Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [45]
‘Nicolas carried it in his cart,’ she said, rubbing the back of her neck. She hadn’t worked up a sweat; she wasn’t even breathing hard. ‘In pieces.’
‘And then you put it back together?’
‘Don’t panic. I’m not about to nuke Paris.’ She saw an image of a city flattened under a piece of asteroid belt, a Martian warning that howled out of the sky, brighter than Hiroshima. Cribbed from a hundred warvid ads, documentaries her father’s description. ‘I’m out of fuel, remember?’
‘What did you tell the locals it was?’
‘I didn’t tell them it was anything. People are desperate for money, there’s a war on. Don’t worry, nobody knows I’m here, it’s all under control.’
The Doctor was sitting on the basement steps, the trap-door over his head.
From time to time the wooden hatch rattled with the falling of distant bombs.
‘So you arrived in the countryside. Why move to Paris?’
‘More central, more resources.’ Kadiatu tried to start up her exercises again, clumsy and uncomfortable under his gaze. ‘And the soldiers were crawling all over Thierry’s estate. We couldn’t leave it out in the open like that.’
‘You must have had help. If nothing else you would have needed French lessons.’
‘ J’ai atterri dans le verger de pommiers de M Thierry, ’ she said. ‘ Il sait que je viens de l’avenir, mais tout est en ordre. ’
Someone banged on the trap-door. The Doctor looked up and pushed it open a crack. One of Kadiatu’s domestiques peered at him. ‘ Excusez-moi. La voiture de M Thierry est arrivée, et il y a des soldats dehors. Madame, est-elle là? ’
‘Soldiers? Hell. What do they want? Hang on, Lili, I’ll be up there in a minute.’
Benny smiled, aimed in the direction of her head and perched the glass atop it.
Her opponent, the fat thief, slid silently under the table. His wife squawked and went down on her knees, fanning him frantically.
Benny took the glass off her head and raked in the kitty. ‘Anyone else?’ she said.
The two men in black were the only sober people left at the table. The one-eyed beggar kept giggling to himself, his stringy beard dripping with beer.
Benny was pleasantly sloshed, but nothing more – she could still walk in a 86
straight line, and had even managed to get to the bar and back again with more of the watered-down beer.
The smaller man reached for the jug and poured himself a cup. ‘What d’you plan to bet?’ she asked.
‘You’ve been talking all night about the French,’ said the short man. ‘But you are not French.’
Benny shook her head. ‘But I want the same thing as the French. Information. About all the old things, the old, old things.’
‘Anything in particular?’
Benny nodded, grinning. She took out a piece of paper. Three English words were written across it in bold capitals.
There was a long moment. The taller man shrugged.
‘I’ve seen that,’ tittered the beggar.
Michel was with the ragged Garde troops when they went on their doorknock through Paris, looking for horses. Through the haze of cheap wine – he never had been able to hold his drink – he wondered how many doors there were left to knock on.
That morning they’d been helping to put up the scaffolding around the Vendome Column. They were planning to pull down the old monument, one of these days; there was even talk of destroying Notre Dame.
The Column would make a good crash when it came down, thought Michel.
A good, loud crash.
When the lieutenant found him quivering against a wall with his hands over his ears, he’d spat and swore and put him on Comité detail. Now Michel trailed behind the other soldiers in his patched uniform, eyes reflecting the details of Paris like broken windows. The morning light was smoky and orange.
The merchants had complained that the Commune put its guns where they would draw the Versailles shells onto their houses. He had no idea whether that were true, but there were houses in ruins – houses with holes knocked in walls or roofs, rich men’s mansions reduced to splinters, children and their grandparents rummaging in the wreckage for firewood.
Sometimes they heard a dog bark under the ruins, or