Of The Last Millennium

by BlndDog

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

They both had a slight limp as they walked the squelching ground, with a hard-learned lesson in botany fresh in their heads: cherry pits are completely indigestible.

Though there was no sign of bat ponies that morning, neither of them spoke until the sun was high overhead and Dodge Junction sunk under the yellow horizon.

Scootaloo was the one who broke the silence, rolling onto her back without warning and clutching her ribs as she laughed heartily.

“The… The look on your face! That… that’s rich! If I had a camera!”

“Hey, it really hurt!” the colt protested, flushing all the way down his neck.

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” Scootaloo was still trembling as she got back onto her feet. “You know, I don’t mind your terrible planning anymore. That wasn’t in your plan, was it?”

In the end they laughed together; a testament to the sincerity of their promises.

The desert didn’t end abruptly. Late in the morning tufts of wilted yellow grass dotted the flat, stony ground. These were dusty and full of ancient fungal spores, tasting even worse than pemmican. Later still the first sign of green appeared beside the river, and thin patches of grass quickly gave way to lush lawns of reeds.

The ponies stayed just close enough to the river that their canteen was seldom used. For lunch they went among the towering cattails of the muddy bank and dug up a feast of starchy white roots. This they ate whilst sitting in six inches of warm water turned murky by their digging, with broad green blades tickling their backs. Scootaloo thought she could stay all day in the riverbank’s gentle embrace, watching the mesmerizing patterns of long leaves blowing in the wind and listening to their enthusiastic yet gentle applause. Her bland, filling meal soothed her stomach and made her a little sleepy, and the sun was so bright that for a time thoughts of bat ponies and shadow magic seemed like quaint notions out of a storybook.

Scootaloo didn’t know how long she sat in the shallows beside her brother, but the sun was still high when she cast her cloak onto the shore and peeled off her boots (which had become perfectly moulded to her hooves). The air tickled her legs, and her vibrant orange coat had become a light brown shell of sweat and dust.

But that was about to change.

The river bottom dropped away steeply past the rushes. Scootaloo filled her lungs and plunged under the slow-moving surface. The tannins-tinted water, warm from its long journey through the sunny desert, smelled and tasted like sweet earth. There was nary an inch of exposed sand on its brilliantly-illuminated bottom; the water plants grew like a shag carpet, waving in the current as cattails in wind.

She swam against the gentle flow, her head rarely breaching the surface. She chased schools of glittering blue fish through the underwater jungle and blew bubbles from the river bottom. In those three metres of vertical space she was free to fly. She tucked her legs in beneath her and let her body undulate with the current, her wings beating slowly, gracefully to propel her forwards.

Morning Rain removed his bandages. His stitches were still quite noticeable, and he could only wade in shoulder-deep. The few time Scootaloo looked over, he was always staring enviously. She really felt sorry for him, and thus returned to shore sooner than she would have liked.

The children sat under the hot afternoon sun, not even bothering to shake themselves dry. Rain’s wings hung at an unnatural angle, and refused to fold completely. He would need to see a specialist, and those were hard to find outside of Canterlot and Cloudsdale. Until then, he was grounded.

Welcome to my world.

They talked in hushed voices and high spirits, Scootaloo cradling the tomahawk in her lap. It was a rather unassuming tool, considering Little Strongheart’s opinion of its value. Its steel head was about half the width of a typical hatchet’s, and the only unusual feature was the dagger point of its rear. The handle was made of a straight core of pale, light wood with tightly-wound grass forming a glossy cross-hatch pattern. The axe was much easier to wield than the broad scythe blade, but Scootaloo knew that it would do her little good in a fight.

“So Princess Luna told you that something was wrong in Appleloosa?” Rain asked after his lively retelling of last Hearth’s Warming Eve in Canterlot.

“Yeah,” Scootaloo yawned. “She interrupted my welcome home party. I didn’t even get to try the cake!”

He giggled at that, and got a hard bump on the shoulder for it.

“What did she tell you?”

“I don’t remember much,” she replied, her brows furrowing as she dug through her many memories from the past two weeks. “She mentioned something about a griffin coming from Canterlot…”

“Starry Night?”

