The Long Earth

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 the farmer who brought him into the hospital. The farmer protested to the police that the man had just stood there in the middle of the field, as if he’d never seen such a vehicle before, and the farmer had been unable to stop in time.
    ‘Despite the efforts of the hospital staff, Percy died of wounds from the collision. An ironic end! But not before one of the nurses who spoke English heard him say something like, “In the end I told the Russians that I wanted to go back, to see how the war was getting on. They were good lads, found me a way home. Good lads, loved singing. Very kind …” And so forth.
    ‘The fact that the man was wearing the remains of a British Army uniform and mentioned the word “Russians” raised sufficient security concerns to cause the gendarmerie to be called to investigate. Well, according to the British Legion, there was indeed a Percy Blakeney involved in the fighting on Vimy Ridge, who was reported missing after the opening bombardment. There appears to have been no attempt at an official explanation as to why his pay-book should show up decades later in the hands of a mysterious itinerant now buried in a graveyard in