Discworld 30 - Monstrous Regiment (31 page)

 
 
  
‘Mrs Enid says we’re to get to work,’ she said. ‘She says the guards come round and check
. . .’
It was women’s work, and therefore monotonous, backbreaking and social. It had been a
long time since Polly had got her hands in a washtub, and the ones here were long wooden
troughs, where twenty women could work at once. Arms on either side of her squeezed and
pummelled, wrung out garments and slapped them into the rinsing trough behind them. Polly
joined in, and listened to the buzz of conversation around her.
It was gossip, but bits of information floated in it like bubbles in the washtub. A couple of
guards had ‘taken liberties’ - that is, more than had already been taken - and had apparently
been flogged for it. This caused much comment along the tub. Apparently some big milord
from Ankh-Morpork was in charge of things and had ordered it. He was some kind of wizard,
said the woman opposite. They said he could see things happening everywhere, and lived on
raw meat. They said he had secret eyes. Of course, everyone knew that that city was the home
of Abominations. Polly, industriously rubbing a shirt on a washboard, thought about this.
And thought about a lowland buzzard in this upland country, and some creature so fast and
stealthy that it was only a suggestion of shadow . . .
She took a spell on the copper boilers, ramming the stewing garments under the bubbling
surface, and noted that in this place without weapons of any sort she was using a heavy stick
about three feet long.
She enjoyed the work, in a dumb kind of way. Her muscles did all the necessary thinking,
leaving her brain free. No one knew for sure that the Duchess was dead. It more or less didn’t
matter. But Polly was sure of one thing. The Duchess had been a woman. Just a woman, not a
goddess. Oh, people prayed to her in the hope that their pleas would be gift-wrapped and sent
on to Nuggan, but that gave her no right to mess with the heads of people like Wazzer, who
had enough trouble as it was. Gods could do miracles, Duchesses posed for pictures.
Out of the corner of her eye Polly saw a line of women taking large baskets from a
platform at the end of the room and stepping out through another doorway. She dragged
Igorina away from the wash trough and told her to join them. ‘And notice everything!’ she
added.
‘Yes, corp,’ said Igorina.
‘Because I know one thing,’ said Polly, waving at the piles of damp linen, ‘and it’s that this
lot will need the breeze . . .’
She went back to work, occasionally joining in the chatter for the look of the thing. It
wasn’t hard. The washerwomen kept away from some subjects, particularly ones like
‘husbands’ and ‘sons’. But Polly picked up clues here and there. Some were in the keep.
Some were probably dead. Some were out there, somewhere. Some of the older women wore
the Motherhood Medal, awarded to women whose sons had died for Borogravia. The bastard
metal was corroding in the damp atmosphere, and Polly wondered if the medals had arrived
in a letter from the Duchess, with her signature printed on the bottom and the son’s name
squeezed up tight to fit the space:
We honour and congratulate you, Mrs L. Lapchic of Well Lane, Munz, on the death of
your son Otto PwtrHanLapchic on June 25 at ••••

 
 
