Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [158]
There’s no mention of Sabbath, or of Juliette. As later events were to show, they both felt their work in the Kingdom to be done.
The Doctor, that most alien of elements, had become something quite new. All those who saw him step out of the palace, into a blackened courtyard surrounded by apes, said that he was ‘as one who had the aspect of a man’. A man: one born of the Earth, or at least bound to it. His (mythical?) link to his homeworld gone, replaced by his bond to Scarlette and the Earth, he could now finally present himself as the champion of his adoptive world.
If he’d walked through the fire alone, the apes might have ripped him to pieces there and then. They were animals, though, and thought in purely animal terms. This was the figurehead of a new tribe, almost a new race. It’s said that when the creatures cast their eyes-across the entrance, at the black figures lined up against the dancing flames, they backed away just a little… because although they may have outnumbered the humans, no beast in the universe would have failed to recognise a territory challenge like this one.
The humans stopped moving, once they were clear of the fire. Only the Doctor carried on. He walked forward, hand still on his chest, into the centre of the cobbled space around the palace. On his feet once again, the elemental figurehead he was always intended to be, the still dark-eyed Doctor regarded the animals around him as if they were no threat at all.
Then he issued the challenge itself. Nobody records whether he made the declaration in English, or just in the body language which he must have known all ape-creatures would understand. He stood there as the leader of his tribe, and challenged the leader of his enemies to come here and face him personally.
As the archives suggest, the leader was already close at hand. The grunting apes looked to their shamans for help – unable to think for themselves, as in any primitive hierarchy – and the shamans, in their robes of skin and fat, could only look to a higher authority. The creatures carrying the burning man, now reduced to nothing more than a skeleton, stood aside. They cleared a path at the top of one of the many streets of the grey city, and from that street marched a retinue like no other.
It was the King of Beasts himself. He didn’t walk, of course, because pack-leaders never do. His massive grey bulk was supported by a framework of canvas, or according to one source ‘a bed of human skin’, like one of the sedan chairs which were so out of style in London. The skin/canvas was supported by poles of wood; the poles were held by other, lesser, apes; the apes were led by two of the shamanic ‘priesthood’, burning wooden staves in their forepaws. The apes not only parted when the procession approached, they positively grovelled, bowing their baboon-like faces until their snouts almost touched the ground.
The King is described, in all the texts, as the greatest possible monstrosity. A massive, powerful creature, strongest and most brutal of his kind, his pelt was a lighter grey than most of the others despite the streak of sheer black that was said to run down his spine (dried blood, possibly). He was bulky and bloated, muscular and bloody-eyed, his long, heavy arms dangling over the edge of his transport and idly scratching at the flesh of the servants beneath him. When he opened his mouth, it’s said that the stench of rotting flesh from his jaws could be smelled fifty yards away. Worst of all, there was the crown of teeth and briar-stems, which seemed to have been designed to offend every human being who witnessed