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// Discipline As A Discarded Encumbrance 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS006

The sergeant major of the second cohort buttonholed me as I was getting the oxen acquainted with a spare section tent out of the supply wagons, prompting and directing them on the subtle details of how to set one up on their own.  Look, I had just found them crashing in a filthy stable, there was no guarantees what they might or might not be able to handle.  But they seemed to have figured out pegs and cord and canvas when Yew Wall ambled into my corner of the camp.  I was wanted for a meeting, more of an argument from what she said, however briefly.  I left the infirmary, in its customary position in the camp, same as ever other camp on this and a hundred other worlds the multiverse over, albeit under the ludricrous nom de guerre "valetudinarium".  

Wherever the Company went, we found ponies or sentient creatures with translations or actual Latin copies of De Munitionibus Castrorum by Hippoginus Arator, and that universality meant that things in camps were named silly archaic things in unnecessarily ornate language, and that made Latin a sort of shibboleth for the trained warrior.  There was much debate about who Hippoginus actually was, everyone agrees it was a pseudonym, and the actual pseudonym varies depending on the copy and the culture using the manual.  Griffins' copies generally are attributed to Gryphioi Dioptra, and I've seen a Minotaur copy claiming to be by Mnemnt Sesotris, which I'm almost positive is some sort of linguistic inside-joke that I don't quite get.  

But what all this improbably universal, possibly divine distribution means is that wherever you go among properly trained organized militaries, you'll find the foundations of castra lurking outside of major towns and crossroads.  The one we were squatting in was a semi-permanent castra hibernia belonging to one of the Bride's standing regiments, or former regiments, since it had been drawn into the rebellion ahead of us, and its shameful rout and shattering had been part of the impetus for the hiring of an offworld mercenary outfit to recover the situation let go to seed by the hapless locals.  Whether that regiment still existed in any useful sense was a matter up for debate.  But their disaster meant that we were happily castellated behind brick walls on a comfortably regular camp-layout, everything in its place, and everything labeled in archaic Latin.  Well, until we got this show on the road, despite the legionary legend, you couldn't actually uproot a permanent camp and take it with you on campaign.  The town beyond the walls continued to blacken the skies to the east with an endless stinking cloud of filth, their charcoal-burners and forges smoking day and night, feeding the Imperium's bottomless appetite for iron and steel.

We  walked down the via principalis to the praetorium which currently housed the Company's headquarters section, and we could hear the meeting still standing outside and halfway to the porta principalis dextra.  We found the Captain and the Lieutenant standing besieged between our irate engineer Mad Jack and the other two cohort commanders, who were equally red-faced and bellowing in tandem at his stubborn mule face.  One of the legate's lackeys was smirking to herself against a wall, surrounded on all sides by half-opened crates and supply chests, the guts of the Company's mobile headquarters scattered in an organized clutter at the base of every wall and across every available surface.  The two sergeants glanced wearily at each other, and the commander of third cohort waved forward Tickle Me, ceding precedence to his senior.  

"The entire plan of campaign for this initial season is based on mobility and celerity.  We need a flying column, we need to be there before they know we're coming, and we want to be gone before their neighbors realize we've been and gone.  We can't do that if every pony is carrying a brace of sudes and entrenching gear, and taking five hours a day digging out a marching camp and breaking the previous night's camp!  If we could possibly rotate ponies between resting on the carts and carriages and hauling the vehicles themselves, I'd be all for making a continuous forced march once we get within striking distance of the built-up sections of Rennet!"

I went a little wide-eyed at this declaration, forced marches and refusal to entrench night camps was certainly not in any of the manuals, and was usually the mark of seriously bad news when it cropped up in the Annals.  The examples I could think of off the top of my head usually came halfway through campaigns that had seen casualties of one-third or more of the extant Company.

"And I'll say it again, and keep saying it until it penetrates that featherbrain of yourn, not properly encamping in the presence of the enemy is always, in every case, in every situation, bad practice, and would get you hung higher than Hamhocks in the old Legions!"   Mad Jack had clearly shouted himself hoarse by this point in the argument, and I wondered why it had taken them so long to rope me into this particular cluster.  It was clearly my duty as Annalist to provide historical perspective… oh, hell, really, to pipe up with my opinion and pretend it was the word of Annalists of yore.

"And if we were your old Legions, heavy infantry with few flyers and a book of tactics oriented towards directing massed maniples against other massed armies or tribal levies, then the case for taking it slow and careful would totally be the order of the day!" yelled the clearly taxed Tickle Me.  

"Lieutenant, I take it there has been a decision to get stuck in rapid-like before they know we're there?" I interrupted, looking around for the rest of the legate's lick-spittles and spittoon-cleaners.  "Where's our employer?  Or, at least the rest of them?"

"The legate is a busy pony, and had other business to the Eastwards.  I have been given full authority in the Marklaird's absence," smirked the jumped-up jenny, who couldn't be older than nineteen summers, and for all her town bronze, wasn't really capable of contributing anything useful to the conversation, as witnessed by the meaninglessness of her pointlessly authoritative interjection.

