//------------------------------// // A Reading For The Recruits // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS003 "From the Book of Esteem, second volume. In those days, the Company was in the service of the Sisterhood of the Red Flails, and the campaign of the previous fall had seen the Company’s blood purchase the freedom of fully half of the unicorn city-states of the Upper Reaches from the Sisters’ sworn enemies, the Chevrine Federation. The survivors of the campaign, under the direction of the much-thinned Company, erected fortifications and entrenchments at the base of the three peninsulas that held the remaining occupied cities, excepting only a causeway leading southwards to the Chevrine home counties, which was thinly posted, the allied forces of the Sisterhood being too few to cover every exposed position…" I droned on and on to a crowd of donkey recruits sprawled all over the forward deck of an ingot hauler, two days out of the port of Rime, headed for the northern provinces, and the promise of rebellion and hard campaigning. We were in convoy, riding half-empty freighters and vast long-hulled log and ingot haulers for a distant port, where those ships would take loads of smelted iron and cut logs and ship them back to Rime and her sisters along the inland sea, stock and fuel and raw materials for the teeming proletarian hordes of worker-ponies packed in the tenement quarters of the brash new cities. We were dead-heading, but the imperium was paying for the privilege, and it seemed that there wasn’t much draw or demand for the finished goods and fineries that fat and haughty Rime produced to justify its excess and pride in those restless northern lands ahead. Or maybe there just wasn’t the cash, I hadn’t figured it out yet. The Company’s officers and the legate’s people were closeted up on another freighter further back down the convoy, trying to figure out our coming campaign, resources and strategies, tactics and goals. They were far too busy planning and thinking deep thoughts to worry about the hundred or more wet-maned recruits we had picked up in Rime almost as an afterthought, almost all of them slicker than the day they dropped out of their mamas’ placental sacs. "…in order to fill the ranks, badly depleted by a season of successful but bloody fighting, the Company levied volunteers from the two cities nearest their sections of the palisades, a small fishing city known as Sidebottom, and the trading colossus Tarseus. Both cities being largely populated by unicorns, the Company formed from the new recruits eight sections of swords-mares, and nine of bow-stallions. Now those sections were distributed between the cohorts as follows-" I continued to rattle on, sweating in the cool breeze as I realized that I was losing the recruits, and baffled as to how to get out of the box of boredom I had read right into, clear-eyed. I was saved from my own dullness by a vile cackle. "My damnation, Sawbones, you could drain the vim and vigor from a gladiator’s death-battle! Do you think you could read them the supply tallies while you’re at it? How about ducal genealogical charts? Maybe one of the cooks’ recipe books?" Saved by the horrible green thing lounging by the portside gunwale, leaving an unpleasant stain on the planking underneath him. Fresh air did not agree with the froggy Gibblets, it aggravated a skin condition. At least, I hoped it was a skin condition. He had never come to me, or my predecessor for help with whatever the hell it was that cause him to… secrete everywhere on certain days. "Well then, Lord Gibblets, how would you summarize Bodkin Point’s defense of the Causeway that Ser Esteem and myself were working our way towards?" I did my best to soak my response in what I imagined was snooty, sarcastic academic accents. I was only guessing – I’ve never darkened a school-room door, let alone academe. But I was game to play along if the witch-thing wanted to help draw in the damp 'uns. The drippy ought to ooze together, I figured, and at least the new fish would dry out eventually, the ones that survived. Even on his dying day, Gibblets would probably soak his cardboard box apart before we could chuck him in the sod. "Weeelll indeeed, you striped dullard, you might start by talking about the two sets of recruits that they pulled out of those nose-high unicorn cities, because the ones from fishtown were hard and humble boys and girls, the scrapings of the docks and the shop-floors. The recruits from the city of bright lights, and brighter money, they were the children of the great and glorious, proud to serve their freed peoples. More proud of the cause than of their brothers, and in their hearts, they were only Company by courtesy. Of course they were utterly useless, filly and colt alike." Gibblets was cheating, these details weren’t in the Annals – it wouldn’t have suited the purposes of Esteem, who had been a stuffy and arrogant unicorn far too fond of the privilege of rank and position. But I wouldn’t contradict him for the world. Our new recruits were mostly factory-floor rejects and guttersnipes, and they sucked up this petty class warfare like it was milk straight from their dams’ teats. "Sections with mares and stallions of both sorts were seconded to the pair of veteran sections holding down the near end of the causeway leading to the back of the Reach, the proud Tarseioi and the grumbling Bottom-bitches alike. All the fighting up to that point had been along the upper ends of the Reach, where everything important was, and the wealth that made any of it worth fighting even a candle’s length. Patrols down the causeway alerted the outpost early enough that the Chevrines were trying the backdoor, having lost enough trying to batter down the front entrances-" Gibblets somehow