FFMS039

The night was long, but it was not, despite the Nightmare's bluster, eternal. Nor were the week of nights that followed. Not all of the sailors we had taken in that first night were leaders within the crews of the forming fleet, but enough were to give our recruitment campaign a certain solidity, an authority. And three of the donkeys were shipmasters in their own right, two dromon-masters and a captain of one of the galleys of the line.

Each donkey of stature gave me another group to offer our deal, our promise. They kept me in the shadows as they talked up their individual targets, for those who merely were respected old salts. Those, they sent to me one-on-one, to whisper in their ears my patter, my blandishments. It was a sort of seduction, those nights, pony after pony, intimate, in the darkened corners of ship-holds, or alleyways, or the shadowed corners of anonymous grog-shops. Each to be brought to the cusp, and given that little extra push over the edge. And then, once my blade had bled them into the life-promise, I walked them to a safe place along with a few fellow conspirators, and I repeated the entire process. All while their sponsor stared, glowering, from a nearby vantage-point.

They wanted their friends and their clients bladed in, protected, safe within harbour, as they put it. But that never meant that they forgave me, or trusted me to be alone with their precious equine resources. The sailors were not like soldiers, not like the warriors of the land. They were a draconian, authoritarian bunch, and as far as the old salts were concerned, these were their donkeys, theirs to do with as they wished.

It wasn't slavery, but it was a sort of bounded bondage.

I had to give up my command of my battalion, my executive taking over as Major from me. I couldn't haul two wagons, couldn't be hitched to two sets of traces. So I cut loose my ties to the regular Order. I would be working with the new thing, the hybrid thing, the nameless thing which was neither Order nor Company.

After my targets were collected, I brought them into the dreamworld as I had their predecessors, and we enacted another night's melodrama with that fragment of the Nightmare who cared to terrorize and romance these strange donkeys of the sea, who regularly sold themselves into servitude, and yet were furiously jealous of their reserved rights and privileges.
The extremities of that first, barbaric, wild night were never repeated, but the first cadre continued to claim their rights and privileges within their so-called 'traditions of the service'. I grew accustomed to the practices – they weren't so different from some of the things I had gotten up to among my peers and elders in the old Company. Just a bit rougher, and harder.

But it was a harder service, the freebooter service.

And I regularly do worse to myself in the practice of my blood-magic. I'm a tough jenny, just ask anyone.
So it was that short-lived Marsh Wisp was retired, and I replaced her with the new jenny, a phantasmic sea-jenny whose name I had not yet given to anypony. They didn't need my name, after all. I was a representative, not their recruiting commander.

The sailing-masters, on the other hoof, were a different matter. They didn't bother with subterfuge, or pussyfooting about. For those elders, we merely waited for dusk, and took their ships far enough out into the lagoon that we were out of earshot of any listening spies, or even the simply curious. The marines stood at attention at their stations, holding their billhooks at the ready, and the 'slaves' sat their benches, looking down at the deck, waiting for the sign. When we were still in the water, I cast my silence-spell upon the ship, and the ship-master strode forth between and before their crew-members.

"Did heny o' ye," drawled the ship-master of the Seventy-Five, "want ta come dawn here ta push these sleds haround this narrah damn hixcuse far ha wattahway? Hi knaw hi shore has feck would ratha bay home wid' my Molly on tha Bourne, hand tha nits, too. Hall ov hus, we werent but taken hin hour places of gatherence, hwhen they blocked tha guild-hall dawrs, hand told the guildenmarsters ta tell hoff their quota-numbers fram tha membaship hin residence."
"Hoy, shore, hi jumpt hat tha chance ta punch my marsters-card, whonce hi had no choice ov hit. Better ta be hin charge, than nawt!"

The congregation laughed at the proud old salt, Itch Meal. I would never have pegged him for the ship-master of a galley of the line, if you had pointed him out in a crowd. On the short side, scrawny and greying. I had found during our long night together that he had been stuck as assistant to a series of grim old captains and ship-masters, always the second to hard-hooved charismatics and martinets. Their collective misfortune was the making of his career, in a way. If he could survive his captaincy, and somehow get back to these donkeys' home-waters.

