Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [57]
He wrote a large KAPTEYNIAN BASE, ballpoint scraping the fine paper, just to make sure she didn’t get lost.
Penelope peered at the map through her spectacles, but didn’t take it in.
‘What is the significance of a flock of butterflies?’ she asked.
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‘A very bad omen, to the Japanese,’ he answered, absently, annotating the map. ‘A battle or a disaster. They’re the souls of those who haven’t died yet.’
‘Curious that I should dream about it. I hope it means nothing. I’m sure my own anxiety is represented by the room without any egress. . . ’
The Doctor looked up at her. She started. ‘What did you say?’
She thought she had offended him. ‘Perhaps you do not discuss dreams in your century –’ she began, but he had caught her wrist and his eyes were demanding she tell him the rest.
‘I went into a hut in a Japanese garden. When I turned to leave again,’ she said, ‘I discovered that the door had vanished.’
‘How many walls?’
‘Six.’
‘Was the ceiling low or high?’
‘High. Very high.’
‘What colour were the walls?’
‘They were – I don’t know, they were no particular colour –’
He took her face in his hands, suddenly, and her eyes went wide with indignation and alarm. He looked into them, hard.
‘You haven’t got a trace of telepathic ability,’ he said, letting her go. ‘So where did that dream come from?’
One button of her jacket had come undone. She was carefully doing it back up, blushing furiously, her eyes on the map. ‘Whatever its significance,’ she said, with barely restrained rage, ‘I am not some sort of biological specimen for you to examine and catalogue.’
He stifled his urge to apologize, scowling at a point on the wall behind her.
She said, ‘Despite the fact that we are fellow scientists, I feel you have treated me very poorly since we first met. I do not care a whit for how advanced you are, nor how far-flung the year you call home. Your ill manners are not excusable by an accident of time.’
She got up and stalked out of the room with utter dignity. He saw she had taken the map with her.
Which was all very well, but where had that dream come from?
And back in her room, the Caxtarid smiled around a mouthful of sea bream.
The more divided these aliens were, the better her chances.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said, bits of fish flying out of her mouth.
‘It all looks so good!’
Penelope wore a kimono. She had tucked her glasses away with her other few nineteenth-century possessions in a leather satchel. The matchlock lay across her lap.
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She rode slowly away from Toshi. Reluctantly, she had to admit that she had half hoped someone would ride after her and stop her. Preferably the Doctor, with an apology.
She had the map, and enough food for several days. She knew where the others were going, and if her mission was unsuccessful, she could meet them there. And the avian people had seemed quite friendly.
She sat up straight, and set off with the same spirit of adventure in which she had launched herself into the fourth dimension.
It began to rain.
One of the horse handlers bowed low and handed Chris a piece of paper. He thought it was the bill, and was halfway to the Doctor’s room for a translation when he saw it was written in English.
‘Dear Chris,’ it said. ‘Have gone to investigate something. Please go on ahead, I’ll catch you up.’
Chris shouted several extremely filthy words. The only reason he was not instantly thrown out of the inn was that no one could understand them.
And in her room at a different inn, Te Yene Rana eyed the Doctor and took out her favourite torture device.
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13
Manacle depression
Wednesday 22 May 1996, subjective time
Probably March 1560, local time
Dear Diary,
I managed to get one of the pages to give me a lesson in etiquette. According to him, I was doing everything wrong, from the way I was sitting to the way I was talking to where I put my eyes.
I don’t know whether it might’ve been better to just be a barbarian,