roared this, despite how dry it reads now that I put it down on the page, conjuring out of his reedy, irritating pipe of a throat and the dried-out material something wild and thundering. The recruits, who had been sprawled sleepy-eyed and lulled half-asleep where they lay draped across the planks and chandlers’ supplies lashed here and there in between the foremost mast and the nameless equipment bow-wards, were stirred awake, actually interested now. But I couldn’t leave it to him alone, not and hold up my head as Annalist, however new I was at this. "You talk as if you were there, oh master of the green-scummed waters! I know you’re older than the fens, and slower than the fetid seeps, but you most certainly aren’t two and a half centuries old!" "Quiet, you benighted grey savage! I’ve heard these stories often enough, and told better than anything you’ll ever manage by better mares and stallions than ye will ever be. And I remember the *pith* of the stories, which you’d bury in the minutiae and the dusty details that belong with the "and we laid to rest"s that you *conclude* these readings. You’re daft enough you’d put them right in the middle of the reading! Listen, my children, and your nuncle Gibblets will tell you of the bowyer, and the Chevrine heavy shock-brigade, and the span he stood upon. His lord and master, a sergeant named Blood Raven, she died in the very first exchange, along with any number of veteran brethren, caught out of place and crushed by a terrible volley of those great hand-catapults the Chevrine’s heavy minotaur shock troops could carry into battle at the jog. They had charged forward to extract the forward guard from the enemy come up quick, and they died ugly, pegasus and earth pony alike. Blood Raven was an old Company hand, one of those bat-winged, slit-eyed things of the night we used to field, those hell-spawn that drew down a terrible fear among our enemies when they got going and keep on going once they went. It availed her naught, dropped from the air at the start of her run by a great thudding rock flung from near point-blank range." The wide-eyed stirring among the long-eared newbies indicated that they were still getting used to the idea that this was a killing company, and they had signed on for ugly death at the hands of uglier plug-uglies. This was what the readings were for, to get them in their minds as well as their bodies ready for the blooding. Some ponies we recruited were born to split skulls and saw hamstrings, cut throats and bathe in the blooded muck and filth; but these were donkeys, not griffins or minotaurs, and those didn’t come from the factory floor standard installed with bloodthirst and a disregard for the bodily integrity of others. That was something you had to cultivate with recruits like these. Well, for the most part. We had picked up some dodgy-looking ones here and there in the crowd… "The disaster disheartened the straggling recruits, who had avoided the killing volley by virtue of being TOO DAMN SLOW IN THE CHARGE, and they fled for the low wall and the abatis built across the exit of the causeway, and far too many kept going afterwards. It could have been a rout, and the loss of the camp behind it, if not for one of those scumlings of the fishtown docks, a dark-furred bow-stallion who had taken a company-name before the banner-lance, calling himself by his favorite arrow-head, Bodkin Point. He had a proper skill with that armor-piercing hell-dart, but it wasn’t that which saved the causeway, it was his steadiness. He reached the wall, and he turned around, and he took up his stave and smacked each and every panicky mare and stallion as they crossed the planks across the abatis and tried to run past him there at the mouth of the way. Nothing quite breaks a panic like a sharp slap across the muzzle with a nice springy length of yew. What remained of the sections rallied beside that new recruit, and took up the planking, and formed a bowline, without any swords-horses, just the abatis, the wall, and their bows, because the rich and privileged recruits who could afford those honking great slabs of steel had been better-fed, faster and quicker, and were off in the rear spreading defeatism and panic behind the line." "The spare quivers had been left stacked behind the wall, and the bow-line quickly arranged their refills, stabbed point-down before and behind them on the wall itself, because they needed to see their targets, and a bow-line is no damn good crouched down behind a earthen mound. The minotaurs, loaded down by their catapults and their heavy armor, lumbered into range, out of breath and lagging. They’re terrible brutish things when they have their wind, but there isn’t much to them when they’re blown, and that’s a lot of meat to put into motion and keep moving. Nopony uses minotaurs for cavalry or scouting, children. Keep that in mind, although your world seems thin of cow-headed walking mountains from the looks of it, Annals know if you’ll face any in any campaign while we’re on this rock." True enough, although they’d imported us; some military entrepreneur might have had some minotaur cows and bulls shipped special-order for the construction of shield-walls or an engineering company. Gibblets wasn’t saying it, but minotaurs were clever mechanics, and builders, and did amazing things with delvings and construction. Rime, as ramshackle as some parts of it was, and as a booming industrial town, would have been like a second Minos if someone had only thought to bring some in through the portal. Not that there were that many minotaurs back in Openwater Bay, but I had heard stories, and there were a scattering. The company had even had a bull in the smiths when I was new in the company. Roarer had liked his rum, though, and apparently