• Published 8th Oct 2018
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Good Trooper Gilda - Mitch H



Gilda just wanted to find herself. Instead, she found herself a soldier's life.

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A Memory Of Stone

"Oh, sky and stars, Gilda, why did I let you talk me into flying?" asked Gleaming Shield, shivering as they glided between pegasus guards. "I can feel every single snowflake on these things! There's zero insulation on them!"

"Because the chariots are still with the battalion, captain ma'am," Gilda replied. "And they won't be back for weeks, given what we heard today."

"But we could have walked!" whined the winged unicorn, her thin gossamer wings fluttering to keep up with the griffon's more substantial eagle's wings. They'd gotten away from the monomaniacal head of personnel without Gleaming Shield being saddled with a brigadiership or an appointment to one of the drier staff slots, but it'd been a damn close run thing.

"You know we'd get ambushed at least once down there on the pavement in the Pennies. The bosses have long memories," Gilda reminded her captain.

"You mean your enemies have long memories! This is all your fault. You're a griffon! Why can't you make friends with your own?"

"I don't make friends with gangsters because I'm a griffon, captain ma'am. Because that would make me a gangster, too."

"There must be a middle ground!"

"That's just the cold and the sleet talking, captain ma'am. And you know you had as much of a hoof in all of that as I did. Some would say that everything I do is your fault."

"They should add that to the traditional list of Eastern Unicornian Curses! 'May you attract diligent griffons to your employ!'" Today was Princess Cadance and the White Sisters' turn to lay siege to the bureaucracy. Gilda and Gleaming Shield had escaped garrison to look into those reports that Pinkie Pie's ponies were renovating an old ruin, deep in the blue zone.

"Ah, here we go, captain ma'am. Almost there. Down, to the left. Two blocks over," Gilda said, turning into an approach vector for the tiny-looking building she'd seen in the distance.

"So it is! Look at the size of that! It looks like something from the older parts of the palace complex back home!" Gleaming Shield marvelled.

Ironmonger's Square was an old market-square in the far western quarter of the city, between the new factories outside the walls, and the old shops and cramped factories within hauling distance of the harbor. The square's ancient confines were made smaller by the encroachments on three sides of equally ancient old-family griffish mansions. Mansions which had been subdivided into multi-family apartments in the collapse of so many old families' fortunes, whose structures had, in their repurposing, gone cancerously metastatic, expanding heedlessly up, down, sideways, and out into the alleged public space of the now-disfavored square.

On the fourth, northern side, sat a large once-ruin. The sacked-out Cathedral of Labour was a relict of the Riots of '73, and the violence which those riots had brought had heavily damaged both the blue zone and the pony side of the city. Today, no signs of the burning remained in the rest of the neighborhood, aside from a general seediness which spoke to the poverty and want left in the wake of those convulsions. The griffons had rebuilt that which they were allowed to rebuild, and put every bit into their own property, their own allowed concerns.

The Cathedral of Labour had been the property of the banned unions. Nogriff would dare to repair the damage done by the army which the factory-owners and the authorities had hired from the outlying districts, had raised among their supporters and clan militias. The Equestrians hadn't been part of the suppression of the '73, excepting those seconded officers who led the then-new Territorial Battalions in their inaugural atrocities. The Territorials and the rich ponies and griffons had put a Trottish face on the suppression of the unions.

The betrayal of the wealthy griffons had come a decade later.

Gilda had found a morgue file of banned newspapers from the era while they'd been researching the governor-general's assistant's new 'tribal council'. She'd found enough to satisfy her captain's suspicions, and prove them true, at least in Gilda's eyes. If there had ever been anything like a tribal council, it hadn't been part of the city's civic life in living memory.

Or those of recently-deceased griffons, for that matter.

The Cathedral of Labour had been where the unions had made their last stand, and large parts of her three transepts had been shattered by the artillery turned against her defenders. The nave itself had only been caved in on one side, where the second tower had collapsed just before the final negotiations led to a relatively bloodless surrender.

