Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [75]
But the more this became plain, and the more the families (and it was difficult to know where one family started and the next one stopped) took her into their homes, welcoming her as if she were a beloved daughter returned from afar, the more alien she felt – and the more she withdrew into the solitude of her little house, as if her very presence would defile Kimonya.
It never seemed that the young-old man who was called the father of the tribe set out to be her teacher.
He would appear apparently at random, but always when she was in need; and disappear long before she felt his presence irksome. A word or two of comfort, or of loving mockery; an overtly simple story which turned out to be enormously complex –
and then even simpler than had first appeared; a light suggestion of a game she might like to play; such things became the nourishment she needed on the spiritual journey she had unwittingly undertaken.
So, travelling alone but always knowing there was a hand waiting to catch her should she fall, she braved the darkness, fought the Katyan demons and annihilated them – only to find herself teetering on the edge of an abyss of emptiness. Darshee’s hand reached out to her – and pushed her into the void.
But who was falling? Not Katyan Glessey. She had perished with the demons. And how could she be falling if there was nowhere left to go? And suddenly the darkness was shining with the radiance of the sun – and there was nowhere left to go.
‘... there was nowhere left to go,’ said Onya.
She looked at her four listeners. On only one of the faces did she see any understanding of what she was saying. How could she explain what she meant?
‘He showed me how to... to untie the knots in my mind.’
she said. ‘How to let the clouds melt away so that I could see the sky again.’
Words!
‘And so he called me Onya Farjen: Sky Born, or Born of the Sky.’
There was silence; and then Sarah breathed, ‘Look!
Look at that butterfly!’
The insect, a handsbreadth across, was fluttering above Onya’s head. The Doctor put out a gentle hand and plucked it from the air, placing it on his left hand, where it lay, silver-blue wings outspread. He stroked its back with the middle finger of his right hand, and then he tossed it into the air, where it flew in a wide zig-zag up into the canopy of trees and out into the sun.
Onya laughed. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we must be going.’
Jeremy groaned. ‘Must we?’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Haban Rance stood in the doorway of the long but wiping the sweat from his craggy face and surveying the chattering crowd of men and women in the club area.
Like many of them, he had just come from completing his shift of manual labour in the irrigated fields that Kaido, the chief of the Kimonyans, had given to the newcomers to grow their food and graze their herds.
They seemed happy enough at the moment, he thought.
No sign of the undercurrents of discontent which seemed to grow stronger as the group enlarged.
At the last meeting, he had managed to bring out into the open the resentment many felt towards those who weren’t doing their share. New sanctions had been imposed, but it wasn’t enough. The sooner they all saw some action, the better.
‘Rance! Rance!’
He lifted a hand to acknowledge the call and threaded his way through to get himself a drink before investigating it. That was another thing, he thought as he took a swig: too much sap wine. The Kimonyans drank it only at feasts, and then rarely to excess. Often, the newcomers who were missing from their work were incapable of rising from their beds.
‘What is it, Medan?’ he asked, as he made his way through the work area past the rows of benches where people were mending, or making, or adapting all sorts and shapes of electronic apparatus.
Medan looked up from his screen and took off his headset. ‘That lazy tyke Ungar hasn’t relieved me. I’m not going to end up doing a