Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 13

'Uh-oh.' Sam stood up.'Village of the d.a.m.ned, here we come.'

'Our Lady wishes to see you now,' said the girl, gazing with ill-concealed curiosity at the pair of them.

They allowed themselves to be led into the main body of the temple and here the jungle growth was, if anything, more rampant. As the ceiling grew domed and receded ever higher, they could see whole thick-boled trees blocking the view, their branches thrust up and sending out sprays of ma.s.sive, dripping leaves, which were stirring with unseen life.

Also, as Gila and Sam were taken to see their rescuer, they realised that the interior forested s.p.a.ce was full of children. They were peered at from between dark s.p.a.ces in the shrubberies and overrun groves. Those black eyes were everywhere, watching them with a stilled, frightened mirth.

'I take it back about Village of the d.a.m.ned,' said Sam.'It's Munchkin Land.'

Gila snapped,'I wish you wouldn't keep making offwortd references. How would you like it if I went nattering on about Ibn-Al-Nadim, or the Aja'ib ?'

'Sorry,' Sam said. It hadn't occurred to her that no one on Hyspero would have seenThe Wizard ofOz . She a.s.sumed everyone had seen it, or at least some other, region-specific version. In her recent travels she had taken to noticing the varying myths and tales and their common roots as they sprang out, seemingly independently in all times and places. The Doctor was a great fan of these congruencies in folklore - he said the native Chelonian version of Cinderella had to be seen to be believed.A thought struck her.'Hey,! know what theAja'ib is,' she said.

"The Doctor um... picked up a copy in the city. He can't put it down.'

Gila's look was dark. 'It is a wicked book.'

'Yeah?'

"The slaver who took me from my homeland said he was involved in its creation. Though theAja'ib is thousands of years old - the work of many, wicked hands through the years - it has great power, that text.'

'Well,' Sam said lightly. "The Doctor always likes a good, racy read.'

Then they came to a cramped clearing in which a table of green wrought iron had been laid with curious delicacies. There were slivers of soaked pink cake and a kind of sherry which was so old that, when Our Lady carefully poured some, it came out thick as liquid demerara sugar.

'Sit with me,' said Our Lady.'And tell me your story.'

Her voice was quite pleasant, welcoming, but Sam couldn't help staring at the perfect white of her face and hands as they worked. She thought that pale flesh had the whiteness of the grubs that fed under stones and rotten tree bark in the deepest, darkest recesses of the woods.

In the self-regarding, self-sufficient town of Fortalice, the travellers had found themselves hopelessly separated and under the influence of three distinct parties. The librarian, the Executioner and the nun. It was one of the many turning points in their journey. These disparate parties worked their influence upon the visitors, as they did upon all newcomers to that town. Tune was an irrelevance here, a toy, a peculiar, limiting construct that elsewhere held its subjects bound.

None of the four, however, forgot their quest for a moment. At the back of their minds, as they sought seclusion from the violence that was climaxing on the streets as the sun went down, they were all still aware of this basic urgency: to get back on the bus, to reunite, to get away and seek out their quarry. Iris repeated, like a mantra, the names of the remaining captives she needed to make elsewhere on this world: the Bearded lady, the Cyborg d.u.c.h.ess, the Mock Turtle. Somewhere, somewhere in the spread, fathomless, opalescent vastness of Hyspero these figures waited for her. First there was the influence of the Executioner, the librarian and the nun to escape.

The Executioner lectured her monotonously in his deathly, sepulchral tones, on his art, his infinitely various and ingenious methods of killing people. Torture was his pa.s.sion, his exquisite forte. There was little use for it in Fortalice, however - to torture visitors would prompt them to confess and to confess contraband knowledge, to spout their alien heresies and fictions, and that was precisely what the Executioner didn't want to hear. Torture was his private, exclusive vice, but he began always by slicing out the victims' tongues, to prevent unwanted babblings. No need for them to beg mercy, either, since he had none.

