Part 12 (2/2)

He led her away from the view. She followed warily.'So?'

'So you must be crowned before the people. Your spectacle will still their... boisterousness.'

'I see,' said Iris and he led her downstairs. His quiet manner had subdued her. There was something so dark and una.s.suming about him that she didn't feel at all threatened. It was as if she was talking to n.o.body at all.

There hadn't been time to get into the bus. From what Sam had already seen of Iris's s.h.i.+p, she wasn't confident that it would protect them against the mob. Instead they were submerged in the surging ma.s.s of angry bodies. She and Gila were separated. Sam concentrated on pus.h.i.+ng her own a.s.sailants away, on ducking and weaving through their ma.s.s. They were clumsy and drunk. The air, she realised, stank of drink.

Breathlessly, fired with adrenaline, she fought through them, looking for an escape route. During her travels she had learned a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat. The Doctor, of course, frowned on the hasty use of weaponry, but he himself wasn't averse to using his fists when the situation called for it. Sam sent a few of her attackers reeling with a series of desperate blows.

A gap opened up around her; the townspeople drew back, seeing the short work she had made of the men who had thought her an easy target. She paused, panting, wiping a trickle of blood from her mouth and found that the atmosphere had infected her. She was jubilant and spoiling for more. Through the gap she saw that Gila was bearing the brunt of the crowd's hatred. Because of his difference they piled on to him. He was marked as foreign to them, as a monster, and they vented the full force of their disgust and fear by concentrating on him. Gila raged and tore at them, pulling unruly drunks off his back and shoulders, but sheer weight of numbers was dragging him down. A great cry went up as he fell and disappeared under a heap of filthy townspeople.

Sam fought to get to him, screaming blue murder.

As she reached the fallen Gila and pitched into battle once more, she caught a glimpse of a great gout of flame from the front of the bus. Cries, shrieks, howls of dismay. The crowd fell back. Those holding GUa down and those kicking at his helpless form looked up and saw a woman approaching them. She was armed with what appeared to Sam to be a slim and active flame-thrower.

'Let the lizard go,' said the woman coolly. She was in blue robes, like a Renaissance Madonna. Her face gleamed with sweat and conviction.

The thrower belched another burst of flame, which rolled above their heads.

Sam stopped in her tracks and felt the sweat stand out on her arms. She turned to see that the others had shrunk back and away from her.

'Leave these two alone,' the woman commanded, and there was little or no argument from the Fortaliceans. She looked like a nun, Sam decided, as she was called over to help drag the wounded Gila out of the dirt.

'His injuries are superficial,' the woman told her.'Come with me.'

Gila leaned heavily on Sam, his rough hide sc.r.a.ping her skin. She winced as the woman led them, cutting a swathe through the stunned crowd with further hissing splashes of bright flame.

The blue-robed woman was taking them to the temple in the far corner of the square, Sam saw. Sanctuary.

'I must go down to them,' said the Doctor impulsively, pulling away from the ledge, high in the library, above the square.

Gharib shook his head. ”They are already rescued, Doctor. Our Lady of the Flowers has got them. They are under her protection now.'

The Doctor stalked about the map room, muttering to himself.'How could I be so stupid? Letting them all wander off on a day like this.'

'You weren't to know,' the librarian said. 'You're a visitor.' He smiled gently at the Doctor now, as if warming to him at last. There was something appraising in that glance, too, as he looked his guest up and down.

From far below - they had clambered into the highest turret of the library - the noise of the street riot was resuming.

'And Iris is out there somewhere.'

Gharib was heaving open thin drawers, one after another, sending up great fans of blue dust.'You came here to see these. I am risking my life to show you them. Before you go, you might as well look.'

The Doctor hurried over. 'Have you got those maps with monsters drawn all around the edges? Sea beasts and dragons and mermaids lurking on the margins? I always liked those.'

Gharib slid out sheet after sheet of charts. 'All our maps are like that.

Because everything in the margins, just out of sight of the still, calm centre, is monstrous.'

'Anything you say,' muttered the Doctor, and started to pore over the maps, with his nose about an inch from their surface.

She was that rare thing in FortaJice: a visitor they had spared and allowed to live in the town among them. Over ten years ago she had wandered out of the hills in her blue robes and marched heedlessly into the town square.

There was something about her that made the people stop and stare.