Scootaloo struggled to focus with her groggy, half-lidded eyes. Morning Rain had the strangest expression on his face, simultaneously scared and curious and thoroughly amused.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Yeah, that was his name. Do you know him?”

The colt rolled over, convulsing on the leafy cushion with trembling wings and mouth stretched wide open. Scootaloo jumped to her feet and was ready to restrain him until the first choked laugh escaped his throat. He clutched his sides, doubled over in pain as he guffawed like a madpony.

“I… Oh…” He gasped as he rolled onto his belly with great difficulty. “Oh… Sc… Scootaloo, you wouldn’t believe if I told you. You’ll… You’ll kill me if I do! I’ll put all my bits on it!”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” she grumped, concern turning to annoyance as her brother sat up again with a smile to rival Pinkie Pie’s.

“Remember all that stuff I brought from Canterlot?” He said. “Well, most of it was Starry Night’s stuff. He works at the orphanage; that night I left, he was packed to go hunting. I just threw my boots and a bag of oats on top and got on the train with his bag! I meant to return it, you know; I don’t like jerky, I just wanted to borrow his map and tools mostly. I didn’t expect to lose everything in Ghastly Gorge. That stuff costs a fortune, Scootaloo, and most of it you can’t even get in Canterlot. That water skin was brought from across the ocean for sure, and he says that he has to go to Talon for rabbit jerky. Starry Night will be so mad if he finds out that all his gear’s gone. He’ll probably skin me to make another water skin!”

“And you’d deserve it,” Scootaloo said when he finished.

“I do!” He cackled, and then they were both laughing.

They stomped their bed of leaves into the soft mud and each took a long drink before getting dressed reluctantly. The cloak and boots, still reeking of sweat and smoke, felt especially restrictive against soft, clean coats. Scootaloo couldn’t get her ears to tuck comfortably under her hood, and constantly rustled her wings for the first few kilometres. She even considered tearing holes in her cloak, but knew that she would regret it in a few hours.

The waterway broadened even more, fed by deep, overgrown gullies. When Scootloo next looked down, the lifeless sand and clay of the desert had turned into rich black loam full of moss and liverworts and sheets of glossy round leaves that hugged the ground. The sun was high and hot when the southern floodplain of the Pacer River crept beneath them like a quiet tatzlwurm. Not a single patch of bare earth could be seen; vegetation grew on islands and over water, and rose out of water, and floated on the water so that from a distance there seemed to be no water at all.

Scootaloo led the way along the last bit of dry ground, and quickly realized the truth about maps. The river was not a discrete highway where water traveled uninterrupted from the northern glaciers southeast to Horseshoe Bay. Even in the rocky north the Pacer branched into a thousand life-sustaining waterways, so that a barge journeying on the “Pacer River” through the cliffs of Foal Mountain would pass a major confluence many times a day until the waterway became so wide that a sharp-eyed pegasus in her prime would be hard-pressed to pick out the far shore.

All the water east of the Everfree drained into the expanse called Hayseed Swamp, though calling the whole area a swamp was no more accurate than calling Ponyville a suburb of Canterlot. True, the ground was never dry, but the water was constantly flowing in most places, and treeless expanses many kilometres wide were not uncommon. Mighty willows rose from the water like battalions of giants, so that reeds tall enough to conceal Princess Celestia to the tip of her horn looked like well-trimmed lawns by comparison.

The children made bundles with their cloaks to carry their boots. Despite her best efforts Scootaloo quickly lost the shore. An ankle-deep crossing to an “island” had them trudging up to their knees for the next hour, pushing through dense water plants below and above the surface. Frustrating though it was, neither of them could resist taking a bite of the plants around them. Most were tender and pleasantly sweet, and with so much fresh water all around the occasional mouthful of spicy leaves made for an exciting surprise.

“So they’re not allowed to hire you as a gargoyle anymore?” Scootaloo asked through a mouthful of water hyacinth.

“Gari stopped it after Silver Flute broke her wing on the fire station,” Rain explained. “I guess it wasn’t a great job anyways.”

“You were a gargoyle for the East Clock Tower,” She recalled.

