Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett [153]
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, at least, 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, and hoped that Tonker and Lofty would one day find a way to eat chocolates in a great big room where the world was a different place.
Shufti, who’d somehow always be Shufti to Polly even if the rest of the world now called her Betty again, 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 of 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’sh 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 spell and maybe they had all decided to be better people, and out of certain oblivion had come