She unfolded another piece of paper. It was a pamphlet. It was headed ‘From the Mothers of Borogravia!’ The mothers of Borogravia were very definite about wanting to send their sons off to war against the Zlobenian Aggressor and used a great many exclamation marks to say so. And this was odd, because the mothers in Munz had not seemed keen on the idea of their sons going off to war, and positively tried to drag them back. Several copies of the pamphlet seemed to have reached every home, even so. It was very patriotic. That is, it talked about killing foreigners.
Polly had learned to read and write after a fashion because the inn was big and it was a business and things had to be tallied and recorded. Her mother had taught her to read, which was acceptable to Nuggan, and her father made sure that she learned how to write, which was not. A woman who could write was an Abomination unto Nuggan, according to Father Jupe; anything she wrote would by definition be a lie.
But Polly had learned anyway because Paul hadn’t, at least to the standard needed to run an inn as busy as The Duchess. He could read if he could run his finger slowly along the lines, and he wrote letters at a snail’s pace, with a lot of care and heavy breathing, like a man assembling a piece of jewellery. He was big and kind and slow and could lift beer kegs as though they were toys, but he wasn’t a man at home with paperwork. Their father had hinted to Polly, very gently but very often, that Polly would need to be right behind him when the time came for him to run The Duchess. Left to himself, with no one to tell him what to do next, her brother just stood and watched birds.
At Paul’s insistence, she’d read the whole of ‘From the Mothers of Borogravia!’ to him, including the bits about heroes and there being no greater good than to die for your country. She wished, now, she hadn’t done that. Paul did what he was told. Unfortunately, he believed what he was told, too.
Polly put the papers away and dozed again, until her bladder woke her up. Oh, well, at least at this time of the morning she’d have a clear run. She reached out for her pack and stepped as softly as she could out into the rain.
It was mostly just coming off the trees now, which were roaring in the wind that blew up the valley. The moon was hidden in the clouds, but there was just enough light to make out the inn’s buildings. A certain greyness suggested that what passed for dawn in 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 the breeches, which were the old-fashioned kind with generous buttoned trapdoors, and also by the experiments she’d made very early in the mornings when she was doing the cleaning. In short, with care and attention to detail, she’d found that a woman could pee standing up. It certainly worked back home in the inn’s privy, which had been designed and built in the certain expectation of the aimlessness of the customers.
The wind shook the dank building. In the dark she thought of Auntie Hattie, who’d gone a bit strange round her sixtieth birthday and persistently accused passing young men of looking up her dress. She was even worse after a glass of wine, and she had one joke: ‘What does a man stand up to do, a woman sit down to do and a dog lift its leg to do?’ And then, when everyone was too embarrassed to answer, she’d triumphantly shriek, ‘Shake hands!’ and fall over. Auntie Hattie was an Abomination all by herself.
Polly buttoned up the breeches with a sense of exhilaration. She felt she’d crossed a bridge, a sensation that was helped by the realization that she’d kept her feet dry.
Someone said, ‘Psst!’
It was just as well she’d already taken a leak. Panic instantly squeezed every muscle. Where were they hiding? This was just a rotten old shed! Oh, there were a few cubicles, but the smell alone suggested very strongly that the woods outside would be a much better proposition. Even on a wild night. Even with extra wolves.
‘Yes?’ she quavered, and then cleared her throat and demanded, with a little more gruffness: ‘Yes?’
‘You’ll need these,’ whispered the voice. In the fetid gloom she made out something rising over the top of a cubicle. She reached up nervously and touched softness. It was a bundle of wool. Her fingers explored it.
‘A pair of socks?’ she said.
‘Right. Wear ’em,’ said the mystery voice hoarsely.
‘Thank you, but I’ve brought several pairs . . .’ Polly began.
There was a faint sigh. ‘No. Not on your feet. Shove ’em down the front of your trousers.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look,’ said the whisperer patiently, ‘you don’t bulge where you shouldn’t bulge. That’s good. But you don’t bulge where you should bulge, either. You know? Lower down?’
