Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [46]
There were people living in cellars, under what was left of their homes. The shells fell in a gentle rain. Each distant thwack drove Michel deeper into himself. His feet followed his little group but his head was wandering in the village of La Bas, under a summer sky.
They had come to a yard attached to a house – damaged, but still standing –
with a stable at the rear. A single gaping hole in the cobblestones showed where a shell had landed, missing the house by a few feet.
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The other soldiers were shouting and bashing at the gates with their rifle butts. Where was the concierge? Killed, or fled, thought Michel. He could see a horse and trap in the courtyard, a man defensively holding a child while he looked back at them in surprise.
The door at the side of the house banged angrily open, and out strode an immensely tall woman. Michel stared at her between the bars of the gate. His head was suddenly full of the musk of the tigers and lions, still alive in the zoo, too terrifying to kill for food even when the elephants’ trunks were being eaten in fashionable restaurants.
The Lieutenant was waving about a requisition from the Comité de Transport. ‘Horses!’ he shouted. We want any beasts of burden which you have.
Donkeys and large dogs will do as well. We are commandeering them.’
The woman was followed by a small man, scurrying to keep up with her.
It was only when Michel saw his paleness that he realized the rich colour of the woman’s skin, saw her African face. Even in her skirts she moved with the perfect rhythm of a panther. Some part of his mind imagined the muscles under her dress, the dark skin beneath her petticoat.
The woman unlocked the gate. The lieutenant waved his pistol in her face.
She moved, in a blur of limbs, long limbs as graceful as a ballerina’s, too fast for Michel to follow. The lieutenant had fallen onto the ground, and still she was moving, dancing between the gardes. Robert fell over, Jean-Paul was skipping backwards, wearing a ridiculous expression of surprise, fumbling with his gun.
Michel unslung his rifle and held it in front of him. She was beautiful, the most incroyable thing he had ever seen.
Someone was shouting. Michel couldn’t understand the words. Perhaps shouting for her to stop.
He saw that there was a single diamond stud on the right side of her nose, glittering like a tiny fire against the deep colour of her skin.
She twisted the rifle out of his hands and smacked the butt into his face, driving three centimetre-long splinters of his nasal bone deep into his frontal lobes.
But the details aren’t important.
The littleboy was eating a biscuit. There were less than a dozen left, carefully wrapped in paper and hidden away in a tin in Kadiatu’s kitchen. The littleboy nibbled it all around the edges, carefully, picking up any crumbs that fell onto his trousers.
Monsieur Thierry sat beside him on Kadiatu’s chaise longue, hat clasped in one hand. He was dressed as simply as he could manage, but the hat gave 88
him away. His trousers might be worn and the sleeve of his shirt conspicuously ripped, but the hat was expensive and in perfect condition.
One of Kadiatu’s gens de maison brought him a glass of wine, and he held it in his hat-free hand. The grandfather clock’s pendulum swung, its deep tock echoing from the wood panelling.
Round and round the littleboy nibbled, red head bobbing, pale eyes watching the grown-ups.
M Thierry was an exceptionally tall man, with unkempt wavy hair, a large mouth, and dark eyes that roamed about the room like an insect’s. His arched eyebrows gave him a permanently serious look. At the moment he felt thor-oughly uncomfortable, and well he might, given that this strange woman friend of his had just slaughtered four soldiers in front of his eyes. What exactly did one say in these circumstances?
‘Are all women of the future like you?’ he ventured, half-jokingly.
‘Assuredly not,’ said the Doctor.
The odd little foreigner was examining in great detail a glass bowl of flowers on the mantelpiece, one hand stretched out