"Still hand all, hi wert rather hi were in the Sea, up ta my snoot, hand still beint ha coxswain hor farst mate. These haint hour waters, har they? Barely waters hat all! Shaller, narrer, fulla traps hand tricks hand warse! We beint hin desperate needfulness ov ha higher powar! Or, leastwise, propar local pilots!"

He paused, and waited for the thought to penetrate.

"They haint gowan ta be hoffering pilots, hour damnable foalnapping commodore hand his bugger-colts! Twa busy buggerin' thair cabin-colts in thair turn, haint they? Nawt that hi'm sayin' nawt hagainst ha bit of rolly-polly, mind ye, bawt thare's ha tyme hand place!"

"They lost the last fleet hon these waters, and tha one befor that'n! If hany of ye gawdless heathen salts had heny gawdlets ta prey ta, hi hexpect ye would beint hon yar pasterns raight naw, would ye nawt?"

He turned and looked at me in my cloak, hugging the deepening shadows cast by the last after-glow before night took us.
"Hand saince thar haint naw true gawds far us, we will hafta barraw thawse ov hothers! You, ya gawt-bathering priestess, mawk yer case ta tha congregation!"

And with a might expectoration of phlegm across the decking from the irate Itch Meal, the stage was mine. I swept forward to seize their attention. I pulled back my hood, and let my thestral eyes glow.

By th' Peacock's pizzle, hit's tha bluddy Company, haint it?

Bedamn, hif hit haint!

Quiet, ya flibbergibberts!

I waited a moment for the whispers to die down. Then I began.

"Far from your homes, you castaways? Stolen from your family and kin? Broken to the wheel by circumstance and the will of others? Well, welcome to the world. I have no idea what paradise, what Rakuen of the open seas that you sailed before this. All the Chain has its burdens to bear, from Holstein to the Roamish whips. No time for weeping for our lost waters, is there?"

"Let me tell you a fable. Once upon a terrible day, a defeated rabble stumbled out of the deepest, driest sands of a terrible desert on a far distant world. They took on that world, and the world, she broke them. Shattered, smashed, their officers dead, their brothers lost to the lances and the javelins of a victorious enemy. They were pushed into that terrible desert, and all too few came out the other side. They went into that desert a proud legion with their gods in their hooves, and in proper order. They came out empty-hooved, broken, with nothing, not even their pride, or their gods. They cracked, and a few shards tumbled out the other side."

The congregation recoiled, alarmed by my volume, and my subject-matter. I would not be promising anything easy this time. No drugs, no alcohol, no seduction. Truth, square across the muzzle. See if the Nightmare tasked me with this night's work.

"Some of those broken ponies, they dragged themselves into the watering-hole of a ragged clan of horses, an oasis, as the call them in the Dar al Hisan. On any other day, that tribe of horses would have cut the throats of those defeated foals, looted whatever they'd managed to drag across the desert to that spot, and forgotten that their victims had ever even existed. It was the way of the desert, and no more than what the defeated deserved."

"One horse said otherwise. A hard young mare, of low status, and less influence, galloped in from the other side of the oasis, and stopped the blades of her clan's warriors before they could water the leafy verge of that little garden in the endless sunlit glare. She saw something of that wreckage which had fallen into her hooves, something she could make of it."

And I continued in that vein, blithering on about broken ponies and an ancient horse who had looked at them and saw more than they knew about themselves. I knew I was losing the congregation, these were not eager volunteers or recruits, open to the individual within the group appeal. I was losing them!

And then the Princess took hold of my awareness, and spoke through my voice, my throat.

"Past songs, for past ponies." A tingling, a wash of blue darkness between I and my audience.

"Old dreams, for the old world." An aching, a stretching in my planted limbs, my outstretched forearm.

"Thou art sailing forth into the new world, art thou not?" My lying semblance washed away in long blue-furred elegance in my peripheral vision, a glittering cloud of starry mane just unseen beyond.

