"Now, it's like this," said Maladict calmly. "We're soldiers of the Duchess, agreed? Just say 'aargh'."
He must have squeezed. The man groaned.
"Thank you. And you're serving up as beer a liquid best described as foul water," Maladict went on in the same level, conversational tone. "I, of course, don't drink... horse piss, but I have a highly developed sense of smell, and really would prefer not to list aloud the things I can smell in this murk, so we'll just say 'rat droppings' and leave it at that, shall we? Just whimper. Good man." At the end of the bar, one of the new recruits threw up. The barman's fingers had gone white. Maladict nodded with satisfaction.
"Incapacitating a soldier of her grace in wartime is a treasonable offence," he said. He leaned forward. "Punishable, of course, by... death." Maladict pronounced the word with a certain delight. "However, if there happened to be another barrel of beer around the place, you know, good stuff, the stuff you'd keep for your friends if you had any friends, then I'm sure we can forget this little incident. Now, I'm going to let go of your wrist. I can tell by your eyebrow that you are a thinker, and if you're thinking of rushing back in here with a big stick, I'd like you to think about this instead: I'd like you to think about this black ribbon I'm wearing. Know what it means, do you?"
The barman winced, and mumbled: "Temp'rance League..."
"Right! Well done!" said Maladict. "And one more thought for you, if you've got room. I've only taken a pledge not to drink human blood. It doesn't mean I can't kick you in the fork so hard you suddenly go deaf."
He released his grip. The barman slowly straightened up. Under the bar he would have a short wooden club, Polly knew. Every bar had one. Even her father had one. It was a great help, he said, in times of worry and confusion. She saw the fingers of the usable hand twitch.
"Don't," she said. "I think he means it."
The barman relaxed. "Bit of a misunderstanding there, gents," he mumbled. "Got the wrong barrel in. No offence meant." He shuffled off, his hand almost visibly throbbing.
"I only thaid it wath horthe pith," said Igor.
"He won't cause trouble," said Polly to Maladict. "He'll be your friend from now on. He's worked out he can't beat you so he's going to be your best mate."
Maladict subjected her to a thoughtful stare. "I know that," he said. "How do you?"
"I used to work in an inn," said Polly, feeling her heart begin to beat faster, as it always did when the lies lined up. "You learn to read people."
"What did you do in the inn?"
"Barman."
"There's another inn in this hole, is there?"
"Oh no, I'm not from round here."
Polly groaned at the sound of her own voice, and waited for the question: "Then why come here to join up?" It didn't come. Instead, Maladict just shrugged and said, "I shouldn't think anyone is from round here."
A couple more new recruits arrived at the bar. They had the same look - sheepish, a bit defiant, in clothes that didn't fit well. Eyebrow reappeared with a small keg, which he laid reverentially on a stand and gently tapped. He pulled a genuine pewter tankard from under the bar, filled it, and timorously proffered it to Maladict.
"Igor?" said the vampire, waving it away.
"I'll thtick with the horthe pith, if it'th all the thame to you," said Igor. He looked around in the sudden silence. "Look, I never thaid I didn't like it," said Igor. He pushed his mug across the sticky bar. "Thame again?"
Polly took the new tankard and sniffed at it. Then she took a sip. "Not bad," she said. "At least it tastes like it's - "
The door pushed open, letting in the sounds of the storm. About two-thirds of a troll eased its way inside, and then managed to get the rest of itself through.
Polly was okay about trolls. She met them up in the woods sometimes, sitting amongst the trees or purposefully lumbering along the tracks on the way to whatever it was trolls did. They weren't friendly, they were... resigned. The world's got humans in it, live with it. They're not worth the indigestion. You can't kill 'em all. Step around 'em. Stepping on 'em doesn't work in the long term.
Occasionally a farmer would hire one to do some heavy work. Sometimes they turned up, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they'd turn up, lumber around a field pulling out tree stumps as if they were carrots, and then wander off without waiting to be paid. A lot of things humans did mystified trolls, and vice versa. Generally, they avoided one another.
But she didn't often see trolls as... trollish as this one. It looked like a boulder that had spent centuries in the damp pine forests. Lichen covered it. Stringy grey moss hung in curtains from its head and its chin. It had a bird's nest in one ear. It had a genuine troll club, made from an uprooted sapling. It was almost a joke troll, except that no one would laugh.
The root end of the sapling bumped across the floor as the troll, watched by the recruits and a horrified Corporal Strappi, trudged to the table.
"Gonna En List," it said. "Gonna do my bit. Gimme shillin'."
"You're a troll!" Strappi burst out.
"Now, now, none of that, corporal," said Sergeant Jackrum. "Don't ask, don't tell."
"Don't ask? Don't ask? It's a troll, sarge! It's got crags! There's grass growing under its fingernails! It's a troll!"