Those unionists who had surrendered in the Cathedral had disappeared into the New Territories, gone away, never to be seen again by Trottish eyes.

The fallen tower was now standing again, truncated, squat, dwarfed by its intact once-twin tower on the west side. Little antlike ponies were crawling across the new eastern tower's face, doing what, Gilda couldn't quite make out as she flew by. The rebuilt tower looked solid, though, almost complete. More ponies were likewise swarming over a series of rebuilt buttresses, stone flying into place, being fitted by hoof over wooden frames. They had already put back together the destroyed transepts, and patched up the wrecked side of the great building, which was rising out of the pony engineers' wooden framework like a crippled griffon patched together by the meatball surgeons of the departed 93/1st medical squadron.

The four guards of Princess Cadance's Cloudsdale Chasseurs spread out around Gilda and her captain as they fluttered past the resurrected cathedral rising stubbornly into the grey heavens among the freezing rain and the sleet. Gleaming Shield landed awkwardly on the east side of Ironmonger's Square, and stumbled several paces until she got her hooves under her. Gilda touched down with a modicum of grace, and looked away in an attempt to not shame her captain with any sort of acknowledgement of the dichotomy.

Gleaming Shield hurried under the overhang of a dormer that jutted out from under one of the repurposed mansion-apartment buildings, fleeing the chilly precipitation that was turning the center of the square into a slick cannon-breaking expanse of half-iced stone. Her wings disappeared with a sharp snap, dispelled as soon as the unicorn could take a breath in her shelter.

"Well, they're certainly dedicated," Gleaming Shield offered. "What kind of fanatic works in this sort of mess?"

"Colonel Pie told me with a straight face that she wanted to acclimate her pioneers to Trottish weather," Gilda said, an eyebrow crooked. "Do you think she had this in mind?"

"She may have just been blowing smoke," Gilda's captain suggested, looking uncertain. "But they say that the ponies on the frontier are a tougher breed than the rest of us, and rock ponies even more so. Look at them all go!"

"I've read about mountain goats climbing cliffs," Gilda said after a moment sharing in the spectacle with her officer. "Do you think it looks like that?"

"I'm pretty sure that mountain goats don't generally build up cliffs while they do that?"

"You've never been to Manehattan?" asked one of the pegasus guards. "There are tons of goats in construction back home. Half the city wouldn't be what it was, without the goats. I hear it has something to do with their native magic. They took to high-rise construction like pigs to shit. Maybe these ponies have goat in their ancestry?"

"You ponies can't see that?" asked Gilda. "Half of those builders are horned. See over there? On that roof? And along the sides of the half-built tower?"

"What?" asked Gleaming Shield. She squinted, trying to make out what Gilda had spotted. "Oh, Tartarus! They blend right into the slate, don't they? I can't believe I didn't see them."

"They are the same color, almost," Gilda said. Now that the ponies had the goat builders pointed out, the guards exclaimed and chattered, chagrined at not having seen the rest of the construction crews. Gilda tried to not be too smug.

Ponies just couldn't match griffish eyesight. Especially in this sort of weather.

The shape of the project now emerged from the chaos, the structure within the swirl. The goats swarmed upwards, climbing impossible surfaces, burdened heavily with stone and supplies. High above the cobblestones hung their earth-pony employers, their magic hooves guiding the stones carried up to them by the goats. The stream of rock flowed upwards against the pull of gravity, and dropped into their courses so swiftly that if you didn't look closely, it might almost appear like a sort of reconstructive magic.

Gleaming Shield sniffed. "I think I could do something like that, if I had a couple weeks to research the necessary matrixes."

"Not at that clip," Gilda laughed. "And not in that sort of volume, captain ma'am. And could any other unicorn do what you're talking about?"

"Maybe not," the captain conceded, looking stubborn, "but even so, they're not going to be ready by Monday!"

"I hear they're not going to try," said a voice, and Gilda turned away from the construction spectacle, to see a door in the wall behind them open. Guildmaster Garrick looked smugly dry and warm in his masters' robes. "The nave is enclosed, and that's where they're setting up the council chambers."