"These long godless years without signs nor portents, the long years of hopelessness and fear, of nothing but thy faith and thy unfaith to keep thee above the cold, cold waves – of course thou wert godless and practical ponies. How else couldst thou beest?" The congregation before me, wide-eyed and silent, staring up, up at me, so small, so frightened, so - what?

"The gods left thee here, my little foals, here in this damned world of death and despair. How wonderful that thou kept thy heads above water, than thou brought thine foals and children into this heavy world of endless waves, hard tides, and miserable demanding tides. Damn the lot of them, their holy purities and pieties! We quiver with the injustice of it all, we rage, we stand before thee so furious that we almost would lead thee forth right in this instant, to find a temple to burn to its foundations!"

Was this the dreamy, gentle, vague Princess?

"Damn all gods, and their expectations and their requirements and their miserable disciplines! We must live here, with thee, in this thine world, which is always trying to destroy thee in all that thou essayist and we wilt. We offerst thee not a god, not a divinity, but rather a… helping hoof. A hoof up. It is a tough world by thineself alone. It is a miserable passage through the fire without friends. We art here as a – a shipwright, here to plane the individual pieces smooth, to nail plank to plank, and coop up the staves into a proper and sleek hull. A sweet-sailing ship, a whole, a fellowship of friends for the long night-cruise."

"Mine children, thou hast struggled, orphaned, for too long. I have a connection to offer thee, a berth and a place. Let us connect thee to the main, and leaveth behind thy starveling desert isles. The storm's dark clouds, her terrible winds, they art on the far horizons – let us offer thee a post, a place. Help us bring the barques into safe harbour! Bind yourselves against the current and the tide, and perhaps our common raft can then be whittled, tied back, until the mass bound in proper whole, can be called, honestly, a seaworthy vessel."

"Let us be a ship solid against the waves, the tide, and the current. Against the wicked wind and the vile weather – joinst us that we might carry thee and thine through it all!"

And then, they stood up, and moved forward, and clamoured for the consummation. All of my squalid scrabbling, my desperate attempts to trick and to lure the unwary into the dark. And a little touch of Princess in the night, and all of my little deceptions fell away into the forgiving darkness. As they came forward to take their bows, I wept with giddy, frustrated adoration, feeling her embrace all around me, the miracle she had wrapped me within.

I will never speak again against the unsettling unworldliness of the Princess, no matter how poorly her understanding, no matter how obscure she was in speech and comprehension. She had, even just this once, pulled my uninspired self from my squalid confusion and my involuted abstraction, and dragged me into the clear waters.

The blades flew overhead, blood-borne, nicking my volunteers in their dozens, as I shouted above the tumult the words and the gestures they must offer the traditions and the expectations. I could feel the swirl of the ritual's magic as it whirled around us all like a tornado.

And in the end, it dragged every pony on that ship into the night's dream-world. The new ponies bowed down before the Princess proud in her blue-feathered dignity, shouting their enthusiasm for the Spirit, their impenetrable salt-donkey dialect returned with joyous, archaic Old Equuish, until I honestly had no idea what any of it meant anymore, and I just laid down and let it all just wash over me, once more simply a wicked little donkey who had once been a vessel for something greater.

Thus, the recruiting of the crews. The large ritual ceremonies led to little rituals for the friends of friends, until by the end of the second week, we had riddled the fleet from one end to the other, leaving gaps here and there, and most of the ship-masters unaligned and innocent of our conspiracy. The Princess came to me many times, if only in a glimpse of glorious blue-starred mane just out of the corner of my eye. A blue-furred embrace in my dreamlike suasions to the new recruits in their single hulls and their squadrons, the nameless in the embrace of Night. It was enough, it sufficed. In the end, we had the controlling majority of the fleet, crew, marines, and the oar-slaves – all hidden in plain sight.

We were ready for the campaign to come. And just in time for the last few weeks or days before the winter winds swept all shipping from the inland waters. All ponies – Order, Company, or the sailors of that nameless vessel the Princess had built from our desperate fears – leaned forward with eagerness. The long weeks, months of preparation were at an end.

The New Fleet trembled in the blocks, ready to race towards our collective destiny, towards her new stage, and our grand performance for all of Tambelon.

We would astonish the world before we were done.