"Right," said the sergeant. "Enlist him."
"You want to fight with us?" Strappi squeaked. Trolls had no sense of personal space, and a ton of what was, for practical purposes, a kind of rock was looming right over the table.
The troll analysed the question. The recruits stood in silence, mugs halfway to mouths.
"No," said the troll at last. "Gonna fight wi' En Army. Gods save the..." The troll paused, and looked at the ceiling. Whatever it was seeking there didn't appear to be visible. Then it looked at its feet, which had grass growing on them. Then it looked at its free hand and moved its fingers as if counting something. "...Duchess," it said. It had been a long wait. The table creaked as the troll laid a hand on it, palm upwards. "Gimme shillin'."
"We've only got the bits of pape - " Corporal Strappi began. Sergeant Jackrum jabbed an elbow into his ribs.
"Upon my oath, are you mad?" he hissed. "There's a ten-man bounty for enlisting a troll!" With his other hand he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a real silver shilling, and placed it delicately in the huge hand. "Welcome to your new life, friend! I'll just write your name down, shall I? What is it?"
The troll looked at ceiling, feet, sergeant, wall and table. Polly saw its lips move. "Carborundum?" it volunteered.
"Yeah, probably," said the sergeant. "Er, how'd you like to shav - to cut off some of that hai - moss? We've got a, a sort of a... regulation..."
Wall, floor, ceiling, table, fingers, sergeant. "No," said Carborundum.
"Right. Right. Right," said the sergeant quickly. "It's not a regulation as per such, actually, it's more of an advisory. Silly one, too, eh? I've always thought so. Glad to have you with us," he added fervently.
The troll licked the coin, which gleamed like a diamond in its hand. It actually did have grass growing under its fingernails too, Polly noticed. Then Carborundum trudged to the bar. The crowd parted instantly, because trolls never had to stand at the back of the press of bodies, waving money and trying to catch the barman's eye.
He broke the coin in two and dropped both halves on the bar top. Eyebrow swallowed. He looked as though he would have said "Are you sure?" except that this was not a question barmen addressed to people weighing over half a ton. Carborundum thought for a while, and then said: "Gimme drink."
Eyebrow nodded, disappeared briefly into the room behind the bar, and came back holding a double-handled mug. Maladict sneezed. Polly's eyes watered. It was the kind of smell you sense with your teeth. The pub might make foul beer as a matter of course, but this was eye-stinging vinegar.
Eyebrow dropped one half of the silver coin into it, and then took a copper penny out of the money drawer and held it over the fuming mug. The troll nodded. With just a hint of ceremony, like a cocktail waiter dropping the little umbrella into a Double Entendre, Eyebrow let the copper fall.
More bubbles welled up. Igor watched with interest. Carborundum picked the mug up in two fingers of each shovel-like hand, and swallowed the contents in one gulp. He stood stock still for a moment, then carefully put the mug back on the bar.
"You gentlemen might like to move back a bit," murmured Eyebrow.
"What's going to happen?" said Polly.
"It takes 'em all differently," said Eyebrow. "Looks like this one's - no, there he goes..."
With considerable style, Carborundum went over backwards. There was no sagging at the knees, no girly attempt to soften the fall. He just went from standing up, one hand out, to lying down, one hand up. He even rocked gently for some time after hitting the floor.
"Got no head for his drink," said Eyebrow. "Typical of the young bucks. Wants to play the big troll, comes in here, orders an Electrick Floorbanger, doesn't know how to handle it."
"Is he going to come round?" said Maladict.
"No, that's it until dawn, I reckon," said Eyebrow. "Brain stops working."
"Shouldn't affect him too much, then," said Corporal Strappi, stepping up. "Right, you miserable lot. You're sleeping in the shed out the back, understand? Practically waterproof, hardly any rats. We're out of here at dawn! You're in the army now!"
Polly lay in the dark, on a bed of musty straw. There was no question of anyone's getting undressed. The rain hammered on the roof and the wind blew through a crack under the door, despite Igor's attempt to stuff it with straw. There was some desultory conversation, during which Polly found that she was sharing the dank shed with "Tonker" Halter, "Shufti" Manickle, "Wazzer" Goom and "Lofty" Tewt. Maladict and Igor didn't seem to have acquired repeatable nicknames. She'd become Ozzer by general agreement.
Slightly to Polly's surprise the boy now known as Wazzer had taken a small picture of the Duchess out of his pack and had nervously hung it on an old nail. No one else said anything as he prayed to it. It was what you were supposed to do...
They said the Duchess was dead...
Polly had been washing up when she'd heard the men talking late one night, and it's a poor woman who can't eavesdrop while making a noise at the same time.