‘Oh! Er . . . I . . . but . . . I didn’t think people noticed . . .’ said Polly, glowing with embarrassment. She’d been spotted! But there was no hue and cry, no angry quotations from the Book of Nuggan. Someone was helping. Someone who had seen her . . .
‘It’s a funny thing,’ said the voice, ‘but they notice what’s missing more than they notice what’s there. Just one pair, mark you. Don’t get ambitious.’
Polly hesitated. ‘Um . . . is it obvious?’ she said.
‘No. That’s why I gave you the socks.’
‘I meant that . . . that I’m not . . . that I’m . . .’
‘Not really,’ said the voice in the dark. ‘You’re pretty good. You come over as a frightened young lad trying to look big and brave. You might pick your nose a bit more often. Just a tip. Few things interest a young man more than the contents of his nostrils. Now I’ve got a favour to ask you in return.’
I didn’t ask you for one, Polly thought, quite annoyed at being taken for being a frightened young lad when she was sure she’d come over as quite a cool, non-ruffled young lad. But she said calmly: ‘What is it?’
‘Got any paper?’
Wordlessly, Polly pulled ‘From the Mothers of Borogravia!’ out of her shirt and handed it up. She heard the sound of a match striking, and a sulphurous smell which only improved the general conditions.
‘Why, is this the escutcheon of her grace the Duchess I see in front of me?’ said the whisperer. ‘Well, it won’t be in front of me for long. Beat it . . . boy.’
Polly hurried out into the night, shocked, dazed, confused and almost asphyxiated, and made it to the shed door. But she’d barely shut it behind her and was still blinking in the blackness when it was thrust open again, to let in the wind, rain and Corporal Strappi.
‘All right, all right! Hands off . . . well, you lot wouldn’t be able to find ’em . . . and on with socks! Hup hup hi ho hup hup . . .’
Bodies were suddenly springing up or falling over all round Polly. Their muscles must have been obeying the voice directly, because no brain could have got into gear that quickly. Corporal Strappi, in obedience to the law of non-commissioned officers, responded by making the confusion more confusing.
‘Good grief, a lot of old women could shift better’n you!’ he shouted with satisfaction as people flailed around looking for coats and boots. ‘Fall in! Get shaved! Every man in the regiment to be clean shaven, by order! Get dressed! Wazzer, I’ve got my eye on you! Move! Move! Breakfast in five minutes! Last one there doesn’t get a sausage! Oh deary me, what a bloody shower!’
The four lesser horsemen of Panic, Bewilderment, Ignorance and Shouting took control of the room, to Corporal Strappi’s obscene glee. Polly, though, ducked out of the door, pulled a small tin mug out of her pack, dipped it into a water butt, balanced it on an old barrel behind the inn, and started to shave.
She’d practised this, too. The secret was in the old cut-throat razor that she’d carefully blunted. After that, it was all in the shaving brush and soap. Get a lot of lather on, shave a lot of lather off, and you’d had a shave, hadn’t you? Must have done, sir, feel how smooth the skin is . . .
She was halfway through when a voice by her ear screamed: ‘What d’you think you’re doing, Private Parts?’
It
was just as well the blade was blunt.
‘Perks, sir!’ she said, rubbing her nose. ‘I’m shaving, sir! It’s Perks, sir!’
‘Sir? Sir? I’m not a sir, Parts, I’m a bloody corporal, Parts. That means you calls me “corporal”, Parts. And you are shaving in an official regimental mug, Parts, what you have not been issued with, right? You a deserter, Parts?’
‘No, s— 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 grey-faced patience for days, making their way back to little villages in the mountains. Polly counted nine arms and ten legs between them, and ten eyes.
But it was the apparently whole who were worse, in a way. They kept their stinking coats buttoned tight, in lieu of bandages, over whatever unspeakable mess lay beneath, and they had the smell of death about them. The inn’s regulars made space for them, and talked quietly, like people in a sacred place. Her father, not usually a man given to sentiment, quietly put a generous tot of brandy into each mug of ale, and refused all payment. Then it turned out that they were carrying letters from soldiers still fighting, and one of them had brought the letter from Paul. He pushed it across the table to Polly as she served them stew and then, with very little fuss, he died.
