In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


The Stage And The Play, or, The Sermon

FFMS035

The Brigadier pulled me aside one night after our general officers' meeting.

The Princess had been the presiding Aspect that night, and our deliberations had been held in a dream-space in half-darkness, lit by the full moon, the first stars of evening, and spell-lights flickering in wall-sconces. The walls and furnishings had continued the theme of 'beautiful night', and the Spirit herself had worn her usual Princess regalia, and usual, dreamy, Princess smile.

The Filly, whose affect was almost designed to appeal to the beliefs and expectations of our former White Rose comrades, was in attitude and affect a child, innocent and guileless. She was the image of the White Rose, reborn again for her troubled world. And the Nightmare? It amused her to playact, to semble, to wear the costume, the appearance of that which the Rose-knights expected of their hosts. The Nightmare might be occasionally irrational, but it was a theatrical, broad, actorly sort of madness, the sort that plays to the rear benches and the pit.

The Princess, I am afraid to say, had a different sort of lunacy – subtle, reticent – one that hid itself in quiet, shy ways. She said little to her new followers when she was the Princess, choosing rather to loom, regally, silently, serenely. This silence covered a great deal of lack of understanding. When the Spirit was the Princess, it was debatable she truly understood where she was, and what was going on around her. She only offered unconditional love for her ponies, because, I suspect, she did not understand enough to offer anything more.

The Princess nodded to me and my Brigadier, Whispering Wheat, as we passed her seat at the head of the chamber, leaving for our next appointments in what promised to be a long night of training and planning.

"Major Feufollet, could you wear your true face for me?" asked the Brigadier. "I have difficulty taking you at your true worth while you wear that country-mare's face."

"I prefer to be Marsh Wisp while I am with the Order, sir. It helps to limit the confusion and the disorder of playing two parts on the same stage."

"Do you think of your own skin as a part, to be shed and donned like a stage-costume?"

"So consider your own face a resource of great value, a prop in the great performance we offer upon the stage which is the Company in its day to day; for we are in our own semblances a part played by the actor which is the pony in the Company, wrote the Annalist Esteem, in his third book. All the Chain's a stage, and we are merely players, Brigadier. I today play the part of Major Marsh Wisp, a mare of considerable greater age and experience than my previous role, who was a jenny not even out of apprenticeship. Would you rather a mare of substance and relation with her subordinates, or a strange and underyoung blood-mage of the wrong tribe?"

"I'm told that a blood-mage jenny took some of the local slaves into a back-room today, along with a cadre of the Order, and swore those slaves into our service. Was that not the Feufollet with whom I should be talking about this, or is there another bloodmage hidden among us, all unknowing?"

"Ah." Ah, indeed. Blast. "I was instructed by the Grand Master to begin processing the true slaves into our service, if we could take them willing. The fewer outsiders we leave uncommitted in our midst, the less the threat of disruption or exposure."

"Grand Master, bah! It's not a title I love. We've never been a faith for masters and servants. Why could we not have named Stomper 'General' like a rational sort of cult?"

"It matched the traditions of similar orders martial. Those few the Company has encountered, and their Annalists described, over the centuries, they called their commanders and rulers 'Grand Master' rather than abbot or general or any other suchlike variant. It is, in the end, just a title."

"It should have been the White Rose, who is not among us nearly often enough as it is."

"Cherie cannot spend daylight hours among us – I can hide her wings, her eyes – but I can't hide how you all act around her. She would be found out in half a day. And she still has a role to play on the outer stages. Tonight, here, we play for a select audience who would not be amused by your messiah in the flesh."

"And yours, too, or are you not a sworn member of this Order of hers?"

I blushed, caught out. "Who would swear me so? I am her minion in this, the swearing of new ponies to your standards. Who shaves the barber, who watches the watch-mare?" I tried to get out of this uncomfortable conversation. "Brigadier, I am late for my next task, I have a company to drill in –"

"Rowing practice, yes, I know," interrupted the Brigadier. "I had word sent ahead, your sergeant-major will take over that task. You shall be drilling with my headquarters-company instead."

