Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [19]
Ace almost dropped her goose wing.
38
I don’t believe it. I don’t mind older men, but this is ridiculous. Go on, tell him you’ve got a hubby and two point four children waiting for you back in the mystical land of Perivale.
‘No. I’m not married. I’m a soldier.’
Sedjet started to laugh.
Ace put her plate down on the ground. The monkey jumped down to in-vestigate. Sedjet was still laughing, great whoops of hilarity coming from his belly.
So Ace picked him up and threw him in the pool, dunking him until his wig fell off.
When she let him up for air, he was still laughing, his shaved scalp glistening in the morning sunlight. He twisted around to see how angry she was. But she was looking back at him without emotion. Just making the point.
That afternoon, he made her one of his bodyguards.
The scribe’s name was Sesehaten. He wrote tiny pictures across a bit of papyrus, dipping his brush into a palette of black ink, his hand flashing over the coarse paper from right to left. Ace stood beside him in the foyer, watching as the little jackals and owls and people lined up on the page. Hieroglyphs were just something you saw on jars or in photos of tomb walls. She had never imagined anyone actually writing them.
Sesehaten was a slender man, around the same age as she was. Like Sedjet, he was taller than the other Egyptians – more money, better diet, thought Ace.
He was still short, though, and not very threatening – but the four thugs in Lord Sedjet’s central hall waited politely for him to finish adding Ace to his records.
She’d broken a jug of beer over the head of the Assyrian, jamming the flat part of her foot into the ex-soldier’s groin. That stopped him laughing. She’d been through it on a dozen worlds, when she was an Auxie, smashing bottles over alien heads and kicking Privates in the privates. Childish, really, like proving herself with scraped knees and bloody noses in the playground. But it gave her a chance to test out her body, see if anything wasn’t working properly, see if anything had been done to her.
What the bloody hell had happened?
She remembered the giant ship descending on them, remembered fighting her way through crowds of panicking passengers as the Cortese went into emergency mode. Containment bulkheads were slamming down all over the place, while men and women in lightweight spacesuits were running up and down with equipment.
Then blackness. In the confusion it was entirely possible that she’d run smack into a bulkhead and knocked herself out.
39
Then a bad taste in her mouth, and cold so bad it stung. Then she was lying on the freezing floor, its coarseness scraping her cheek – what was it made from? – trying to get her eyes open.
There was a great purple bruise on his left cheekbone, the impact of a human fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow.
Shit happens, as the T-shirt says, and a lot of shit had happened while she’d been playing corpsicle.
At least she’d landed on her feet. She could look after herself here while she searched for the Doctor and Benny. They had to be here somewhere. She’d find them or they’d find her, they’d sort out who the enemy was, the Doctor would have a plan. And his plans always worked.
A drop of blood, brilliant red against his white skin, ran out of his nose.
Cruk it! What had happened?
She shook her head.
Sesehaten was saying, ‘You’ll be provided with weaponry. A bow, plenty of arrows, and a khopesh. You do know how to use the weapons, Tepy?’
First One, they called her Tepy, ‘Of course I do. What’s a khopesh?’
The ex-soldier and the half-Hittite grinned at each other. The Assyrian started laughing again. Out of his belt he pulled a heavy copper sword, shaped like a sickle – a long straight piece with a wicked curve and a pointed tip. It looked like a question mark.
He threw it at Ace. She caught it, awkwardly, feeling the weight drag her wrist down. The tip thumped into the floor with a crack.
‘I’ll need some practice,’ said Ace, shrugging. She flipped the sword up, gripped the hilt in both hands and had it