Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [66]
But there was definitely a threat. When the rat-catchers had tried to assassinate Sabbath, Sabbath had sent his agent on an errand to assassinate the Council in return. It was a message to Westminster: ‘I’m not going to be intimidated, so please stop bothering me.’ And this must have troubled the Doctor. He was still intent on bringing together all factions, using the wedding as a focus, so for his best man to be murdering the other guests was impolite to say the least. He knew that Sabbath would have left Manchester by now, and decided that the best way to stop the slaughter was to stop Tula Lui herself. Which meant finding the other three members of the Council.
But after the first two killings, the three survivors had gone to ground. Rumour had it that they’d fled abroad. The only one whose exact whereabouts could be traced had gone to stay at his continental residence in Paris. There he’d formally asked for the protection of the Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcassonne, a group whose secrets no historian has ever unravelled, and which in 1782 had just initiated the American ambassador-cum‐scientist Benjamin Franklin into its ranks. The Temple was still considering its reply.
The Doctor knew that Sabbath himself wouldn’t be in France. This could be why Scarlette so readily volunteered to cross the channel, taking only Lisa-Beth as a companion.
Besides which, Scarlette had her own interests in the Mayakai.
The City of Love
The Polynesian race known as the Mayakai essentially ceased to exist around 1773, when a South American survey of their native island found ‘a blasted and appalling land… bodies lie wasted on the shore, and no man has reason to give them decent burial’. As the Mayakai’s first contact with Europeans had occurred less than a decade earlier, many believed that it was European disease which had decimated the population, as with so many Polynesian peoples.
A scant handful of the race survived, and by 1776 were taking refuge in Europe or the Americas. Though no first-hand writings exist, it’s worth examining the few stories told by these refugees. Although western disease is mentioned (it’s described, not entirely accurately, as a ‘pox’), the Mayakai had their own beliefs as to what had caused their destruction. It was, they said, all about the Moak: often translated as ‘gods’, but in fact closer to ‘giants’, albeit giants of a spectral rather than physical nature. The Mayakai essentially believed themselves to be the chosen ones of these giants. The giants had suffered a great battle – the Mayakai lived on too small an island for them to have created a word for ‘war’ – which had lasted for generations, in which many of the greatest gods had been smitten by the Na Koporaya, a word notoriously difficult to translate. The greatest of the giants had passed on to the Polynesians the duty of guarding the ancient wisdom, ready for the day when they would walk again in this world to reclaim what had been lost in the battle.
Although the stories speak of the battle as a physical thing, it may well have been a metaphor for the disease which ravaged the island and virtually destroyed the pure Mayakai bloodlines. One of the few who survived was Tula Lui, and she can’t have been more than seven when she left for the western world. From Sabbath’s own recollections, it’s known that he first encountered Tula Lui as a child of ten in 1776. He immediately took an interest in the girl, possibly seeing the great similarities between the ways of the tantra and the time-oriented beliefs of the survivors. But the Mayakai were warriors too, and Sabbath the strategist must have seen the appeal of taking on one of the few survivors as an ‘apprentice’.
By 1780, the year in which all ties between Sabbath and the Service were finally broken, Tula Lui was under his wing. Perhaps as an entertainment, he took the girl to several society functions shortly before his fall from grace, where he dressed her in