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// The Recruits Below The Pikestaff 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS004

The convoy's long voyage up the draglines took weeks of the late summer, the heavy sun weakening with every night coursing northwards.  The inland sea left the onrushing ships at the same elevation, and yet day after day, the heavy hot glare lessened almost imperceptibly.  I was posted with the recruits on the largest of the ingot haulers, with the widest decking and the biggest space for the veteran cadres to drill stumbling foolish recruits in the most basic of military drill.

The glorious sun of late summer, pure blue skies above, and fresh waves below, and in the distance, green shores turning slowly from scattered deciduous woodlots and vast heavy-headed grain fields to increasingly wide coniferous slopes turned steeper and steeper as our magically drawn ships were dragged north and east to our destination.

My clinic was cluttered evening after evening with the detritus of training. We might have been cash-rich, but our hauling capacity was such that we couldn't really keep training weapons on hand, and the corporals made do by wrapping battle-blades and warhammers in heavy cloth, padding the recruits, and trying to explain the concept of turning the flat in training encounters.  Still, inexperienced donkeys, inexperienced in the sparring necessary to train clueless sinews and unmodified minds, invariably left a residue of broken bones, ugly cuts, and outright bad wounds.  My living-space on the ingot hauler became cluttered with the bruised, the mangled, and the wounded.  They were lucky that I had half a decade of experience in holding together the results of the Company's over-enthusiastic training, and that zebra potioning was ideally suited for the treatment of wound infection, gangrene, and compartment syndrome.  My infirmary could lose ponies from shock and simple trauma, but when it came to simple accidents, I was already a master.  And damn that greedy rotter the Company had stolen my expertise from, who wouldn't have ever let me free to find my own professional way out from under his selfish hoof.  I was everything he had made of me, and so much more.  Screw zebra apprenticeships, anyways.

Eventually the long pine-wooded reaches closed around the convoy, and we drew near to our port of intent.  Ironically, as we beat closer to that terminus, the pine trees fell away, leaving naked slopes and deep-eroded gullies on every side.  In the distance ahead, great pillars of black smoke rose into the heavens, marking the woodland smelters which normally fed these ingot-haulers.  This port whose harbor we slowly coasted into was near its capacity.

There weren't any trees anywhere in eyeshot, the voracious forges having devoured every bit of native wood anywhere within the range of seizure or purchase.  The truncated pyramids which glowed day and night, rendering down ore into iron ingots, were fed in that day by the trash trees floated down-stream by the mighty stream by which Tonnerre thrived.  Its vast back-country upstream on the river by which Tonnerre lurked like a tumor, fed its numerous charcoal-burners and iron-forges.  When that great logging country exhausted itself, so would Tonnerre, and it would blow away like the dust and wind-blown dirt of its worthless and nearly-agronomically-useless neighboring farmlots.  Those wretched fields barely fed the workers of the charcoal-burners and forgers; just barely enough to justify not importing grain from the rich bottomlands of the country to the south and east.

The rebellion was not upstream in the wild forests that teemed with the lumberponies of the frontier, nor the barely-functional grain-lots of Tonnerre.  Rather, the centres of rebellion spread out on the Bride's Roads to the south-east and south-west from Tonnerre, those fringes between the wooded northlands and the edges of the granaries all along the frontier.  These were the edges of the control of the Bride's over-proud vassals, those verges between where the advantages of the granary-laws benefited the peasantry, and were irrelevant to the semi-nomadic tribes of the great pine barrens.  Here, on the edge between comfortable tyranny and squalid freedom, the locals quivered between comfort and liberty, and split, raged against the world and their torment.

We disembarked slowly, the haulers not suited to the unloading of carts and wagons and mercenaries, being optimized for the unloading of simple dry goods and the loading of dumb logs and ingots.  It took time to carefully unload delicate loads, and there was little we or our recruits could do to hurry along the process.  A perfect time for ritual and regimented display.

The officers shipped over from their freighter, and unbound the sacred banner-pikestaff from the forward mast to which it had been bound, and marched it offship to an open space in the centre of  Tonnerre.  The sergeants and corporals of the cohorts had secured this space, and their sections lined the space on every side, keeping away civilian and curious eyes, above and below.  Despite the absence of winged recruits, the third cohort was very much involved in the stage-setting of this display, dressed to the nines as if they were the thestrals of old, some of them wearing the enchanted helms which gave them the cat-eyed and tufted-eared appearance for which the Company once was known, looking like nightmares aloft on terrible dragons'-wings.

The recruits were marched one by one off the hauler by their corporals, perched precariously on narrow planks over the docks below.  The witch-battalion had turned out in full, and their terrible mage-fire lit the scene as the sun faded from the scene, leaving all in gloaming as the donkeys marched two by two into the square made strange.

The Banner had been set aloft on its pike-staff, blown aloft by a peculiar evening breeze, displaying the unicorns-marehead for all the assembly, sable and glowing in the growing darkness.

As they assembled before the pikestaff, I strode forward, my spiky mane dyed black and any expression wiped clean by the solemnity of the occasion.  I read from the Book of Lyova Leiba, and the text was a recitation of the sublimation of the self and the replacement of the Company and brotherhood for individuality.  We are fallen, and squalid, and selfish in ourselves, but we become something greater in the Company.  The Company is neither moral, nor well-intentioned, nor good in and of itself, but we are greater gathered together than we are in the fragments blown by the winds of random chance.  Death and anonymity are the wages of the self outside of the Company.  And the alternative....

Tickle Me advanced as I concluded my reading, and she unfurled the banner from the top of the pike-staff.  Somehow the remaining light concentrated about the banner, drawing forth from the ranks below, leaving veterans and recruits alike in darkness, and only the banner itself visible.  It twisted and snapped like a thing alive overhead.

The first recruit, a heavy-limbed donkey, strode forward, unprompted.  I  rushed forward, and listened closely as he bent forward to kiss the pikestaff.  He pressed his muzzle against the ebony shaft, and whispered to himself.  Somehow I heard it, and later after I polled the assembly, I found that every single pony had heard the statement, when he had named himself "Heavy Bucket".  I was the only one to observe his eyes shift, though, as his pony-like eyes suddenly turned catlike and glowing, green.  Each donkey which came forward that night likewise glowed cat-eyed below the banner, "Halon", "Yew-Barrow", "Talon-Spite", "Oaken-Hull", "Galleon-Full", and half a hundred others.  Not every recruit found themselves a Company-Name that night, but every recruit who found themselves a company-name survived the first battle of the campaign that was coming.