In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The March Down-Country Into Tambelon

SBMS002

As I walked up to the cluster, the Captain turned towards me and held out a talon, telling the black thing, "…and this is our company physician and Annalist, Sawbones. That makes him an officer of sorts. Sawbones, this is our new employer – "

"Legate Marklaird, doctor. It is [skktt] good to meet you. [ttkkkt] I am an avid consumer [vvttkt] of historical records and chronicles. Might I [kttvt] see a copy of your work one of these [kkttkt] days?” The legate's voice was horrifying, shifting registers, genders, age and tone without warning. I will not try any further to replicate the exact experience of listening to that freak, as it hurts my mouth to write almost as much as it hurt my ears to hear.

"We will see what can be done in the way of a summary if I ever can find the time, Legate, but the Annals themselves are not to be read by non-brethren. They're something in the way of a sacred text, and part of that is that they themselves are a… mystery. No outsider can read them, at least not without doing violence to the Company's traditions. Some of our ponies would get… violent if they thought I was neglecting my responsibility,” I equivocated. There was no way in Tartarus I was ever going to find that time, not for some strange critter that wouldn't show me its face, and my second job was honestly already straining my time as it was.

I could have sworn the legate smirked behind its featureless mask, no more fooled by my mendacity than I was at its alleged historical curiosity.

Under all that dark wrapping and creepiness lurked a warlock who went by the name Marklaird, and it was an imperial legate, which in the local parlance meant it was a representative of the Bride of Tambelon. The Bride was something of an empress, sovereign over a vast swathe of the continent, from the blasted sands five hundred leagues to the south, to the edge of the permafrost a thousand leagues to the north. She ruled everything from sea to sea but the empire by its very nature meant that she hardly governed anywhere outside of her capital in, let's see if I got this spelled right – Bibelot? At least according to the bright-eyed ambitious young things that followed in the wake of the legate. The Bride had enough land and fractious vassals that, even given her principle of "ruling but not governing”, there was always a rebellion somewhere in that vast expanse, and her own vast forces were largely tied up in pacification campaigns of varying violence amongst her loving vassals. It was a matter of course that she would have use for a band of condottieri like the Black Company, if only to make messes that her more diplomatic corps could swoop in and "solve” with a display of heroic patriotism and open-hoofed mercy.

Any which way, the Company couldn't linger on the threshold at that nameless outpost for long – our horsepower would strain the resources of that pretty but barren little plot of land in even the shortest of timeframes, and we needed to move onwards down-country before hunger and thirst began to undermine the health of our mares and stallions. It doesn't take starvation to start wiping names off the rolls when you're dealing with an entire organization, just a bit of malnutrition can weaken constitutions and fill my infirmary cots with goldbrickers and malingers. Since the cots were currently buried at the bottom of a number of wagons towards the back of the column, I felt our march held a certain urgency, and did my best to communicate my urgency to command. We needed to get on the road.

This well-meaning urgency had to wait, tapping its hooves in anxiety, because the supply corps and the ground-pounders were in no condition for long road marches. We had a lot of ponies in light shoes, and some in nothing but raw hoof, especially the serious spellcasters, who often complained that all that cold iron played hob with their matrixes. So the farriers did a land sale business, ripping out old shoes and hammering in heavy iron shoes day and night, aided by every pony and griffin that could be trusted near a fetlock with a pair of pliers or a hammer.

"This is nonsense,” I muttered as it was my turn to get nails driven into my poor hooves, "Our ancestors out on the sahel didn't have to wear pounds of glorified grey rocks on their hooves when they pounded predators into the grasses. We just thundered across the turf naked-hooved as the day our dams dropped us.”

"Give over, Sawbones. I remember that town we pulled you out of, nopony there had seen open savanna in generations. You probably couldn't tell elephant grass from crab-grass!” the head smith jeered at me over his shoulder as one of his drafted privates fumbled with my hooves and a hammer.

"Pay attention to my hooves!” yelped Iron Hoof's current victim, a carter and cook named Asparagus, as the smith rapidly drove in the nails without looking at his work.

