Doctor Who_ The Sea-Devils - Malcolm Hulke [4]
For you who tread this land
Beware the justice hand
Little boats like men
in days of yore,
They come by stealth at night
They come in broad daylight.
Little boats like men—
Beware the shore.
Jo was not impressed. ‘It’s a poem,’ she said. ‘Not a very good one either.’
‘What does “justice hand” mean?’ said the Doctor, more to himself than to Jo.
‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Jo. ‘Can we keep walking?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’ The Doctor strode off again, Jo racing to keep up. ‘I’ve heard of the long arm of justice, but not the hand of justice.’
‘It didn’t say “the hand of justice”,’ said Jo, feeling a bit warmer now that they were walking again, ‘it said “justice hand”. Maybe it’s Anglo-Saxon or something.’ The wind was blowing up more fiercely now, stinging Jo’s cheek with grains of sand whipped up from the near-by shore. She turned up her coat collar.
‘Anglo-Saxons,’ corrected the Doctor, ‘did not build water walls, at least not like that one.’ He walked on, head down, obviously thinking hard.
‘Does it really matter?’ Jo said, spitting grains of sand out of her mouth.
‘Of course it matters, my dear,’ boomed the Doctor. ‘Physical exercise without mental exercise is a bore.’ He strode on for a full minute without a word. Then his good-looking face lit up with an idea: ‘Is it some ghastly pun on “the scales of justice”?’
‘How do you mean?’ said Jo, trying to seem interested.
‘It’s clearly a warning,’ said the Doctor, ‘but of what we know not. But a warning means that something bad happens to you if you do the wrong thing. That suggests justice of some sort.’
‘Where do scales come into it?’ said Jo.
The Doctor laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Fish have scales. So do reptiles. Just a stupid thought.’
By now they were well away from the quayside with its little café and couple of fishermen’s cottages. The château was well in sight, and Jo could see that it was set in its extensive grounds, the road turned a little away from the sea at this point, but the remnants of a track forked off here seeming to run straight to the shore. At the fork there was an old-fashioned milestone sunk deep into the grassy edge. The Doctor stopped and looked at it.
‘Fascinating,’ he said, staring at the ancient marker. ‘What’s fascinating,’ said Jo, ‘about an unused old track that leads straight down to the sea?’
‘It means,’ said the Doctor patiently, ‘that this is a bit of shoreline that is receding before the waves.’ He produced his little wire brush again and started to clear moss away from the surface of the milestone. ‘Did you know that Henry VIII used to stand on the ramparts of Sandown Castle and, as he wrote, “look out across the fields to the sea beyond”?’
‘No,’ said Jo apologetically, ‘I hadn’t heard that. I suppose you knew Henry VIII personally when you travelled back through Time?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said the Doctor, ‘no. I’ve never met him. But the significance of all that is that not only have those fields disappeared beneath the sea, but Sandown Castle has as well. There!’ He had finished his moss-removing work, and now stood back to regard the result.
Jo could now clearly read a name inscribed in the stone. ‘So once upon a time,’ she said, ‘down that track, before the land sank and let in more of the sea, there was a place called’—she screwed up her eyes to read the name—‘Belial Village. So what?’
‘“So what?”’ exclaimed the Doctor, pretending to be shocked. ‘That’s an out-dated Americanism.’
‘I picked it up watching old movies on television,’ said Jo. ‘So what?’
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, pocketing his little wire brush, ‘it just strikes me as interesting.’
‘Everything,’ said Jo, ‘strikes you as interesting—and I am cold, rather hungry, and there are grains of sand in my eyes, nostrils, mouth, and now leaking down my neck. What is interesting about a village which must have been washed away by the sea hundreds of years ago?’
‘Belial is a name for the Devil, don’t you see?’ he