Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 19

'He can't help what he is. His gender is alien, but intransigent. The cosmos is guided by male and female impulses - quite separate...'

"That's c.r.a.p!' Sam shouted."The Doctor isn't your average man, at all. I don't think he even has a gender. How can you - whoever you are - pontificate on what he's like? He's private. He's untouchable.'

'He's a man.'

'I love him,' Sam found herself saying. With a shock, she realised she was telling the creatures the truth. The voice stayed quiet and she let herself absorb what she had just blurted. Love. Still. With it came no shame or surprise. Obviously, she thought, I've moved on a bit from the fixation stage, past the embarra.s.sment-at-covert-glances stage. No longer was she frightened by his proximity. She had come through a change. She loved him, but that was all right. She loved him enough to step back and let him go wherever he needed to. She didn't want him in the way she had wanted him once.'I love him,' she repeated.

'He spurned your desire.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'You were curious about his own desires.'

'Of course I was.'

'But you have never seen or heard him articulate anything of the sort.'

'Sometimes... odd glimpses. The way he looks at certain people. Women and men. But he never acts on anything. There's something about him that makes you think he's beyond s.e.x.'

The voice of the creatures chuckled inside her head, reverberating like a seash.e.l.l. 'Is anyone beyond gender and s.e.x, Samantha Jones?'

Then suddenly, she and Gila were set free and left to float gently, unharmed, to the choppy surface.

Into daylight. They were free of the tunnel.

They had come a long way.

Sam wondered about asking him what he had seen down there. She thought better of it, but eventually Gila spoke up of his own account. 'It was the slaver. The slaver came back to me. He came back and told me I was returning to the sludge, the primeval sludge and that I deserved to.

He told me I wouldn't be human for very much longer. He said I was an animal.'

Sam didn't know what to say to that.

This Doctor had never been very good at remembering stories. In the same way that he couldn't tell a joke, when it came to telling stories, he found that he could never work out what had to come next. Never could he figure out how the plot worked. Maybe, he thought, that was why he wandered so haplessly into events in his real, everyday life. Previous selves of his hadn't thought of themselves as quite so guileless. Unlike them, he wasn't apt to go back to the start of things, to ravel back the plot lines to lay clues for himself, and to plant surprises. To him, that would seem like cheating. No longer did he think of himself as the shifty, anonymous auteur, manipulating chance and circ.u.mstance to suit himself.

Tonight, forced to talk for his life before the parliament of exotic and razor-billed birds, he felt his well of stories dry up. He found he had no idea what might entertain them.

He remembered Romana dragging him off to the opera in Milan and then to see the marvellous soprano hermaphrodites of Alpha Centauri.

He had never seen them before. Romana was rapt, of course, following the score from their gilded box. The Doctor had been bored, unable to keep up and follow, itching to be off and wanting something else to happen.

Tonight he would have to depend on Iris's help. Luckily she was an old gasbag. But she made him go first.

How the birds shuffled and stirred and what a racket of approval, disappointment and uneasiness they set up. He found that they hung on his every word, their pinhead eyes watching his every move, and he started to warm to his theme.

First he told them fables, which he recalled he was very fond of. Once he started, he remembered more and more. He saw again how story could lead to story. He told them the one about the greedy and eccentric merchant who wore a dressing gown and slippers everywhere and was laughed at in the street for looking so bizarre and it made him unhappy.

One day he was caught up in a vast wind, and clung to a palm tree to anchor himself. At last he came to the land of the Turks, where everyone wore slippers and dressing gowns all day long, as a matter of course. At first he felt he fitted in, but eventually he grew bored with being ordinary.

The wren spoke up.'And what is the meaning of this tale?'

'Meaning?' frowned the Doctor. 'Sorry, I don't get you.'

'There must be meaning!' shrilled the wren. 'Stories must have a meaning. How else are we to be edified?'

'I'm not sure I hold with being edified,' said the Doctor sadly. 'Listen. I'll try another.'

Then he told them about the elephant who stole pumpkins from the patch that was a family's sole source of sustenance. This was an African tale. A boy hollowed out one pumpkin, crawled inside and hid. When the elephant king swallowed that choicest pumpkin whole, the boy waited until he was right inside the creature's belly, then he broke out of the orange skin and crawled upwards, to stab the elephant's greedy pink heart.

'Good,' cried one of the more extravagant birds, a kind of macaw. 'You are telling us that vengeance is good and best when it is merciless. That the oppressors will be tamed with violence.'

'Am I?' the Doctor wasn't sure that he was happy with this.

So he tried the one about the childless woman who adopted a bird to be her baby.

