Part 12 (1/2)

No wonder the locals seemed malnourished. They had done their best, however, and had haggled and bartered and even traded in various trinkets and pieces of electronic circuitry that they had found in the boot of the bus.

'I hope we didn't give away anything Iris wanted to keep,' said Sam.

'Serve her right if we did,' Gila muttered.

They were attracting even more notice now, as a crowd started to a.s.semble in the town square. It was a rabble, chuntering all around them. 'Something's up,' Sam observed. 'Maybe we should wait aboard the bus.' A rock was flung and it hit Gila squarely on the back. He spun around snarling.

'It was him,' Sam pointed. A man they had bought bread from. They had paid him with what Gila had called 'a partially dismantled and useless etheric-beam locator'. The man had almost bitten off his fingers in his greed for the exotic-looking object. He had stowed the device away, pushed the loaves into their arms, and shooed them out of his shop.

Now he was hurling rocks at them. A few more were thrown, rattling against the bus. A skirmish broke out within the burgeoning crowd.

”This looks nasty,' said Sam.

'Get aboard,' hissed Gila.

Then, as if at some prearranged signal, the mob descended on them.

Chapter Twelve.

Queen of Misrule

For quite some time she had known she was very ill. This body had lasted a good long while and Iris had settled happily into it, knowing its shape, textures, its limits and the way it felt to be her. She almost felt mortal. Fatter and slower was what she had become, though the word she preferred was seasoned. It was with a certain amount of pride that she reflected on the fact that her current incarnation had outlasted and seen out five of the Doctors. Or should that be 'five of the Doctor's', with an apostrophe? What a difference a single apostrophe could make, she thought. That tiny fleck of punctuation denoted the exact difference between regarding the Doctor as separate, though mysteriously interconnected, beings, and seeing them as manifestations of one core, essentially unchanging being. That apostrophe expressed the precise ontological quandary of these lives that she and the Doctor endured.

Iris was given to thinking along lines such as these. They were the things she mulled over as she allowed herself to drift, whenever a bad bout in her illness cropped up. And they were happening with greater frequency nowadays. She would draw into herself, pulling upon reserves of strength to weather out the disease and its effects. A month ago she had woken on the top deck of the bus to find that she had been unconscious for three days. When she discovered this she'd become frightened for the first time.

She ached all over, she pa.s.sed out periodically, her hearts sometimes beat wildly out of synch. Sometimes she could hardly breathe, or felt that she had forgotten how to.

This is ridiculous, she thought. I have a TARDIS. I can seek the best medical help that has ever existed, anywhere. Somewhere in the cosmos there must be someone who can help me. And yet she put it all to the back of her mind, letting other, random concerns take her thoughts off her ailments. She'd done this until she discovered that she had lain unconscious for those three nights, suspended in the vortex.

That had convinced her that she wasn't getting any better. Radical measures needed to be taken. And so she had come to Hyspero.

Iris wasn't afraid of death. In her travels she had faced it many times.

Almost daily, in fact. She had encountered quite as many tinpot dictators, conspirators and deadly a.s.sa.s.sins as the Doctor. She had a greater sense of self-preservation than the Doctor, however, never quite endangering herself for the sake of others as he seemed to relish doing.

When the time came to relinquish this life and to pa.s.s almost seamlessly into the next, she would greet that new self with gusto.

Only a few days ago, as they shared the cab of the bus, Sam and Iris had discussed this. Sam asked if Iris ever worried about dying. A s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed through the old woman as if a goose had walked over her grave, but she told Sam, 'I know that, in the end, I'll be all right. For a while, anyway.' She grinned. 'Remember I told you that I met my other selves, once? We were summoned, seven of us, against our wills to a terribly bleak, gladiatorial wilderness on Gallifrey. We were transported by the horrid revenants of Morbius. All us girls got together, put our heads together, in order to get ourselves out of the mess. I was number five - still am, in fact, and I had the pleasure of meeting my number six. I'm not supposed to remember this, but there you are, I do. So I know that I survive, in one timeline, at least. She's a gorgeous, slinky s.e.x kitten, looks about thirty in human terms, with ma.s.ses of honey-blonde hair.

She was in a s.h.i.+ny plastic bikini cut very daringly, and thigh-length boots. She had a look of Jane Fonda about her.' Sam had seemed impressed.

What Iris hadn't told her was that if this disease continued at its present rate and ended up annihilating every cell of Iris's current body, then there wouldn't be anything left of her to regenerate into that next, voluptuous self. Everything would be changed.

She woke, with a jolt, in a dank cell, somewhere beneath the home of the Executioner of Fortalice. She gasped with pain. Dreaming of her illness again, she thought ruefully. It filled all her waking moments, too, until sometimes, recently, she had wanted to grab the Doctor by his velvet lapels and scream at him.'I'm dying,you fool! Stop blathering and save me!' Something always held her back. She had to get on with her mission. It was her only hope.

And now someone, or something, had taken her prisoner. Worse, she was alone. No one to help unshackle her, to help unpick the locks on the cell door, to come padding down the labyrinthine corridors that no doubt led away from this room. No one.

Her head still throbbed from whatever had laced that horrid wine.

'Let me out!'she wailed.

The door clicked and slid open.

She sat up and found herself unbound. Pulling her cardigan into shape, she stepped cautiously out into a stone hallway, lit by candles that dripped down the elaborate ironwork. Standard, dungeony accoutrements, she mused.

She listened. Through the thick sandstone walls she could hear the various noises of a crowd. The voice of the mob - jubilation and dismay.

Somewhere there was a riot going on, and she had a negligent jailer.

She crept along the pa.s.sageway, turning left at the corner, and left and left and left again. She decided firmly that she no longer enjoyed just her own company. Creeping about wasn't the same with no one to hiss at.

Perhaps Sam could be persuaded to defect from the Doctor's side.

More candles guttering in the lurid gloom.

Anything could step out of the shadows, but Iris was used to anything.

She and anything were old, old friends.

When she came to the room with the window above the town and the man who stood watching the fracas below, she wasn't surprised. He was her negligent jailer - a squat, ugly man in a vest and a cowled hood. He turned and gave her a sickly grin, from which many of the teeth were missing.

'You're awake,' he said. She nodded curtly. 'Come and see the bloodshed,' he urged. ”This time they are really going for it. I'd be surprised if half the townsfolk aren't dead by nightfall.'

She found herself standing beside him at the parapet.

Below, the town of Fortalice had turned on itself. She could see perhaps a square mile of streets, all teeming with life, the details smudged with dust and a bewildering surge of bodies in motion. Bodies were being flung and strewn everywhere, bodies were being battered and torn apart by the bare hands of other bodies, which were pitching themselves heedlessly into the b.l.o.o.d.y melee. There were no sides or factions, as far as Iris could make out. Bodies fought the bodies beside them in a cacophonous and promiscuous Bosch-like vista.

Above the din she asked her captor,'Have they all gone loopy?'

'Yes,' he said. 'It is that day in the year when the Fortaliceans are permitted to go mad.'

'I take it you're the Executioner.'

'That is my function. Come with me, please.'

She snorted.'No thanks.'

'But you have your public to face.'

'My public?'

'You are the Queen of this misrule. A visitor. The quintessence of everything we deplore.You are subversion itself.'