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Polly cut off her hair in front of the mirror, feeling slightly guilty about not feeling very guilty about doing so. It was supposed to be her crowning glory, and everyone said it was beautiful, but she generally wore it in a net when she was working. She’d always told herself it was wasted on her. Yet she was careful to see that the long golden coils all landed on the small sheet spread out for the purpose.

If she would admit to any strong emotion at all at this time, it was sheer annoyance that a haircut was all she needed to pass for a young man. She didn’t even need to bind up her bosom, which she’d heard was the normal practice. Nature had seen to it that she had barely any problems in this area.

The effect that the scissors had was…erratic, but it was no worse than other male haircuts here. It’d do.

She did feel cold on the back of her neck, but that was only partly because of the loss of her long hair. It was also because of the Stare.

The Duchess watched her from above the bed.

It was a poor woodcut, hand-colored, mostly in blue and red. It was of a plain, middle-aged woman whose sagging chin and slightly bulging eyes gave the cynical the feeling that someone had put a large fish in a dress, but the artist had managed to capture something extra in that strange, blank expression. Some pictures had eyes that followed you around the room; this one looked right through you. It was a face you found in every home. In Borogravia, you grew up with the Duchess watching you.

Polly knew her parents had one of the pictures in their room, and knew also that when her mother was alive she used to curtsy to it every night.

She reached up and turned this picture around so that it faced the wall.

A thought in her head said No. It was overruled. She’d made up her mind.

Then she dressed herself in her brother’s clothes, tipped the contents of the sheet into a small bag that went into the bottom of her pack along with the spare clothes, put a note to her father on her bed, picked up the pack, and climbed out of the window. At least, Polly climbed out of the window, but it was Oliver’s feet that landed lightly on the ground.

Dawn was just turning the dark world into monochrome when she slipped across the inn’s yard.

The Duchess watched her from the inn sign, too. Her father had been a great loyalist, at least up to the death of her mother. The sign hadn’t been repainted this year, and a random bird-dropping had given the Duchess a squint.

Polly checked that the recruiting sergeant’s cart was still in front of the bar, its bright banners now drab and heavy with last night’s rain. By the look of that big fat sergeant, it would be hours before it was on the road again. She had plenty of time. He looked like a slow breakfaster.

She let herself out of the door in the back wall and headed uphill.

At the top, she turned back and looked at the waking town. Smoke was rising from a few chimneys, but since Polly was always the first to wake, and she yelled the maids out of their beds, the inn was still sleeping. She knew that the Widow Clambers had stayed overnight (it had been “raining too hard for her to go home,” according to Polly’s father) and, personally, she hoped for his sake that she’d stay every night. The town had no shortage of widows, for Nuggan’s sake, and Olga Clambers was a warm-hearted lady who baked like a champion. His wife’s long illness and Paul’s long absence had taken a lot out of her father. Polly was glad some of it was put back. The old ladies who spent their days glowering from their windows might spy and peeve and mumble, but they had been doing that for too long. No one listened anymore.

She raised her gaze. Smoke and steam were already rising from the laundry of the Girls’ Working School. The building hung over one end of the town like a threat, big and gray with tall, thin windows. It was always silent.

When she was small, she’d been told that was where The Bad Girls went. The nature of “badness” was not explained, and at the age of five Polly had received the vague idea that it consisted of not going to bed when you were told. At the age of eight she’d learned it was where you were lucky not to go for buying your brother a paint box.

She turned her back and set off between the trees, which were full of birdsong.

Forget you were ever Polly. Think young male, that was the thing. Fart loudly and with self-satisfaction at a job well done, walk like a puppet that’d had a couple of random strings cut, never hug anyone, and, if you meet a friend, punch them. A few years working in the bar had provided plenty of observational material. No problem about not swinging her hips, at least. Nature had been pretty sparing there, too.

And then there was the young-male walk to master. At least women swung only their hips. Young men swung everything, from the shoulders down. You have to try to occupy a lot of space, she thought. It makes you look bigger, like a tomcat fluffing his tail. She’d seen it a lot in the inn. The boys tried to walk big in self-defense against all those other big boys out there. I’m bad, I’m fierce, I’m cool, I’d like a pint of shandy and me mam wants me home by nine…

Let’s see, now…arms out from the body as though holding a couple of bags of flour…check. Shoulders swaying as though she was elbowing her way through a crowd…check. Hands slightly bunched and making rhythmical circling motions as though turning two independent handles attached to the waist…check. Legs moving forward loosely and apelike…check…

It worked fine for a few yards until she got something wrong and the resultant muscular confusion somersaulted her into a holly bush. After that, she gave up.

The thunderstorm came back as she hurried along the trail; sometimes one would hang around the mountains for days. But at least up here the path wasn’t a river of mud, and the trees still had enough leaves to give her some protection.

There was no time to wait out the weather, anyway. She had a long way to go. The recruiting party would cross at the ferry, but Polly was known to all the ferrymen by sight and the guard would want to see her permit to travel, which Oliver Perks certainly didn’t have. So that meant a long diversion all the way to the troll bridge at Tübz. To the trolls, all humans looked alike and any piece of paper would do as a permit, since they didn’t read. Then she could walk down through the pine forests to Plün.

The cart would have to stop there for the night, but the place was one of those nowhere villages that existed only in order to avoid the embarrassment of having large empty spaces on the map. It was just what she wanted. No one knew her in Plün. No one ever went there. It was a dump.

It was, in fact, just the place she needed. The recruiting party would stop there, and she could enlist. She was pretty certain the big fat sergeant and his greasy little corporal wouldn’t notice the girl who’d served them last night. She was not, as they said, conventionally beautiful. The corporal had tried to pinch her bottom, but probably out of habit, like swatting a fly, and there was not enough for a big pinch, at that.

She sat on the hill above the ferry and had a late breakfast of cold potato and sausage while she watched the cart cross over. No one was marching behind it. No lads had been recruited back in Munz this time. People had kept away. Too many young men had left over the last few years, and not enough had come back, and of the ones who’d come back, sometimes not enough of each man had come back. The corporal could bang his big drum all he liked. Munz was running out of sons almost as fast as it accumulated widows.

The afternoon hung heavy and humid, and a yellow pine warbler followed her from bush to bush.

Last night’s mud was steaming when Polly reached the troll bridge, which crossed the river in a narrow gorge. It was a thin, graceful affair, put together, it was said, with no mortar at all. And it was said that the weight of the bridge anchored it ever more deeply into the rock on either side. It was said to be a wonder of the world, except that very few people around here ever wondered much about anything and were barely aware of the world.

It cost one penny to cross, or one hundred gold pieces if you had a billygoat.*

 

Halfway across Polly peered over the parapet and saw the cart far, far below, working its way along the narrow road just above the white water.

The afternoon’s journey was downhill all the way, through dark pines on this side of the gorge. She didn’t hurry and, toward sunset, she spotted the inn. The cart had already arrived, but by the looks of it the recruiting sergeant had not even bothered to make an effort. There was no drum banging like there had been last night, no cries of “Roll up, my young shavers! It’s a Great Life in the Ins-and-Outs!”

 

There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn’t be fighting them, eh? There was always a war.

Polly’s father had been in the army before he took over The Duchess from Polly’s grandfather. He didn’t talk about it much. He’d brought his sword back with him, but instead of hanging it over the fireplace he used it to poke the fire.

Sometimes old friends would turn up and, when the bars were shut for the night, they’d gather around the fire and drink and sing. The young Polly found excuses to stay up and listen to the songs they sang, but that had stopped when she’d got into trouble for using one of the more interesting words in front of her mother; now she was older, and served the beer, it was presumably assumed that she knew the words or would find out what they meant soon enough. Besides, her mother had gone where bad words would no longer offend and, in theory, never got said.

The songs had been part of her childhood. She knew all the words of “The World Turned Upside Down” and “The Devil Shall Be My Sergeant” and “Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and, after the drink had been flowing for a while, she’d memorized “Colonel Crapski” and “I Wish I’d Never Kissed Her.”

And then, of course, there had been “Sweet Polly Oliver.” Her father used to sing it when she was small, and fretful or sad, and she’d laughed to hear it simply because it had her name in it. She was word-perfect on the words before she’d known what most of them meant.

And now……Polly pushed open the door. The recruiting sergeant and his corporal looked up from the stained table where they were sitting, beer mugs halfway to their lips.

She took a deep breath, marched over, and made an attempt at saluting.

“What do you want, kid?” growled the corporal.

“Want to join up, sir!”

The sergeant turned to Polly and grinned, which made his scars move oddly and caused a tremor to shake all his chins. The word “fat” could not honestly be applied to him, not when the word “gross” was lumbering forward to catch your attention. He was one of those people who didn’t have a waist. He had an equator. He had gravity. If he fell over, in any direction, he would rock.

Sun and drink had burned his face red. Small dark eyes twinkled in the redness like the sparkle on the edge of a knife. Beside him, on the table, were a couple of old-fashioned cutlasses, weapons that had more in common with a meat cleaver than a sword.

“Just like that?” he said.

“Yessir!”

“Really?”

“Yessir!”

“You don’t want us to get you stinking drunk first? It’s traditional, you know.”

“Nosir!”

“I haven’t told you about the wonderful opportunities for advancement and good fortune, have I?”

“Nosir!”

“Did I mention how the spanking-red uniform will mean you’ll have to beat the girls off with a stick?”

“Don’t think so, sir!”

“Or the grub? Every meal’s a banquet when you march along with us!” The sergeant smacked his belly, which caused tremors in outlying regions. “I’m the living proof!”

“Yes, sir. No, sir. I just want to join up to fight for my country and the honor of the Duchess, sir!”

“You do?” said the corporal incredulously, but the sergeant appeared not to hear this. He looked Polly up and down, and Polly got the definite impression that the man was neither as drunk nor as stupid as he looked.

“Upon my oath, Corporal Strappi, it seems that what we’ve got ourselves here is nothin’ less than a good, old-fashioned patriot,” he said, his eyes searching Polly’s face. “Well, you’ve come to the right place, my lad!” He pulled a sheaf of papers toward him with an air of bustle. “You know who we are?”

“The Tenth Foot, sir. Light infantry, sir. Known as the ‘Ins-and-Outs,’ sir,” said Polly, relief bubbling through her. She’d clearly passed some sort of test.

“Right, lad. The jolly old Cheesemongers. Finest regiment there is, in the finest army in the world. Keen to join, then, are yer?”

“Keen as mustard, sir!” said Polly, aware of the corporal’s suspicious eyes on her.

