Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 24

'I am the Empress,' she said.'You could say I was the first of the type.'

'Of course.' The Doctor executed a swift bow.

Iris had shuffled forward a little. 'Then it's all true? Everything the Scarlet Empress told me?'

The woman shrugged. She was a little devil-may-care, the Doctor thought, frowning. 'You mean the current Empress? I don't know what she's been telling you, dear.'

"That all the Empresses of old exist and live still, deep beneath the throne room of the palace, all in jars in the catacombs.'

The original Empress tossed her head.'All quite true. We're all down there, having our well-deserved rest. All my many daughters and I.

Except me, of course. Kidnapped as I am. And forced to work, in my extreme old age.'

She looked pleased with herself, though, for someone who had been roped into slavery. She looked glad to be out and about like this. Her face was powdered white, her cheeks caked in rouge. Her eyes were so thick with mascara that they looked like they'd been poked in by a sooty finger. Her headdress had now been set back on her head at a rather jaunty angle.

Iris muttered to the Doctor, 'This really is the planet of the fabulous old queens, isn't it?'

He gave her a sickly smile. Then he challenged Major Angela. 'What are you doing, keeping this poor old thing hostage?'

Angela's eyes flashed. The bears, overcoming their fear of the deity in their midst, bridled and made as if to take hold of him.

'Watch your mouth, Doctor,' the Bearded Lady warned.

'Ask her advice,' Gila put in. 'If that's why you called her up from the dead.' His clammy hands were itching. Never had he seen a genie of any kind before. Not in any of his escapades. The kabikaj didn't really count. He just knew that this Empress had the kind of power that could answer wishes and commands. He could tell this by her quite careless and insouciant manner.

To Iris, meanwhile, the woman from the jar seemed rather common.

Now that the image had steadied and resolved itself, the Empress that Iris could make out had bubbled blonde hair - the very shade of vanilla ice cream. Her flesh was ample and very much on show. Even given the apparition's immense age (and Iris put the figure at ten thousand at a conservative estimate) there was still something extremely... suggestive about the woman. All the while, as she outstared her breathless audience, she was slowly wiggling her hips. Both hands were resting on those hips and there were jewels on her fingers that glittered like artillery. In her very person the earliest Empress distilled a certain provocative charm and a distinctly risque wit. She wore ropes of tiny pearls, they saw, each pearl no larger than a grain of rice.

'Well,' she said, in a purring, unctuous tone. 'How nice of you to call me up at last. I've been waiting for just the right chance to meet my public.

And here you are.' She treated the Doctor to a raking, saucy leer, looking him up and down slowly as she batted her three-inch-long eyelashes.'Was that you who opened my jar?' He coughed. 'Ahm, actually... it was all of us.'

'It's so wonderful to be wanted,' she smiled, still concentrating on the Doctor. 'She isn't what I expected,' Iris whispered.

'Things never are, dear,' said the earliest Empress. She asked the Doctor, 'Do you always bring your mother along when you meet royalty?'

'Enough of this,' Major Angela barked gruffly. 'I've called you up, Majesty, for a very particular reason.'

The Empress rolled her eyes. 'People only ever call me up when they're in a fix.'

"These... brigands are here to steal you.'

The earliest Empress looked at the Doctor again, and then at Gila, who puffed out his glistening, lizardy chest and stared fiercely back.

'And you're trying to stop them? Honey, let me go. I'll submit to captors like these.'

'You,' said the Bearded Lady,'are my property.'

'You can't stand in the way of kidnappers like these.'

'She sounds like my gran,' said Sam.'After she's had a few.' Sam's raffish grandmother was an embarra.s.sment to her family, who liked to think of themselves as quite right-on and enlightened. Sam got on rather well with her gran.

"They want,' said the furious Angela.'to take you back to Hyspero and back into the clutches of the current Scarlet Empress.'

"That silly girl,' sighed the old woman.'She's getting above herself. I'm not going back there. She's a monster. Why's she sent you to fetch me, sweetie?' she asked the Doctor. 'Why hasn't she sent out the usual tattooed muscle boys?'

Iris interposed herself. She was still a little wobbly on her pins, Sam noticed. 'I'm the leader of this expedition.'

'Good for you, honey.'

"The Scarlet Guard are pursuing us. Major Angela wanted to ask you if she should stay and fight or come with us.'

The earliest Empress thought briefly. 'If I was you, I'd go with them. And if there's any trouble... I'll be here to help.'

Then she shimmered once, expanded once more into a column of yellow fumes, and issued back into the jar, which sealed itself. The bears gave a collective sigh.

Major Angela had reached her own decision. Her bushy jaw was set with resolve.'If we return to Hyspero, we go my way.And we go by sea.'

