Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [124]
‘It’s a noble occupation,’ said the Doctor. He meant it, too.
‘Didn’t always work like that,’ Magdelana went on. ‘Not when I was younger. All this was under the Clan. This town. The towns off east. Where I came from.’
She got the impression that the Doctor was suddenly frowning, although she didn’t look straight at his face to check. ‘This “Clan”,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t called… Faction Paradox, by any chance?’
‘No,’ said Magdelana. ‘Why?’
‘Just making sure,’ the Doctor told her. ‘Carry on.’
So Magdelana did. She told him how the Clan had started, as a bunch of cattle men who’d owned some of the land to the east where there was still grass left, who’d all grouped together to protect their herds from the predators and the raiding parties. She told him how the Clansmen had dealt with the ‘criminals’ they’d caught, how they’d flayed their victims alive and left them out in the sun for all the world to see. She told him how the Clan had started making its own rules, its own laws and codes and uniforms. If you could call them uniforms. A bright‐red scarf around the arm of your greatcoat, a red cloth mask pulled down over your head.
In the end, she told him what she remembered about the Clan from the days before she’d even fired her first Derenna. The gangs of men who’d ridden into her hometown on horseback, in groups of five or ten or twenty, with masks over their faces and lynching ropes slung over their shoulders.
‘Remember seeing people being hung up from the walls,’ she said. ‘Not sure if it happened how I remember it, though. Things look kind of bigger when you’re a kid. Just remember seeing hundreds of them. Hundreds of bodies, all strung up. All these Clansman symbols carved into their backs with cattle knives. Probably weren’t hundreds. Probably only a couple of dozen. Looked like hundreds to me, that’s all.’
Finally, she turned back to the Doctor. He’d bowed his head, respectfully, and now he was nodding, slowly.
‘People can be cruel,’ he said. ‘Very, very cruel. Especially when they’re desperate.’
‘My father was in the Clan,’ Magdelana told him. ‘Still remember him. Getting drunk. Dancing around the house with his mask on. Breaking stuff.’
‘I understand,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s why you became what you are. You became the closest thing there is to law and order on this planet. Because you couldn’t stand what life did to your father. What it turned him into.’
Magdelana thought for a moment. Then she put down the shotgun. She quite deliberately propped it up against the wall behind her, just so the Doctor could see that she wasn’t thinking of shooting him. Once she’d done that, she leaned forward across the desk, and gently, very gently, took the half‐full cup of coffee out of his hands.
She threw it in his face before he could even blink. The coffee had cooled down from boiling point, but it was still hot enough to scald, and she saw the flash of the Doctor’s teeth as he turned his head away from her.
When she sat back in her seat, the Doctor didn’t move. He was sitting frozen in his chair, head tilted to one side. Teeth clenched. Eyes shut.
‘You don’t know who I am,’ Magdelana told him.
The Doctor didn’t speak. Probably couldn’t.
‘Everyone knew the Clan were just butcher‐men,’ Magdelana went on. ‘That’s what my father was. He was a butcher and he was a crook, and I was happy when he got shot in the head, and I’m not going to say anything different. But that didn’t stop me. Didn’t change anything. I signed up with the Clan when I was fifteen, soon as they’d let me. The whole thing was coming apart anyway, so they were getting desperate. Desperate enough to let women in. Girls, even. Fifteen‐year‐old girls.’
Slowly, the Doctor began to open his eyes, to wipe the hot coffee out of his face. Magdelana kept talking.
‘Don’t make guesses about me,’ she said. ‘About what I am or why I do what I do. I’m not a butcher‐man. Maybe that’s the big reason I went with the Clan. Because I knew what people’d say, and I knew they’d be wrong. They’d see some butcher‐man with a mask, and I’d be the only