"Guildmaster! I didn't expect to see you here!" Gilda chirped, and blushed, embarrassed by her fledgeling outburst.

"Corporal Gilda, so good to see you again. I have information sources other than you and Lady Rarity, you know. I've been here since yesterday, watching the work from my friend's son's window. A box seat to the festivities, as it were. Would you and your friend care to come inside where it's warm?"

"Oh! Pardon me, Guildmaster. Please allow me to introduce to you my captain! Captain ma'am, this is the griffon I told you about, the guildmaster of the tin trade, Guildmaster Garrick!"

"Gleaming Shield, Guildmaster. It's good to meet you, and I would welcome the opportunity to come in from this cold. Is there somewhere our guard detail could dry off in?"

"Captain, we're not supposed to leave you alone," the senior guard objected.

"Stratocumulus, we can't have all of you crowd into the guildmaster's host's apartment," Gilda said, repressively. "I'll be enough to keep the captain ma'am safe."

The pegasus skittered to the side, dragging Gilda away from the guildmaster and the unicorn. "Corporal! This is deep inside the blue zone! There could be rebels everywhere!" She looked side to side, as if a swarm of clangriffons might spring out of the sleet and kill them all in a heartbeat.

"If you want to put two guards on the alley behind this building," Garrick offered, "I'm sure that little Gally here can show them where the rear entrance can be found. They can join my own griffons. I try to keep my followers out of sight of the construction crews outside. After all, as busy as they are, they are still occupation troops, and wouldn't look kindly on guild militia standing to arms in plain sight."


After some rearrangements, Gilda and Gleaming Shield found themselves in comfortable chairs arranged in a well-appointed parlor with a wide plastic-sheeted window giving a lovely view of the goats and earth ponies working on the great stone edifice across the square. A roaring fire in an old stone fireplace kept the room warm. It was obvious from the quality of the furnishings and the size of the apartment that Garrick's friends were the owners of the converted mansion, who had turned the master's quarters into a comfortable apartment for the owner's building supervisor. In this case, the owner's son, a large, quiet tom who stayed in the suite's kitchen, ostentatiously, flagrantly not listening to his guests' conversation.

"I can't believe I'm seeing that tower rise again," Garrick said. "It almost fills me with a sort of doomful optimism. The destruction of the Cathedral was… well, it was the beginning of the troubles. The true beginning, I think. When we gave permission for the owners to bring down the old union bosses, we set loose the windigoes."

"We?" asked Gleaming Shield. "I wasn't even born when they put down the unions."

"No, no, my dear. I don't mean you. I mean me."

"I- I thought you were a unionist?" Gilda stuttered, confused.

"Shh!" said the old guildmaster, a sad smile on his beak and a talon to his culmen. "Nogriffon are unionists today. We are all good guildgriffs. But in those days, my family were union griffons. Everygriff but me."

He looked aside, at the end table across from his chair. A heavy piece of stonework sat embedded in the face of the end table, a pattern of raised crescents defaced by a second pattern of hammer and tongs carved across them. Gilda frowned at the ugly bit of masonry. It was a strange thing to have in such a handsome parlor.

"In those days as today, many of the old families made a practice of hedging their political bets. Younger sons and daughters would often join the opposing side in disputes, so that if the game went against the family, there was a voice among the victors for the defeated. In my generation, I was that traitor to the family cause."

Garrick stared out at the ponies and goats swarming over the building across the square, seeing something Gilda could only imagine. "I voted with my party. I was a member of the council, even then, as young as I was. I voted for the establishment of the Territorials, for the legitimization of the ponies' militia. The regulation of the unions, the banning of this practice and that. And in those days, it was even justifiable. I was able to justify it to myself. With every vote cast, I convinced myself more and more deeply of the owners' case. The unions truly were out of control in the 160s, you know. Gangsters, some of them, selfish, hostile, obstructive. They hated the country clans even then. When the end came, the owners were able to recruit griffons from throughout the backcountry to fill the ranks of their army. Almost all of those are gone now, aside from two or three of the sergeant majors, I think, and if we weren't in the midst of a war, I truly think those griffons would be retired.