“Good lad!”

The sergeant unscrewed the top from a bottle of ink and dipped a nib pen in it. His hand hovered over the paperwork.

“Name, lad?” he said.

“Oliver, sir. Oliver Perks,” said Polly.

“Age?”

“Seventeen come Sunday, sir.”

“Yeah, right,” said the sergeant. “You’re seventeen and I’m the Grand Duchess Annagovia. What’re you running away from, eh? Got a young lady in the family way?”

“He’d have ’ad to have ’ad help,” said the corporal, grinning unpleasantly. “He squeaks like a little lad.”

Polly realized she was starting to blush. But then, young Oliver would blush too, wouldn’t he? It was very easy to make a boy blush. Polly could do it just by staring.

“Don’t matter anyway,” said the sergeant. “You make your mark on this here document and kiss the Duchess and you’re my little lad, you understand? My name is Sergeant Jackrum. I will be your mother and your father, and Corporal Strappi here will be just like your big brother. And life will be steak and bacon every day, and anyone who wants to drag you away’ll have to drag me away too, because I’ll be holding onto your collar. And you might well be thinking there’s no one that can drag that much, Mr. Perks.” A thick thumb jabbed at the paper. “Just there, right?”

Polly picked up the pen and signed.

“What’s that?” said the corporal.

“My signature,” said Polly.

She heard the door open behind her, and spun around. Several young men—she corrected herself, several other young men—had clattered into the bar, and were looking around warily.

“You can read and write, too?” said the sergeant, glancing up at them and then back to her. “Yeah, I see. A nice round hand, too. Officer material, you are. Give him the shilling, Corporal. And the picture, of course.”

“Right, Sergeant,” said Corporal Strappi, holding up a picture frame on a handle, like a looking glass. “Pucker up, Private Parts.”

“It’s Perks, sir,” said Polly.

“Yeah, right. Now kiss the Duchess.”

It was not a good copy of the famous picture. The painting behind the glass was faded, and something—some kind of moss or something—was growing on the inside of the cracked glass itself. Polly let her lips brush it while holding her breath.

“Huh,” said Strappi, and pressed something into her hand.

“What’s this?” said Polly, looking at the small square of paper.

“An IOU. Bit short of shillings right now,” said the sergeant, while Strappi smirked. “But the innkeeper’ll stand you a pint of ale, courtesy of Her Grace.”

He turned and looked up the newcomers. “Well, it never rains but it pours. You boys here to join up too? My word, and we didn’t even have to bang the drum. It must be Corporal Strappi’s amazin’ charisma. Step up, don’t be shy. Who’s the next likely lad?”

Polly looked at the next recruit with a horror that she hoped she was concealing. She hadn’t really noticed him in the gloom, because he was wearing black—not cool, styled black, but a dusty black, the kind of suit a person got buried in. By the look of it, that person had been him. There were cobwebs all over it. The boy himself had stitches across his forehead.

“Your name, lad?” said Jackrum.

“Igor, thur.”

Jackrum counted the stitches.

“You know, I had a feeling it was going to be,” he said. “And I see you’re eighteen.”

 

“Awake—!”

“Oh, gods…”

Commander Samuel Vimes put his hands over his eyes.

“I beg your pardon, Your Grace?” said the Ankh-Morpork consul to Zlobenia. “Are you ill, Your Grace?”

“What’s your name again, young man?” said Vimes. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been traveling for two weeks and not getting a lot of sleep and I’ve spent all day being introduced to people with difficult names. That’s bad for the brain.”

“It’s Clarence, Your Grace. Clarence Chinny.”

“Chinny?” said Vimes, and Clarence read everything in his expression.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” he said.

“Were you a good fighter at school?” said Vimes.

“No, Your Grace, but no one could beat me over the one-hundred-yard dash.”

Vimes laughed.

“Well, Clarence, any national anthem that starts with ‘Awake!’ is going to lead to trouble. They didn’t teach you this in the Patrician’s Office?”

“Er…no, Your Grace,” said Chinny.

“Well, you’ll find out. Carry on, then.”

“Yes, sir.” Chinny cleared his throat. “The Borogravian National Anthem,” he announced, for the second time.

“Er…” Vimes said. “That last bit…?”

“That is a literal translation, Your Grace,” said Clarence nervously. “It means something like ‘an amazing opportunity’ or ‘a glittering prize,’ Your Grace.”

“When we’re not in public, Clarence, ‘sir’ will do. ‘Your Grace’ is just to impress the natives.” Vimes slumped back in his uncomfortable chair, chin in his hand, and then winced.

“Two thousand three hundred miles,” he said, shifting his position. “And it’s freezing on a broomstick, however low they fly. And then the barge, and then the coach…” He winced again. “I read your report. Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane?”

Clarence swallowed. He’d been told that he was talking to the second most powerful man in Ankh-Morpork, even if the man himself acted as though he was ignorant of the fact. His desk in this chilly tower room was rickety; it had belonged to the head janitor of the Kneck garrison until yesterday. Paperwork cluttered its scarred surface and was stacked in piles behind Vimes’s chair.

Vimes himself did not look, to Clarence, like a duke. He looked like a watchman, which, in fact, Clarence understood, he was. This offended Clarence Chinny. People at the top should look as though they belonged there.

“That’s a very…interesting question, sir,” he said. “You mean the people—”

“Not the people, the nation,” said Vimes. “Borogravia looks off its head to me, from what I’ve read. I expect the people just do the best they can and get on with raising their kids, which, I might say, I’d rather be doing right now, too. Look, you know what I mean. You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.”

“It’s a fascinating idea, sir,” said Clarence diplomatically.

Vimes looked around the room. The walls were bare stone. The windows were narrow. It was damn cold, even on a sunny day. All that bad food, and that bumping about and sleeping on bad beds…and all that traveling in the dark, too, on dwarf barges in their secret canals under the mountains, the gods alone knew what intricate diplomacy Lord Vetinari had pulled off to get that, although the Low King owed Vimes a few favors…

—all of that for this cold castle over this cold river between these stupid countries, with their stupid war. He knew what he wanted to do. If they’d been people, scuffling in the gutter, he’d have known what to do. He’d have banged their heads together and maybe shoved them in the cells overnight. But you couldn’t bang countries together.

Vimes picked up some paperwork, fiddled with it, and threw it down again.

“To hell with this,” he said. “What’s happening out there?”

“I understand there are a few pockets of resistance in some of the more inaccessible areas of the Keep, but they are being dealt with. For all practical purposes the Keep is in our hands. That was a clever ruse of yours, Your Gr—sir.”

Vimes sighed. “No, Clarence, it was a dull old ruse. It should not be possible to get men into a fortress dressed as washerwomen. Three of them had moustaches, for goodness sake!”

“The Borogravians are rather…old-fashioned about things like that, sir. On that subject, we appear to have zombies in the lower crypts. Dreadful things. A lot of high-ranking Borogravian military men were interred down there over the centuries, apparently.”

“Really? What are they doing now?”

Clarence raised his eyebrows. “Lurching, sir, I think. Groaning. Zombie things. Something seems to have stirred them up.”

“Us, probably,” said Vimes. He got up, strode across the room, and pulled open the big heavy door.

“Reg!” he yelled.

After a moment, another watchman appeared and saluted. He was gray-faced and Clarence couldn’t help noticing when the man saluted that the hand and fingers were held together with stitching.

“Have you met Constable Shoe, Clarence?” said Vimes cheerfully. “One of my staff. Been dead for more than thirty years and loves every minute of it, eh, Reg?”

“Right, Mister Vimes,” said Reg, grinning and revealing a lot of brown teeth.

“Some fellow countrymen of yours down in the cellar, Reg,” said Vimes.

“Oh, dear. Lurching, are they?”

“’Fraid so, Reg.”

“I shall go and have a word with them,” said Reg. He saluted again and marched out, with a hint of a lurch.

“Fellow countrymen? He’s, er, from here?” said Chinny, who had gone quite pale.

“Oh, no. The undiscovered country,” said Vimes. “He’s dead. However, credit where it’s due, he hasn’t let that stop him. You didn’t know we have a zombie in the Watch, Clarence?”

“Er…no, sir. I haven’t been back to the city in five years.” He swallowed. “I gather things have changed.”

Horribly so, in Clarence Chinny’s opinion. Being consul to Zlobenia had been an easy job, which left him a lot of time to get on with his business. And then the big semaphore towers marched through, all along the valley, and suddenly Ankh-Morpork was an hour away. Before the clacks, a letter from Ankh-Morpork would take more than two weeks to get to him, and so no one worried if he took a day or two to answer it. Now people expect a reply overnight! He’d been quite glad when Borogravia had destroyed several of those wretched towers. And then all hell had been let loose.

“We’ve got all sorts in the Watch,” said Vimes. “And we bloody well need ’em now, Clarence, with Zlobenians and Borogravians scrapping in the streets over some damn quarrel that began a thousand years ago. It’s worse than dwarfs and trolls! All because someone’s great-to-the-power-of-umpteen grandmother slapped the face of someone’s great-ditto uncle! Borogravia and Zlobenia can’t even agree on a border! They chose the river, and that changes course every spring! Suddenly the clacks towers are now on Borogravian soil—or mud, anyway—so the idiots burn them down for religious reasons!”

“Er, there is more to it than that, sir,” said Chinny.

“Yes, I know. I read the history. The annual scrap with Zlobenia is just the local derby. Borogravia fights everybody. Why?”

“National pride, sir.”

“What in? There’s nothing there! There’s some tallow mines, and they’re not bad farmers, but there’s no great architecture, no big libraries, no famous composers, no very high mountains, no wonderful views. All you can say about the place is that it isn’t anywhere else. What’s so special about Borogravia?”

“I suppose it’s special because it’s theirs. And of course there’s Nuggan, sir. Their god. I’ve brought you a copy of the Book of Nuggan.”

“I looked through one back in the city, Chinny,” said Vimes. “Seemed pretty stu—”

“That wouldn’t have been a recent edition, sir. And I suspect it wouldn’t be, er, very current that far from here. This one is more up to date,” said Chinny, putting a small but thick book on the desk.

“Up to date? What do you mean, up to date?” said Vimes, looking puzzled. “Holy writ gets…written. Do this, don’t do that, no coveting your neighbor’s ox…”

“Um…Nuggan doesn’t just leave it at that, sir. He, er…updates things. Mostly the Abominations, to be frank.”

Vimes took the new copy. It was noticeably thicker than the one he’d brought with him.