"Then we have to travel down to the next level,' said Gila. 'It might give the Scarlet Guard the slip that way.'

'Why by sea?' asked Sam.

'There's someone we have to fetch; said Angela. Something dawned on Gila.'Oh, not him'

Angela nodded. "The fourth member of our company of old. We need him too, Gila.'

The alligator man groaned.

'We need transport, horses and furs. It's freezing on the next level down.'

Before the Doctor could ask what they were talking about, he heard Iris give a mournful grunt and he caught her as she sank backwards into his arms.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

I've Had My Moments

When the bears decided that what they wanted most of all, more than anything, was to be human, there was the problem of what to do with all the fur. Major Angela was their example, their shining reason for wanting to be human beings, but she begged them not to do away with their golden hair. It was so l.u.s.trous and rich. She would have given anything for a beard of the same fine substance. This puzzled the bears, who wanted only to be her, in the way that medieval saints wanted to become Christlike. They wanted to be able to use knives and forks like she did. It was Giselle, the most trusted, Giselle who had recently died on the hillside, who suggested that they give all their golden clippings and curls to the Bearded Lady herself, in a kind of tribute.

She kept a room at the top of her mansion especially for the purpose. It was a golden room. Under the door crept a b.u.t.tery golden light. Here the bales of golden fur were stacked and stored and, when it was decided that Major Angela was leading the party of fugitives to the sea, it was the door to this golden room that she flung open. She set the bears to weaving and creating cloaks and hoods from their own gleaming fur.

She warned her bears that none of them would be coming with her on this next adventure. They were to stay and watch the beloved homestead against the Scarlet Guard. It was not a decision that she took very lightly. Major Angela had not been separated from her bears in a decade. The bears kicked up a dreadful fuss, but she was not to be deterred.

'We will not let you go,' warned her footman, looming over the Bearded Lady. This was in the doorway of the spectacular golden room. Once more she was forced to the conclusion that she was as much the bears'

prisoner as their ruler. 'You promised that you would always be here, instructing us in your human ways.'

'If I leave alone, I will be able to come back sooner,' she insisted. 'I need to sort this mess out properly and I can't do that with an entourage.'

The footman was perplexed. Like any of the bears he was extremely short-sighted and this made him, quite naturally, bad tempered and gruffer than he meant to be. Angela stood right up close so that he could be sure she was still there. She knew that the world the bears saw was always twilit, their eyes were so bad. Not as bad as hers, of course. She knew they loved her because she had never been afraid to stand right up close and face them. She had never been bothered by her bears'

rank breath.

'You won't stop me,' she said.'Will you?'

'We don't have anything to do without you.'

'There's the house to keep up and keep safe.'

The bear grumbled.

Major Angela went off to think. This might be a problem.

She went to the kitchens, deep under the mansion. Here, two golden bears, sisters, had the run of this domain, and they were two of her trusted favourites. They were cooking tonight's broth. It took only a moment's diversion for Angela to pop into the pot a certain powerful sleeping draft. Something that wasn't very harmful, but strong enough to knock out a houseful of bears. She had kept it just in case, one day, she found herself having to creep away without their knowing.

I could have told the Bearded Lady how difficult it sometimes is to relinquish power. Often, when I was Empress, millennia since, I wanted to dismantle the mechanics of power and just walk away and do my own thing. But oh, no. There are always lackeys and hangers-on, viziers and generals to hold you in place and uphold the state. Who'd be Empress?

How relieved I was when my day was done and they put me in the Tunnel, in the catacombs beneath the Scarlet Palace. I was the first banished underground at the end of my reign and through the centuries I have been joined and joined and joined again by my many daughters. All of them, too, have been pleased to give up supreme command of Hyspero. It is wearing, ruling a place such as this, we all agree. All save our current daughter, of course. Who, I fear, seeks to be Empress for ever.

So I do feel it is a good idea that we put our motley heads together -this little gang a.s.sembled about me now - and do something about her. I think my great-great-great-etcetera-granddaughter has grown into something of a fiend. And you'll appreciate my help, won't you, Doctor, honey?

Ah, he wasn't expecting that. He isn't used to voices out of nowhere. He jolts right out of his seat. He's on the front seat of Iris's double-decker bus. For a few idle moments he was watching the others carry supplies on board. He was staring abstractedly out of the s.m.u.tty windowpanes at the pale-cream and icing-sugar walls of the Bearded Lady's mansion. He was thinking about decor, and about golden fur crammed into golden rooms and wondering how soon he will see his own - what's the word - TARDIS?.

