Monstrous Regiment tds-28

by Terry Pratchett

  “Well, yes, sir. I would have kicked him. Harder, probably. I was defending myself, sir,” Polly said, carefully avoiding further details. You couldn’t be sure what someone like de Worde would do with them.

  “Right, good, yes,” said de Worde. “Then you might be pleased with this. Our cartoonist Fizz drew this for the special edition. It was on the front page. We’ve sold a record number of copies.” He handed her a flimsy piece of paper, which by the look of the creases had been folded many times.

  It was a line drawing, with lots of shading. It showed a huge figure, with a large sword, a monstrous monocle and a moustache as wide as a coathanger, menacing a much smaller figure armed with nothing more than an instrument for lifting beets—in fact there was a beet stuck on the end of it. At least, that was clearly what had been happening right up to the point when the smaller figure, wearing a not bad attempt at an Ins-and-Outs shako and a face that looked slightly like Polly’s, had kicked the other one squarely in the groinal regions. A sort of balloon was coming out of Polly’s mouth, containing the words: “That for your Royal Prerogative, you Blaggard!” The balloon issuing from the mouth of the ogre, who could only be Prince Heinrich, said: “Oh my Succession! That such A Small Thing could hurt so Much!” And in the background a fat woman in a rumpled ballgown and a huge old-fashioned helmet was clasping her hands to an unbelievably large bosom, staring at the fight with a mixture of concern and admiration, and ballooning: “Oh my Swain! I fear our Liaison is Cut short!”

  Since no one else was saying much, but was simply staring, de Worde said, rather nervously: “Fizz is rather, er, direct in these matters, but amazingly popular. Ahem. You see, the curious thing is that although Ankh-Morpork is probably the biggest bully around, in a subtle kind of way, we nevertheless have a soft spot for people who stand up to bullies. Especially royal ones. We tend to be on their side, provided it doesn’t cost us too much.”

  Blouse cleared his throat. “It’s quite a good likeness of you, Perks,” he said hoarsely.

  “I only used my knee, sir!” Polly protested. “And that fat lady certainly wasn’t there!”

  “That’s Morporkia,” said de Worde. “She’s a sort of representation of the city, except that in her case she’s not covered in mud and soot.”

  “And I have to add, for my part,” said Blouse, in his talking-to-a-meeting voice, “that Borogravia is in fact larger than Zlobenia, although most of the country is little more than barren mountainside—”

  “That doesn’t actually matter,” said de Worde.

  “It doesn’t?” said Blouse.

  “No, sir. It’s just a fact. It’s not politics. In politics, sir, pictures like this are powerful. Sir, even the Alliance commanders are talking about you, and the Zlobenians are angry and bewildered. If you, the heroes of the hour, could make a plea for a little common sense—”

  The lieutenant took a long, deep breath.

  “This is a foolish war, Mr de Worde. But I am a soldier. I have ‘kissed the Duchess’, as we say. It’s an oath of loyalty. Don’t tempt me to break it. I must fight for my country. We will repel all invaders. If there are deserters, we will find them and rally them again. We know the country. While we are free, Borogravia will be free. You have ‘had your say’. Thank you. Where is that tea, Perks?”

  “What? Oh, nearly done, sir!” said Polly, turning back to the fire.

  It had been a sudden strange fancy, but a stupid plan. Now, out here, all the drawbacks were visible. How would she have got Paul home? Would he have wanted to come? Could she have managed it? Even if he was still alive, how could she hope to get him out of a prison?

  “So you’ll be guerilla fighters, eh?” said Mr de Worde, behind her. “Madmen, all of you.”

  “No, we are not irregulars,” said Blouse. “We kissed the Duchess. We are soldiers.”

  “Oh, well,” said de Worde. “Then I admire your spirit, at least. Ah, Otto…”

  The vampire iconographer ambled up, and gave them a shy smile.

  “Do not be afraid, I am a Black Ribboner, just like your corporal,” he said. “Light is mine passion now.”

  “Oh? Er… well done,” said Blouse.