“It’s what they call a Living Testament,” Chinny explained. “They—well, I suppose you could say they ‘die’ if they’re taken out of Borogravia. They no longer…get added to. The latest Abominations are at the end, sir,” he said helpfully.

“This is a holy book with an appendix?”

“Exactly, sir.”

“In a ring binder?”

“Quite so, sir. People put blank pages in and the Abominations…turn up.”

“You mean magically?”

“I suppose I mean religiously, sir.”

Vimes opened a page at random.

“Chocolate?” he said. “He doesn’t like chocolate?”

“Yes, sir. That’s an Abomination.”

“Garlic? Well, I don’t much like it either, so fair enough…cats?”

“Oh, yes. He really doesn’t like cats, sir.”

“Dwarfs? It says here, ‘The dwarfish race which worships Gold are an Abomination Unto Nuggan’! He must be mad. What happened?”

“Oh, the dwarfs that were here sealed their mines and vanished, Your Grace.”

“I bet they did. They know trouble when they see it,” said Vimes. He let “Your Grace” pass this time; Chinny clearly derived some satisfaction from talking to a duke.

He leafed through the pages and stopped.

“The color blue?”

“Correct, sir.”

“What’s abominable about the color blue? It’s just a color! The sky is blue!”

“Yes, sir. Devout Nugganites try not to look at it these days. Um…” Chinny had been trained as a diplomat. Some things he didn’t like to say directly.

“Nuggan, sir…um…is rather…tetchy,” he managed.

“Tetchy?” said Vimes. “A tetchy god? What, he complains about the noise their kids make? Objects to loud music after nine P.M.?”

“Um…we get the Ankh-Morpork Times here, sir, eventually, and, er, I’d say, er, that Nuggan is very much like, er, the kind of people who write to its letter column. You know, sir. The kind who sign their letters ‘Disgusted with Ankh-Morpork’…”

“Oh, you mean he really is mad,” said Vimes.

“Oh, I’d never mean anything like that, sir,” said Chinny hurriedly.

“What do the priests do about this?”

“Not a lot, sir. I think they quietly ignore some of the more, er, extreme Abominations.”

“You mean Nuggan objects to the dwarfs, cats, and color blue and there’re more insane commandments?”

Chinny coughed politely.

“All right, then,” growled Vimes. “More extreme commandments?”

“Oysters, sir. He doesn’t like them. But that’s not a problem because no one there has ever seen an oyster. Oh, and babies. He Abominated them, too.”

“I take it people still make them here?”

“Oh, yes, Your Gr—I’m sorry. Yes, sir. But they feel guilty about it. Barking dogs, that was another one. Shirts with six buttons, too. And cheese. Er…people just sort of, er, avoid the trickier ones. Even the priests seem to have given up trying to explain them.”

“Yes, I think I can see why. So what we have here is a country that tries to run itself on the commandments of a god who, the people feel, may be wearing his underpants on his head. Has he Abominated underpants?”

“No, sir,” Chinny sighed. “But it’s probably only a matter of time.”

“So how do they manage?”

“These days, people mostly pray to the Duchess Annagovia. You see icons of her in every house. They call her the Little Mother.”

“Ah, yes, the Duchess. Can I get to see her?”

“Oh, no one sees her, sir. No one except her servants has seen her for more than thirty years. To be honest, sir, she’s probably dead.”

“Only probably?”

“No one really knows. The official story is that she’s in mourning. It’s rather sad, sir. The young duke died a week after they got married. Gored by a wild pig during a hunt, I believe. She went into mourning at the old castle at Prince-Marmaduke Piotre Albert Hans Joseph Bernhardt Wilhelmsberg and hasn’t appeared in public since. The official portrait was painted when she was about forty, I believe.”

“No children?”

“No, sir. On her death, the line is extinct.”

“And they pray to her? Like a god?”

Chinny sighed. “I did put this in my briefing notes, sir. The royal family in Borogravia have always had a quasi-religious status, you see. They’re the head of the church, and the peasants, at least, pray to them in the hope that they’ll put in a good word with Nuggan. They’re like…living saints. Celestial intermediaries. To be honest, that’s how these countries work in any case. If you want something done, you have to know the right people. And I suppose it’s easier to pray to some picture than to a god you can’t see.”

Vimes sat looking at the consul for some time. When he next spoke, he frightened the man to his boots.

“Who’d inherit?” he said.

“Sir?”

“Just following the monarchy, Mr. Chinny. If the Duchess isn’t on the throne, who should be?”

“Um, it’s incredibly complex, sir, because of the intermarriages and the various legal systems, which, for example—”

“Who’s the smart money on, Mr. Chinny?” said Vines wearily.

“Um, Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia.”

To Chinny’s astonishment, Vimes laughed.

“And he’s wondering how Auntie’s gettin’ on, I expect. I met him this morning, didn’t I? Can’t say I took to him.”

“But he is a friend of Ankh-Morpork,” said Chinny reproachfully. “That was in my report. Educated. Very interested in the clacks. Got great plans for his country. They used to be Nugganatic in Zlobenia, but he’s banned the religion and, frankly, hardly anyone objected. He wants Zlobenia to move forward. He admires Ankh-Morpork very much.”

“Yes, I know. He sounds almost as insane as Nuggan,” said Vimes. “Okay, so what we’ve probably got is an elaborate charade to keep Heinrich out. How’s this place governed?”

“There isn’t much. A bit of tax collecting, and that’s about all. We think some of the senior court officials just drift on as if the Duchess is alive. The only thing that really works is the army.”

“All right, how about coppers? Everyone needs coppers. At least they have their feet on the ground.”

“I believe informal citizens’ committees enforce Nugganatic law,” said Chinny.

“Oh, gods. Prodnoses, curtain-twitchers, and vigilantes,” said Vimes. He stood up, and peered out through the narrow window at the plain below. It was nighttime. Cooking fires in the enemy camp made demonic constellations in the darkness.

“Did they tell you why I’ve been sent here, Clarence?” he said.

“No, sir. My instructions were that you would, um, oversee things. Prince Heinrich is not very happy about it.”

“Oh, well, the interests of Ankh-Morpork are the interests of all money-lov…oops, sorry, all freedom-loving people everywhere,” said Vimes. “We can’t have a country that turns back our mail coaches and keeps cutting down the clacks towers. That’s expensive. They’re cutting the continent in half, they’re the pinch in the hourglass. I’m to bring things to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion. And frankly, Clarence, I’m wondering if it’s even worth attacking Borogravia. It’ll be cheaper to sit here and wait for it to explode. Although I notice…where was that report…ah, yes…it will starve first.”

“Regrettably so, sir.”

 

Igor stood mutely in front of the recruiting table.

“Don’t often see you people these days,” said Jackrum.

“Yeah, run out of fresh brains, ’ave yer?” said the corporal nastily.

“Now then, Corporal, no call for that,” said the sergeant, leaning back in his creaking chair. “There’s plenty of lads out there walking around on legs they wouldn’t still have if there hadn’t been a friendly Igor around, eh, Igor?”

“Yeah? Well, I heard about people waking up and findin’ their friendly Igor had whipped out their brains in the middle of the night and buggered off to flog ’em,” said the corporal, glaring at Igor.

“I promith you, your brain ith entirely thafe from me, Corporal,” said Igor. Polly started to laugh, and stopped when she realized absolutely no one else was doing so.

“Yeah, well, I met a sergeant who said an Igor put a man’s legs on backwards,” said Corporal Strappi. “What good’s that to a soldier, eh?”

“Could advance and retreat at the thame time?” said Igor levelly. “Thargent, I know all the thtorieth, and they are nothing but vile calumnieth. I theek only to therve my country. I do not want trouble.”

“Right,” said the sergeant. “Nor do we. Make your mark, and you’ve got to promise not to mess about with Corporal Strappi’s brain, right? Another signature? My word, I can see we’ve got ourselves a bleedin’ college of recruits today. Give him his cardboard shilling, Corporal.”

“Thank you,” said Igor. “And I would like to give the picture a wipe, if it’th all the thame to you.” He produced a small cloth.

“Wipe it?” said Strappi. “Is that allowed, Sergeant?”

“What do you want to wipe it for, mister?” said Jackrum.

“To remove the invithible demonth,” said Igor.

“I can’t see any invis—” Strappi began and stopped.

“Just let him, all right?” said Jackrum. “It’s one of their funny little ways.”

“Dun’t seem right,” muttered Strappi. “Practically treason…”

“Can’t see why it’d be wrong just to give the old girl a wash,” said the sergeant shortly. “Next. Oh…”

After carefully wiping the stained picture and giving it a perfunctory peck, Igor came and stood next to Polly, giving her a sheepish grin. But she was watching the next recruit.

He was short and quite slim, which was fairly usual in a country where it was rare to get enough food to make you fat. But he dressed in black and expensively, like an aristocrat; he even had a sword. The sergeant was, therefore, looking worried. Clearly a man could get into trouble talking wrong to a nob who might have important friends.

“You sure you’ve come to the right place, sir?” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant. I wish to enlist.”

Sergeant Jackrum shifted uneasily. “Yes, sir, but I’m sure a gentleman like you—”

“Are you going to enlist me or not, Sergeant?”

“Not usual for a gentleman to enlist as a common soldier, sir,” mumbled the sergeant.

“What you mean, Sergeant, is: is anyone after me? Is there a price on my head? And the answer is no.”

“How about a mob with pitchforks?” said Corporal Strappi. “He’s a bloody vampire, Sarge! Anyone can see that! He’s a Black Ribboner! Look, he’s got the badge!”

“Which says ‘Not One Drop,’” said the young man calmly. “Not one drop of human blood, Sergeant. A prohibition I have accepted for almost two years, thanks to the League of Temperance. Of course, if you have a personal objection, Sergeant, you only need to give it to me in writing.”

Which was quite a clever thing to say, Polly thought. Those clothes cost serious money. Most of the vampire families were highly nobby. You never knew who was connected to who…not just to who, in fact, but to whom. “Whoms” were likely to be far more trouble that your common, everyday “who.” The sergeant was looking down a mile of rough road.

“Got to move with the times, Corporal,” he said, deciding not to go there. “And we certainly need the men.”

“Yeah, but s’posin’ he wants to suck all my blood out in the middle of the night?” said Strappi.

“Well, he’ll just have to wait until Private Igor’s finished looking for your brain, won’t he?” snapped the sergeant. “Sign here, mister.”

The pen scratched on the paper. After a minute or two, the vampire turned the paper over and continued writing on the other side. Vampires had long names.

