Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [24]
‘Oh, I know that.’ The laugh lines around Mrs. Sedjet’s eyes stood out as she spoke. ‘He’s always had a passion for foreign women. I won him away from a Babylonian, a very exotic lady. He was smitten with her, but there was one difficulty.’
‘What?’
‘He can’t speak a word of Babylonian.’
Ace grinned, despite herself. ‘Look, there really isn’t anything going on.
He’s a married man, right?’
Mrs. Sedjet nodded. ‘Yes, I was aware of that. It doesn’t bother me when he has the occasional affair. I even had one myself – that came as a shock to him, I think. Ours is a business relationship: not only can’t he speak any foreign languages, he can’t add up to save his life. I supervise the books and the foreign traders.’
‘Where I come from,’ said Ace, ‘people are supposed to get married because they’re in love. Doesn’t always work that way, though.’
Mrs. Sedjet nodded. ‘I do love Sedjet. He’s a good man, Tepy, a gentle man.’
A gaggle of children wandered past, following their mother and father, tripping over one another as they gawked at the Pyramid. Ace folded her arms.
‘So if he did – I mean, I keep expecting him to say something, but I – if he did say –’
‘I would not be offended. After all, if he’s serious about you, he can always take you on as a concubine.’
‘Oh.’
‘You don’t look very happy, my dear.’
Ace shook her head. Mrs. Sedjet, looking a little puzzled, peered up at the receding form of her husband.
It was a seething hot day when Sedjet decided to visit his uncle. He chose four of his bodyguards for the trip. Only one of them came back alive.
They took a short-cut across the desert in chariots, the horses’ hooves kicking up great plumes of dust. The thugs were dressed in loin-cloths and not much else, showing off their muscles and scars. Ace wore what any leisured 47
lady might wear: white linen, the pleats ironed carefully into place by servant girls going cross-eyed with the precision, and half a kilo of jewellery.
The arrows came showering down from the cliffs, killing one of the horses, scattering the chariots. Something slapped Ace’s face, hard, and she realised there was an arrow caught in her hair.
When the thieves ran down to attack, waving clubs and swords, they mis-took her for a harmless noblewoman. She killed two of them before they realised what was going on.
Centuries in the future, when the art of damaging human beings was honed to fine technological precision, she could have left them alive. But a khopesh is a bloody great lump of soft metal with a nasty hook, and all you can do with it is hack out your enemy’s guts and hope he dies quickly. That was how the half-Hittite died, groaning in the sand, hairy hands pressed against the gash in his armour.
The khopesh had a clumsy swing and a lousy recovery time, but if you hit with it, it was very palpable. Ace came silently up behind one of the bandits as Sedjet tried to fight him off. Whoosh, wallop, sounds of parting air and parting flesh, head rolling on the ground. Next? She dragged the hooked sword through the side of the largest bandit, feeling organs tear like paper against the force of her swing.
Something hit her, missing her face but crunching into her collarbone She screamed, enraged, striking out gracelessly with her khopesh and her foot.
One or the other connected, sending the luckless bandit stumbling back into Sedjet’s hands. He twisted the man’s neck until it made a satisfying crack and dropped him.
Ace discovered she sat down hard in the dust, a ferocious line of pain spitting blood from her left shoulder. Sedjet loped over. ‘Sister! Does it hurt?
How bad is it?’ His face loomed over her like a dark-skinned sun, eyes black as night-time, their corners creased with concern.
Ever so romantic, she had thought, as the pain thumped up into her skull and laid her flat out against the sand. I bet Benny’s having an even worse time.
Cairo 1798 CE
Benny was eating grapes. She was lying on soft cushions in a voluminous drawing room, a silken sheet drawn up to her neck. Flickering candles illuminated the room, picking out Vivant