'Charming,' said Iris and listened, appalled as he went on to describe the apparatus on a platform in the town square which, at midnight, he would have her placed in and eviscerated for all to see. He described their forthcoming orgiastic glee at this sight, Iris blanched.'It's like a giant egg slicer!'

And like an egg, or the goose that laid the golden egg, she would be split open spectacularly, and they would scoop out her golden hearts in public, as the clock bonged out the midnight chimes. Iris was twin-hearted - double-yolked - and how pleased they would be at this discovery.

As the Executioner chuntered on and on about his specialist skills and the spiritual benefits of this kind of ritual offering, this obscure, heartless propitiation, Iris raised her eyes to the windows to stare at the darkening sky and prayed that the Doctor, wherever he was, would come and rescue her once again.

Chapter Thirteen.

Pulling Out Her Hearts

Nothing corresponded. He looked at chart after chart and nothing stayed the same. Whole mountain ranges, seas and deserts found themselves displaced, transplanted, pulled out of all shape like a bad piece of knitting in each successive map he examined. No two cartographers used the same methods, scales, signs and symbols. Nothing measured up. In each map Hyspero mutated into something quite different.

"The map-makers came from all over the world, all different eras,' said the now solicitous Gharib. Could the Doctor detect an undercurrent of irony in his tone? A surrept.i.tious: See? It's hopeless. No one can know Hyspero with any degree of accuracy. Best to ignore it, deny it, know only what you can know. The Doctor thought that the apparent confounding changeability of the rest of the world was what made the Fortaliceans so short-sighted. He was glimpsing the root cause of their incuriosity. Him, it only enticed.

Each map-maker had read the world and constructed it in his or her own baffling and partisan fas.h.i.+on. Features were exaggerated or occluded.

Some drew fabulously preposterous versions of the world that bore no resemblance to any other. Some maps were created by people who claimed to have travelled every inch of their breathtaking scope, and others boasted of never having left their armchairs.

The Doctor reduced the secret map room to a dreadful mess. It came to resemble his own, absent-mindedly chaotic work s.p.a.ces aboard his TARDIS. Unscrolled and frangible texts were scattered on each available surface as he, with unseemly haste, took in all of their details with those avid, blue-green eyes.

He was reminded of those maps he had seen of the Earth, when Australia was still the great unknown. Its edges were nibbled cautiously, etched in fine, distorted detail, and its central, unexplored heart was left to fill a full quarter of the world's s.p.a.ce. Ignorance let those blank.

s.p.a.ces aggrandise themselves - as on Gallifrey, where the timid, still superst.i.tious Time Lords a.s.sumed that the abandoned Death Zone was a far greater expanse than it truly was. The Doctor had been there, he knew (as did, curiously, Iris) that the Death Zone was actually no larger than North Wales. Far from being clear and pa.s.sionless renderings of facts, he knew that maps were expressions of fear, conquest, loathing, greed, imagination and unbounded curiosity.

Kestheven, the great wooded region south of here, appeared several times over as, variously, Kssven, Kest, Cha'vin, Kaastn, and Keeisht.

Over and over again it was embodied in drawings of monstrous bears and vicious-looking, b.l.o.o.d.y-beaked, predatory birds. The birds' beaks and the pelts of the bears were now and then painted in golden ink.

South of here. It was the best information he could glean from these questionable sources. One or two maps, the more ancient he could uncover, sketched in routes from the foothills, through verdant valleys.

He felt in his pockets for paper and a pencil. He found only the Aja'ib and set about sketching rough copies of the lines in the back flyleaf. Gharib was staggered. 'You have a book.'

The Doctor nodded, smiling. He'd forgotten how the Aja'ib might startle the keeper of the thousand and one Fortalicean volumes. 'And you are defacing it!'

'Nonsense,' said the Doctor, who was an inveterate underliner, a scribbler in margins, a very unpa.s.sive reader. Some of his oldest, most precious volumes in the TARDIS library were swamped by his commentaries from successive readings over the years. All of the Doctors had added their contributions - picking fights with the original author, then with each other as their various, hotly held opinions clashed and altered, To the Doctor his own books were the place his previous selves met in a busy, textual polyphony. All his books were dense palimpsests of gripes.