  “Take the pictures, Otto,” said de Worde. “These gentlemen have a war to fight.”

  “Out of interest, Mr de Worde,” Blouse interrupted, “how did you get the pictures back to your city so quickly? Magic, I assume?”

  “What?” De Worde looked momentarily off balance. “Oh no, sir. Wizards are expensive and Commander Vimes has said that there is going to be no first use of magic in this war. We send things by pigeon to our office in the Keep and then by clacks from the nearest trunk tower.”

  “Oh, really?” said Blouse, showing rather more animation than Polly had seen up until now. “Using numbers to indicate a scale of grey shades, perhaps?”

  “Mein Gotts!” said Otto.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do,” said de Worde. “I’m very impressed that you—”

  “I have seen the clacks towers on the far bank of the Kneck,” said Blouse, his eyes lighting up. “Very clever idea, using big shuttered boxes rather than the old-fashioned semaphore arms. And would I be right in my surmise that the box on the top, which opens its shutters once a second, is a kind of system, er, clock that makes certain the whole clacks line keeps in step? Oh, good. I thought so. One beat a second is probably the limit of the mechanisms, so no doubt all your efforts now are concentrated on maximizing the information content per shutter operation? Yes, I imagined that would be the case. As for sending pictures, well, sooner or later all things are numbers, yes? Of course, you would use each of the two columns of four boxes to send a grey code, but it must be very slow. Have you considered a squeezing algorithm?”

  De Worde and Chriek exchanged a glance. “Are you sure you haven’t been talking to anyone about this, sir?” said the writer.

  “Oh, it’s all very elementary,” said Blouse, smiling happily. “I had thought about it in the context of military maps which are, of course, mostly white space. So I wondered if it would be possible to indicate a required shade on one column and, on the other side, indicate how far along that rank that shade would persist. And a delightful bonus here is that if your map is simply in black and white, then you have even more—”

  “You haven’t seen inside a clacks tower, have you?” said de Worde.

  “Alas, no,” said Blouse. “This is simply ‘thinking aloud’ based on the de facto existence of your picture. I believe I can see a number of other little mathematical, ahem, tricks to make the passage of information even swifter, but I am sure these have already occurred to you. Of course, a fairly minor modification could potentially double the information burden of the whole system at a stroke. And that is without using coloured filters at night, which I’m sure even with the overhead of extra mechanical effort would surely increase throughput by—I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?”

  The two men both wore a glazed expression. De Worde shook himself. “Oh… er, no. Nothing,” he said. “Er… you seem to have got the grasp of things quite… quickly.”

  “Oh, it was perfectly straightforward once I started thinking about it,” said Blouse. “It was exactly the same when I had to redesign the department’s filing system, you see. People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.”

  “In politics as well as, er, filing systems and clackses, do you think?” said de Worde.

  Blouse’s brow wrinkled. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I follow…” he said.

  “Would you agree that sometimes a country’s system is so out of date that it’s only the outsiders that can see the need for wholesale change?” said de Worde. He smiled. Lieutenant Blouse did not.

  “Just a point to ponder,
maybe,” said de Worde. “Er… since you wish to tell the world of your defiance, would you object if my colleague takes your picture?”

  Blouse shrugged. “If it gives you any satisfaction,” he said. “It’s an Abomination, of course, but these days it’s hard to find something that isn’t. You must tell the world, Mr de Worde, that Borogravia won’t lie down. We will not give in. We will fight on. Write that down in your little notebook, please. While we can stand, we will kick!”

  “Yes, but once again may I implore you to—”

  “Mr de Worde, you have I am sure heard the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword?”

  De Worde preened a little. “Of course, and I—”

  “Do you want to test it? Take your picture, sir, and then my men will escort you back to your road.”

  Otto Chriek stood up and bowed to Blouse. He unslung his picture box.

  “This vill only take vun minute,” he said.

  It never does. Polly watched in horrified fascination as Otto took picture after picture of Lieutenant Blouse in a variety of what the lieutenant thought were heroic poses. It is a terrible thing to see a man trying to jut out a chin he does not, in fact, have.