'Yes,' he snaps. 'TARDIS. My Ship. And what are you doing, rummaging around in my head?' Then he shakes those lovely, tousled curls as if - poor thing - he could thus dislodge me.

'Call it a little narratological sleight of hand, sweetheart,' I whisper. 'One of the perks of first-person narration, we could say. When I was the Scarlet Empress I was of course omnipotent and that is only a shade away from thinking yourself omniscient. And here I am, able - blithe and willing - to slip into your thoughts'

'Oh, it's you,' he says, restraining a scowl. 'Your Majesty does me honour with her presence.'

'Too right.You intrigue me, Doctor. Both you and Iris do.'

'I'm glad to hear it.' Now he's wondering where my actual, corporeal self might be.Where my stoppered jar has been left. I am stowed within the bearded major's fur cloak, as she stealthily prepares her escape from the bears. She switches off all the lights, blows out the candles and, feeling her accustomed route, tiptoes carefully, very carefully, between the dropped and snoring, pale forms of the bears. They sleep where they have fallen in their unceremonious heaps and she feels regret - I can tell - to run out on them this way. Major Angela is not a bad leader, in her own way. But she wants to be off. That old, roving, adventuring spirit is stirring within her, galvanised by her bizarre visitors. She feels only the slightest apprehension for her blindness. This will be her first real jaunt in the dark.

'You and Iris have been free all your lives to wander at will and embroil yourselves in anything you've wanted,' I tell the Doctor. 'You make me very envious. You've never been cooped up inside a jar. Or forced to wear the robes of great office.'

'You'd be surprised,' he says. 'I've had my moments. And I've had to work hard to be this free of responsibility, you know.'

'I think youVe been here before,' I say, suddenly realising that this is the truth. 'I've felt your presence on my world in the past.'

'I might have.' He is guarded.

'And only now you come to see me.' If I had a face just now it would look rueful. 'You naughty old thing.' Then I yank myself out of his mystifying, perplexing mind and visit the lower deck of the bus, where Sam, his young and rather loyal companion, is arguing with the old woman Iris about a wheelchair.

It had been waiting for them, silver and resplendent black, in the gangway, when they boarded Iris's bus.

'I'm not getting into that,' Iris burst out. She seemed to be addressing the bus itself.

Sam saw the wheelchair and tried to placate her. 'It might be a good idea. You could conserve your strength for a while.'

The old woman rounded on her.'Why is it everyone suddenly knows what's best for me? What is it that happens when someone gets ill?

Have I lost all my faculties?'

'No, of course not.'

'All this is getting out of hand. This was my plan, my expedition.

Everyone is taking over.'

'All I said,' said Sam, keeping a level tone,'was that it might rest you a bit if you used the chair.'

'Sam, last night I astral-projected myself halfway across this whole world.'

'I know,' murmured Sam, although this was the first she'd heard of it. Iris scrutinised her face for signs she was being humoured. Then she let out a great sigh and flung herself down in the wheelchair.'Oh, what the h.e.l.l. I don't know who I'm fighting any more. You're a good girl, Sam. You can push me around.'

The doors of the bus flew open and Gila appeared, weighed down with immense and s.h.a.ggily golden fur coats. Iris's eyes lit up. 'Well, they're fantastic.'

Gila rolled his eyes and was followed aboard by the d.u.c.h.ess, who was similarly enc.u.mbered.

'At least we get fabulous outfits for this part of the trip,' Iris smiled.

"These put my old furs upstairs to shame: The d.u.c.h.ess trained all ten eyes on her. They watched the cyborg drop the furs on to the couch, select one, and pull it carefully over her silver shoulders.

There was a thudding from the stairwell and the Doctor appeared.'Do you know, that odd little old woman from inside the jar has been fiddling about inside my mind?' He looked fl.u.s.tered.

'Lucky you,' grunted Gila, tugging on his own furs.

The Doctor seized a coat from the heap and looked pleased. Sam had noticed before the way he always enjoyed a chance to dress up. When they were all kitted out she said,'We're going to have trouble telling who's who.'

'Not a bad thing,' Gila said.

Still a bit miffed, Iris wheeled herself to the driver's cab, saying,'Let's get this whole shebang on the road.'

Major Angela stomped aboard in her own furs, clutching the jar to her chest. Already out of her familiar environment, she looked a little lost and had to be guided, by Sam, to a seat. The doors whooshed shut behind her.'We can go.' She looked worried and wan beneath the beard. T hate leaving all my lovely bears like this. I feel I've betrayed them.'

Sam looked out of the bus windows. From here you could see the slumbering creatures everywhere: face down in the hall, halfway up the gilded staircase, up on the landing. "They'll understand, Major Angela.'