Doctor Who_ The Awakening - Eric Pringle [10]
Turlough joked.
Everybody was trying to be funny today. But Tegan wasn’t in the mood.
They caught up with the Doctor ooutside the lych gate, and found themselves on the threshold of a broad, undulating meadow. The Dotor had stopped, and was looking up a green hillside which stretched away to their left. He raised an arm to bring them to a halt.
‘Behave yourselers,’ he ordered. ‘We have company.’
They followed his gaze and suns, etched sharply against the skyline where green hilltop met hard blue firmament, the dark, statuesque outline of a horseman. As they watched, he urged his horse into a canter and rode down the hillside in a line calculated to cut them off if they tried to cross the meadow.
Then they heard hooves beating behind them, too, and the harsh voices of men goading their horses. They turned and saw three more horsemen break cover behind the tree-fringed churchyard and come galloping through the grass towards them.
Tegant’s eyebrows shot up in surprise: the horsemen wore the steel pointed helmets and the breastplates of troopers of the English Civil War. She was going to point out the absurdity of this, but Turlough sensed danger and shouted, ‘We should go back!’
But before they could retreat, armed foot soldiers in full battledress appeared around a corner of the church and came running; towards them from behind.
They were trapped. The Doctor spun round, frantically searching for an escape route, but all ways were denied them, by mounted troopers looming close and now forcing them back against a hedge, and foot soldiers racing up the path to the lych gate. ‘Too late,’ he muttered. They could only face their attackers like cornered animals.
‘Sergeant’ Joseph Willow glared down at them through the steel bars of his visor, from the safe height of his big grey horse. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he snarled.
He had the rasping, ill-tempered voice of a natural bully.
‘This is Sir George Hutchinson’s land.’
The Doctor looked up at him. Instinctively aware of the man’s short temper, he took a deep breath. This was a moment for patience and sweet reason, not anger. ‘If we are trespassing,’ he said mildly, ‘I apologise.’
It was an apology which Willow refused to accept.
‘Little Hodcombe,’ he persisted, ‘is a closed area, for your own safety. We’re in the middle of a war game.’
Now Tegan understood their armour and weapons.
These were grown men playing at historical soldiers – but even so, surely they were being too aggressive? The threat in their drawn swords was very real. ‘We’re here to visit my
.grandfather,’ she explained, anxious like the Doctor to calm things down.
Willow didn’t want her explanations either. ‘You’d better see Sir George,’ he said curtly. ‘He’ll sort it out.’ He urged his horse forward, moving between them and the hedge. ‘Move out!’ he shouted.
At his command, the troopers and the foot soldiers closed in around the Doctor and his companions, forming a bizarre prisoners’ escort. Then, led by Sergeant Willow, the party moved across the meadow towards Little Hodcombe village and Sir George Hutchinson.
As they went, there peered around a crumbling, mossy gravestone in the churchyard the head of the limping, beggar-like figure they had glimpsed briefly in the crypt.
As he watched the strangers being led away, the sun illuminated his devastated face.
His left eye was gone. Where it should have been, wrinkled skin collapsed into a shrivelled, empty socket.
The man’s mouth twisted awkwardly towards this, and the entire left side of his lace was dead. It looked as if it had been burned once, long ago, as if the skin had been blasted by fire and transformed into a hard, waxen shell which now could feel no pain – or any other sensation.
Holding the coarse woollen cloth around his throat, so that it hooded his head, he knelt behind a gravestone and stared, with his one unblinking eye, at the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough being herded away through the grass.
After an undignified forced march, at first among fields and then between the scattered cottages