FFMS034
The first draft I wrote of this was full of drama, and angst, and high-strung tensions. In retrospect, I hung on events more than they carried in the waking world. We were slaves, doing the bidding of others, and in so doing, made our goals reality. It is easy to make such the subject of over-exaggerated melodrama.
In truth, getting work done without anypony realizing you're responsible for it getting done is a comedy of attribution. It is known: slaves are not eager workers, they're not industrious, they're not motivated, and whenever they're seen to be any of those three things, it sets off alarms in any observant onlooker. How do you avoid being seen as industrious, and motivated, and eager, when you are patently all of these things to any unbiased observer? The ponies of the Order wore our chains in public, and we could not be seen to run with them a-jangling – it would be heard as an alarm, a klaxon that there was a slave revolt in progress.
Oh, the lords they tell us what to do.
Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.
Sing a carrying song for the masters new.
Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.
Sing a hauling song for the masters old.
Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.
Sing a running song for the masters, all.
Whip in hoof and a song in their mouths.
To be successful, a slave must be a clown. Each band of Order ponies dredged up their own little memories, skits, ways of behaving – they dug down, and remembered for the first time how to be mechanics – to be those lightweights that surround the heroes and heroines of the main action of the play – the tumblers and the fools, the silly fools who dance and sing in between the soliloquies and the grand duels.
"Hey, Honored Bright! What's the penalty for not bringing the master's sailcloth?" asked the head slave of her fellow burdened servants.
"A whipping, Head High," chorused the column
"What's the penalty for sleeping on the job?"
"A whipping, Head High."
"What's the penalty for being late with the needles and the thread?"
"A whipping, Head High."
"Well, I think it's about time to take a nap, my most Honored Brightness – we're late with the master's needles and thread."
Nopony is alarmed by a clown when they're clever, because it's always a foolish sort of cleverness. The slave trying to get one over on his captors, her masters.
"Oh, milord, I'm not supposed to be here – these materials are three days late – pretend we weren't here, and we'll deliver X for you tomorrow! Oh, sure, we can make something happen. Just give Midsummer Shadow at the end of the line the details, yeah!"
It's amazing how much ponies will let you do for them when you present it all as a petty sort of corruption – of getting one over on the Masters. They feel virtuous in a sleazy sort of way whenever they help slaves trick their Masters – especially if the help they give benefits they themselves in some material fashion. And oh, did their slaves prove useful for them, once we had re-cast it all as a sort of tit for tat, a way of getting over.
"Hey, can't you let us past, marster? The hobbledehoys and I, we're running short on time, yanno? The big mare, she'll be stroppy if we don't make this run. No, no, we can do that. Easy loads, and I know you won't whip us if we're a little late, right? Oh! Oh, come on now – that's not how you get your loads on time, Honored Bright!"
So it went in getting about, moving materials around. The rest of the time, we worked on not being seen. Concealed workshops were improvised alongside of the most decrepit, problematic hulls, and certain ponies among the herd snuck materials to the hidden workers in between all the clever shuffling for the benefit of the freepony labourers and artisans.
Hurrying in public became an art. Hovers, carriers, and other menials found ways to hurry while appearing to dawdle and laugh. Our complicit guards performed their own little skits of display, deliberately attracting attention – blustering, bellowing, swaggering and generally behaving theatrically. Many of them started wearing long red feathers in their half-helms, and they bobbed distractingly whenever their rants and boasts reached a fever-pitch. Nopony pays attention to the drab, downcast slave when a veritable Miles Gloriosus is in full bellowing form beside them. Sometimes, they were able to organize impromptu columns of carriers hurrying at the double-step with their burdens while the guards cracked their whips overhead and shouted their heads off.
"Oye, oye! Prance lightly, the lot of ye! Sweetcheeks, why ya gotta drag your frogs like that, make me look so feeble, so weak. The faster you lot move, the sweeter our cider sips when the day's done, lovies! Don' make me crack this whip again!"
The shipwrights were duly impressed by this latest group of guards – so much so, they never thought to ask where exactly this particular batch had come from. We had come up with a 'legend' about the Army of the North dumping all of their 'omega companies' on guard duty, but as I said – no questions. The donkeys of Coriolanus just never asked. The guards did their duty – extravagantly so – and the slaves didn't cause problems, so that was that.
Slave-drivers drive.