There were flurries of agitation in the rafters about this. Maybe I should have told another, he thought, but ploughed on.

The woman and her bird-child were mocked by her husband and his new wife, who was able to bear real children. Then the new wife ate the bird-child, roasting him on a spit, in order to distress the woman.

The parliament rose in uproar.

'It's all right!' The Doctor waved his hands.'It ends happily!' And he told how the bird-child, eaten by the husband and new wife, came back to life and clawed both their insides to pieces until they died.

This mollified the birds somewhat.

'All this is rather bloodthirsty, Doctor,' Iris told him. 'I would never have thought it of you.'

He shrugged and let her take over.

Iris began, "The Doctor has been bamboozling you all with tales of revenge and being eaten. He tells his tales this way in order to avoid talking about himself and his own life. Now I am going to tell you all about me and my life and the journeys I have been on, and the things I have seen...'

The Doctor looked pained.

'Get on with it, then,' warned the wren.

'I was born in the cradle of mountain tops,' said Iris.'Where the snow was fierce and daily, keeping us trapped in the house that was rooted into the rock by hundreds of storeys, rooted like a tooth in the jaws of the mountain.'

'Birds do not have teeth,' someone pointed out.

'And I was tended by my Aunties, some dozen of them in all, the most beloved of whom was my Baba, who had a shawl that could carry her anywhere in the world, because it was woven from the discarded feathers of every single bird known to our people.'

The room was silent.

The Doctor half listened as she described a life in the southern hemisphere of Gallifrey, which he knew very little about. And yet it seemed familiar, this wintry, fabulous vista she painted, in an oblique sort of way. All the while his eyes raked over the walls and ceiling of that raftered parliament, searching out a means of escape.

Iris told her long story, unspooling the endless tale of her earliest adventures. She had them hooked.

Chapter Eighteen.

Will You Come Back for Me?

Queens are quite common, here on Hyspero.

What does it take, how much effort does it require on this rough, shifting world, to lay claim to a province, a populace, even an entire city, and impress it with the force of your personality and the might of your will?

All over Hyspero tinpot tyrants run small princ.i.p.alities. Endlessly they plot skirmishes and wars against their neighbours, drawing up elaborate plans of conquest and colonisation, but they all know better than to try.

There is a delicate equilibrium here, even on this chaotic world, and each small power balances the next. The small-time rulers of these various lands have learned to realise when they are well off.

Only the Scarlet Empress and her brood of nine hundred grandmothers behind her, each identical with her, thirst for more and more power. Her insatiably malign presence at the heart of Hyspero, in the city named for their world, bonds the other, lesser rulers in adversity and maintains the tentative structures of power here.

Few have actually laid eyes on the Empress. They have seen her guards - the squad of beautiful, tattooed men she sends out to patrol her world in their flowing crimson cloaks. They feel her might and hatred in many more or less insidious ways.

Yet one of those rulers of lesser lands, happy with her lot and content to be apart from the rest of Hyspero - happy in fact, never to return again to the rest of the world - is Angela, the Bearded Lady. Major Angela, self-declared queen of the forest and bears of Kestheven.

That morning she was sitting with her thick legs upon the wooden garden furniture that Sutt had built her. He was showing himself to be a proper worker, that boy - one of her best. As she lay back on the white veranda, she could crane her neck and listen to him as he crashed about, checking the outer walls of her house for storm damage. He had complained to her that his fleshy hide was strawberry-marked with rashes and cuts. It wobbled as he shook the shutters and ambled thoughtfully about her garden. Angela tutted and sighed. After all these years she still couldn't keep the bears from trying to shave themselves.

The sun was going in over the lowest part of the forest canopy. She could feel it drenching away on her skin. Days were so brief here. It was one of the things she'd had to grow used to, back when she had first come to rule in Kestheven, about a decade ago: that, generally, the sun penetrated only feebly into the heart of the forest. For ten years she had lived here, and for ten years she had been deprived of her sight. She was in full and confident possession of the belief, however, that her beard itself equipped her with a curious kind of sixth sense. It bristled and whispered things to her. Sometimes, unbeknown to her companions, Major Angela knew a little more about what was going on than she ought.

Blind, she had thought she wouldn't miss the sunlight, but she had been wrong. Her skin had turned sallow and pale in these intervening years of her self-exile. All the while, however, her impressive beard-growth had flourished. Once she had worn it as an insignia, a badge, a token of her oddity and singularity. Now it hung like an old man's, white and faded down her patched and faded battle fatigues. Angela, she told herself gruffly; you're an old, blind warhorse. That's what you are. She hauled herself up on to her comfy chair and barked a command at Sutt, her gardener:'Pack it in there for the afternoon, soldier. I think we're patched up quite nicely. Come and have some dinner.'