And with that, the low-lit darkness of the Princess's dream-palace faded away from us, replaced by overcasts skies over a sketchy dock, a misty galley rising above us, and the gangplank between the two. I looked back at the Brig- no, Whispering Wheat, and realized that I wasn't getting out of it that easily.

Or at all.

We met his milling headquarters-company, who braced to salute us both. Whispering Wheat waved their salutes away, and voicelessly gestured to the benches. A moment of chaos resolved itself into everypony to a bench, and an oar, in very short order.

I sighed, and grasped my oar, sitting on the top deck of the bank. The Brigadier took the bench behind me, and his own sergeant-major the bench in front. The two decks of the bank below were within yelling distance, but the architecture of the galley gunwhale was such that simple conversation with the lower decks was difficult, if not impossible.

The pace-drummer took up the beat, and we began the pull, both bank-cadets barking out their commands to their respective banks – drawn by lot from each company in the exercise, if I did not miss my guess. We were on the starboard bank, and another, shadowy company matched us on the port side. There was no conversation as we slowly drew the great galley from its dockside repose, as this evolution took some attention and care, not to be interrupted by chatter among the oar-ponies.

Then we were into the open water, and Whispering Wheat resumed his assault on my soldierly virtue. "Such a marvel, is it not, Major Wisp? The resources and equipment of a university, a training-school - an entire world's worth of possibility, all given to us by our promised one? An entire dream-world – worlds after worlds of possibility and time, time enough to learn, to experience, to come to understand ourselves, truly? Who needs to promise a paradise in the life to come, if Wilderness were Paradise enow?"

I almost paused in my stroke, but kept up the rhythm, the bass thump of the drum felt more than heard. "You've read the Ailttashatah-Alnibihi of wa-Khiamanah?" I asked in astonishment.

"Ailttashatat-Alnnabidh, is the name, I think you'll find if you had occasion to check – Major. But I believe I've seen it more recently than you have. You were given it by your Annalist to read?" I could hear the smirk in his voice, as we continued the stroke.

"Sawbones loves to quote it, although not so much recently. When did you see a copy? I thought we had the only – "

"Copy on Tambelon? Yes, that's what he said when he gave me his copy to read. We had some interesting conversations in the cages. A strange stallion, your surgeon-scholar. I returned it before we left, of course. A properly gloomy poet, the wa-Khiamana. Although I suspect that whomever translated the book into Equuish had more of a hoof in the music of the words than the original writer. Translated from something else, I gather?"

"Yes, from Feresi, supposedly by Fatinah herself."

"Ah, the famous Fatinah. Your first Annalist? From whom, by whom all of your Company's traditions have been transmitted? We have no one single source like that of the White Rose. She had many companions survive the Great War, as bloody and all-consuming as that conflagration was. For every dozen companions killed by the fighting or the plagues that came after, some one or two survived to leave their memoirs of the filly of destiny. Have you ever heard tell of the White Rose, the great story of her life and death?"

I frowned, insulted. "But of course, sir. I was born and raised here on Tambelon. We had a copy of Les Écritures in my family's parlor, like every other respectable family in the district. She came to us in our time of torment, to pull down the Lord of Death, the Great and Terrible Ram, and destroy all of his works. She came with an army of her followers, most of whom died in the fighting, and in the end, when all was not enough, she gave more, and spent her life to bind Grogar the great and terrible within his barrow-prison, never to be risen again so long as sun rise, moon fall, and her soul restraineth him in his cursed soil."

"Ha! Even the phrasing is right – I thought you were raised in a Prench-speaking household?"

I was alarmed to hear he had learned so much of me – I thought I had been more circumspect. "It was, and what little I knew of Equuish, was from my father reading from that damnable book over family dinners, as if any of us understood a word of it. We learned it phonetically. Worthless exercise."

"Ah, well. Your priest did poorly by you, to not get you a proper Prench edition. Shame, shame. But the priests always were slack in that regard, it's why we in the preaching sects broke away in the first place. They were always more concerned with commanding the hows and wheretofores of their herds, than the state of their souls, or the eternal vigilance that the faith demands of us."

