Doctor Who_ The Romans - Donald Cotton [9]
‘Why,’ I told him, spitting out a tooth for which I had no further use, ‘in the shade of an old apple tree, or some such. Last on the right as you go towards Assissium. If you start from here, that is...’
‘Then how is it,’ he enquired, in a voice throbbing, like they say with menace, ‘that the late-lamented blood-soaked victim, having cleaned the scarlet stains of your brutal assault off his toga, has just booked in to the first floor back of this select, grade twelve establishment? Answer me that, if you will be so very kind!’ Whereupon he once more swats me, this time in the bread-basket.
Partly because of this, I was not at once able to furnish an explanation, as you can well imagine. But in any case, I mean, well, look here, the time has been, as someone says somewhere, that the dead would lie where left. But now apparently the yawning graves yield their ghastly inmates, to push us from our bar stools. Which eventually, having got my breath back where it belonged, I said so, but he was not obviously impressed by such impromptu rhetoric; and has since told me that if I wish to rise, however eventually, to Legionary First Class, I must finish the job so ill-begun, this very evening. Which I now propose to attempt – but with what qualms of a morbidly superstitious nature I can only leave you to improvise.
I didn’t join for this, as I need hardly say, but will have another murderous go as requested, and let you know what happens this time...
Am going to have just one for the road, and then be about it.
In haste,
Your disturbed son,
Ascaris.
PS. Why did you and Dad name me after a parasitic worm?
Always meant to ask...
DOCUMENT VII
Third Extract from The Doctor’s Diary A disturbed night, as I was intelligent enough to anticipate, and therefore on the ‘quivive?’
After some reflection I had decided not to share with Vicki my suspicions about our travelling companion, considering that recent events – which included bodies in bushes and toads in bowls, you will recall – might possibly have unhinged her tiny mind sufficiently for one day.
I therefore advised her to take early retirement, and soothed her indignant objections by pointing out that the morrow’s programme not only included a long and arduous forced march through difficult and dangerous terrain, but the possibility of lethal assault by the maniac, Ascaris, of whom the suspect centurion had been thoughtful enough to warn us.
I fancy this comforted her to some extent; and she went obediently to her room, muttering something inaudible in which I could only detect the words ‘senile dementia’ –
possibly a reference to the late Maximus Petullian, though on what grounds she should doubt his sanity I am unable to say - and with only the evidence of a light pallor about her features to indicate that I was right to surmise that she had allowed herself to become over-tired. Youth is so often unaware of the physical limitations which the more mature have learnt to take in their stride; as indeed I always ignore my own, if any.
After a pleasant hour or so spent in lecturing my new military acquaintance on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the phalanx and tortudo when campaigning against Parthian cavalry - a subject on which I consider myself to be something of an expert - I noticed that he was beginning to display signs of drowsiness, and took this as the cue to plead my own fatigue - simulated, needless to say - and go to my quarters; for I deemed it prudent to get in a little lyre practice, if I were to be able to converse with Nero about the instrument on anything like an equal footing.
I soon mastered the rudimentary principles on which the lyre can be persuaded to operate, and was endeavouring to implement some