They brought, indeed, cabbage and potatoes and roots and apples and barrels of fat, things that kept. And winter was defeated, and the snowmelt roared down the valleys, and the Kneck scrawled its random wiggles across the flat silt of the valley.
They’d gone home, and Polly wondered if they’d ever really been away. Were we soldiers? she wondered. They’d been cheered on the road to PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHans JosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg, and had been much better treated than their rank deserved, and even had a special uniform designed for them. But the vision of Gummy Abbens kept rising in her mind . . .
We weren’t soldiers, she decided. We were girls in uniform. We were like a lucky charm. We were mascots. We weren’t real, we were always a symbol of something. We’d done very well, for women. And we were temporary.
Tonker and Lofty were never going to be dragged back to the school now, and they’d gone their own way. Wazzer had joined the general’s household, and had a room of her own, and quietness, and made herself useful and was never beaten. She’d written Polly a letter, in tiny spiky handwriting. She seemed happy; a world without beatings was heaven. Jade and her beau had wandered off to do something more interesting, as trolls very sensibly did. Shufti . . . had been on a timetable of her own. Maladicta had disappeared. And Igorina had set up by herself in the capital, dealing with women’s problems, or at least those women’s problems that weren’t men. And senior officers had given them medals, and watched them go with fixed, faint smiles. Kisses don’t last.
And, now, it wasn’t that good things were happening, it was just that bad things had stopped. The old women still grumbled, but they were left to grumble. No one had any directions, no one had a map, no one was quite certain who was in charge. There were arguments and debates on every street corner. It was frightening and exhilarating. Every day was an exploration. Polly had worn a pair of Paul’s old trousers to clean the floor of the big bar, and had got barely a ‘hurrumph’ from anyone. Oh, and the Girls’ Working School had burned down, and on the same day two slim masked figures had robbed a bank. Polly had grinned when she heard that. Shufti had moved into The Duchess. Her baby was called Jack. Paul doted on it. And now . . .
Someone had been drawing in the gents’ privy again. Polly couldn’t wash it off, so she contented herself with correcting the anatomy. Then she swooshed the place clean – at least, clean by pub urinal standards – with a couple of buckets and ticked off the chore, just as she did every morning. When she arrived back in the bar there were a group of worried men there, talking to her father. They looked mildly frightened when she strode in.
‘What’s happening?’ she said.
Her father nodded to Gummy Abbens, and everyone stepped back a little. What with the spittle and the bad breath, you never wanted a conversation with Gummy to be particularly intimate.
‘The swede-eatersh is at it again!’ he said. ‘They’re gonna invade ’cos the Prince saysh we belong to him now!’
‘It’s all down to him being the Duchess’s distant cousin,’ said Polly’s father.
‘But I heard it still wasn’t settled!’ said Polly. ‘Anyway, there’s still a truce!’
‘Sheems like he’s shettling it,’ said Gummy.
The rest of the day passed at an accelerated pace. There were groups of people talking urgently in the streets, and a crowd around the gates to the town hall. Every so often a clerk would come out and nail another communiqué on the gates; the crowd would close over it like a hand, open again like a flower. Polly elbowed her way to the front, ignoring the mutterings around her, and scanned the sheets.
The same old stuff. They were recruiting again. The same old words. The same old croakings of long dead soldiers, inviting the living to join them. General Froc might be female, but he was also, as Blouse would have said, ‘a bit of an old woman’. Either that or the heaviness of those epaulettes had weighed her down.
Kissing don’t last. Oh, the Duchess had come alive before them and turned the world upside down for a space and maybe they had all decided to be better people, and out of certain oblivion had come a space to breathe.
But then . . . had it really happened? Even Polly sometimes wondered, and she had been there. Was it just a voice in their heads, some kind of hallucination? Weren’t soldiers in desperate straits famous for seeing visions of gods and angels? And somewhere in the course of the long winter the miracle had faded, and people had said ‘yes, but we’ve got to be practical’.
All we were given was a chance, thought Polly. No miracle, no rescue, no magic. Just a chance.
She walked back to the inn, her mind buzzing. When she got there, a package was waiting. It was quite long, and heavy.
‘It came all the way from Scritz on the cart,’ said Shufti excitedly. She’d been working in the kitchen. It had become, now, her kitchen. ‘I wonder what it can be?’ she said pointedly.
Polly levered the lid off the rough wooden crate, and found that it was full of straw with an envelope lying on top of it. She opened it.
Inside was an iconograph. It looked expensively done, a stiff family group with curtains and a potted palm in the background to give everything a bit of style. On the left was a middle-aged man looking proud; on the right was a woman of about the same age, looking rather puzzled but nevertheless pleased because her husband was happy; and here and there, staring at the viewer with variations of smile and squint, and expressions extending from interest to a sudden recollection that they should have gone to the toilet before posing, were children ranging from tall and gangly to small and smugly sweet.
And sitting on a chair in the middle, the focus of it all, was Sergeant-major Jackrum, shining like the sun.
