Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 16

Gila saw that she was awake.

'Don't frighten it,' he told Sam.

She kept still.'What... who is it?'

'It is part of one of those we are looking for,' he breathed. 'She knows we are coming. These are the hands of the d.u.c.h.ess.'

To Sam they looked as if they were beckoning them ever on in their quest. But the inscrutable hands could just as easily be warning them, and holding them off.

All through the night she kept her foot on the pedal. At last they had left Fortalice far behind and the rain lashed down as they cleared the foothills. Iris drove grimly, hunched over the wheel, allowing herself to calm down gradually, letting her hearts beat at their accustomed rate.

She was trying to fight that ever-present nausea, the blackness at the edges of her vision that were threatening to overwhelm her. The Doctor had heaved himself on to a settee and fallen into a deep sleep.

The roads here were rough and looked as if they had been unused for centuries. It took a fair amount of concentration to keep the bus safely intact as they bounced and crashed through the remains of the storm.

She drove all night and, at the end of it, when day poked cautiously into view, the storm had spent itself and she found that they were in a valley.

It was perilous and rocky and filled with straggly vegetation. Everything was pale in the morning light, his hated pale colours. She pulled the bus to a halt and for the first time felt relieved that they had managed to get out of town alive. They had travelled over a hundred miles.

Mercifully, the Doctor was still sleeping. When he woke she knew what he would say. She had left their companions behind. She hadn't even thought of them until the later stages of this drive. Would he insist on going back for them? Surely even he wouldn't insist on foolhardiness like that.

She opened the doors, stepping out into the cool dawn. It was eerily silent. Far away, birds cried. She sat on a rock overlooking the valley and lit herself a glorious cigarette. She would have to shower, change, make herself up again. Her travels seemed to her to be a constant round of hasty repatchings of her worn old self. She hated to be seen at anything less than her very best, and at the moment she felt a filthy, dishevelled mess.

Her breath rattled inside her. If she was honest, she felt ghastly. It was time to get this show on the road. There was work to be done.

Iris stubbed out her cigarette and hurried back to the bus. On the way upstairs she peeked at the Doctor and, for the first time, allowed herself to think, I have him all to myself. Usually there were distractions, companions, other dangers that got in the way. This was the first time they had been alone together in years. The old feelings were still there.

She loved him, whatever shape he was in. He slept restlessly, arms flung out, tousled, rumpled in his green coat. He muttered. In their present, respective bodies he looked young enough to be her nephew.

She chuckled. He was going to be furious with her when he woke, she was sure. Yet this current Doctor was gentler, conciliatory, much more human, in many ways, than the Doctors of old. She was surprised how chatty and frank, how touchy-feely he had become, as if making up for years and years of standoffishness. And yet he was also rather quick to anger. She had witnessed some formidable outbursts, tantrums almost, during their few short days together. This Doctor was more rooted in the everyday, and p.r.o.ne to the emotional wrangles of those about him. It made him much more approachable, and Ms - easy prey as ever to her emotions - could only approve.

She'd make herself up and look all glamorous, ready for his waking.

Then she'd be ready for those inevitable reproaches. She would mollify him somehow.

It was morning outside in ruinous Fortalice. The streets were churned with masonry and mud and, in the town square, among the wreckage of torture equipment and bonfires, lay the still, half-devoured carca.s.ses of the hydra and the gryphon which had both, predictably, battled through the night, to the death. The sh.e.l.l-shocked Fortaliceans emerged, wide-eyed, to see what had become of their town. It was all outside of their usual experience. Their straitened circ.u.mstances, education and imaginations had no way of taking it all in. Their Executioner, however, was dead. Their librarian was turned to stone. They would have to find their own way out of this particular ontological and epistemological rubble. For now, though, they stared. And they stared at the only building that had remained untouched throughout the disastrous night - the temple of Our Lady.

Within the temple it was dark still. The light would take a number of hours to penetrate the jungle gloom.

Sam and Gila were walking, creeping, through the trees and tethered, barbed vines. They were following the progress of the silver hands, which, now equipped with eyeb.a.l.l.s, seemed to know exactly where they were going. The hands of the d.u.c.h.ess floated on the rich, humid air and Sam and GUa had no choice but to follow.

It should have been impossible, but the loamy ground seemed to be even more overgrown; it appeared to be declining and they were stumbling downhill. All signs that they were inside a temple had disappeared during their hours of stealing after the winging hands.

'And we haven't been stopped by that old witch, either,' said Gila, with as much glee as he could muster. "We've done it, Sam! The d.u.c.h.ess is leading us to safety!'

Sam frowned. 'Don't talk too soon.' She knew that it was just at the point when you were feeling all smug and confident of your own success that fate always intervened and pushed you on your a.r.s.e.

'Have faith, Sam,' said Gila.

'That's what the Doctor says.'

At length the hands brought them to a stone wall. The jungle ended abruptly. It was a dead end. The metal fingers rapped impatiently at the pitted surface.

'We're still inside the temple, after all,' said Sam.

'Of course we are.' Gila squatted, looking depressed. 'We've been going round in circles.'

