Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 18

So they were building their raft and preparing themselves to go white watering or black watering or whatever it is they call it. Plunging headlong and heedlessly I call it, giving yourself up to the recklessness of water. I myself like to be in command of where I'm going and the means by which I'm getting there.

I'm Iris, remember? We're back in my journals - these cramped, recollected notes cribbed after the event which, of course, might well lessen your suspense, dearest reader, in that my narrating from the future, back on past events, alerts you to the fact that I at least survived!

Ah, but in what form? That's what you have to ask yourself. The thing about someone of my gifts and faculties is that even now, when I speak to you from the future, you still don't know how I came through these shenanigans. Or if I even did. So back up goes the suspense level.

Crank it up. The Doctor and I were in dire peril again - naturally.

Because it was round about this time, during our peregrinations in the gaudy and perplexing Forest of Kestheven that we were gathered up and captured - ah, captured; how that verb makes your ears p.r.i.c.k up -by certain birds of paradise.

I call them that, but I never knew their true name. I was never very scientific. Not like the Doctor who, seemingly without effort, could pull out of his hat the preferred and correct race name, species type etc., etc., of any of the creatures and peoples he encountered. It was he who gave me a ticking off for still calling (rather picturesquely, I thought) the Earth Reptiles we had both encountered Silurians and Sea Devils. Very incorrect, he said solemnly - as bad as those creatures calling human beings ape primitives.Well.

What these birds looked like to me, at any rate, were birds of paradise.

Each one distinct and gorgeously arrayed. They alighted in a loose and splendid ring about us one day when we were a fair distance from the sanctuary of my bus. The Doctor had decided that we ought to forage on ahead, checking out the backwaters of the woods, where the bus couldn't penetrate the gloom. The air whirred, buzzed and hummed as the birds riffled heavily down through the lofty branches. Each stared at us beadily, the tallest of them fully seven feet high. What a hat I could make, I found myself thinking, just by plucking up the golden, crimson, aquamarine plumes they had shed as they settled on the ground around us. But I suppressed the thought. It seemed that we were in rather grave danger.

Beside me the Doctor was rigid with surprise and a certain wariness. I looked and this time was struck by the savage hooked bills of the birds.

Each was dull black and gold and they were sharp as knives. Their claws were lizard-like and dextrous as those of any humanoid species.

So we stood for some moments, appraising each other. Then our stillness was broken by the Doctor's sudden, violent sneezing.'I must be allergic,' he said, frowning, and sneezing again.

Then one of the birds, a shabby brown wren, said in a nasal and bored-sounding voice,'Bring these two aloft.'

And before we could say a word in our defence or protest, we were gripped by those scaled, prehensile claws and the air was whisked up into a feathery, leafy storm once more, as we were borne high up into the trees, where the birds had established a society and a city of their own. It was quite absurd; I clutched my bag and my clothing to me as I was lifted, quite gently, really, and focused on the Doctor as he sneezed and sneezed, bundled into the ample breast of an equally stricken-looking and disdainful roc.

When we were set down again, it was on to a surprisingly steady platform constructed from a kind of grey wattle and daub. The birds had built themselves an intricate system of tree houses and walkways from the detritus of the forest floor. We were bullied wordlessly into a covered pen, some several hundred feet up an ancient tree, and forced to sit in the company of a family of terrifled-looking swine.

Wearily the Doctor rubbed his nose and blew it hard into his hanky.'I think that's the first animal allergy I've ever developed.'

I wasn't surprised. There was a hothouse stink in this canopy of trees.

The pigs stank, too. They were huddled in a dark corner of the straw-filled pen, glaring at us with alarm.

'I think we're in the larder,' I said.

The Doctor shushed me in case I alarmed the pigs any more. He addressed them.'How long have you been here?'

'I don't think they can talk.'

'Jo Grant once told me that about a bunch of chickens we met. She laughed at me for being overly polite.'

'Those chickens that picked us up aren't very polite.'