"And so, self-righteous and half-forgetting my proper familial purpose, I voted for the final suppression. Like we all did. It was unanimous in the council. The old council, before they docked it, and cut off the council's griffish tail. Griffon and pony, we voted to put down the armed, rebellious unions. They'd seized the factories, you know. Threw the owners' supervisors out, those they hadn't suborned. Murdered a couple of them, in the heat of the general strike.

"General strikes are horrible things, Ms. Shield. Almost as terrible as war, and worse in some ways, because the general strike raises the whole of the working classes against the whole of the rest of society. The things some of those griffons did to the children they were able to catch…

"So yes, we voted to destroy the unions, and set loose the army on the workers. Broke the general strike with spear, brand, and axe. Tore that building down over there. Shipped the survivors overseas. Including my sister and my brother, and their adult children. I took their youngest into my household. My nephews and nieces barely remember their parents, or their elder siblings."

The old griffon's confession complete, he settled into his chair, collapsing into a sort of self-stunned sadness.

"How did it go so bad?" Gleaming Shield asked. "Was it a griffon-pony thing?"

"Ah? No, not at all. There was another siege in the pony quarter. Much briefer, the pony unionists weren't so… stubborn. And almost none of them were transported. They all confessed their sins! Bowed their head to the Duchess, swore their oaths. Some of them now are on the true city council today.

"The Duchess wouldn't see the griffish unionists. She came over here, and was getting ready for it, when she saw the rubble. This rubble, here - that my friend had embedded in this table. It wasn't like this, then, of course. He had someone carve the unionist crest into it, so he didn't have to explain to guests the crescent moon thing.

"You see, the Cathedral wasn't always the heart of the workers' movement. It's ancient, older than the Duchess, some griffons say. Some say the original ponies of Trottingham built the city around the original temple, an abandoned building they found on the site. Some say that it looked nothing like this Trottic building you see in front of you. Then it was rebuilt oh, a thousand years ago, and made into a place of worship for some ancient demon from the old days, when Equestria was expanding and great monsters fled the united pony kingdoms and their magic. Some versions of the settlement narratives say that the Trottish were originally exiles from Equestria, that they brought the worship of demons with them, the worship that alienated them from the Duchess and her government.

"Oh, I suppose she was the foreign princess in those days. The worship of pony demons came to an end when the old earls seized the city, of course. We griffons have always worshipped nothing but our own towering egos, and the wind."

"Mostly the wind, in the good old days," Gilda muttered, stunned by the old tom's forbidden history. None of this was in the ponies' histories, nothing she'd seen or read. Well, nothing she'd come across yet. She'd had so little time to explore the shelves…

"The good old days," continued Garrick. "That was when the earls overthrew the barons of Trottingham, and made themselves dukes. They removed all the obvious aspects of demon-worship, tore down their holy sanctuary, turned it into a palace, hung with Isles icons. But they mostly just hung tapestries. Never bothered to remove the carvings.

"When Gharne sold her inheritance to the pony princess, Duchess Celestia came to see her new duchy. The stories say that she saw what was under the tapestries, and refused to stay in the palace. Shunned it, threatened to burn it to the ground. Her pony advisors talked her out of arson, and talked her new subjects into building her a new palace over on the pony side of the city. All the governance of the Isles moved to that side of the city, some of it bit by bit, some of it all at once.

"She left the old palace to rot, and the unions moved into the vacuum. Converted it to offices, and a workers' rally hall. Flourished in it, really. But they left the new duchess with a distaste for the griffons and ponies who had set up in the old temple. Relations between the coronet and the unions were chilly from then onwards. Adversarial, despite their constant attempts to make the Duchess love them."

The old guildmaster stared at that piece of masonry with its defaced crescent moons, and ignored the soldiers and goats outside his parlor window rebuilding the ancient temple. A temple missing at least one stone, bearing the taint of old demons and the spite of their immortal duchess, who had for some now-forgotten reason rejected the love of those long-lost dwellers within the Cathedral of Labour.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.