Dead, they said, but the people up at PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg weren't admitting it. That was 'cos what with there being no children, and with royalty marrying one another's cousins and grannies all the time, the ducal throne would go to Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia! There! Can you believe that? That's why we never see her, right? And there hasn't been a new picture all these years? Makes you think, eh? Oh, they say she's been in mourning 'cos of the young Duke, but that was more'n seventy years ago! They say she was buried in secret and...
At which point her father had stopped the speaker dead. There are some conversations where you don't even want people to remember you were in the same room.
Dead or alive, the Duchess watched over you.
The recruits tried to sleep.
Occasionally, someone belched or expelled wind noisily, and Polly responded with a few fake eructations of her own. That seemed to inspire greater effort on the part of the other sleepers, to the point where the roof rattled and dust fell down, before everyone subsided. Once or twice she heard people stagger out into the windy darkness, in theory for the privy, but probably, given male impatience in these matters, to aim much closer to home. Once, coasting in and out of a troubled dream, she thought she heard someone sobbing.
Taking care not to rustle too much, Polly pulled out the much-folded, much-read, much-stained last letter from her brother, and read it by the light of the solitary, guttering candle. It had been opened and heavily mangled by the censors, and bore the stamp of the Duchy. It read:
Dear all,
We are in ¡���ich is ¡��th a ¡�ig thing with knobs. On ¡��e with ¡���ich is just as well because ¡��t of. I am keeping well. The food is ¡�� ¡��'ll ¡�at the ¡��t my mate ¡�r says not to worry, it'll be all over by ¡��and we shall all have medals.
Chins up!
Paul
It was in a careful hand, the excessively clear and well-shaped writing of someone who has to think about every letter. She slowly folded it up again. Paul had wanted medals, because they were shiny. That'd been almost a year ago, when any recruiting party that came past went away with the best part of a battalion, and there had been people waving them off with flags and music. Sometimes, now, smaller parties of men came back. The lucky ones were missing only one arm or one leg. There were no flags.
She unfolded another piece of paper. It was a pamphlet. It was headed "From the Mothers of Borogravia!!" The mothers of Borogravia were very definite about wanting to send their sons off to war Against the Zlobenian Aggressor!! and used a great many exclamation marks to say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in Munz had not seemed keen on the idea of their sons going off to war, and positively tried to drag them back. Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.
Polly had learned to read and write after a fashion because the inn was big and it was a business and things had to be tallied and recorded. Her mother had taught her to read, which was acceptable to Nuggan, and her father made sure that she learned how to write, which was not. A woman who could write was an Abomination Unto Nuggan, according to Father Jupe; anything she wrote would by definition be a lie.
But Polly had learned anyway, because Paul hadn't, at least to the standard needed to run an inn as busy as The Duchess. He could read if he could run his finger slowly along the lines, and he wrote letters at a snail's pace, with a lot of care and heavy breathing, like a man assembling a piece of jewellery. He was big and kind and slow and could lift beer kegs as though they were toys, but he wasn't a man at home with paperwork. Their father had hinted to Polly, very gently but very often, that Polly would need to be right behind him when the time came for him to run The Duchess. Left to himself, with no one to tell him what to do next, her brother just stood and watched birds.
At Paul's insistence, she'd read the whole of "From the Mothers of Borogravia!!" to him, including the bits about heroes and there being no greater good than to die for your country. She wished, now, she hadn't done that. Paul did what he was told. Unfortunately, he believed what he was told, too.
Polly put the papers away and dozed again, until her bladder woke her up. Oh, well, at least at this time of the morning she'd have a clear run. She reached out for her pack and stepped as softly as she could out into the rain.
It was mostly just coming off the trees now, which were roaring in the wind that blew up the valley. The moon was hidden in the clouds, but there was just enough light to make out the inn's buildings. A certain greyness suggested that what passed for dawn in Pl¨¹n was on the way. She located the men's privy which, indeed, stank of inaccuracy.
A lot of planning and practice had gone into this moment. She was helped by the design of the breeches, which were the old-fashioned kind with generous buttoned trapdoors, and also by the experiments she'd made very early in the mornings when she was doing the cleaning. In short, with care and attention to detail, she'd found that a woman could pee standing up. It certainly worked back home in the inn's privy, which had been designed and built in the certain expectation of the aimlessness of the customers.
The wind shook the dank building. In the dark she thought of Auntie Hattie, who'd gone a bit strange round her sixtieth birthday and persistently accused passing young men of looking up her dress. She was even worse after a glass of wine, and she had one joke: "What does a man stand up to do, a woman sit down to do and a dog lift its leg to do?" And then, when everyone was too embarrassed to answer, she'd triumphantly shriek, "Shake hands!" and fall over. Auntie Hattie was an Abomination all by herself.
Polly buttoned up the breeches with a sense of exhilaration. She felt she'd crossed a bridge, a sensation that was helped by the realization that she'd kept her feet dry.