'Exactly.'

The black, hairy pigs snuffled and shuffled in the straw and never said a word.

'I hate being derailed like this,' the Doctor said.

'I imagine,' I said, stretching out on the lumpy floor.'that they'll let us know soon what they have in mind for us.'

'Sometimes all of life seems to be about who takes whom prisoner,' he complained.

"That's the company you keep.'

'I think I've become addicted to that wonderful moment when you spring free of a trap. When you think the game is up and you'll never get out.

Then, suddenly, you're out, clean as a whistle, and a player again.'

'Oh, Doctor,' I chuckled at him.

'What?' I shrugged. 'You're laughing at me.'

'Perhaps.'

'Well, don't: 'You know,' I said.'I'm probably one of the few people who knew you when you were in that very first incarnation of yours. Newly on the run from Gallifrey. So young. So impetuous.Your hair not even white yet.You looked younger then than you do now. A bit of a bruiser you looked. A hothead.'

'Was I really?'

'You'd flung yourself into the French Revolution.You'd freed yourself from dungeon after dungeon. A proper Scarlet Pimpernel. And back then you said exactly the same thing to me. You told me what you've just told me now. That your biggest thrill was magicking yourself out of captivity.'

'So I haven't changed much?'

'Not at all,' I said, and he sighed.

'I'm not as much of a... what did you call it? A bruiser?'

'Your first self was.When he was young, at any rate. A touch of the old Empire about him. No, you're not the same as that. More so than your other selves, I get the impression that now you are more...

magnanimous, perhaps. You go out of your way to get to know people, in a way that you never did before. You're much less of the mystery man.'

'There's only so long,' he said,'that you can hold yourself apart from the rest of the world.'

I must admit, I felt my hearts jump up daringly at his words.Yet I still couldn't ask him what he felt about me. It would be ridiculous and grotesque, perhaps, to even try. I didn't want to become just one more thing for him to escape.

Then I thought, How ridiculous. That we're stuck in a roomful of pigs bred for fodder by a race of b.l.o.o.d.y parrots and I'm thinking about a man I've loved for hundreds of years. And it became a whole lot more ridiculous when we were dragged, under protest, into the birds' council chamber and made to talk. The birds, it seemed were fond of stories.

And we were made to talk for our lives.

The self-satisfied wren-like leader sat on a plinth, surrounded by a motley guard and listened to us as we were forced to blether on in a ragged, improvised duet. The rafters were full of brilliant birds, all listening to us. I thought of Scheherazade in the old, old tale, talking for her life and that of her sister, bargaining with the bloodthirsty sultan, who was just as fond of tall tales. That night the Doctor and I racked our brains. We had a lot of stories to tell.

Already they had travelled some miles aboard the uncomfortable craft that Gila had knocked together from bits and pieces. There was something quite balmy and relaxing about simply letting themselves be tugged along by the boiling current like that. They hardly needed to punt themselves at all. Gila stretched out and dozed, content to give himself up to the elements.

Sam lay beside him. It was like being in somebody's bloodstream and heading for the heart. She couldn't quite be sure if it was any lighter yet.

Her eyes were playing tricks on her, and maybe she was just becoming used to this gloom.

A noise roused her out of her half-sleep. She saw those pale metal hands clutching themselves together again, flapping and wheeling like a rainbird. The eyeb.a.l.l.s goggled curiously on the ends of their digits at Sam and the still-sleeping alligator man. The hands of the d.u.c.h.ess winged effortlessly over them, and then pa.s.sed on ahead into the tunnel, as if showing them the way. Then the hands were swallowed up in the dark.

The next time she woke it was from a deeper sleep and she found her nose and lungs filled with burning, sulphurous fumes. The raft was beginning to rock wildly as the river buffeted them between the cavern walls. The yellow-tinged water boiled and heaved. It looked like lager, Sam thought, and smelled of rotten eggs. She shook Gila awake.

'What is it?'