minotaurs didn’t float, he fell off a pier drunk as a lord five months after we arrived in the Bay, and he didn’t come back up. "I don’t know what they taught the unicorns of that fishtown, or where they had picked up the skill, but somehow those wet-maned-as-Tartarus newbies managed to generate a proper old-fashioned arrow-storm, and every bull who wandered into range went down feathered like a penguin, or ran yelping like a proud-tailed peacock stuck full of feathered sticks. It wouldn’t have mattered in the end – weight will tell, and a minotaur bull with his blood up will burst right through abatis, but the bow-line gave the Chevrines a bloody nose, and gave them pause, and it was enough. While they were gathering their nerve and hauling up their catapults just out of bow-range, the recruits’ toffee-nosed peers had been herded back to the defense by veteran reinforcements, and under a proper rain of Bodkin Point’s favorite warhead, they were brought up to the wall, and the planking put back down, and they formed up in front of the abatis, the bows planted firmly on the wall in the rear. It’s not an easy thing to do, charging while your own brothers fill the air over your heads with feathered death, but I’ll give the swords-ponies of Tarseus this, they gathered their nerve before the minotaurs gathered their breath. The Company charged the enemy, and broke them, and burned their catapults, and butchered their wounded, and set them lumbering for their own side of the causeway." Gibblets at this point produced a flask from thin air, and seemed like he expected me to bring it all home. I flushed, happy to get back on track with my intended moral. "Thus did Bodkin Point demonstrate the virtues of a Company recruit – prudence, steadiness, resolution, leadership, competence with his weapon," I concluded. It wasn’t much of a flourish, but every one of those donkeys were on their hooves, leaning forward, rapt in the story. I felt a shameful envy for that spellbinding flair that my green brother displayed, more so for the fact that it had nothing to do with magic, it was just simple personality and charisma. This was why the Company’s Annalists were wizards, the force of personality that came with the usual wickedness and determination made for a riveting reading style. "Thus endeth the lesson, fledglings, unless you’d like to stay for the 'and we laid to rest’s. Away with you, your corporals have work for you, and you’ve rested enough," I concluded rather lamely, trying to put some sort of official seal on Gibblets’ hijacking of my lecture. I gazed up at the banner-pikestaff, braced beside the nearest mast, as the audience broke up, ambling off to be drilled in lance-executions and hoof-blade katas by their new-minted corporals. I walked over to the warlock, and thanked him for his save, looking down at the water rushing below, far faster than any ship I’ve ever seen on fresh or salt seas. "We don’t have a square inch of sail up, how is this boat going so fast, Gibblets?" "Ha! It’s a clever gag, these donkeys have their tricks. You see that box way the heck up on the bow, and those racks on either side behind it? They’re great honking charms, entangled with enormous enchanted loadstones beside every harbor this ship services, and a couple headlands here and there in between. They link them up as they go, and the whole thing pulls itself to and fro like a pony drawing a canal-boat through a set of locks. Don’t have to depend on wind directions, sitting ironbound until the right breeze comes in the right direction. Just hook up and go go go. Didn’t you see that great ochre lump of granite looming outside of the entrance to Rime when we left?" "I did, but apparently I missed the briefing where this was discussed. Why are there masts?" "Well, everything breaks, and you never know when you’ll need to suddenly go off course. Shallow seas like this trough can blow out sudden sand-bars and the like." "So, where did you get that business about Blood Raven? I don’t think any of the Annals mentioned she was a thestral, although it matches the sparse mentions of her name here and there well enough. It *could* be true. How old are you, Gibblets? None of the Annalists said when you were recruited, and the first one to mention you was Crescent Moon about eighty-five years ago, by my reckoning. " "Pfft, as if a pegasus calling herself 'Blood Raven’ would be anything other than a bat-pony. Might as well have called herself 'Bloodbath’ or 'Blood Eagle’." We both paused to shudder. I’d never seen one of the victims of that caribou execution method, but I’ve read enough to never want to see one if I could. I suspect that Gibblets *had* seen a few in his day. "As for Crescent Moon, that mare was too loose-tongued for her own good, it got her killed quick enough, when she tried to fast-talk her way out of a blown ambush. You’ll note that she only had the one volume, she didn’t last long as an Annalist. They didn’t like to talk about us, the stranger brethren, back in those days. You new ones don’t have any respect, but you don’t have that fear, either. I suppose it’s a mixed bag. And any rate, I’m the last of them, our caster ranks are filled with mayfly hacks like Crescent Moon and Shorthorn and that new half-donkey filly." "And Bongo?" I dared, still a little irate about the incident back before Crossroads. "Well, mayfly enough," he sighed, somehow even smaller and greener than his usual self. "Never tell Shorthorn, but she wasn’t a complete waste as one of the weird brethren. I never thought she’d…. well. It was another world, and the wench is dead, isn’t she?" He squelched off, leaving an unexpected melancholy. I prepared myself to go open the clinic, and stopped, struck. He had never actually said when he had been recruited.