The rest of the men moved unsteadily on later that day, taking with them, to give to his parents, the pot-metal medal that had been in the soldier’s coat pocket and the official commendation from the Duchy that went with it. Polly had taken a look at it. It was printed, including the Duchess’s signature, and the man’s name had been filled in, rather cramped, because it was longer than average. The last few letters were rammed up tight together.
It’s little details like that which get remembered, as undirected white-hot rage fills the mind. Apart from the letter and the medal, all the man left behind was a tin mug and, on the floor, a stain which wouldn’t scrub out.
Corporal Strappi listened impatiently to a slightly adjusted version. Polly could see his mind working. The mug had belonged to a soldier; now it belonged to another soldier. Those were the facts of the matter, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. He resorted, instead, to the safer ground of general abuse.
‘So you think you’re smart, Parts?’ he said.
‘No, corporal.’
‘Oh? So you’re stupid, are you?’
‘Well, I did enlist, corporal,’ said Polly meekly. Somewhere behind Strappi, someone sniggered.
‘I’ve got my eye on you, Parts,’ growled Strappi, temporarily defeated. ‘Just you put a foot wrong, that’s all.’ He strode off.
‘Um . . .’ said a voice beside Polly. She turned to see another youth, wearing secondhand clothes and an air of nervousness that didn’t quite conceal some bubbling anger. He was big and red-haired, but it was cut so close that it was just head fuzz.
‘You’re Tonker, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah, and, er . . . could I have a borrow of your shaving gear, right?’
Polly looked at a chin as free of hair as a billiard ball. The boy blushed.
‘Got to start sometime, right?’ he said defiantly.
‘The razor’ll need sharpening,’ said Polly.
‘That’s all right, I know how to do that,’ said Tonker.
Polly wordlessly handed over the mug and razor, and took the opportunity to duck into the privy while everyone else was occupied. It was the work of a moment to put the socks in place. Anchoring them was a problem, which she solved by unwinding part of one sock and tucking it up under her belt. They felt odd, and strangely heavy for a little package of wool. Walking a little awkwardly, Polly went in to see what horrors breakfast would bring.
It brought stale horse-bread and sausage and very weak beer. She grabbed a sausage and a slab of bread and sat down.
You had to concentrate to eat horse-bread. There was a lot more about these days, a bread made from flour ground up with dried pease and beans and vegetable scrapings. It used to be made just for horses, to put them in fine condition. Now you hardly ever saw anything else on the table, and there tended to be less and less of it, too. You needed time and good teeth to work your way through a slice of horse-bread, just as you needed a complete lack of imagination to eat a modern sausage. Polly sat and concentrated on chewing.
The only other area of calm was around Private Maladict, who was drinking coffee like a young man relaxing in a pavement café, with the air of someone who has life thoroughly worked out. He nodded at Polly.
Was that him in the privy? she wondered. I got back in just as Strappi started yelling and everyone started running around and rushing in and out. It could have been anyone. Do vampires use the privy? Well, do they? Has anyone ever dared ask?
‘Sleep well?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Did you?’ said Polly.
‘I couldn’t stand that shed, but Mr Eyebrow kindly allowed me to use his cellar,’ said Maladict. ‘Old habits die hard, you know? At least,’ he added, ‘old acceptable habits. I’ve never felt happy not hanging down.’
‘And you got coffee?’
‘I carry my own supply,’ said Maladict, indicating an exquisite little silver and gilt coffee-making engine on the table by his cup, ‘and Mr Eyebrow kindly boiled some water for me.’ He grinned, showing two long canine teeth. ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve with a smile, Oliver.’
Polly nodded. ‘Er . . . is Igor a friend of yours?’ she said. At the next table Igor had obtained a sausage, presumably raw, from the kitchen, and was watching it intently. A couple of wires ran from the sausage to a mug of the horrible vinegary beer, which was bubbling.