“But you can call me Maladict,” he said, dropping the pen back in the inkwell.

“Thank you very much, I must say, si—private. Give him the shilling, Corporal. Good job it’s not a silver one, eh? Haha!”

“Yes,” said Maladict. “It is.”

“Next!” said the sergeant. Polly watched as a farm boy, breeches held up with string, shuffled in front of the table and looked at the quill pen with the resentful perplexity of those confronted with new technology.

She turned back to the bar. The landlord glared at her in the manner of bad landlords everywhere. As her father always said, if you kept an inn you either liked people or went mad. Oddly enough, some of the mad ones were the best at looking after their beer. But by the smell of the place, this wasn’t one of those.

She leaned on the bar.

“Pint, please,” she said, and watched glumly as the man gave a scowl of acknowledgment and turned to the big barrels. It’ll be sour, she knew, with the slop bucket under the tap tipped back in every night, and the spigot not put back, and…yes, it was going to be served in a leather tankard that had probably never been washed.

A couple of new recruits were already knocking back their pints, though, with every audible sign of enjoyment. But this was Plün, after all. Anything that made you forget you were there was probably worth drinking.

One of them said, “Lovely pint, this, eh?” and the boy next to him belched and said, “Best I’ve tasted, yeah.”

Polly sniffed at the tankard. The contents smelled like something she wouldn’t feed to pigs. She took a sip, and completely changed her opinion. She would feed it to pigs.

Those lads have never tasted beer before, she told herself. It’s like Dad said. Out in the country, there’re lads who’d join up for an uninhabited pair of breeches. And they’ll drink this muck and pretend to enjoy it like men, heyup, we supped some stuff last night, eh, lads? And then next thing—

Oh, lor’…that reminded her. What’d the privy be like here? The men’s one out in the yard back at home was bad enough. Polly sloshed two big pails of water into it every morning while trying not to breathe. There was weird green moss growing on the slate floor. And The Duchess was a good inn. It had customers who took their boots off before going to bed.

She narrowed her eyes. This stupid fool in front of her, a man making one long eyebrow do the work of two, was serving them slops and foul vinegar just before they marched off to war—

“Thith beer,” said Igor, on her right, “tastes of horthe pith.”

Polly stood back. Even in a bar like this, that was killing talk.

“Oh, you’d know, would you?” said the barman, looming over the boy. “Drunk horse piss, have you?”

“Yeth,” said Igor.

The barman stuck a fist in front of Igor’s face.

“Now you listen to me, you lisping little—”

A slim black arm appeared with amazing speed and a pale hand caught the man’s wrist. The one eyebrow contorted in sudden agony.

“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. Maladict nodded with satisfaction. The barman’s fingers had gone white.

“Incapacitating a soldier of Her Grace in wartime is a treasonable offense,” 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 could 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: “Tem’prance 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 offense 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 around 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 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 among 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 gray 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 analyzed 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 liked 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 a troll 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-handed 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 girlie 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, come in here, order an Electrick Floorbanger, doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“Is he going to come around?” 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 getting undressed. The rain hammered on the roof and the wind blew through a crack under the door, despite Igor’s effort 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 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 Prince Marmaduke-Piotre Albert Hans Joseph Bernhardt Wilhelmsberg 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? Make 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:

It was in a careful hand, the excessively clear and well-shaped writing of someone who had to think about every letter.

She 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 the other 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 points to say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in the town 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.

She’d 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 painfully, with a lot of care and heavy breathing, like a man assembling a piece of jewelry.

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.

She 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 grayness suggested that what passed for dawn in Plün 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 her 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 with the certain expectation of the aimlessness of the customers.

The wind shook the dank building.

In the dark, she thought of Aunty Hattie, who’d gone a bit strange around 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. Aunty 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’d need these,” whispered the voice. In the fetid gloom, she made out something rising over the top of the 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 had 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 favor 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 sulfurous smell that 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 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 around 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 noncommissioned 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 their 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 apocalyptical 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 practiced this, too. The secret was in the old cutthroat 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—Corporal!”

“A thief, then?”

“No, Corporal!”

“Then how come you got a bloody mug, Parts?”

“Got it off a dead man, sir—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 gray-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 man’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 his hair 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 peas and beans and dried 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 like 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 sidewalk café, with an 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 scars, you know? They like them to show. Ha, we had a servant once who had stitches all the way around 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 around.

“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 toward 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 at home 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 a 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 Strappis. 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, Sarge,” 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 saber 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 among 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 saber 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 saber 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,” Polly said, 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 shall learn. All right, fun over. Go and put some cold water on that, Corporal, it always looks worse than it is. And that’s the 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 head 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 upright, 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, coprolith…”

“This is affnualt on a fnuperior officer!” screamed the corporal in a muffled voice.

“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 Plün to the wind and rain. About an hour after they’d vanished around 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, held an impromptu lesson in the concepts of “right” and “left” for a few of them, and, by degrees, they left the mountains.

Polly remembered those first few 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 wondered how Strappi, whose nose was now about the same color 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 them quickly, competently, and with 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 by Strappi off the cart and shouted up and, after a supper of stale bread and sausage had been shouted, 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 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—” Shufti began.

“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 bustled 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!” moaned Wazzer, shaking with fear.

“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 around 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?”

“I was just wondering why it’s so crowded, Corp,” said Tonker. “If it’s so bad, I mean.”

“That’s because they are a degraded people, private! And they’ve sent a regiment up here to help Heinrich take over our beloved Motherland. He has turned aside from the ways of Nuggan and embraced Ankh-Morpork’s godlessn—godawfulness.” Strappi looked pleased at having spotted that one, and went on: “Point Two: in addition to its soldiers, Ankh-Morpork has sent Vimes the Butcher, the most evil man in that evil city. They are bent on nothing less than our destruction!”

“I heard that Ankh-Morpork was just angry that we cut the clacks towers down,” said Polly.

“They were on our sovereign territory!”

“Well, it was Zlobenian until—” Polly began.

Strappi waved an angry finger at her.

“You listen to me, Parts! You can’t get to be a great country like Borogravia without making enemies! Which leads me on to Point Three, Parts, who’s sitting there thinking he’s so smart. You all are. I can see it. Well, be smart about this: you might not like everything about your country, eh? It might not be the perfect place, but it’s ours. You might think we don’t have the best laws, but they’re ours. The mountains might not be the prettiest ones or the tallest ones, but they’re ours. We’re fighting for what’s ours, men!”

Strappi slammed his hand over his heart.

They joined in, with various levels of drone. You had to. Even if you just opened and shut your mouth, you had to. Even if you just went “ner, ner, ner,” you had to. Polly, who was exactly the kind of person who looks around surreptitiously at times like these, saw that Shufti was singing it word-perfectly and Strappi actually did have tears in his eyes. Wazzer wasn’t singing at all. He was praying. That was a good wheeze, said one of the more treacherous areas at the back of Polly’s mind.

To the bewilderment of all, Strappi continued—alone—all through the second verse, which nobody ever remembered, and then gave them a smug, I’m-more-patriotic-than-you smile.

Afterwards, they tried to sleep on as much softness as two blankets could provide.

They lay there in silence for some time. Jackrum and Strappi had tents of their own, but instinctively they knew that Strappi at least would be a sneaker and a listener at tent flaps.

After about an hour, when rain was drumming on the canvas, Carborundum said: “Okay, den, I fink I’ve worked it out. If people are groophar stupid, then we’ll fight for groophar stupidity, ’cos it’s our stupidity. And dat’s good, yeah?”

Several of the squad sat up in the darkness, amazed at this.

“I realize I ought to know these things, but what does groophar mean?” said the voice of Maladict in the damp darkness.

“Ah, well…when, right, a daddy troll an’ a mummy troll—”

“Good, right, yes, I think I’ve got it, thank you,” said Maladict. “And what you’ve got there, my friend, is patriotism. My country, right or wrong.”

“You should love your country,” said Shufti.

“Okay, what part?” the voice of Tonker demanded, from the far corner of the tent. “The morning sunlight on the mountains? The horrible food? The damn mad Abominations? All of my country except whatever bit Strappi is standing on?”

“But we are at war!”

“Yes, that’s where they’ve got you,” sighed Polly.

“Well, I’m not buying into it. It’s all trickery. They keep you down and when they piss off some other country, you have to fight for them! It’s only your country when they want you to get killed!” said Tonker.

“All the good bits in this country are in this tent,” said the voice of Wazzer.

Embarrassed silence descended.

The rain settled in. After a while, the tent began to leak.

Eventually someone said, “What happens, um, if you join up but then you decide you don’t want to?”

That was Shufti.

“I think it’s called deserting and they cut your head off,” said the voice of Maladict. “In my case, that would be a drawback but you, dear Shufti, would find it simply puts a big crimp in your social life.”

“I never kissed their damn picture,” said Tonker. “I swiveled it round when Strappi wasn’t looking and kissed it on the back!”

“They’ll still say you kissed the Duchess, though,” said Maladict.

“You k-kissed the D-duchess on the b-bottom?” said Wazzer, horrified.

“It was the back of the picture, okay?” said Tonker. “It wasn’t her real backside. Huh, wouldn’t have kissed it if it was!” There was some unidentified sniggering from various corners and just a hint of giggle.

“That was w-wicked!” hissed Wazzer. “Nuggan in heaven saw you d-do that!”

“It was just a picture, all right?” muttered Tonker. “Anyway, what’s the difference? Front or back, we’re all here together and I don’t see any steak and bacon!”

Something rumbled overhead. “I joined t’ see exciting forrin places and meet erotic people,” said Carborundum.

That caused a moment’s thought. “I think you mean exotic?” said Igor.

“Yeah, that kind of stuff,” agreed the troll.

“But they always lie,” said someone, and then Polly realized it was her. “They lie all the time. About everything.”

“Amen to that,” said Tonker. “We fight for liars.”

“Ah, they may be liars!” snapped Polly, in a passable imitation of Strappi’s yap. “But they’re our liars!”

“Now, now, children,” said Maladict. “Let’s try to get some sleep, shall we? But here’s a happy little dream from your Uncle Maladict. Dream that when we go into battle, Corporal Strappi is leading us. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

After a while, Tonker said: “In front of us, you mean?”

“Oh, yes. I can see you’re with me, Tonk. Right in front of you. On the noisy, frantic, confusing battlefield, where oh so much can go wrong.”

“And we’ll have weapons?” said Shufti wistfully.

