Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors Part 16

There was another of the searing flashes, and the hut next to Penelope suddenly caught fire, the thatch exploding into red and orange flame.

Penelope put her back to the wooden wall and wished to G.o.d there was somewhere to run to. But there was nowhere. She could not move.

Joel slid the paper door open an inch. There was a samurai standing next to it. He smiled upwards at the man, sheepishly, and closed the door again.

They had just left him alone, sent him food and escorted him to the bath house and toilet. But other than that, nothing. They politely avoided his questions. He spent his time writing in his journal and playing Tetris until that got boring. Then he lay on his back on a futon, listening to the silence.

Joel prayed silently for ventilation ducts. But there was nowhere to run to.

He could not move.

'She did not protect us.'

Chris raised his head. The Doctor gently pushed him back down.

It was Sonchou's wife Chris never had caught her name. One of her grandkids was hanging on to her, tiny face buried in her clothes.

She knelt in the middle of a street. In the middle of Hekison village. Her face was smeared with soot.

The Doctor was feeling Chris's ribs, methodically. Head down. Focused.

Paying no attention to the woman.

'She did not protect us,' said Sonchou's wife again.

Chris flinched as the Doctor found a palmful of pain. 'Bruised,' murmured the Time Lord, 'but not broken.'

Behind the woman, Chris could see the remains of her home. The wooden walls had fallen in, the stilts had collapsed. It was a charred house of cards, just a pile of ruined pieces.

They were all like that. Except for perhaps a few further up the hill. The fire had strolled from wooden house to wooden house, easily, lazily. Here and there were walls embedded with arrows. Here and there were people embedded with arrows.

93.'All right,' said the Doctor.

Chris sat up, gingerly.

It all came slamming into his field of view. The bodies, the burnt houses, the shattered fence, the cries and the wailing. Samurai bodies, mostly. But not all of them. Kame, dead again, struck down by a barrage of arrows, looking like a porcupine. Sonchou, the old headman, face down in the mud after catching a lungful of searing smoke.

'I tried,' Chris said, bending forward, trying to curl up around the thumping pain in his chest. 'G.o.ddess, I tried.'

'I know you did.' The Doctor put his hand on Chris's hair. 'It wasn't your fault.'

'Do you tell yourself that?' gasped Chris.

He reached out for the Time Lord, and held on to him, his eyes overwhelmed, blinded by smoke and destruction.

'What did I tell you?' he yelled.

Second Slice

The life-giving sword

What does a Time Lord really know about death, about the consuming, gnawing fear of losing one's grip on life and falling off into the unknown? The Doctor's been through pain before, been threatened with death in a thousand forms, but he always bounces back. What's regeneration, even, but one almighty bounce? Where others tremble on the brink of eternity, the Doctor goes bungee-jumping.

Rebecca J. Anderson, Sacrifice Sacrifice, 1996

10.Changing direction

The samurai wouldn't let them have a fire, but they found themselves huddling around the firepit anyway.

The air was still heavy with smoke. Penelope guessed the burnt smell wouldn't go away for days. She tried going to the doorway for a breath of fresh air, but the odour seemed even worse outside.

A handful of buildings, at the edge of the village, had survived the blaze.

The fence was a tangle of vines and charcoal.

Unsurprisingly, the shrine was untouched.

Penelope turned back to the other huddled prisoners. The headman's wife; a mother and her squalling child; three farmers. Kame, sitting off to one side, holding one of the arrows that had felled him. The samurai stroked the feathers, slowly, wondering.

Their single guard was the youngest warrior to have survived the battle, a sixteen-year-old who looked nearly as scared as they were. Providence only knew why Gufuu's samurai were bothering to keep them prisoner.

The Doctor and Chris sat at the edge of the firepit. Mr Cwej had his head down, as though he didn't have the strength to lift it.

The Doctor was stroking the hair over the boy's left ear, speaking softly. 'And then what happened?'

'I realized I couldn't stop the fighting,' murmured Mr Cwej. Penelope sat down, keeping a little distance away, watching. 'The samurai just kept charging, even when the Kapteynians were firing right amongst them.'

'And then what happened?'

'I climbed back up the rope and got into the village. They were shouting and screaming.'

'We could hear the battle,' said Penelope, 'but we couldn't see what was happening.'

The Doctor's eyes flicked up to her for a moment, and then went back to Mr Cwej. After his near-hysteria earlier, the boy was quiet, almost sleepy. Was 97 the Doctor using some form of mesmerism? Or perhaps some Zen technique?

'I told them to evacuate. They were frightened. I tried shouting at them.

Just made it worse. Wasn't until the fence caught fire that they started to move. Stray energy bolt hit it. Went up in a whoosh of pink flame. Still some of them wouldn't go. They were trying to put the fire out. I couldn't get them all to go. Some of them even came back after we'd got them over the fence.

Why didn't it help us? Why didn't it protect us?'

'It's selfish,' said the Doctor. 'It only saved me because it thinks I can help it.'

'It thinks?' said Penelope, but the Doctor ignored her, frowning. He glanced through the doorway, towards the untouched shrine.

'If the samurai try to take it. . . '

'They wouldn't listen to me,' murmured Mr Cwej. 'They wouldn't listen listen to me, none of them would!' to me, none of them would!'