The gargoyle was an occupation unique to the orphans of Canterlot. Preschool-age pegasi were especially favoured, since most were used to heights and took great pleasure in chasing pigeons off bell towers and neatly-shingled roofs. Morning Rain’s big wings made him especially suited for the job, and he used to make extra bits selling pigeon eggs to the city’s many painters at one bit for a dozen.

“I didn’t like it,” he explained. “You wouldn’t know this, but gargoyles are supposed to put down hatchlings if we found them with the nest.”

“I know,” Scootaloo grumped. That she never got to perch on the Eternal Summer Theatre’s ancient brick steeple still bothered her.

“Usually it’s not a problem,” he continued, answering her complaint with a sheepish glance. “Pigeons lay a lot of blank eggs. But a little while after you left, I found a nest with chicks. There were three of them, and they were just so tiny; they all fit on my hoof.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re tiny,” Scootaloo quipped. “You can fit three turkeys on one of your hooves.”

“Hey!” Rain exclaimed with mock pain.

“Couldn’t resist,” she giggled.

“Anyways, I just couldn’t kill them, so I hid them in my egg basket at the end of the day and brought them home. I didn’t have a new roommate, so raising them was easy. I kept them in my snowsuit so nopony could hear them.”

“Those were really nice snowsuits!” Scootaloo interrupted. “You wasted yours on three flying rats?”

“Come on,” he whined. “You know I’m a sucker for cute things.”

“Why didn’t you just tell Gari?” She pointed out. “Didn’t Shade Weaver have a bunny?”

“Well, I was a little embarrassed,” admitted the colt. “You’re right, pigeons really don’t do much of anything, and these ones turned out to all be grey. I thought I was done with them after they learned to fly, but then they started following me around. It was like those cartoons with little birds flying around the bad guy’s head after he gets hit with a brick.”

They both got a laugh out of that mental image. Scootaloo lowered her head and nearly snorted up water.

“Anyways, Mortar caught on real quick and got himself an owl to deal with the birds, and for a while I had three carrier pigeons. A few weeks later Silver Flute got her wing caught in a crack on the fire station tower, and Gari told all of us to stop doing it. I was one of the last gargoyles in Canterlot; isn’t that a nice title?”

“That’s nothing,” retorted the filly. “I was the last chimney sweeper in Canterlot, and I was a courier.”

Among the children of Canterlot Orphanage there was a long-standing tradition of comparing to see who had the worst job. The contest between ground couriers and gargoyles had been raging for years, and could set even the best of friends at each other’s throat in a sentence or two.

“That doesn’t count!” Rain argued. “You weren’t allowed to sweep chimneys in the first place!”

“It pays real well, and it’s way worse than anything you’ve ever done,” she said triumphantly. “If you want to talk about tough work, I’ll always win. Have you ever hauled a baby grand piano across Canterlot with a rusty metal scooter? I didn’t think so.”

“Have you ever scrubbed ten years’ worth of pigeon poo off of a twenty storey ledge?” He shot back, the good-natured playfulness gone from his voice.

“Have you ever run over your own wings?”

Scootaloo braced herself as she spoke, and managed to keep her head above water.

“That’s not funny!” Rain cried as he wrestled on her neck.

The water became murky as the two fought. Shredded stems floated to the surface, tickling their faces and legs. All their gear was thoroughly soaked, yet still they waged battle in a war which preceded their siblinghood.

They were interrupted by a thunderous splash. Looking across the overgrown floodplain, Scootaloo saw a big grey log spring from the depths with a blast of glistening white foam. It sailed through the air with one end skimming the surface, straight towards an earth pony walking on water.

“Oy! Sto’ it ye big scaly toad!”

The children ran for cover in the rushes. When Scootaloo looked again, the log rested clear above the water line with the end facing the pony split like a giant slingshot.

“Git back t’ yer hogs ‘n cows, ya hear?” Bellowed the bargepony. Scootaloo now saw that he was standing on a broad blue platform, which heaved wildly as he began beating his newly-acquired cargo with a broad paddle.

Deep, sibilant growling filled the air. The log twisted and snapped at the onslaught, its great weight tipping the stern end of the barge with canvas deckhouse clear off the water. The bargepony swayed a little before dropping down on all four, never skipping a beat in his enthusiastic cussing.

