In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Past And The Dead

SBMS023

Languid was as useless as she's ever been. She brought an unwieldy dressing-divider screen, and hid herself and the Captain in a corner, doing her voudoun hidden from filthy pony eyes. Or putzing around like always, you could never tell with that mare. She claimed there was nothing magical wrong or influenced, just the natural griffin, insensate. Useless, useless. I should have sent for Gibblets, he was an obnoxious little troll, but he knew more magic than… I couldn't call for Gibblets.

So we waited. Operations sent notice that the Lieutenant had been signaled, and that as soon as I was free, they needed me out In the field. I discussed the matter with the courier, and we made arrangements to send out some of the oxen with an escort and two of the ambulances to a staging and fallback point; she had a hoof-drawn map of the roadnet between our compound and the expected ambush zone. I hoofed the point at which we probably wanted Sack and Tiny and the others with the ambulances and… I recommended sending out multiple sections, enough to make a difference if they were being pressed when the Lieutenant's vexellation made the rendezvous. Then I cuffed the courier and reminded her to not take the blasted map with her out of the base. Last thing we needed was to let that fall into the hands of the rebel.

And waited. No news, no new patients, and my convelescents had fallen asleep, even the ones who drifted off over their cards. Roggentochter and I dragged those gamblers back to their respective cots. She was dragging pretty badly herself by that point, and I tucked her into a cot in the far corner, and she dropped like a pebble into a dry well.

Near dawn, the Captain's eyes opened. Brown, avian, as they ought to be. He rumbled, making no particular sense, mostly clearing his throat. And again, and again. He continued to not make much more than noise for a while. I gave him some small beer cut heavily with water from the cask, and let him rest, and did some work on the Annals, which I had left under a cot the day before.

I was still working on my "voice" for my first volume, trying to work out what I wanted to sound like to my successors, what I wanted my Company to sound like. In truth, we speak with many voices, but in the Annals, by necessity, all voices are spoken with one throat, one voice. The best we can do is a sort of mimicry. The Company of old, that lives on in the story the old Annalists spun… Desecrated Temple's single volume is a strange and terrible record, from a strange and terrible moment in the Company's history.

The third known Annalist, during whose tenure the Company was driven from the Dar-al-Hisan, and reduced to not much more than a bandit band with delusions of grandeur, by his own account. The many horses who had joined the Company in their glory days under Fatinah and her Captains, and proud al-Hazar and her adored Faris al-Dhubabi – they had all fallen away or been slaughtered in the chaos and betrayal of that great Captain's fall from grace. The thestral core had escaped with their sole surviving unicorn, and Desecrated Temple took the Annals and his ponies through a minor portal out of that world of fanatics and fighting faiths, sacking small shrines as they fled.

There was no Captain in Desecrated Temple's account, no officers, no Company but for himself and a remnant of savage bat-winged thieves. Was this the Company, at its hard-pressed core? It was smaller under Desecrated Temple than it had been when they came out of the desert wilderness defeat with their war-lance and no books. But this version of the Company, it had the Annals, and it had an Annalist. And what little wisdom Desecrated Temple had to offer beyond tips on the efficient looting of holy places and useful advice on the evasion of pursuit, was this: ‘the past is never dead; it isn't even past'.

His account, when it isn't about burning altars and evading cavalcades of enraged temple guards, is heavily larded with dreamlike verse about, well, it wasn't exactly clear. Dark memories and allusions of the Company's past. Fatinah wrote little of the Company before the disaster in the desert wilderness, but Temple, who hadn't even been born when the Annals had been lost, wrote bad poetry about the lost Company. And sitting there in the morning light, a direct beam shining down the long corridor from the open gates through the infirmary's open door, looking after a ward full of sleeping patients, reading Temple's book, I saw what I had never seen before. The Spirit who curled in the heart of the Company. Temple had met her, known her, may have loved her, insofar as he had loved anything more than arson and blasphemy.

How had he met her? Was it because he was, effectively, Annalist and Captain both? Had it left him somehow vulnerable to her influence?

Was it his blasphemous, betrayed madness, did it somehow resonate with her obvious lunacy?

My musing over the ancient books of the Annals was interrupted and put to a close by the arrival of the ambulances, their bulk cutting off the morning light I had been basking in, down that long corridor. The courier pulled me out into the mustering-yard and the full sun-light. It was a chaos of battered, grinning ground-pounders, many of them still covered in the dried mementos of the rebel discomfit they so clearly were glorying in. But those were the intact brethren, and the ones in the ambulances were my concern. They were full of broken ponies, and the oxen and I organized litter parties to carry the most broken but salvageable inside, while I evaluated the worst cases there in the mud and blood of the yard. I sent the courier back into the infirmary with the first wave of surgery candidates for my supply of mercy potions, for those conscious enough to be aware of their hopelessness. The rest were already past my intervention, one way or the other.

I should have been out there with the ambulances. This was on me. I mean, the Captain's well being was of higher priority than the wounded from one fight, however… extensive. But I had had a good idea what was wrong with the Captain, and I should have left him to the warlocks, and minded my own lane. Three trauma cases whose bloodloss would carry them away, no matter what I could do for them now…
I rushed inside to get to work in the surgery. The awakened convalescents were shuffling out, and I grabbed a couple of the most effective to play nurse and orderly. I told Roggentochter to watch and help with the rags and bandages, and got to work.

It was a long day. I spent hours washing out and cleaning pike wounds, some of them terrible. None of the ponies who made it to the infirmary died on my table, but two donkeys and an earth pony lost limbs to my bone-saws, and over a dozen earth ponies, donkeys and pegasi would be joining the convalescent corps for weeks as their deep wounds and blood loss took them out of the active lists.