To the whistle of the whip!
Slave-driven drag their frogs.
Here come the whistle of the whip!
Don' matter how hard slave-driver drive.
Singing with the whistle of the whip!
We get there when the day is done.
And still the whistling of the whip!
Very few of us had any experience in caulking, or rigging, or many of our dozens of little industrious tasks. It was caulking in particular that was the most urgent task in getting our ships ready for the water. The Filly and the Nightmare worked overtime, spreading knowledge from our two or three 'experts' on the subject, even if that expertise was a few weeks spent years ago on the task. We made do; it was all we could do, after all.
Fetch and carry!
Tote that bale!
Fetch and carry!
Haul up that sheet!
Fetch and carry!
Since you can't stitch worth a damn!
You gonna fetch and carry, bae!
The various artisans assigned to get the ships up and running were a mixed bunch, as any slice of equinity taken unawares generally were. Some were enthusiasts, all bustle and adrenaline, some were slackers, barely delivering what was explicitly expected of them by their overseers – some just floated along with the stream, and delivered what they could, when they could. We developed strategies for dealing with each type of pony, with each class of mark.
"Honored Bright, this load was delivered while you were on the starboard pays. Where'd you need it?"
"Honored Bright, we tried to caulk this seam, is it what you needed?"
"Honored Bright, our apologies, she's just not that swift, and hain't been since she caught that clubbed shaft to the poll last spring. We'll re-do, just show us the how and the why, if you have the time."
The enthusiast were assigned a quiet retinue of Order ponies to shadow their every move, watch how they worked, help them without seeming to help them, and most importantly – give them every opportunity to shine in any way they were capable of shining. If we had to do the work, as we did with the slackers, we would – but better that the trained artisans rig the sheets, fit the masts, seat the benches and oars – to do all the infinite little tasks that devoured the time of trained workers in the fitting-out of a ship of war. We weren't artisans, and we couldn't make ourselves trained in the time we had available. So whenever we could, we cheated.
In the dreamworld, our shadowers practiced the skills they had spied.
In the dreamworld, we could re-set the broken frame, wipe clean the mis-tied sheets, undo the mis-caulked seam, unpitch the bungled pays.
In the dreamworld, we didn't have to shuck and jive.
In the dreamworld, it wasn't reality. It was something better, somewhere we didn't have to play the part of the fool.
But the dreamworld wasn't reality, the skills practiced weren't true muscle-memory, the work done meant nothing in the physical world and on the physical ships, and the results were less easy to transfer in the world of playacting, of hiding in plain sight, and in working with stubborn, material stuff than one could have hoped. Our secret workshops produced only modest trickles of additional work, out of the sight of any possibly alarmed onlookers. And the actual workers were too few, too poorly managed, and too… average to get done what we needed done. There was never enough time in the real world.
Our nightly officers' meetings in the dreamworld quickly became raucous, unproductive. Everypony was morbidly fixated upon our onrushing seasonal deadlines, and our lack of progress caused a great deal of anxiety. Even breaking down the meetings into brigade gatherings didn't reduce the cacophony, it only shrunk the arguments down to where individual ponies could get into each others' faces instead.
So the Nightmare intervened, one dream-time about two days into the project.
"Enough! Enough, you fools. You clearly have too much energy on your hooves. We need to burn it out of you! And I don't have enough brands to do it with literal fire. Let us now, my angry little ponies, get that aggression out of you the old-fashioned way!"
"With dodgeball." She conjured a round, stuffed pig-skin in her dream-magic, and flung it in the face of the most red-cheeked and irate of the battalion commanders, the Third's Oak Heart.
"Milady, what is this? A hoofball?" asked Oak Heart. He wasn't the swiftest officer in my brigade, but he recovered well from having an object smash him in the dream-mug. "I don't know that I want to waste time putting together a hoofball team."
"Nonsense! You all are too worked up for anything as structured as hoofball. This is something far simpler than that – a mere foal's game. Surely you all have played this in your youth!" A dozen hoofballs materialized out of the air, over what now was an empty room with a line painted down the middle of it. The other brigades' officers had appeared all around us, pulled from their own meetings.
"It's played like this –" her magic took three of the floating balls, and flung them at two battalion commanders and Brigadier Whispering Wheat. One battalion commander was knocked down, one avoided the ball thrown at her, but the Brigadier, he grabbed the hurtling ball in his forehooves, and it knocked him back a bit on his rear legs.
