SBMS080

The Bride had left, and in her wake the influenza sailed into port on a hungover tide of dehydration and dissipation. I was one of the first of the Company to greet l'monseiur, and he knocked me right off my hooves. I was delirious for a week, they tell me, but all I can remember of the period was the Spirit's disappointed faces, images of her sharp-tooth sneer interspersed with periods of her great, blue eyes gazing down sadly from a height. I don't recall the details of any conversations, albeit I retain a sense that they were about infidelity and metaphysical adultery. As if I could ever allow that semi-suicidal great lady to replace our Mistress in my affections…

I was not the only member of leadership laid out by the flu. Both the Captain and the Lieutenant were struck down, and joined me in checking out at a most inopportune moment. Many of the sergeants and corporals were likewise sickened, and all three of the cohorts' commands devolved upon fairly green corporals, and the overall command of the Company to Broken Sigil, who like the stick he had driven deep into his colon, was as dry as you'll find among the military, a complete teetotaller. Gibblets and the griffins escaped the flu's wrath, by being sufficiently inequine that it passed them by. Broken Sigil being who he was, direction of the Company fell into the control of the sole standing warlock.

And it was a terrible time for half the Company to be down sick with camp-disease. The weather broke the day after our employer continued on her tour of the war. Ghouls are generally no more active in bad weather than living ponies; they are subject to the same physiological and physical limitations as mere living flesh, and are notably sluggish in the cold and the rain. They tend to dry out like the rest of the landscape once the sun breaks through and milder weather warms the fields and woods. And until the last of the shamblers were winkled out of their hiding-places and remote hollers, they would continue to drift back into the cleared areas.

The inexperienced ponies who controlled the Company did what they knew, which was to reinstate combat patrols in the forward areas. They overstrained the remaining pegasi in charioteer duties, and provoked a second wave of flu-driven collapses in the aerial cohort. The combat patrols got a number of 'pounders wounded in counterproductive skirmishes that just helped scatter known concentrations of ghouls all over the still-infested districts. In two incidents, the new earth-pony proved his worth, and kept bad situations from going lethal, saving a round dozen of his elders from being overrun and killed by the bad situations that the temporary commanders allowed their scattered, understrength sections to get into, time after time. Carrot Cake's axe twice made the difference between a half-dozen eaten arms-ponies and a scrambling evacuation. He was making his name known in the Company.

I'm told that my ambulance-drivers dragged me out of my sickbed and had me talk them through how to patch together the wounded, hopped up on stimulants. I have no memory of these incidents, but I can't think which is worse, that they might have let a zebra delirious with fever and infectious as all hell into a surgery, or that those great oxen with their lack of pony dexterity stitched our wounded back together. Nopony died from that particular aftermath, so we must have done well enough, but in retrospect I am properly horrified with our professionalism. I really needed a journeymare. Rye Daughter was several years away from that, and Gibblets had sensibly left the foals upcountry at the Palisades, well-quarantined away from the plague sweeping Dance Hall.

We were not as lucky as we had been in the last season of sickness. The influenza carried away several of the Company, and ponies we could not easily spare. The new Lieutenant, Yew Wall, failed to keep properly hydrated in her delirium, exhausted herself taking care of the Captain as their batmare lay insensitate, and collapsed in her quarters that she shared with our commander. She was discovered by Broken Sigil when he went in search of the missing batmare, and found all three laying in their shared quarters. The Captain and the servant survived, Yew Wall did not. Corporals Humility Gift, of the bowmares, Heft Hilt of the sword-stallions, and the ranker Claymore of the sword-stallions also did not survive their encounter with the influenza.

That season's sickness was very hard on the unicorns of the Company. If I didn't know my statistics and probabilities, I would have superstitiously speculated that it had been a plague deliberately engineered against our poor tribal brethren. Such a disease could never have gotten traction in a land so empty of the magical breed, it was merely a function of the lower vitality and resilience of your standard-issue unicorn. Our sturdier brethren took the hit to their constitutions in stride, in the sense that they collapsed in their cots and bedding like the rest of us, but most every other pony made it back out to fight again. Luckily, Gibblets was the only warlock operating out of Dance Hall. Shorthorn having had a relapse of his horn condition, had gone back up to the Palisades to rest before the sudden onset of empress, and the other two had never come down in the first place.

I, having been the first to fall sick, was also among the first to recover. I got my lazy bones out of my cot, and shuffled about the infirmary supervising my oxen. We got as much small beer out of the supplies as we could find, most of the cooks being themselves sick and in their cots like the rest. The oxen carried their rehydration casks, and I carried the willow-bark extract, which had been forgotten in my delirium. I went from barracks to barracks and among the officers' quarters, dosing everypony I could find with the miracle-drug. This is when we found two of the three fatally sick unicorns already past our aid. Claymore was still delirious, and I dosed him like the rest. But for him, it was too late.

The funeral pyres were under-attended, as I forbade anypony to expose themselves to the weather unless they had definitely recovered from their own bouts with the flu. Just enough hooves to bring out the dead, and to build the fires, and tend to the ashes. I watched from the nearest rampart platform, technically still recovering myself. A very small group of musicians in Mondovi struck up a mournful tune for the ceremony; the towns-folk were contributing their own to the ceremony, having built their own pyres next to ours. And their urgency was far more than ours - we could at least be sure that our dead would not return in the dead of night, clouded-eyed and vengeful upon those that had the temerity to survive. The music made me cry, I suppose it felt safe to do so then, when nothing was clawing at our walls, and the only threats to the Company were lurking in distant abandoned mining-towns and back-slope lairs.

I would miss Yew Wall.

Everypony else recovered, except for Dancing Shadows, whose bout with the flu left her bed-bound and feeble. The long exposure travelling on the road with our employer had drained all of her late-adolescent vigour, and her recovery was notably slow. In her lucid moments, she was rueful and guilty, convinced that she had brought the plague with her. I tried to explain that there must have been multiple vectors, and that often the flu just lurks, already in place and waiting until exposure and exhaustion allows it to surge into the gaps opened by the weather, or weakness, or, well, hangovers.

I left Dancing Shadow's quarters, and pondered her effective isolation within the Company. She wasn't here often enough to maintain proper friendships with other ponies, being here and there. She had been sort of close to Yew Wall, but that was that, and no longer a solution. II dropped a word with Gibblets and Asparagus, and the next week, we shuffled into the still-convalescent Dancing Shadow's guest-chambers with Sack and a deck of cards. She turned her face from the wall she had been staring at, and got up in her bed as we dragged a table and a couple of pillows into place.

"Shadows, I seem to remember that you're always flush with cash. Time to lighten your wallet. Gibblets, you deal first, and remember to keep your damn witcheries in your pocket. We're not playing with unicorns here. And I've got an amulet that Otonashi made up for me after last time, I'll know when you cheat, you great gooey green bugger."

Wouldn't you know, Dancing Shadows was a born card-shark?

Author's Notes:

A little mood music.

Did the Bride bring the plague into Dance Hall? Well, she wasn't wrong to say that she brings consternation and catastrophe wherever she goes, no matter her intentions. The road to Tartarus is paved with good intentions, and if the Bride is anything, she is a great builder of roads.

[Edit 11/3/16, damnit, I put the wrong ox into the poker game. Sack replaces Tiny.]