The fingers of the d.u.c.h.ess got to work then, decisively. They split up and went their separate ways, drawing a careful, perfectly symmetrical portal on the brick wall. This outline glowed with a pearly light and Sam stared at it as the solid wall within the lines crumbling and dissolved like an aspirin, revealing blackness beyond.

'A pa.s.sageway!' laughed Gila, jumping up.'d.u.c.h.ess, I love you.'

The hands came together and spread open, as if awaiting applause.

Then they shot into the dark, leading the way once more.

When Sam and Gila stepped through the portal the hands were gone.

They were at the top of a stone staircase that seemed to lead down into a cavern, which rang hollowly with the sound of dripping water.

'Slimy stone steps,' Sam grunted, leading the way. 'Just what we need to break our necks. Why is it no one on other planets has carpets?' In the dark she paused and rummaged through her leopard-skin bag for a torch.

The portal behind and above them clashed back down. Gila gave a sibilant curse and they were in complete, Stygian gloom until Sam found and switched on her torch.'It's a fake light sabre,' she smiled.'Like in Star Wars. Isn't it fantastic?' The fluorescent beam had extended into a brilliant blue shaft and illuminated the cavern with crazy, wayward shadows. It wasn't in the least bit comforting. She led them down the steps into a wide, damp-floored tunnel.

'IsStar Wars another of your offworld references?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'I wish you would stop that.'

'It's my culture. I can't help it.'

Gila muttered. 'Save your breath for walking. I think we've got quite a distance to go.'

'Right.' She was starving as they set off, she realised.'We had it so easy on the bus, didn't we? The Doctor cooking up lunch, brewing tea. Iris laying on wonderful dinners every night. Veggie fare, too. Why can't all journeys be like that?'

'Because they can't,' snapped Gila bad-naturedly.'And I would rather depend upon my own resources than Iris. I've had enough of that flaky old sow.'

'Get you!' Sam laughed. 'You should lighten up, Gila!' She waved the torch beam in his face. He looked at her venomously and s.n.a.t.c.hed the light-sabre toy.

'I'll lead the way,' he growled.

They walked and Sam tried not to irritate him too much by talking. He was so touchy. She just kept thinking of things to say.

'When I was in the temple of Our Lady, I had this dream...'

'I had dreams there, too,' said Gila. His voice sounded troubled to her.

'Dreams of the swamps again, and of the dark man, the slaver. It was something in scents and the pollen, working on our brains, insinuating themselves into our cells.'

'I dreamed I was warning the Doctor,' said Sam,'and telling him where we were. I saw the Skarasen - these two hundred slumbering dragons we were taking to an outer world. And at the time the Doctor said how pleased he was to do that, because once he had seen a Skarasen alone, an exile from its natural habitat.'

'So he transported two hundred dragons?' said Gila incredulously.

Sam nodded. 'He was giving them another chance. In their natural habitat. It was only on Earth, in the wrong place and the wrong time, that they became monsters. He wanted to put them into the right... context. It just came back to me in this dream.'

'On this world,' said Gila, 'he would be thought of as a great and benevolent vizier, your Doctor.' It was a rare compliment from the alligator man.

'I suppose he would.'

'Benevolent viziers don't last long here,' said Gila harshly. "This is a rough world.You've seen that.'

And again Sam had that sense that the Doctor was too good, too unworldly, for this world or any other. Yet he had managed to survive.

He managed. He went forward in all his beliefs...

'Integrity, I suppose is what he has,' she said, eyeing Gila.

'Well, we can't afford that, on Hyspero,' he said shortly, and in that moment Sam got a glimpse of the real Gila. She thought, Eventually, he'll betray us. Gila's only with us while it suits him. Sooner or later...

he'll turn.

They walked.

Sam knew that when the Doctor had talked about feeling sad for the exiled Skarasen he'd seen years before, he was talking, at some level, about himself. Despised, monstrous, caught in its pitiful, ineluctable exile. She had pieced together enough of his sketchy previous life to know that once he had spent time in England, forced to stay there by his own people. Exiled, he had tried to acclimatise himself to England of the seventies. Right before I was born, Sam thought, and in my very earliest years, the Doctor was already world-weary and stuck. He had lived in a dilapidated Victorian house in Kent, called on occasionally by his secret-service contacts, by other offworld visitors, by old human friends. He earned his keep on Earth by repelling unfriendly alien incursions, and the nefarious schemes of a rival, known only as the Master. The Doctor of those years, Sam had discovered, was an elegant, patrician, establishment Doctor, who hobn.o.bbed with royalty and politicians.

Sam found it hard to believe in these previous selves of his. Yet she knew they existed. They were with him all the time. At times he would vanish into himself, as if consulting those inner voices. But he was her only Doctor, the one that she knew: raffish and roguish, naive and inexplicable. Funny to think of those previous hims.

She was still thinking about her dream. His horrible mirth at her terror.

The heads on stakes. She could rationalise it: she knew it all came from the tales of the Scarlet Empress and her seers in the palace. But she had this fear of those who weren't exactly what they seemed. The Doctor couldn't help, occasionally, being just that.

