Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [20]
A Certain Kind of Warfare
The name Mayakai should be explained at this point. It was the name of a race which ceased to exist in the late eighteenth-century, any genetic survivors of the Mayakai people having been subject to such interbreeding that none can be truly said to have been alive even by the middle of the nineteenth century. Like the Samoans or the inhabitants of Easter Island, the Mayakai were Polynesian, occupants of one of the minor Pacific island-groups. But unlike the people of Rapa Nui they left behind no impressive stone heads, no major monuments, no evidence of their remarkable interests. Yet their legacy is perhaps more important, as one of the ‘secret springs of events little known’, than any number of prehistoric artefacts.
There was something of an obsession with Polynesians in eighteenth-century England. The first South Sea Islander to set foot on British soil did so in 1760, and it’s impossible to imagine the impact this must have had. The people of London had seen Africans, and Turks, and Chinese: but this newcomer to the city, this big, powerful-looking man who wasn’t quite black, who wasn’t quite an Arab, who wasn’t even quite Oriental… he must have seemed genuinely alien, a living olive-skinned idol dressed up in society clothes. It must have endeared him to the nation, too, when on meeting King George III himself – and this, remember, in an age where protocol was so tight that the King refused to let Pitt the Elder sit in his presence, even though one of Pitt’s legs was practically dropping off from gout – the visitor addressed his majesty with the immortal words: ‘How do, King Tosh.’
The obsession with the Polynesians lasted as long as to 1779, in fact, when Commander Cook had his skull smashed in on the shores of Hawaii and obscure tribes suddenly seemed a lot less amusing. But the contribution of the Mayakai was special. The Mayakai, for cultural reasons almost impossible to imagine, felt they had a certain special relationship with time. The first westerners to meet them failed to understand a great deal of their vocabulary, simply because many of their nouns related to things they couldn’t simply point at. Just as the Eskimos specialise in words for ‘snow’, the Mayakai specialised in words that described the shape of time, the size of time, the direction of time: or at least, that was the conclusion etymologists would reach over two hundred years later, when the old accounts would be re-evaluated. Much of the Mayakai vocabulary is subject to guesswork, but the one inescapable conclusion is that they saw the world much as the tantrists saw it. They didn’t need muscular techniques, and they didn’t need rituals. For the Mayakai, it was a part of the culture.
The idea that one of these strange and incomprehensible people should have attended Scarlette’s ball seems peculiar enough in itself, even if Scarlette had indeed been partly tutored by one of the Mayakai brought to Britain in the 1770s (as stories suggest). But the notion that a Mayakai could have crept into the House unseen… it seems to beggar belief, and only later events can really explain it.
It was towards the end of the ball, when the guests were summoning hackney cabs and discreetly disappearing into the snow outside, that the Doctor’s prone body was found: either in the rear office, or (less likely) in the cellar study. It was Juliette who found him. Having discharged her duty admirably at the ball, Juliette was instantly ‘shocked and concerned’ by her discovery, as the ring on her left hand bound her to the Doctor as much as it bound her the House. She responded to the crisis by (typically) calling Scarlette away from the remaining guests, careful to disguise her panic. By the time Scarlette reached the bruised, prostrate Doctor, he was beginning to regain consciousness.
It immediately became obvious that he’d been attacked.