusty, filthy floors…
Once they took an actual census, they discovered our numbers to be much less than advertised by the bills of delivery and supply; much furor was no doubt to come later down the line, as the bureaucrats were set on the problem of the missing slaves. Messages were sent up through the ranks to Broken Sigil and the Lieutenant of the Company, and when the forensic accountants arrived, they would likewise arrive at the correct conclusions – that this official or that had diverted labour to this project or that, and whittled away the actual ponypower delivered to the Arsenal, who had been billed for the delivery of the whole.
Which left us the problem of organizing ourselves after the Master and his shipwrights stomped off to their offices, muttering logistics to themselves the whole way. When the coast was clear, I led my random cavalcade back into the barracks, and Stomper got together with her brigade commanders, who decided which partial brigade would take Prench leave and eventually to find their own ways onto the boats when the time came.
The remaining brigades were eventually driven out of the barracks by our bellowing guards, who sent them tromping hither and yon on various deliveries here and there within the Arsenal, up and down the curling streets of suppliers and manufacturers, and out along the docks and piers, and then, infuriatingly, mostly back again. I missed a great deal of hurry-up-and-wait while I slipped the actual fifteen hundred ponies reduced-in-force out of the city. This was an infuriating, long and painstaking process that I do not care to commit to paper, lest I have occasion to exfiltrate an entire demi-brigade out of a semi-hostile city again one of these days. Suffice to say, I now know how Obscured Blade plays his tricks, and I must admit, I was surprised how little power it took to pull it off. Took a while, though.
I was one tired pseudo-pony when I finally made it back to my battalion the day after that. Lucky for me, I wasn't supposed to look like I was in charge, and the ones who were supposedly directing us in our labours had no more idea of what they were going to do with us than I. By that afternoon, my ponies found themselves hauling bundled oars out to mothballed galleys east of the Arsenal slips, where they had been stashed by the shipwrights in their urgency and their alleged industry.
Great ship after great ship lay under sailcloth covers, leaning against their supports on dryland slips, waiting for masters, crew, and rowers to populate their empty hulls. They lay without oars, without supplies, and some without masts, their caulking drying or dried out, some in desperate need of pitching. We were supposed to be simply hauling equipment and materials, but it quickly became obvious that this blasted fleet would never weigh anchor if matters were left in the hooves of the overwhelmed, addlepated shipwrights. The great masses of wasted work, wasted material, wasted potential was breath-taking in its comprehensiveness. They had taken a mountain, and let it waste away into a plateau of mole-hills.
I heard from more than one of my ponies the rather pungent opinion that these civilians were either fifth-columnists or incompetents. I laughed at my converts, so swiftly turned from one side to the other, mocking the hapless loyalist shipwrights in their inefficiencies. Then I heard the explanations underlying their contempt, and was illuminated.
The story goes, that as the great Arsenal fell on degenerate times, many freedom-loving artisans had left the great Arsenal in the years before the rebellion of the White Rose. According to my troops, it was much-celebrated, this exodus of the shipwrights - an event of great importance in the history of their revolution. Songs were sung of the Exile Shipwrights, who had come out east. They sailed up the long tributaries of the Trade, and settled along the heavily-forested fringes of the west, to harvest masts and lumber, to build boats and shipping for the West and her waters. The Exile Shipwrights – whose journeymares and apprentices had fought in the initial skirmishes and riots of the war – who had built a half-dozen wilderness echoes of the great centralized Arsenal among whose gutted and listless hulk we laboured – whose great ships had seized the central reaches of the Great River – whose great ships had driven down the Imperial Fleet in that catastrophic battle on the Housa.
We, children of a less heroic age, found ourselves in chains, and stuck with those heroic builders' hidebound rivals in the Arsenal of the East. Those uninspired captains of industry – who scrabbled here and there upon the shores of Coriolanus's wide Lagoon – who built ships only to let them go to rot unused on the shore – who struggled to recruit sailors in sufficient numbers to get those ships afloat.
We, their captive slaves, began undoing the neglect we found everywhere, secretly appropriating materials and hiding our labour from their slack and distracted oversight.
Somepony had to get these blasted boats in the water, before winter's gales shut down all traffic on the rivers.