But she wished he was here.

He was above ground, no doubt muddling along with Iris. She had seen an image of him in the temple, even if only a dream image. Somehow she knew she would see him again in the Forest of Kestheven. Of course they had been separated before. She knew the cosmos ran along fairly shaky lines of random coincidence and mischance. But these were the Doctor's natural element. Hers too, she decided. All she had to do was press on.

Chapter Sixteen.

I've Been Possessed by the Best of Them

Following their two major rows the Doctor and Iris barely spoke to each other for a week. They drove in stolid silence through the southern valleys of Hyspero, swapping turns at the wheel without a word. They cooked in silence, ate in silence, and when they went off to their separate bunks, on separate decks of the bus, it was without a single goodnight. Iris reflected sadly that the Time Lord capacity to maintain a sulky blackout of communications was prodigious. They were as bad as each other; with hundreds of years to fill, there was no hurry to make it up. Iris was blaming herself, however. It was she who, as the Doctor angrily put it, effectively abandoned their companions in Fortalice. She was obsessed with her quest. He had been all in favour of going back, but had given in to her determination. She placated him, saying that Sam and Gila would surely make their own way to Kestheven. They knew that was the next port of call. They weren't stupid, or without resources. She and the Doctor couldn't risk using Iris's TARDIS for short hops any more, trying to find their friends. They couldn't risk returning to Fortalice. And they were too far south to drive back now. They could only press on. Surlily, the Doctor gave in.

For days they traversed the crisscrossing valley roads, which became lusher and more verdant. They were approaching a different, more hospitable country and yet the Doctor wouldn't let that lighten his mood.

A great river pulled and surged alongside them, and they watched flocks of gaudy flamingo-like birds follow its course. They watched in a distinctly uncompanionable silence.

Their second row had come when the Doctor was upstairs reading one day as Iris drove. She'd known it was a mistake to let him rummage among her shelves. Somewhere between the Edgar Rice Burroughs and the William S. Burroughs she had stowed her own capacious volumes of memoirs. As she concentrated on the rutted, narrow road, she realised that the Doctor would have found them, would be reading them in appalled horror. Sure enough, he came thudding down the stairwell and started yelling at her.

'It's my record of my life,' she protested, looking round. He had a heap of the handwritten volumes held out accusingly before him.'Maybe you can keep all your thoughts in order, can keep your sanity no matter how much you skip about in time. Maybe memory means nothing to you. But it does to me. I'd like to have evidence, in the end, of how I've lived.'

'But this is a farrago of lies and deceit...!' said the Doctor. 'And outright stealing!'

She turned back to the road. She wanted to tell him the memoirs were all meant for him. It was her gift to him, when she eventually vanished from time and he, as she knew he would, carried on. Her journals were sometimes apocryphal, of course. They were a tapestry woven hastily and frequently on the hoof, a vivid phantasmagoria of maybes and might-have-beens.'If these ever got into the wrong hands...'the Doctor said, shaking his head.'I've just read the material about the Death Zone.

You're not meant to have been there! All these descriptions of the Tower, the secrets of Ra.s.silo n..."

'Since when did you care about that stuff?'

'I don't leave a trail behind me, for others to find.'

'You know what you sound like?'

'Go on.'

'Like that vizier in the library you were telling me about. When you were still speaking to me. And like the librarian himself. No imagination.

Suppressing the detail, the possibility, the variety of life. Censoring people's texts.'

The Doctor flushed.

'And,' she went on, seizing her advantage.'You sound a mite like that last incarnation of yours. A portentous little feller, swaggering around, thinking he's got all the world's darkest secrets under his hat. Defending the secrets of time, indeed. Guardian of Forever. Time's Champion, my a.r.s.e.You were a pretentious old thing then, Doctor, and you got on my nerves, frankly. I thought you'd pulled yourself out of those doldrums.'

He frowned.'Well,I...'

'Look. The cosmos, as you and I both know, is wider and more complex, and much more apocryphal than either you or I can ever know. Nothing's going to interfere with that. And certainly not an old woman's diaries.

You keep running around, thinking that anyone tampering with timelines, tinkering with balances, changing the plot can end the universe in a nasty flash. It isn't true. You've grown scared of your own shadow.You sound so... establishment, these days. Maybe it's to do with your gender.'

He bridled. 'What does that make you? The great feminist reinterpreter of patriarchal Gallifrey? Pleading the endless polymorphous perversity of time and possibility?'

'Yes,' she said simply.'Time is more resilient than you can imagine. It's a male ego that thinks it can alter it all by pulling a few strings. Look at the Master - that pitiful, deluded, phallocentric dope.'

'I don't believe this,' said the Doctor.

'You're a little guy, Doctor, like me. A vagabond. We just muddle through. And I...' She glared at him beadily. 'I can write exactly what I want.' He could see that he wouldn't get any further with this one.'And, by the way,' she went on,'I did, actually, go to the Death Zone. Morbius did come back and reactivate the time scoop. Just because no one told you doesn't mean it didn't happen.'