//------------------------------// // The Fleet of Charon // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// FFMS042 We met the resupply convoy in the wide, slow pool just upstream from the half-burned, entirely-abandoned wreck of a town on the southern shore of the Housa. There were over a dozen such towns on either side of that grand river, and every single one we had seen so far were empty, abandoned and half-wrecked. But even if the town was gone, the wide spot in the river remained, beside the burnt piers and the wrecked merchant-galley laying across the landing-beach beside the piers. We had been obliged to reverse the fleet's column for the emptied dromons to reach the supply ships in the rear of the heavies. Although the Housa was a wide and deep river, it wasn't that wide, nor nearly that deep across its entire width, in every reach. Where the river was wide and slow, you could comfortably deploy three heavy war-galleys abreast, or an entire squadron of dromons. But for much of the length of the Housa, and in any reach with obstructing islands, the river moved faster and narrower, with side-passages and sandbars and byways and hidden tributaries lurking along the heavy-limbed wooded verges of the shore. Many of the tributary streams were themselves wide and deep enough to hide a number of pinnaces, or a dromon or two. Lurking within these streams might be one or more the White Rose's pocket-galleys, though not so large as our heavies, still ship enough to drive their proper steel-headed rams into an unwary opponent. The freighters rode low with their supplies in their holds when we met them by the side of that sleeping town. Our dromons lined up to winch over our resupply one by one from the slow, patient civilian ships. The stevedores swung the supply-crates and naphtha tanks across on long booms, and some of these donkeys hung onto the booms to guide them with their weight, dangling from their netting by their hooves beside their cargo. The crew of each ship swarmed the crates and tanks as they landed on their upper decks, clearing them into the narrow, tight holds of each military vessel. The civilian stevedores snapped up the empty crates and tanks in return, then slapped the deck as they left, prompting the ship-masters to start up the oar-banks to clear the booms for the next ship in line. As the ship I was riding took on its resupply, I carefully sniffed the naphtha tanks one by one, pretending to be a crew-donkey checking for leaks. No smell of death on any of them, thank the Rose. The seals had held. The resupply took all afternoon, and as the weather shifted, smoke began to cast a pall over the work. While everypony was distracted by the chaos of the transshipment and the increasingly bad air, a number of shadows slipped across under cover of glamour and misdirection. Among them were some last-minute reinforcements to hide with the rest of our supercargo, and my fellow-witches, arrived to help with the campaign's expected high demand for illusion, phantasm, and other typical Company witchcraft. That morning's exchange of fire on the reach below our rendezvous point had given our squadrons an excuse to move upriver and meet with the freighter convoy. Our suborned and replaced ship-masters had wasted naphtha fire with abandon, lighting everything in sight on fire, until the whole of the river had been burning from one shore to the other, and the enemy's pike-line of huge, staked logs driven into the riverbed had been set alflame like all the brush and drowned trees lining the flaring river. The enemy ships themselves had fled in well-considered terror from our display. Reports were that the commodore was as overjoyed at the enemy's rout as she was enraged that the flames were too intense for her heavy galleys to follow up the chance. Without the fire, the staked line of obstructions would still have kept the fleet from passing the choke-point. You could barely pass a dromon at a time through the side-channels which had allowed the enemy pinnaces to retreat. They got away, those that had survived the initial repulse. Two, maybe three squadrons of tiny little river-galleys, long-beaked rammer-craft smaller than the dromons had come booming up the river in the early hours just before dawn, and brushed aside our pinnaces. We'd lost two of those to the clash and the rams, and a third eventually impaled against the now-burning hedge of sharpened stakes and poles built across the sides of the river, blocking the central channel between two islands narrowing the stream into a choke-point. Both the islands were now an inferno of uncontrolled wild-fires. If I didn't know for a fact that they were unoccupied, I would have felt guilty about the devastation. With the river a sea of fire, all we could do was retrieve the surviving crew and oarponies off of the destroyed pinnaces. The pinnace crews lost a fair number of donkeys and ponies to the engagement, all of them Coriolani or recruited from neighboring towns, and none part of our conspiracy. I'd had no opportunity to go recruiting among the pinnacemares and stallions, and their oarponies were criminals and other unfortunates, largely drawn from other parts of the Lagoon shore. The engagement in front of the first line of obstructions had chewed up the pinnaces, though, which meant that the dromons would have to sail closer to the van in order to support the survivors more closely. They couldn't take too many more repulses like that and retain their espirit. They weren't Company, after all. They weren't even Order. Well, nothing to be done about it. Battle must be given, and battles aren't fought without losses. Not unless you're staging one hell of an imitation of a battle, that is. Which is what we were