I looked aside in disgust, and glared as shadows passed over us. The damn flyers, they didn't have to get all this crap hammered into their precious toes. Why couldn't zebras have grown wings? What was the Creator thinking when he was handing out racial bennies? I'd like to fly over the rocks and the mud, too, damnit!

Finally, the necessaries were completed, and the mobile smithies were packed up and made as mobile as those heavy damn loads could be made, and we hit the road. I could swear I could hear the outpost's supply clerks weep in our wake as they mourned their empty larders.

***

The mountainsides rose around our column as we followed behind the carriages of the legate downhill. I had hitched myself up to the medical supplies wagon, leaving the heavy stuff to a set of taciturn brothers seconded to me from one of the ground-pounder sections. Earth ponies are really the greatest when it comes to being dumb muscle. For the rest of us… I sweated like a unicorn doing heavy labor. We had really gone a little soft lounging around garrison in the Bay. I'd have left this heavy-ass wagon to one of the Eyupers except the medical supplies were full of narcotics and other precious, highly abusable drugs. I trust my brothers, but I don't believe in tempting the herd.
The Eyupers had names –for the record, and for the Annals, those were Driftwood and Rhubarb Fritter – but everypony just called them "Eyuper”, and they both answered to the name, mostly because it was the only thing they ever seemed to say. I suppose they'd say something else if it bothered them.

The alpine meadows quickly fell behind us as we descended below the treeline, a barely logged terrain lightly harvested for the town we had left behind. The roads were steep enough I almost considered re-hitching to the back of our wagons and letting the wagons drag us - but I wasn't sure how to re-rig the tack. Iron Hoof had my number, I really was more of an urban zebra.

As we marched beyond the immediate back country of the outpost, we descended into a wilderness of sorts, held back from the road by imperial fiat and forced labor imported from the inhabited regions below. Apparently the corvee fell under the rubrick of "ruling, not governing”, but it was explained to me at some point in my military apprenticeship the inestimable value of good roads to any imperial project. Good roads, well-maintained meant lightning-fast and heavy-hoofed response to any un-necessary independence of thought or worse, disagreement among vassals.

But the long trip impressed upon us the following facts: any military organization the size of the Company in those days could never stand still for any period time, especially in a wasteland like those wooded slopes. A thousand or more ponies would eat their own heads off in no time at all left to their own devices in such a place. Any single soldier is free – a regiment is tied to the apron-strings of whichever master it can find, soonest possible. A squad can go bandit – an entire Company has to hold to the lordship in whatever land it finds itself.

That first night on the road, as I set up shop by the light of a fire and examined a series of overstrained hocks, sore-hooves, and one serious sprain case, the warlock-legate came back to my wagon to talk some more.

"So, my dear doctor, how far back does your mystery chronicle go? We've found tales of a Black Company going back centuries elsewhere,” buzzed the Marklaird in the voice of an elderly stallion with his vocal cords crushed by some half-healed wound.

"First off, I'm no doctor of medicine, I'm a surgeon. I work for a living. Never seen the inside of an academy, let alone a university. Names and titles are important, that's a big part of why the Annals are sacred to us. In a real sense, the Annals are the Company, its memory and history. And we go back five centuries, when the Company made the mistake of signing on with the second false Mahdi in the Dar al Hisan. The Eighters caught us in a vicious trap on the edge of the irrigated lands, and drove us into the open desert. Some of the Company came out the other side, but the Annalist of the time and his assistants weren't among them. It is the earliest disaster we can remember, but hardly the last one. War isn't a safe occupation,” I trailed off, eyeing the new shoes on a bellyaching donkey. He'd have to go back to the farriers and get his shoes re-set, someone had botched it. As I sent the ground-pounder off to bother the smith-ponies, I eyed my visitor.

The Marklaird was a damn creepy pony, and I use that term advisedly. It was covered entirely in animal hide, skinned from some poor fool, I have no idea if from a nonsentient creature like swine or some talking beast like a deer, cow or (shudder) pony. Whatever it came from, that hide, called I found out later "leather”, was dyed black, and covered in some sort of terrible glamour so that you couldn't make out what exactly the Marklaird was. It could be a pony, it could be a donkey or a diamond dog or even a centaur. The only thing I was fairly certain was that, if it was winged, it had bound its wings firmly against its barrel with those terrible straps of animal hide. You'd expect a warlock to be a unicorn, but there were mages who were other races, rare enough, you come across them now and again, especially when dark magic was involved.

