Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [64]
‘Qui est?’ The Doctor called, keeping eye contact with her.
‘Jueves, Doctor. It is Jueves. There’s news, big news!’
The Doctor smiled, raising his eyes upwards, then unlocked the door. Anji leant on the bed, not bothering to rise. She’d had quite enough today and just wanted to crash out. She had a feeling the big news wouldn’t help her sleep.
Jueves was flustered, his arms holding smudged newssheets. He slammed the door behind him and threw the crumpled papers on to the bed. Anji spotted one word before all the others. Guernica. She grabbed the nearest paper. Guernica had been razed to the ground. It had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. By accident. By design. She scrambled in the papers, skimming the hazy, confusing reports. There were no photographs yet, just reports of the burning sky, the skeletal ruins.
‘Yesterday,’ Jueves said, ‘It happened yesterday.’
Anji hadn’t found a familiar name in any of the reports and sat back on her heels. The Doctor was glancing through the reports methodically, smoothing the papers. He evidently drew the same conclusion.
‘Fitz. He’ll be coming back.’
* * *
Chapter Eight
Treballar Pel Control De La Situaciò
Fitz looked about the valley. They had left the truck near the border, Sasha throwing the keys to a man leading a small handful of men out from the foothills. Then they had wrapped themselves up in as much clothing as they could find, stuffed their bags with anything they might find useful and set off on foot. Into the Pyrenees. It was an insane route, Fitz was sure. Across the mountains to freedom, then back again. He looked about the valley again, with the snow-coated peaks high above them and the thin, well-trodden trail they were walking along.
‘Climb every mountain, ford every stream, some line I’ve forgot, till you find that dream.’
Sasha, walking ahead, turned back and laughed as Fitz’s voice bounced back from the sides. ‘You sing? I had no idea.’
Fitz shrugged. He just hadn’t been able to resist it. As if some inner part of him had dared him to do it, to see if his suspicions about Sasha were right. No one in 1937 would know that song. Then again, Fitz told himself, you could have not been thinking at all. At least he hadn’t suggested they dressed as nuns to make their break for France. After seeing the wounded women back in Guernica, the blood-soaked habits, he couldn’t bring himself to think of nuns as funny any more. Sasha had paused now, and waited for him to catch up. ‘What was the song?’
‘Oh,’ Fitz paused to think of the best lie, ‘something I wrote.’
Sasha grinned again. ‘You are full of secrets, Fitz. Come, what shall we sing?’
They settled on blues songs, the back catalogue of Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday. Music both of them had heard from whiskery wirelesses, the signal fading in and out. Sasha’s voice was midrange as well and they fell to harmonising, taking turns to be lead. Sasha knew the route out well enough that they walked through the night, rather than try to find shelter.
‘Sasha? Why do you know these songs? Shouldn’t you be all –’ Fitz waved a hand about trying to find the right way to express his opinion of Soviet music without offending. It wouldn’t do to get stranded up here, no matter how beautiful the cold night was.
‘Ah, tomorrow, Fitz, I will teach you some good revolutionary songs that you can sing on the barricades, yes? Contra ataques muy rabiosos, rumba la rumba la rumba la, deberemos resistir. Ay Carmela, Ay Carmela! But tonight we are clear of all that.’
Fitz decided not to push it, although he mentally filed it on his list on inconsistencies about his companion. Things that made him wonder about the Russian. He suspected the other man had a similar list on him, since he was bound to be doing something wrong, something out of time. They walked on, resting every hour and stamping the warmth back into their feet. Fitz could feel a blister forming on his heel.
Just after dawn, the palest yellow pink sky in the east, crystal cold, they reached a tiny building, little more than a lean-to in the lee of the rocks.