putting the last final few preparations in place, that afternoon. Once the freighters had pulled out of range, the ponies and donkeys of the dromons began breaking open the false naphtha tanks, smashing them open with the butt-ends of billhooks and belaying pins. And it was when those containers were breached, that the hideous stench rose over the dromon squadrons. From one ship to the next, it rose as a miasma. Death, old death, unnatural, horrible death in every pony's nostrils. The witches came out of their hiding-places, still soaked from having snuck across from the freighters in the confusion. I exchanged greetings with my elders in the Company, although none of us were within shouting distance of each other. The wonders of the princess-radio. We got to work on the suppression of the smell of the old, inert corpses we'd successfully smuggled on board the dromons. Oh, no necromancy for us, don't worry about that. We didn't need the undead - just bodies. You'll see, soon enough. The ship-masters brought their boats within crossing distance as they worked downstream, slowly. Gibblets, Otonashi, the Crow and I jumped from ship to ship as we went, enchanting each cargo-hold against the amazing smell of old corpses and hiding away the cargo so that casual visitors wouldn't detect them. I was not sure how well anypony would be fooled by this ancient, rotted flesh once it hit the river, but it would make a first approximation if nopony looked closely at the bodies in the water afterwards. When night came, we sent our ships out to the site of the day's battle under cover of clearing the obstructions in the main channel for the main fleet. While a hoof-full of dromons did the actual work we were assigned, the rest fished as many fresh bodies out of the wrecks and the water as they could find, without any torches or lanterns to aid their search or to let the galleymares know what we were up to. The Nightmare gifted the searchers with thestral sight so that they could see where they were going, and allowed the ship-masters to keep their own ships from impaling themselves upon the wreckage and the sharpened stakes still standing, however charred. That night, as the Order pulled White Rose corpses of both sides from the river, Cherie and the Spirit haunted our enemies from overhead. White phantasms overflew their ships throughout the night, singing unearthly songs without lyrics or discernible words. Only a terrible, high wailing, which came in waves as the wide-winged things moved slowly through the night. Cherie reported the endless barrage of petit batards they wasted upon her illusions, and was vastly self-satisfied at her newfound ability to maintain Company-quality glamours of the necessary size and duration to ensure that all that fire was indeed wasted. I was simply pleased that the two – or three or four, however you count the Spirit when they were in conference with our Cherie – the (however many of them!) of them had managed to keep the enemy awake and alert and alarmed throughout a night that the enemy should have spent resting and planning for our demolition. A tired and distracted enemy was vastly preferable to one on her game, after all. The distracted enemy did not show their faces north of the islands that night, and left the next half-dozen reaches and two narrow passages to us without a fight. We took a long, stressed pair of days to slowly inch our way down the river, pinnaces and their dromon supports crawling through uncertain side-channels and up tributaries, looking for the trap, the inevitable trap. And each night, a new wave of phantasms and screaming omens sought out the enemy, to spread alarms and disturbed the rest of a hopefully frazzled opposition. Assuming that Cherie and her assistants could find the enemy. Her pegasi escorts reported repeated contacts, and the enemy remained close enough to shadow us in the night. But during the day they fell back far enough that we on the ships never laid eyes on them. And the stench of our cargo grew increasingly foul and difficult to mask. The timberlings grew restless, and I had to re-apply my blood-runes on those animate tangles of brush to keep them from breaking cover and alarming the shrinking pool of the unsuborned among the fleet. I also took this opportunity of our dromons working so closely with the pinnaces to recruit here and there. Not that the plan expected that we would be taking them with us! We hoped to send off the truly loyal upstream on the pinnaces, 'survivors' fleeing in plain view, the better to explain the absence of prisoners when the time came. But it would aid in the deception, if we could get the pinnaces to play their part knowingly. And if they came to grief in the fall-out – well, the Company could use its own, tiny fleet in the chaos that was sure to come. I was beginning to suspect that we'd somehow broken the spirit of the damned enemy, and she'd never cooperate and offer a proper fight. What if they just gave up, and retreated all the way into the Great River? Wouldn't it be ironic if all our preparations had been for naught, and we inadvertently raised the siege of the Second Mouth, still apparently loyal? Thankfully, the next day the enemy took the opportunity provided by our approach of another picketed, barricaded choke-point, once again to be found between a larger island in the stream and a long sandbar. They lurked in a wide tributary to the south behind the island, large enough to hide multiple squadrons stacked in those narrow but deep waters. A single squadron of small river-galleys stood downstream below the line of obstructions, likewise screened by their surviving pinnaces. Proper bait for the trap, made even more convincing by a scree of workers in row-boats