Polly let that pass, but said: "You don't want to go back and see your grandchildren?"

"Wouldn't wish meself on him, lad," said Jackrum firmly. "Wouldn't dare. My boy's a well-respected man in the town! What've I got to offer? He'll not want some fat ol' biddy banging on his back door and gobbing baccy juice all over the place and telling him she's his mother!"

Polly looked at the fire for a moment, and felt the idea creep into her mind. "What about a distinguished sergeant major, shiny with braid, loaded with medals, arriving at the front door in a grand coach and telling him he's his father?" she said.

Jackrum stared.

"Tides of war, and all that," Polly went on, mind suddenly racing. "Young love. Duty calls. Families scattered. Hopeless searching. Decades pass. Fond memories. Then... oh, an overheard conversation in a bar, yeah, that'd work. Hope springs. A new search. Greasing palms. The recollections of old women. At last, an address - "

"What're you saying, Perks?"

"You're a liar, sarge," said Polly. "Best I've ever heard. One last lie pays for all! Why not? You could show him the locket. You could tell him about the girl you left behind you..."

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 means 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 favours 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 round.

"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. 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.

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 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 rectangle that had been inserted like a bookmark. It showed a rather florid coat of arms and bore the printed legend:

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 hid 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 bustle 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 PrinceMarmadukePiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg 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 mid-stream. 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.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***