'Shhh. . . ' The Doctor stroked Chris's hair until the boy quietened. 'That's better. Now listen to me, Chris Cwej.' The boy nodded, almost imperceptibly.

'What happened here was not your fault.'

'I was supposed to stop this '

'No. Listen. You couldn't have stopped this. It was just very bad luck.'

'You asked me '

'I didn't ask you to magically prevent anything from happening. By evacuating the villagers, you did the best you could to save their lives. You couldn't have done anything more to help them. Do you believe me?'

Mr Cwej's head lowered further. 'No,' he whispered.

The Doctor put his other hand on Chris's head, making his companion look up into his eyes. 'Do you believe me?' he repeated, sternly.

'Yes.

'You need sleep. There's nothing more to be done now. Get some rest.'

Mr Cwej obediently lay down on his side and curled into a ball. In moments, he was snoring.

The Doctor moved over to Penelope's side. 'He was so badly affected,' she murmured. Mr Cwej's hands had been curled into fists; now they were relax-ing, pale fingers against the sooty floor. 'Have you. . . healed him?'

The time traveller shrugged his shoulders, folding his arms as though to keep himself warm. 'He'll need a lot more than that to regain the confidence he's lost. Long before we arrived here.'

'These villagers have lost a lot more,' Penelope said, and the words just came tumbling out. 'See what your interference has done, you proud man.

Look at them!'

The Doctor didn't look up. 'And where were you during the battle?'

98.Penelope frowned. 'Helping Mikeneko pull her grandchildren out of a burning hut.'

'Ah,' he said, and smiled without humour. 'There's hope for you yet.'

'I feel,' said Penelope, 'filthy. Not because there is soot in my mouth and nose and my clothes are muddy. I feel d.a.m.ned for my part in this tragedy.

d.a.m.ned.'

'Then you have two choices,' said the Doctor. His voice sounded as though it was coming from a long way away. 'You can stay in h.e.l.l.'

'Or?' said Penelope, at length.

The Doctor looked up at the time conveyance, lying in the corner like a sorry collection of clockwork.

'You can win.'

The afternoon was dragging for Aoi. He sat on the veranda of the house, his back to the captives, and wished his father had seen fit to give him a more important duty than watching over these peasants.

He felt a little sorry for them, but peasants must be used to this sort of thing, so why didn't they stop crying? He shifted his position, holding his spear across his lap.

From here he had a view of the rest of the ruined village. In the centre were the remains of the great bonfire where they had burnt the enemy corpses, along with the handful of villagers who had been caught by arrows or trampled by horses.

To one side was the shrine. Two huts to either side had collapsed, their singed roofs lying on piles of charred timber. The shrine itself had escaped the fire, though it was covered in soot and ash.

Their own honoured dead were being taken to their families by the messengers who were returning to court.

Kiiro was amongst them, slain by some kind of demon fire, his skin blackened and his armour warped. Father had not said a word about his old friend's demise, though his face was stem.

Aoi had caught a glimpse of the object inside the shrine, part stone and part metal. Or perhaps there were two objects. His father had not permitted anyone to go into the building, not until they had reinforcements. The Doctor had told him just what had happened to Umemi's initial taskforce.

If the kami kami had any magic, it wasn't using it. If it had any magic at all, and it wasn't just a trick to frighten away gullible had any magic, it wasn't using it. If it had any magic at all, and it wasn't just a trick to frighten away gullible bushi bushi.

As far as Aoi could see, the only power it had was the power to make men greedy, and to rain destruction on them. They ought to bury it deep beneath the ground and forget about it.

99.The Doctor had been working on Penelope's time conveyance for hours. It was starting to get dark, but once again the dim light didn't bother him.

Penelope glanced towards the door. Their guard had his back to them one of the older samurai now, she saw. She wanted to borrow the Doctor's flashlight flashlight, but she didn't want to risk attracting the warrior's attention.

She peered at the time traveller's scrawled diagrams, hoping they would begin to make sense. He had jotted them down on the back of a cafe menu, a flier from an organization called Greenpeace, and a parchment covered in writing she couldn't understand. And then he had rolled up his sleeves and gone to work on the engine of her time conveyance.

Half the components were scattered across the floor in bits, including the futuristic battery which Mr Cooke had concocted for it in 1996. The other half had a.s.sumed an angular shape, no larger than a typewriter. It looked as though he had preserved the central calculating device, but had removed all of the parts necessary to input or output information. She felt a pang. Her child was shrunken, blind and helpless.

The Doctor sat back, evidently having finished his. . . modifications. He took the strange little eggshaped device from his pocket. It was evidently deactivated, silent and colourless.

The screaming child had at last fallen silent, nestled in its exhausted mother's arms. Kame was snoring, the arrow still clutched in one hand. The other peasants watched the Doctor and wondered what he was doing.

He rolled the egg in amongst the cogs and gears of the engine. Now he could reach into the angular ma.s.s and touch the device. And yet somehow it had become part of the machine. How he had made the two technologies mesh was beyond her.

'They should be asleep by now,' he whispered, 'for the most part. We only need to worry about that one guard.' The Doctor nodded at the back of 'their'

samurai. 'I think it's time to wake Chris up.'