The Peacock Cloak

time they got to the front of the queue and Thomas and Jenny, nauseated by the stink, had both vomited out of the windows. The spotty-faced soldier ordered all three of them to get out so they could be searched.
    “Holy Joseph!” he exclaimed in Brythonic as Doreen climbed unsteadily out. “The old bag has shit herself!”
    The other Logrians laughed.
    Thomas knew the best thing for everyone would be if he could contain himself – Doreen didn’t understand Brythonic after all and had no idea what had just been said about her – but his nerves were at breaking point.
    “That’s my mother you’re talking about, you cruel, rude little boy!”
    Immediately the soldier swung up his rifle and hit Thomas round the head with the barrel.
    “Who are you calling a boy you Saxon arsehole!”
    Thomas was momentarily dazed. Everything moved in slow motion and seemed very far away… and he remembered the strange sensation that he had had in the classroom a few days previously.
    This particular world, he realised, this particular England, this particular history, was just one of many that he’d passed through. It wasn’t real, or not real in the sense that all these people around him, English and Logrian, thought it was. Even the people weren’t real in the way they thought they were.
    A spotty young boy from one imaginary nation had just struck a cautious old school teacher from another imaginary nation that happened to occupy the same space . The schoolteacher was Thomas Turner, aged 52 and born a few miles away in Sutton, Cambridgeshire. The soldier (Thomas didn’t ask himself how he knew) was Private Salvador Galego, aged 19, born in Madrid to a schoolteacher mother and a father who was a minister in the Spanish Brythonic Church.
    “Tom?” Jenny called to him, fearful and yet somehow resentful too. “What are you doing?”
    There was a lark high above them, Tom suddenly noticed. Through all of this, its strange, rapid, angular little song went on and on. Thomas peered upward, trying to find the little bird. But it was hiding in the white hot sun.
    “Yes, I’m fine. As a matter of fact I’m just trying to spot the lark.”
    Salvador Galego, the acne-faced soldier, didn’t have enough English to understand what Thomas was saying, but he was unnerved by Thomas’ apparent indifference to the situation in hand. It seemed to him subversive.
    “Get back in the car Saxon!” he shouted at Thomas. “And take that stinking old woman away from here.”
    The lark went on singing in the sun. Thomas considered the anger of the Logrian soldier with interest. Then his attention became drawn to a certain loud high-pitched sound coming from nearby. It was a frail old woman called Doreen who had no idea where she was or who the foreigners with guns were that had just hit her son round the face. After a moment he remembered that she was his mother and that the weary grey woman with her was his wife.
    “It’s all right mum,” he said, smiling at her. “It’s all all right. Get back in the car and we’ll have you sorted out in no time.”
    He noticed a chill on his cheek, touched it and looked down in surpise at the redness on his hand.

    When Jenny and Thomas finally got home that night, their son William was in the front room playing video games with Harry Duckett. Doreen was to stay the night with them and Thomas helped Jenny to get her bathed and calmed down and tucked up in bed. Then he went to the kitchen and heated up the pasta that Willam had made for them two hours previously. Harry followed him.
    “How did you get that mark on your face?” he demanded.
    He was like his father. In any other area of life the Ducketts would be the first to forgive a wrong done to them. But when it came to the Brythons, they were implacable. They never let it rest.
    “It was the soldiers, wasn’t it?” Harry persisted. “One of them at the checkpoint hit you.”
    “It was my own fault really.”
    “What do you mean your own fault?”
    “Well, I…”
    “Did you attack him?”
    “No, but I called him a silly boy.”
    “Good for you. This is our land. You’ve lived here all your life. So did your father and your grandfather before you.”
    Thomas laid cutlery on the table for Jenny and himself.
    “I’m rather tired, Harry. I’m sure you’re right. But I’d prefer just to forget it now if you don’t mind.”
    “But that’s all wrong! You can’t just forget it or they’ll have beaten us. You might as well