"The going's getting rougher.'

'It's all right,' he grunted, wanting to rest some more. "This thing is st.u.r.dy enough...'

At that precise moment one of the perilous cross-currents caught them and pitched the raft into the air, sending it skimming across the swift, perplexing tides, and smas.h.i.+ng it to matchwood. Sam and Gila were tossed deep into the river.

They fell like stones through the dense yellow and green, down to the more turgid currents.

Here moments took on their own momentum, and the two of them were flung into a different sense of pa.s.sing time. They didn't know how to breathe. They thought they were dead. Sam couldn't recall the exact second of succ.u.mbing to the dark and giving herself up for dead, but it must have happened, because she had stopped trying to swim. She let the glaucous depths swallow her.

Then she saw the shapes moving uncertainly through the unclear water.

The light was only fitful and so she couldn't be sure of exactly what she was seeing. She started to swim again and held her breath hard and she steeled herself for accidental contacts with the creatures who shared the water.

And what would their flesh feel like? like a shark's, perhaps, so that she'd be flayed at the slightest touch. Or it would be like brus.h.i.+ng the softly pliable transparency of jellyfish, and waiting for the jolt of a sting.

But none of the creatures were making sudden moves and she tried not to get sucked into a false sense of security by them. She moved steadily, coursing strongly towards the surface again, which stretched like rippled skin high above. She kept Gila within sight; he was making his own, steady progress.

The creatures seemed content to let her be, yet she could swear they were keeping an eye on her, though there were no eyes to be seen.

Slowly they tumbled and twirled, mauve-and grey-fleshed bulks revolving in the murk. Something about the very anonymity of their forms deterred the eye. She tried to keep the ma.s.s of a particularly menacing aubergine-shaped beast at a distance. It was smoothly featureless; she couldn't tell which end was which, but it was clearly sentient. It roved from side to side in agonising restlessness, probing the chilled filth of the river. An ebony pyramid of some fleshy, coruscated substance shot out a coronet of obscene-looking spines at her approach and Sam's heart thudded at the sight. She tried to bear away from it and, luckily, the thing made no attempt to follow. She was running out of air; her lungs burned and seemed to be cramming themselves up into her throat. Her limbs ached and she felt quite separated from all her exertions as her body strove upward of its own accord.

Purplish starfish creatures moved past her curiously, taking her in, all the while. Their blank fingers were like velvet gloves and very dextrous.

They spun in perfect formation and ringed about her, each spreading to its utmost, which was about the size of a dinner table. Their eyes, set squarely in those dark palms, were quite human, disconcertingly so, and they blinked regularly, declaring a sort of pa.s.sive incredulity.

Sam thought, If I wasn't here, if Gila and I hadn't ended up here, then no one would ever know these creatures existed. She had touched some form of life she had never expected, nor suspected, and the thought of that thrilled her. If we weren't here, these bizarre vegetable-like things in their cold broth need never even be here, or they'd just be carrying on, about their l.u.s.treless business. For once she was glad to see something new and find that it wasn't trying to kill her or eat her or hypnotise her.

Not every new experience was painful and not every novelty deadly.

That was worth remembering. The Doctor had promised her...

everything. He had promised to boggle her mind, and when he had said that, gleefully, expansively, she had laughed at his old-fas.h.i.+oned, schoolboy slang.

Sam's own thoughts were interrupted by those of the creatures she was watching. They were talking to her for some time before she even realised it. The shapes of the creatures made no rash moves, didn't attempt to impede her gradual progress, but their voices invaded her head.

He's sent you on a false journey, they said. He has plunged on ahead as he always does, pretending to flout the Laws of Time and Patriarchy and G.o.d, but his quest, as ever, is all religion. A religion of himself, and he is the pure martyr setting his sensible feet firmly towards the Dark Tower.

Tower, Sam - he is leading you towards one more confrontation with the father and the phallic Tower is the last, black card in the Doctor's pack.