  
The place was always censored in case it brought aid and comfort to the enemy. It
astonished Polly to find that the cheap medals and thoughtless words did, in a way, bring aid
and comfort to the mothers. Those in Munz who had received them wore them with a sort of
fierce, indignant pride.
She wasn’t sure she trusted Mrs Enid very much. She had a son and a husband up in the
cells, and she’d had a chance to weigh up Blouse. She’d be asking herself: what’s more
likely, that he gets them all out and keeps them safe, or that there’s going to be an almighty
mess which might well harm us all? And Polly couldn’t blame her if she went with the
evidence . . .
She was aware of someone talking to her. ‘Hmm?’ she said.
‘Look at this, will you?’ said Shufti, waving a sodden pair of men’s long pants at her.
‘They keep putting the colours in with the whites!’
‘Well? So what? These are enemy longjohns,’ said Polly.
‘Yes, but there’s such a thing as doing it properly! Look, they put in this red pair and all
the others are going pink!’
‘And? I used to love pink when I was about seven.’*
* It is an established fact that, despite everything society can do, girls of seven are
magnetically attracted to the colour pink.
‘But pale pink? On a man?’
Polly looked at the next tub for a moment, and patted Shufti on the shoulder. ‘Yes. It is
very pale, isn’t it? You’d better find a couple more red items,’ she said.
‘But that’d make it even worse—’ Shufti began.
‘That was an order, soldier,’ Polly whispered in her ear. ‘And add some starch.’
‘How much?’
‘All you can find.’
Igorina returned. Igorina had good eyes. Polly wondered if they’d ever belonged to
someone else. She gave Polly a wink and held up a thumb. It was, to Polly’s relief, one of her
own.
In the huge ironing room, only one person was working at the long boards when Polly,
taking advantage of the temporary absence of Mrs Enid, hurried in. It was ‘Daphne’. All the
rest of the women were gathered round, as if they were watching a demonstration. And they
were.
‘—the collar, d’you see,’ said Lieutenant Blouse, flourishing the big, steaming, charcoal-
filled iron. ‘Then the sleeve cuffs and finally the sleeves. Do one front half at a time. You
should hang them immediately but, and here’s a useful tip, don’t iron them completely dry.
It’s really a matter of practice, but—’

 
 
  
Polly stared in fascinated wonder. She’d hated ironing. ‘Daphne, could I have a word?’ she
said, during a pause.
Blouse looked up. ‘Oh, P . . . Polly,’ he said. ‘Um, yes, of course.’
‘It’s amazing what Daphne knows about pleat lines,’ said a girl, in awe. ‘And press cloths!’
‘I am amazed,’ said Polly.
Blouse handed the iron to the girl. ‘There you are, Dympha,’ he said generously.
‘Remember: always iron the wrong side first, and only ever do the wrong side on dark linens.
Common mistake. Coming, Polly.’
Polly kicked her heels for a while outside, and one of the girls came up with a big pile of
fresh-smelling ironing. She saw Polly, and leaned close as she went past. ‘We all know he’s a
man,’ she said. ‘But he’s having such fun and he irons like a demon!’
‘Sir, how do you know about ironing?’ said Polly, when they were back in the washing
room.
‘Had to do my own laundry back at HQ,’ said Blouse. ‘Couldn’t afford a gel and the
batman was a strict Nugganite and said it was girls’ work. So I thought, well, it can’t be hard,
otherwise we wouldn’t leave it to women. They really aren’t very good here. You know they
put the colours and the whites together?’
‘Sir, you know you said you were going to steal a gate key off a guard and break his neck?’
said Polly.
‘Indeed.’
‘Do you know how to break a man’s neck, sir?’
‘I read a book on martial arts, Perks,’ said Blouse, a little severely.
‘But you haven’t actually done it, sir?’
‘Well, no! I was at HQ, and you are not allowed to practise on real people, Perks.’
‘You see, the person whose neck you want to break will have a weapon at that moment and
you, sir, won’t,’ said Polly.
‘I have tried out the basic principle on a rolled-up blanket,’ said Blouse reproachfully. ‘It
seemed to work very well.’
‘Was the blanket struggling and making loud gurgling noises and kicking you in the socks,
sir?’
‘The socks?’ said Blouse, puzzled.
‘In fact I think your other idea would be better, sir,’ said Polly hurriedly.
‘Yes . . . my, er . . . other idea . . . which one was that, exactly?’
‘The one where we escape from the washhouse via the clothes-drying area, sir, after
silently disabling three guards, sir. There’s a kind of moving room down the corridor over
there, sir, which gets winched all the way to the roof. Two guards go up there with the
women, sir, and there’s another guard up on the roof. Acting together, we’d take out each
unsuspecting guard, which would be more certain than you against an armed man, with all
due respect, sir, and that would leave us very well positioned to go anywhere in the keep via
the rooftops, sir. Well done, sir!’
There was a pause. ‘Did I, er, go into all that detail?’ said Blouse.

