Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [43]
‘Which gods?’ Ace asked, but she already knew.
‘We are the men of Set,’ said the leader of the priests.
‘Yeah, and I’m Cleopatra,’ said Ace.
‘We are the priests of Set, called Sutekh, called Setekh. He is the all high, the all powerful, who holds all life in his hands, who brings death. He is the desert, the storm, the flood. He is the destroyer, the trickster, the chaos-bringer, the lawbreaker.’
Ace laughed. ‘Sounds like the Devil,’ she said. ‘But that’s okay. I’ve worked for the Devil before.’
80
Second Piece
Butterfly Wings
They say that chess, like cards, has Kings and Queens.
What of the Aces? They play too!
(Jan Standinger)
Chapter 7
Opening Flower
Yume no naka ni
Ai-mimu koto wo
Tanome-tsutsu
Kuraseru yoi wa
Nemu kata mo nashi
I was up all night hoping I’d dream about you.
(Anonymous Japanese poet, Kokin Shu, tenth century) The soldier’s name was Michel. He was twenty-two years old, tall and skinny, with fair hair and blue eyes that looked perpetually surprised.
But the details aren’t important.
Michel had joined the Garde Nationale long before the trouble had begun. He had a dream about becoming a soldier of fortune, marching through France’s colonies, writing to his mother and sisters to tell them about his adventures. He wanted to see something amazing, something really unbelievable.
Michel tried to make the war more exciting by imaging it written down in books, being read by scholars and schoolchildren in a hundred years’ time, in a thousand. He was part of that history. But the events of the past few months were shuffled inside his head like a deck of cards.
Paris was the City of Light, the centre of the civilised world. It was all about Paris. He remembered the September day the Emperor had surrendered to the Prussians. Like all the Garde, he had no chance to bite the enemy; they stayed in the capital, idle, as the news from Sedan came through in trickles. It was hard to remember that France had started the war in the first place. Nach Paris, the Germans were shouting. Paris next!
The very next day the Parisians had elected their own Republican government. There was no way la ville de lumière could be made to surrender! But Michel had not been with Flourens when he marched on the Hotel de Ville, demanding that Garde be permitted to attack the Prussians. That was one day he did remember clearly, staying behind as the news trickled through. But no, there was more waiting.
The bombardment and the famine came together, followed quickly by small-pox. The rich were dining on elephant and antelope as the Paris zoo was 83
emptied. The poor were eating one carrot a day and freezing to death in the gutter.
Michel wrote to his mother and sisters in La Bas, scribbled notes tucked into the coats of travelling soldiers. Once, he sent a letter by balloon. That was another moment of clarity: staring at a patch of blue sky long after the fickle thing had flown away. He sighed, hoping his letter wouldn’t land in Norway, or the ocean.
Michel spent his days at rifle practice, or drinking, or swapping stories with the other men of the Garde. It was hideously cold. Every tree in the Champs Elysee had been cut down for firewood, old women using picks to hack up the roots.
It was January when they finally sent the Garde out against the Prussians.
Michel stayed behind. Michel wasn’t one of the ten thousand gardes who died.
The word was that the government had wanted to see as many of the Garde killed as possible. They knew they were sitting on an army of rebels, half-starved, half-crazy and half-drunk, burning with siege fever. Why not let the Prussians thin them out a bit?
The armistice had come soon after. They’d cut the Garde Nationale pay –
you had to beg to get anything. In the popular clubs, the revolutionaries debated the demands on the poor to pay the rent waived during the siege, the fact that the food and aid pouring into the capital was bypassing the starving.
Paris seethed under its surface