• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 494 0

possibly fearing that they might hurt their pack-leader. Yet still they came, one after another after another, bounding up the stairway. Scarlette ‘dispatched’ several of the creatures as they tried to mount the balcony, at least a dozen of the animals falling to her sabre. The floor of the salon, Lisa-Beth goes on to say, was ‘wet and bloody with the carcasses of those that had fallen from on high’. In fairness, none of the three other women were exactly helpless. When one of the apes leapt from the stairway and gripped on to the railings of the balcony, Lisa-Beth managed to kick at its fingers until it lost its grip and tumbled to the floor below. For the first minute or two, then, it seemed that things were going well.

Then Scarlette lost her sword. It was hardly a surprise: the enemy had weight of numbers on its side. Several of the apes pushed forward at once, their ‘fetid breath and rank hides’ overwhelming her and forcing the blade out of her hands. She slipped back, away from the stairs, as the apes climbed on top of her. Somehow, by some fluke, she managed to survive this. She succeeded in forcing the first of the animals away from her, and sent it rolling down the staircase. It fell among a group of its comrades, still only halfway up the steps, those creatures falling back in turn. Down in the salon, the rest of the horde tossed around the furniture, overturning the chaise-longues and shredding some of the paintings in frustration. The legs of chairs were quickly turned into clubs.

The second of the apes on top of Scarlette was wrenched away by the other three women, and ended up falling over the railing, breaking its back on the floor below. This victory, however, had gained them seconds rather than minutes.

Once again, and for the last time in the war of 1782-83, Scarlette decided that only in symbols could she find the power to end this madness. Lisa-Beth – implacable, mythology-proof Lisa-Beth – writes that while Katya and Rebecca could only panic, Scarlette

took in a deep breath… seeing that Beast of hers gathering below her, unwilling to give up. The Mistress [the only time Lisa-Beth ever calls her that] must have known what she was required to do. At the top of the steps she reared up to her full height like some true mare of the night, her red wedding-gown blazing around her still. Her sword was lost, fallen somewhere in the hair and blood below us. She reached instead for that fragment of glass which hung on a silver chain at her neck…

Once more the apes pushed at us, jumping and leaping on each other’s backs to be first at the head of the stairs. Hand on her glass totem, Scarlette did not even turn away when she told us to retreat upwards to the sanctuary of the Doctor. She said she knew how this battle would have to end, so that the Doctor might play his part.

I know that we all three of us hesitated before we turned. In that hesitation I for one saw that she released the chain from around her neck. When the nearest of the demons bolted at her unarmed person she was awaiting it, with the totem of glass held out towards it. It was then that I turned away. I saw that K. and R. had already turned, the better not to see what followed.

I recall fast movement up the next flight of stairs. The ape could not have immediately torn into Scarlette, for even when I was halfway up the flight I could still hear her speaking behind me. R. insisted after this that Scarlette had in the heat of battle given a last message to be told to the Doctor, though I believe it may have been the curious mind of R. which devised this version of the history. Myself, I believe her final words to this enemy to have been: ‘All right, you hairy bastards. I’m ready for you.’

The ‘sanctuary of the Doctor’ was anything but a sanctuary, however. What’s most noticeable is that neither Fitz nor Anji seem to have said anything, or done anything, to interfere with the battle taking place inside the room. They were still standing on the threshold, frozen, when the three women arrived. They must have realised that for the struggle to be