Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett [152]
Jackrum looked away, but said: “You’re a shining bastard of a thinker, Perks. And where would I get a grand coach, anyway?”
“Oh, Sarge! Today? There are…men in high places who’ll give you anything you ask for, right now. You know that. Especially if it meant they’d see the back of you. You never put the bite on them for anything much. If I was you, Sarge, I’d cash in a few favors while you can. That’s the Ins-and-Outs, Sarge. Take the cheese while it’s there, ’cos kissin’ don’t last.”
Jackrum took a deep, long breath.
“I’ll think about it, Perks. Now you push off, all right?”
Polly stood up. “Think hard, Sarge, eh? Like you said, anyone who’s got anyone left is ahead of the game right now. Four grandchildren? I’d be a proud kid if I had a grandad who could spit tobacco juice far enough to hit a fly on the opposite wall.”
“I’m warning you, Perks.”
“It was just a thought, Sarge.”
“Yeah…right,” Jackrum growled.
“Thanks for getting us through it, Sarge.”
Jackrum didn’t turn around.
“I’ll be going then, Sarge.”
“Perks!” said Jackrum, as she reached the door. Polly stepped back into the room.
“Yes, Sarge?”
“I…expected better of ’em, really. I thought they’d be better at it than men. Trouble was, they were better than men at being like men. Hah, they do say the army can make a man of you, eh? So…whatever it is you are going to do next, do it as you. Good or bad, do it as you. Too many lies and there’s no truth to go back to.”
“Will do, Sarge.”
“That’s an order, Perks. Oh…and Perks?”
“Yes, Sarge?”
“Thanks, Perks.”
Polly paused when she got to the door. Jackrum had turned her chair to the fire, and had settled back. Around her, the kitchen worked.
Six months passed. The world wasn’t perfect, but it was still turning.
Polly had kept the newspaper articles. They weren’t accurate, not in the detail, because the writer told…stories, not what was actually happening. They were like paintings, when you had been there and had seen the real thing.
But it was true about the march on the castle, with Wazzer on a white horse in front, carrying the flag. And it was true about people coming out of their houses and joining the march, so that what arrived at the gates was not an army but a sort of disciplined mob, shouting and cheering. And it was true that the guards had taken one look at it and had seriously reconsidered their future, and that gates had swung open even before the horse had clattered onto the drawbridge. There was no fighting, no fighting at all. The shoe had dropped. The country had breathed out.
Polly didn’t think it was true that the painting of the Duchess, alone on its easel in the big, empty throne room, had smiled when Wazzer walked toward it. Polly had been there and didn’t see, but lots of people swore it had, and you might end up wondering what the truth really was, or whether there was the truth, and then again, if there was also the truth and, of course, THE TRUTH. Anyway, it was the stuff of legends, where accuracy is not required as a major ingredient.
Anyway, it had worked. And then……they went home. A lot of soldiers did, under the fragile truce. The first snows were already falling and, if people had wanted a war, then the winter had given them one. It came with lances of ice and arrows of hunger, it filled the passes with snow, it made the world as distant as the moon…
That was when the old dwarf mines had opened up, and pony after pony emerged. It had always been said there were dwarf tunnels everywhere, and not just tunnels; there were secret canals under the mountains, docks, flights of locks that could lift a barge a mile high in busy darkness, far below the gales on the mountain tops.
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’ve ever really been away. Were we soldiers? she wondered. They’d been cheered on the road