Doctor Who_ Byzantium! Part 10

Somewhere nearby, people were being called to prayer. Had it only been a day since she and Ian had observed the same process with the detached curiosity of travellers about to embark on their way, never to see such a thing again?

It had.

The wailing cry of the priest reminded her of a dog in considerable pain.

She shook her head. Life is too cynical, too critical, she thought angrily to herself. Get over your prejudices and your stupid. outdated twentieth-century ideas of right and wrong and make the best of what you've got.

Now.

'Things must change,' she said in a whisper.

She looked again at the sunrise and found it not to be disappointing, but rather miraculous. Get used to that, too, she noted. It might be the view that you wake to every day for the rest of your life.

From somewhere downstairs she heard voices. Raised and agitated. The Barbara Wright who had taught at Coal Hill School would have cowered under her bedclothes rather than face whatever potentially embarra.s.sing situation she was about to walk into, but Barbara had already changed in the year or more that she and Ian had travelled with the Doctor.

She had grown more a.s.sertive, more willing to face whatever life had to offer head-on, and confront its delicious ironies and capricious dangers. So she trooped down the stairs to Hieronymous's living room and found herself in a scene from a particularly melodramatic episode of The Grove Family. The Grove Family.

Hieronymous was in the middle of a heated argument with a strikingly beautiful young woman in her early twenties with lengthy jet-black hair and skin like porcelain. The pair seemed not to have seen Barbara who froze at the foot of the stone steps, hardly daring to breathe.

'What treasons can be committed?' Hieronymous asked.

'No wrongdoing shall come to pa.s.s within this my house.'

The woman threw up her hands in exasperation. 'You are blinded by a pretty face, good father. And by loneliness. I do not trust this gentile gentile woman. You are breaking each and every one of the very rules that you always instilled in me.' woman. You are breaking each and every one of the very rules that you always instilled in me.'

The priest laughed. 'You were reticent to learn them, my heart. You only accepted them at the point of a stick.'

'That is as maybe,' said the young woman, with a half-hearted smile. She moved forward and grabbed the old man's hands in her own. Standing next to him. they were almost a comical sight with the woman dwarfed by her father's bulky frame. 'Trust no one except family,' she said pointedly. 'Those were the words that you always intoned.

And after a hundred beatings, I firmly believed them. And now, this...'

I sense no evil ways in the woman,' Hieronymous noted.

At this point, Barbara decided that valour was the better part of dissection and coughed, loudly. Two heads snapped simultaneously in her direction. 'Good morning,' she said with a practised and charming smile. 'I think it would be better for all concerned if I leave this house immediately.'

A long silence followed as Barbara waited for some reaction to her dramatic little piece of good manners.

It was broken only by the continued and distant call to prayers.

Finally, it was the woman who spoke. 'No,' she said in a flat, monotonous, almost-rehea.r.s.ed voice. 'It is I who shall leave. Immediately.'

She turned and headed for the door.

'Gabrielle,' said Hieronymous in a small, cracked, slightly pathetic voice. 'You will return this evening?'

'Perhaps,' she said enigmatically, closing the door behind her.

Oh dear,' Barbara noted. 'This is bad, bad, bad...'

Hieronymous didn't say anything. Barbara noticed that the old man was crying. Resisting every urge in her body, Barbara turned her back on the priest and began to walk up the stairs. She got halfway before her heart broke in two and she ran back down to him 'Walk with me in the garden,' Hieronymous asked.

Barbara nodded and gently led the priest, his shoulders hunched with pain and guilt, to the door. 'I'm a good listener,'

she said, then instantly regretted it as Hieronymous gave her a look of infinite displeasure. That was like a pick-up line used by every good-time girl in every sleazy bar in Soho, she reflected. 'I'm sorry,' she continued. 'I simply meant that if you need a sympathetic ear...'

'My daughter has never recovered from the death of her mother,' Hieronymous said as they entered the oasis of the temple gardens. Rich, green and verdant, life seemed to abound and flourish here, within five miles of a dust-bowl, bone-dry desert. The magical colours of the flowers and shrubs briefly startled Barbara. Hieronymous said something but she wasn't concentrating on him. So much for being a sympathetic ear, she berated herself, and said, 'I'm desperately sorry, what was that?'

Hieronymous looked sheepish and embarra.s.sed, as though what he had just said had required a great deal of courage to get it out first time around and he wasn't looking forward to a repeat performance. It is about your friends,' he stammered. He stopped, turned and held Barbara by the shoulders. 'Be strong, woman, and have faith in the Lord when I tell you that over one hundred and sixty men, women and children died in the midst of the ma.s.sacre in the market-place yesterday. The overwhelming evidence suggests that your friends were among them.'

He stopped and looked crestfallen.