  “Very impressive,” said de Worde. “I just hope you live to see it in my paper, sir.”

  “I shall look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,” said Blouse. “And now, Perks, please go along with the sergeant and put these two gentlemen back on their way.”

  Otto sidled up to Polly as they walked back to the cart. “I need to tell you somezing about your vampire,” he said.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “You are a friend of his?” said Otto.

  “Yes,” said Polly. “Is something wrong?”

  “Zere is a problem…”

  “He’s got twitchy because he has run out of coffee?”

  “Alas, if only it vas that simple.” Otto looked awkward. “You have to understand that ven a vampire forgoes… the b-vord, there is a process that ve call transference? Ve force ourselves to desire something else? For me this vas not painful. I crave the perfection of light and shade. Pictures are my life! But your friend chose… coffee. And now he has none.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I vunder if you do. It probably seemed so sensible to him. It is a human craving, and no one minds if you say, as it might be, ‘I am dying for a cup of coffee’, or ‘I’d kill for a cup of coffee’. But without coffee, he vill, I am afraid… revert. You understand, this is very difficult for me to talk about…” Otto trailed off.

  “By revert you mean…?”

  “First vill come mild delusions, I think. A psychic susceptibility to all kinds of influences from who knows vhere, and vampires can hallucinate so stronkly zat zey can be contagious. I zink zat is happening already. He vill become… erratic. This may last for several days. And then his conditioning vill break and he vill be, vunce again, a true vampire. No more Mr Nice Coffee Drinker Guy.”

  “Can’t I do anything to help him?”

  Otto reverentially laid his picture box in the back of the cart, and turned to her. “You can find him some coffee, or… you can keep a vooden stake and a big knife ready. You vould be doink him a favour, believe me.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  Otto shrugged. “Find someone who vill.”

  “He is amazing!” said de Worde, as the cart rocked back down through the trees. “I know the clacks is against your religion, but he seems to understand all about it.”

  “Like I said, sir, he assesses stuff,” said Jackrum, beaming. “Mind like a razor.”

  “He was talking about clacks algorithms that the companies are only just now investigating,” said de Worde. “That department he was talking about—”

  “Ah, I can see nothing gets past you, sir,” said Jackrum. “Very hush-hush. Can’t talk about it.”

  “To be frank, sergeant, I’d always assumed that Borogravia was, well… backward.”

  Jackrum’s smile was waxy and bright. “If we seem to be a long way back, sir, it’s only so’s we can get a good run-up.”

  “You know, sergeant, it’s a great shame to see a mind like that wasted,” said de Worde, as the cart lurched in a rut. “This is not an age of heroes and famous last stands and death-or-glory charges. Do your men a favour and try to tell him that, will you?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” said Jackrum. “Here is your road, sir. Where will you be heading now?”

  “To the Kneck valley, sergeant. This is a good story, sergeant. Thank you. Allow me to shake you by the hand.”

  “Glad to hear you think that, sir,” said Jackrum, extending his hand. Polly heard the faint clink of coins in their passage from palm to palm. De Worde took the reins.

  “But I must tell you, sergeant, that we’ll probably send off our stuff by pigeon within the hour,” he said. “We will have to say you have prisoners.”

  “Don’t worry about that, sir,” said Jackrum. “By the time their mates come out here to rescue those gallopers, we’ll be halfway back to the mountains. Our mountains.”

  They parted. Jackrum watched them out of sight, and turned to Polly.

  “Him with his airs and graces,” he said. “Did you see that? He insulted me by giving me a tip!” He glanced at his palm. “Hmm, five Morpork dollars? Well, at least he’s a man who knows how to insult you handsomely,” he added, and the coins disappeared into his jacket with remarkable speed.

  “I think he wants to help us, sarge,” said Polly.

  Jackrum ignored that. “I hate bloody Ankh-Morpork,” he said. “Who’re they to tell us what to do? Who cares what they think?”

  “Do you think we can really join up with deserters, sarge?”