Someone said, "Psst!"
It was just as well she'd already taken a leak. Panic instantly squeezed every muscle. Where were they hiding? This was just a rotten old shed! Oh, there were a few cubicles, but the smell alone suggested very strongly that the woods outside would be a much better proposition. Even on a wild night. Even with extra wolves.
"Yes?" she quavered, and then cleared her throat and demanded, with a little more gruffness: "Yes?"
"You'll need these," whispered the voice. In the fetid gloom she made out something rising over the top of a cubicle. She reached up nervously and touched softness. It was a bundle of wool. Her fingers explored it.
"A pair of socks?" she said.
"Right. Wear 'em," said the mystery voice hoarsely.
"Thank you, but I've brought several pairs..." Polly began.
There was a faint sigh. "No. Not on your feet. Shove 'em down the front of your trousers."
"What do you mean?"
"Look," said the whisperer patiently, "you don't bulge where you shouldn't bulge. That's good. But you don't bulge where you should bulge, either. You know? Lower down?"
"Oh! Er... I... but... I didn't think people noticed..." said Polly, glowing with embarrassment. She'd been spotted! But there was no hue and cry, no angry quotations from the Book of Nuggan. Someone was helping. Someone who had seen her...
"It's a funny thing," said the voice, "but they notice what's missing more than they notice what's there. Just one pair, mark you. Don't get ambitious."
Polly hesitated. "Um... is it obvious?" she said.
"No. That's why I gave you the socks."
"I meant that... that I'm not... that I'm..."
"Not really," said the voice in the dark. "You're pretty good. You come over as a frightened young lad trying to look big and brave. You might pick your nose a bit more often. Just a tip. Few things interest a young man more than the contents of his nostrils. Now I've got a favour to ask you in return."
I didn't ask you for one, Polly thought, quite annoyed at being taken for being a frightened young lad when she was sure she'd come over as quite a cool, non-ruffled young lad. But she said calmly: "What is it?"
"Got any paper?"
Wordlessly, Polly pulled "From the Mothers of Borogravia!!" out of her shirt and handed it up. She heard the sound of a match striking, and a sulphurous smell which only improved the general conditions.
"Why, is this the escutcheon of her grace the Duchess I see in front of me?" said the whisperer. "Well, it won't be in front of me for long. Beat it... boy."
Polly hurried out into the night, shocked, dazed, confused and almost asphyxiated, and made it to the shed door. But she'd barely shut it behind her and was still blinking in the blackness when it was thrust open again, to let in the wind, rain and Corporal Strappi.
"All right, all right! Hands off... well, you lot wouldn't be able to find 'em... and on with socks! Hup hup hi ho hup hup..."
Bodies were suddenly springing up or falling over all round Polly. Their muscles must have been obeying the voice directly, because no brain could have got into gear that quickly. Corporal Strappi, in obedience to the law of non-commissioned officers, responded by making the confusion more confusing.
"Good grief, a lot of old women could shift better'n you!" he shouted with satisfaction as people flailed around looking for coats and boots. "Fall in! Get shaved! Every man in the regiment to be clean shaven, by order! Get dressed! Wazzer, I've got my eye on you! Move! Move! Breakfast in five minutes! Last one there doesn't get a sausage! Oh deary me, what a bloody shower!"
The four lesser horsemen of Panic, Bewilderment, Ignorance and Shouting took control of the room, to Corporal Strappi's obscene glee. Polly, though, ducked out of the door, pulled a small tin mug out of her pack, dipped it into a water butt, balanced it on an old barrel behind the inn, and started to shave.
She'd practised this, too. The secret was in the old cut-throat razor that she'd carefully blunted. After that, it was all in the shaving brush and soap. Get a lot of lather on, shave a lot of lather off, and you'd had a shave, hadn't you? Must have done, sir, feel how smooth the skin is...
She was halfway through when a voice by her ear screamed: "What d'you think you're doing, Private Parts?"
It was just as well the blade was blunt.
"Perks, sir!" she said, rubbing her nose. "I'm shaving, sir! It's Perks, sir!"
"Sir? Sir? I'm not a sir, Parts, I'm a bloody corporal, Parts. That means you calls me 'corporal', Parts. And you are shaving in an official regimental mug, Parts, what you have not been issued with, right? You a deserter, Parts?"
"No, s¨C corporal!"
"A thief, then?"
"No, corporal!"
"Then how come you got a bloody mug, Parts?"
"Got it off a dead man, sir¨C corporal!"
Strappi's voice, pitched to a scream in any case, became a screech of rage.
"You're a looter?"
"No, corporal! The soldier..."
...had died almost in her arms, on the floor of the inn.