I listened to it boast of the glories of its empire, taking it all with a grain of salt. Its voice was no clue as to what it was, as every sentence, or rather, every breath was in the voice of a different beast, one statement in the voice of a little filly, the next in that of an aged old grampa, and the one after that in the dulcet tones of a new-betrothed bride. The legate was no common warlock, but rather a horror that spoke in the voices of a multitude, a legion. One hopes that it held power consummate with its terror, something to compensate for its unseelie nature, because by the alicorns, it was an unsettling creature.

The next day we broke out of the wilderness. Tambelon was the name of the continent we had cast ourselves up onto, and it was a rich country, increasingly fertile as we worked our way down out of the mountains. It was more donkey country that it was pony or zebra or griffin country, which made our current roster stand out more than I was comfortable, to be honest. Hamlet by hamlet, we passed out of the logging backcountry and into the granaries. At least this meant that we were no longer marching hoof to hoof, dependent on the wagons-loads dispatched by the legate's bureaucracy. Each town had reserves more than sufficient to feed the company for the day or two we spent in their vicinity. it was comforting to be in such a rich country, and a bit perplexing to encounter such peacefully prosperity, given what we had been told of the rebellious nature of the country. But further details provided by the legate's eager young staff settled my curiosity; the currently rebellious provinces were weeks' worth of march from our vicinity. There was a port downcountry that we would be using to transit to the vicinity the Bride needed us to be without months of march wasted overland. Meanwhile, the imperial roads paid for by the distant Bride were making many a sullen peasant quietly prosperous, and fattened the burghers of each town we passed with the crops and taxes of a deep back-country. Towns which elsewhere would have to have squatted like fat spiders on navigable rivers or well-harbored coasts had sprung up here at actual crossroads, limited only by local water supplies, as far as I could tell. The more I saw of the Bride's roads, the more I was a convert. No tyrant, however horrible, could be all bad if she built good roads.

Rime, on the other hand, was a fat and stupid port, perched at the head of a long lake, really, more of an inland sea, full of the taxed excess of thousands of square miles of rich back-country, the sort of fat and stupid which inexorably produces thoughtless corruption, worthless carabineri, and officials with their hooves continuously stretched out in selfish expectation. The Bride's central administration was light-hoofed and distant; all this meant was that her local vassals were free to be as awful as their consciences and their peasantry allowed them to be. The Company generally passes through such nonsense without much of a wake. Our history and the Annals give us an edge in how to deal with this sort of petty nonsense. We can dodge their expectations and demands without too much expended energy.

Command chose to raise the banner for a recruiting stop in this foul, impacted burg. Sometimes I can't comprehend the thought-processes of officers, even though the Annalist thing technically means I was now in the line of command. At that point I hadn't really processed the change in my status; I had been safely irresponsible as the zebra who stitched up management's mistakes, not the pony who was being paid, even theoretically, to make those mistakes. Even though I had already started making my very own mistakes back in the Bay. The Good Idea Fairy leaves her eggs in us early, and they grow fat on our lack of self-introspection and quicken with the fuel of self-deception.

I suppose I haven't described the Company's banner yet. The flag itself wasn't technically important, it had been replaced on a regular basis for centuries, although the earliest Annals report that the current flag is mostly faithful to that long-rotted rag that the flag-bearer dragged out of the desert in the Dar-al-Hisan. The Annals are the memory of the Company, but the banner-lance is its heart, and its heart precedes its remembrance. It may very well be the original pikestaff of the Company's long-forgotten founding; there are hints in that first surviving Annal of the contents of the lost volumes, and they all suggest that the lost history of the Company is as long as the history that is written. The banner lance certainly looks old enough to be almost a thousand years old. You'd think that wood would have lost its strength, that steel would have rusted away, but there was something unearthly in that pikestaff. It…. oozed. I've read accounts of the flag-bearer stabbing enemies, even great and terrible enemies, true monsters, with that lance and killing them ugly. Its prick was death.

