//------------------------------// // A Song In Time Of Rebellion // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// FFMS043 "And why again are you here?" I asked. The little blue mare grinned widely at me as she labored away at her heavy sweep, trying her best to keep the rhythm of the stroke. Above us on the top seat of this row was Corporal Cake, silently and easily keeping his long-sweep moving with the beat of the drum. I pushed back my borrowed chamfron and glared at the baker. I was sweating heavily in the caparison and petyral, despite the cool autumn weather. I wasn't used to marines' barding. "Oh, don't be so grim, deary. You're far too young to be so pokered-up. It's a beautiful morning! And we're here because this is where we're supposed to be." I had been applying blood-runes to this particular galley in strategically helpful locations, and pinning down her suborned crew to paint them likewise with the sigils and markings which would allow my magic to take root when the time came, and dress them in the semblances of westerners and rebel-ponies. The runes painted on the ship's planks would support our grand illusions and tricks like a trellis-work bearing up under the runners of a wisteria or a riot of morning-glories. I had taken a break, and was headed for the fresh-water barrel and dipper placed mid-ship for the watering of the oar-ponies, when I had found the Cakes among the slaves, labouring away as if they had always been here with the Order. "Where you're supposed to be. According to who?" "Whom, you mean. It was in a dream, deary. A rather loud one. Your abomination could tell you, if you want to ask her." My gaze turned to the Nightmare, who in my mind's eye peered down through the low deck-planking, her sneering muzzle poking through the wood as if it were a cloud or an illusion. "Mistress?" "The little spy, she sees visions of a tree, of all things. A crystalline, silent, brooding tree, wrapped in terrible-thorned black vines. And what that tree says? Oh, only the little baker knows. Chiffon Swirl, what does your captive god tell you?" demanded the Nightmare. "Why can't you be quiet, you awful spook? I'm not that filly anymore, any more than you're the dusty princess you sometimes pretend to be! Who am I to ask how and why Harmony looks the way she does? Harmony tells us what we should be doing, not vicey-versey!" "Harmony, Harmony! You're like a broken record, deary!" "Ma'am, Mistress, please. I hardly have all day, do I? I have timetables, Mistress." "Oh, I have all the time in the world, Feufollet. Or – whatever name you're wearing this morning. And you have hours, days even. Nopony is sitting to watch the curtains go up, so why not pace yourself? And you'll love this story the baker has to tell. It is one for the Annals, it is." The little baker rolled her eyes in time with her oar, the drum, and the stroke. "It figures that you'd be amused by this, you giddy haunt. Death and destruction and betrayal, and here I have to follow in its train to observe." "What? You're having visions now? Are you two saying that Cup Cake's a prophet?" "Oh, really. A vision or two doesn't make one a prophet," chided the Spirit. "I'm pretty far from Equestria, can't really take commands or even suggestions from home, here. Have to rely on dream-quests instead I guess!" Cup Cake actually giggled. I'm not sure I've ever heard anypony other than Cherie do that, when matters were so serious otherwise. "But why are you here, with us? Wouldn't it have been safer and easier to keep track of the Company back with, I don't know – the Company? In Braystown?" "Have you looked at the map? Have you looked at the situation? The only thing that's going to happen back at the Shambles is a siege. The decisions, the possibilities, the pivot – they're here, with you maniacs. You're like a madpony's relay race, with this black terror tossed between trotters like a spiked baton! You're carrying her here, now. Not those stiffs behind their tumbled walls. Like a seed, or an infection… I don't know which. All I know is, I know my job, and it's to keep track of how far the horror spreads here, in this world. And to keep you where I can see you. And definitely, definitively, not on the road to Equestria! Anything else? My employers don't give a buck. So long as you stay safely here, in this half-tartarus, I'm golden." I almost went cross-eyed trying to follow Cup Cake's nonlogic. "So you think… we're about to go lunging for the portal offworld? We're moving further away from the nearest door off-world, and the others are more than half a continent away!" "Oh, I don't know what will be, I can't know that. But Harmony? She knows. I put my faith in the Harmony. It's the only thing we meek, mortal