SBMS005
The next morning, I hesitantly asked Shorthorn about the glowy eye thing. The recruits had lost their cats-eyes with the morning dew, and looked like the damp donkeys they honestly were, sweating and barking away at their morning drill as we continued to haul our equipage off the docks.
"Ha! That thing, I remember that creepy-damn effect from my days keeping the Annals. It wasn't a trick of ourn, although now that you mention it we really ought to see if we can fake it up for effect. Scare the horseapples out of the enemy if all the brethren were coming the batpony at ‘em in the right conditions…" I had successfully if inadvertently diverted the witch from the subject in question; I almost let him wander off, but my curiosity drove me to draw him back in.
"Oh, yeah, right, the bats-eyes. It's something that demon's-pizzle does on its lonesome, without anypony prompting it. You know what Gibblets says, the Company's genius? And I don't mean a bright spark, or even the angel that some think of when you say that. More of an evil muse, or an imp of the perverse. Whatever it is, it sleeps most of the time, but when we do that thing with the Lance, it kind of rolls over in its sleep, and touches the new brethren. Something that we carry afterwards, a little bit of the luck of the Company. I've heard some say that some ponies get the eyes when the shit gets too deep, but I've never seen it for myself. You could ask Otonashi, I think she watches out for that sort of thing."
"Nah, I don't think so, my hoof-language is for crap."
"You ought to brush up, for a mute, that pony has a lot to say. But we have preparations I'm playing hooky from here, Sawbones. See you round…" He waved one hoof over his head as he rambled off down the dock away from me, and I shook my head, remembering my own errands, and trotted off myself to track down Asparagus and Tickle Me. We needed to go shopping.
***
The port, as modest as it was, was the terminus of two branches of the Bride's Road at the head of the great inland sea. They had a number of carters' suppliers, carriage-makers, and vehicle sales lots – and I was going to need more ambulances. We were planning on being a lot more mobile than we had been for the Openwater Bay contract, and the company had let go a lot of our bulkier equipment. Campaigning meant fighting, and fighting meant wounded, and often wounded far from my surgery. We needed something more than the few carts and supply wagons I had to hoof, and that meant ambulances. And that assumed we won all of our battles – if we needed to bug out fast, we needed to put as many wheels beneath our non-walking-wounded as I could afford.
Used cart salesponies are the same the multiverse over, and there's no such thing as a new cart. They get used as soon as they're wheeled off the carriage-maker's shop floor. Slimy, oleaginous, cart-sales-pony, they're all synonyms. This one knew she had me over a barrel, it wasn't *that* big of a town, and her stock was exactly what I needed, well-sprung, not covered in the sort of overwrought decoration that true ponies seem compelled by their marks to lavish all over humble equipages, driving up prices and attracting roadside bandits by the gangful. Dull-looking, sweetly braced with sturdy canvass hoods and spacious imperials, it was perfect for hauling multiple wounded or convalescent brothers. The only problem was…
"I don't know, these are great for my purpose, and we won't have to retrofit at all, but these are rigged for multiple carters, and we just don't have the ponies to spare to haul oversize ambulances like this. Even if I get them to second me some of the new donkey recruits…"
The earth-pony salesmare, at this suggestion, turned up her muzzle as if I had proposed feeding my patients road-apples. "What on earth are you thinking, my good zebra! We have perfectly suitable stock in the stables out back, just eating me out of hearth and stable! They're a drug on the local market, I could sell you them for a song!" Her mood had turned on a dime, suddenly swinging from a sneer to chirpy good humor. Both Asparagus and Tickle Me, who had been examining the harness displays while I dickered on the salesfloor, had shuffled behind the oblivious salespony, the both of them looking rather stormy.
"I don't quite understand you, are you saying you have a line in scouting carters' contracts or that you act as an agent for the local union? The Company generally prefers to not travel with hired help, it's generally a security-"
"Oh, no no no no, not in these parts. Almost nopony *hires* carters in this duchy. Our duchess is quite forward-thinking, and runs a proper breeding stable. Everypony who can afford it own their own haulers, and the ones who can't afford it – well, the less said of *them* the better."
"Slavery is legal here? I thought I heard something about the Bride…"
"Well, what the Bride doesn't know doesn't hurt her, and the vassalage are free in their interpretations of the common law. And in *this* Duchy, cattle are owned as they ought to be. Everypony knows they're not capable of taking care of themselves, bless their hearts. Dumber than the carts, the lot of them, and really, walking along dragging a cart is about their speed, isn't it?" My sisters-in-arms looked about ready to rip the good mare's limbs off and beat her senseless with her own hocks, but I gave them the stink-eye, and gestured for them to rein it in.
"So, could you show me these… cattle you say? Cows?"