‘Never seen him before in my life,’ said the vampire. ‘Of course, if you’ve met one you have in a sense met them all. We had an Igor at home. Wonderful workers. Very reliable. Very trustworthy. And, of course, so good at stitching things together, if you know what I mean.’
‘Those stitches round his head don’t look very professional,’ said Polly, who was beginning to object to Maladict’s permanent expression of effortless superiority.
‘Oh, that? It’s an Igor thing,’ said Maladict. ‘It’s a Look. Like . . . tribal markings, you know? They like them to show. Ha, we had a servant once who had stitches all the way round his neck, and he was extremely proud of them.’
‘Really?’ said Polly weakly.
‘Yes, and the droll part of it all was that it wasn’t even his head!’
Now Igor had a syringe in his hand, and was watching the sausage with an air of satisfaction. For a moment, Polly thought that the sausage moved . . .
‘All right, all right, time’s up, you horrible lot!’ barked Corporal Strappi, strutting into the room. ‘Fall in! That means line up, you shower! That means you too, Parts! And you, Mr Vampire, sir, will you be joining us for a morning’s light soldiering? On your feet! And where’s that bloody Igor?’
‘Here, thur,’ said Igor, from three inches behind Strappi’s backbone. The corporal spun round.
‘How did you get there?’ he bellowed.
‘It’th a gift, thur,’ said Igor.
‘Don’t you ever get behind me again! Fall in with the rest of them! Now . . . Attention!’ Strappi sighed theatrically. ‘That means “stand up straight”. Got it? Once more with feeling! Attention! Ah, I see the problem! You’ve got trousers that are permanently at ease! I think I shall have to write to the Duchess and tell her she should ask for her money back! What are you smiling about, Mr Vampire sir?’ Strappi positioned himself in front of Maladict, who stood faultlessly to attention.
‘Happy to be in t
he regiment, corporal!’
‘Yeah, right,’ mumbled Strappi. ‘Well, you won’t be so—’
‘Everything all right, corporal?’ asked Sergeant Jackrum, appearing in the doorway.
‘Best we could expect, sergeant,’ sighed the corporal. ‘We ought to throw ’em back, oh dear me, yes. Useless, useless, useless . . .’
‘Okay, lads. Stand easy,’ said Jackrum, glancing at Strappi in a less than friendly way. ‘Today we’re heading on down towards Plotz, where we’ll meet up with the other recruiting parties and you’ll be issued with your uniforms and weapons, you lucky lads. Any of you ever used a weapon? You have, Perks?’
Polly lowered her hand. ‘A bit, sarge. My brother taught me a bit when he was home on leave, and some of the old men in the bar where I worked gave me some, er, tips.’ They had, too. It was funny to watch a girl waving a sword around, and they’d been kind enough when they weren’t laughing. She was a quick learner, but she’d made a point of staying clumsy long after she’d got the feel for the blade, because using a sword was also ‘the work of an Man’ and a woman doing it was an Abomination unto Nuggan. Old soldiers, on the whole, were on the easy-going side when it came to Abominations. She’d be funny just as long as she was useless, and safe as long as she was funny.
‘Expert, are yer?’ said Strappi, grinning nastily. ‘A real fencin’ genius, are yer?’
‘No, corporal,’ said Polly meekly.
‘All right,’ said Jackrum. ‘Anyone else—’
‘Hang on, sarge, I reckon we’d all like a bit of instruction from swordmeister Parts,’ said Strappi. ‘Ain’t that right, lads?’ There was a general murmuring and shrugging from the squad, who recognized a right little bullying bastard when they saw one but, treacherously, were glad he hadn’t picked on them.
Strappi drew his own sword. ‘Lend him one of yours, sarge,’ he said. ‘Go on. Just a little bit of fun, eh?’
Jackrum hesitated, and glanced at Polly. ‘How about it, lad? You don’t have to,’ he said.
I’ll have to sooner or later, Polly thought. The world was full of Strappies. If you backed away from them, they only kept on coming. You had to stop them at the start. She sighed. ‘Okay, sarge.’