Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [154]
Ultimately, Scarlette gave one final order to her ‘followers’. She told the remaining Masons, Servicemen and Maroons to fend off the apes for as long as they had ammunition. When their weapons were exhausted, they were to scatter in different directions and attempt to find some way back home to Earth. They’d done all they could, and only the Doctor could possibly help them now. With that, Scarlette re-holstered her own empty guns and began the march through the echoing hallways of the palace, perhaps in the hope that she could assist whatever ritual the Doctor had devised to end this nightmare.
So it was that Scarlette, too, arrived in the central chamber and saw the Doctor dying in the centre of the Great Eye. So it was that she joined Fitz, and Anji, and Katya, and Mrs Gallacher, and a handful of the other ritualists who’d retreated to this place, all of them hovering at the Doctor’s side. Those assembled cleared the way when they saw her hurrying across the great floor of the chamber in her riding-boots, and made space for her at his head. The Doctor was still staring up at the ceiling, eyes dark, ribcage rising and falling far more slowly now. Anyone could see that his death was mere minutes away.
Then Scarlette, under the gaze of Fitz and Anji, put her hand under his neck and slowly lifted his head. He didn’t respond, and there wasn’t even any change to the rate of his breathing. All present watched as Scarlette lowered her face to his ear, and began to whisper.
The myth claims that she spoke of all the worlds she’d seen, while she’d been here in the Kingdom of Beasts. She allegedly told him that she’d seen untold alien cities, like ‘dwellings on the Moon’ (the notion of life on Mars hadn’t occurred to anyone of importance other than Voltaire). She told him that if he should die then it wasn’t just Earth which would be in peril. Hadn’t the apes taken this place, this once-magnificent palace, from the Doctor’s own world? Weren’t they prepared to ravage any world, in the form of apes or reptiles or bats or whatever else? Wasn’t the universe itself at stake here?
How anyone else heard her words remains untold. The effect of them, however, is clear. The effect was absolutely nil. Once she’d finished her speech, Scarlette
…looked into his eyes, and saw that nothing was there.
Finally, she had to concede defeat. Slowly, very slowly, she lowered his head again. She looked up at Fitz then, and Fitz could only shake his head, though Anji glanced at him as if to say: ‘so, what do we do now?’
There was a noise from outside the chamber, at that point. The humans in the halls of the palace were falling back, crying out, some of them screaming as if the animals had already fallen on them. Those gathered around the Doctor became more anxious still, as news reached the chamber that the apes had ceased their random assaults on the human defenders. Instead, the animals seemed to have adopted fire as their weapon of choice. The front of the building, said the cries, had been set aflame. The robed apes, the ‘shamans’ of the ape-race who’d given their blessing to the King himself, had approached the palace bearing lighted sticks and branches. The hall beyond the gateway had been torched, and now the blaze was spreading inwards, helped by the dry breeze from outside. The floor may have been stone, but there were untold ‘pipes and conduits’ – possibly rubber – beneath those flagstones, which were all too ready to burn. The humans had fallen back, and some of the apes had advanced, too mindless to understand the threat of fire to their own persons. Even now it was burning the apes as well, a handful of the creatures already rolling over and over in the hallways in an attempt to put out their pelts.
When she heard this, Scarlette is said to have glanced once more at the fallen Doctor. Once more, and for the last time, she seems to have been looking to him for guidance. Hoping