There had been half a dozen men in that party of returning heroes. They must have been trekking with grey-faced patience for days, making their way back to little villages in the mountains. Polly counted nine arms and ten legs between them, and ten eyes.
But it was the apparently whole who were worse, in a way. They kept their stinking coats buttoned tight, in lieu of bandages, over whatever unspeakable mess lay beneath, and they had the smell of death about them. The inn's regulars made space for them, and talked quietly, like people in a sacred place. Her father, not usually a man given to sentiment, quietly put a generous tot of brandy into each mug of ale, and refused all payment. Then it turned out that they were carrying letters from soldiers still fighting, and one of them had brought the letter from Paul. He pushed it across the table to Polly as she served them stew and then, with very little fuss, he died.
The rest of the men moved unsteadily on later that day, taking with them, to give to his parents, the pot-metal medal that had been in the soldier's coat pocket and the official commendation from the Duchy that went with it. Polly had taken a look at it. It was printed, including the Duchess's signature, and the man's name had been filled in, rather cramped, because it was longer than average. The last few letters were rammed up tight together.
It's little details like that which get remembered, as undirected white-hot rage fills the mind. Apart from the letter and the medal, all the man left behind was a tin mug and, on the floor, a stain which wouldn't scrub out.
Corporal Strappi listened impatiently to a slightly adjusted version. Polly could see his mind working. The mug had belonged to a soldier; now it belonged to another soldier. Those were the facts of the matter, and there wasn't much he could do about it. He resorted, instead, to the safer ground of general abuse.
"So you think you're smart, Parts?" he said.
"No, corporal."
"Oh? So you're stupid, are you?"
"Well, I did enlist, corporal," said Polly meekly. Somewhere behind Strappi, someone sniggered.
"I've got my eye on you, Parts," growled Strappi, temporarily defeated. "Just you put a foot wrong, that's all." He strode off.
"Um..." said a voice beside Polly. She turned to see another youth, wearing secondhand clothes and an air of nervousness that didn't quite conceal some bubbling anger. He was big and red-haired, but it was cut so close that it was just head fuzz.
"You're Tonker, right?" she said.
"Yeah, and, er... could I have a borrow of your shaving gear, right?"
Polly looked at a chin as free of hair as a billiard ball. The boy blushed.
"Got to start sometime, right?" he said defiantly.
"The razor'll need sharpening," said Polly.
"That's all right, I know how to do that," said Tonker.
Polly wordlessly handed over the mug and razor, and took the opportunity to duck into the privy while everyone else was occupied. It was the work of a moment to put the socks in place. Anchoring them was a problem, which she solved by unwinding part of one sock and tucking it up under her belt. They felt odd, and strangely heavy for a little package of wool. Walking a little awkwardly, Polly went in to see what horrors breakfast would bring.
It brought stale horse-bread and sausage and very weak beer. She grabbed a sausage and a slab of bread and sat down.
You had to concentrate to eat horse-bread. There was a lot more about these days, a bread made from flour ground up with dried pease and beans and vegetable scrapings. It used to be made just for horses, to put them in fine condition. Now you hardly ever saw anything else on the table, and there tended to be less and less of it, too. You needed time and good teeth to work your way through a slice of horse-bread, just as you needed a complete lack of imagination to eat a modern sausage. Polly sat and concentrated on chewing.
The only other area of calm was around Private Maladict, who was drinking coffee like a young man relaxing in a pavement cafe, with the air of someone who has life thoroughly worked out. He nodded at Polly.
Was that him in the privy? she wondered. I got back in just as Strappi started yelling and everyone started running around and rushing in and out. It could have been anyone. Do vampires use the privy? Well, do they? Has anyone ever dared ask?
"Sleep well?" he asked.
"Yeah. Did you?" said Polly.
"I couldn't stand that shed, but Mr Eyebrow kindly allowed me to use his cellar," said Maladict. "Old habits die hard, you know? At least," he added, "old acceptable habits. I've never felt happy not hanging down."
"And you got coffee?"
"I carry my own supply," said Maladict, indicating an exquisite little silver and gilt coffee-making engine on the table by his cup, "and Mr Eyebrow kindly boiled some water for me." He grinned, showing two long canine teeth. "It's amazing what you can achieve with a smile, Oliver."
Polly nodded. "Er... is Igor a friend of yours?" she said. At the next table Igor had obtained a sausage, presumably raw, from the kitchen, and was watching it intently. A couple of wires ran from the sausage to a mug of the horrible vinegary beer, which was bubbling.
"Never seen him before in my life," said the vampire. "Of course, if you've met one you have in a sense met them all. We had an Igor at home. Wonderful workers. Very reliable. Very trustworthy. And, of course, so good at stitching things together, if you know what I mean."
"Those stitches round his head don't look very professional," said Polly, who was beginning to object to Maladict's permanent expression of effortless superiority.