Polly stared, and then turned the picture over. On the back was written, in big black letters: ‘SM Jackrum’s Last Stand!’ and, underneath, ‘Don’t need these.’
She smiled, and pulled aside the straw. In the middle of the box, wrapped in cloth, were a couple of cutlasses.
‘Is that old Jackrum?’ said Shufti, picking up the picture.
‘Yes. He’s found his son,’ said Polly, unwinding a blade. Shufti shuddered when she saw it.
‘Evil things,’ she said.
‘Things, anyway,’ said Polly. She laid both the cutlasses on the table, and was about to lift the box out of the way when she saw something small in the straw at the bottom. It was oblong, and wrapped in thin leather.
It was a notebook, with a cheap binding and musty yellowing pages.
‘What’s that?’ said Shufti.
‘I think . . . yes, it’s his address book,’ said Polly, flicking through the pages.
This is it, she thought. It’s all here. Generals and majors and captains, oh my. There must be . . . hundreds. Maybe a thousand! Names, real names, promotions, dates . . . everything . . .
She pulled out a white pasteboard oblong that had been inserted like a bookmark. It showed a rather florid coat of arms and bore the printed legend:
William De Worde
EDITOR, THE TIMES OF ANKH-MORPORK
‘The Truth Shall Make Ye Frep’
Gleam Street, Ankh-Morpork
c-mail:
[email protected] Someone had crossed out the ‘p’ in ‘frep’ and pencilled in an ‘e’ above it.
It was a sudden strange fancy . . .
How many ways can you fight a war? Polly wondered. We have the clacks now. I know a man who writes things down. The world turns. Plucky little countries seeking self-determination . . . could be useful to big countries with plans of their own.
Time to grab the cheese.
Polly’s expression as she stared at the wall would have frightened a number of important people. They would have been even more concerned at the fact that she spent the next several hours writing things down, because it occurred to Polly that General Froc had not got where she was today by being stupid and therefore she could profit from following her example. She copied out the entire notebook, and sealed it in an old jam jar which she h
id in the roof of the stables. She wrote a few letters. And she got her uniform out of the wardrobe and inspected it critically.
The uniforms that had been made for them had a special, additional quality that could only be called . . . girlie. They had more braid, they were better tailored, and they had a long skirt with a bum roll rather than trousers. The shakos had plumes, too. Her tunic had a sergeant’s stripes. It had been a joke. A sergeant of women. The world had been turned upside down, after all.
They’d been mascots, good-luck charms . . . And, perhaps, on the march to PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardt Wilhelmsberg a joke was what everyone needed. But, maybe, when the world turns upside down, you can turn a joke upside down too. Thank you, Gummy, even though you didn’t know what it was you were teaching me. When they’re laughing at you, their guard is down. When their guard is down, you can kick them in the fracas.
She examined herself in the mirror. Her hair, now, was just long enough to be a nuisance without being long enough to be attractive, so she brushed it and left it at that. She put the uniform on, but with the skirt over her trousers, and tried to put aside the nagging feeling that she was dressing up as a woman.
There. She looked completely harmless. She looked slightly less harmless with both cutlasses and one of the horsebows on her back, especially if you knew that the inn’s dartboards now had deep holes in the bullseyes from all the practising.
She crept along the hall to the window that overlooked the inn yard. Paul was up a ladder, repainting the sign. Her father was steadying the ladder and calling out instructions in his normal way, which was to call out the instruction just a second or two after you’d already started doing it. And Shufti, although Polly was the only one in The Duchess who still called her that and knew why, was watching them, holding Jack. It made a lovely picture. For a moment, she wished she had a locket.
The Duchess was smaller than she’d thought. But if you had to protect it by standing in the doorway with a sword, you were too late. Caring for small things had to start with caring for big things, and maybe the world wasn’t big enough.
The note she left on her dressing table read: ‘Shufti, I hope you and Jack are happy here. Paul, you look after her. Dad, I’ve never taken any wages, but I need a horse. I’ll try to have it sent back. I love you all. If I don’t come back, burn this letter and look in the roof of the stables.’
She dropped out of the window, saddled up a horse in the stables, and let herself out of the back gate. She didn’t mount up until she was out of earshot, and then rode down to the river.
Spring was pouring through the country. Sap was rising. In the woods, a ton of timber was growing every minute. Everywhere, birds were singing.
There was a guard on the ferry. He eyed her nervously as she led the horse aboard, and then grinned. ‘’Morning, miss!’ he said cheerfully.
Oh, well . . . time to start. Polly marched in front of the puzzled man.
‘Are you trying to be smart?’ she demanded, inches from his face.
‘No, miss—’
‘That’s sergeant, mister!’ said Polly. ‘Let’s try again, shall we? I said, are you trying to be smart?’
‘No, sergeant!’
Polly leaned until her nose was an inch from his. ‘Why not?’
