Doctor Who_ The Romans - Donald Cotton [24]
In fact, it is only by the most painful contortions that I am able to continue this chronicle at all, but I am determined not to relapse into apathy; and it is only the thought that, somewhere in the far distant future, I have a friend – for so I consider you, Headmaster – which sustains me through this dark vigil.
You will have gathered from my reference to tomorrow’s contest that I have opted for single combat – to the death! – with Delos; rather than to go rushing round the ring with a lot of strange lions of uncertain temper, and I can only hope I have chosen wisely.
The weapon I have selected is the javelin - perhaps you may remember my prowess on the dart-board at the staff social? - and my defence is to be a weighted net, with which I shall hope to entangle my vast opponent’s sword arm at the first opportunity; thereby rendering him powerless, and at my mercy. Which mercy I shall, of course, be prepared to grant. For I recall a film featuring Kirk Douglas, in a role similar to my own - Spartacus, I think - when the two combatants spared each other’s lives, and then together turned on their tormenters with some degree of success.
I put this suggestion to Delos, but he merely regarded me pityingly; and the only concession he seemed prepared to make, was that he would do it quick, when the time came, as he was anxious to get back to his home in Greece, and not hang about.
He then summoned our gaoler, and arranged to be given separate accommodation for the night, as he wanted to get a good night’s sleep before starting; a thing he would find impossible if I was going to keep on making fatuous suggestions every five minutes.
For my part, I was quite relieved to see him go, since he does not so much snore as snarl and eructate alternately; and I can only hope that the morning will fmd him in a more amenable mood. For I still maintain that, back to back, against whatever odds, we might well hold off our adversaries for long enough to make good our escape.
But will the dawn never come? And if it does, as seems likely, then what will it bring? These and a hundred other rhetorical questions flood my brain; but no time for more now, as I must get a spot of shut-eye myself, if I’m to be anything like on top form.
Your very sincere, but often apprehensive, Ian Chesterton DOCUMENT XXII
Third Extract from the Commonplace Book of Poppea Sabina
I am more than ever convinced that unsteady is the head which sports a crown, or some such; and it is quite right to be so under the circumstances. Which are that my unsought consort will shortly qualify for the laughing academy if he carries on like this!
Today when I visited our cosy old throne-room, expecting – not unreasonably, I think – to catch him at it with the demon Barbara, I found instead another nutcase (What is it about the lyre which does this to people?) who proceeded to lecture me on the hydrostatic principles of the aqueduct, if I understood him correctly.
I was backing away to summon assistance on the alarm gong, when my husband entered – on his stomach, for some reason – and immediately engaged the man in a totally incomprehensible conversation, bearing, I think, on aspects of political economy; culminating in a lyre obligato of such dissonance as to set me swooning, swan-like in a dream of sudden screams in saw-mills.
I was roused from this temporary inverted coma by the entrance of yet another new slave-girl, bearing two drinks on a tray; at one of which I clutched, in an unusually palsied paroxysm of the dipsomania which has troubled me from infancy, when I was given pause by her murmuring as she curtsied, ‘From the lady Locusta, ma’am;’ upon hearing which I shrank back from the proffered cordial as a cobra does from a mongoose, and offered it to my husband, saying,