Scootaloo felt sick as she realized what she was witnessing. The water around her knees might as well have been a bottomless ocean, and she took a step back hoping to get higher.

The barge was doing a nose-stand when the crocodile closed its mouth at last and flopped overboard beneath the floating plants. It was seen off with one last enthusiastic whack with the paddle, but the dropping of the boat back to horizontal finally threw the pony off his feet. He was standing again before his craft could stop swaying, still mumbling vile curses under his breath that made the children blush.

“Buck off, ye scaly brainless bag o’ teeth! Zit ‘ere’s no fodder fer the likes ‘a yee!”

Having had the last word, he ceremoniously dusted off his dark blue coat and reared up with a long pole gripped in his front legs. He pushed with long, smooth strokes, three of these being enough to reach a decent speed. Hyacinth and lily pads piled up under the low bow and rolled onto the deck, the bargepony pushing his craft like a wind-up toy.

Scootaloo looked to her left and saw Morning Rain shivering like the last leaf of autumn, his pupils reduced to pinpricks on eyes that threatened to bug out of his head. A few minutes ago she might have laughed, but now she just backed further into the marginal vegetation, hopefully into shallower water.

The two stood in silence among the towering rushes. Wading east was no longer an option in their minds. Scootaloo continued away from the place where they spotted the barge, but the water deepened again. There was no shore.

“We can’t go in there,” she said as they stood at the northern edge of the tract.

“What can we do?” Rain whimpered. “There’s no road here! There’s not even dry land!”

“We’ll need a ride,” she replied, squinting at the horizon. “That boat has to land somewhere. I’ll bet there’s dry ground within a day’s walk of here.”

“What about the crocodile?” He asked.

“There’s probably more than one,” she said, and did her best to copy the keen grin that Rainbow Dash wore so well. “We’ll just have to outrun them. Now come on, we have a boat to catch.”

Scootaloo trotted along awkwardly, trying to keep her hooves beneath the surface. The water dampened her steps, but she had no idea how crocodiles hunt. Her head turned at every movement in the water, and a leaping fish nearly made her scream.

They found out quickly that to follow the barge would involve lots of swimming. For the first stretch—a relatively open channel between the rushes and a grove of moss-covered willows—Scootaloo moved quickly by pushing off the ground with the very tips of her hooves. The water did not become shallower at the base of the trees, however; Scootaloo lost the ground completely and had to cling to a slick trunk to catch her breath. Morning Rain, who had never been an especially strong swimmer, huffed and sputtered behind her with his face barely above the surface. His back was completely submerged.

What time they lost in swimming was made up in shallower tracts. Emerging from a long tract of tall red reeds, Scootaloo saw the tail end of a neon green barge glide beyond a patch of trees.

Climbing into the broad branches of a willow, the children were rewarded with a breathtaking view. Open water, shallow and clear, glistened under the afternoon sun. Trees encircled much of the perimeter, completing the illusion of a small lake with shores.

Scootaloo could see three barges, two blue and one green. From the higher vantage point she could see that the boats were quite big; the decks were broad rectangles, each one twice as long as the Apples’ biggest traveling wagon and about half that wide. The deckhouses were made of tight, multicolour canvas, and these added another wagon-length still.

“Whet ya be haulin’ t’day, Maestro?” Sang the pony who was recently attacked.

“No gud kitch, Ca’tin,” replied the massive earth pony in the green barge, who with his faded brown vest looked to be Ponyville’s Bulk Bicep in disguise. “Jist skinny perch ‘n pathitic lil’ picker’l, t’s kitch o’ the day. Git ‘m down ta’ Warmblue’d, awl do! Mik Warmblue’d ‘fore dinner, ‘n awl et well t’night. Hard dem Griffins come early wit no meat o’ thar un. Thall et awny’n, n’ pay li’ kings ‘n queens, awl till ya!”

“Good un ya, Maestro!” Exclaimed the first bargepony. “Any’n frum yer pith, Matter? Nev’ understud why yid nev’ fish. ‘em griffins pay fer passage, aye, ‘cept by yer fare yid break yer back a’fore ye eat!”