“Of course you’ll have weapons. You’re soldiers. And there’s the enemy, right in front of you…”

“That’s a good dream, Mal.”

“Sleep on it, kid.”

Polly turned over, and tried to make herself comfortable.

It’s all lies, she though muzzily. Some of them are just prettier than others, that’s all. People see what they think is there. Even I’m a lie. But I’m getting away with it.

 

A warm autumnal wind was blowing leaves off the rowan trees as the recruits marched among the foothills. It was the morning of the next day, and the mountains were behind them.

Polly passed the time identifying the birds in the hedgerows. It was a habit. She knew most of them.

She hadn’t set out to be an ornithologist. But birds brought Paul alive. All the…slowness in the rest of his thinking became a flash of lightning in the presence of birds. Suddenly he knew their names, habits, and habitats, could whistle their songs, and, after Polly had saved up for a box of paints off a traveler at the inn, had painted a picture of a wren so real you could hear it.

Their mother had been alive then. The row had gone on for days. Pictures of living creatures were an Abomination in the eyes of Nuggan. Polly had asked why there were pictures of the Duchess everywhere, and had been thrashed for it. The picture had been burned, the paints thrown away.

It was a terrible thing. Her mother had been a kind woman, or as kind as a devout woman could be while trying to keep up with the whims of Nuggan, and she’d died slowly and painfully, amid pictures of the Duchess and among the echoes of unanswered prayers, but that was the memory that crawled treacherously into Polly’s mind every time: the fury and the scolding, while the little bird seemed to flutter in the flames.

In the fields, women and old men were getting in the spoiled wheat after last night’s rain, hoping to save what they could. There weren’t any young men visible. Polly saw some of the other recruits steal a glance at the scavenging parties, and wondered if they were thinking the same thing.

They saw no one else on the road until midday, when the party was marching through a landscape of low hills; the sun had boiled away some of the clouds and, for a moment at least, summer was back—moist and sticky and mildly unpleasant, like a party guest who won’t go home.

A red blob in the distance became a rather larger blob and resolved itself into a loose knot of men. Polly knew what to expect as soon as she saw it. By the reaction of some of the others, they did not. There was a moment of collision and confusion as people walked into one another, and then the party stopped and stared.

It took the wounded men some time to draw level, and some time to pass. Two able-bodied men, as far as Polly could tell, were trundling a handcart on which a third man lay. Others were limping on crutches, or had arms in slings, or wore red jackets with an empty sleeve. Perhaps worse were the ones like the man in the inn, gray-faced, staring straight ahead, jackets buttoned tight despite the heat.

One or two of the injured glanced at the recruits as they lurched past, but there was no expression in their eyes beyond a terrible determination.

Jackrum reined in the horse.

“All right, twenty minutes breather,” he muttered.

Igor turned, nodded to the party of wounded heading grimly onward, and said, “Permithion to thee if I can do anything for them, Tharge?”

“You’ll get your chance soon enough, lad,” said the sergeant.

“Tharge?” said Igor, looking hurt.

“Oh, all right. If you must. D’you want someone to give you a hand?”

There was a nasty laugh from Corporal Strappi.

“Some athithtance would be a help, yeth, Thargeant,” said Igor with dignity.

The sergeant looked at the squad, and nodded.

“Private Halter, step forward! Know anything about doctorin’?”

The red-headed Tonker stepped forward smartly.

“I’ve butchered pigs for me mam, Sarge,” he said.

“Capital! Better than an army surgeon, upon my oath. Off you go. Twenty minutes, remember!”

“And don’t let Igor bring back any souvenirs!” said Strappi, and laughed his scraping laugh again.

The rest of the boys sat down on the grass by the road, and one or two of them disappeared into the bushes. Polly went on the same errand, but pushed in a lot further, and took the opportunity to make a little sock adjustment. They had a tendency to creep if she wasn’t careful.

She froze at a rustling behind her, and then relaxed. She’d been careful. No one would have seen anything. So what if someone else was taking a leak? She’d just push her way back to the road and take no notice—

Lofty sprang up as Polly parted the bushes, breeches around one ankle, face red as a beetroot.

Polly couldn’t help herself. Maybe it was the socks. Maybe it was the pleading expression on Lofty’s face. When someone’s broadcasting “don’t look!,” the eyes have a mind of their own and go where they’re not wanted.

Lofty jumped up, dragging at her clothes.

“No, look, it’s all right—” Polly began, but it was too late. The girl had gone.

Polly stared at the bushes and thought: Blast! There’s two of us! But what would I have said next? It’s okay, I’m a girl too? You can trust me! We could be friends? Oh, and here’s a good tip about socks?

 

Igor and Tonker arrived back late, without saying anything. Nor did Sergeant Jackrum.

The squad moved off.

Polly marched at the back, with Carborundum. This meant she could keep a wary eye on Lofty, whoever she was.

For the first time, Polly really looked at her. She was easy to miss, because she was always, as it were, in Tonker’s shadow. She was short, although now Polly knew she was female, the word “petite” could be decently used, and was dark and dark-haired and had a strange, self-absorbed look, and she was always marching with Tonker.

Come to think of it, she always slept close to him, too.

Ah, so that was it. She’s following her boy, Polly thought. It was kind of romantic, and very, very dumb. Now she knew to look beyond the clothes and haircut, she could see all the little clues that Lofty was a girl, and a girl who hadn’t planned enough.

She saw Lofty whisper something to Tonker, who half-turned and gave Polly a look of instant hatred and a hint of threat.

I can’t tell her, she thought. She would tell him. I can’t afford to let them know. I’ve put too much into this. I didn’t just cut my hair and wear trousers. I planned…

Ah, yes…the plans.

It had begun as a sudden strange fancy, but it had continued as a plan.

At first, Polly had started to watch boys closely. This had been reciprocated hopefully by a few of them, to their subsequent disappointment. She watched how they moved, she listened to the rhythm of what passed, among boys, for conversation, she’d noted how they punched one another in greeting. It was a new world.

She had good muscles for a girl, because running a large inn was all about moving heavy things, and she took over a number of the grittier chores, which coarsened her hands nicely. She’d even worn a pair of her brother’s old breeches under her long skirt, to get the feel of them.

A woman could be beaten for that sort of thing. Men dressed like men and women like women; doing it the other way around was “a blasphemous Abomination Unto Nuggan,” according to Father Jupe.

And that was probably the secret of her success so far, she thought as she trudged through a puddle. People didn’t look for a woman in trousers. To the casual observer, men’s clothes and short hair and a bit of swagger were what it took to be a man.

Oh, and a second pair of socks.

That had been gnawing at her, too. Someone knew about her, just like she knew about Lofty. And he hadn’t given her away. She’d feared it was Eyebrow, but doubted it; he’d have told the sergeant about her, he was that sort. Right now she was guessing it was Maladict, but perhaps that was just because he seemed so knowing all the time.

Carbor—no, he’d been out cold, and in any case…no, not the troll. And Igor lisped. Tonker? After all, he’d know about Lofty so maybe…no, because why would he want to help Polly? No, there was nothing but danger in owning up to Lofty. The best she could do was try and see to it that the girl didn’t give both of them away.

She could hear Tonker whispering to his girl.

“…had just died so he cut off one of his legs and an arm and sewed ’em on men who needed ’em, just like I’d darn a tear! You should’ve seen it! You couldn’t see his fingers move! And he has all these ointments that just…”

Tonker’s voice died away. Strappi was haranguing Wazzer again.

“Dat Strappi really gets on my crags,” muttered Carborundum. “You want I should pull the head off’f him? I c’d make it look like a accident.”

“Better not,” said Polly, but she did entertain the thought for a moment.

They’d reached a road junction, where the road down from the mountains joined what passed for a main highway. It was crowded. There were carts and wheelbarrows, people driving herds of cows, grandmothers carrying all the household possessions on their backs, a general excitement of pigs and children…and it was all heading one way.

It was the opposite way to the way the squad was going. The people and animals flowed around it like a stream around an inconvenient rock.

The recruits bunched up. It was that or be separated by cows.

Sergeant Jackrum stood up in the cart.

“Private Carborundum!”

“Yes, Sergeant?” rumbled the troll.

“To the front!”

That helped. The stream still flowed, but at least the crowds parted some distance further along the road and gave the squad a wide berth. No one wants to barge up against even a slow-moving troll.

But faces stared as the people hurried by. An old lady darted out for a moment, pressed a loaf of stale bread into Tonker’s hands, and said “You poor boys!” before being swept away in the throng.

“What’s this all about, Sarge?” said Maladict. “These look like refugees!”

“Talk like that spreads Alarm and Despondency!” shouted Corporal Strappi.

“Oh, you mean they’re just people getting away early for the holidays to avoid the rush?” said Maladict. “Sorry, I got confused. It must be that woman carrying a whole haystack we just passed.”

“D’you know what can happen to you for cheeking a superior officer?” screamed Strappi.

“No! Tell me, is it worse than whatever it is these people are running away from?”

“You signed up, Mr. Bloodsucker! You obey orders!”

“Right! But I don’t remember anyone ordering me not to think!”

“Enough of that!” snapped Jackrum. “Less shouting down there! Move on! Carborundum, you give people a push if they don’t make way, y’hear?”

They moved on. After a while, the press of people abated a little, so that what had been a torrent became a trickle. Occasionally, there would be a family group, or just one hurrying woman, burdened with bags. One old man was struggling with a wheelbarrow full of turnips.

They’re even taking the crops out of the fields, Polly noted. And everyone moved at a kind of half run, as if things would be a little better when they’d caught up with the mass of people ahead. Or merely overtook them, perhaps.

The squad was passed by an old woman bent double under the weight of a black-and-white pig.

And then there was just the road, rutted and muddy. An afternoon mist was rising from the fields on either side, quiet and clammy. After the noise of the refugees, the silence of the low countryside was suddenly oppressive. The only sound was the trudge and splash of the recruits’ boots.

“Permission to speak, Sarge?” said Polly.

“Yes, private?” said Jackrum.

“How far is it to Plotz?”

“You don’t have to tell ’em, Sarge!” said Strappi.

“About five miles,” said Sergeant Jackrum. “You’ll get your uniforms and weapons at the depot there.”

“That’s a milit’ry secret, Sarge,” Strappi whined.

“We could shut our eyes so’s we don’t see what we’re wearing, how about that?” said Maladict.

“Stop that, Private Maladict,” said Jackrum. “Just keep moving, and guard that tongue.”

