Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [12]
saying. 'But their practical
achievements, bringing civilisation to large chunks of the world, and their success in maintaining an empire of that size was pretty impressive, wouldn't you say? I mean, the aqueduct alone...'
Out of breath, the Doctor seemed to be both nodding and shaking his head at the same time. 'Enslavement,' he gasped at long last, as he stood with his hands on his knees and his chest heaving. 'It is a truly terrible thing to keep intelligent creatures in fear and bondage, my child. Your appreciation of the Roman face, I mean race, will be lessened, I should say, when you actually see some of the reality of everyday life.'
He stumbled to a pause, then added, `Tales of the glories of the Caesars are but one aspect of life in these times. The Romans didn't appreciate or understand either diplomacy or democracy, do you see? Those are Greek words and they had already conquered the Greeks, as you are about to find out. Look over there and you'll see what I mean.'
So Barbara and Ian and Vicki looked. And they marvelled at what they saw.
There is a shade of paint, a kind of burnt orange that the colour charts of hardware shops identify as Arabian Sunset.
Barbara Wright once used it on the walls of the scullery of her little flat in Kensal Rise. It helped to give the place more light on the long evenings of an English winter when the television finished at 10:30 and she would read. by candlelight, some of the second-hand history books that she bought from shops on the Charing Cross Road, to save putting another shilling in the electric meter.
She had never quite understood why the colour was called what it was.
Until now.
The sky was a staggering rich shade of Arabian Sunset, stretching all the way to the horizon of the Black Sea; only it wasn't black at all, it was a rich, rolling aquamarine with silver streaks reflecting back the moonlight like a fractured, deep, dark and truthful mirror. Between themselves and the sea lay the city, lights from it twinkling through the twilight. A great sandstone vista in the middle distance, surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by rocky hills, it was laid out not in a haphazard and disorganised fashion as most towns are when viewed from a distance, but with perfect symmetry and co-ordination.
Ìt's utterly magnificent,' said Ian. 'When did you say it becomes Constantinople?'
`When the emperor Constantine gets here, fairly obviously!' There was a warmth to the sarcasm in Barbara's voice that Ian found both attractive and exciting.
`History's her strong point,' he explained hurriedly to Vicki.
'If we come across anything requiring an explanation on how the laws of physics have just been broken, or don't apply in this case, then I'm your man. Everything else, just ask the Doctor.'
The Doctor, meanwhile, had wandered a short distance from the group. Across the scrubland and into the city lay a destiny of sorts. The Doctor's acutely honed sense for trouble in the making was telling him (actually, it was screaming at him) that there was some on the way.
A whole wheelbarrow full of trouble.
A soft noise behind him caused the Doctor to spin around quickly, which didn't do his vertigo any favours and he, once again, felt dizzy and disorientated.
Vicki helped to steady him. Ì'm sorry I startled you,' she said.
'Child,' replied the Doctor, 'I suspect that you will be having a similar effect on me quite frequently in our future travels.'
The girl wasn't entirely sure how to take this enigmatic statement. Before she could decide whether it was a reproach or a compliment, she found the Doctor asking her a question and turned her attention back to him.
`What do you think of it?' he asked, indicating towards the city.
'It's fab,' replied Vicki.
‘”Fab",’ the Doctor noted with disdain. ‘Now there is an example of the way in which computers have ruined the universe's most individualistic language. The youth of the future all speak in tautologies, malapropisms,