Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [23]
He was a small and delicately boned man with a handsome, if puffy, face and a nervous and hesitant laugh which he seemed to lapse into at the end of everything he said.
Ian liked him enormously, probably because he reminded the schoolteacher of a man he had once met who sold second-hand jewellery on the Portobello Road. He was a Greek as well, Ian remembered.
`We have a long journey ahead of us,' Ian said, casting a quick glance at the Doctor who merely blinked his eyes like a cat sitting contentedly in the sun.
`Travel is the greatest thing in the world,' Nikos added, handing four flat pitta bread pieces to Ian. 'It makes a wise man of the fool. And a great man of the wise man. That will be three obols, or half of one drachma, or one sestertius, or one half shekel, or a knife to my throat if you prefer. For I am just a poor and humble shopkeeper...’ He shrugged his shoulders in mock-surrender as Ian fumbled in the pocket of his tunic and brought out a battered and dirty silver Roman coin, a sestertius, that he had found on the roadside two days earlier.
`Blessings be always upon you, good traveller,' said Nikos with a smile as wide as the Bosphorus estuary, flashing two rows of gleaming white teeth. 'I wish you and your fellow companions good fortune and fair weather for your travels.
And may your Gods go with you.'
`Thank you, good patron,' replied the Doctor. 'And may you always find the world in need of... bread. Or whatever.'
As he finished speaking, a group of ten rough-shaven and aggressive-looking men barged past the Doctor and Ian and strode towards the centre of the market-place, pushing out of their path any hapless locals that had dared to get in their way. 'Trouble,' the stall owner noted nervously, picking up his money and leaving his bread without another word.
Ì knew it was too good to last,' the Doctor said regretfully.
'We should have left yesterday, I had a feeling in my bones.'
'Doctor,' Ian said. 'Don't be so paranoid. They're probably just out to do their weekly shopping. Come on, let's find Barbara and Vicki.'
They walked into the central square of the forum. In front of them was the massive frontage of the synagogue whilst to the right were the more architecturally staggering Roman temple buildings, their Ionic columns and arches a wonder in an age where most other cultures were still building houses out of mud and straw.
'They certainly knew a bit about construction,' Ian said, as the Doctor and he reached the base of the sweeping granite steps leading up to the temple. ‘Must have taken a thousand labourers to throw up this little beauty.'
'Mostly slaves,' the Doctor said; absent-mindedly. 'Coerced into building these triumphalist monuments. It's sickening.'
Ian craned his neck to look up to the temple's high, arched roof. 'I agree, but it's impressively sickening, wouldn't you say?'
At that moment, they spotted Barbara and Vicki emerging from a smaller building on their left across the crowded market square. Ian waved his hand and Vicki responded.
'There they are,' Ian could lip-read the girl telling Barbara.
And then all hell broke loose.
The violence erupted, terrifyingly, without warning. One moment the square was packed with thronging, jostling crowds, the next a shout went up and fists were flying everywhere. Just like Saturday night down the Old Kent Road, reflected Ian Chesterton. Men wrestled each other to the ground. Ian and the Doctor looked on aghast as, around them, knives were produced and a Roman soldier standing mere feet from them had his throat slit from ear to ear by a grinning man in Jewish garb.
The man shouted something unintelligible at the collapsed corpse and then spat at it, gleefully The meaning was clear enough. He turned with livid madness in his eyes and stared