'What is that book?' asked Gharib, with unmistakable greed. The Doctor finished his rapid note-taking. 'You can't have it, I'm afraid. I've grown rather attached to this. It's a fat anthology - a kind of adventure story.

Perfect for lonely desert nights. Listen to this.' He flipped at random and started to read to Gharib, about the race of men built of molten silver, whose innards ran with mercury, who emerged from deep beneath the world's icy crust.

Instinctively the librarian covered his ears.'But where are the caveats?

Where does the book deny these things their existence? Where are the footnotes to disprove these outrageous a.s.sertions?'

'There aren't any,' said the Doctor. 'These things are just said and left at that. Let me find the bit about the vast white bird who roosts at the beginning of time...' He started to flick pages.

'You cannot be allowed to have this.' Nimbly the librarian s.n.a.t.c.hed the Aja'ib from his fingers.

'Ah,' said the Doctor, and s.n.a.t.c.hed it back. 'I hate lending out books.

They never come back.'

'It's a dangerous book in the wrong hands,' said Gharib.

'Mine are the right hands,' countered the Doctor in a conciliatory tone.

'I can't let you out of this building, taking a book of heresies out into the streets of Fortalice.'

'The Fortaliceans are rather more interested in beating each other up at the moment.'

The fl.u.s.tered librarian was putting away the maps, ramming them back any old how into drawers.'I should never have brought you here,' he said.

'I'll just be going, then,' said the Doctor.'You'll never know I'd been.'

'I can't,' gabbled Gharib.'I can't let you go if you don't leave that book behind.'

'I'm afraid I don't want to do that.'

'Then I'm sorry, Doctor,' said Gharib and, immediately, the room filled with a noxious green cloud. It came issuing, sinisterly, from the gaps between sheaves of paper on the shelves. Its effect was instantaneous.

As the Doctor fell to his knees, then toppled head first on to the flagstones, he was berating himself: what was the point of a respiratory bypa.s.s system if you didn't give yourself time to use it? Then he pa.s.sed out, next to Gharib, who had succeeded in ga.s.sing himself as well.

Torches had been lit, as had a number of pyres around the town square, and on to these were tipped the bodies of those killed in the afternoon's festivities. The sky was darkened further and impenetrably by the stinking smoke that plunged upward from the flames. A new, subdued mood took the battered, bleeding populace. They were too stunned to fight any more and they shambled into the dark to stand before the rough stage that had been set ready in front of the Executioner's house.

Under red and black cloths his apparatus lay waiting for the final ceremonials, and it was these that the townsfolk came to see.

The storm had not yet come. Clouds that were not all smoke gathered above the town, ama.s.sing themselves ponderously, as if waiting for some signal.

'Why do they fight each other?' Iris asked the Executioner. "What makes them do it?'

He shrugged as if he hadn't a care in the world. 'A simple trick. They have built up a year of neighbourly resentments. We need this fracas to get these out into the open. It would be a much less peaceful place without this chance to vent the collective spleen.'

Iris and the Executioner were in a small cell behind the platform, waiting like actors to emerge. She could see the crowd through the slatted wood, feel the heat of their flames, smell the blood and booze on them.

Curiously, she didn't feel scared. She was thinking about Mary, Queen of Scots, being led out to her death.And it wasn't the actual Mary she thought of, whom she'd seen at the time, looking rather wild and white; in Iris's memory Mary looked like Katherine Hepburn in the black-and-white film of the same name. Iris sighed. It was one of the hazards of her kind of travelling and seeing too many films; she was apt to mix up what she had seen, experienced, or even read. At any rate, she struggled to muster a queenly dignity and yet she couldn't seriously believe that this would be the end. She had faced this kind of hullabaloo before and survived it. Something or someone always turned up in the nick of time to save her. It wasn't in her nature to die in a stunted backwater like this.

Still... whatever form the distraction or rescue was going to take, it was certainly taking its time about it.