“Now if that were true, I would not be here talking to you, would I?”

Scootaloo was taken aback by the third bargepony’s refined accent, and instantly took a disliking to him. He sounded like a self-important aristocrat, the kind that used to tip her the bare minimum for a cross-city rush delivery. His neatly-clipped mane and the shoulder-high socks on his front legs fueled the impression that here was a stallion who could fill his days with a hundred garden parties and his nights with the finest champagne if he so wished.

“Bah!” Snorted the pony in the green barge. “Yid chew reeds fer a livin’ ‘n till ‘s yer pleasure! Dun bick’r nun wit Mas-ter, Ca’tin. Less ya come lik the Doc!”

This last comment greatly agitated the fair-spoken one. He heaved his long pole out of the water, letting his barge drift as he jabbed at the giant.

“I’ll have you know, I had nothing to do with what happened to Doctor!” His voice rose angrily as his companions cackled. “He was an idiot, just like the two of you! And I hope his craziness catches on! I’d gladly see you paddle up the Pacer after him; there’s room for the both of you in Dodge Junction!”

“Peace! Peace!” The first one cried, his laughter dying abruptly in his throat. “’S no need fer that talk, Matter, ‘less ye want us gone that way.”

He sighed at this and lowered his pole. “I’m sorry, Captain. I didn’t really mean all that.”

“Aye,” replied his companion. “Yid bet’ not. Yer mouth dun serve ye, ‘nit’s pity. Naow, ‘less ye need sutt’n from me awl be gun up ta’ Spurton ‘n ze wife.”

“You’re still in Spurton?” The aristocrat said incredulously. “Don’t you think that’s just a bit too close to Percheron Landing?”

Morning Rain let out a little yelp at the mention of Percheron Landing, and Scootaloo felt a chill pass through her despite the sweet muggy air. Little known in the north outside of military circles, the town was supposedly the gathering place of the most dangerous pirates on the east coast. It was the EUP’s greatest challenge, and a black hole for the children of Canterlot Orphanage where mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters went to never return.

“Nae,” the one called “Captain” chuckled. “Thar good folks in Spurton, ‘n rich un’s in Perch’ron. I take it you’ve nev’ been to Perch’ron?”

“I haven’t,” he said indignantly. “And I don’t plan to.”

“Yer loss, Matter,” the other said.

The meeting adjourned after that, each bargepony pushing in his own direction. “Captain” returned upstream, perhaps for a rematch with the scaly beast. The muscular one guided his craft alongside the pony in socks. Unbeknownst to them, two children quietly dropped into the water and frantically swam in pursuit of their swift boats.

For the time Scootaloo knew which boats to follow. No way were they going anywhere near Percheron Landing.

The current picked up as the clearing became narrow. One hundred and fifty metres from the tree where they had rested, the blue barge veered off towards a low wharf of dark wood protruding from a field of reeds. The hull bumped into a wrapped pile, the crunch of dead brittle leaves sending a flock of cowbirds careening noisily skywards.

They entered the reeds as soon as they could, not eager to be spotted just yet. The relief Scootaloo felt when her hooves touched bottom was indescribable. But the leaves around them were long and stiff, so that every little movement sparked a cascade of rustling that rang through the entire field.

“Ow!”

Morning Rain fell with a loud splash. Scootaloo turned around, but a reed wall separated her from her brother.

“Oy! Who goes there?” The bargepony sounded more amused than concerned, and Scootaloo heard his paddle whistle through the air a second time to strike the hapless colt. “Come on out, all of you! Unless you’re a crocodile. Stay there if you’re a crocodile.”

“Stop it!” Cried Rain, deflecting a third powerful strike. “I’m not a crocodile!”

Scootaloo followed the voices for half a dozen steps and emerged into a clearing on the muddy bank. Her brother lie with teary eyes squeezed shut on a sheet of felled reeds, clutching his head and chewing his lip. The barge pony stood on one of many uneven wooden pallets that formed a dry pathway to the dock, his cracked wooden paddle slung over his shoulder with a domineering air.

“Oh, there’s two of you,” he sneered, showing a mouthful of straight yellowing teeth. “And what’s your name, little girl?”

