Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [70]
There was touch too; the gentle soothing of female fingers and the dry firm male pressure on her brow – or were they the touch of the same cool hand?
And what of the faces? How could Katyan see once more and love anew the sweet lost face of her mother and yet know it too as the crumpled face of a stranger?
Then one morning when she opened her eyes, she saw herself to be in a room – a hut? – with unpainted wooden walls. A beam of sunlight was pushing its way past a roughly woven curtain, half looped back from an unglazed window, little more than an oblong hole. She seemed to be lying on a pile of skins and fitrs, which held her body in a soft embrace, as though to reassure her that, yes, her pain was gone.
On the other side of the small room, she could see the back of a small figure, a boy – or could it be a girl? sitting cross-legged, gazing out of the open door.
Where was she?
As though in response to her thought (or had she spoken?), the figure leapt to its feet and with the spring of youth in its step almost ran to her side.
You are awake, my daughter,’ said the little old man in a light, smiling voice.
‘I... I...’ She couldn’t find the words.
‘You have been away from us for a long time. Several times we thought we had lost you to the demons you have been fighting.
But now you are back, and you are safe.’
Safe.
As she tried to repeat the word, it grew in her throat and filled her whole being. The tears which had never come when Caldon had been taken, nor since, were running down her face. She turned her head away and wept as she had not wept for many years.
She felt a light touch on her shoulder, and heard the murmur of his voice. ‘Weep, my daughter. Grieve for all that you have lost. For only by losing will you find.’
In a while, the racking, tearing sobs died away, leaving only the hiccuping gasps she recognized from childhood. With a long shuddering sigh, she accepted with relief that the storm had blown away.
She turned her head. The little man was back by the door, sitting as before, gazing out into the sunlight.
Why did she feel that she had come home?
She fell asleep.
Jeremy was at last getting some breakfast. With the juice from the golden, sweet, sharp fruit spilling from every bite, he was at last able to quieten the demands of his importunate innards. He’d eaten two already; he swallowed the last lush piece of his third.
‘Yummy, aren’t they?’ he said to Sarah. ‘Like – like a champagne cocktail.’
‘I was about to say, like a sherbert dip,’ she said, pulling out her handkerchief to wipe her mouth.
He looked up at the twisted branches of the tree next to the one with the fizzy fruit. Hanging from them were rich red globes even more plumped out with the promise of succulence. He reached out a hand. ‘I wonder what these are,’ he said.
‘No! Stop!’
He pulled back his hand as if he’d touched a live wire.
Now what? More elder sister stuff?
‘For Heaven’s sake, Jeremy! Don’t you ever listen? They only look like fruit. Those are the sort of land jellyfish things that Onya said eat you up from the inside.’
He looked up at the Jezebel spheres in their tempting robes of scarlet. ‘I don’t think I like this place,’ he said.
Waldo Rudley lay on his bed trying to think his way through a realistic assessment of his position. Once the transmission needles had been implanted in his brain, his privacy would be gone. Although the watchers would not be able to pick up his thoughts, they would know his every action as certainly as if they were in the room with him. So if he were going to attempt an escape...
The notion died almost before it had formed. Even if he managed to get out of his cell, maybe stealing his guard’s uniform, there was no way he could bluff his way past the genetic identity scanners he would encounter at every level of the Entertainments Division HQ.
As he told Sarah, there had always been tales of unsuccessful hunts, where the quarry had escaped in the Lackan itself. But escaped to what? The life