Doctor Who_ Cats Cradle_ Witch Mark - Andrew Hunt [39]
'Oh, yuk! What's that?' She screwed up her face and pressed the back of her hand over her nose and mouth. 'Whiffy!' she exclaimed.
'No sewers,' the Doctor told her. 'Look around you. There must be a couple of thousand people here.
That's a lot for one small valley. It's bound to create some smell.'
Ace coughed and felt the bile rising in her throat. 'How can they stand it?'
'The human being is one of the most adaptable organisms in the universe. That s one of the reasons why the species is so successful. Other species have to bend their environment to fit a preordained need.
Humans just do it because they can.
So how can they stand it?'
The Doctor shrugged. 'They get used to it after a while. Gallifreyans developed a respiratory bypass system which could miss out the olfactory organs. Your method is simpler.'
They went on in silence. Ace looked closely around her. As they passed, faces, grime-streaked and gaunt, peered out from behind tent-flaps, silently drawn aside. Each face was different, but they all bore a common look that haunted their hollow eyes. It was a look that she recognized, the look of the hunted, and it was a look which stirred strange feelings in her because of her experience as one of the hunters on the planet of the Cheetah people. But a closer examination revealed something more, something beyond them being mere quarry.
The hunted lacked hope but had a fierce air about them, for their predator was close on their heels.
But these people, whilst they were indubitably fugitives, had a pathetically hopeful look which suggested that they thought they had somewhere to run to. The people here weren't cornered prey - the ferret facing a dog could at least turn and fight to the death, even though it had no hope of surviving.
These people had been given a ray of hope which they clung to tenaciously, even as it slipped through their fingers.
The tents ended where the ground began to rise to the edges of the valleys and Ace, her eyes becoming acclimatized to the dim light, could see that at regular points along the valley top were squat towers, silhouetted in black against the sky. Between these towers marched small patrols. Ace wondered, as the Doctor had, what they were guarding against.
But now she turned her eyes to the front and saw where they were being taken. Across what had been the open end of the valley was an enormous wall built out of huge blocks of stone. Here and there on this vast edifice there twinkled points of firelight, framed by small rectangles of dim orange light. The pale red sun low in the west, gave depth and shadow to the wall. In its centre was a large opening, a deep set hole in the wall. Far into the wall and half shrouded in darkness was a mighty wooden door.
The length of the tunnel which led to this door was such that Ace could only believe that the wall must be over a hundred feet thick.
‘What is this place?' she asked the Doctor.
‘You heard Captain Rhys. This is Tír na n-Óg, which, unless I’m very much mistaken in my memory of your ancient mythologies, was the kingdom where the Celts retired to when they died.'
Ace looked around her at this stinking, muddy, hellish world of faerie and rejected the idea. 'But, Professor,' she whispered, that’s just mythology. Where is this really? Where on Earth are we? Have we gone back in time?'
The Doctor raised an eyebrow at this. 'Just mythology is it, Ace? Again, if my memory serves me right, King Arthur was just mythology.' He became serious. 'I don't know where we are exactly, Ace, but we are a long way from Earth. Look up at the stars.'
Ace did as she was told. The sky wasn't like Earth's where, during the day, the glare of the sun drowned the distant and relatively dim stars. The low level of light from the red sun allowed the stars to shine through the haze. Ace had once stood on a street corner in Perivale, while her friends took drags on cigarettes, and peered