They plodded on. The road grew muddier. A breeze sprang up, but instead of carrying the mist away it merely streamed it across the damn fields in twisty, clammy, unpleasant shapes. The sun became an orange ball.

Polly saw something large and white flutter across the field, blown by the wind. At first she thought it was a migratory lesser egret that had left things a little late, but it was clearly being blown by the wind.

It flopped down once or twice and then, as a gust caught it, blew across the road and wrapped itself across Corporal Strappi’s face.

He screamed.

Lofty grabbed at the fluttering thing, which was damp. In tore in his—her—hands, and most of it dropped away from the struggling corporal.

“It’s just a bit of paper,” she said.

Strappi flailed at it. “I knew that,” he said. “I never asked you!”

Polly picked up one of the torn scraps. The paper was thin and muddy, although she recognized the words “Ankh-Morpork.” The godawful city. And the genius of Strappi was that anything he was against automatically sounded attractive.

“Ankh-Morpork Times…” she read aloud, before the corporal snatched it out of her hand.

“You can’t just read anything you see, Parts!” he shouted. “You don’t know who wrote it!”

He dropped the damp scrap onto the mud and stamped on it.

“Now let’s move on!” he said.

They moved on. When the squad was more or less in rhythm, and staring at nothing more than its boots or the mist ahead of it, Polly raised her right hand to chest height and carefully turned it palm up so that she could see the fragment of paper that had soggily stayed behind when the rest had been pulled away.

 

“NO SURRENDER”
TO ALLIANCE SAYS
DUCHESS (97)

 

From William de Worde
Valley of the Kneck, Sektober 7.

They were winning, weren’t they? So where did the word “surrender” come from? And what was the Alliance?

And then there was the problem of Strappi, which had been growing on her. She could see he got on Jackrum’s nerves as well, and he had a struttiness about him, a certain—er…sockiness, as if he was really the one in charge. Perhaps it was just general unpleasantness, but…

“Corporal?” she said.

“Yes, Parts?” said Strappi. His nose was still very red.

“We are winning this war, aren’t we?” said Polly. She’d given up correcting him.

Suddenly, every ear in the squad was listening.

“Don’t you bother yourself about that, Parts!” snapped the corporal. “Your job is to fight!”

“Right, Corp. So…I’ll be fighting on the winning side, will I?”

“Oho, we’ve got someone who asks too many questions here, Sarge!” said Strappi.

“Yeah, don’t ask questions, Perks,” said Jackrum, absentmindedly.

“So we’re losing, then?” said Tonker. Strappi turned on him.

“That’s spreading Alarm and Despondency again, that is!” he shrieked. “That’s aiding the enemy!”

“Year, knock it off, Private Halter,” said Jackrum. “Okay? Now, get a—”

“Halter, I’m placing you under arrest for—” Strappi began.

“Corporal Strappi, a word in your shell-like ear, please? You men, you stop here!” growled the sergeant, clambering down from the cart.

Jackrum walked back down the road about fifty feet. Glaring around at the squad, the corporal strutted after him.

“Are we in trouble?” said Tonker.

“You guess,” said Maladict.

“Bound to be,” said Shufti. “Strappi can always get you for something.”

“They’re having an argument,” said Maladict. “Which is odd, don’t you think? A sergeant is supposed to give orders to a corporal.”

“We are winning, aren’t we?” said Shufti. “I mean, I know there’s a war, but…I mean, we get weapons, don’t we, and we’ll…well they’ve got to train us, right? It’ll probably be all over by then, right? Everyone says we’re winning.”

“I will ask the Duchess in my prayers tonight,” said Wazzer.

The rest of the squad looked at one another with a shared expression.

“Yeah, right, Wazz,” said Tonker kindly. “You do that.”

The sun was setting fast, half-hidden in the mist. Here, on the muddy road between damp fields, it suddenly felt as cold as it could be.

“No one says we’re winning, except maybe Strappi,” said Polly. “They just say that everyone says we’re winning.”

“The men Igor…repaired didn’t even say that,” said Tonker. “They said ‘you poor bastards, you’ll leg it if you’ve any sense.’”

“Thank you for sharing,” said Maladict.

“It looks at though everyone’s feeling sorry for us,” said Polly.

“Yeah, well, so am I, and I am uth,” said Igor. “Thome of thothe men—”

“All right, all right, stop lollygagging, you lot!” shouted Strappi, marching up.

“Corporal?” said the sergeant quietly, hauling himself back onto the cart. Strappi paused, and then in a voice dripping with syrup and sarcasm went on: “Excuse me. The sergeant and myself would be obleejed if you brave-heroes-to-be would join us in a little light marching? Jolly good! And there will be embroidery later on. Best foot forward, ladies!”

She heard Tonker gasp. Strappi turned, eyes glinting with sinister anticipation.

“Oh, someone doesn’t like being called a lady, eh?” he said. “Dear me, Private Halter, you’ve got a lot to learn, haven’t you? You’re a sissy little lady until we make a man of you, right? And I dread to think how long that’s going to take. Move!”

I know, thought Polly as they set off. It takes about ten seconds and a pair of socks. One sock, and you could make Strappi.

 

Plotz turned out to be like Plün, but it was worse because it was bigger. The rain started again as they marched into the cobbled square. It looked as though it always rained here. The buildings were gray and mud-spattered near the ground. Roof gutters overflowed, pouring rain onto the cobbles and sending a spray over the recruits. There was no one about. Polly saw open doors banging in the wind, and bits of debris in the streets, and remembered the lines of hurrying people on the road.

There was no one here.

Sergeant Jackrum climbed down from the cart as Strappi bawled them into line. Then the sergeant took over, leaving the corporal to glower from the sidelines.

“This is wonderful Plotz!” he said. “Have a look round, so that if you is killed and goes to hell, it won’t come as a shock! You’ll be bivvying in that barracks over there, what is milit’ry property!” He waved a hand toward a crumbling stone building that looked about as military as a barn. “You will be issued with your equipment. And tomorrow it’s a nice long march to Crotz, where you will arrive as boys and leave as men did I just say something funny, Perks? No, I thought so, too! Attention! That means stand up straight!”

“That’s straight!” yelled Strappi.

A young man was riding across the square on a tired, skinny brown horse, which was quite suitable, because he was a tired, skinny man. The skinniness was helped by the fact that he wore a tunic that had clearly been made for someone a couple of sizes larger. The same applied to his helmet. He must have padded it, Polly thought. One cough and it’ll be over his eyes.

Sergeant Jackrum snapped off a salute as the officer approached.

“Jackrum, sir. You’ll be Lieutenant Blouse, sir?”

“Well done, Sergeant.”

“These are the recruits from upriver, sir. Fine body of men, sir.”

The rider peered at the squad. He actually leaned forward over the horse’s neck, causing rain to pour off his helmet.

“This is all, Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

“Most of them look very young,” said the lieutenant, who didn’t look very old.

“Yessir.”

“And isn’t that one a troll?”

“Yessir. Well spotted, sir.”

“And the one with stitches all around his head?”

“He’s an Igor, sir. Sort of like a special clan up in the mountains, sir.”

“Do they fight?”

“Can take a man apart very quickly, sir, as I understand it,” said Jackrum, his expression not changing.

The young lieutenant sighed.

“Well, I’m sure they’re all good fellows,” he said. “Now then, er…men, I—”

“Pay attention and listen to what the lieutenant has to say!” bawled Strappi.

The lieutenant shuddered.

“—thank you, Corporal,” he said. “Men, I have good news,” he added, but in the voice of one who hasn’t. “You were probably expecting a week or two in the training camp in Crotz, yes? But I’m glad to be able to tell you that the, the war is progressing so, so, so well that you are to go directly to the front.”

Polly heard one or two gasps, and a snigger from Corporal Strappi.

“All of you are to go to the lines,” said the lieutenant. “That includes you too, Corporal. Your time for action has come at last!”

The snigger stopped.

“Sorry, sir?” said Strappi. “The front? But you know that I’m—well, you know about the special duties—”

“My orders said all able-bodied men, Corporal,” said Blouse. “I expect that you’ll be itching for the fray after all these years, eh, a young man like you?”

Strappi said nothing.

“However,” said the lieutenant, fumbling under his soaking cloak, “I do have a package here for you, Sergeant Jackrum. A very welcome one, I’ve no doubt.”

Jackrum took the packet gingerly.

“Thank you, sir, I’ll look at this later on—” he began.

“On the contrary, Sergeant Jackrum!” said Blouse. “Your last recruits should see this, since you are a soldier, and, as it were, a ‘father of soldiers’! And so it’s only right that they see a fine soldier get his reward: an honorable discharge, Sergeant!”

Blouse spoke the words as if they had cream and a little cherry on top.

Apart from the rain, the only sound now was Jackrum’s pudgy finger slowly ripping open the package.

“Oh,” he said, like a man in shock. “Good. A picture of the Duchess. That’s eighteen I have now. Oh, and, ooh, a piece of paper saying it’s a medal, so it looks like we’ve even run out of pot metal now. Oh, and my discharge with a printing of the Duchess’s very own signature itself!” He turned the packet over and shook it. “Not my three months back pay, though.”

“Three loud hurrahs for Sergeant Jackrum!” said the lieutenant to the rain and wind. “Hip-hip—”

“But I thought we needed every man, sir!” said Jackrum.

“Judging by all the notes pinned on that packet, it has been following you around for years, Sergeant,” said Blouse. “You know the military. That is your official discharge, I am afraid. I cannot rescind it. I am sorry.”

“But—” Jackrum began.

“It bears the Duchess’s signature, Sergeant. Will you argue with that? I said I am sorry. In any case, what would you do? We will not be sending out any more recruiting parties.”

“What? But we always need men, sir!” Jackrum protested. “And I’m fit and well again, got the stamina of a horse—”

“You are the only man to return with recruits, Sergeant. That is how the matter is.”

The sergeant hesitated for a moment, and then saluted. “Yessir! Very good, sir! Will see the new lads settled in, sir! Pleasure to have served, sir!”

“Can I ask something?” said Maladict.

“You do not address an officer directly, Private,” snapped Jackrum.

“No, let the man speak, Sergeant,” said the lieutenant. “These are…unusual times, after all. Yes, my man?”

“Did I hear you say we’re going into battle without training, sir?”

“Oh, well, most of you will almost certainly be pikemen, haha,” said the lieutenant nervously. “Not a lot of training there, eh? You just need to know which end is which, haha.” The lieutenant looked as though he wanted to die.

“Pikemen?” said Maladict, looking puzzled.

