Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [122]
She tried looking out through the window instead, but it didn’t help. Outside, the skinny dirt‐people were still heading for the gate, the lifeblood of the town seeping out into the desert. She tried to make out faces through the cracks in the boarded‐up window, to put names to the shapes that were shuffling and muttering their way across the square, but it was harder than she’d expected. Some of the names came to her in a second – the old men, especially, the ones who’d been in the town for so long that their names had started rooting themselves in the foundations – but most of the people were just blurs. She spotted someone who’d been her love interest, three or four years earlier, and it took her nearly a whole minute to remember what he was supposed to be called.
She’d had a grand total of five lovers while she’d been in this town. All of them young. The first one had been a whole decade younger than she was, which had seemed like a big age gap, back when she’d been thirty. The last one – the one in the square – had obviously felt that sleeping with her was less bother than not sleeping with her. She’d made a play for him while she’d been drunk, a bag of dried‐up skin and bones still acting like a sixteen‐year‐old.
Five lovers, and she couldn’t remember how a single one of them had felt under her fingertips, or how any of them had smelled, or what kind of noises they’d made in the heat and the dark. Because Dust took everything away, didn’t it? Names, faces, memories. The locals seemed to lose a little more of their identity every year, so Magdelana wasn’t sure whether it was the people who were being eaten away or her own senses.
She remembered the men from the Clan, the ones who’d run her hometown back in the days when her skin had still been more white than yellow, and she hadn’t felt as though the dust in her joints was the only thing holding her together. She remembered the Clan’s masks more than anything. Sharp and red against the grey of the desert. She remembered the burning crosses they’d planted in the ground, when there’d still been wood left to burn. Crosses on the horizon, flaming in a hundred different shades of red and gold.
That was how far they’d had to go to keep themselves whole. That was what her own people had turned themselves into, just to stop themselves losing their souls to the desert. Or losing their identities, anyway. It was better to burn, they said, than to let the dust take you.
Sometimes, you had to hold on to the terror to keep yourself human.
‘So the Remote only arrived here quite recently,’ said the Doctor.
Magdelana forced herself to look away from the window. ‘I can remember when they weren’t here,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking. Does it matter?’
‘Hmm. Then the two aliens you say were crucified in the desert. And now the travelling show. And myself.’ The Doctor folded his long, bony fingers in front of his face. ‘Doesn’t it strike you that something rather odd is going on? Almost as if all these “offworlders” were being deliberately drawn here. Pulled together in one place.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m not sure. I have a feeling the rules have changed.’ All of a sudden, his eyes were fixed right on her, and there was the hint of a smile on his face. Magdelana shuffled in her seat, and made sure the shotgun was at the ready.
‘How old are you?’ the Doctor asked.
Magdelana squinted at him. ‘You want to know…?’
‘How old you are. If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘Why?’
The Doctor unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair. ‘You were obviously born here. You must know an awful lot about the way this planet works. I’d like to know exactly how much experience you’ve had of it.’
Sounds reasonable, thought Magdelana. Not a lot of damage you could do with a piece of information like that. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m fifty‐three. Happy?’
‘Ah. You’ve aged very well.’
Magdelana ground her teeth together. She hadn’t aged: she’d just tanned. Like leather