‘Igor?’ said the vampire, waving it away.
‘I’ll thtick with the horthe pith, if it’th all the thame to you,’ said Igor. He looked around in the sudden silence. ‘Look, I never thaid I didn’t like it,’ said Igor. He pushed his mug across the sticky bar. ‘Thame again?’
Polly took the new tankard and sniffed at it. Then she took a sip. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘At least it tastes like it’s—’
The door pushed open, letting in the sounds of the storm. About two-thirds of a troll eased its way inside, and then managed to get the rest of itself through.
Polly was okay about trolls. She met them up in the woods sometimes, sitting amongst the trees or purposefully lumbering along the tracks on the way to whatever it was trolls did. They weren’t friendly, they were . . . resigned. The world’s got humans in it, live with it. They’re not worth the indigestion. You can’t kill ‘em all. Step around ‘em. Stepping on ‘em doesn’t work in the long term.
Occasionally a farmer would hire one to do some heavy work. Sometimes they turned up, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they’d turn up, lumber around a field pulling out tree stumps as if they were carrots, and then wander off without waiting to be paid. A lot of things humans did mystified trolls, and vice versa. Generally, they avoided one another.
But she didn’t often see trolls as . . . trollish as this one. It looked like a boulder that had spent centuries in the damp pine forests. Lichen covered it. Stringy grey moss hung in curtains from its head and its chin. It had a bird’s nest in one ear. It had a genuine troll club, made from an uprooted sapling. It was almost a joke troll, except that no one would laugh.
The root end of the sapling bumped across the floor as the troll, watched by the recruits and a horrified Corporal Strappi, trudged to the table.
‘Gonna En List,’ it said. ‘Gonna do my bit. Gimme shillin’.’
‘You’re a troll!’ Strappi burst out.
‘Now, now, none of that, corporal,’ said Sergeant Jackrum. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’
‘Don’t ask? Don’t ask? It’s a troll, sarge! It’s got crags! There’s grass growing under its fingernails! It’s a troll!’
‘Right,’ said the sergeant. ‘Enlist him.’
‘You want to fight with us?’ Strappi squeaked. Trolls had no sense of personal space, and a ton of what was, for practical purposes, a kind of rock was looming right over the table.
The troll analysed the question. The recruits stood in silence, mugs halfway to mouths.
‘No,’ said the troll at last. ‘Gonna fight wi’ En Army. Gods save the . . .’ The troll paused, and looked at the ceiling. Whatever it was seeking there didn’t appear to be visible. Then it looked at its feet, which had grass growing on them. Then it looked at its free hand and moved its fingers as if counting something. ‘. . . Duchess,’ it said. It had been a long wait. The table creaked as the troll laid a hand on it, palm upwards. ‘Gimme shillin’.’
‘We’ve only got the bits of pape—’ Corporal Strappi began. Sergeant Jackrum jabbed an elbow into his ribs.
‘Upon my oath, are you mad?’ he hissed. ‘There’s a ten-man bounty for enlisting a troll!’ With his other hand he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a real silver shilling, and placed it delicately in the huge hand. ‘Welcome to your new life, friend! I’ll just write your name down, shall I? What is it?’
The troll looked at ceiling, feet, sergeant, wall and table. Polly saw its lips move. ‘Carborundum?’ it volunteered.
‘Yeah, probably,’ said the sergeant. ‘Er, how’d you like to shav— to cut off some of that hai— moss? We’ve got a, a sort of a . . . regulation . . .’
Wall, floor, ceiling, table, fingers, sergeant. ‘No,’ said Carborundum.
‘Right. Right. Right,’ said the sergeant quickly. ‘It’s not a regulation as per such, actually, it’s more of an advisory. Silly one, too, eh? I’ve always thought so. Glad to have you with us,’ he added fervently.
The troll licked the coin, which gleamed like a diamond in its hand. It actually did have grass growing under its fingernails too, Polly noticed. Then Carborundum trudged to the bar. The crowd parted instantly, because trolls never had to stand at the back of the press of bodies, waving money and trying to catch the barman’s eye.