  “Nope. They deserted once, what’s to stop ’em a second time? They spat on the Duchess when they deserted, they can’t kiss and make up now. You get one kiss, that’s all.”

  “But Lieutenant Blouse—”

  “The rupert should stick to sums. He thinks he’s a soldier. Never walked on a battlefield in his life. All that rubbish he gave your man was death-or-glory stuff. And I’ll tell you, Perks, I’ve seen Death more often than I care to remember, but I’ve never clapped eyes on Glory. I’m all for sending the fools to look for us where we ain’t, though.”

  “He’s not my man, sarge,” said Polly.

  “Yeah, well, you’re at home with the writin’ and readin’,” grumbled Jackrum. “You can’t trust the people who do that stuff. They mess around with the world, and it turns out everything you know is wrong.”

  They reached the gully again. The squad had come back from their various hiding places, and most were clustered around one of the newspapers. For the first time, Polly saw The Picture.

  It was actually quite good, especially of Shufti and Wazzer. She was mostly hidden by the bulk of Jackrum. But you could see the sullen cavalrymen behind them, and their expressions were a picture in themselves.

  “It’s a good one of Tonker,” said Igorina, who didn’t lisp so much when there were no officers to hear.

  “Do you think having a picture like this is an Abomination in the Eyes of Nuggan?” said Shufti nervously.

  “Probably,” said Polly absent-mindedly. “Most things are.” She ran her eye down the text next to the picture. It was full of phrases like “plucky farm boys” and “humiliation of some of Zlobenia’s best troops” and “sting in the tail”. She could see why it had caused trouble.

  She rustled through the other pages. They were crammed with strange stories about places she’d never heard of, and pictures of people she didn’t recognize. But one page was a mass of grey text, under a line of much bigger printing which read:

  Why This Mad State Must Be Stopped

  Bewildered, her eye picked up phrases from the sea of letters: “disgraceful invasions of neighbouring states”, “deluded worshippers of a mad god”, “a strutting bully”, “outrage after outrage”, “flying in the face of international opinion”…


  “Don’t you lads read that rubbish, you don’t know where it’s been,” said Sergeant Jackrum jovially, arriving behind them. “It’ll all be lies. We are leaving right—Corporal Maladict!”

  Maladict, emerging from the trees, gave a lazy salute. He was still wearing his blanket.

  “What are you doing out of uniform?”

  “I’m in uniform underneath, sarge. We don’t want to be seen, right? Like this, we become part of the jungle.”

  “It’s a forest, corporal! And without bloody uniforms, how the hell will we know our friends from our enemies?”

  Maladict lit a cigarette before he replied. “The way I see it, sarge,” he said, “the enemy is everyone but us.”

  “Just one moment, sergeant,” said Blouse, who had looked up from a newspaper and had been watching the apparition with considerable interest. “There are precedents in antiquity, you know. General Song Sung Lo moved his army disguised as a field of sunflowers, and General Tacticus once commanded a battalion to dress as spruces.”

  “Sunflowers?” said Jackrum, his voice oozing with disdain.

  “Both actions were successful, sergeant.”

  “No uniforms? No badges? No stripes, sir?”

  “Possibly you could be an extra large bloom?” said Blouse, and his face betrayed no hint of amusement. “And you have surely carried out actions at night, when all markings are invisible?”

  “Yessir, but night is night, sir, while sunflowers is… is sunflowers, sir! I’ve worn this uniform for more’n fift—all my life, sir, and sneaking around without a uniform is downright dishonourable! It’s for spies, sir!” Jackrum’s face had gone beyond red into crimson, and Polly was amazed to see tears in the corners of his eyes.

  “How can we be spies, sergeant, in our own country?” said Blouse calmly.

  “The el-tee’s got a point, sarge,” said Maladict.

  Jackrum turned like a bull at bay, and then to Polly’s amazement he sagged. But she wasn’t amazed for long. She knew the man. She didn’t know why, but there was something about Jackrum that she could read. It was in the eyes. He could lie with eyes as honest and tranquil as those of an angel. And if he appeared to be backing away, it was indeed only to get a run-up later on.