Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [110]
Finally, the Doctor was beginning to die.
Sacrifice Means Giving Up
In the whole of ritual, there’s no word more misunderstood than ‘sacrifice’. In the Old Testament tradition, every sacrifice would involve a spilling of blood – a fatted calf or goat sacrificed on the altar – and as a result the word has become almost synonymous with bloodshed. But ‘sacrifice’ only means ‘a giving-up’. Blood-sacrifices were made because, in the subsistence-farming world of the Old Testament, to kill one of your valuable animals in the name of your God was to show your devotion above material possessions, perhaps even above your own survival. On the other hand, the ‘virgin sacrifice’ planned for Juliette had nothing to do with death. She was simply intended to give a certain part of herself away. As Scarlette grimly noted, some time after Juliette’s disappearance, ‘one can only sacrifice what belongs to one… this above all else may have been the Doctor’s misunderstanding’.
But although there was no slaughter involved in the ways of Scarlette and her kind, blood was certainly an important factor. Even in London, no young woman would be admitted into any witch-cult until she had begun to menstruate. Some groups, such as the Mayakai who’d played such an important part in raising Scarlette, held that a woman was only initiated when she had sex: while the more masculine groups, mostly outside Europe and including the witch-factions of Mackandal’s Maroons, held that a man wasn’t a man until he’d killed another (preferably French) human being. This wasn’t a sacrifice, it was simply an act of faith. The same ancient ritual insisted that when a member of the aristocracy participated in a fox hunt for the first time he would be ‘blooded’ with the blood of the slain animal.
When the Countess and the Lord had set out in their carriage, that night back in September, had they really just gone searching for apes out of boredom? It’s possible, given the Lord’s background, that his intention was to blood himself with the carcass of a dead ape. But unlike the foxes of the Lord’s youth, these animals could fight back. It hardly seems worth relating the Countess’s description of the scene, as the carriage was overturned; the coachman was ripped from his seat; the horse, screaming wildly, was brought down by the teeth that were sinking into its flanks; and the Lord was dragged out of the broken transport through one of the windows. It’s perhaps surprising that the Countess herself managed to escape, although she had at least some knowledge of protective ritual.
So in the end, it was the Countess who’d been ‘blooded’ that night. She’d seen the consequence of ‘infernal dabbling’, and smelt the foul, rotting-meat stench of its breath. She’d run from the scourge, and although eventually she had returned to the city of London she (like Anji?) had spent some time lost in the bestial city. She had, she claimed, even had one peculiar encounter with what she described as the ‘King of Beasts’ (about which more later). She had realised, then, that the apes were a form of punishment. The King of Beasts, like the King of England, was as far as she was concerned a gibbering idiot whose kingdom was a den of wilful barbarism, an empire of filth falling into neglect. No wonder her audience had left the Star Chamber shaken. They would have expected this kind of treason from Sabbath, not from a Lady.
It’s interesting to compare the Countess’s ‘initiation’ to the events which took place on board the Jonah the following