scrambling away from the half-built line of staked obstructions in the river. Perhaps they thought they'd fooled us. But as tangled as the river could be, it was still a linear potential battlefield, and they were spotted from overhead by our pegasi overwatch before the jaws of their trap could close on our vanguard, helpfully lunging for the bait. Their battle-line burst out of their close, coming on a half-squadron frontage, as wide of a deployment as they could manage in the tight quarters of the confluence. I'm sure they thought they had our van dead to rights. Poor, sad fools. The galley main force was in place to sweep into their upstream flank, three galleys wide, as closely as they could sail and not foul each others' sweeps. A full third of their committed force was trapped before they could turn about and defend themselves. The rest sprang forward, and caused their own damage among our dromons before they saw they had been flanked. One of our ships was stove in, and another lost her entire left bank of oars to the rush of a ram. Dozens of oarponies were crushed against their benches and the bulwarks in the sudden crash. Almost a hundred were crippled in the collision. The fact that twice as many of the enemy ships were stove in by our own battle-line meant nothing to the Order, who died or were crippled in their seats, paying with their lives for the opportunity that the rest of the fleet seized. The remaining dromons laid into the ambuscade with their bolt-throwers, their naphtha projectors, and the javelins of the marines. The marines upon the stricken ships charged their opposite numbers upon the galleys which were ram-bound with their targeted dromons. It was a moment of chaos, and I found myself on the ship whose oar-bank had been caught up in a battle-galley's ram. The marines on the victorious galley outnumbered our own contingent by three to two, and I picked up a belaying pin to support the barded marines. I couldn't let all of our plans be wasted by an idiot accident of battle, a mere collision. I didn't even use my mystical resources in the fight – no matter how strongly my sense of self-preservation prodded me to strike down these fools before they ruined everything. I fought like a proper salt-donkey, brutish and enthusiastic beside my fellow sailors. A few of the 'oar-slaves' jumped up from their benches, tripping up surprised White Rose marines, and distracting them at exactly the right time. Hopefully nopony on the other ships of the White Rose fleet were paying close enough attention to notice that we had unchained oarponies on board. The marines who had actually boarded us were thrown off their pace sufficiently for our surviving 'loyalist' marines and deck-crew to drive them back onto their own ship, and sweep over their sides in turn. By this point in the exchange, several of our war-galleys had come to the aid of our stricken dromons, and the superior fire-weight of their deck-mounted war-engines began to tell against the enemy. Their resistance collapsed like a wave, their unbound ships, not tangled up with victims or stove in by loyalist rams, turning and running as each ship-master spotted their own mortal danger, according to their individual powers of observation. The enemy commodore had by that point lost all control of her ships, I think. Each boat was being fought by their own ship-masters as if they were two dozen flotillas of one, rather than a closed hoof of a fleet directed by a single mind. And so, the enemy ships turned and fled – shamefully! – from their failed ambush, while the half-dozen or so entangled ships were left to their fate. Our marines passed along the length of each stricken ship, subduing the resistance of the trapped and isolated crews and marines and oarponies as they went. Half of the fleeing ships went up the tributary, and a squadron of dromons pursued them closely. Eventually, they grounded out their ships and fled overland, leaving their small ram-galleys and pinnaces and other supporting ships to be burnt – empty-hulled – by the naphtha-throwers. By my count, we lost forty-five dead in the fighting that morning, and twice that many mangled and crippled in the collision and the fighting. We took seven ships, and perhaps five hundred prisoners, more than half wounded. See attached appendix for the names and the circumstances of the dead. The Order wasn't the Company, but some traditions shall continue, the old Spirit within her new shell. The commodore was talked into shipping the prisoners back up-river in the emptied freighters, securely hobbled hoof and limb. Not much we could do about those poor fools, and we couldn't work our magic with hostile, unprocessed prisoners on board. This shattering defeat was the opportunity we had been waiting for. Our fleet's commodore took her own opportunity, and sent us racing forward deep into enemy waters. We would wait our chance – until the enemy was in utter despair, was desperate, was trapped with a victorious fleet bearing down upon their vital points. Then – then! The only question then became how much of the loyalist core would have to be 'slaughtered', and how to hide the prisoners from observation until they could be dealt with, smuggled out, or snuck into the fold. Tomorrow would be the day, I thought, as I slaved over the stinking corpses in our holds, trying to stave off the unimaginable smell. Onward we beat, following the current down the river, carrying our cargo of corpses and betrayal. The mentioned appendix with the lists of the dead is missing from the trove of manuscripts. I'm not sure if this was deliberate, or simply an oversight on the part of whomever it was that edited this collection. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives