The Princess's Bit

by Mitch H


Recruits, File Closers, and Lance Corporals

Fish Eye didn't have enough time to miss her camera. She was too busy to really feel that itch in her hands that came when she felt most alone, most confused. 

Back home, Fish Eye had never had a chance to enjoy dorm life like all of those lucky ponies whose families had shipped them off to board at Farrow in the glamorous capital. Her mother had never been the most warm of mares, and when her and Hawk's father had disappeared with their entire kingdom, Stiff Beak had disappeared behind that impenetrable amiable reserve which was her barding and her armor. Sometimes it felt like the youngest mare in the family was a dried pea in a gourd, rattling around their rented suites and making noise by herself.

When she'd gotten the camera, it had let her escape her mother's rented suites, and go out into the city and see it through the camera lens. At a remove.

The barracks were sort of like a boarding school dorm, in that there was zero privacy, little amenities, and shared bathrooms. And, like a good boarding school, they spent as little time in them as possible, having been herded by the corporals, put to running or flying or drilling or reading out loud from the stacks of manuals for the recruits that couldn't read for themselves.

All in all, being foalnapped into the military wasn't all that different from going to a prestigious pony preparatory academy. The biggest difference was…

Fish Eye wasn't alone in a herd of ponies. There wasn't really a herd of ponies at all. Regular ponies weren't even a plurality of the regiment she'd been stolen away by; a full quarter of the recruits and the older troopers were griffons, and nearly half of the rest were...

Well, they were ponies, but not any Fish Eye had ever seen. 

Batponies! Batponies everywhere, making screechy noises, glowering from dark corners, squinting at the bright spring sunshine, sneaking their sunglasses whenever they thought the corporals weren't watching.

Fish Eye was so busy seeing new things for the first time, that she didn't need the lens to see them clearly. It was all right there in front of her!

Although about half of the corporals were batponies themselves, and they knew all the tricks their troopers got up to. More than once, Fish Eye had broken out into laughter at the profane rants issued against her fellow batpony rankers, and been ordered to get down and give a corporal 'twenty'. That had turned into thirty, the first time, because she'd had no idea what punishment exercise she was being given.

Wing pushups were kind of fun. It was cheating, of course - hippogriff wings have all the flexibility of pegasus wings, and all the strength of griffon wings. And even weedy underweight little Fish Eye had enough power and precision in her big wings to make a batpony non-com's cat eyes pop.

So yeah, the camera was staying safe in squadron storage for now. Safe from the mud and the rough-housing and the battering anonymity of life in the barracks. 

Because every evening, there were two or three or a half-dozen new faces in the barracks. In the afternoons, the new lieutenant and that big griffon sergeant - Fish Eye's 'evil griffon' foalnapper - put the prospects through the obstacle course, and ran them ragged. The batponies always passed with flying shadows, of course, because they were mostly old troopers from the pegasus regiments, or so one of them explained Fish Eye's second night with the regiment. But the locals, and the regular troops trying to transfer into a flash new guards squadron?

They washed out left and right. The numbers were coming out a little uneven, because the captain and her sergeant had brought in a bunch of cronies from their old griffish territorial battalion, and various special-recruited, well, specialists. To do this and that. 

But in the actual troops? Mostly griffons and batponies, and a scattering of Trottish earth ponies. 

And almost all of them strangers to each other. Fish Eye wasn't the only stranger in the herd, here. Here, she was a stranger in a crowd of strangers, of little groups precipitating out of multiple fragmentary herds mixing for the first time.

Fish Eye had heard two of the corporals grousing about the lack of pegasi, when she was supposed to be on punishment detail, sanding down the planks of the corridor outside Troop Apple's barracks room. "Grind that down until I can lick a stripe forty feet long down this hall, wetmanes!" her corporal had yelled. But now the corporal had a new friend, and Fish Eye wasn't sure if they knew how sharp her hearing was…

"-I don't care what they say, no griffon is as good in the traces as a well-trained pegasus. Nor as good a climber."

"We've got plenty of bats…"

"Well, yeah, but you big-thumbed leather-firmament types hain't exactly power fliers, either."

"I don't see any wings on you, Mews Gate."

"Well, yeah, the battery lieutenant needs somepony to lay the falcons, and keep them in powder and shot. I can't believe they thought a lieutenant could both build and train up a battery by herself. Poor Lieutenant Lulamoon, they hated her back home. Broke my heart… and if I could fly her falcons for her, I'd do that too. Have you seen that trick the captain-"

After that night, the corporal was gone, and had been replaced by a Trottish bird with a thick accent Fish Eye could barely understand, and a new approach towards things. 

Fish Eye never heard the rest of that tantalizing story about whatever 'trick' their unicorn captain could do, that somehow had something to do with flying, but she found out enough when she asked around about the situation with the 'battery'.

Cannon! They were going to be fielding a flying battery! That was so cool!

Fish Eye decided on the spot that she wanted to be a part of that troop. Or company? She was a little shaky on military titles and names and designations. She'd gotten in trouble more than once for calling a corporal 'sir' or the new lieutenant an 'ensign'.

But no, she was certain she wanted to be part of the flying battery. Because it felt like a team forming! They'd never let her play on any of the sports teams back at Farrow. Something about being the only big-bird flier, and it not being fair… she'd volunteered to be the manager's assistant - and in her senior year, the manager - of a bunch of pony sports teams. But being the 'pony' who cleaned the filthy tack and carried the water for the polo team and the pony lacrosse team and the pony rugby team - ponies liked to claim things by slapping the adjectival 'pony' on the front of totally species-neutral things - wasn't the same thing as actually swinging a mallet or a club or running with a leather ball under your wing.

And taking photographs as the team manager or the manager's assistant was a sort of way of being part of the team, but it was at a remove, distancing. 

Her camera was in storage. She wasn't seeing things, she was going to do things

So, Fish Eye was going to set out to be a part of that team. And set her mind to becoming the 'pony' that could be a battery horse.

Being in the army was kind of like being a team manager. Times eleven. If you think the tack for playing polo was excessive, just wait until you had to clean real working barding. And rugby uniforms didn't have a patch on the amazing filth that gambesons accumulated, no, attracted, like magnets to iron filings, were gambesons to mud.

She was so happy her camera wasn't part of the kit she had to keep clean of this ever-present mud!

But in between the cleaning, was the training! And that was a hell of a lot of fun. Splashing around in the mud herself! And running with all the rest! Just that would make Fish Eye happy.

So she was.

But she also felt like she should be a bit ambitious. A mare's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a heaven for? And artillery-horse sounded like it was right up that alley!

She had a lot of work to get there. For one thing, she knew nothing about hauling gun carriages, let alone flying falcon gigs, like the stripped-down marvels the new battery lieutenant was rebuilding in an improvised workshop somewhere deep in the bowels of the garrison.

It wasn't good that she didn't particularly relish chariot training. Admittedly, it wasn't anything she'd ever done before she'd been impressed into the guards. They hadn't played Trottish-rules cloudball back in Canterlot. Apparently it was a thing here in Trottingham - fancy that, the Trottish fancying something called 'Trottish'! - and because she'd never done it before, Fish Eye was pretty clumsy at first.

Let's just say she wouldn't be winning any cups for the school display cabinet. Er, the regimental display cabinet? Do military outfits have sports trophies? She'd have to ask sometime.

When everything wasn't so rush-rush-rush hup-hup-hup.

Still fun! Just not so much with the spare breath for asking really quite vital questions.

No matter what the corporals said when she gasped said questions out.

And so, as Fish Eye ran with her training section from the chariot training field to the obstacle course, so consumed was she with the simple glow of communal exercise and puzzling over her inchoate desires for something cool to do with her young life, that she barely noticed the skinny Trottish griffon recruit running in step behind her, staring at the back of her head as the corporals sang cadence, something about loving wide-flanked alicorns…


Giles stared at the pinkish freak's tail, counted the steps between the airfield and the obstacle course, and closed file. Eighty-four hundred paces from airfield to course. Equestrian quick step of 140 clops per minute. The corporal's calling the cadence a bit fast, but these mixed units are murder on the march. They're sorting us into tribal units, they have to if we're not to keep stepping on each other's paws.

Bats and griffons and ponies could all get along like kits in a hammock sleepin' the sleep of the just, but they simply couldn't march in tandem. Their bodies weren't built to walk in lock step with each other.

It was easier in the air, but only by a bit, and winds help you if you tried to tie a griffon and a pegasus to the same cart.

Giles had concluded, by the third day of training, that they'd be setting up griffish and pony troops by the middle of May. He hadn't expected the influx of weird featherin' bat-winged ponies, though. That threw his expectations into a cockaded hat.

Or being made file closer as soon as corporals started precipitating out of the recruit-mass like maggots in week-old meat.

How many troops were they planning on putting into this oversized squadron, anyways? The Sixth Guards by the first of May was already bigger than his entire home town's militia had been. Not that Aerie Tarvie had been all that big of a place. They'd called the militia a 'battalion', but it hadn't been more than a double-strength troop by the measurin' sticks the corporals used for organizing this new home Giles' doom had given him.

As far as Giles knew, he was the last survivor of the Aerie Tarvie militia. He'd never heard of any other survivors, and had been too afraid to even display interest in whatever had happened to the captives in the big POW camps outside the city.

