The Long Earth

and space, to wonder if he still had any legs on which to hang those boots. You could lose your legs and not know until the shock wore off, or so he had been told. It was like poor old Mac who never knew his feet had gone until he tried to stand up. He remembered walking around this forest, of course he did, but maybe that was all a dream as like as not, and maybe he was back in the mud and the blood after all.

And so he tried gingerly to pull himself upright, and was cheered by the realization that at least he appeared to have both hands. Shifting gently he moved his aching body until he could rise enough to see, yes, boots! Blessed boots! Apparently on legs that were probably his and, as a bonus, apparently still attached to him.

They could be treacherous, could boots, just like legs. Like the time when a forty-pounder hit a box of ammunition and he was part of the detail that had to go and sort things out. The sergeant had been a bit quiet, and uncharacteristically soothing when Percy was in distress because, even though he found a boot, lying in the churned-up mud, he couldn’t find a man’s leg to go with said boot. And the sergeant had said, patting Percy on the shoulder, ‘Well lad, seeing as he has no head either, I reckon he won’t notice, don’t you? Just stick to doing what I told you, lad: pay-books, watches, letters, anything that can identify the poor sods. And then stick ’em looking up over the top of the trench. Yes, lad, stick those dead bodies up there! They might take a bullet but, as sure as salvation, they won’t feel anything where they’ve gone, and there will be one bullet less for you or me. Good lad. Fancy a tot of rum? It’s the medicine for what ails you.’

So the discovery of feet, his own feet, still attached as per, exhilarated Private Percy, known to his chums as Pimple because when your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced ‘Black-knee’, and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn’t anything worse. He lay back again and must’ve dozed off for a while.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was still full daylight, and he was thirsty. He sat up. The Russians were still here, patiently watching. Looking at him almost kindly, through those furry faces, he thought.

Maybe his head was clearing, a bit. It occurred to him for the first time that he ought to have a good look at his kit.

He opened up his kit bag and emptied out the contents on the green ground. And he found that somebody had robbed him! His canteen had gone, his bayonet blade had gone, as had the blade of his entrenching tool. Come to that, his helmet was nowhere to be found; he didn’t remember having that when he woke up, although he did find the strap around his neck. Blimey, they’d even taken the aglets off his boots and the nails out of the heels! All the bits of steel. And what was very odd was that even though his canteen had gone, what was actually missing was the steel flask — there was the stitched-leather container lying on the grass, intact. But his pay-book was untouched, and nobody had bothered about the few pennies in his kit bag, and even the glass bottle containing his rum ration was still here. It must have been a funny sort of thief! And he still had his paints — but the metal box that had contained the little tubes had vanished. Not only that, somebody had even taken the trouble to unwrap the metal bands around the bristles of his paint brushes, so that the little bits of stubble were left lying at the bottom of the canvas bag. Why?

And what about his weapons? He checked the pistol at his belt. All that was left of that was the wooden stock. Again, why? Steal a pistol, yes, but you would have a devil of a job to use it without the stock. It made no sense. But then, what did? Where, on the western front, had good sense ever played a part?

The Russians watched, silent, apparently baffled by his fiddling about with all this stuff.

Memory came trickling back from whatever foxhole it had been hiding in.

Private Percy had been seconded to the camouflage corps after his leg wound. This was because, amazingly enough, the Army had recognized that he had once been a draftsman, and sometimes this Army who needed men who could hold a gun, and even more men who could take a bullet, also needed men who could wield a pencil, and select from God’s good rainbow just the right hue of paint to turn a Mark I tank into a harmless haystack, albeit with a wisp of smoke coming out of it if the lads were having a quick drag behind it. He’d been happy for the respite. And that was why he carried a paint box, for colour matching, and for bits of fine work after the usual application of daubs of camouflage green.

What else could he remember? The very last thing before the shelling? Oh yes, the sergeant roasting the new kid because he had one of those wretched Testaments that fitted into his breast pocket, the kind of thing mothers and sweethearts sent to the front in the hope that the holy words would keep their boys safe, and maybe, if words alone did not do the trick, then the gunmetal coating might achieve what mere faith could not. And Percy, packing up his gear to go on to the next job, remembered the sergeant was apoplectic, waving the offending article in front of the kid and screaming, ‘You bloody, bloody idiot, ain’t your bloody mother ever heard of shrapnel? There was a sapper once, a good lad, and a round hit his bloody iron Testament and it drove the living heart right out of his body, poor devil!’

And then he had been rudely interrupted by the shelling. Why had the red-faced kid and the sergeant disappeared into the incandescence of a bomb which hit only a little way away from Percy, who was now sitting here in this peaceful world, in the company of these friendly-looking Russians, and still managing to hear the wonderful birdsong? Deep inside, Percy knew he was never going to get answers to such questions.

Best not to ask, then.

The Russians, sitting there in the green, watched him patiently as he struggled to climb out of the black pit inside his head.

When the two Russian hunters returned, one of them was carrying a freshly killed deer, a big floppy animal, with apparent ease.

Having the carcass of a deer dropped right in front of him by a huge furry Russian might have perplexed a lesser man. But Private Percy’s brief adolescence as a poacher, and years of near malnutrition on the front line, combined firmly around one purpose. The butchery was a messy job without steel, but the button rod in his small pack was thin brass and helped a little, and so did smashing the bottle that had contained the last of his rum ration to make a few more cutting edges.

He was disconcerted by the way the Russians ate with their bare hands, and carefully picked out the creature’s guts and the lungs, what Percy had grown up calling the lights, and crammed them into their mouths, but he took the charitable view that the poor souls probably knew no better. He saw no steel, and certainly not any rifles, and that was odd. After all, the Russians had come to fight alongside the English, yes? Surely they would have had guns of some sort, because what was a soldier without a weapon?

Light dawned, for Private Percy. Of course, some might say that he was a deserter, although heaven only knew what had really happened to him. Maybe these Russians were deserters. They had surely flung their weapons away and kept only their enormous hairy greatcoats. And if that was so, why should Percy worry? That was their business, and the Czar’s.

So he took a venison steak for himself, diplomatically walked away to avoid staring at the Russians’ table manners, found some dry grass, pulled some dried twigs off some half-rotted branches of a fallen tree, and used one more precious lucifer to light another fire.

Five minutes later, as the steak cooked, they were sitting around him as if he had become King himself.

And later, when they walked away with him, singing as they went, he regaled them with every music-hall song he knew.

22

‘HOW DO YOU KNOW all this, Lobsang?’

‘About Private Percy? Mostly from that chronicle of the unexplained, the Fortean Times. The December 1970 issue recounted the story of an elderly man wearing antiquated British battledress being admitted to a French hospital some years before. He appeared to be trying to communicate by whistling. According to the British Army pay-book still in his blouse he was Private Percy Blakeney of a Kent regiment, recorded as missing in action after the battle of Vimy Ridge. Nevertheless, he appeared well nourished and in good, if somewhat puzzled spirits — although severely injured, having been run over by the tractor driven by