"Oh, no, of course not. Too small for the heavy hauling. We have several braces of hearty oxen, they're quite large, and docile," she said as she led the way out back to a low-slung building in the rear. Within the spartan, hay-lined stable – like something out of the third world, you know the one where they went back to the stone age and everypony ran around with sticks and rocks because nobody remembered how to do modern things like smelt and make pottery – were hulking figures in the shadows of a row of open-faced cells. As our voices carried, the "oxen" came out into the light. Huge beasts, horned, rings through their noses and heavy chains hung between those horns with rings dangling in between.
If you haven't heard of oxen, well, you live in a better world than most, and I bless your innocence. In this and most others, the word meant "castrated bull", and that was the case with these unfortunates. Cattle were not exactly renowned for their cleverness or even good sense, but they were speaking beasts, however dull their conversation might be. Nopony ought to have their tackle stripped before they were old enough to get any use out of it. It takes a lot to make a mercenary medico sick, but our host had found the trick of it, and I was about ready to set my two valkyries loose on her. I took a deep breath, and looked across the congregation, trying to find one with that spark of coherence which might lead me out of this ugly little encounter with my self-respect and reputation intact.
A smaller ox stood to the side, in a cleaner corner of the filthy chamber, an actual expression other than dull disinterest gracing his heavy features. Admittedly, it looked rather like he was thinking of taking a dump right there in public, but it was a look, and that was something.
"You, over there, in the corner with the constipated look, what do they call you? What's your name?"
He lowed in a basso profundo greater than his height, which, while it was entire hooves higher than mine (mane-spikes included), still was on the puny side for a towering ox. "They call me Lack-Sack, or occasionally Sad-Sack. It weren't my name, but I answer to it when I can, if only so's they don't beat the others. Couldn't care less if they care to beat me, haint as if it were to make anything worse."
"Do you care to be known by that insult, or some other name if you could?"
"Don't rightly know, the names haint the worst things hever happened to us. Let me think on it?"
"Well enough, but I think I'll call you ‘Sack' for now. You the sort of cattle to keep up with the herd? We're a mercenary company, we're not chasing deadlines or profits, they're chasing us. Slow is death, do you understand me?"
He blinked, mildly. "Slow is a beating elsewhere, the distance between beaten and dead is covered by the corpses of those oxen whose owners didn't know when to stop beating." A philosophical ox! If wonders ever ceased, ponies would die of the shock.
"Would you care to cart for killers, predators, and ponies known to make bad puns?"
"Ser, if you want me to, I'll put my hooves behind whatever beast you care to leave the leading of me. Oxen have even been known to trample the slow and unwary in our time. But I don't think I have the wit in me to make puns."
"Sack, there's no wit in puns, but rather the celebration of their lack."
The salespony, who had been leaning back and sniggering as if we were a vaudeville routine, looked up at my glare, suddenly aware that I had come to a conclusion. I informed her that we would be taking a half-dozen oxen off her hands, and told her the price, on top of the highway-robbery she had already extracted from us in the sales-room for the tack, harness, and ambulances. She started blustering and trying to haggle me back up from my own little essay on larceny, until the hoof-blades crossing under her suddenly sweating throat put an end to that particular line of discussion. It was agreed that we would sweeten the pot by not carving her a new necktie, and she'd throw in the oxen for a pittance. I asked Sack to point out any relatives of his in the coffle, and he waved forward a tall pointy-headed ox with a particularly dim expression and two grizzled older oxen. Having exhausted the Sack family register, I went through the coffle, yelling for two adventurous oxen without any ties here. Another pair of brothers lumbered forward, and we chivvied the Company's new ambulance drivers onto the sales-floor to collect the carts, the tack and harness, and make our leave. The oxen perhaps brought more out of that sales-lot than we had strictly speaking paid for, but the blade-shocked mare was not in the mood for quarreling anymore. We harnessed those oxen up to the ambulances right there in the street, and I led my plunder-train through town towards the Company rendezvous, feeling properly piratical for the first time since Openwater Bay. I eyed the chains hung between their horns.
"Sack, what does the horn-chains mean?"
"Slavery-mark. Can't put us in collars with the yokes in the way."
"Hrm. We'll roll by the smiths on the way into camp. I think they can cold-chisel those off without chipping anything."
Sack gave me a skeptical sidelook.
"Ain't no slaves in the Company, Sack. Maybe next reading I'll do something from the Book of Fatinah, on the occasion of the Vizier of the Closeted Caliph trying to fold the Company into his Mamelukes, and how many household doorframes we nailed bits of vizier to as a reminder to posterity that the Black Company is a band of freeponies..."
Wouldn't you know, those oxen's eyes glowed like slit-eyed cats when the next ceremony in front of the banner-lance came ‘round? I guess our sleepy evil genius approved of my shopping tactics.