'It's almost time,' said the Executioner. They were in the wings, waiting for the audience to settle, to stop chatting and rattling sweet wrappers.'You ought to make your peace with whatever heretical deity you serve.'

Iris snorted in derision. Then she asked, 'You said you get the Fortaliceans to vent their spleen by means of a simple trick. What did you mean?'

'You expect me to disclose my means of crowd control?'

She nodded.'Oh yes.'

'It is with this.' He had a small device clipped to his belt buckle. It looked rather like a TV remote control. This didn't help Iris, who could never tell one remote from another. She liked the hands-on approach.

'What does it do?'

'It magnifies antagonisms. It enlarges upon the prevailing mood. It makes everyone in the vicinity temporarily mad. They see things that aren't there.'

'A very handy little object, then,' she said appraisingly.

He smiled at her grimly and she thought, If only he didn't try to act so tough and wear such horrible retro S-and-M gear, he wouldn't be too bad-looking. He said to her.'Don't even think it.'With that, he unclipped the device and placed it safely among a whole lot of grisly, unsavoury implements of torture that didn't even look like they'd been washed.

'Come on. Let's get you out there.You've got a public to face.'

Iris let herself be shoved out through a hatchway on to the platform. A cry went up from the crowd as she was glimpsed, shambling into view.

"This is all very interesting from an anthropological point of view," she was saying. 'Have you ever read the work of the French cultural historian Michel Foucault?'

The Executioner was checking ropes, hinges and springs. The cowled apparatus beside them looked distinctly unwelcoming.'No,' he snapped, reverting to his surly, public persona.

'Pity,' said Iris.'I think you'd enjoy what he has to say.'

'h.e.l.lo,' he said as he woke.'I'm the Doctor.'

He had a new captor, staring down at him.

The Doctor was used to this business of tumbling from one set of hands into another, this frying-pan-and-fire existence of his. When he woke and found himself strapped to a chair, the librarian Gharib similarly bound beside him, and the two of them on a balcony high atop the library building, he hardly turned a hair. The Doctor knew the advantages to be had from not letting his enemies see him knocked off his stroke.

And his enemy? Well, he wasn't sure what the fellow's intentions were yet. Give him the benefit of the doubt. However, the man confronting Gharib and the Doctor and watching them as they woke didn't look all that promising. He stood well over two meters tall, in flowing, high-collared robes, a turban wound ceremoniously on his head, the whole ensemble set off with brooches and scarabs. He had a fine, twirling moustache that the Doctor rather admired. He was also entirely transparent, glistening silver in the moonlight. When he moved there came a strangely calming chiming sound, like something carefully smoothing the lip of a gla.s.s. Their captor and his robes indeed appeared to be constructed of solid gla.s.s, and when he moved the light struck through him in a bewildering array of refractions and distortions.

'And can I ask who you are?' said the Doctor brightly.

When the man spoke his voice seemed to be coming up from the bottom of a well. The Doctor was intrigued - he had never met anyone made entirely of gla.s.s. He had once heard of a race of cats, gla.s.s all apart from their hearts, which could be seen quite plainly through their bodies, but for him, this was indeed a first.

The man said,'I am the Vizier.'

'The only one?'scoffed the Doctor.'I imagined that Hyspero would be overrun with Viziers. Why are you the definitive article?'

The Vizier curled a transparent lip. 'And you, then, are the only doctor?'

The Doctor smiled. Point taken.'I certainly hope so. Can I ask why you have bound us?'

Beside him Gharib was shaking in his quite elegant black shoes. "The Vizier only comes to check up on the very worst heresies.'

'We've had none of those round here,'said the Doctor glibly,'but if we hear of any, you'll be the first to -'

The Vizier sneered and produced the Aja'ib , which, presumably, he had taken from the Doctor's grasp while he had been unconscious.'You can't be allowed to run around with things like this, you know.'

'I don't believe in banning books. It's a vile business.'

'There are some things it is dangerous for the people to know.'

'I don't agree with you.'

"Then you come from a very permissive society.'