Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [47]
It was Sonchou’s wife – Chris never had caught her name. One of her grandkids was hanging on to her, tiny face buried in her clothes.
She knelt in the middle of a street. In the middle of Hekison village. Her face was smeared with soot.
The Doctor was feeling Chris’s ribs, methodically. Head down. Focused.
Paying no attention to the woman.
‘She did not protect us,’ said Sonchou’s wife again.
Chris flinched as the Doctor found a palmful of pain. ‘Bruised,’ murmured the Time Lord, ‘but not broken.’
Behind the woman, Chris could see the remains of her home. The wooden walls had fallen in, the stilts had collapsed. It was a charred house of cards, just a pile of ruined pieces.
They were all like that. Except for perhaps a few further up the hill. The fire had strolled from wooden house to wooden house, easily, lazily. Here and there were walls embedded with arrows. Here and there were people embedded with arrows.
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‘All right,’ said the Doctor.
Chris sat up, gingerly.
It all came slamming into his field of view. The bodies, the burnt houses, the shattered fence, the cries and the wailing. Samurai bodies, mostly. But not all of them. Kame, dead again, struck down by a barrage of arrows, looking like a porcupine. Sonchou, the old headman, face down in the mud after catching a lungful of searing smoke.
‘I tried,’ Chris said, bending forward, trying to curl up around the thumping pain in his chest. ‘Goddess, I tried.’
‘I know you did.’ The Doctor put his hand on Chris’s hair. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Do you tell yourself that?’ gasped Chris.
He reached out for the Time Lord, and held on to him, his eyes overwhelmed, blinded by smoke and destruction.
‘What did I tell you?’ he yelled.
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Second Slice
The life-giving sword
What does a Time Lord really know about death, about the consuming, gnawing fear of losing one’s grip on life and falling off into the unknown? The Doctor’s been through pain before, been threatened with death in a thousand forms, but he always bounces back. What’s regeneration, even, but one almighty bounce? Where others tremble on the brink of eternity, the Doctor goes bungee-jumping.
Rebecca J. Anderson, Sacrifice, 1996
10
Changing direction
The samurai wouldn’t let them have a fire, but they found themselves huddling around the firepit anyway.
The air was still heavy with smoke. Penelope guessed the burnt smell wouldn’t go away for days. She tried going to the doorway for a breath of fresh air, but the odour seemed even worse outside.
A handful of buildings, at the edge of the village, had survived the blaze.
The fence was a tangle of vines and charcoal.
Unsurprisingly, the shrine was untouched.
Penelope turned back to the other huddled prisoners. The headman’s wife; a mother and her squalling child; three farmers. Kame, sitting off to one side, holding one of the arrows that had felled him. The samurai stroked the feathers, slowly, wondering.
Their single guard was the youngest warrior to have survived the battle, a sixteen-year-old who looked nearly as scared as they were. Providence only knew why Gufuu’s samurai were bothering to keep them prisoner.
The Doctor and Chris sat at the edge of the firepit. Mr Cwej had his head down, as though he didn’t have the strength to lift it.
The Doctor was stroking the hair over the boy’s left ear, speaking softly. ‘And then what happened?’
‘I realized I couldn’t stop the fighting,’ murmured Mr Cwej. Penelope sat down, keeping a little distance away, watching. ‘The samurai just kept charging, even when the Kapteynians were firing right amongst them.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘I climbed back up the rope and got into the village. They were shouting and screaming.’
‘We could hear the battle,’ said Penelope, ‘but we couldn’t see what was happening.’
The Doctor’s eyes flicked up to her for a moment, and then went back to Mr Cwej. After his near-hysteria earlier, the boy was quiet, almost sleepy. Was 97
the Doctor using some form of mesmerism? Or perhaps some Zen technique?
‘I told them