"Oh, that? It's an Igor thing," said Maladict. "It's a Look. Like... tribal markings, you know? They like them to show. Ha, we had a servant once who had stitches all the way round his neck, and he was extremely proud of them."
"Really?" said Polly weakly.
"Yes, and the droll part of it all was that it wasn't even his head!"
Now Igor had a syringe in his hand, and was watching the sausage with an air of satisfaction. For a moment, Polly thought that the sausage moved...
"All right, all right, time's up, you horrible lot!" barked Corporal Strappi, strutting into the room. "Fall in! That means line up, you shower! That means you too, Parts! And you, Mr Vampire, sir, will you be joining us for a morning's light soldiering? On your feet! And where's that bloody Igor?"
"Here, thur," said Igor, from three inches behind Strappi's backbone. The corporal spun round.
"How did you get there?" he bellowed.
"It'th a gift, thur," said Igor.
"Don't you ever get behind me again! Fall in with the rest of them! Now... Attention!" Strappi sighed theatrically. "That means 'stand up straight'. Got it? Once more with feeling! Attention! Ah, I see the problem! You've got trousers that are permanently at ease! I think I shall have to write to the Duchess and tell her she should ask for her money back! What are you smiling about, Mr Vampire sir?" Strappi positioned himself in front of Maladict, who stood faultlessly to attention.
"Happy to be in the regiment, corporal!"
"Yeah, right," mumbled Strappi. "Well, you won't be so - "
"Everything all right, corporal?" asked Sergeant Jackrum, appearing in the doorway.
"Best we could expect, sergeant," sighed the corporal. "We ought to throw 'em back, oh dear me, yes. Useless, useless, useless..."
"Okay, lads. Stand easy," said Jackrum, glancing at Strappi in a less than friendly way. "Today we're heading on down towards Plotz, where we'll meet up with the other recruiting parties and you'll be issued with your uniforms and weapons, you lucky lads. Any of you ever used a weapon? You have, Perks?"
Polly lowered her hand. "A bit, sarge. My brother taught me a bit when he was home on leave, and some of the old men in the bar where I worked gave me some, er, tips." They had, too. It was funny to watch a girl waving a sword around, and they'd been kind enough when they weren't laughing. She was a quick learner, but she'd made a point of staying clumsy long after she'd got the feel for the blade, because using a sword was also "the work of an Man" and a woman doing it was an Abomination Unto Nuggan. Old soldiers, on the whole, were on the easygoing side when it came to Abominations. She'd be funny just as long as she was useless, and safe as long as she was funny.
"Expert, are yer?" said Strappi, grinning nastily. "A real fencin' genius, are yer?"
"No, corporal," said Polly meekly.
"All right," said Jackrum. "Anyone else - "
"Hang on, sarge, I reckon we'd all like a bit of instruction from swordmeister Parts," said Strappi. "Ain't that right, lads?" There was a general murmuring and shrugging from the squad, who recognized a right little bullying bastard when they saw one but, treacherously, were glad he hadn't picked on them.
Strappi drew his own sword. "Lend him one of yours, sarge," he said. "Go on. Just a little bit of fun, eh?"
Jackrum hesitated, and glanced at Polly. "How about it, lad? You don't have to," he said.
I'll have to sooner or later, Polly thought. The world was full of Strappies. If you backed away from them, they only kept on coming. You had to stop them at the start. She sighed. "Okay, sarge."
Jackrum pulled one of his cutlasses out of his sash and handed it to Polly. It looked amazingly sharp.
"He won't hurt you, Perks," he said, while looking at the smirking Strappi.
"I'll try not to hurt him either, sir," said Polly, and then cursed herself for the idiot bravado. It must have been the socks talking.
"Oh, good," said Strappi, stepping back. "We'll just see what you're made of, Parts."
Flesh, thought Polly. Blood. Easily cut things. Oh, well...
Strappi waved his sabre like the old boys had done, down low, in case she was one of those people who thought the whole idea was to hit the other man's sword. She ignored it, and watched his eyes, which was no great treat. He wouldn't stick her, not mortally, not with Jackrum watching. He'd try for something that'd hurt and make everyone laugh at her. That was the Strappi type through and through. Every inn counted one or two amongst its regulars.
The corporal tested her more aggressively a couple of times, and twice, by luck, she managed to knock the blade out of the way. Luck would run out, though, and if she looked like putting up a decent show Strappi would sort her out good and proper. Then she remembered the cackled advice of old Gummy Abbens, a retired sergeant who'd lost his left arm to a broadsword and all his teeth to cider: "A good swordsman 'ates comin' up against a newbie, gel! The reason bein', he don't know what the bugger's gonna do!"
She swung the cutlass wildly. Strappi had to block it, and for a moment the swords locked.