Barbara accepted this news stoically. 'Life goes on,' she said, reflecting that now was not the time to grieve. 'And we, however reluctantly, have to go on with it.'

When Georgiadis and Evangeline awoke a sleepy Vicki to give her similar news, she was distraught.

'Well, thanks for sharing that,' that,' she said tearfully and got back into bed, pulling the rough hessian blanket over her head. she said tearfully and got back into bed, pulling the rough hessian blanket over her head.

Gently Evangeline pulled the blanket back down and Vicki emerged, blinking, into the light like a small animal after hibernation. 'Let your tears flow like the river, little one,' said the woman, putting an arm. around Vicki's trembling shoulders. 'The pain will get so much worse before it, eventually, gets better. Embrace the pain; for a while it may be your only friend.'

Strange advice, reflected Vicki in a moment of clarity amidst the horror of her situation. The Doctor was dead. Ian was dead Barbara... Poor Barbara.

'I have nothing left to live for,' Vicki said with a eye for the heightened drama of the situation. Curiously, what she really felt was utterly hollow. She was sad, of course. Her companions were the nearest thing that she'd had to a family since her father's death on Dido. But she was used to being alone. It wasn't the end of the world.

It was only the enormity of her own personal predicament that truly upset her. Without the TARDIS, she was stuck.

Here.

'Life is bigger than you, little one,' Evangeline said in a voice that reminded Vicki of her dead mother.

The a.s.sociation set off a chain reaction, like a dam being breached. As Vicki began to cry, huge choking sobs of regret and sorrow, a free-form melange of imagery and memories came flooding out with it. 'I was eleven when my mother died,' she said. 'She was going to call me Tanni, she always said, but daddy preferred the name Vicki so I was stuck with it... It's a stupid name, don't you think?'

Georgiadis gave his wife a look of concern, but Evangeline shook her head. 'Go on, angel, tell me what your heart feels.'

'Alone,' said Vicki, tearfully. 'Alone and afraid. I'm so scared.'

The Greek woman nodded wisely and sat on the bed, hugging Vicki close to her. 'My own parents were murdered when I was no more than a girl. Younger than you. I survived by my wits and the true kindness of others. And because you have to. Life is bigger than you, and you are not me. We are all unique, individual.'

Vicki clung to Evangeline as the woman gently rocked her back and forth. 'Ask for a shoulder to cry on, you get a philosopher,' she muttered.

'Your aunt and uncle meant the world to you?'

'Yes,' said Vicki, fighting back the tears. 'Literally. And the Doctor... They saved me from certain death.'

'Family does that,' Georgiadis said quickly, feeling somewhat left out. 'We shall be your family now.'

Evangeline brushed the wet hair from Vicki's eyes. 'Hush, little one. You have learned a harsh lesson this day. But you shall survive it.'

Some hours later, Vicki emerged sleepily from her bed to the smell of cooking. She found Evangeline up to her elbows in a huge stone pot mixing some sort of vegetable stew. It didn't look particularly appetising to Vicki, but the aroma, after a day of having eaten nothing at all, was enticing enough.

'Smells nice,' she said in a croaky whisper. Her throat felt salty and tasted of the pain of loss.

Evangeline nodded and tapped the side of the pot with the wooden spoon she was using to stir the brew. 'I had to find the biggest one that we possess. I am cooking for four mouths now.'

Suddenly, the vastness of the change in this family's life hit Vicki. There they were, perfectly balanced and static in their own narrow lives and along comes a helpless orphan who...

'Thank you,' she said, as the tears started again. 'Thank you for taking me into your home. I really appreciate it.

Sometimes, it might not seem like I do, but I do.'

Vicki ran to the door and stood, crying, on the threshold, looking out at the cobbled curved street where the Greek family lived. This was her new world and, grateful as she was to have shelter and food and a good chance of survival, she silently cursed that they had ever come to Byzantium.

Ian Chesterton had hardly slept either, though for vastly different reasons. Finding himself escorted to the Villa Villa Praefectus Praefectus by Drusus and having been given impressively lavish quarters. Ian was just settling down for the night when there was a soft but impatient knock on his chamber door. by Drusus and having been given impressively lavish quarters. Ian was just settling down for the night when there was a soft but impatient knock on his chamber door.

And, before he had a chance to offer entrance, he was treated to the arrival of a middle-aged woman in a white silken dress with her hair piled up on her head in a towering bouffant She saw Ian lying naked in bed and her eyes widened.

'So, you are the Briton?' she asked, l.u.s.tfully. 'Your arrival has caused something of a stir within this house.'

'Bad news travels fast,' Ian noted. 'Madam, it would seem that you have me at something of a disadvantage...'

