Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [29]
He found himself in the vanity mirror. There was a nasty scar across his left cheek, bright red, surrounded by a mass of bruised purple tissue. ‘Odd,’ he muttered. ‘The peripheral damage should heal first.’
‘You’re lucky to be alive. What happened?’
‘I hate it when a plan falls apart,’ he said, slowly drinking the water. His gaze was reflected from the mirror and onto her. Her hair was short. Her eyes were shaped like almonds, sharp windows in her serious face. She was more than a head taller than him, long-limbed and muscular.
‘I feel like eating,’ she said. ‘Are you hungry?’
Bernice closed her eyes. They felt like a desert, seared by the noonday sun and full of sand. She lay back under the canvas, in the shade, praying for the premature invention of air conditioning.
She and Denon had taken a detour, leaving Desaix to his forced marches for a few days. A short boat trip down the Nile and they’d be in Amarna.
She’d arrived in France months ago. She had fallen out of the rift alone and glowing like a light bulb, scattering the terrified peasants who had been picking apples. All she had had was her travel bag.
She unzipped it and took out her diary. Stuffed inside the bag were antibiotics, camping equipment – things which might help to keep her alive, assuming she landed somewhere that didn’t kill her instantly.
She’d spent almost a month aboard the TARDIS waiting for the Doctor and Ace to signal her. She slept in her clothes, the bag under her head, ready at a moment’s notice to home in on the beacon.
The signal had jerked her out of sleep. The TARDIS automatically locked in on it. She bolted into the console room, the bag slung across her shoulders, force shield clipped onto her wrist. The TARDIS doors were already opening, a great spiralling corridor of light leading out into the Vortex. She could see a flickering portal at the other end.
She ran out of the doors, felt herself propelled through the time corridor, picked up at the last moment by the forces inside and flung out through the portal. Somehow she managed to keep her feet as she crashed through a temporal barrier, then a real one.
56
The corridor’s energies surrounded her in a rapidly dissipating halo. Bits of shattered glass melted into droplets, falling like rain at her feet.
The Doctor and Ace had been there. Somehow, things had been worse than the nightmares she’d been having.
Bernice pulled the Doctor’s Fedora down over her eyes. She wasn’t sure why he had left it behind – or why she had stuffed it into her travel bag. She was glad she had it with her. After all, it did keep the sun off.
The gold and the vodka had gone in the first month. She’d spent that time just surviving, struggling to polish up her high school French. The TARDIS’
telepathic circuits had spoilt her rotten as far as languages were concerned –
but puzzling out ancient tongues was an archaeologist’s skill.
She had needed every bit of that skill. At first, everything had been totally alien – the money, the food, the clothes, even how the loos worked. She couldn’t hope to blend in, so she’d kept on the move, working her way towards Paris with a crazy plan in mind. If she hadn’t spent part of her youth living in a forest, she’d have starved. As it was she’d been eating bugs by the time she made it to the capital.
Denon was the obvious choice. He more or less invented Egyptology and was one of the first archaeologists. She’d studied him; she’d be able to impress him. He had money and connections. He was a life preserver in the ocean of history.
It was good to get out of Cairo. Egyptian rebels were harassing French soldiers daily, the French had burned down mosques, and both sides were already responsible for shocking massacres. Napoleon had even poisoned all the dogs to stop them barking a warning to the rebels. Fairly standard stuff for a war, in fact.
Benny frowned sleepily. She didn’t care to be on the conquerors’ side, but