Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [69]
The street was cordoned off. Armed men stood beside the road barricades. Thin streams of smoke rose from cigarettes in the dawn light. More soldiers waited inside jeeps, or stood leaning on the vehicles, boots crunching in the Christmas snow.
All was silent. Except for a blazing argument going on outside number twenty eight.
‘Holy cruk!’ exploded Bernice, waving her arms exasperatedly at the accumulated firepower. ‘I expected you to come, plus maybe a couple of police. Not half the crukking marines.’
‘They’re not marines,’ said Macbeth, rolling something between his fingers. ‘They’re UNIT. This sort of thing is their job.’ He sealed the paper and popped the first smoke of the morning into his mouth. ‘No sense in taking any chances.’
‘All you have to do is walk in and retrieve the Doctor. You haven’t even done that.’
‘You were the one talking about unknown psychic forces.’ He gestured at the house. ‘At the moment, everything seems very quiet.’
From high up in number twenty eight, a dreadful scream resounded, lingering in the cold air. The soldiers shuffled and muttered. Bernice blanched. Macbeth’s mouth fell open, and his cigarette fell down and burned a hole in his shoe.
Without a word, Benny ran for the front door. Macbeth waited a dignified moment and signalled his men.
* * *
oh i remember now
His mother had named him Hummingbird because when he grew up, he would be a warrior. Little Huitzilin studied his namesakes as they swarmed around the long flowers, their iridescent feathers glistening like sunshine on water. One would pick out a bit of territory, some bush rich in nectar, and then it would defend it.
He had spent hours watching them. They were not afraid of him, the little Aztec boy with the shrivelled foot. Sometimes a hummer would fly right up to his face and hover an inch away, as though studying him, its wings an invisible singing blur.
And they would fight. He’d watched a tiny hummer fend off a hawk that must have been fifty, a hundred times larger than itself. And they’d fight one another for a flower or a branch. There’d be a clacking of beaks, longer than the bodies of the birds themselves, as though they held swords in their mouths. They would break apart and collide, smashing together, losing feathers. Sometimes one would fall to the grass and lie still. Huitzilin was always careful to collect the little corpses. Sometimes they would still be alive. He would sacrifice them to the gods, smashing the tiny bodies with a rock.
Once he came so close to a hummer it almost attacked him, hovering agitatedly near the long, tubular yellow blossom it was planning to feed on. It finally decided he was just a bit of scenery, and thrust its long sword into the flower, drinking deep.
Little Hummingbird watched and watched as the tiny creature drained every last drop out of the yielding flower. When it was gone he plucked one of the blossoms and squeezed its base against his tongue. Tasting the sweetness.
* * *
Huitzilin did not know the man’s name, or his rank, or his tribe. He only knew that he was a foreigner, and that one of them would kill the other.
The swamp dragged at their feet. They snapped fat branches from the trees to hit one another with. They fished rocks out of the mud to throw at one another’s heads. No one knew they were here.
At last they ran out of weapons, tumbling over and over in the water as they wrestled, slapping and punching. There was no thought of capture, no thought of sacrifice; only the need to kill, to break up the opposing mass of flesh. Only in rape and in combat can you do whatever you want to the other person’s body.
Huitzilin screamed in rage as he clawed at his opponent’s eyes. The other was bigger than him, with two working feet; and yet he could see the uncertainty on the foreigner’s face. The scout had not been expecting to find anyone in the swamp, much less some witch with blue eyes and feathers. It was Huitzilin’s only advantage, and he pressed it, howling like the spirit