"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. 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 him, 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 the 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 towards it. Polly had been there and didn't see it happen, but lots of people swore it had, and you might end up wondering what the truth really was, or whether there were lots of different kinds of truth.
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; 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'd ever really been away. Were we soldiers? she wondered. They'd been cheered on the road to PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg, 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, 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 breach, 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 communique on the gates; the crowd would close over it like a hand, open again like a flower.