ponies can do, you know. Embody the virtues if we can, obey the Princess, harmonize with those we meet, and love each other if we can." The Nightmare, now laying so that her head was dangling upside-down beneath the deck-planks, snorted in derision. The silently listening Order ponies in the oar-benches all around us said nothing. But they were listening, believe that if nothing else. "But why us, here? When the Company, and worse, Blade is out there – thataways!" "Obscured Blade is a danger to himself and all those around him, but he'll never run off on his own, carrying his own pitiful little fragment, his sad little splinter of her abominability. He by himself can't make the sort of Nightmare he dreams about; he needs you all for that. And if you aren't careful, you'll give him what he wants, you half-baked tray of muffins!" She sighed. "Look, that vision wasn't the only one. I've dreamed about your promised filly, about poor, addled Cherie." My teeth clenched in sudden fury and possessive jealousy at her tone. What did she know? "Oh, you don't like that one? Yes, you know, I think that the ether must be absolutely alive with the import of that dangerous little flitterer. It's not all that often that a shard of harmony sings itself into existence!" "Quoi?" "Oh, don't you roll your eyes at me. Every now and again, they say, somewhere on the Chain – Harmony harmonizes with herself, sings a little song. And the higher realities, they reach down into we mere physical stuff, and they weave an instrument to sing their songs back at ‘em. Harmony births itself into a world as a mortal. A… child of harmony. A melody, if you were. A leitmotif, my primary school teacher called it. Cherie's parents sang as one with Harmony, and a miracle came into Tambelon, opened its green little eyes, and screamed out her fury at having been born." Cup Cake smiled. "Like all foals, I have no doubt she was not impressed by the miracle of her existence. But the rest of us? A loose harmonic, a tune not yet sung! She could have been literally anything, anypony, anysong!" "And a wandering band of devil-worshiping murderers snapped her up like the prize that she is. Oh, that scared us pretty bad, you bet. The harmony-shard, the melody – in the hooves of madponies!" The stroke kept on, and the little blue earth-pony kept the stroke like she had been doing this all her life, with a fury, with a vengeance. "Well, I suppose that it was all to the best. All the advantages on the Chain laid in the hooves of the madponies of the Company, and still Cherie sings her own little song. The madponies of your Order think to orchestrate her to their own sheet-music. I think perhaps that will not happen any more than 'Cherie, daughter of the Nightmare' would have happened." She smiled, vengefully. "Not White Rose, nor Nightmare's Avatar, nor Bride's Dragon, nor Peacock's Angel, nor any of a hundred other dreams of glory. That little thestral will insist on her own song, won't she? Miracles are kind of like that. They impose their own logic on the world, whatever the world thinks about the matter." Then her smile washed away in a dead-eyed stare. "Or you'll get her killed in some damn fool stunt. The choice of that is up to you, jenny. You've been given an inestimable gift by the infinite harmonic convergence of the ineffable spirit of creation itself. What will you do with it, Feufollet?" The beat of the drum rolled across the waters, and the stroke of the oars sang their roundelay in response. Back and forth, interweaving, the simplest of melodies, the most basic of harmonies. I shook my head, and looked back down at the smaller of the two Cakes. "What, so you're here to protect your precious filly? Just her?" "Oh, deary, don't be jealous. I love all of you foals. I'm just here for her. I wasn't sure for the longest time, but I figured it out, after a while. It's hard to concentrate on holy children, when there's something as distracting as this screaming horror hovering overhead, I can tell you that, don't you know!" The Nightmare, lazing giddily overhead, snickered at the jab. "Don't you worry, jenny. We won't get in your way. Unless you start trying something really stupid, then I'll be there to scream in your ear, you bet! And Carrot here will be available if you need a strong back and a heavy hoof. Won't you, dear?" "You know I will, honeybunch." I snorted, and stomped away. Too much time wasted on the Cakes and their silly game of playing house on the lip of a rumbling volcano. The long reaches of the lower Housa wandered lazily between wooded shores, twining here and there around the occasional fat island. Some of those islands were half-cultivated, their burnt buildings and wild-rotted fields testimony to the ravages of