That the best you can do, Parts?" the corporal jeered.
Polly reached out and grabbed his shirt. "No, corporal," she said, "but this is." She pulled hard and lowered her head.
The collision hurt more than she'd hoped, but she heard something crunch and it didn't belong to her. She stepped back quickly, slightly dizzy, with the sabre at the ready.
Strappi had sunk to his knees, blood gushing from his nose. When he got up, someone was going to die...
Panting, Polly appealed wordlessly to Sergeant Jackrum, who had folded his arms and was looking innocently at the ceiling.
"I bet you didn't learn that from your brother, Perks," he said.
"No, sarge. Got that from Gummy Abbens, sarge."
Jackrum suddenly looked down at her, grinning. "What, old Sergeant Abbens?"
"Yes, sarge!"
"There's a name from the past! He's still alive? How is the evil old sot?"
"Er... well preserved, sarge," said Polly, still trying to get her breath.
Jackrum laughed. "Yeah, I'll bet. Did his best fighting in bars, he did. And I'll bet that's not the only trick he told you about, eh?"
"No, sir." And the other men had scolded the old boy for telling her, and Gummy had chuckled into his cider mug, and anyway it had taken Polly a long time to find out what "family jewels" meant.
"Hear that, Strappi?" said the sergeant to the cursing man dribbling blood onto the floor. "Looks like you was lucky. But there's no prizes for fighting fair in a melee, lads, as you will learn. All right, fun over. Go and put some cold water on that, corporal. It always looks worse than it is. And that's an end of it, the pair of you. That is an order. A word to the wise. Understood?"
"Yes, sarge," said Polly meekly. Strappi grunted.
Jackrum looked at the rest of the recruits. "Okay. Any of the rest of you boys ever held a stick? Right. I can see we're going to have to start slow and work up..."
There was another grunt from Strappi. You had to admire the man. On his knees, with blood bubbling through the hand cupping his injured nose, he could find time to make life difficult for someone in some small way.
"Private Bloodfnucker hnas a fnord, fnargeant," he said accusingly.
"Any good with it?" said the sergeant to Maladict.
"Not really, sir," said Maladict. "Never had training. I carry it for protection, sir."
"How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don't know how to use it?"
"Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don't attack me," said Maladict patiently.
"Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn't be any good with it," said the sergeant.
"No, sir. I'd probably settle for just ripping their heads off, sir. That's what I mean by protection, sir. Theirs, not mine. And I'd get hell from the League if I did that, sir."
The sergeant stared at him for a while. "Well thought out," he mumbled.
There was a thud behind them and a table overturned. Carborundum the troll sat up, groaned, and crashed back down again. At the second attempt, he managed to stay upright, both hands clutching his head.
Corporal Strappi, now on his feet, must have been made fearless by fury. He headed for the troll in a high-speed strut and stood in front of him, vibrating with rage and still oozing blood in sticky strings.
"You 'orrible little man!" he screamed. "You - "
Carborundum reached down and, with care and no apparent effort, picked the corporal up by his head. He brought him to one crusted eye and turned him this way and that.
"Did I join th' army?" he rumbled. "Oh, coprolite..."
"This is affnault on a fnuperior officer!" screamed the muffled voice of the corporal.
"Put Corporal Strappi down, please," said Sergeant Jackrum. The troll grunted, and lowered the man to the floor.
"Sorry about dat," he said. "Thought you was a dwarf."
"I dnemand this man is affrested for - " Strappi began.
"No you don't, corporal, no you don't," said the sergeant. "This is not the time. On your feet, Carborundum, and get in line. Upon my oath, you try that little trick one more time and there will be trouble, understand?"
"Yes, sergeant," growled the troll, and knuckled himself to his feet.
"Right, then," said the sergeant, stepping back. "Now today, my lucky lads, we're goin' to learn about something we call marching..."
They left Pl¨¹n to the wind and rain. About an hour after they'd vanished round a bend in the valley, the shed they'd slept in mysteriously burned down.
There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made by penguins. Sergeant Jackrum brought up the rear in the cart, shouting instructions, but the recruits moved as if they'd never before had to get from place to place. The sergeant yelled the swagger out of their steps, stopped the cart and for a few of them held an impromptu lesson in the concepts of "right" and "left" and, by degrees, they left the mountains.
Polly remembered those first days with mixed feelings. All they did was march, but she was used to long walks and her boots were good. The trousers ceased to chafe. A watery sun took the trouble to shine. It wasn't cold. It would have been fine, if it hadn't been for the corporal.
She'd wondered how Strappi, whose nose was now about the same colour as a plum, was going to handle the situation between them. It turned out that he intended to deal with it by pretending it hadn't happened, and also by having as little as possible to do with Polly.
