Cartography of War

by Daetrin

Don't Go Alone

“What are you even planning to do, once you get there?” He’d sunk into a sort of melancholy reverie after answering her, and she didn’t want to leave him to it. “Just...fight with Kree? Or what? And will he still even be there, after weeks and weeks?”

“I suspect he will be. To his mind, there is opportunity...may I see your maps again, Rose?”

She retrieved them wordlessly, and he took one - not the one she was recording the journey on, but the one that showed wind patterns. “He will be finding these out.” Gérard traced a talon over the symbols nearest the gryphon camp. “And setting up forward posts, a chain of them here.” He swept the talon up toward the pony settlements, along the line of the most favorable currents. “Once that is done, I am certain he will request more soldiers. Or he may begin raiding himself.”

Rose flinched. The border settlements weren’t completely undefended, of course, but they didn’t have anyone who would be able to deal with gryphons in force. On the other hoof, she had to wonder why that hadn’t been the goal from the beginning, and gave voice to her question. “If you could do that, why haven’t you before?”

“Because we can’t do that.” His beak clicked. “It takes time to send ships around your patrols, approaching the coast against the prevailing winds and best currents. Too much time for a true force to be away from the front.”

“And Kree doesn’t know that, does he? Or at least, doesn’t see it as a problem.”

“No,” Gérard agreed. “And a year ago, it might have been a good idea, if we had known the lay of the land.”

And he’d said as much before, back when he’d seen the maps in the first place. “All right, well, that still doesn’t answer my first question.”

“Tch.” He deliberately rolled up the map, offering it back to her. “I do not know. That depends on him. And on those who would be loyal to me over him.”

“Will most of them be?”

Gérard’s fierce gold eyes fixed her in place. “You are wondering,” he said in a soft voice. “Whether it will be safe for you.”

“Safer than three hundred miles of wilderness, at least.” Rose stowed the maps in her saddlebags. “I don’t have many options.”

“You would be as safe as I,” he said uncomfortably. “Which is little enough promise. I only wish I could offer you more.”

“Gérard,” she said, and his ears pricked forward, predator-sharp focus fixing on her in an instant. “I know - I trust you’re doing the best that you can. So am I. And we both know that might not...work out well, all the time. So I trust that you’ll tell me what you think. Should I, can I walk into that outpost with you? Or should I take my chances and go home?”

“That is the first time you have used my name.”

Rose blinked. “What? No, I - “ She stopped. It was true, now that she thought of it. The syllables had been unfamiliar on her lips when she’d pronounced them. She frowned, feeling as if she’d slighted Gérard somehow, but he didn’t give her much time to reflect.

“Rose,” he said. “I want you to come with me very much, but all my reasons are selfish. I am not certain I would be able to find it without you, and...I would be glad of the company.”

The last came out oddly coy, and she gave him a long look. He ran his talons along his beak for a moment, not quite meeting her gaze, and then dropped his forepaw to focus on her all at once.

“If you were a gryphon,” he said. “I would know how to go about this. I could total up our debts and obligations, and know what I am asking. I could call you a comrade-in-arms...but you are not, and would not want to be.” He gestured vaguely, taking in the tent, the wilderness, and the two of them. “You are a pony, and you do not share my honor, or duty, or obligation. There is nothing here to tell me under what propriety I can treat you.”

“How about as a friend?”

Gérard’s eyes flickered with uncertainty, and the half foot of tent between them suddenly seemed an unbridgeable gulf. “What can a friendship be when we do not know what we are to each other?”

Rose understood then, if only in a vague, half-formed way, the murk that Gérard was trying to feel his way through. She wanted to reach out and help him, to show him a path, but it wasn’t so easy as reading a map.

He decided to follow her anyway. “Trust is nothing if it does not go both ways. If you can trust me with your life, certainly I can trust you with my integrity.”

She nodded, feeling on one hoof he was being far more formal than need be, and on the other that his integrity was altogether more important to him than his life. “So…”

“So. I would like you to come with me, Rose. But it is a thing that I want, not something I can justify to you.”