"The eternal vigilance that allowed your preaching sects to let yourselves be taken over by liches and necromancers, old stallion?"

"Ha! There's the fire I thought was in there, reflected by that fake cutie mark. Yes, we're all fools, the lot of us. Our spear-heads always pointed outwards, and never looking inside the formation for the rot, for the falseness. You see why I feel like I can't just coast without questioning what I see around me? Not anymore, not that."

Boom, boom – stroke. Boom, boom – stroke. Boom, boom – stroke.

"So what is it that you think you see around you, Whispering Wheat?" I finally asked.

Boom, boom – stroke.

"We don't really mind that your Cherie lied to us about the spirits, my jenny-mare."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Do you feel lied to, Whispering Wheat?"

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Oh, be easy upon that mark, Major. We knew coming into it that she had her sympathies, and her loyalties. Loyalty is one of the ancestral virtues, after all! Before states, before princesses, before tyrannies and republics was – faith, and loyalty. And she is definitely, unquestioningly, the White Rose come again. All of the discordant remembrances of the Companions, all the markers, all the testimonies and prophesies in the centuries since then, she matches them, every one. Even the crazy ones, the mad ones that talked about the savior who gazed with demon-eyes, the bat-winged messenger of darkness, the innocent in the company of monsters – Company indeed! All the discordant, lunatic mélange of foolishness that a millennium of quarrelling prophets could produce – all wrapped up in a bubbly, small, winged, great-lunged – angel. Do you have any idea what a confounding impossibility you and your mercenary rabble delivered to our defeated door-step?"

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Some little idea, yeah, we did. Although Sawbones always discouraged talk of it among the Tambelonian recruits. Not that White Rose esthalology is in vogue on this side of the Great River. Sounds too much like sedition since the revolt."

"Eschatology is how it's pronounced, my little jenny-mare. It was always my specialty in my preaching-days. I could whip up a decent fire-and-brimstone with the best of them, and I could do theodicy as well as anypony, but my bread and butter was eschatology. The theology of the end of days, of the return of the Filly, the Pale Pony. She would come at the fore of all the forces of Tartarus released, devils and demons and the horrors of the night – to burn out the unfaithful, and destroy the worshipers of death and decay. The return of life in the darkness, the darkness which devours darkness. There were ponies enough that took askance at those dark and foreboding books, and culled them from their sects' scriptures. Too many never read the Book of Apple-Lion, or the Letters of Halting State, and thought that salvation would only come in the daylight, smiling and talking happy talk. Fools, the lot of them – and they were the ones to bring the new magic into the fold, who supported the revolution. The loud ones, the ones who believed in redemption without sacrifice, without pain, without judgment."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Pain and sacrifice," continued Whispering Wheat, "Is the price we pay for our faults and shortcomings. So no, we don't mistake you and yours for angels of the alicorns, for righteous soldiers of Her salvation. She will be – this White Rose who won't stand to be called by that name – but you – you! We are her followers, not you."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Not all of the first White Rose's companions were righteous ponies," the old preacher-stallion went on. "Many were – if you read between the lines – mercenaries, professional soldiers, adventurers and fools. Some died, but some survived until the end – and some even afterwards. Some of the ones who wrote our scriptures, perhaps were the worst of the lot."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Salvation, like revolution, requires liars as well as saints, killers as well as holy mares," he said, his voice rising above the slap and splash of the oars in the water.

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Remember this – we are not your Company. We will love your spirits – or I should say, your Spirit – as well as we can, because it has been commanded of us. And they are, truly, loveable mares, even the loud and bombastic one who thinks she's fooling us with her masks and her playacting. But we love for Her sake. Because we know what is coming, and we know all shall be one before Death is burned from this world."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Forever and ever, amen."

Boom, boom - stroke.

"AMEN!" bellowed the whole of the Brigadier's headquarters-company, in time with the stroke.