The Long Earth (16 page)

He heard the voice of Lobsang. ‘Excellent! I can’t say that this is what I expected, but it is most certainly what I had hoped for. By the way it would be appropriate if you gave them something of yours.’

The previous keeper of the magnificent fish was beaming encouragingly at Joshua.

‘Well, I’ve got my glass knife, but somehow I don’t think this guy ever needs a knife.’ He hesitated, feeling awkward. ‘And it
is
my knife, I knapped it myself from a bit of imported obsidian.’ A gift from somebody whose life he had saved. ‘Been with me a long time.’

Lobsang said impatiently, ‘Consider the following. A little while ago you were expecting to be viciously attacked, yes? And now we have the obvious point that it was
his
fish and
he
gave it to
you
. I suspect the act of giving is more important than the gift here. Should you feel naked without a weapon, please do help yourself later to one of the laminated knives in the armoury, OK? But right now,
give him the knife
.’

Angry, mostly at himself, Joshua said, ‘I didn’t even know we had an armoury!’

‘We live and we learn, my friend, and be grateful that you still have the chance to do both. A gift has a worth that has little to do with any currency. Hand it over with a cheerful smile for the cameras, Joshua, because you are making history: first contact with an alien species, albeit one which has had the decency to have evolved on Earth.’

Joshua presented his beloved knife to the creature. The knife was taken with extravagant care, held up to the light, admired, had its blade gingerly tested. Then there was a cacophony in his headset that sounded like bowling balls in a cement mixer.

After a few seconds this mercifully stopped, to be replaced by Lobsang’s cheerful voice. ‘Interesting! They sing to you using the frequencies that we think of as normal, while among themselves they appear to communicate in ultrasonics. What you heard was my attempt to translate the ultrasound conversation down to a range that a human could perceive, if not understand.’

And then, in an instant, they were gone. There was nothing to show that the creatures had been there, apart from very large footprints in the snow, already being filled in by the blizzard. And, of course, the salmon.

Back on the ship Joshua dutifully put the huge fish in the galley’s refrigerator. Then, cradling a coffee, he sat in the lounge outside the galley, and said to the air: ‘I want to speak to you, Lobsang. Not to a voice in the air. A face I can punch.’

‘I can see you are annoyed. But I can assure you that you were never in any danger. And as you must have guessed you are not the first person to have met these creatures. I have a strong hypothesis that the first person who did meet them thought they were Russians …’

And Lobsang told Joshua the story of Private Percy Blakeney, as reconstructed from notes found in his diary, and comments he made to a very surprised nurse in the hospital in Datum France where he was taken after appearing there suddenly in the 1960s.

21

FOR PRIVATE PERCY
, faced by his row of impassive singing strangers in the green of his unsmashed forest, the penny had quickly dropped.

Of course! They had to be Russians! The Russians were in the war now, weren’t they? And hadn’t there been a copy of
Punch
magazine passed around in the trenches which showed Russians looking, yes, just like bears?

His granddad, who had been a Percy too, had once been taken prisoner in the Crimea, and he was always ready to talk about the Russians to an attentive boy. ‘Stank, they did, lad, dirty sods to a man, savages to my mind, and some of them from God knows where in the wilds, well, I’ve never seen the like! So much fur, and beards a man could keep a goat in, except I would warrant the goat would leap out straight away being particular about the company it kept. But they could sing, lad, stinking though they was, they could sing, better than the Welsh, oh yes,
they
could sing! But if you hadn’t been told, you would have thought they were animals.’

Now Percy looked at the row of hairy, emotionless, but not particularly hostile faces, and said boldly, ‘Me English Tommy, yes? On your side! Long live the Czar!’

This won some polite attention, with the hairy men looking at one another.

Maybe they wanted another song. After all, hadn’t his mother told him that music was the universal language? And at least they weren’t imprisoning him, or shooting him, or suchlike. So he gave
them
a resounding chorus of ‘Tipperary’, and finished by saluting and crying, ‘God save the King!’

Whereupon the Russians surprised him by waving their heavy great hands in the air and booming ‘God save the King!’ with considerable enthusiasm, their voices sounding like men shouting into a tunnel. Then they put their shaggy heads together as if reaching a conclusion, and once again broke into ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.

Only this wasn’t the same kit bag and nor were they the same troubles. Private Percy tried hard to understand what he was listening to. Oh, yes, the song was there, but they sang it like a Sunday choir. Somehow the singers took his song apart so that it gained a strange life of its own, harmonies that broke and twisted into one another like mating eels and then came apart again in another bubble-rush of sound, and yet it was still good old ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. No, it was a better ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, it was more, well,
there
, more real. Private Percy had never heard music like it, and clapped his hands, and so did the Russians with a sound like heavy artillery. They clapped as enthusiastically as they sang, possibly more so.

And now it occurred to Percy that last night’s crayfish had been more of a snack than a meal. Well, if these Russians were his friends, then maybe they had some Russian rations to share? They looked bulky enough under those furry greatcoats. It had to be worth a try, so Percy rubbed his stomach, poked his finger suggestively in his mouth and looked hopeful.

After their singing, again they huddled amongst themselves, and the only sounds he could make out were whispers as faint as a gnat, that tiny annoying whine that keeps you awake at night. However, once they had reached some sort of accord, they burst into song again. This time it was whistles and trills, very much like impressions of birds, and good impressions at that, a touch of nightingale, a hint of starling, birdsong that flowed like the best dawn chorus he had ever heard. Still, somehow he got the
impression
that they were talking, or rather singing, about
him
.

Then one of them walked closer to him, watched carefully by the others, and sang, in the voice of Percy, ‘Tipperary’ perfectly all the way through, and it was
his own voice
, he was certain, his mother would have known it.

After that a couple of Russians disappeared into the woods, leaving the rest sitting around Percy placidly.

When Percy sat on the ground with the Russians, waves of tiredness suddenly washed over him. He’d had years of war and not even a day of this peaceful green, and maybe he deserved a little nap. So he drank a few scoops of water from the river and, despite the presence of the hairy Russians all around him, lay down on the grass and closed his eyes.

He surfaced only slowly from his nap.

Private Percy was a practical and methodical young man. And therefore, still lying in the grass, he decided, in this waking dream, not to worry about these Russians, as long as the Russians weren’t trying to kill him. Save your worrying for your boots, boys, the veterans always said.

Boots! So his sleepy brain reminded him. They were the thing! Look after your boots and your boots would look after you! He had always spent a lot of time thinking about his boots.

At this point it occurred to Private Percy, waking slowly, still somewhat battered by his war and adrift in time 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 draughtsman, 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.