“That’s...honest enough,” Rose said, shying away from the naked pain in his voice. “Well, we’re not going anywhere yet. You’re going to stay here and heal until you can take more than ten steps without keeling over.”

“Or my food runs out.” Gérard’s beak clicked as he accepted the change of topic without protest. “Tch. I should be ready for travel in a day or so. Aquila knows I’ve had my fair share of injuries before.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. Granted, Gérard was tough, but he was as much flesh and blood as she was, and she was still aching. “We’ll see,” she said skeptically. “For now, you rest.”

He sputtered a laugh. “As you say.” That, apparently, was good enough for him since he simply dropped his head and closed his eyes. Rose watched, startled, as he fell asleep on command. With all the trouble she’d had managing a proper night’s sleep, she envied him the skill.

Despite the rain still drumming on the fabric of the tent, she poked her muzzle out of the front flap and looked out at the grey curtains surrounding them. And she shivered.

She wasn’t quite sure she could call him a friend, not yet. It was one thing to talk, but it was another thing altogether to really consider putting her life in the hooves - or talons - of someone who had said they were willing to kill her if necessary. And it was another thing to know how to treat him, friend or not, since he was not a pony. Some decision had been made when she’d first used his name, but it was small and subtle and she wasn’t quite sure she had swallowed it.

Water-scented air rippled over her muzzle. It might have been the flip of a coin, but for two things. If Gérard got there soon enough, he might be able to prevent more pony deaths, or even gryphon deaths. And, he had asked. It was just as well that she didn’t have to decide now. It was too big to take all at once.

Then she shook her head, thinking of Gérard’s worries, so deep in other people’s troubles that his own life was at the bottom of the list. It was a humbling bit of perspective. And yet the gryphon seemed just as worried about her as about his own people, in his own obtuse way. Which was, itself, worrying.

Rose snorted rain from her muzzle, pulling free of the ridiculous spiral of self-concern. Instead she turned to Gérard, still more comfortable attending to his injuries when he was asleep than awake. And was surprised to find that they were healing. Raw and deep as they were, they were visibly better than when she’d dragged him into the tent.

She blinked. Gérard was tough, granted, but she’d thought his reassurance was just bravado. Or maybe it had been longer than she thought; between the rain and inconstant sleep, the only thing to mark time was the weight of their supplies. With a frown, she pulled boiled water from her canteen and began rinsing again, the water running clear for once instead of a cloudy, clotted mess.

And that time she noticed something else. Scars, hidden under the blue of his fur. They weren’t obvious, just thin white tracks in parallel, clawmarks over his back and shoulders, some older than others. Of course. Gérard didn’t boast, had no need of bravado. He really had taken his share of injuries.

She covered him with the top flap of the bedroll again, leaving him to heal as rain bounced off the tent. While she should probably take her own advice, she was still too unsettled to drop off like Gérard. Instead she took her keepsakes out of her saddlebags, looking at them for the first time in days.

The river hadn’t done them any favors, since the rocks had chewed away the waterproofing, but the journal and sketchbook were still salvageable, if just barely. But Sharp’s pendant was completely gone, ripped off at some point during her tumble in the river. Her hoof rubbed at her chest where it had lain, a dull ache in her heart where it should have been.

She had a sudden, sad certainty that all her mementos would be gone by journey’s end. All she would have would be memories. Mercy’s charm bracelet clinked softly as she turned it over, not thinking, just looking, and then not even looking anymore.

For the first time she actually felt like talking to Gérard about her friends, about who they had been and how much she missed them. She even had a feeling that were she to wake him, he’d be glad to listen. But she didn’t, of course, packing everything away but Scarlet’s crochet and draping the half-scarf over her neck. The warmth there was only imagined.

When her eyes opened again she was alone in the tent. There was sunlight, finally, casting a patch of brightness through the flap onto the bedroll where Gérard had been. She yawned, gathering herself up, and toppled out into the sun.

