Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [43]
They heard her yelling orders. Ancelyn bowed his head to Merlin and set off in her wake.
Ace found that Lethbridge-Stewart was watching her.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ he enquired.
‘Just call me the Latest One,’ she said sourly and started to walk after Bambera. ‘I’ll get my own blanket. Coming, Shou Yuing?’
The Brigadier found himself alone with the Doctor and the archaeologist. ‘Oh dear. Women. Not really my field,’
he said. And he had forgotten to ring Doris as well.
The Doctor flicked away a charred piece of his hat. He thought of Morgaine and studied the woods that surrounded the lake. ‘Don’t worry Brigadier, people will be shooting at you soon,’ he said cheerfully.
Chapter 2
Elizabeth Rowlinson sat quietly and listened. It was ten minutes since she and Pat had heard the helicopter come down beyond the trees.
The phone was still out of order and none of the staff had turned up that morning, but there were no new customers either. The hotel had seemed mercifully empty once the visitors had vanished. When they heard the crash.
Pat had taken the first-aid kit and gone to help.
Elizabeth waited in the lounge bar and strained to hear the familiar sounds that no one else noticed. She had felt presences too. Since the strange night before, instincts that she kept to herself warned her that the world had somehow changed or was out of kilter. She had even sensed what she supposed was darkness. The change was beyond her definition, but it was unnatural and filled her with fear.
She moved to the window where she could feel the sunlight. The more she strained to hear, the less she heard.
The silence nearly deafened her. She could no longer tell what she listened for from what she imagined she heard.
She thought she heard many footsteps on the road, marching in unison like soldiers. The sun’s warmth faded as she felt a shadow pass across the window.
She thought she heard the outer door to the hall open.
She even felt the brief chill of a sudden draught. Then there was silence; a silence that was too full of quiet.
She fumbled for her white stick and started to tap her way across the floor. Twice she collided with chairs that were not in their normal places.
She had almost reached the door when her stick tapped metal. She paused, sensing a presence and hearing breathing. There was a smell of man’s sweat.
‘Pat?’ she said and put out a hand to find a shoulder.
Her fingers touched cold metal that curved around its wearer’s shape.
Elizabeth snatched away her hand and tried to back off.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ she said.
The presence did not move.
No one answered.
‘Pat, come quickly. Patrick!’
A cold hand gloved in fine chain mail seized her wrist.
‘Pat!’ she screamed.
Excalibur’s cry had ceased. Morgaine’s power was not so diminished that she could not hear the sword’s sudden silence.
The Knight Commander of the Queen’s entourage awaited orders. One hundred men-at-arms, summoned at Morgaine’s behest through the rent between worlds, stood in ranks in a marshy field. One hundred red cloaks shifted in the wind.
Tempered steel among tufts of meadow flowers.
She had broken the bridge across the abyss behind her soldiers and healed the wound in time with her arts. Her quest was irrevocable. They would not see the world again until her needs were fulfilled.
Those natives of Avallion they had encountered since leaving the shrine had scuttled away in fear before them.
They had been rough peasant stock, not the warrior nobility that the Knight Brigadier had represented.
The summons of the King’s sword had been for her; and so she had answered and the calling had ceased. Yet was it also for her to choose the meeting place? Or was this yet another of Merlin’s tricks? For surely Arthur was oath-bound never to step beyond the rules of chivalry?
Yet there had been one time, one moment, when all gallantry had failed the High King. And that moment of dishonour burned daily in her heart.
So be it. Let Merlin play his games of Blind Mole’s Bluff, she would