Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [123]
She was aware, however, that the hunt had to be watched closely. More than once, hunters came upon certain constructions in the jungle, piles of carefully-arranged rock and marble which didn’t appear to have been created by the natives. The significance of these is obvious. Whenever it called more apes, the TARDIS stood at the threshold between the world and the realm of the monsters. Occasionally it would be as if the apes’ world were trying to impinge on the island just as it had impinged on London, so that the hunters would glimpse the ‘black eye’ overhead or see ancient, half-ruined buildings covered by the undergrowth. The piles of rock they found were like those that had been described by Anji, after her experience in the beast-realm. They were monuments to the King of Apes, piles of rubble stuck together with dung in honour of the babewyns’ new god-ruler. The evidence suggests that the hunters soon realised this, because whenever they encountered such a mound they would destroy it, and those lodges who felt themselves in competition with the others would claim bonus points.
They must have known, even then, that the King of Apes would not take kindly to this kind of sacrilege.
Mixed Blessings
On November 16, just over two weeks before the alleged day of the wedding ceremony, a new guest arrived in the harbour-town. She was a warrior of the Mayakai, the oldest known surviving member of the ‘pureblood’ Mayakai line, who’d been lodged in St James’s since the fall of the rest of her kind. It’s possible that Scarlette herself had a hand in transporting this elder she-warrior to the island.
In London, the old Mayakai was considered something of a curiosity. It was well known that the woman could barely move, her joints having succumbed to a kind of paralysis, her breathing stifled by a growth on her lungs. In London she spent her life laid out in a bed in a spartan room, staring up at the ceiling while her two servants, women who had once been prostitutes in the capital but who had now adopted a puritan lifestyle and wore plain black dresses to match, solemnly attended to her needs. Whenever a visitor would call they’d throw a veil over the Mayakai’s body, a silken sheet so fine that more than one visitor described it as ‘a spider’s web’. It would have been like visiting some kind of living, breathing marble oracle: certainly the visitors never came to watch her do anything, as the Mayakai rarely even spoke. And when she did, it would be in a croaking, snapping Polynesian language that barely anybody could decipher.
The Mayakai was carried into the harbour-town in a form of sedan chair, a framework of wood long enough to allow her to remain horizontal, surrounded by curtains of the same spider-web which covered her body. A cortege of four black-clad, blank-faced Englishmen carried the chair, and flanking them were the two female servants, who threw grey petals ahead of the procession in disturbing silence. The locals, watching from all sides, must have wondered whether it was a funeral being conducted on the island rather than a wedding.
Scarlette met the procession in the street that led to the Church of Saint Simone, and in the hush which followed she bowed down on one knee in front of the chair. The crowds could only wonder who this web-shrouded foreigner was, if she had the power even to make the English witch-queen bow. There was a long pause after Scarlette knelt, in which the only sound came from the old woman’s sickly, rasping lungs. Everyone who witnessed it must have realised that Scarlette was waiting for something, a sign from the elder sorceress, although the old amazon hardly even seemed to notice Scarlette at all. It was some time before the woman finally managed to speak, a single phrase in her own obscure tongue.
Little is known of the dead language, but Scarlette