Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [46]
The man looked up from his thoughts. Aoi could almost see him packing them away, his eyes losing their depth as he considered the young man riding 91
beside him.
‘She was greedy,’ he said. ‘And she’d never drunk blood like mine before.’
What kind of blood? wondered Aoi. ‘I let her drain me until she thought I was dead. When she was sleeping, I set the Castle on fire.’
They emerged from the water, their horses shaking themselves. The Doctor added, ‘It’s not as romantic as the fairy tales that built up around it, I’m afraid.
It was brutal and straightforward.’
‘Her bite cannot have been pleasant.’
‘I meant setting the fire,’ said the Doctor. ‘My socks are wet.’ He looked up sharply. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered.
Aoi frowned, puzzled. A moment later he smelt the smoke on the wind.
His father barked a command, and they were suddenly galloping forward, covering the last ground between them and Hekison village. Aoi remembered the way the forest thinned out to nothing, and then an empty plain, the steep rise.
Before they got to the top they could see the fat black clouds of smoke, rising.
The samurai halted at the top of the slope, their horses snorting with alarm.
Red and orange flames were poking fingers up through the dense smoke –
spreading rapidly from the front of the little village, Aoi saw.
Samurai were galloping all around Hekison, shouting, loosing arrows. They had broken formation. Aoi couldn’t see who they were firing at. The villagers couldn’t be putting up that much resistance, surely. . .
He heard his father’s shouted order, and almost before he knew it, he was racing down the hill, drawing his long katana, ready to protect the property of Gufuu Kocho. Stampeding through the rice paddies, trampling the plants beneath their hooves.
Somewhere behind him, amid the cries and the thunder, he could hear the Doctor shouting something. But he couldn’t make out what it was.
Penelope was running.
There was nowhere safe. As soon as you ducked behind one building, the samurai wheeled around in their lethal dance, helmets racing past the irregular line of the fence.
Some of them were fighting hand to hand. They weren’t the problem. It was the ones who were taking potshots at one another.
Penelope heard something whizz past her head like an angry insect. She tried not to think about what might have happened if the shot had been a little closer. Beyond the fence, there were constant sharp noises as the har-quebusiers fired, and louder, tearing noises as the bird creatures fired their weapons. Searing orange and purple light danced behind the posts and vines.
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At the back of the village, at the furthest point from the fighting, Mr Cwej was herding peasants over the fence. They were shouting, or standing still in confusion, but the ones who had got the idea were running into the forest.
Penelope wondered if she could make it across the few yards between them.
Mr Cwej glanced up and saw her, shouting something over the noise of the battle.
She saw a woman run towards him, saw an arrow come from nowhere and embed itself in her skinny body. The woman stood for a moment, as though astonished, and then crumpled into the dust.
There was another of the searing flashes, and the hut next to Penelope suddenly caught fire, the thatch exploding into red and orange flame.
Penelope put her back to the wooden wall and wished to God there was somewhere to run to. But there was nowhere. She could not move.
Joel slid the paper door open an inch. There was a samurai standing next to it. He smiled upwards at the man, sheepishly, and closed the door again.
They had just left him alone, sent him food and escorted him to the bath house and toilet. But other than that, nothing. They politely avoided his questions. He spent his time writing in his journal and playing Tetris – until that got boring. Then he lay on his back on a futon, listening to the silence.
Joel prayed silently for ventilation ducts. But there was nowhere to run to.
He could not move.
‘She did not protect us.’
Chris raised his head.