Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [21]
The temple was looking at him.
* * *
Chapter 4
Pronounced Weet‐Zeelo‐Potch‐Tlee
‘He underestimates me.’
The priest nodded sympathetically. He adjusted his cloak, throwing a glance at his fellow.
‘Or perhaps he just overestimates himself.’
The priests started walking, and Bernice found herself striding swiftly to keep up with them. ‘It’s not as though I can’t keep up with him,’ she explained. ‘He thinks he’s the only one who can understand the situation. He thinks he’s the only one who’s been uprooted, who’s seen every side of life.’
They crossed a bridge. A frog splashed in the marshy water below. ‘Here I am, thirty‐two years old, perfectly capable of looking after myself. I can think, I can even fight.’
There was a massive building ahead, some sort of ziggurat, a great sculpted serpent wriggling at its base. One of the priests took her arm with a black‐painted hand, and she leaned on his muscular bulk. ‘He wants to do all the thinking. All the fighting. Does he think he’s God’s police? Or is it just a bad dose of the messiah complex?’
She smelled flowers and fresh‐cut stone, and something else, something metallic, as they began to ascend the steps of the pyramid. The steps were slippery, and the other priest had to take her arm to help her up. ‘Maybe he’s just trying to protect me. Can you believe it? Protect me? He’s trying to protect me.’
They were almost to the apex. There were two small stone houses on the flat top of the pyramid. Each was flanked by a huge statue of an idiot‐faced man. The sun was going down, throwing burning orange light over the houses. The colour floated on the waters of the lake.
At the front of the shrines was a great chunk of stone like a truncated, blood‐stained bed. The priests led her to it, her shoes slipping in the precious liquid. ‘One day they’re not going to fall for his tricks, his clever strategies, you know. They’re not going to join in the game. They’ll just crush the life out of him.’
They laid her down on the stone. She felt the liquid soaking through the back of her shirt as strong hands gripped her wrists and ankles, bending her uncomfortably backwards. Above her, a statue snarled at the sunset, gripping a banner in one stone hand. Bright feathers moved in the warm breeze at the top of the pole. Distantly, she could hear chanting in a language that sounded like falling rain.
There was another priest with a knife. His hair was long and white, bone‐white and glistening in the dimming light, and his face was painted half blue and half black. He smiled at her with pearly white teeth. He held a stone knife that had a little face on it, a toothy mouth and a beady white eye that looked down at her.
He said something to her in the language like rain.
Benny jerked awake and discovered she was lying on the kitchen floor. She’d rolled off the mattress, got tangled in her blankets. The lino was cold under her cheek.
She sat up, banged her head on a chair, and managed to stop herself from swearing loudly. The luminous dial of her watch told her it was three a.m. The absolute nadir of the circadian cycle.
Tomorrow – this morning she’d be off to the Institute for some more research. Bernice had wanted to make a side‐trip to 1978, to check out the actual date of Coyolxauhqui’s discovery for themselves. But Cristián wasn’t going anywhere in the TARDIS, and besides, they’d surely be able to find out more from the sixteen years of research that had followed.
Research. She was the archaeologist. She was the one who should have had a joyride back to ancient Mexico. But the Doctor had elected to leave her behind, sifting through dusty records. Surely she’d be more help, more use in the past. It wasn’t fair.
Childish, childish. Ace couldn’t do the research Benny was going to have to do. And there was no reason to think that 1994 would be any safer than 1487. And anyway, Benny always worked better by herself.
At least Cristián