 
 
  
‘Oh, no, sir. You shouldn’t have to, sir. Sergeants and corporals deal with the fine detail.
Officers are there to see the big picture.’
‘Oh, absolutely. And, er . . . how big was this particular picture?’ said Blouse, blinking.
‘Oh, very big, sir. A very big picture indeed, sir.’
‘Ah,’ said Blouse, and straightened up and assumed what he considered to be the
expression of one with panoramic vision.
‘Some of the ladies here used to work in the upper keep, sir, when it was ours,’ Polly went
on quickly. ‘Anticipating your order, sir, I had the squad engage them in light conversation
about the layout of the place, sir. Being aware of the general thrust of your strategy, sir, I
think I have found a route to the dungeons.’
She paused. It had been good flannelling, she knew. It was almost worthy of Jackrum.
She’d larded it with as many ‘sirs’ as she dared. And she was very proud of ‘anticipating your
order’.
She hadn’t heard Jackrum use it, but with a certain amount of care it was an excuse to do
almost anything. ‘General thrust’ was pretty good, too.
‘Dungeons,’ said Blouse thoughtfully, momentarily losing sight of the big picture. ‘In fact
I thought I said—’
‘Yessir. Because, sir, if we can get a lot of the lads out of the dungeons, sir, you’ll be in
command inside the enemy’s citadel, sir!’
Blouse grew another inch, and then sagged again. ‘Of course, there are some very senior
officers here. All of them senior to me—’
‘Yessir!’ said Polly, well on the way to graduating from the Sergeant Jackrum School of
Outright Rupert Management. ‘Perhaps we’d better try to let the enlisted men out first, sir?
We don’t want to expose the officers to enemy fire.’
It was shameless and stupid, but now the light of battle was in Blouse’s eyes. Polly decided
to fan it, just in case. ‘Your leadership has really been a great example to us, sir,’ she said.
‘Has it?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘No officer could have led a finer bunch of men, Perks,’ said Blouse.
‘Probably they have, sir,’ said Polly.
‘And what man could dare hope for such an opportunity, eh?’ said Blouse. ‘Our names will
go down in the history books! Well, mine will, obviously, and I shall jolly well see to it that
you chaps get a mention too. And who knows? Perhaps I may win the highest accolade that a
gallant officer may obtain!’
‘What’s that, sir?’ said Polly dutifully.
‘Having either a foodstuff or an item of clothing named after one,’ said Blouse, his face
radiant. ‘General Froc got both, of course. The frock coat and Beef Froc. Of course, I could
never aspire that high.’ He looked down bashfully. ‘But I have to say, Perks, that I have
devised several recipes, just in case!’
‘So we’ll be eating a Blouse one day, sir?’ said Polly. She was watching the baskets being
stacked.

 
 
