‘Good grief, a lot of old women could shift better’n you!’ he shouted with satisfaction as people flailed around looking for coats and boots. Tall in! Get shaved! Every man in the regiment to be clean shaven, by order! Get dressed! Wazzer, I’ve got my eye on you! Move! Move! Breakfast in five minutes! Last one there doesn’t get a sausage! Oh deary me, what a bloody shower!’
The four lesser horsemen of Panic, Bewilderment, Ignorance and Shouting took control of the room, to Corporal Strappi’s obscene glee. Polly, though, ducked out of the door, pulled a small tin mug out of her pack, dipped it into a water butt, balanced it on an old barrel behind the inn, and started to shave.
She’d practised this, too. The secret was in the old cut-throat razor that she’d carefully blunted. After that, it was all in the shaving brush and soap. Get a lot of lather on, shave a lot of lather off, and you’d had a shave, hadn’t you? Must have done, sir, feel how smooth the skin is . . .
She was halfway through when a voice by her ear screamed: ‘What d’you think you’re doing, Private Parts?’
It was just as well the blade was blunt.
‘Perks, sir!’ she said, rubbing her nose. ‘I’m shaving, sir! It’s Perks, sir!’
‘Sir? Sir? I’m not a sir, Parts, I’m a bloody corporal, Parts. That means you calls me “corporal”, Parts. And you are shaving in an official regimental mug,” Parts, what you have not been issued with, right? You a deserter, Parts?’
‘No, s— corporal!’
‘A thief, then?’
‘No, corporal!’
‘Then how come you got a bloody mug, Parts?’
‘Got it off a dead man, sir— corporal!’
Strappi’s voice, pitched to a scream in any case, became a screech of rage. ‘You’re a looter?’
‘No, corporal! The soldier . . .’
. . . had died almost in her arms, on the floor of the inn.
There had been half a dozen men in that party of returning heroes. They must have been trekking with grey-faced patience for days, making their way back to little villages in the mountains. Polly counted nine arms and ten legs between them, and ten eyes.
But it was the apparently whole who were worse, in a way. They kept their stinking coats buttoned tight, in lieu of bandages, over whatever unspeakable mess lay beneath, and they had the smell of death about them. The inn’s regulars made space for them, and talked quietly, like people in a sacred place. Her father, not usually a man given to sentiment, quietly put a generous tot of brandy into each mug of ale, and refused all payment. Then it turned out that they were carrying letters from soldiers still fighting, and one of them had brought the letter from Paul. He pushed it across the table to Polly as she served them stew and then, with very little fuss, he died.
The rest of the men moved unsteadily on later that day, taking with them, to give to his parents, the pot-metal medal that had been in the soldier’s coat pocket and the official commendation from the Duchy that went with it. Polly had taken a look at it. It was printed, including the Duchess’s signature, and the man’s name had been filled in, rather cramped, because it was longer than average. The last few letters were rammed up tight together.
It’s little details like that which get remembered, as undirected white-hot rage fills the mind. Apart from the letter and the medal, all the man left behind was a tin mug and, on the floor, a stain which wouldn’t scrub out.
Corporal Strappi listened impatiently to a slightly adjusted version. Polly could see his mind working. The mug had belonged to a soldier; now it belonged to another soldier. Those were the facts of the matter, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. He resorted, instead, to the safer ground of general abuse.
‘So you think you’re smart, Parts?’ he said.
‘No, corporal.’
‘Oh? So you’re stupid, are you?’
‘Well, I did enlist, corporal,’ said Polly meekly. Somewhere behind Strappi, someone sniggered.
‘I’ve got my eye on you, Parts,’ growled Strappi, temporarily defeated. ‘Just you put a foot wrong, that’s all.’ He strode off.
‘Um . . .’ said a voice beside Polly. She turned to see another youth, wearing secondhand clothes and an air of nervousness that didn’t quite conceal some bubbling anger. He was big and red-haired, but it was cut so close that it was just head fuzz.
‘You’re Tonker, right?’ she said.
‘Yeah, and, er . . . could I have a borrow of your shaving gear, right?’
Polly looked at a chin as free of hair as a billiard ball. The boy blushed.
‘Got to start sometime, right?’ he said defiantly.
‘The razor’ll need sharpening,’ said Polly.
‘That’s all right, I know how to do that,’ said Tonker.
Polly wordlessly handed over the mug and razor, and took the opportunity to duck into the privy while everyone else was occupied. It was the work of a moment to put the socks in place. Anchoring them was a problem, which she solved by unwinding part of one sock and tucking it up under her belt. They felt odd, and strangely heavy for a little package of wool. Walking a little awkwardly, Polly went in to see what horrors breakfast would bring.
It brought stale horse-bread and sausage and very weak beer. She grabbed a sausage and a slab of bread and sat down.
You had to concentrate to eat horse-bread. There was a lot more about these days, a bread made from flour ground up with dried pease and beans and vegetable scrapings. It used to be made just for horses, to put them in fine condition. Now you hardly ever saw anything else on the table, and there tended to be less and less of it, too. You needed time and good teeth to work your way through a slice of horse-bread, just as you needed a complete lack of imagination to eat a modern sausage. Polly sat and concentrated on chewing.
The only other area of calm was around Private Maladict, who was drinking coffee like a young man relaxing in a pavement cafe, with the air of someone who has life thoroughly worked out. He nodded at Polly.
Was that him in the privy? she wondered. I got back in just as Strappi started yelling and everyone started running around and rushing in and out. It could have been anyone. Do vampires use the privy? Well, do they? Has anyone ever dared ask?
‘Sleep well?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Did you?’ said Polly.
‘I couldn’t stand that shed, but Mr Eyebrow kindly allowed me to use his cellar,’ said Maladict. ‘Old habits die hard, you know? At least,’ he added, ‘old acceptable habits. I’ve never felt happy not hanging down.’
‘And you got coffee?’
‘I carry my own supply,’ said Maladict, indicating an exquisite little silver and gilt coffee-making engine on the table by his cup, ‘and Mr Eyebrow kindly boiled some water for me.’ He grinned, showing two long canine teeth. ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve with a smile, Oliver.’
Polly nodded. ‘Er . . . is Igor a friend of yours?’ she said. At the next table Igor had obtained a sausage, presumably raw, from the kitchen, and was watching it intently. A couple of wires ran from the sausage to a mug of the horrible vinegary beer, which was bubbling.
‘Never seen him before in my life,’ said the vampire. ‘Of course, if you’ve met one you have in a sense met them all. We had an Igor at home. Wonderful workers. Very reliable. Very trustworthy. And, of course, so good at stitching things together, if you know what I mean.’
‘Those stitches round his head don’t look very professional,’ said Polly, who was beginning to object to Maladict’s permanent expression of effortless superiority.
‘Oh, that? It’s an Igor thing,’ said Maladict. ‘It’s a Look. Like . . . tribal markings, you know? They like them to show. Ha, we had a servant once who had stitches all the way round his neck, and he was extremely proud of them.’
‘Really?’ said Polly weakly.
‘Yes, and the droll part of it all was that it wasn’t even his head!’
Now Igor had a syringe in his hand, and was watching the sausage with an air of satisfaction. For a moment, Polly thought that the sausage moved . . .
‘All right, all right, time’s up, you horrible lot!’ barked Corporal Strappi, strutting into the room. ‘Fall in! That means line up, you shower! That means you too, Parts! And you, Mr Vampire, sir, will you be joining us for a morning’s light soldiering? On your feet! And where’s that bloody Igor?’
‘Here, thur,’ said Igor, from three inches behind Strappi’s backbone. The corporal spun round.