The cleaning took fifteen minutes. Arthur was glad to remove at least some of the visible evidence of battle, though in his mind he could still picture Nithling blood on the blade of his savage-sword.
Helve did not leave them time to think after the immediate cleaning was done.
‘Platoon, by the left, quick march! Left wheel! Keep in step, Lanven!’
‘He didn’t mention what happened to the others,’ whispered Fred to Arthur. They were fairly safe talking, as they were right at the back, with Helve marching at the front.
Helve directed the platoon to a building Arthur hadn’t been to before. There were a lot of buildings at Fort Transformation he hadn’t been into. Like the Mess Hall. He hadn’t even known there was one. This building had the ubiquitous red-and-black sign on the door, which read POST POST OFFICE.
Like the barracks, the Post Post Office was larger inside than it was outside. It appeared to be completely empty, save for a long wooden counter that had a bell on it. Helve halted the platoon, then marched up and smacked the bell with his palm.
This had an immediate response. A Denizen in a dark-green uniform Arthur recognised as Commissary field dress leaped up from behind the counter.
‘We’re closed!’ he said with a sniff. Arthur was amazed that a mere Commissary corporal would dare to speak to Sergeant Helve in such a manner. Particularly as the sergeant’s cuirass was dented in several places and smeared with Nithling blood. ‘Come back in three months!’
Helve’s hand shot across the counter and gripped the Commissary corporal by the top button of his tunic, preventing him from sliding back down again.
‘The COs ordered a special mail call, Corporal. Don’t you read your orders?’
‘That’s different, then,’ said the corporal. ‘Mail for the entire recruit battalion?’
‘That’s right,’ said Helve. He let the corporal go with a twang that threatened to separate button from tunic. ‘The whole battalion.’
‘Coming up,’ said the corporal. He retrieved a piece of paper from under the counter, got out a quill pen and inkwell, and quickly wrote on it. He then marched out from behind the counter to the empty space beyond and threw the paper into the air.
An instant later, there was a deafening rumble. The corporal jumped back as a dozen six-foot-tall canvas mailbags thudded down out of nowhere.
‘That’s it,’ said the corporal. ‘Help yourself.’
With those words, he sank behind the counter again.
‘Grab those bags,’ said Helve. ‘One each. Green and Gold, you take one between you.’
The sergeant picked up two of the bags, one under each arm, without apparent difficulty. Arthur and Fred found it hard to even lift one off the ground, but once they got it balanced it wasn’t as immovable as they’d feared.
‘Stay in line and look orderly,’ said Helve. ‘We’ll stay off the parade ground. Round the back to the Mess Hall.’
Arthur was not all that surprised to discover that he’d never seen the Mess Hall, because it was not a building at Fort Transformation. It was like the washroom, reached by a weirdway in the outside wall of an armoury.
Lugging their mailbags, the platoon lumbered along the weirdway, eventually emerging in a room so large that Arthur couldn’t see the walls, though there was a ceiling fifty or sixty feet up. Like the washroom, the Mess Hall was populated by ghostly images of thousands of other soldiers, most of them sitting on benches alongside trestle tables laden with food and drink.
Unlike the washroom, these tables were labelled, each one having a sign on it for a particular unit.
Fort Transformation Recruit Battalion was about fifty tables directly in from the weirdway entrance. As they marched through, Arthur noticed that a lot of the ghostly soldiers were visibly wounded. There were many bandages, crutches, eye patches, and very new scars. And most of the unit tables were considerably less than fully occupied.
It was not the picture painted by The Recruit’s Companion, Arthur thought with a sinking heart. In the book everything was clean and spotless, and the illustrated soldiers positively radiated health, fitness, and contentment.
Fred and Arthur were very weary by the time they got to their own spot, and they almost didn’t have the strength to haul their bag onto a table.
‘Open them up,’ said Helve. ‘We don’t have to go back immediately. We might as well get our mail before the rush.’
The bags were opened, cascades of mail pouring out onto the tables. Then suddenly a letter left the cascade, flew through the air, and struck one of the recruits sharply on her helmet. She reached up and caught it, exclaiming in delight. ‘I got a letter!’