The pikestaff was what the brethren revered, but the would-be recruits were attracted by the silly cloth hung from its lethal length. This was a long pennant-flag, elongated triangular, with a sable unicorn's-head over a field bleu celeste, superimposed over a crescent moon, argent. Its provenance was long-lost in the Annals, but the description in that first volume was quite clear. It had been briefly replaced in the days of our service to the Hashish-mares and their dun stallion al-Telekker, by a banner with twelve argent hung earth ponies over a sable field, but once the underlying vendetta which drove that unprofitable service had been satisfied, the Annalist of the time had prevailed on a new Captain to revert the banner-flag to something more traditional.

As it was a donkey town, our recruits were likewise mostly donkeys. They weren't quite as useful to a mercenary company as the stolid earth ponies which compromised the iron core of the Company in those days, but still, donkeys could be hard enough if hammered into shape. Especially in Tambelon, where there was something in the soil and the air which gave them a certain advantage which meant that not every wrestling match was won by a veteran earth pony, and a surprising number of donkey hedge-wizards could be beaten out of the brush if one put one's mind to it. Rime's recruits weren't quite enough to compose another cohort, and we wouldn't have concentrated the wet-manes into such a compact formation of cluelessness even if we could have; one or two sections from the two ground-pounder cohorts were broken up and used as cadre for the new recruit sections, which were divided equally between the ‘pounder cohorts. This left the aerial cohort a bit undersized in comparison, but in the absence of serious griffin or pegasi towns to recruit from, we had little choice. I don't quite understand the dispersal of the pony diasporas, but however the migrations had broken, Tambelon had lost out in the weatherpony sweepstakes. This new world was at the mercy of random weather; weather magic was the rare gift of the occasional talented unicorn here, and those more rare than hen's teeth.

We picked up a half-breed unicorn-donkey who went by "the Crow” in Rime. She was a minor hedge-wizard, and it almost completely escaped my notice, despite my concentration on the new recruits and their catch-as-catch-can training while we waited for the small fleet which would ferry us across the great lake to Tonnerre. I was busy putting together a series of readings from the Annals for the new recruits at the time, in hopes of properly inducting the new donkeys heart and soul into the Company before we saw action, so the goings-on of another hedge-wizard in the madhouse that passes for the Company's witches-coven wasn't properly recorded in the Annals as it happened.

Author's Note:

So, I went back and forth over how much to lean on the Crow. She's an expy of a fairly prominent part of the original trilogy, but every time I tried to write out an introduction, things went pear-shaped. There's something about Raven which breaks the harmony of the story, he was kind of an anti-Stu in the source material, and that gives me the scrabbling itches; the Crow might end up a minor part of the story in the end. We'll see, I've got notions of where this is going, but not an ironbound outline.

Comments

[totallynotabrony]

I know you said you had experience, but this is one heck of a high quality first story on the site.

[Dorath]

Hmmm ... Celestia seems ripe for filling the part of the Lady (or "the Bride" as you have it), with Luna ready to step into 'Taker's shoes ... but the flag already implies a past connection with Luna ... and you have Marklaird showing 'Takers most obvious character "quirk" ...

Eager to see where you take this

[horizon]

It's always odd to be jarred out of the text by the occasional anachronism (such as "racial bennies" here, or (more awkwardly) "randos" in the first chapter, and "eyupers" tastes too in-jokey for my palate), but those are minor hitches in an otherwise intriguing narrative voice.

I'm not sure this captures the full charm of the original source -- the in medias res start is less forgiving than Black Company's, and mimicking the tight pacing of the original is a tough balancing act with getting us invested in the characters. (This doesn't spend any significant time with anyone besides the narrator so far, with the possible exception of Gibblets -- though what of him we've seen is great so far.) That said, this is definitely holding my attention, and I'm seeing signs that it's smoothing out as it goes.

[Mitch H]

7970091 The original almost certainly intended a reference to the White Company, Glen Cook knew what he was doing. This is a theme/style crossover with Cook's Black Company novels.

And I was planning on doing a clean-up pass on the first three chapters one of these days. Among other things, I intend to insert at least one "correction" written long after the initial "annals entries" at the later insistence of Sawbones' future understudy and student. And I want to clean out some poor formatting choices that I made in the early chapters that have been pointed out to me elsewhere.

Thanks for reading.