“You heard the lieutenant, Private Maladict,” snapped the sergeant.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Maladict, stepping back into the ranks.

“Are there any more questions?” said Blouse, looking along the line. “Jolly good, then. We leave by the last boat, at midnight. Carry on, Sergeant…for now. What was the other thing…oh, yes. And I shall need a batman.”

“Volunteers to be the lieutenant’s batman step forward! Not you, Private Maladict!” snapped the sergeant.

No one moved.

“Oh, come now,” said the lieutenant.

Polly slowly raised a hand.

“What’s a batman, sir?”

The sergeant grinned mirthlessly.

“Fair question,” he said. “A batman is, like, a personal servant who takes care of the officer. Fetches his meals to him, sees he’s smartly turned out, that style of thing. So’s he is free to perform his duties more adequatelier.”

Igor stepped forward.

“Igorth are uthed to thervice, Thargeant,” he said.

Using the amazing powers of deafness and restricted vision sometimes available even to the most nervous officers, the lieutenant appeared not to notice him. He looked fixedly at Polly.

“What about you, Private?” he said.

“Private Perks used to work in a bar, sir,” the sergeant volunteered.

“Capital. Report to my quarters in the inn at six, Private Perks. Carry on, Sergeant.”

As the horse staggered away, Sergeant Jackrum directed his glare at the squad, but there was no real fire to it. He appeared to be operating on automatic, with his mind elsewhere.

“Don’t just stand there trying to look pretty! There’s uniforms and weapons inside! Get kitted up! If you want grub, cook it yerself! At the double! Disssssssmiss!”

The squad dashed for the barracks, propelled by sheer volume. But Polly hesitated. Corporal Strappi hadn’t moved since the snigger had been cut short. He was staring blankly at the ground.

“You all right, Corporal?” she said.

“You go away, Parts,” said the corporal in a low voice that was much worse that his normal petulant shout. “Just go away, all right?”

She shrugged and followed the others. But she had noticed the steaming dampness round the corporal’s feet.

 

There was chaos inside. The barracks was really just one big room which did duty as mess, assembly room, and kitchen, with big bunk rooms beyond it. It was empty, and well on the way to decay. The roof leaked, the high windows were broken, dead leaves had blown in and lay around on the floor, among the rat droppings.

There were no pickets, no sentries, no people. There was a big pot boiling on the sooty hearth, though, and its hiss and seethe were the only liveliness in the place.

At some point, part of the room had been set up as a kind of quartermaster’s store, but most of the shelves were empty. Polly had expected some sort of a queue, some kind of order, possibly someone handing out little piles of clothes.

What there was, instead, was a rummage stall. Very much like a rummage stall, in fact, because nothing on it appeared to be new and little on it appeared to be worth having. The rest of the squad were already pawing through what might have been called merchandise if there was any possibility that anyone could be persuaded to buy it.

“What’s this? One Size, Doesn’t Fit Anyone?”

“This tunic’s got blood on it! Blood!”

“Well, it ith one of the thtubborn thtainth, it’s alwayth very hard to get it out without—”

“Where’s the proper armor?”

“Oh, no! There’s an arrow hole in this one!”

“What dis? Nuffin fits a troll!”

A small, leathery old man was at bay behind the table, cowing under the ferocity of Maladict’s glare. He wore a red uniform jacket, done up badly, with a corporal’s stripes, stained and faded, on the sleeve. The left breast was covered in medals.

One arm ended in a hook. One eye was covered in a patch.

“We’re going to be pikemen, the lieutenant said!” said the vampire. “That means a sword and a pike per man, right? And a shield if there’s an arrow storm, right? And a heavy helmet, right?”

“Wrong! You can’t yell at me like that!” said the man. “See these medals? I’m a—”

A hand descended from above and lifted him over the table. Carborundum held the man close to his face and nodded.

“Yah, can see ’em, mister,” he rumbled. “And…?”

The recruits had fallen silent.

“Put him down, Carborundum,” said Polly. “Gently.”

“Why?”

“He’s got no legs.”

The troll focused. Then, with exaggerated care, he lowered the old soldier to the ground. There were a couple of little tapping sounds as the two wooden peg legs touched the planking.

“Sorry about dat,” he said.

The little man steadied himself against the table and shuffled his arms around a couple of crutches.

“All right,” he said gruffly. “No harm done. But watch it, another time!”

“But this is ridiculous!” said Maladict, turning to Polly and waving a hand at the heap of rags and bent metal. “You couldn’t equip three men out of this mess. There’re not even any decent boots!”

Polly looked along the length of the table.

“We’re supposed to be well equipped,” she said to the one-eyed man. “We’re supposed to be the finest army in the world. That’s what we’re told. And aren’t we winning?”

The man looked at her. Inside, she stared at herself. She hadn’t meant to speak out like that.

“So they say,” he said in a blank kind of way.

“And w-at do you say?” said Wazzer. He’d picked up one of the few swords. It was stained and notched.

The corporal glanced up at Carborundum, and then at Maladict.

“I’m not s-stupid, you know!” Wazzer went on, red in the face and trembling. “All this stuff is off d-dead men!”

“Well, it’s a shame to waste good boots—” the man began.

“We’re the last o-ones, aren’t we?” said Wazzer. “The last r-recruits!”

The peg-legged coporal eyed the distant doorway, and saw no relief heading in his direction.

“We’ve got to stay here all night,” said Maladict. “Night!” he went on, causing the old corporal to wobble on his crutches, “where who know what evil flits through the shadows, dealing death on silent wings, seeking a hapless victim who—”

“Yeah, all right, all right, I did see your ribbon,” said the corporal. “Look, I’m closing up after you’ve gone. I just run the stores, that’s all. That’s all I do, honest! I’m on one-tenth pay, me, on account of the leg situation, and I don’t want trouble!”

“And this is all you’ve got?” said Maladict. “Don’t you have a little something…put by…”

“Are you saying I’m dishonest?” said the corporal hotly.

“Let’s say I’m open to the idea that you might not be,” said the vampire. “C’mon, Corporal, you said we’re the last to go. What are you saving up? What’ve you got?”

The corporal sighed and swung with surprising speed over to a door, which he unlocked.

“You’re better come and look,” he said. “But it’s not good…”

It was worse. They found a few more breastplates, but one was sliced in half and the other was one big dent. A shield was in two pieces, too. There were bent swords and crushed helmets, battered hats and torn shirts.

“I done what I can,” sighed the corporal. “I hammered stuff out and washed out the clothes but it’s been weeks since I had any coal for the forge and you can’t do nothin’ about the swords without a forge. It’s been months since I got any new weapons and, let me tell you, since the dwarfs buggered off, the steel we’ve been getting is crap anyway.” He rubbed his nose. “I know you think quartermasters are a thieving bunch and I won’t say we might not skim a bit off the top when things are going well, but this stuff? A beetle couldn’t make a living off this.” He sniffed again. “Ain’t been paid in three months, neither. I guess one-tenth of nothing is not as bad as nothing, but I was never that good at philosophy.”

Then he brightened up. “Got plenty to eat, at least,” he said. “If you like horse, that is. Personally I prefer rat, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

“I can’t eat horse!” said Shufti.

“Ah, you’d be a rat man?” said the corporal, leading the way out into the big room.

“No!”

“You’ll learn to be one. You’ll all learn,” said the little one-tenth corporal, with an evil grin. “Ever eaten scubbo? No? Nothing like a bowl of scubbo when you’re hungry. You can put anything in scubbo. Pork, beef, mutton, rabbit, chicken, duck…anything. Even rats, if you’ve got ’em. It’s food for the marching man, scubbo. Got some on the boil out there right now. You can have some of that, if you like.”

The squad brightened up.

“Soundth good,” said Igor. “What’th in it?”

“Boiling water,” said the corporal. “It’s what we call ‘blind scubbo.’ But there’s going to be old horse in a minute unless you’ve got something better. Could do with some seasonings, at least. Who’s looking after the rupert?”

They looked at one another.

The corporal sighed. “The officer,” he explained. “They’re all called Rupert or Rodney or Tristram or something. They get better grub than you do. You could try scrounging something at the inn.”

“Scrounge?” said Polly.

The old man rolled his one eye.

“Yeah. Scrounge. Scrounge, nick, have a lend of, borrow, thieve, lift, acquire, purrrr-loin. That’s what you’ll learn, if you’re gonna survive this war. Which they say we’re winnin’, o’course. Always remember that.” He spat vaguely in the direction of the fire, possibly missing the cooking pot only by accident. “Yeah, an’ all the lads I see coming back down the road walking hand in hand with Death, they probably overdid the celebrating, eh? So easy to take your hand right off if you open a bottle of champ-pag-nee the wrong way, eh? I see you’ve got an Igor with you, you lucky devils. Wish we’d had one when I went off to battle. I wouldn’t be kept awake by woodworm if we had.”

“We have to steal our food?” said Maladict.

“No, you can starve if that takes your fancy,” said the corporal. “I’ve starved a few times. There’s no future in it. Ate a man’s leg when we were snowed up in the Ibblestarn campaign but, fair’s fair, he ate mine.” He looked at their faces. “Well, it’s not on, is it, eating your own leg? You’d probably go blind.”

“You swapped legs?” said Polly, horrified.

“Yeah, me an’ Sergeant Hausegerda. It was his idea. Sensible man, the sergeant. That kept us alive for the week and by then the relief got through. We were certainly relieved about that. Oh, dear. Where’s my manners? How d’yer do, lads, my name’s Corporal Scallot. They call me Threeparts.”

He held out his hook.

“But that’s cannibalism!” said Tonker, backing away.

“No it’s not, not officially, not unless you eat a whole person,” said Threeparts Scallot levelly. “Milit’ry rules.”

All eyes turned to the big pot bubbling on the fire.

“Horse,” said Scallot. “Ain’t got nothing but horse. I told you. I wouldn’t lie to you, boys. Now kit yerselves up with the best yer can find. What’s your name, stone man?”

“Carborundum,” said the troll.

“Got a wee bit o’ decent snacking anthracite saved up out the back, then, and some official red paint for you ’cos I never met a troll yet that wanted to wear a jacket. The rest of you, mark what I’m telling yer: fill up with grub. Fill yer pack with grub. Fill yer hat with grub. Fill yer boots with soup! If any of you run across a pot of mustard, you hang on to it, it’s amazin’ what mustard’ll help down. And look after your mates. And keep out of the way of officers, ’cos they ain’t healthy. That’s what you learn in the army. The enemy dun’t really want to fight you, ’cos the enemy is mostly blokes like you who want to go home with all their bits still on. But officers’ll get you killed.” Scallot looked around at them. “There. I’ve said it. And if there’s a political amongst you, mister, you can go an’ tell tales and to hell with you.”