Aerie Tarvie had been on the right of the line, and had crossed right in front of the ponies' falcon batteries. There hadn't been time to run.

The sun had barely moved in the sky by the time the platoon arrived at the obstacle course. Wish they'd let us fly. These quick-march jogs are for the ponies.

As the griffish recruits scrabbled through the same old obstacle course in the same old way, Giles kept twitching, and losing his grip on this rope or his balance on that log or tripping over the other rubber tyre in the mud.

Every time that damned freak spoke and he wasn't looking at her, Giles heard his little sister squeaking. It was unearthly - feather-rustling, flank-pricklingly weird. The pony-griffon-monkey-thing didn't look a thing like Giles' long-dead sister, and her plummy, toffy-nosed Canterlotian pony accent didn't bear any resemblance to long-lost Ginny's lisping MacGregor tones. 

But winds if it didn't sound like Ginny gone off with the ponies a changeling, and come back talking like the ruddy enemy. Like stories of the evil elves under their dark mounds, who'd take up kitlings and fledgelings and unwary hens from the hills or the darker moors, and haul them Under Hill to be - well, the stories varied about what happened to the elf-lost.

Ginny hadn't been elf-lost, Giles had found her body himself, grey-eyed and still and terrible. Nogriff who's ever found a corpse would ever mistake it for a living griffon. When life goes out of a body, everything that was them goes with it.

No, Ginny drowned, and no changeling myth could fix that.

But damn if the hippogriff freak didn't sound exactly like her.

The corporal let them rest for fifteen minutes after the second time 'round the obstacle course. As Giles billowed and heaved with the rest of the muddy, run-ragged training cadre, he stared at the back of the head of the freak until she turned around with that cheery, open-hearted grin on her freakish beak.

Maybe she looked a little like Ginny around the eyes.

The corporal squawked, and the cadre got up off their paws and dusted themselves off. Giles and the other file closers formed up their fellows into files, and flowed into the column.

2500 paces from the obstacle course to the shower stations outside the walls.


"Gilroy! Giles! Grant! And… Fish Eye! Front and center!" bawled Corporal Gwaine.

Fish Eye looked up from her cot, where she was cleaning the last of her file's filthy training gear, astonished to be called out along with three of the file-closers. Including her own. They followed the platoon corporal out of the barracks-room like four ducklings toddling after their momma duck.

The mess hall was full of ponies and griffons and, for some reason, a goat. At the head of the tables was that big, beefy pegasus lieutenant and Fish Eye's evil sergeant, taller than ever and looking hassled.

The evil sergeant yelled 'a ten-hup', and the room full of troopers formed into ad-hoc lines, braced to attention.

The new lieutenant, Lieutenant Bell strode forward, and crossed in front of the rough formation.

"Aw kay, you all! Listen up! The captain laid down the law, and we talked it over. You all have been trainin' in yer clumps of files for a while now, but it's time to shake out into real units. You all are, mostly, our better file closers. Most of you can write, and you all better have your letters enough to read a written order! Even if it's some idiot lieutenant's muddled fat-lipped scrawl in the heat of Celestia knows what balls-up mess.

"We've got more of you than we strictly need, on account of some of ya will wash out. It happens, we all know it, won't be a total shame, you just go back into th' ranks.

"Most of you all will be running twelve-pony sections in your respective platoons. We're gonna be callin' them 'lances' on account of it sounds damn stupid and confusin' to have squads inside-a squadron! You'll be answerin' to your platoon corporal, and through her, yer ensign.

"We ain't got ensigns yet, still talkin' that over with the captain and the sergeant here.

"Those-a you all who ain't got a lance when we're done givin' out assignments are gonna be runners for the corporals, and workin' for the ensigns when we got some.

"Apparently th' captain has some regular army notions about the dignity of officers. One of you is gonna be with me, and won't that be a kick in the head? I ain't never had a servant before. We never held with such things in the Marezonians. But this ain't the provincials, we're the Guard now!

"So hey, give a cheer, troopers! You all just became lance corporals. Provisional-like. Assumin' you don't piss off anypony more important than you all!"

Corporal Gwaine claimed his flock of new-hatched lance corporals, and led them back to the corridor outside of their platoon barracks-room. He was talking them through their new responsibilities, when Fish Eye heard herself ask:

"But Corporal, what about us flying falcons for the new battery?"

"Eye! The first thing yer gonna learn, is to nawt innerrupt th' corporals, or th' ensigns when we gets 'em! And we ain't gonna be the battery troop, that's nawt 'appenin'. They's sayin' that they need those as ain't raw recruits for that duty. Also, they's recruitin' special-like fer the battery. Is that to yer approval, Princess Eye?"

"Well, gol-lee!" Fish Eye cursed.

And blinked in surprise as the other lance corporals laughed at her.