But you don't have to go with him. A woman's journey is different. A woman's journey is to the source, to the briny superabundance of the world that man will never know. Leave him to his phallic quest - his probe into the Real. Come with us, back to the Imaginary, to the time before. Come back to the Mother.

'Who are you on about?' Sam found herself asking. She didn't like the sound of this. All this 'we' and 'him'. In her travels she'd encountered a number of cults, busily recruiting and taking others over; she'd seen mob mentality run riot. She played dumb. She didn't want these voices in her head. But she asked them,'Who are you on about? Gila?'

Then she looked and saw with a shock that Gila was caught up by the dark, huddled creatures. They had gathered their obtuse shapes and held him penned in, afloat in the dense water.

'Let him go! He'll drown!'

'He will last a good while longer than you will here,' they said.'Sister.'

'Don't call me sister.'

'Nevertheless, you belong with us. Do you truly believe that you belong with this alligator creature? Look in his eyes, Samantha Jones. He is all naked avarice. He is domination and fury, like all his gender. He is nothing but show. Do you think he has respect in those eyes? What do you suppose he is thinking when he looks at you?'

By now their dextrous extrusions were all about Gila and his struggles were slowing. Either he was reserving his strength or he was pa.s.sing out.

'He wants you, Samantha Jones. When you fell into our element, when your petty, pathetic raft broke its back on the water and you plunged into our world, we saw it all at once, all too clear. He desires you for his use, for his own harem. He looks at you and sees only an a.s.semblage of female accoutrements designed for his use.'

'I agree,'said Sam,'that he can be a bit of s.e.xist t.o.s.s.e.r...'

'More than that,' the voice went on. 'He is racked with an unappeasable nostalgia for the Imaginary, before his boy's engagement with the world of man. He identifies the fetid swamps of his boyhood with the mother's body from which he was born. He loathes and desires it at once. All he can do is take it, take it ruthlessly in as many forms as he can, and abuse that woman's body when he finds it. And he has fallen upon you.'

'I can deal with him,' said Sam grimly.

'You think you know the ways of these men.'

'Look, who are you?'

'You don't see how they repress you.You are such a child. You speak true, you speak your whole mind and body and you trust that it is speaking the truth. You are all diffusion; you have no focus. You fling your trembling body into the void and trust that no harm will come to you, yet how can it not when you have dealings with the world of men?'

'I can look after myself.'

'When we talked of the greater danger, of the man who leads you ever forward on his own messianic, masculine quest, we didn't mean this alligator creature.'

'You meant the Doctor.' Sam was astonished.

'He'll lead you on to your destruction, Samantha Jones. If not of your body, then your spirit. Bind yourself to his quest and you will lose for ever your link with the mother. With the delightful and blissful violence of our element. You will lose contact with that in you which makes all possible.'

'You talk about the Doctor like he's evil: 'He is a boy. He doesn't know what he is doing.'

'Yeah?'

'He is full of sickness for a home he can never return to. His own pedigree is so complex, he has no single home. He was woven from genetic broth, a Loom, on a Patriarchal world without mothers - though sometimes he believes he was birthed of a more Earthly mother. He doesn't know and, whichever way, the Doctor is confused about his origin. He will always search after it. He has a boy's journey to make. He wants to appropriate his point of origin only for himself and die there. He wants to die a man. He'll plunge back into time, further, further back, hoping to demythologise himself, by going back into mythology. If you go with him, Sam, it will destroy you.'

Sam was oddly touched by this. She held still in the water and realised that she was suspended in a bubble of viscous air. It was like a blob of oil in a lava lamp. The voice gave her a moment to think. She said,'I trust him.'

'You are a fool. You know that a woman's quest is different. She already is her own mother. We are in and in and in each other, like Russian dolls of your world. We don't need that all-consuming quest for the source.

Our journey is further.We head for the unknown.We are free to invent.'

'You've got the Doctor all wrong. He's not a s.e.xist pig like Gila.'