After a few moments of embarrassed silence, Polly said: “What’s a political?”

“Like a spy, only on your own side,” said Maladict.

“That’s right,” said Scallot. “There’s one in every battalion these days, snitching on their mates. Get promotion that way, see? Don’t want dissent in the ranks, eh? Don’t want loose talk about losing battles, right? Which is a load of bloody cludgies, ’cos the infantry grumbles all the time. Moaning is part of bein’ a soldier.” He sighed. “Anyway, there’s a bunkhouse out the back, I beats the pallyarses regular so’s there probably not too many fleas.” Once again he looked at blank faces. “That’s straw mattresses to you. Go on, help yourselves. Take what you like. I’m closing up after you’ve gone, anyway. We must be winning now you rattling lads are joining, right?”

 

The clouds had broken when Polly stepped out into the night, and a half moon filled the world with cold silver and black.

The inn opposite was another rubbishy alehouse for selling bad beer to soldiers. It stank of ancient slops, even before she opened the door. The sign was flaked and unrecognizable, but she could read the name: The World Turned Upside Down.

She pushed open the door. The smell got worse. There were no customers and no sign of Strappi or Jackrum, but Polly did see a servant methodically spreading the inn’s dirt evenly across the floor with a mop.

“Excuse m—” she began, and then remembered the socks, raised her voice, and tried to sound angry. “Hey, where’s the lieutenant?”

The servant looked at her and gestured up the stairs with a thumb. There was only one candle alight up there, and she knocked on the nearest door.

“Enter…”

She entered. Lieutenant Blouse was standing in the middle of the floor in his breeches and shirtsleeves, holding a saber. Polly was no expert in these matters, but she thought she recognized the stylish, flamboyant pose as the one beginners tend to use just before they’re stabbed through the heart by a more experienced fighter.

“Ah, Perks, isn’t it?” he said, lowering the blade. “Just, er, limbering up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There’s some laundry in the bag over there. I expect someone in the inn will do it. What’s for supper?”

“I’ll check, sir.”

“What are the men having?”

“Scubbo, sir,” said Polly. “Possibly with hor—”

“Then bring me some, will you? We are at war, after all, and I must show an example to my men,” said Blouse, sheathing the sword at the third attempt. “That would be good for morale.”

Polly glanced at the table. A book lay open on top of a pile of others. It looked like a manual of swordsmanship, and the page it was open at was page five. Beside it was a thick-lensed pair of spectacles.

“Are you a reading man, Perks?” said Blouse, closing the book.

Polly hesitated. But, then, what did Ozzer care?

“A bit, sir,” she admitted.

“I suspect I shall have to leave most of these behind,” he said. “Do take one if you want it.” He waved a hand at the books. Polly read the titles. The Craft of War. Principles of Engagement. Battle Studies. Tactical Defense.

“All a bit heavy for me, sir,” she said. “Thanks all the same.”

“Tell me, Perks,” said Blouse, “are the recruits in, er, good spirits?”

He gave her a look of apparently genuine concern. He really did have no chin, she noticed. His face just eased its way into his neck without much to disturb it on the way, but his Adam’s apple, now, that was a champion. It went up and down his neck like a ball on a spring.

Polly had been soldiering for only a couple of days, but already an instinct had developed. In summary, it was this: lie to officers.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Getting everything they need?”

The aforesaid instinct weighed the chances of them getting anything more than they’d got already as a result of a complaint, and Polly said, “Yes, sir.”

“Of course, it is not up to us to question our orders,” said Blouse.

“Wasn’t doing so, sir,” said Polly, momentarily perplexed.

“Even though at times we might feel—” the lieutenant began, and started again. “Obvious warfare is a very volatile thing, and the tide of battle can change in a moment.”

“Yessir,” said Polly, still staring. The man had a small spot where his spectacles had rubbed on his nose.

The lieutenant seemed to have something on his mind, too.

“Why did you join up, Perks?” he said, groping on the table and finding his spectacles at the third attempt. He had woollen gloves on, with the fingers cut out.

“Patriotic duty, sir!” said Polly promptly.

“You lied about your age?”

“Nosir!”

“Just patriotic duty, Perks?”

There were lies, and then there were lies. Polly shifted awkwardly.

“Would quite like to find out what’s happened to my brother, Paul, sir,” she said.

“Ah, yes.” Lieutenant Blouse’s face, not a picture of happiness to begin with, suddenly bore a hunted look.

“Paul Perks, sir,” Polly prompted.

“I’m, er, not really in a position to know, Perks,” said Blouse. “I was working as a, I was, er, in charge of, er, I was engaged in special work back at headquarters, er…obviously I don’t know all the soldiers, Perks. Older brother, w—is he?”

“Yessir. Joined the Ins-and-Outs last year, sir.”

“And, er, have you any younger brothers?” said the lieutenant.

“No, sir.”

“Ah, well. That’s something to be thankful for, at any rate,” said Blouse. It was a strange thing to say. Polly’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

“Sir?” she said.

And then she felt an unpleasant sensation of movement. Something was slipping slowly down the inside of her thigh.

“Anything the matter, Perks?” said the lieutenant, catching her expression.

“Nosir! Just a…a bit of cramp, sir! All the marching, sir!” She clamped both hands around one knee and edged backwards toward the door. “I’ll just go and…go and see to your supper, sir!”

“Yes, yes,” said Blouse, staring at her leg. “Yes…please…”

Polly paused outside the door to pull her socks up, re-tucked the end of one under her belt as an anchor, and hurried down to the inn’s kitchens. A look told her all she wanted to know. Food hygiene here consisted of making a half-hearted effort not to gob in the stew.

“I want onions, salt, pepper—” she began.

The maid who was stirring the soot-black pot on the soot-black stove glanced up, realized she had been addressed by a man, and hastily pushed her damp hair our of her eyes.

“It’s stoo, sir,” she announced.

“I don’t want any. I just want the stuff,” said Polly. “For the officer,” she added.

The kitchen maid pointed a soot-blackened thumb to a nearby door and gave Polly what she probably thought was a saucy grin.

“I’m sure you can have anything that takes your fancy, sir,” she said.

Polly glanced at the couple of shelves that had been dignified by the name of pantry, and grabbed a couple of large onions, one in each hand.

“May I?” she said.

“Oh, sir!” giggled the maid. “I do hope you’re not one of them coarse soldiers who’d take advantage of a helpless maiden, sir!”

“No, er…no. I’m not one of them,” said Polly.

“Oh.” This didn’t seem to be the right answer. The maid put her head on one side. “Have you had much to do with young women, sir?” she asked.

“Er…yes. Quite a lot,” said Polly. “Er…lots, really.”

“Really?”

The maid drew closer. She smelled mostly of sweat, tinged with soot. Polly raised the onions as a kind of barrier.

“I’m sure there’s things you’d like to learn,” the maid purred.

“I’m sure there’s something you wouldn’t!” said Polly, and turned and ran. As she made it out into the cold night air, a plaintive voice behind her called out, “I’m off at eight o’clock!”

 

Ten minutes later, Corporal Scallot was impressed. Polly got the feeling this did not happen often.

Shufti had wedged an old breastplate beside the fire, had hammered some slabs of horsemeat until they were tender, dipped them in some flour, and was frying them. The sliced onions sizzled next to them.

“I always just boil ’em,” said Scallot, watching him with interest.

“You just lose all the flavor if you do that,” said Shufti.

“Hey, lad, the stuff I’ve ate, you wouldn’t want to taste it!”

“Sauté things first, especially the onions,” Shufti went on. “Improves the flavor. Anyway, when you boil you ought to boil slow. That’s what me mam always says. Roast fast, boil slow, okay? This isn’t bad meat, for horse. Shame to boil it, anyway.”

“Amazin’,” said Scallot. “We could’ve done with you in Ibblestarn. The sarge was a good man but a bit, you know, tough in the leg?”

“A marinade would probably have helped,” said Shufti absently, flipping a slice of meat with a broken sword. He turned to Polly. “Was there any more stuff in the larder, Ozz? I can make up some stock for tomorrow if we can—”

“I’m not going in that kitchen again!” said Polly.

“Ah, that’d be Roundheels Molly?” said Corporal Scallot, looking up and grinning. “She’s sent many a lad on his way rejoicing.”

He dipped a ladle in the boiling scubbo pot next to the pan. Disintegrated gray meat seethed in a few inches of water.

“That’ll do for the rupert,” he said and picked up a stained bowl.

“Well, he did say he wanted to eat what the men eat,” said Polly.

“Oh, that kind of officer,” said Scallot uncharitably. “Yeah, some young ones try that stuff, ifn’ they’ve been readin’ the wrong books. Some of ’em tries to be friends, the bastards.” He spat expertly between the two pans. “Wait ’til he tries what the men eat.”

“But if we’ve having steak and onions—”

“No thanks to the likes o’ him,” said the corporal, ladling the slurry into the bowl. “The Zlobenian troops get one pound of beef and a pound of flour a day minimum, plus fat pork or butter and half a pound of peas. A pint o’ molasses sometimes, too. We get stale horse-bread and what we scrounge. He’ll have scubbo and like it.”

“No fresh vegetables, no fruit,” said Shufti. “That’s a very binding diet, Corp.”

“Yeah, well, once battle commences I reckon you’ll find constipation’s the last thing on your mind,” said Scallot. He reached up, pushed some rags aside, and pulled down a dusty bottle from a shelf.

“Rupert’s not having none o’ this, neither,” he said. “Got it off’f the baggage of the last officer that went through, but I’ll share it with you, ’cos you’s good lads.” He casually knocked the top of the bottle off against the edge of the chimney. “’S only sherry, but it’ll make you drunk.”

“Thanks, Corp,” said Shufti and took the bottle. He sloshed a lot over the sizzling meat.

“Hey, that’s good drink you’re wastin’!” said Scallot, making a grab for it.

“No, it’ll spice up the meat a fair treat,” said Shufti, trying to hang on to the bottle. “It’ll—sugar!”

Half the liquid had gone on the fire as the two hands fought for it, but that wasn’t what had felt like a small steel rod shooting through Polly’s head. She looked around at the rest of the squad, who didn’t appear to have—

Maladict winked at her and made a tiny gesture with his head toward the other end of the room, and strolled in that direction. Polly followed.