For a moment she just basked in the soothing warmth of Celestia’s morning and the scent of a world washed clean after rain. After the slog through so many miles of mud, it was paradise. Then a whisper of sound off to her side made her turn her head, sore muscles still throwing out a few protests.

Gérard was exercising in slow motion. His forepaws stretched and moved, his wings extending with precise deliberation, the injured one drooping. An uninjured gryphon would probably have been an intimidating sight; Gérard just looked lopsided. And it couldn’t be doing him any favors.

“What are you doing?” Rose frowned at him. “You’re supposed to be resting and healing.”

“One must move when muscles heal, or they will not heal right at all.” He kept going through the exercises, smooth and practiced. He’d done it before.

“Celestia,” she murmured. “How often have you been hurt?”

His beak clicked. “You first.”

“What?”

He twisted his head to fix one eye on her. “You know more about me than I about you. I do not think you have missed any of the morsels I have offered.”

She gawked at him. “You were doing that on purpose?”

“On purpose?” His wing flopped and he narrowed his eyes at it. “I am not certain. I know how to be silent. I chose not to be.”

The surprise faded. She had thought his mentions of this detail or that were incidental, offhoof, just because he was comfortable talking with her. But he was actually trying to reach out to her. Which only emphasized the gap between pony and gryphon.

“Well…” She tried to think, suddenly blank of any interesting facts to share with him. “My home is actually near mountains, too. A little village nestled up against the Unicorn Range.” Though she hadn’t been there since the war started, and the request came for her skills. She’d trod through half the country since then, to the north and the south, even spending a restless six months close enough to the front that they had soldier chaperones, but she hadn’t seen her home.

“I suppose they are not the same if you cannot fly.”

“Probably not,” Rose agreed. “Though really I haven’t spent much time on them. I’m still not sure how I avoided that.”

Gérard snorted a laugh. “I still miss mountains. But I do not blame you.”

“What else? Hmm.” She tried to consider what she would tell a pony, or might have in days of traveling, but her mind kept hiccuping over the attack, or skittering to the start of the war.

“A family?” Gérard muttered. “A mate?”

“No, none of that.” Rose shook her head. “I just have a brother, Farcaster. He’s a courier working for Princess Celestia. We...sort of left after our parents died,” she added reluctantly.

“The war?” He peered at her, still going through the motions of his exercise.

“No. The Nightmare Winter.”

“Oh.” His beak clicked shut. Nobody liked to talk about those six months. “I am sorry.”

“Thank you.” Rose watched him silence for a bit, but finally he stopped. Still favoring his right, he limped over to her. She could smell blood on him, but faintly, and thought about chiding him again.

“For the past eight years,” he said. “I have spent nine out of every ten days flying over or fighting through the slopes of Eyrie or the northern coast of your land.”

Rose stared at him. After all, Gérard had no need to boast. “And the tenth day?”

The gryphon gestured with a talon, indicating himself, tip to tail. “Healing.”

“When did you find time to live?

He lifted his eyebrows at her and she raised a hoof, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. It must be different for you.”

“No, Rose.” His voice was gentle. “Though it may not seem so, we do not spend all of our time fighting. Or even much of it. In truth, I do not even like fighting,” he confided. “But I have been in a unique position to keep Aida’s peace from falling apart.”

“For eight years?” Rose was aghast. Ponies had spats, of course, and there was always bickering. But it almost never came to blows, and certainly nothing so terrible could possibly drag on for so long.

“The clans haven’t been united since Gael the Pretender,” Gérard rumbled. “It takes more than kind words to hold them together.”

“The clans? I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

He rolled his head to one side in a peculiarly avian gesture, looking at her. “For how long have ponies been a single people?”

“I don’t know. At least since Princess Celestia and that’s something like...two, three thousand years?”

Gérard made a surprised noise deep in his throat, a sort of a cough, then clutched his beak with his talons as a familiar laugh came bubbling out. It was the dark one, pained and terrifying, with little of sanity in it.