He broke the coin in two and dropped both halves on the bar top. Eyebrow swallowed. He looked as though he would have said ‘Are you sure?’ except that this was not a question barmen addressed to people weighing over half a ton. Carborundum thought for a while, and then said: ‘Gimme drink.’
Eyebrow nodded, disappeared briefly into the room behind the bar, and came back holding a double-handled mug. Maladict sneezed. Polly’s eyes watered. It was the kind of smell you sense with your teeth. The pub might make foul beer as a matter of course, but this was eye-stinging vinegar.
Eyebrow dropped one half of the silver coin into it, and then took a copper penny out of the money drawer and held it over the fuming mug. The troll nodded. With just a hint of ceremony, like a cocktail waiter dropping the little umbrella into a Double Entendre, Eyebrow let the copper fall.
More bubbles welled up. Igor watched with interest. Carborundum picked the mug up in two fingers of each shovel-like hand, and swallowed the contents in one gulp. He stood stock still for a moment, then carefully put the mug back on the bar.
‘You gentlemen might like to move back a bit,’ murmured Eyebrow.
‘What’s going to happen?’ said Polly.
‘It takes ‘em all differently,’ said Eyebrow. ‘Looks like this one’s – no, there he goes . . .’
With considerable style, Carborundum went over backwards. There was no sagging at the knees, no girly attempt to soften the fall. He just went from standing up, one hand out, to lying down, one hand up. He even rocked gently for some time after hitting the floor.
‘Got no head for his drink,’ said Eyebrow. ‘Typical of the young bucks. Wants to play the big troll, comes in here, orders an Electrick Floorbanger, doesn’t know how to handle it.’
‘Is he going to come round?’ said Maladict.
‘No, that’s it until dawn, I reckon,’ said Eyebrow. ‘Brain stops working.’
‘Shouldn’t affect him too much, then,’ said Corporal Strappi, stepping up. ‘Right, you miserable lot. You’re sleeping in the shed out the back, understand? Practically waterproof, hardly any rats. We’re out of here at dawn! You’re in the army now!’
Polly lay in the dark, on a bed of musty straw. There was no question of anyone’s getting undressed. The rain hammered on the roof and the wind blew through a crack under the door, despite Igor’s attempt to stuff it with straw. There was some desultory conversation, during which Polly found that she was sharing the dank shed with ‘Tonker’ Halter, ‘Shufti’ Manickle, ‘Wazzer’ Goom and ‘Lofty’ Tewt. Maladict and Igor didn’t seem to have acquired repeatable nicknames. She’d become Ozzer by general agreement.
Slightly to Polly’s surprise the boy now known as Wazzer had taken a small picture of the Duchess out of his pack and had nervously hung it on an old nail. No one else said anything as he prayed to it. It was what you were supposed to do.
They said the Duchess was dead . . .
Polly had been washing up when she’d heard the men talking late one night, and it’s a poor woman who can’t eavesdrop while making a noise at the same time.
Dead, they said, but the people up at PrinceMarmaduke-PiotreAlbertHansJosephBernhardtWilhelmsberg weren’t admitting it. That was ‘cos what with there being no children, and with royalty marrying one another’s cousins and grannies all the time, the ducal throne would go to Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia! There! Can you believe that? That’s why we never see her, right? And there hasn’t been a new picture all these years? Makes you think, eh? Oh, they say she’s been in mourning ‘cos of the young Duke, but that was more’n seventy years ago! They say she was buried in secret and—
At which point her father had stopped the speaker dead. There are some conversations where you don’t even want people to remember you were in the same room.
Dead or alive, the Duchess watched over you.
The recruits tried to sleep.
Occasionally, someone belched or expelled wind noisily, and Polly responded with a few fake eructations of her own. That seemed to inspire greater effort on the part of the other sleepers, to the point where the roof rattled and dust fell down, before everyone subsided. Once or twice she heard people stagger out into the windy darkness, in theory for the privy but probably, given male impatience in these matters, to aim much closer to home. Once, coasting in and out of a troubled dream, she thought she heard someone sobbing.