Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [107]
Outside the temple, the jungle island burned.
The flames seared the travellers’ faces and hands, and the natives were whooping agitatedly at them to move quickly.
Victoria looked around at all the corpses, noticed Santi passing them blithely by, without even flinching. Jamie seemed quite close to her, she found herself thinking with a bite of what could have been jealousy. She chided herself. She had believed the highlander to be dead, so she should hardly be angry he’d got himself a girlfriend instead, should she? Even if the girlfriend was Santi, the foul-mouthed dancing girl from Batu.
They stumbled through the banks of smoke, past trees roaring with flame, and reached the dock. The mercenary’s cruiser was still parked clumsily on the wooden landing. The cannibals were pulling Kepennis towards a long painted canoe. Still he said nothing, following them meekly without struggling.
‘Wait, Jamie!’ the Doctor said as they stood on the dock.
‘What are they going to do with Kepennis?’
Jamie shrugged, looked a little sheepish. ‘I didn’t know the Krallik would be Kepennis, did I? We had a bargain – they would spare me and...”The Soiled One” here – ow!’ Santi interrupted him at this point with an elbow in the ribs.
‘Go on,’ the Doctor said darkly.
‘Well, the chieftain promised not to eat me and marry Santi if we delivered someone to them that possessed great spirit and courage. It looks like they found their man.’
Kepennis was sitting facing them in the canoe. The last of the cannibals was already leaping in to the vessel which was being paddled away from the pier as they spoke.
They were alone on the smoky dock.
The Doctor gazed at Kepennis’s dwindling face helplessly, guiltily. There was no reaction, no sign of understanding.
Kepennis was immobile, lifeless, just like a mannequin. .
Victoria shuddered. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s discovered the true horror of things, I should imagine,’ the Doctor said morosely. ‘Inside himself. Nothing anybody else can do will make him suffer more.’
‘Discovered? Or did you show him?’
The Doctor shifted uncomfortably at Victoria’s question and gave no answer.
A melodic jungle chant lifted from the Kirowai tribesmen as they rowed away across the lake.
‘But they’ll eat him!’ Victoria persisted.
‘Better than they eat Santi!’ the Indoni girl pointed out pragmatically. Victoria glared at her, but Santi had been glared at by more formidable foes than a prim Victorian Miss in her time, fierce Kirowai cannibals being one recent example. She pointed at the cruiser. ‘We go?’
Jamie nudged the Doctor who was still staring out across yhe lake at the receding canoe. The surface of the lagoon was relatively still now, volcanic activity evident only in very intermittent bursts of bubbles softly breaking the hush of the afternoon.
‘Well, Doctor?’
He looked at Jamie with a frown, struggling to collect his thoughts.
‘Yon flying thing: can we no travel back to the TARDIS in it?’ His tone was endearingly hopeful, but he knew what the answer would be.
‘You know I hate gadgets like that, Jamie.’ the Doctor said, as if repeating a doctrine to a child with learning difficulties. Then he beamed brightly, shaking off his earlier mood as he pointed at one of the OPG canoes still tethered to the pier. ‘That will be more than suitable.’
‘Och, ye’re no serious!’
‘You want row all way to Batu!’ Santi was incredulous too, and not a little peeved, which secretly warmed Victoria to