Doctor Who_ The Romans - Donald Cotton [14]
Heigh-ho!
DOCUMENT XII
Fourth Extract from the Journal of Ian Chesterton
My premonition of impending doom has proved to be correct! The galley foundered when almost in sight of Ostia! Strange how often these inexplicably instinctive feelings come from nowhere to warn us, when it’s far too late to do anything at all about them. Science cannot explain the phenomenon; and neither can I, not being sufficiently interested perhaps.
At all events, no sooner had a bolt from the black flattened the main-mast – which, happily, collapsed on the galley-master, spattering his odious remains impartially about the bilges – than a rain of splintered spars from above, and a lancing of fanged rocks from below pierced the already straining and complaining hull in so many water-spouting places that some sixth sense told me we were about to sink!
Which we forthwith did; to the accompaniment of the sighs of the dying and the whingeing of the injured.
Then how, you may ask, have I survived to continue my action-packed narrative? Well, Headmaster, if you have been paying attention, you will perhaps remember that my last entry in this journal told of the giant Greek, Delos; whose interminable and vainglorious tales of his prowess in the field of amateur athletics have subsequently abominably bored me? I mean, if it hasn’t been flogging, keel-hauling, or short rations, it’s been ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I won the...’ whatever it was! No, simply not on, that sort of thing, in my opinion. However, as the ship disintegrated about our very ears, this loutish loud-mouth was inspired to whisper into one of them that now was our chance!
I looked at him blankly - rather in the manner of Jack Benny regarding Rochester - the ‘slow burn’, I think it’s called - for try as I might, I could detect no chance at all of any outcome to our present predicament other than dismemberment in the wretched wreckage, or drowning in the foul and furious foam. If asked to express a preference, I would probably have opted for the latter, and I said as much. But really, I told him, the matter was of little consequence; and my only serious concern was that, whatever the cause of death, I trusted that the Fates would find it convenient to expedite the business, as there seemed no further point in hanging around.
At this he asked me if I would mind standing up for a moment; and on my complying, somewhat grumpily I fear, with his request, he gripped our rowing bench in his spatulate hands, and wrenching it from its protesting sockets, sprang sideways through a convenient newly-opened hole in the woodwork, muttering sepulchrally
‘Follow me!’
I could do little else, being chained to this particular ship’s timber by every limb; and presently found myself floundering in his wake as he ploughed through the fish-infested elements towards the dimly visible, far distant, surf-encrusted coast-line in what I took to be a gentleman’s freestyle breast-stroke.
I mention fish, because in next to no time I was bitten painfully by a marauding specimen of the filthy brutes - a mackerel, possibly, or a hake, but I have little knowledge of icthyology - at which, I fear, I fainted; although mercifully maintaining buoyancy by virtue of the afore-mentioned thwart.
So, once again, I knew no more; until, this time, I found myself lying on a beach, half smothered in sand and seaweed, the claws of a lobster or some such crustacean protruding from a hole in my toga, while my moronic rescuer snapped the links of our fetters between his terrifying teeth! Or so I supposed in my semi-conscious condition - but it does appear, Headmaster, that metal-bending was one of his optional subsidiary subjects in the Pentathlon.
He then suggested that we should head north; pointing out that in the event of recapture, the statutory penalty for escape from a galley was - you’ve guessed it, Headmaster -
death. As, I would like to know, what other penalties are there, in this Godforsaken country?
But I am made of heavier mental mettle than he; and have insisted that, no matter what