Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [159]
Even so, the Doctor was undaunted. The procession stopped no more than four or five yards from the spot where the Doctor stood, unblinking, waiting for his audience with the cannibal-god. When the servants came to a halt, the King gave an almighty yawn, which threatened to suffocate all those present. He flexed his enormous arms, and then, as the red-shot eyes of all his subjects fell on him, he let out a huge scream of triumph. In a sketch of the scene, part of a painting commissioned (but never completed) from the artist Benjamin West at the behest of the Grand Lodge, the black eye sun can be seen surrounding the King’s head as he sits on his makeshift throne. It’s like a halo, granting the ape its power while simultaneously watching every move he made. No written record mentions the great eye, however.
So what did the Doctor do, when faced with this behemoth of an animal? He simply took another step forward. He, let every creature present, every human and every babewyn, see that the King filled him with no fear at all.
And then, presumably in the same language he’d used to call the King in the first place, he challenged the monarch to single combat.
In retrospect, it was a stroke of genius. The only real logic the apes understood was the logic of animals, the law of tooth and claw; of strongest-leads‐the-tribe. Had the Doctor remained a man of his own people, he would have had no power to make this challenge. But thanks to the wedding he was the King of Time, the King of Earth Time, and thanks to the presence of the other lodges he was the undisputed leader of the humans: even Scarlette, prone as she was to dominate any situation, was happy to defer to him. No ape could have misunderstood this. The leader of the humans was challenging the leader of the apes, the most primal form of ritual in existence.
Did the King of Beasts look around him, searching for help from his followers? It’s tempting to think so. But for most primates, a challenge to authority is a matter of personal combat rather than pack democracy. So the King of Beasts stood from his majestic slouch, raising himself up on his fat but powerful hind legs. He stretched his arms again, and he bellowed, a howl of sheer animal fury which left those assembled in no doubt that he was ready for a fight. Scarlette stepped forward then, perhaps to give the Doctor support as the Doctor looked up at his huge opponent. She didn’t have time to reach him, though. As she moved towards him he spoke one phrase, this time in a human language that all his compatriots could understand.
‘You want the territory that’s under my protection,’ he told the King of Beasts. ‘All right. Then we’ll fight on that territory.’
All the stories of the Kingdom, all the rumours and legends, end here. It’s as though the battlefield of the Kingdom ceased to be important, after the palace had burned and the last fragment of the Doctor’s old homeworld had been taken away. The final stages of this fight would take place on Earth.
Thus it was that on February 8, the Doctor was found back at Henrietta Street. How he got there is a matter of debate, although Lisa-Beth holds that the TARDIS returned at the same time, to sit in its old position in the corner of the salon. Picture this scene: the Doctor in his bed, bloodied but unbowed, regaining consciousness as his colleagues gathered around him. It almost suggests that the events of the Kingdom had all been a dream, from which he was now awakening just in time to deal with the threat in the real world.
As for Sabbath, the Doctor’s unlikely saviour… he was to play no further part in the battle against the King himself and nor was Juliette. They weren’t idle, though. Those who knew the truth about the events of 1782 noted that throughout February