The grin faded. This was not a soldier on the fast track to promotion. ‘Huh?’ he managed.
‘If you are not trying to be smart, mister, you’re happy to be stupid!’ shouted Polly. ‘And I’m up to here with stupid, understand?’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘But what, soldier?’
‘Yeah, but . . . well . . . but . . . nothing, sergeant,’ said the soldier.
‘That’s good.’ Polly nodded at the ferrymen. ‘Time to go?’ she suggested, but in the tones of an order.
‘Couple of people just coming down the road, sergeant,’ said one of them, a faster man with an uptake.
They waited. There were, in fact, three people. One of them was Maladicta, in full uniform.
Polly said nothing until the ferry was out in midstream. The vampire gave her the kind of smile only a vampire can give. It would have been sheepish, if sheep had different teeth.
‘Thought I’d try again,’ she said.
‘We’ll find Blouse,’ said Polly.
‘He’s a major now,’ said Maladicta. ‘And happy as a flea because they’ve named a kind of fingerless glove after him, I heard. What do we want him for?’
‘He knows about the clacks. He knows about other ways war can be fought. And I know . . . people,’ said Polly.
‘Ah. Do you mean the “Upon my oath, I am not a lying man, but I know people” kind of people?’
‘Those were the kind of people I had in mind, yes.’ The river slapped against the side of the ferry.
‘Good,’ said Maladicta.
‘I don’t know where it’s going to lead, though,’ said Polly.
‘Ah. Even better.’
At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be going on with. The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.
She looked at the other two passengers who’d sidled aboard. They were country lads in ragged, ill-fitting clothes, keeping away from her and staring intently at the deck. But one glance was enough. The world turned upside down, and history repeated. For some reason, that suddenly made her feel very happy.
‘Going to join up, lads?’ she said, cheerily.
There was some mumbling on the theme of ‘yes’.
‘Good. Then stand up straight,’ said Polly. ‘Let’s have a look at you. Chins up. Ah. Well done. Shame you didn’t practise walking in trousers, and I notice you didn’t bring an extra pair of socks.’
They stared, mouths open.
‘What are your names?’ said Polly. ‘Your real names, please?’
‘Er . . . Rosemary,’ one of them began.
‘I’m Mary,’ said the other. ‘I heard girls were joining, but everyone laughed, so I thought I’d better pretend to—’
‘Oh, you can join as men if you want,’ said Polly. ‘We need a few good men.’
The girls looked at one another.
‘You get better swear words,’ said Polly. ‘And the trousers are useful. But it’s your choice.’
‘A choice?’ said Rosemary.
‘Certainly,’ said Polly. She put a hand on a shoulder of each girl, winked at Maladicta and added: ‘You are my little lads – or not, as the case may be – and I will look after . . . you.’
And the new day was a great big fish.
THE END
1 Trolls might not be quick thinkers but they don’t forget in a hurry, either.
2 And allowing for the fact that all pigeons who know how birds of prey catch are dead, and therefore capable of slightly less thought than a living pigeon.
3 A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish or the woman.
4 And even then it was the kind of home that has a burned-out vehicle on the lawn.
5 Lieutenant Blouse read only the more technical history books.
6 Actually a tree is not, technically, required, but seems to be insisted upon for reasons of style.
7 And failed to hit anything, especially a duck. This is so unusual in situations like this that it should be reported under new humour regulations. If it had hit a duck, which quacked and then landed on somebody’s head, this would of course have been very droll and would certainly have been reported. Instead, it drifted in the breeze a little and landed in an oak tree some thirty feet away, where it missed a squirrel.
8 It’s hard to be an ornithologist and walk through a wood when all around you the world is shouting: ‘Bugger off, this is my bush! Aargh, the nest thief! Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!’
9 It is an established fact that, despite everything society can
do, girls of seven are magnetically attracted to the colour pink.
10 Every long-established kitchen has one of these, and no one ever remembers why. It is generally for something that no one does any more and, even when it was done, it wasn’t done with any real enthusiasm, such as celery basting, walnut shredding or, in the worst case, edible dormouse stuffing.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld® series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Worldwide sales of his books now stand at 70 million, and they have been translated into thirty-seven languages.
For more information about Terry Pratchett and his books, please visit www.terrypratchett.co.uk
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Discworld® series
1. THE COLOUR OF MAGIC
2. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
3. EQUAL RITES
4. MORT
5. SOURCERY
6. WYRD SISTERS
7. PYRAMIDS
8. GUARDS! GUARDS!
9. ERIC
(illustrated by Josh Kirby)
10. MOVING PICTURES
11. REAPER MAN
12. WITCHES ABROAD
13. SMALL GODS
14. LORDS AND LADIES
15. MEN AT ARMS
16. SOUL MUSIC
17. INTERESTING TIMES
18. MASKERADE
19. FEET OF CLAY
20. HOGFATHER
21. JINGO
22. THE LAST CONTINENT
23. CARPE JUGULUM
24. THE FIFTH ELEPHANT