"Ya dodge, yer worship?" asked the grinning Brigadier. And then he flung it right back at the great Spirit.
The room was sudden chaos, as ponies ran for the floating balls, and began hurtling them at each other with abandon. Sometimes, you just have to forget your worries, and just paste the ever-living pony out of someone.
The nightly dodgeball tournaments gave us a necessary vent, to unload the excess aggression and stress built up over a day's spent in faking and slaving and enduring the sound of the whip. The guards generally caught it the worst in dream-dodge-ball, but they were game. They got to whip us all day long, after all.
Some few ships were put into commission by the middle of the second week, and the guards herded some gaggles of Order slaves to the slips – some of us to push the boats into the water, some of us onboard to take our places on the rowers' benches. The crews' barracks in the Arsenal were full of recruits brought down from the Inland Sea, and they swarmed the decks of the new-refurbished galleys, yelling at each other, yelling at the ship, yelling at the oar-slaves. You could barely tell there were ships-masters and captains in among all of the yelling – their crews barely paid any attention to the ponies supposedly running their ships.
Personally, I got a kick out of the bluster of the ships' crews. Shame what would have to happen to them when the time came.
Our oarponies had trained constantly in the dreamworld for this very task, but we could hardly let the ships' crews know that their newly-bought galley-slaves knew their business too quickly, too soon. So there was a great deal of splashing about, of back and forth and general grabflankery in the waters of the great lagoon.
We generally managed to avoid plunging any of the new-hung rams into any unsuspecting targets in the course of the 'training'.
The scattering of true slaves in the slave-barracks of the Arsenal had presented us a challenge. They were in too close with us, flank to muzzle, packed into the communal quarters. We could hardly keep from that sharp-eyed, thin-withered property that their fellow 'slaves' were up to something. Nopony watches as close, as clearly, as sharply as chattel whose every future moment is dependent on the starts and foibles of those around them.
So we gave them something to buy into, a reason to play along with the pageant. If there's anything a slave wants – more than love, more than ease, more than safety, more than freedom itself – it's to belong to something which is love, which is safety, which is freedom, and better than all three. Slaves will fall into conspiracy, build their secret societies, given the slightest opening, the slightest opportunity.
And we were the mother of all opportunities, the queen of secret societies, the grandest conspiracy those owned ponies would ever encounter.
They were easy prey for the recruiters of the Order. As equine material goes, they were not the best. The slave-pens of Tambelon are rarely full of great warriors, wise statemares, or even, all that often, strong backs. Those with the skills and talents to keep out of the slave-pens, generally manage it before being sent to the Arsenal's barracks. These were in many respects the scrapings of the gutters – those who were just barely not worth being sold to unscrupulous necromancers looking to fill out their ghoul quotas for the month.
Certain hard-hoofed handlers were assigned from the 'old Order' to deal with the new recruits. The ones that were ready, were ushered into a back-room where I ran them through the ceremony, as abbreviated as I could justify. One had to maintain the standards, however warped, however far we'd walked from the old methods.
I looked at these scrawny, desperate-eyed losers, and wondered what Sawbones would think of his sort-of-brethren. Did the old Company consider those of us seconded to the Order to still be, Company ponies? We all were bladed into the same brotherhood of the Night, children alike of the Spirit – that greedy, envious, jealous Spirit, who claimed every new pony to love and to coddle in her endless night of dreams. She took to visiting every new swearing-in ceremony, appearing to the new recruits as they passed before the blade.
We only had to clean up the room the once – and that guy, they kept a special watch on poor Phillippe Pantalon after that. We gave him the benefit of the doubt – and kept him away from the cider and the harder stuff.
I made the case for the recruitment of the ships' crews, where we could, when we could. The more of them inside the Order, the easier the moment when the crisis arrived. I didn't convince enough officers to get resources assigned to the project, but they didn't ban it outright. I just needed to figure out how to draw those hard-bitten sea-dogs into conversation, into conspiracy, all on my lonesome, without diverting anypony from the actual, vital tasks at hoof.
And the docks and the slips buzzed with activity, roared with song, and thrummed with industry, as the galleys of the fleet bumbled around the waters of the lagoon, splashing and thumping the urgent fall days away.