Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [74]
‘Sssh!’ said the Doctor, who was moving towards him so smoothly and surely that scarcely a leaf was disturbed.
‘It’s all right, old fellow,’ he went on, speaking on his breath, ‘we’ll soon have you out of there. Sssh! Sssh!’
He was now right by Jeremy. He slowly squatted until, with movements as slow and careful as a stalking cat, he could reach out and part the leaves which hid the creature from view. Jeremy screwed up his eyes. He couldn’t bear to look. What if it bit his foot right off!
‘All right, Jeremy,’ said the Doctor in a normal voice, standing up. ‘You can take it out.’
‘The thing’s still got me!’
‘You’ve caught your ankle between two tree roots.’
‘What?’
He looked down. Sure enough, there was his right leg jammed firmly between two high roots.
‘So I have. Sorry.’
Pulling his leg backwards he extracted his foot.
‘Oh Jeremy!’ said Sarah.
There! No sympathy. No backing up a fellow journalist.
Just the elder sister routine all over again!
‘For Pete’s sake, let’s get a move on,’ said the Doctor, moving back to Onya. ‘Lethbridge-Steward, would you be so good as to bring up the rear? Then you can keep an eye on him.’
And then the Brig started ordering him about as well.
‘Come on, Jeremy,’ he was saying. ‘On our way. Chop chop.’
Why did everybody have to be so beastly rotten to him?
He’d said sorry, hadn’t he?
‘Sorry, everybody,’ he said again as they moved off. ‘I mean, I really am sorry, you know. Sorry, Onya. Sorry, Sarah. I mean, sorry and all that.’
At least he’d had a bit of a rest.
By the time they stopped for their proper rest, when the rays of the great red sun were slanting almost vertically through the high branches, Onya could see that they were all starting to flag, even the Doctor and the Brigadier.
Perhaps she’d been pushing too hard, she thought. It was difficult to judge.
‘About as far again to reach the eastern hills,’ she said, as she distributed pieces of tipka root, with the poisonous skin scraped off ‘Then we start climbing. When we get to the top, you’ll be able to see the valley. That’s when I feel I’ve come home, to my family.’
‘When I lost my teacher,’ said the Doctor, ‘I felt as if my father had died.’
Again she considered this man who so often seemed to mirror her own thoughts. She propped her back against a convenient slark tree (she could tell from the condition of the bones in it that the stark nest was old and abandoned) and told him – told them all – about old Darshee.
So many pictures in her head: seeing Katyan Glessey as if she were another person, as in a sense she was; knowing again the quiet welcome of the people of Skyland, the Kimonyans; living once more the endless days which allowed the grateful sun to heal the hurt in her body – and at the last, having no choice but to face the sickness in her mind.
Katyan had become a familiar sight to the Kimonyans, wandering from her tiny but near Darshee’s through the scattered wooden buildings which formed their village.
When she had first emerged from her refuge, it seemed to her that the huts were placed at random, as if a giant hand had dropped them from the sky to settle at the whim of the wind.
But as she explored the settlement, she found that each was sitting in exactly the right position; convenient to the stream perhaps, and sitting on the precise point of a gentle slope which would allow a view of the beasts in their communal corral, yet forming with its immediate neighbours a family of houses which, in its welcoming arms, offered a focus of love and security to all.
For the Kimonyans were a beautiful people. Like prepubescent children, both in stature and in the innocence of their smooth large eyed faces, they seemed incapable of building or making anything that was not beautiful to see.
The roughly hewn beams which formed the houses; the lie of the fences with the contours of the fields and the sweep of the corn; the very fall of a half-eaten haystack; all answered the curves of the wide green valley and the harsher lines of the rocky hills which enclosed it. Nothing was square