“Yes!” Mandy’s buttery round face lighted up, but Jem glanced at Mam. Mam looked as if she wanted to kick Uncle Joe under the counter for a second, but then she glanced down at Mandy and her face went all soft.
“All right,” she said, and Jem felt a fluttery, excited sort of feeling in his middle. Mam was telling Uncle Joe how far the school was, but Jem wasn’t paying attention. They were going to do it. They were really going to do it!
Because the only reason Mam would let Mandy eat Pop-Tarts without a fuss was because she figured she’d never get to eat another one.
“Can I have one, too, Uncle Joe?” he asked. “I like the blueberry ones.”
THE WALL
HADRIAN’S WALL looked very much as Roger recalled it from a long-ago school trip. A huge thing, standing nearly fifteen feet high and eight feet wide, double stone walls filled with rubble in between, winding off into the distance.
The people were not that much different, either—at least in terms of speech and livelihood. They raised cattle and goats, and the Northumberland dialect had apparently not developed much since Geoffrey Chaucer’s time. Roger and Buck’s Highland accents elicited slit-eyed looks of suspicious incomprehension, and they were for the most part reduced to basic gestures and sign language in order to obtain food and—occasionally—shelter.
With a bit of trial and error, Roger did work out an approximate Middle English for “Hast come here a stranger?” From the looks of the place—and the looks he and Buck were getting—he would have said the contingency was remote, and so it proved. Three days of walking, and they were still plainly the strangest men anyone near the wall had ever seen.
“Surely a man dressed in RAF uniform would look even more peculiar than we do?” he said to Buck.
“He would,” Buck replied logically, “if he was still wearing it.”
Roger grunted in chagrin. He hadn’t thought of the possibility that Jerry might have discarded his uniform on purpose—or been deprived of it by whomever came across him first.
It was on the fourth day—the wall itself had rather surprisingly changed, being no longer built of stone and rubble but of stacked turves—that they met a man wearing Jerry MacKenzie’s flight jacket.
The man was standing at the edge of a half-plowed field, staring morosely into the distance, apparently with nothing on his mind save his hair. Roger froze, hand on Buck’s arm, compelling him to look.
“Jesus,” Buck whispered, grabbing Roger’s hand. “I didn’t believe it. That’s it! Isn’t it?” he asked, turning to Roger, brows raised. “I mean—the way ye described it . . .”
“Yes. It is.” Roger felt his throat tighten with excitement—and fear. But there was only the one thing to be done, regardless, and, dropping Buck’s hand, he forged through the dead grass and scattered rock toward the farmer, if that’s what he was.
The man heard them coming and turned casually—then stiffened, seeing them, and looked wildly round for help.
“Eevis!” he shouted, or so Roger thought. Looking over his shoulder, Roger saw the stone walls of a house, evidently built into the wall.
“Put up your hands,” Roger said to Buck, throwing up his own, palm out, to show his lack of threat. They advanced slowly, hands up, and the farmer stood his ground, though watching them as though they might explode if they got too close.
Roger smiled at the man and elbowed Buck in the ribs to make him do likewise.
“Gud morn,” he said clearly and carefully. “Hast cum a stranger here?” He pointed to his own coat—and then to the flight jacket. His heart was thumping hard; he wanted to knock the man over and strip it off his back, but that wouldn’t do.
“Naow!” said the man quickly, backing away, holding on to the edges of the jacket. “Begone!”
“We mean ye no harm, daftie,” Buck said, in as conciliating a tone as he could manage. He patted the air in a soothing manner. “Kenst du dee mann . . . ?”
“What the bloody hell is that?” Roger asked, out of the side of his mouth. “Ancient Norse?”
“I don’t know, but I heard an Orkneyman say it once. It means—”
“I can tell what it means. Does this look like Orkney to you?”
“No. But if you can tell what it means, maybe he can, too, aye?”
“Naow!” the man repeated, and bellowed, “EEVIS!” again. He began to back away from them.
“Wait!” said Roger. “Look.” He fumbled quickly in his pocket and withdrew the little oilcloth packet holding his father’s identity disks. He pulled them out, dangling them in the chilly breeze. “See? Where is the man who wore these?”
The farmer’s eyes bulged, and he turned and ran clumsily, his clogs hindering him through the clods of the field, shouting, “Eevis! Hellup!” and several other, less comprehensible things.
“Do we want to wait for Eevis to turn up?” Buck said, shifting uneasily. “He may not be friendly.”
“Yes, we do,” Roger said firmly. The blood was high in his chest and face, and he flexed his hands nervously. Close. They were so close—and yet . . . his spirits went from exhilaration to plunging fear and back within seconds. It hadn’t escaped him that there was a strong possibility that Jerry MacKenzie had been killed for that jacket—a possibility that seemed much more likely in view of their interlocutor’s precipitate flight.
The man had disappeared into a windbreak of small trees, beyond which some sheds were visible. Perhaps Eevis was a stockman or dairyman?