As she led the way indoors, her boots thudding resolutely on the bare, polished boards, she wondered about this. The old homestead wasn't half as solid as she'd hoped. This season's storms and gales had battered away at it nightly, carrying off whole walls and doors, wardrobes and window frames into the black winds of the night. It was most perplexing. If Angela - as Major Angela had once been known - had been a different sort of girl, a superst.i.tious, silly son of girl, say, then she might have begun to think that her homestead and her little princ.i.p.ality were under some kind of curse. Oh, but never. No one, she thought gruffly, would have the b.a.l.l.s to set a curse on me.

Except, perhaps...

She dismissed the thought brusquely and had the hairless bears who were her servants batten down the hatches and the storm windows before the night came down with its customary vengeance. Her maid shuffled awkwardly around the dining table, clutching a lit taper in one clumsy hand, concentrating hard on lighting each stem of the candelabra. The room pulsed with rosy shadows, oddly disquieting shadows that Angela could feel rather than see. The old mansion was full of draughts, noises and sudden gusts. Luckily it was also full of bears, each of whom was loyal to the last, and as savage as they were loyal to Major Angela; who, satisfied and extra hungry, seated herself at the head of her own glossy table and clapped her hands in antic.i.p.ation of dinner.

'Where are the others?' she asked her maid. None of her chosen circle, the most articulate and amusing of her bears, were present. This she could sense. Lesser members of her court were shuffling into the chamber, smarting with shaving cuts, awkward in their human dress, all of them ambling to their correct spots around the room - but, she could tell, none of them were from her chosen few. None were part of the inner circle. Suddenly the maid sounded shifty in her demurrals.

'Where are they?' Angela snapped. A silent lull dropped on the room - in which someone clashed their cutlery. The Major wasn't pleased.

'Picking up intruders,' the maid stammered at last. 'Giselle and the others were fishing at the RiverMouth and they discovered...'

"They discovered...?' prompted Angela.

'Intruders,' said the maid. "They wanted to keep them a surprise and deliver them to you at dinner, but since they aren't here yet...'

Angela glowered.'Since they aren't here yet, you'd better tell me now.'

The maid cringed. 'A girl and a man with a hide thick and green as alligator skin. They came gushing out of the RiverMouth, straight out of the rock face, as if they had been spat out of the centre of the world...'

Angela considered.'I want these people brought to me.'

'They are doing so, madam.'

'No one intrudes on my land without my knowing. Even blind as I am.'

'No, indeed, madam.'

All the hairless bears were looking along the bright and spotless tablecloth at Major Angela now. She was rapt and clearly elsewhere.

'Not even those birds that roost in our rafters,' she hissed.'Even those birds belong to me.'

It was to those very birds, in their parliament in the canopy of the forest, that the Doctor was, at that very moment, giving an account of the various megalomaniacs he had happened across.

'What I don't understand is this business of stamping your will on everything,' he said, digressing from his tale, which had been about how he was sent to avert the very genesis of the dreams and desires of one particular historical despot. 'So that everything becomes the same as you - and then what do you have? Everything being the same. Unhappy h.o.m.ogeneity. Dullness.'

'It's like Narcissus, though,' mused Iris. 'So in love with the image of himself, that the image replaces all else until nothing remains but the beloved - himself. It's the terrible, deathly romance of yourself.'

The wren in command of the birds piped up. 'Your narrative has ceased moving.'

'Ha!'cried the Doctor.'All this constant onflowing garrulous non-stop motion. You're insatiable! Where was I? Ah, now. I was holding the two wires, if you remember, and by touching the two together I would trigger the explosion that would destroy the incubation chamber containing the creatures that would one day become my deadliest foes. Now Sarah Jane says to me -'

'What a lovely girl she was,' Iris put in.

'Indeed. So she says to me -'

'What's she doing now?'

The leader of the birds turned to Iris and said in a sudden, shrill, tone to one of his lieutenants,'Peck out her eyes.'

'What?' said the Doctor, aghast, as the eagles ruffled and stirred themselves to do as bidden. 'If you so much as touch my friend, then I can't go on with my story. With any of them.'

'You must!' shrilled the wren.

'I certainly will not.'

'She is an irritating woman.'

'I know that, but she's also my friend.'

'You are suggesting that we spare her, so you will tell us more of your tales?'

Already, to Iris's disgruntlement, the birds had decided after all that they preferred the Doctor's stories to hers.