the White Rose among the depopulated Riverlands. We saw very little of the enemy for several days, as they chose to fall back with their surviving ships. The great tributaries appeared to our left, one after the other. We passed Castor and Pollux, the great fortresses of the Fourth and Fifth Mouths so far up-stream that they could not be seen from the main channel. The shores west of the mouth of the Pollux were polluted with the occasional wreckage of a raft or a shoddily-built ship. This was the stretch upon which the Highlanders had beaten out their bravery in a pointless and stupid display of upland elan. I made good use of the long cruise, and worked my way through most of the remaining galleys, rigging each with the pyrotechnics and the special effects that the coming performance would require. But even mortal noses were strong enough to smell the stench of death our cargo cast over those ships, and our time was coming close, whether or not we were ready. Only the crew of the Commodore's own ship had been spared my evangelism, when the morning of our performance dawned. Well, good enough. Well enough. That ship alone would see honest fighting. The chorus and the orchestra commenced the overture as we hove into view in the thin morning light of latest autumn. It was perhaps the last day before fell Winter washed over the limb of the year, and the river-air was brisk, sharp and cold. We approached the outer outposts of the White Rose, built on an island a quarter-day's sail upstream from their war-camps around the Second Mouth. The Company's aerial cohort coursed overhead, having taken the full measure of what we would encounter, mapped out the eyes to see, the witnesses, the audience. With this information, we'd blocked out our performance, known what angles to cover with our illusions and phantasms, when certain acts must begin and end, all so that our legend could be told through the mouths of our victims – no, our audience. The night before, Cherie and the Spirit had resumed their haunting of the wild Roses, tormenting them with apparitions and phantasms now that they knew where to put on their night-show. We could see the lights and the explosions from the ships of the fleet, off in the distance, just over the horizon. They must have expended a hundred thousand deniers worth of le petit batards in that response to the Spirit and Cherie and their illusions, and all of the confluence of the rivers must have been kept awake by that heavenly conflagration. The next morning, by that late-autumn morning light, our pinnaces scattered before the war-engines they had mounted on the islands. Our audience had dug in and revetted their heavy weapons in well-placed lunettes built on the upstream side. The pinnacers deliberately drew their fire, provoking them, waking them up so that they were both alert and focused. The audience's ships were nowhere to be seen, hidden perhaps behind the protection of those land-batteries? The pegasi knew, and they told the Commodore by mouth, and Cherie by the radio. We brought a squadron of dromons forward to threaten the entrenchments and their heavy weaponry, with naphtha fire arching overhead in a threat display. We had calculated that this was the moment of supreme tension, of terror and fear. The audience had to be convinced that they were about to die, that they would be immolated by overwhelming force. That terror and fear made them malleable. Because the next bit was the worst part of the script, the most naked we would ever be. It didn't make sense, read on the page. Dromons with their decks full of marines, and naphtha-thrower crews, ready to lay waste to the last defenses of the enemy's cowering fleet and their siege-camp beyond – and then! What was that? Why did the terrible flame-ships suddenly pause, lose headway, twist and turn in sudden un-control? Was – was that fighting on their decks? What new madness were the loyalists deploying in their unceasing campaign against the righteous? The sharper-eyed, and those with spy-glasses, spotted it first. The oar-slaves, broken free of their bonds, rising up on ship after ship, rising like a tide of equinity against the outnumbered marines. And somehow – somehow! The numbers told. Splash after splash told of heavily-barded marines forced overboard, and screams echoed across the waters as the suddenly defenseless crews were overrun by their chained oarponies. The insurrection was brief but very, very bloody, and the morning sun shone brilliantly over the blood-stained decks of the dromon squadron as it suddenly fell out of loyalist control. They yawed back and forth, the ships of the squadron, suddenly all on their own hook, their ships-master having all been thrown into the drink to drown. The