Doctor Who_ The Myth Makers - Donald Cotton [19]
As it was, I couldn’t take it at that hour in the morning, and I scurried away to suitable cover. Nobody had thanked me for my help, but you don’t really expect that these days. And as I cowered behind a giant pilaster with flowered finials, or whatever it was – a great stone column anyway, outside what I took to be the palace, another light sleeper emerged.
‘What is it now?’ King Priam asked irritably. ‘By the Great Horse of Asia is none of us to rest? Who’s there?’
You could sense at once that he was a Trojan of the old school, accustomed to getting his own way, or knowing the reason why. In his mid-sixties, I should think, but well-preserved and still formidable.
Paris pranced proudly forwards, like a war-horse saying ‘ha-ha!’ to the trumpets: ‘It’s Paris, father, returned from patrol.’
‘Well, why can’t you do it quietly? What news, boy? Have you avenged your brother, Hector, yet? Have you killed Achilles?’
‘Ah,’ said Paris, ‘I sought Achilles, father, even to the Graecian lines. I flung my challenge at him, but he skulked within his tent and feared to face me.’
A likely story, I must say, and not at all good enough, as it proved.
‘Well, you go back and wait until he gets his courage up!
Upon my soul, what sort of brother are you? And, furthermore, what sort of son?’ He noticed the TARDIS for the first time.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘A prize, father, captured from the Greeks.’
‘Captured, you say? I should think they were glad to see the back of it. What is it?’
Paris had been rather afraid of that. He wasn’t sure – and you couldn’t blame him. But he did his best. ‘It’s a sort of shrine, it seems..
‘And what, may I ask, do you propose to do with this seeming shrine?’
Paris tilted his helmet over one eye, and scratched his head.
‘You don’t like it where it is?’
‘I do not. Right in everybody’s way! How are the chariots meant to get around it?’
‘Ah, I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Think about it now.’
‘Right ho! Then how about if we put it in the temple?’
Not a bad solution, I’d have thought, but at this moment there was an interruption to the steady flow of reasoned argument.
‘You are not putting that thing in my temple,’ snarled a shrill voice from the opposite side of the square, and there was Paris’s sister, Cassandra, standing on the steps of the temple in question.
A bad woman to cross, Cassandra; put me in mind of her brother Hector in drag, if you can imagine such a thing. Paris quailed before her.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘Well, the point is, old thing, Father and I were rather hoping, we could, perhaps...’
‘Nothing of the kind!’ snapped Priam, obviously glad to let him down. ‘Don’t drag me into it. Honestly, bringing back blessed shrines that nobody wants. Go and bring Achilles’ body, if you want to do something useful! Get back to the war!’
‘And take that thing with you,’ added Cassandra, with as much vehemence as she could muster, which was always considerable. But, as is well known, there are limits, and she had now reached them, as far as Paris was concerned.
‘No, I say, really Cassandra, if you knew the weight of it!
Can’t I just move it to the side of the square, and leave it for the moment? As a sort of – well, as a monument, if you like?’
‘A monument to what?’ asked Cassandra, rudely, not letting the matter rest.
‘Well, to my initiative, for instance. After all, it’s the first sizeable trophy we’ve captured since the war started. It seems a pity not to make some use of it, don’t you think?’
‘And what sort of use would you suggest?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I? Once we’ve examined it thoroughly, it will probably prove to have all sorts of uses.’
‘Yes, I’m quite sure it will; uses to the Greeks.’
‘Now what on earth do you mean by