Monstrous Regiment

D-duchess on the b-bottom?” said Wazzer, horrified.
    “It was the back of the picture, okay?” said Tonker. “It wasn’t her real backside. Huh, wouldn’t have kissed it if it was!” There was some unidentified sniggering from various corners and just a hint of giggle.
    “That was w-wicked!” hissed Wazzer. “Nuggan in heaven saw you d-do that!”
    “It was just a picture, all right?” muttered Tonker. “Anyway, what’s the difference? Front or back, we’re all here together and I don’t see any steak and bacon!”
    Something rumbled overhead. “I joined t’ see exciting forrin places and meet erotic people,” said Carborundum.
    That caused a moment’s thought. “I think you mean exotic?” said Igor.
    “Yeah, that kind of stuff,” agreed the troll.
    “But they always lie,” said someone, and then Polly realized it was her. “They lie all the time. About everything.”
    “Amen to that,” said Tonker. “We fight for liars.”
    “Ah, they may be liars!” snapped Polly, in a passable imitation of Strappi’s yap. “But they’re our liars!”
    “Now, now, children,” said Maladict. “Let’s try to get some sleep, shall we? But here’s a happy little dream from your Uncle Maladict. Dream that when we go into battle, Corporal Strappi is leading us. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
    After a while, Tonker said: “In front of us, you mean?”
    “Oh, yes. I can see you’re with me, Tonk. Right in front of you. On the noisy, frantic, confusing battlefield, where oh so much can go wrong.”
    “And we’ll have weapons?” said Shufti wistfully.
    “Of course you’ll have weapons. You’re soldiers. And there’s the enemy, right in front of you…”
    “That’s a good dream, Mal.”
    “Sleep on it, kid.”
    Polly turned over, and tried to make herself comfortable.
    It’s all lies, she though muzzily. Some of them are just prettier than others, that’s all. People see what they think is there. Even I’m a lie. But I’m getting away with it.

    A warm autumnal wind was blowing leaves off the rowan trees as the recruits marched among the foothills. It was the morning of the next day, and the mountains were behind them.
    Polly passed the time identifying the birds in the hedgerows. It was a habit. She knew most of them.
    She hadn’t set out to be an ornithologist. But birds brought Paul alive. All the…slowness in the rest of his thinking became a flash of lightning in the presence of birds. Suddenly he knew their names, habits, and habitats, could whistle their songs, and, after Polly had saved up for a box of paints off a traveler at the inn, had painted a picture of a wren so real you could hear it.
    Their mother had been alive then. The row had gone on for days. Pictures of living creatures were an Abomination in the eyes of Nuggan. Polly had asked why there were pictures of the Duchess everywhere, and had been thrashed for it. The picture had been burned, the paints thrown away.
    It was a terrible thing. Her mother had been a kind woman, or as kind as a devout woman could be while trying to keep up with the whims of Nuggan, and she’d died slowly and painfully, amid pictures of the Duchess and among the echoes of unanswered prayers, but that was the memory that crawled treacherously into Polly’s mind every time: the fury and the scolding, while the little bird seemed to flutter in the flames.
    In the fields, women and old men were getting in the spoiled wheat after last night’s rain, hoping to save what they could. There weren’t any young men visible. Polly saw some of the other recruits steal a glance at the scavenging parties, and wondered if they were thinking the same thing.
    They saw no one else on the road until midday, when the party was marching through a landscape of low hills; the sun had boiled away some of the clouds and, for a moment at least, summer was back—moist and sticky and mildly unpleasant, like a party guest who won’t go home.
    A red blob in the distance became a rather larger blob and resolved itself into a loose knot of men. Polly knew what to expect as soon as she saw it. By the reaction of some of the others, they did not. There was a moment of collision and confusion as people walked into one another, and then the party stopped and stared.
    It took the wounded men some time to draw level, and some time to pass. Two able-bodied men, as far as Polly could tell, were trundling a handcart on which a third man lay. Others were limping on crutches, or