Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [113]
Chapter Thirty-Four
... And Miles to Go Before We Sleep
And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.
Mark 16:20
‘I had a really freaky dream last night,’ Ian Chesterton said, as he poked the embers of the smouldering lire with his stick and made the sparks from it leap into the chilly night air. ‘It was all mixed-up confusion, you know? I owned a Ford Anglia which is, in itself, ridiculous because I’d never buy Ford again after the last time. And I drove us all the way to Rome. But we crashed when we got there and I hurt my head. And we met a lion tamer. Then, afterwards, I went to a party in South Kensington with Keith Joseph and Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the Beatles. Alma Cogan was doing the twist on top of the piano with Brian Epstein. And then there was this annoying little pipsqueak, I used to go to school with, called Perryman or something, who asked me what I’d done with my life. He said he worked as a book reviewer on some provincial rag. Proud of it, he was. So, I said, “Well I get to travel in time, you pleb.” Then I woke up in a cold sweat.’
There was a momentary silence around the fire. No one quite knew what to say next.
The sparks of flame thrown up from the tire briefly joined the light of the stars over the desert before their moment of dazzling brilliance was over and they perished and died.
‘Our life in microcosm,’ Barbara finally added, pithily. Ian wasn’t certain if she was talking about the dream or the fire.
‘The party sounds rather good,’ said Vicki. ‘I wish I’d been invited. Who’s Alma Cogan by the way?’
As the Doctor’s friends fell about laughing and the rest of the tribesmen with them scratched their heads and wondered what their strange new travelling companions were talking about, he remained silent, a grim and determined expression on his face. What the future held for them all, now was an unsolved mystery. Their destiny was no longer to be found in the stars, to be sought by the light of distant and magical suns. Rather, it lay along a dusty and ramrod-straight road, the Egnatian Way, guided by a single sun and moon. Earth’s sun. Earth’s moon. One led them far across the barren, sandy desert by day. The other kept a safe watch over them during the bone-chilling nights.
The TARDIS crew were three days into their journey.
Ahead of them lay another one thousand miles of potential treachery and danger, without even the certainty that the TARDIS would be there waiting for them when they finally arrived in Rome.
It was turning into quite an unpredictable adventure and it would get a good deal more strange and dangerous before it was finally over, the Doctor was certain of that.
‘Regrets?’ Barbara asked him, sensing that the answer would reveal much about this mysterious old man.
Because, if the truth were told, while both Ian and Barbara had travelled with the Doctor for what seemed like a lifetime, neither really knew him. They never knew how he was reacting inside to the things that they saw and the people that they met.
And, she thought, it’s unlikely that we ever will.
‘No, not really,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Oh, I’m certain that if we had never come here, we would have found somewhere equally complicated and dangerous to visit. Somewhere for Chesterton to get himself into a positive heap of trouble. Isn’t that what being a nomad is all about? Ask these people,’ the Doctor continued, sweeping an arm towards their new companions. ‘I’m sure they will tell you a thing or two about what it is like to have no fixed or permanent abode. To travel only by the position of the stars and to be constantly searching for a place to call your “home”.’
They sat around a camp fire in the Thracian twilight with the Bedouin who had allowed the former TARDIS crew to join them as they trekked across the vast open spaces of the northern Mediterranean. Towards Rome.
Towards destiny.
The Bedouin were interesting people with an insular view of the