  
‘Possibly, possibly, if I may dare hope,’ said Blouse. ‘Er . . . my favourite is a sort of
pastry ring, d’you see, filled with cream and soaked in rum—’
‘That’s a Rum Baba, sir,’ said Polly absently. Tonker and the others were watching the
stacked baskets, too.
‘It’s been done?’
‘ ‘fraid so, sir.’
‘How about . . . er . . . a dish of liver and onions?’
‘It’s called liver-and-onions, sir. Sorry,’ said Polly, trying not to lose concentration.
‘Er, er, well, it has struck me that some dishes are named after people when really they just
made a little change to a basic recipe—’
‘We must go now, sir! Now or never, sir!’
‘What? Oh. Right. Yes. We must go!’
It was a military manoeuvre hitherto unrecorded. The squad, coming from different
directions on Polly’s signal, arrived at the baskets just ahead of the women who’d proposed
to take them up, grabbed the handles and advanced. Only then did she realize that probably
no one else wanted the job, and the women were only too happy to let idiot newcomers take
the strain. The baskets were big and the wet washing was heavy. Wazzer and Igorina could
barely lift one basket between them.
A couple of soldiers were waiting by the door. They looked bored, and paid little attention.
It was a long walk to the ‘elevator’.
Polly hadn’t been able to picture it when it had been described. You had to see it. It really
was just a big open box of heavy timbers, attached to a thick rope, which ran up and down in
a sort of chimney in the rock. When they were aboard, one of the soldiers hauled on a much
thinner rope that disappeared up into the darkness. The other one lit a couple of candles,
whose only apparent role was to make the darkness more gloomy.
‘No fainting now, girls!’ he said. His mate chuckled.
Two of them and seven of us, Polly thought. The copper stick banged against her leg as she
moved, and she knew for a fact that Tonker was limping because she had strapped a washing
dolly under her dress. That was for serious washerwomen; it was a long stick with what
looked like a three-legged milking stool on the end of it, the better for agitating clothes in a
big cauldron of boiling water. You could probably smash a skull with it.
The stone walls dropped past as the platform rose.
‘How thrilling!’ trilled ‘Daphne’. ‘And this goes all the way up through your big castle,
does it?’
‘Oh, no, miss. Gotta go up through the rock first, miss. Lots of old workings and
everything before we get that high.’
‘Oh, I thought we were in the castle already.’ Blouse gave Polly a worried look.
‘No, miss. There’s just the washhouse down there, ‘cos of the water. Hah, it’s a climb and
a half even to the lower cellars. Lucky for you there’s this elevator, eh?’
‘Wonderful, sergeant,’ said Blouse, and allowed Daphne back. ‘How does it work?’

 
 
  
‘It’s corporal, miss,’ said the string-puller, touching his forelock. ‘It’s pulled up and down
by pris’ners in a treadmill, miss.’
‘Oh, how horrid!’
‘Oh no, miss, it’s quite humane. Er . . . if you’re free after work, er, I could take you up
and show you the mechanism . . .’
‘That would be lovely, sergeant!’
Polly put her hand over her eyes. Daphne was a disgrace to womanhood.
The elevator rumbled upwards, quite slowly. Mostly they passed raw rock but sometimes
there were ancient gratings or areas of masonry, suggestive of tunnels long ago blocked—
There was a jerk, and the platform stopped moving. One of the soldiers swore under his
breath, but the corporal said, ‘Don’t be afraid, ladies. This often happens.’
‘Why should we be afraid?’ said Polly.
‘Well, because we’re hanging by a rope a hundred feet up the shaft and the lifting
machinery’s thrown a cog.’
‘Again,’ said the other soldier. ‘Nothing works properly here.’
‘Sounds like a good reason to me,’ said Igorina.
‘How long will it take to repair?’ said Tonker.
‘Hah! Last time it happened we were stuck for an hour!’
Too long, Polly thought. Too many things could happen. She looked up through the beams
in the roof. The square of daylight was a long way up.
‘We can’t wait,’ she said.
‘Oh dear, who will save us?’ Daphne quavered.
‘We’ll have to find a way to pass the time, eh?’ said one of the guards. Polly sighed. That
was one of those phrases, like ‘Well, lookee what we have here’, that meant things were only
going to get a lot worse.
‘We know how it is, ladies,’ the guard went on. ‘Your menfolk away, and all. It’s as bad
for us, too. I can’t remember when I last kissed my wife.’
‘And I can’t remember when I last kissed his wife, either,’ said the corporal.
Tonker jumped up, caught a beam, and chinned herself to the top of the box. The elevator
shook and, somewhere, a piece of rock dislodged and crashed down the shaft.
‘Hey, you can’t do that!’ said the corporal.
‘Where does it say?’ said Tonker. ‘Polly, there’s one of those filled-in tunnels here, only
most of the stones have been knocked out. We could get in easily.’
‘You can’t get out! We’ll get into trouble!’ said the corporal.
Polly pulled his sword out of his scabbard. The space was too crowded to do much with it
except threaten, but she had it, not him. It made a huge difference.
‘You’re already in trouble,’ she said. ‘Please don’t force me to make it worse. Let’s get out
of here. Is that okay, Daphne?’
‘Um . . . yes, of course,’ said Blouse.