His muzzle was small; effeminate, even, though Scootaloo would never say so. His light grey coat was oddly clean for a pony who spent his days pushing a boat, and his silver mane looked to be recently-combed. The socks on his forelegs were made of heavy brown cloth; more like long boots than socks. The considerable wear at his wrist justified his using them, though the fact remained that his confreres took no such precautions.

“Well?” He prompted. “Cat got your tongue? Frog in your throat? Should I knock it out for you?”

“She’s Scootaloo!” Rain blurted out. “My name is Morning Rain! We’re from Canterlot Orphanage!”

“Orphans, then?” He said, idly hefting his weapon. “Well, what’s your business here? If you’re begging for bits you’ve come a long way to do it.”

“We are Children of the Night,” the colt explained, indignation warring with pain in his voice. “We don’t beg, sir, but we do need passage.”

“Do you need it today?”

“As soon as we can have it,” he said. “We lost our bits a while back…”

The stallion’s face turned dour at that.

“So you’re saying that you don’t beg,” he said in his smooth, overbearing voice that made Scootaloo want to buck his legs out from beneath him. “But you want me to give you free passage. I don’t see why you can’t just swim. I heard pegasi float pretty well.”

“You didn’t understand,” Rain continued. How he was staying so calm Scootaloo did not know. “We lost our bits, but we will gladly work for you. I am a candle maker,” here he shifted slightly to show the mark on his flank, “and my sister is the fastest pony in Canterlot on land and in water. We’ve worked a hundred jobs between the two of us. Do you have clothes that need repair? Messages that need delivering? Shall we cook for you?...”

The bargepony was shaking his head vigorously long before Rain could finish.

“You’ve got nothing I want! If I needed somepony to mend my clothes or make my food, I wouldn’t be out here on my own now would I? And candles! Don’t get me started on candles! Commodore down in Bareback had candles on his lighter, and lost his boat for it. I don’t need your stinking candles!”

“We can row for you,” Scootaloo pitched in, her patience stretched like an overfilled balloon.

He stopped talking at that and stared at her, sizing her up. And then he laughed.

“You? Row? Do you need a good whack in the noggin, or have you had too many? My barge is two tonnes empty. No, you won’t move it much if there were ten of you.”

“We need to get to Horseshoe Bay!” Morning Rain insisted. “There has to be a way!”

“Like I said, swim.” He brandished his paddle, making the poor colt tuck in his head. “You’ll not find any barge to take you for what you have. But my fare is the lowest you’ll find, and ten bits isn’t hard to earn. How about this: I’ll be back in a week, and if you can get ten bits by then I’ll take you. I’ll take you all the way to Saddletowne, if that’s where you’re headed.”

“We can’t wait for a week!” Rain implored. “Let’s talk about this, okay? Here, I have this nice sword…”

He began fumbling with the brass clasp of his sling. The barge pony frowned and slowly raised the paddle high over his head as if he would strike him again.

“Master! What’s going on here?”

All turned at the deep, authoritative voice.

The griffin’s pure white face was almost too bright to look at, like a torch inside his brown hood. His massive bird’s head was propped atop a bird’s neck, and his scaly yellow claws were those of a bird also. Another head, even bigger than his, with foot-long fangs in its mouth and framed by a fiery red mane, peered unblinking over his shoulder.

Beside the one who had spoken first was another griffin of similar size, with gentler features and a red-streaked tuft of down protruding from her own hood. This one had a black longbow slung over her shoulder and supported the right half of the blankly-staring monster.

With these two to wonder at plus their terrible cargo, Scootaloo almost didn’t notice the two kids skipping along the wooden path at the front of the procession. They were about the same size as Morning Rain, with huge wings of their own. One of them had black bat wings; a very odd thing to find on a griffin, but then Scootaloo hadn’t seen that many griffins in her life. Otherwise they looked like identical twins, one wearing a green hood while the other wore khaki. They were bound straight for the ponies, their smiling beaks eagerly parted.

Scootaloo was so awestruck at the griffins and their game that she failed to notice Morning Rain faint.

Author's Note:

I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am. I'm enjoying this a lot.