audience strained at their war-machines, but the fighting had taken place entirely out of their range, and although they signaled vigourously for their own ships to come forward, the fighting was over before they were done signaling. As the pegasi and griffins of the Company stooped over them, flinging spears and javelins to slow them down, the mutinied dromons turned about, and slowly, erratically, began beating against the current, casting eastwards toward the next squadron of dromons, and the next. And those ponies with spyglasses on the islands' shore, watched in amazement as the fore-most squadron came, impossibly, about, and turned back upon our own column. All that morning and afternoon, the loyalist fleet collided with itself, the mutiny spreading by contagion and observance, as each contingent of oar-slaves observed the previous contingent having risen up and triumphant, that knowledge of successful rebellion inspiring their own, inspiring the next, and the next – until the chain-reaction found its way into the galleys, and tore through the great ships like a paroxysm of bloody freedom. And as the great ships fought their individual battles, the little pinnaces swarmed around the larger boats like foals whose parents had gone mad, quarreling destructively in public – shamed! Devastated! They peppered the convulsing dromons and galleys with sprays of fire from their bolt-throwers and javelins from their own marine contingents, trying and failing to turn the tide on any single ship in the tormented fleet. The Company's pegasi cooperated with the pinnaces, and harried the mutinied ships in their own way, but nothing took, nothing stayed. The waters fountained with the bodies of the dead and the desperate plunging escaping loyalists, and the river ran ever so slightly red with the blood of loyalist and mutineer alike. Not a few ponies among the mutinied ships broke character ever so briefly, to breath deep as the foul dead were pitched overboard – finally! So much else of that day was artifice, nonsense, play-acting. But the dead were real, and those poor unfortunates – tortured to death by necromancers, or killed by ghouls, or dead of natural causes, and all of them smuggled out of the loyal lands to play their dead parts in our play, our performance. All of them had been gifted the Company blade's-edge, just to be sure. Whatever afterlife they had in the offing, no death's-curse would cause their mortal meat to dance to the necromantic tune. Their part was to be simply – dead. The presumptive token of our 'bloody mutiny', washed up on the downstream shore, to stink of river and rot and death. The little 'loyalist' ships took up swimming refugees from ship after ship, as they beat their way through the collapsing fleet, fleeing the mutineers. By the late afternoon, a swarm of overburdened pinnaces surrounded the Commodore's galley, the only remaining ship under loyalist control. The White Rose's own battered, shocky fleet had appeared in the west, slowly, cautiously approaching the open waters in which the mutiny had carried out. Throughout the day, the ground-troops watched us as we capered in full view of their wondering gaze. As if we had staged our mutiny entirely for their eyes. The awkwardly-commanded ships of the mutiny sculled about above the land-batteries, clearly under the uncertain hoof of inexperienced ponies. As afternoon faded towards the early twilight of evening, each mast saw crude flags and banners bearing some semblance of a White Rose tacked to their heights, and the ragged but sweet sounds of "How Great Is Her Garden" carried over the open waters. After a few moments of stunned silence, the audience followed the cue of the jubilant performers, and joined in with this common inheritance of song. The White Rose's ancient anthem echoed back and forth over the waters of the lower Housa like a song in round, the chorus repeating itself in the throats of the rebels in the land-batteries, those of the crews of the approaching flotillas, and the ships of the mutinied fleet. The catastrophe which had borne down upon them in the morning – silently, quietly, remorselessly – was now a memory. The vision of destruction had washed away in a welter of blood, and screaming, and fury. A terrible cacaphony – until the cacophony itself was washed away, the discordance falling away, harmonizing, until it resolved itself into a song. And that terror, which had threatened to burn them from their last redoubts, had self-immolated, and suddenly the waters in front of them were crowded with cheering, singing, harmonizing galley-ships full of freed slaves – of rebels. And the rebels of the White Rose sang their victory-song in a complex welter of emergent, almost orchestrated harmony.