Her first impulse was to take several steps away, to put a safe distance between her and Gérard until he regained control. But she would hardly leave a pony alone that way, so instead she sidled over and put a foreleg over his shoulders.

His hide twitched, crawling under her touch as if trying to slide away from her and he hunched down further, a confused mix of avian and feline noises slipping out from his beak, his talons still wrapped around it as if he could silence himself. She gave him a few cautious pats, and then edged away again since, if anything, she seemed to be making things worse. All she could do was watch helplessly.

All of a sudden he dropped his talons, opening his eyes and taking a deep breath before turning to her. “Forgive me, Rose. You seem to have a talent in giving me shocks.”

“Apparently!” She felt near hysterical herself, relieved that he’d pulled out of whatever dark mood had swept over him. “What was so shocking?”

His tail flipped back and forth, restlessly. “It is just I have spent eight years struggling to maintain the unity of my people in the face of a terrifying power.” He waved a talon in her direction. “And I find that to you that is a history more ancient than our first writings.”

“I...can see how that might be upsetting,” Rose said carefully, trying to consider it from his perspective. Last time he’d broken down it had been because of the map, and what he might have done with it. This time, she could only guess at all the choices he was wishing he could have made. Or made differently.

“Is it any wonder,” he said darkly. “That we fear ponies so?”

She didn’t think they were very fearsome, but he had a point. There was so much that she took for granted that Gérard, that any gryphon, didn’t know. Couldn’t know. And he was trying.

“I think,” she said slowly. “That we should leave as soon as you’re ready.”

Comments

[FinalFan]

Going to war against an enemy that you cannot defeat, not because they are attacking you, but because they can destroy you just by existing. I'm not sure how true that is, but that appears to have been Gerard's perspective, and it's an unhappy one.

[Cerulean Voice]

Well, both characters just got a lot deeper.
Excellent development chapter. What seeds are you sowing, Daetrin? Friendship? Something more?

[ShutterflyYay]

“It is just I have spent eight years struggling to maintain the unity of my people in the face of a terrifying power.” He waved a talon in her direction. “And I find that to you that is a history more ancient than our first writings.”

That hit me...

[Darksymphony777]

4860662 sorry if i'm replying to an old comment i think they believe they being destroyed by existing i think they are being destroyed because the ponies are united while the gryphons are infighting every so often

[FinalFan]

7368908 I don't have any problem with hearing back about an old comment. To be honest, though, I don't actually remember what reasoning underlay my comment.

I speculate the following, but keep in mind that it should not be trusted to necessarily reflect the backstory accurately. In the aftermath of the Nightmare Winter, the gryphons felt driven to go to war. (After re-reading this far, I still have no idea of exactly what set them off; perhaps it was the fact that one of Equestria's rulers was to blame for it.) But the target of that war is a nation with a population huge in comparison, accustomed to unity for thousands of years, led by an ageless and age-old immensely powerful being; while the attackers are only held together tentatively, and even that much due to the ceaseless efforts of highly-placed and highly-respected individuals. This is the disunity that can destroy them militarily that you speak of. But, based on what my comment says, I would speculate that I was implying that Gerard also fears being destroyed culturally by the ponies' culture, which could happen without the ponies ever wishing them harm. Although the gryphons seem to share one culture, which I imagine would help defend against being culturally overwhelmed, I suppose political disunity would make them more susceptible to this as well. One thing I do not recall anything about at all is why this would have been triggered by the Nightmare Winter, or be a new concern for other reasons.

Looks like it's time for a reread. I will edit this comment if and when I get around to it and can more definitively tell you what I was actually thinking when I wrote my original comment.

[edit: I pretty much stand by my earlier speculations, and added the sentence in parentheses. There is also a passage from earlier in the story that seems relevant:
“You won the war, with what you have now. In five or eight or ten generations, with all this yours, we will exist only by your leave.”
“That’s not true. We don’t want to fight, or invade, or take over, or anything. You know that.”
“You would not have to. That much strength would be enough.”
]