Crow Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

were he was lying unconscious somewhere and all this . . . he stared in wide-eyed amazement at his surroundings in all their incredible complexity – all this was probably some kind of dream he was having while they fixed him up. He couldn’t help thinking about Kane, the hero of Timeslyp , bursting through a doorway to find himself in an unfamiliar world. Maybe that idea had somehow wormed its way into his mind.
    Either that or he’d time-travelled back to the seventeenth century. And there was no way that could have happened. Was there?
    Meanwhile, it was hard to concentrate, because at every few steps there was some amazing new thing to grab his attention. Here, in the entrance to what must have been a butcher’s shop, a pig was strung up by its back legs and a couple of men were removing its guts and heaping them into a series of metal buckets. Blood slopped over the edges and ran down the centre of the already filthy street. There, out on the cobbles, a man with a soaped-up face was sitting in a barber’s chair while another man wearing a white wig shaved him with a cut-throat razor.
    â€˜Gardez Loo!’ shouted a voice from up above and an instant later a bucket of foul-smelling slops hurtled down from a balcony and struck the cobbled street, splashing in all directions. An old man who had failed to step back in time shook his fist at the woman who had emptied the bucket, an odd-looking creature with a white painted face and rouged cheeks. She was leaning over the balcony and laughing openly at his predicament, displaying quite a bit of cleavage as she did so. Tom tried not to stare. He moved on, taking more notice of where he was walking and he saw that, though the sewage was mostly dry and baked by the sun, a sluggish trickle of wet stuff still coursed its way along the middle of the street and his shoes were already plastered with evil-smelling muck. Mum was going to be delighted when he got home. If he got home . . .
    â€˜Where are we going?’ he asked Morag and she shot him a funny look.
    â€˜ I’m going to Missie Grierson’s,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where you’re going.’
    â€˜I’m . . . I’m going there too,’ he told her, quickly.
    â€˜Why? Are you an orphan?’ she asked him.
    He thought for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sure. Sort of.’
    â€˜How can you be ‘sort of’ an orphan?’ she asked him. She didn’t get an answer so she went on. ‘You talk funny,’ she observed. ‘You dress funny too. What’s that red coat you’re wearing?’
    â€˜It’s just a school uniform,’ said Tom defensively.
    â€˜You go to school ?’ Morag seemed impressed at this.
    â€˜Sure. Doesn’t everyone?’
    Morag laughed, as though he’d made a joke, but he couldn’t see anything remotely funny about what he’d said. ‘And the voice?’ she prompted him.
    â€˜Oh, I’m from Manchester.’ She looked at him blankly as though he’d said he was from Mars. ‘You’ve heard of Manchester, right?’ He tried to think of something that might be familiar to her. ‘Manchester United?’ he ventured. ‘You know, the football team?’
    He might as well have been talking in a foreign language.
    â€˜Are you a Sassenach ?’ she asked him and he frowned, nodded. He was pretty sure he knew what that word meant. A blow-in. An outsider. The kids at his school didn’t use the word, but it was how they saw him.
    Now Tom and Morag were pushing their way through some kind of outdoor market, grubby little wooden buildings with thatched roofs, where men and women stood shouting at the passers-by to come and taste their produce. ‘Mutton pie!’ one man was shouting. ‘Finest in Edinburgh, who’ll try my wares?’ But nobody seemed interested in pies today. ‘Fresh fruit!’ shouted an odd-looking woman with a