Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [25]
It was early, yet there was something different in the streets. People were moving with a purpose and as he neared the docks he heard cheering and drums being beaten. The crowds were thickening and Fitz found himself following them, caught up in the swirling chatter, the odd burst of burbling laughter. Down through the town the stream of people pulled him, back to the docks that had been empty and silent the day before and where he had said his goodbyes the night before that. The stream ran faster, denser and he suddenly recognised the outline of the cranes. And the funnels of a merchantship, a Royal Ensign damply fluttering in the onshore breeze, the hawsers still being tightened as goods were thrown ashore by the crew. Each time a bundle of food or cloth sailed into the air, people sprang and reached upwards, clutching clumsily at the packages. Fitz couldn’t resist the urge and leapt as a small box arced down towards his part of the crowd. At his height, his hand was easily first to be hit by the object and some reflex let him hold on to it as he fell back to his feet.
Looking up at his hand, still raised, he realised he was holding a bar of chocolate. The bitter, dark chocolate in foil wrappers. He even recognised the brand. The crowd was calming now, the merchant seamen having gone back below decks, and some started to drift back into town, still laughing and calling out to friends. Militiamen had appeared from somewhere and were securing the gangplanks to the ship. Others stood about watching the scene with the lazy interest of people with nowhere to be. Fitz wondered if it was worth asking the soldiers about lifts to Guernica but they looked to be settling in for some serious unloading of a cargo of food and supplies. Turning back, he spotted a young woman and a toddler sitting on the kerbside, watching the crowds. She could only have been twenty and the child was barely walking. It was crying though. The woman was talking softly, almost crooning, but the kid kept wailing. The girl had wavy dark hair that hadn’t been set for a couple of weeks, the shape slowly falling. She had nice tanned legs too, angled carefully to avoid showing her slip, the calf muscles taunt. Shame about the brat. Fitz was about to walk past when he noticed that the kid, although not stopping the tantrum, had huge eyes on the bar in his hands.
‘Chocolate?’ Fitz asked, waving the bar about slightly.
‘Gracias, er, thank you. You are from the boat, yes?’ The girl was smiling at him, her head tilted to one side. The kid stopped yelling, crammed some of the offered sweet into its mouth and then hiccuped. Fitz nodded, realising his accent might be an advantage for the next day or so at least, since a British boat had broken the blockade.
‘See,’ Fitz said, although he doubted she would understand his comment, ‘it’s just what the doctor ordered.’ The girl smiled, humouring him, but Fitz was already moving back up into the town. He’d just got the strangest feeling that he was being watched.
* * *
The Absolute crosschecked the time and date stamps. The search for the two flickering figures from Bilbao had turned up no results, just like the man in the square. This time there were not even faint traces: it was if they had been taken out of the record, as if their actions were not as real, not as definite. He had begun to wonder whether the flicker was an illusion brought on by his unnatural state of being. Whether trying to view this world from the eyes of the humans was causing a glitch in the System.
Then he had seen them again. Now he was crosschecking. He had seen them first in Bilbao, in April 1937, yet now they were in Barcelona in November 1936. This was wrong, he should have noticed them in Barcelona first otherwise the implication was that they had somehow gone back and appeared at the earlier date. That the day had taken place both with and without them. Could that be the cause of the flicker? It made