The woman seemed to consider this for an age. 'I am the lady Jocelyn, the wife of the praefectus,' praefectus,' she said at last. 'And I am here for the sole purpose of seducing you.' she said at last. 'And I am here for the sole purpose of seducing you.'

'Oh,' said Ian, matter-of-factly. 'That's nice.' He paused as the directness of her approach sank deeper. 'It's not that I'm ungrateful, or anything, I'm truly flattered, but...'

Joceyln inclined her head to one side, smiled, and then threw herself onto the bed at Ian's feet and began to crawl towards him.

Chesterton leapt from the bed like a scalded cat, almost falling as his legs entangled themselves in the bedding. He grabbed a robe as he freed himself and cowered in the corner, dressing, whilst the woman watched him with a look that was touching the torrid. 'It would,' Ian said, covering his dignity with some haste, 'be unseemly for a guest to take advantage of his host's hospitality before proper introductions had even been made. You understand, of course?'

'Humph,' Jocelyn seemed to have become bored by the chase. She rolled off the bed and moved towards the door before looking over her shoulder and giving Ian an ice-cold stare. 'I usually get what I want,' she said, flatly.

Oh, I'll bet you do, missus,' Chesterton muttered as he scuttled after her and closed the door, standing with his back pressed against it for several moments before he finally went back to bed. He sat upright, s.h.i.+vering despite the balmy night heat. 'This place is worse than Notting Hill Gate,' he noted before drifting into a fitful sleep.

He awoke shortly before dawn and lay for a while, stroking his memories. 'I've got all sleep's secrets hidden in my bag,'

he muttered, smiling at the pleasant, warm touch of the slowly rising sun on his arm, banis.h.i.+ng the gooseflesh. Then the bedroom door opened again and Ian closed his eyes with a groan of disappointment. Would this awful woman never take a simple no for an answer?

Thinking lurid thoughts, he opened his eyes to find not the expected, unattractive n.o.blewoman looking for a bit of rough, but a girl in her late teens, dressed in a short, white, and delightful one-piece dress and carrying a bowl of scented fruit.

'Smells like a tart's boudoir,' Ian offered, sitting up and exposing his bare chest again. The girl's eyes widened just as the lady Jocelyn's had earlier. 'Good morning,' Ian said brightly, covering himself with a silken sheet. 'I'm Ian, how do you do?'

The girl giggled, flirtatiously, and laid the fruit on a small table at the foot of the bed.

'I am Felicia, handmaiden to my lady Jocelyn: 'We've met,' Ian noted, bluntly, and the girl had to place a hand over her mouth to stifle the giggles that followed. Ian didn't like the nuances of Felicia's amus.e.m.e.nt one little bit.

Too coquettish, by half. Good gracious, did n.o.body in this household think about anything other than s.e.x? 'Could you possibly inform housemaster Drusus that I'm awake? I have a few questions that I'd like answered.'

Felicia nodded, though she hovered for a long and lingering moment, tugging at the hem of her skirt in an act of open provocation that Ian had seen a thousand times in a thousand crush-driven schoolgirls.

'Now, please,' he continued with a slow-and-measured voice that tried not to give away how unnerved he was by the whole encounter. 'I'd hate you to get into trouble.' please,' he continued with a slow-and-measured voice that tried not to give away how unnerved he was by the whole encounter. 'I'd hate you to get into trouble.'

Almost comically, Felicia seemed torn between throwing herself onto Ian, pinning him to the bed with her shapely thighs and making wild and pa.s.sionate love to him until he begged her for more, and obeying his commands without question. Ian felt a bit sorry for her, but rejection was rejection, probably not something that the women of this villa had encountered a great deal of. Even the slaves, seemingly, got what they were after. 'Hurry,' he shouted, and Felicia ran from the room, her face a picture of scowling disappointment.

Briefly, Ian wondered why he had suddenly become a magnet for every woman in Byzantium. 'Looked in the mirror lately, pal?' he asked aloud, as he puffed out his chest and let his pride swell significantly. 'Nice work if you can get it,' he mused as he dressed, ready to face whatever else this place had to offer.

Drusus and Erastus were eating a breakfast of bread and cheese when Ian was shown into the servants' mezzanine, overlooking the main hallway of the Villa Praefectus. Villa Praefectus. It was clear that both men had been discussing Ian, from the sudden silence that accompanied his arrival. It was clear that both men had been discussing Ian, from the sudden silence that accompanied his arrival.

'Thank you,' Ian told the young serving boy who had brought him to Drusus. He sat, without being asked, beside the housemaster and the cadet trainer and smiled at both men. 'Lovely morning for it,' he noted.

'For what?' asked Erastus with an irritated snarl.

Oh, a bit of this and that, you know? Ducking and diving.'

Drusus attempted to change the subject but Ian brought him to a juddering halt.