Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [44]
Michel wasn’t one of the gardes who attacked the Hotel de Ville after the January Sortie. The first French blood spilled by French bullets. He stayed behind, reading the Red Poster that was stuck up everywhere: “Make way for the people! Make way for the Commune!”.
Barely a month after that the Garde Nationale seized scores of army cannon and took them to Montmartre, storing up arms and ammunition. Suddenly they were the most powerful army in France. Michel had stayed behind, marching in the Second Empire anniversary celebrations.
He remembered a shell striking the pavement close by him and the taste of concrete powder in his mouth. Things after that were a little blurry.
Vaguely Michel was aware of the clock spinning around him, of grains of sand running through the hour-glass too fast for him to count.
He remembered the fumigation of Paris after the Prussian victory parade, the smell of bonfires and disinfectant.
He remembered a little of Montmartre, the screaming of the mob, gardes and rabble pressing in around the army. The regular soldiers were abandoning their own officers and joining the Garde. Michel watched when they shot a couple of generals, for really no reason at all. Was it the soldiers, or the mob?
He couldn’t remember. Someone with guns. Angry faces, shouting.
84
Things after that were more blurry still. He remembered the election of the Commune, of course – who could ever forget that day? Two revolutions in a row! ‘ Vive le Commune! Vive le Commune! ’ and pouring through the streets before the Hotel de Ville. Red flags waving. Smiling faces, shouting.
But the shelling went on, and the fighting went on, and the Garde were as confused and drunk as the Commune, wandering about Paris with no-one to fight.
And some small part of Michel, a buried human understanding passed down through generations of killing, knew that this war was no different to any other war. The reasons weren’t important, the strategies, the economics, the history. It was part of the long-unbroken chain of human violence. It was just another war.
It was a surgeon shot under a flag of truce.
It was an innocent man bound by a mob and hurled into the Seine and stoned until he finally sank.
It was the field of Buzenval, so jammed with bodies that you couldn’t walk over it.
It was a grandmother gnawing at a rat’s bones because there was nothing else to eat.
It was a small girl sliced in half by a shell on her way home from school.
But the details aren’t important.
Kadiatu’s ship was well-stocked with antibiotics. In her own time, the whole human race was stitched together by massive public transport; if someone came down with a cold, a million people got it – and got immunity to it.
But the past was a foreign country – or a lot of foreign countries, with no Solar Transit System to homogenize them, separated by trivial barriers: mountains, water, politics. Kadiatu had been expecting to pick up every little bug. She’d brought plenty of tissues along with the medicines.
But Kadiatu had never been ill in her life.
Around her, Parisians were dying in their hundreds as the water went bad and the food started to run out. Or in childbirth. Or from a pinprick. Or a mosquito bite. Sometimes Kadiatu imagined herself taking a shot of penicillin, and some severe French schoolmarm rapping her over the knuckles and saying, ‘Well, my girl, I hope you brought enough for everybody.’
She was spending a lot of her time in the basement these days, not so much because of the stored equipment but because of the shelling. A house right next door had been completely demolished; only the joining wall had been left standing. Her own house was completely untouched, except for a rain of brickbats and plaster powder onto the roof.
‘How did you get that thing in here?’ the Doctor said.
85
Kadiatu had been going through her morning exercises, stretching and jogging on a bit of carpet in the corner of the basement. She wore the undergar-ment of her hostile environment suit, grey synthetic stuff that breathed like her