He didn't spare the others, although he was selective. Maladict was left strictly alone, as was Carborundum; whatever else Strappi was, he wasn't suicidal. And he was bewildered by Igor. The little man did whatever stupid chore Strappi found for him, and he did it quickly, competently, and giving every impression of someone happy in his work, and that left the corporal completely mystified.
He'd pick on the others for no reason at all, harangue them until they made some trivial mistake, and then bawl them out. His target of choice was Private Goom, better known as Wazzer, who was stick-thin and round-eyed and nervous and said grace loudly before meals. By the end of the first day, Strappi could make him throw up just by shouting. And then he'd laugh.
Only he never really laughed, Polly noted. What you got instead was a sort of harsh gargling of spit at the back of the throat, a noise like ghnssssh.
The presence of the man cast a damper on everything. Jackrum seldom interfered. He often watched Strappi, though, and once when Polly caught his eye, he winked.
On the first night a tent was shouted off the cart by Strappi and shouted up and, after a supper of stale bread and sausage, they were shouted in front of a blackboard to be shouted at. Across the top of the board Strappi had written WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR and down the side he had written 1, 2, 3.
"Right, pay attention!" he said, slapping the board with a stick. "There's some who think that you boys ought to know why we are fighting this war, okay? Well, here it comes. Point One, remember the town of Lipz? It was viciously attacked by Zlobenian troops a year ago! They - "
"Sorry, but I thought we attacked Lipz, didn't we, corporal? Last year they said - " said Shufti.
"Are you trying to be smart, Private Manickle?" Strappi demanded, naming the biggest sin in his personal list.
"Just want to know corporal," said Shufti. He was stocky, running to plump, and one of those people who bustle about being helpful in a mildly annoying way, taking over small jobs that you wouldn't have minded doing for yourself. There was something odd about him, although you had to bear in mind he was currently sitting next to Wazzer, who had enough odd for everybody and was probably contagious...
...and had caught Strappi's eye. There was no fun in having a go at Shufti, but Wazzer, now, Wazzer was always worth a shout.
"Are you listening, Private Goom?" he screamed.
Wazzer, who had been sitting and looking up with his eyes closed, jerked awake. "Corporal?" he quavered, as Strappi advanced.
"I said, are you listening, Goom?"
"Yes, corporal!"
"Really? And what did you hear, may I ask?" said Strappi, in a voice of treacle and acid.
"Nothing, corporal. She's not speaking."
Strappi took a deep, delighted breath of evil air.
"You are a useless, worthless pile of - "
There was a sound. It was a small, nondescript sound, one that you heard every day, a noise that did its job but never expected to be, for example, whistled or part of an interesting sonata. It was simply the sound of stone scraping on metal.
On the other side of the fire, Jackrum lowered his cutlass. He had a sharpening stone in his other hand. He returned their group stare.
"What? Oh. Just maintaining the edge," he said innocently. "Sorry if I interrupted your flow there, corporal. Carry on."
A basic animal survival instinct came to the corporal's aid. He left the trembling Wazzer alone, and turned back to Shufti.
"Yes, yes, we attacked Lipz, too - " said Strappi.
"Was that before the Zlobenians did?" said Maladict.
"Will you listen?" Strappi demanded. "We valiantly attacked Lipz to reclaim what is Borogravian territory! And then the treacherous swede-eaters stole it back - "
Polly tuned out a little at this point, now that there was no immediate prospect of seeing Strappi decapitated. She knew about Lipz. Half the old men who came and drank with her father had attacked the place. But no one had expected them to want to do it. Someone had just shouted "attack!"
The trouble was the Kneck River. It wandered across the wide, rich, silty plain like a piece of dropped string, but sometimes a flash flood or even a big fallen tree would cause it to crack like a whip, throwing coils of river round areas of land miles from its previous bed. And the river was the international border...
She surfaced to hear: " - but this time everyone's on their side, the bastards! And you know why? It's 'cos of Ankh-Morpork! Because we stopped the mail coaches going over our country and tore down their clacks towers, which are an Abomination Unto Nuggan. Ankh-Morpork is a godless city - "
"I thought it had more than three hundred places of worship?" said Maladict.
Strappi stared at him in a rage that was incoherent until he managed to touch bottom again.
"Ankh-Morpork is a godawful city," he said. "Poisonous, just like its river. Barely fit for humans now. They let everything in - zombies, werewolves, dwarfs, vampires, trolls - " He remembered his audience, faltered and recovered: " - which in some cases can be a good thing, of course. But it is a foul, lewd, lawless, overcrowded mess of a place, which is why Prince Heinrich loves it so much! He's been taken over by it, bought by cheap toys, because that's the way Ankh-Morpork plays it, men. They buy you, they will you stop interrupting! What's the good of me trying to teach you stuff if you're going to keep on asking questions?"
