Doctor Who_ The Stone Rose - Jacqueline Rayner [46]
Ursus stepped forward. ‘Watch your tongue when you speak to the goddess!’ he snarled.
The Doctor frowned. ‘I think that would make speaking rather difficult,’ he said. He stuck his tongue out and crossed his eyes to look down on it. ‘Therterly inghockigal,’ he said.
Ursus growled, and the Doctor shrugged and spoke normally. ‘Are you denying you’ve been doing harm, then? Because I really think you have been. You know, with all that turning people to stone and so on. Call me a philistine if you like – although actually the Philistines weren’t as bad as all that. They might not know a good painting if they saw one, but they knew how to throw a classy party… Where was I? Oh, yes – call me a philistine, but I can’t quite see the justification of the petrification‐as‐art business.’
‘Art justifies everything,’ Ursus said simply.
‘Er, no, it doesn’t,’ the Doctor replied. ‘One nil to me. Next?’
‘Without art, life would have no meaning!’
‘Hmm. Actually don’t entirely disagree with you on that one, believe it or not – but, and I think this may be the point at which we part company, there’s already quite a lot of art in the world. Mosaics, paintings, music – even rather a nice lot of actually‐carved‐from‐stone statues. So, lots of meaning, life is happy, no need to go around zapping people with your magic fingers.’
Ursus pulled off his gloves and held up his hands, showing those stubby, clumsy digits. ‘Do you know what it’s like,’ he said, ‘to feel that you’re in the wrong body?’
‘Well, actually…’ the Doctor began, wiggling his own fingers in front of his face.
‘I was supposed to create art,’ Ursus continued, and Rose suddenly had a flash of memory, of the words he had spoken as the world turned dark around her.
‘So you made offerings to Minerva and asked her to –’ she struggled to remember – ‘give you the ability to make beauty in stone?’
He nodded. ‘Minerva answered my entreaties, allowed me to do what I was born to do, be what I was born to be.’
‘Bet it was a bit of a shock for you when you discovered her take on the matter,’ said the Doctor. ‘On the one hand, you’ve got the real craftsmen toiling away with their hammers and chisels, and on the other, you’ve got a serial killer carrying out assault with a deadly finger. By the way, did she give you the magic gloves too? I mean, imagine what would happen every time you picked your nose otherwise.’
‘I just can’t believe a… a god would do something like this!’ said Rose. She turned to Minerva, hardly able to believe she was standing up to a deity. ‘Are you really happy that he’s going around killing people like this?’
That unearthly smile shone out again. ‘But of course. He does it to glorify me. And brings me many offerings in return.’
‘Roman gods were in it for the offerings,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘They don’t mind what you get up to, as long as you observe the rites correctly. And they have a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” relationship with their worshippers. You give them a pig, they’ll smite your enemy for you. That sort of thing.’
‘But all the people…’
Ursus looked puzzled. ‘They were only slaves bought for the purpose. Men are bought to be slaughtered in the arena. Surely becoming beauty is a better death than being hacked to pieces in a gladiatorial show?’
Rose opened and closed her mouth a few times, each argument failing on her tongue. Funny how places on Earth could sometimes be more alien to her than other planets. ‘Optatus wasn’t a slave,’ she said finally, abandoning the whole ‘killing is wrong’ subject altogether.
Ursus snorted. ‘That stupid fool Gracilis kept on about a tribute to his pathetic son. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Hadn’t wanted to know me when I was a failure, a no one. All over me as soon as my name was spoken of in Rome.’ He smiled, amused. ‘Besides, he offered me so much money, how could I refuse?’
‘Well, you know, if it’d been me I’d have found a way,’ Rose told him. ‘What you’ve been doing is just… evil. All those people are dead!’
‘Actually,