Roggentochter was a trooper, only vomited in a corner once, and was good about cleaning it up afterwards. I didn't blame her – a pony with half her face sheared off isn't anything you should be easy with, not that young. Feather Fall would live, but she'd never be pretty again. Well, some ponies like their mares in masks, and our smiths were good with that sort of thing. Ahem.

This I had from Long Haul, who had the time to describe the Lieutenant's victorious disaster:

The deep recon scouts had identified a collection of rebel units which were rushing back from the posts on the frontier to the inner districts, the civilian White Rose had gotten word to their regiments somehow, we didn't know at the time exactly how, although some sort of witchy rune communication scheme was suspected. The response was scattered, and disorganized, but there were two big concentrations advancing down the roads crossing the byway that Otonashi's Benoit column was supposed to be using to return to the main base that evening. The Captain, the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil had worked out an overly-clever ambush plan, to have the Benoit column to cross the rebel "T" and draw them into a prepared kill zone that the Lieutenant and Tickle Me's vexellations would use to them smash up. Indirection, distraction and ambush – the Company's preferred mode of operation.

It hadn't gone to (excessively complicated) plan. Every pony has a plan until you buck them in the face. The Benoit column had been too slow, too burdened with their haul of stolen vehicles, grain, and cheeses. They were still in the kill zone when the enemy forces overtook the rear guard. The carters cut their traces and left the vehicles, but the damage was done. The rear guard got mauled, and far too many Company ponies went down under a rush of pike. It would have been a catastrophe if not for one of my oxen, who instead of following the rest of the carters in running for their lives, turned about and counter-charged into the face of a fence of pikes.

One of Sack's and Tiny's aged uncles, had apparently made the calculation, or just was tired of running. He hit that line like a boulder of beef, and broke off a half-dozen pikeheads in his thick hide. I'm told he made a hash of their nice neat formation, broke their momentum. He died, of course, and I looked over the body when I had time, before they buried him. I counted no less than sixty-seven wounds, and fished twenty-five pike-heads out of him. As far as I can tell, he died of shock and blood loss, they never actually got a blade into anything vital. Lourd, an ox of considerable age and experience, decided on the road to Benoit that he was tired of running away from trouble, and trouble found him instead.

Lourd's stand gave Otonashi's rear guard time to disengage, and Otonashi herself set some surprises to slow and disorient the caribou who managed to get around the enraged ox and had tried to re-form a line to continue the pursuit. This was the point at which the Lieutenant and Tickle Me had closed their trap on the enemy.

The Benoit rear guard had been engaged inside the kill zone, and had left the ambush elements out of position and wrong-hoofed. They had had to maneuver to find the rear of the enemy, and had nearly blundered into the enemy twice before they were ready. Once they had dressed their lines, though, it was basically over. They pulled off the same trick I had performed in Pythia's Fell, except instead of benefiting from the confined quarters of a (by battlefield standards) narrow high-street, they had to envelope the disintegrating rebel phalanxes. It must have helped that the enemy wasn't an organized force, but rather an opportunistic collection of different units' forward elements with no united command or control. It wasn't as pretty as Pythia's Fell, but the presence of the aerial cohort, committed en masse, meant that the enemy lost as many ponies in the rout as in the battle itself. There were survivors, perhaps as many as there were dead on and around the field, but they were scattered, and from the sound of things, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of them never rejoined their units. This sort of thing is how good ponies become deserters. As well as bad ones.

We recovered our dead:
The following, dead of pike wounds to their front: Maille Fine, jenny; Deuxieme Etage, jack; High Kick, corporal, earth pony stallion; Escaliers Retour, jack; Seventh Yard, zebra stallion; Dream Valley, earth pony mare. All of them in the rear guard, facing a charging caribou pike line. None showed wounds in the rear or flank. Two Clouds, pegasus mare, of blood loss from a partially severed wing taken in pursuit of an escaping caribou officer, who was run down by her wingmares who made sure he would not escape to brag of his feat. Lourd, ox, of massive blood loss on the field, as described above. Grable, dragon wyrming, of wounds taken in the thick of the fighting during the breaking of the phalanx; the killing wound was probably one of three to his femoral arteries on either side; he had trusted in his tough hide one battle too many. Driftwood, earth pony stallion, of heavy wounds to his barrel and crop, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Alaborn, jack, of wounds to his throat and groin, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Catsfoot, earth pony mare, of massive wounds to her muzzle and forehead, again in the breaking of the phalanx.

I polished off the whiskey in my interrogation kit that night, and slept the sleep of the stinking drunk well into the next morning.

Comments

[Bookeater_otaku]

Grable, dragon wyrming, of wounds taken in the thick of the fighting during the breaking of the phalanx; the killing wound was probably one of three to his femoral arteries on either side; he had trusted in his tough hide one battle too many.

Almost missed this. Grable the dragon! And you said somewhere this was an OC only story. Nice little cameo but I was under the impression there was only ponies, griffons, donkeys and zebra.

[Mitch H]

9420677

Technically, he was an OC, and he showed up in the first chapter, among the other soldiers that participated in the raid on that inn where Company ponies had been poisoned. Equestria's Garble and the Black Company's Grable aren't the same drake; they probably would have been astounded to discover each other existed, I think. Given the context and Grable's apparent age, he was probably hatched in Crossroads, or possibly Miklagard, the previous world the Company passed through before Crossroads and then Tambelon.