Sir Thursday(22)
Helve nodded and spat again. He carefully restored the half-masticated cigarillo to the tin and slid it back into his belt pouch. Then he drew out a clipboard that was five times larger than the pouch, took a pencil from behind his ear, though one had not been there before, and made some quick amendments to the papers on the board.
‘Hide that ring,’ Helve said as he wrote. ‘The crab-armour can be explained for a hurt Piper’s child, but no recruit has a personal item like that ring.’
Arthur twisted off the crocodile ring and slipped it into his own belt pouch. As far as his questing fingers could tell, it was the same size inside as out, though the sergeant’s pouch was obviously trans-dimensional.
‘Recruit Ray Green, we never had this conversation,’ said Helve, quietly for once, as he stuffed the clipboard back in the pouch, both board and papers twisting bizarrely as they went in.
‘No, Sergeant,’ agreed Arthur.
‘Atten-hut!’ screamed Helve. The sudden intensity and volume of his voice made Arthur leap into the air. He came down quivering at attention.
‘You see those buildings, Recruit! That is Fort Transformation, where we take Denizens and make them into soldiers. We are going to march there and you are going to do me proud! Back straight! Fists clenched, thumbs down, by the left, quick march!’
Arthur started marching towards the buildings. Helve followed a few steps to the left and behind him, bellowing corrections to his posture, his step, how he swung his arms, and his timing. In between these practical comments, Helve lamented what he had done to deserve such a sickly-looking specimen, even for one of the Piper’s children.
By the time he got to the buildings, Arthur was wondering whether he would ever learn how to march properly, or at least up to Helve’s standards. He was also wondering where everybody else was. As far as he could tell from the position of the rather rickety but extremely hot sun that was crossing the horizon, it was late afternoon, so he would have expected lots of recruits and training staff to be out doing … military stuff.
‘Halt!’ yelled Sergeant Helve, once Arthur had passed the first row of buildings and was about to step onto a large area of beaten earth ringed with white-painted rocks that was clearly the parade ground. ‘When I give the command “Recruit, dismiss”, you will smartly pivot on your left foot, raise your right foot and bring it crashing down next to your left foot, stand at attention for precisely one second, and then you will march briskly to Barracks Block A, which you will see in front of you unless you are Nothing-rotted blind as well as stupid! You will report there to Corporal Axeforth. Recruit! Waaaait foooor it! Dismiss!’
Arthur pivoted on his left foot, brought his right down, and then marched clumsily rather than briskly forward. There was only one building directly in front of him, so he headed straight for that. It was a long single-storey whitewashed wooden building, raised on stilts about four feet high. Steps led up to a door, which had a red plaque on it with black-stenciled type that said: BARRACKS BLOCK A, SECOND RECRUIT PLATOON, CORPORAL AXEFORTH.
Arthur marched up the steps, pushed the door open, and marched in.
The room was bigger inside than it should have been, but Arthur hardly even noticed this sort of thing anymore. It was common in the House. It was about the size of a football field, with a ceiling twenty feet up. What light there was was provided by about twenty large hurricane lamps that swung from the rafters. There were windows on each side, but they were all shuttered.
In the pools of light from the hurricane lamps, Arthur saw that one side of the huge room was entirely lined with stretcher beds and large wooden wardrobes, rather like Captain Catapillow’s aboard the Moth. There had to be a hundred beds, each with a wardrobe next to it.
The other side of the room was more open, with thirty or so racks arranged in rows of three. The racks were ten feet high and thirty feet long, and they were hung with all kinds of weapons and armour, all of it to Arthur’s eye very old and some of it very strange. The rack closest to him held a variety of straight and curved swords, small round shields, large kite-shaped shields, blue uniform coats, large unwieldy-looking pistols, and grappling irons and rope. The next one along was entirely given over to fifty or sixty muskets, with strange stovepipe hats of stretched white cloth arranged above the weapons.
At first Arthur thought no one was there, but as he marched farther into the room, he saw a group of Denizens in blue recruit uniforms standing down at the other end. As he drew closer, he saw a scarlet-uniformed instructor in front of them, demonstrating some kind of weapon. From the two gold stripes on the instructor’s scarlet sleeve, Arthur guessed he was Corporal Axeforth.