‘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.
‘All right, all right,’ the sergeant said. ‘Upon my oath, I am not a man to disobey orders.’ And the eyes twinkled.
‘Well done, sergeant,’ said Blouse.
Jackrum pulled himself together. ‘I don’t want to be a sunflower, though,’ he said.
‘Happily there are only fir trees in this area, sergeant.’
‘Point well made, sir.’ Jackrum turned to the awed squad. ‘All right, Last Detail,’ he bellowed. ‘You heard the man! Spruce up!’
It was an hour later. As far as Polly could tell, they’d started out for the mountains but had travelled in a wide semi-circle so that they ended up facing back the way they had come, but a few miles away. Was Blouse leading, or had he left it to Jackrum?
Neither man was complaining.
The lieutenant called a halt in a thicket of birch, thus doubling the size of the thicket. You could say that the camouflage effects were effective, because bright red and white shows up against greens and greys. Beyond that, though, language tended to run out.
Jade had scraped off her paint, and was green and grey anyway. Igorina looked like a walking brush. Wazzer quivered like an aspen all the time, so her leaves rustled permanently. The others had made more or less reasonable attempts, and Polly was pretty proud of her own efforts. Jackrum was about as tree-like as a big red rubber ball; Polly suspected that he’d surreptitiously shined up his brasswork, too. Every tree held a mug of tea in limb or hand. After all, they’d stopped for five minutes.
‘Men,’ said Blouse, as if he’d only just reached that conclusion. ‘You may have gathered that we are heading back towards the mountains to raise a deserters’ army there. This story is, in fact, a ruse for the benefit of Mr de Worde!’ He paused, as if expecting some reaction. They stared at him. He went on: ‘We are, in fact, continuing our journey to the Kneck valley. This is the last thing the enemy will be expecting.’
Polly glanced at the sergeant. He was grinning.
‘It is an established fact that a small, light force can get into places that a battalion cannot penetrate,’ Blouse went on. ‘Men, we will be that force! Is that not right, Sergeant Jackrum?’
‘Yessir!’
‘We will come down like a hammer on those forces smaller than us,’ said Blouse happily.
‘Yessir!’
‘And from those that outnumber us, we will merge silently into the forest—’
‘Yessir!’
‘We will slip past their sentries—’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said Jackrum.
‘—and take Kneck Keep from under their noses!’
Jackrum’s tea sprayed across the clearing.
‘I dare say our enemy feels impregnable just because he commands a heavily armed fort on a rocky crag with walls a hundred feet high and twenty feet thick,’ Blouse continued, as if half the trees weren’t now dripping tea. ‘But he is in for a surprise!’
‘You all right, sarge?’ whispered Polly. Jackrum was making strange little noises in his throat.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’ said Blouse.
Igorina raised a branch. ‘How will we get in, sir?’ she said.
‘Ah. Good question,’ said Blouse. ‘And all will become apparent in due time.’