"So, it's been requested that we arrive with all speed in-theatre, Miss…"

"My name is-"

"Wasn't actually asking.  Yes or no, quick insert or not, by your lord's explicit will?"

She pokered up, her dignity offended by my lack of manners, but nodded starchily without further interjection or puffery.

"The hope is that we can make use of the witches' darksight cantrips and some tricks we have in mind," explained the Lieutenant, "and terrorize the rebel forces.  They're not exactly militias, but they've not been an organized force for very long, this is only their second campaign season in the field, and intelligence claims they're shaky.  If we can get them running, we think they'll fragment."

"Hah!  More like hope.  The enemy's morale is never as shaky as the spooks say it is, any more than our allies as solid as the liaisons claim.   You know that!"  Mad Jack was now painting outside of his lane, he wasn't a trained officer, just an ascended old pioneer we'd picked up from a long-ago contract with the New Roamish legions as auxiliaries four or five worlds back. Long before my time, and before the time of everypony present but the Captain, who had been a junior sergeant with the then-aerial second cohort in those campaigns.  From the Annals I knew this sojourn with the New Legions wasn't the first time the Company had fought under that strict discipline, but Mad Jack took an especial ownership of that particular sub-tradition.  And that reminded me that it was a mighty tradition, excellent for cultivating discipline in gormless new recruits and beating old grumblers back under the standards with which they had been trained.  We would be an increasingly shaggy and wild band of hussars if we didn't beat the basics into the sections now.

"Blast.  I can see the need for flying-column tactics, and the black-hearted buccaneer in my ugly shriveled heart delights in the prospect.   But we do have a lot of recruits in the ranks, and a lot of veterans who have been going slack in garrison without the usual discipline.  We really ought to have been performing the manual the whole way from the portal to Rime, and I regret the lost time.  Better to have the troops with the experience and mind-set, than to rush madly into the rebellious province with a half-trained, half-blown brigade of wildlings that can't fall back on the fruits of that training."  I could see the sergeants were deeply disappointed that I wasn't supporting their wild hair.   But hasty hosses into battle were going find themselves stacked like cordwood in my shiny sorta-new ambulances more like than not.  I turned to the Captain, who certainly remembered the value of legionary discipline.

"There isn't as much of the campaign season as I'd like left to us in this latitude.  Maybe another eight weeks before it starts getting muddy and cold.  Rennet is a week's forced march, but three weeks doing it the right way hauling entrenching equipment and digging our way across the countryside.  And that tends to piss off the peasantry, ripping up good land just before the second harvest.  We'll have to spend a couple days harvesting oak for the stakes, too, and there isn't anything useful within two day's march of this voracious, alicorn-forsaken, belching hellhole."

Mad Jack had a plan for marching cross-country north of the Bride's Road, the whole Company less a courtesy covering force with the carts and carriages on the main road, wanting to have the rank-and-file tromp uphill to a surviving stand of oaks and chop them down with axes & carve out sudes, or stakes for the regulation palisades. I suppose he had been doing his research with the local rangers, to know where available woodlots were and their status.  You could see from the gleam in his eyes that he was eager to get out into the forest and butcher him some innocent trees.   He really had been going spare from all those years stuck on a set of unforested tropical cays and overbuilt dockside cityscape around Openwater Bay.

The Captain hesitated, conflicted.  The setting sun suddenly shone through the open flap of the headquarters tent, bringing a strange glint to his eagle-eyes, making them look briefly more draconic than avian.

"No, no delay.  We can substitute other factors for the lack of practiced march-discipline.   Sawbones, we'll be stopping every evening at full dark, and you'll be reading from the Annals.  Make it something blood-stirring, and we'll see what we can do about adding some drama and theatrics to the presentation.  Sergeants, you're so set on this flying-column business, I want you to raid the Annals and  your own ranks' evilest imaginings and experience.  I want us to be Tartarus on the march, I want those rebels to think the Wild Hunt is harrowing Rennet.  The moral is to the physical as three to one… we're jettisoning the discipline aspect of that ratio, we need to compensate accordingly."

"They've never heard of the Black Company on this world," I mused aloud.  "We need to make their first encounters such a terror that our reputation races ahead of us to empty their bowels and pin their patrols to the gates of their strongholds.  No matter what their numbers, if we recruit their fears, we *are* legion."

The sergeants looked impressed.  I must be getting better at this Annalist business of bullshitting with a solemn face. I hated this entire plan, but the Captain had made his decision, and in Tambelon we would be madcap, madness and night-terrors.  Goodbye, discipline and good order.

"We'll need blacking for the troops' barding and weapons.  Mad Jack, can you source some charcoal for the cohorts?"  The Lieutenant walked out of the tent leading the fuming engineer, talking him down from his offended snit.  I suddenly realized that I had a lot of reading and preparing for the Captain's nightly readings.  I went off to find Gibblets, I needed coaching. If I was to inspire discipline from thin air, glamour and sheer charisma, I'd have to conjure up my inner pulpit-thumping tartarus-and-brimstone preacher.   At that moment, I regretted being the godless unchurched heathen that my damnable parents had raised.