Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [6]
Cartethus bowed and then grabbed the wrist of the serving girl, twisting it and making her cry out in pain. 'Yes.
Excellency,' he noted. 'A most unfortunate error. I shall deal with this incident personally,' he continued, dragging the slave with him through the doors.
Agrinella waited until he was gone and then propped herself up on one elbow and took a sip from her own cup.
'Tastes perfectly all right to me', she said, grabbing a chicken leg and hungrily biting into it. 'You are so impetuous, my heart. How many times have I cautioned you to consider the consequences of your deeds before you act with such rash impatience?'
`Do we speak of the chastisement of a slave girl for arrant insolence or of plots and schemes concerning the ridding from our sight of the worst general in all the empire?' asked Marcus, licking his lips into a wicked and lustful smile whilst Fabius raised his eyebrows quizzically.
Agrinella merely lay back and began to laugh. 'My brave soldiers,' she said at last, holding her stomach against the niggling pain of indigestion. ‘So nakedly ambitious but, oh, so obvious!' She rolled onto her side and slipped from the couch to the cool marble floor. She walked, barefooted, across to Fabius and sat in his lap, stroking her hand down his chest all of the way to his groin. She kissed him full on the lips, and plunged her tongue deeply into his mouth, biting hard his bottom lip and drawing blood from it. 'Dear Fabius,' she said at last, casting a quick and knowing glance at her husband on the other side of the room. 'It is not that we do not seek your welcome company, our good and loving friend, but Marcus wishes to take me, now, to his bedchamber and roughly fill me with his seed. Do you understand why you must leave our home at once, my sweet?'
Fabius pushed Agrinella gently away, slapping her playfully on the buttock as she snaked her way back to the couch with a swish of eastern silk. He stood, straightening his uniform and reattaching his belt and sword to his full and sore stomach. 'You married a vixen!' Fabius told his friend. 'This one will take you and I all of the way to the Circus of Nero. If she does not have us dragged through the streets in chains and beheaded like common criminals first.’
`Then we can all forget about Byzantium forever,' Agrinella added, like a hungry child anticipating a lip-licking feast. Her husband, once again, seemed distracted. 'What say you, my love?' she asked.
`Before we can forget Byzantium,’ Marcus offered, `firstly, it must be ours...
Chapter Three
Through the Past, Darkly
Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies?
Who can forgive sins but God only?
Mark 2:7
The bottomless chasm of time and space did, seemingly, have a bottom after all.
A strangely comforting thought, that.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity (but was probably just seconds), the craft stopped falling. The TARDIS
impacted with something solid and its inhabitants ceased to be tossed around the console room like tiny objects collected in a matchbox.
As his head thudded, hard, against the floor, Ian Chesterton felt only a momentary numb and warmish sensation, as though an off switch had been flicked in his central nervous system. It wasn't at all unpleasant, he decided. A bit like how he felt after three pints of Theakston's and a whisky chaser in Pages Bar.
For the merest fraction of a second there was utter blackness around him and then the emergency lighting kicked in. The only sound was the constant hum of the TARDIS instrumentation in the console room. Until, that is, Vicki began crying.
Ridiculously, in retrospect, Ian found himself back in the physics lab in Coal Hill school, talking to a class of '0' level pupils about the mechanics of Newton's first law of motion. A body will remain at rest or travelling in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by an external force.