She was calm, resolute, staring back at them, her face unlined, unmarked by time and anxiety. Neither were the faces of the Fortaliceans, existing as they did in their eternal round of self-renewal, but they were weathered by their environment, by the scathing, perennial desert storms. Our Lady, as they came to call her, seemed to them to be pure. The elements seemed never to have touched her or had a bearing upon her. Yet she claimed to have come from the mountains, to have lived there all her life. Some said that she had been raised by wolves, others said by angels. Whatever her story - and Our Lady was never very forthcoming - they spared her and let her live in their temple, an empty and neglected edifice of onion domes and broken spires. They had forgotten its original function and so Our Lady was allowed to take it for herself, which she did, wordlessly, as if it were her due.

There was a talent that Our Lady had, alongside her beguiling purity, that prompted the Fortaliceans and their then current Executioner to keep her as their prize. In this arid, thwarted land, she had the knack of cultivating the most extraordinary plant life. She came here with nothing but, almost as soon as she was installed in the ruined temple, she set about provoking an unprecedented growth of vegetation. She specialised in exotic flowers - useless, flaunting, ostentatious creations which crammed inside the inner courtyards, the cells, the pa.s.sageways and the whole vast interior chambers of the dank building.

The Fortaliceans drew closer to see what she had accomplished in her short time here. The rest of the town lay as barren and dusty as ever, but within the temple of Our Lady there thrived and rustled a monstrous cornucopia. Thorned vines festooned with roses reached to the domed ceilings, and swagged down to snare the unwary. Lily heads like trumpets, gilded and glistening with mysteriously perfumed dew, thrust themselves out of the gloom, and anemone heads the size of the local, stunted cabbages furled their secrets to themselves and exuded a cloying scent - and it was this that pulled the townsfolk in. But it also revolted them, this smell and this display, with its hint of longings for times and places other than their own. Plants that gave forth their gaudiness and their scents colonised the whole interior; it seethed with life. It was said that those who sneaked in to visit the temple rarely came out again. The Executioner of that time decreed that none of his people should venture into that seductive, vegetative realm.

Our Lady of the Flowers hardly ever emerged. She sat in her jade factory and let the various desert breezes take the dangerous smells of her flouris.h.i.+ng home to seep through the town.

Slowly, and by degrees, the endlessly pragmatic, phlegmatic Fortaliceans came to wors.h.i.+p her. They brought their wares to honour her, laying samples of their own pathetic cultivation at her steps.

Pumpkins like death's heads, onions like rocks. These withered tributes would vanish overnight and be replaced in the morning - as if some alchemical change had occurred through the intervening hours - by the most scandalously ripe and tempting fruits that had ever been found in this region. The populace would fall upon these wares with abandon, breaking out in violence for Our Lady's favours. Sometimes the fruit would be squashed and ruined in the kerfuffle. Our Lady had a particular talent for pomegranates.

'Doesn't talk much, does she?'

They had been left in a small, overgrown chamber. The light was shot through with green. As Sam sat herself down on damp stone to wait, she thought she could even hear the chlorophyll chugging through the fat, translucent veins of the plants around her. Now she was safe here, safe from the crowd, she was glad to relax and soak up the contemplative stillness.Yet she was still stirred up and spoiling for a fight. She dipped a hand into the dark pool by which they had been left and ran it through her blonde hair, enjoying the silvery cool.

The pool dappled what could be seen of the stone walls with eerie, subterranean light.

Our Lady had gone, swallowed up by the green.

Gila lowered himself into the water. It was so thick with weed, with a bottomless, viscous opacity, that for some moments Sam could see nothing of him but a rea.s.suring trail of tiny, joyful bubbles. Sam was reminded of hippos in the zoo, and of tramping around with her parents - both of whom were outspokenly appalled at the senselessness of keeping intelligent creatures in paddocks. There had been three hippos face down in water, bobbing slowly like leathery, obese horses, taking it in turns to suddenly plunge to the bottom of their filthy pool. Sam had taken bets with her parents - who were fascinated despite themselves - over which hippo would sink itself next. They operated in a tacit, obscure rotation system, and emerged violently, with green water pouring from their colossal, tusked jaws. Sam had stood too close, of course, hypnotised by their awesome power.

Gila came splas.h.i.+ng out of the water now, raising great spumes of froth, reminding her of his own strangeness. His hide and his narrowed, avaricious eyes were gleaming, making him seem every inch an alligator man.

'Whoever she is, we owe her one,' he said.

'What was going on out there? That mob was fighting itself as much as us.'

Gila lay back on the stone floor and shrugged carelessly. 'Some kind of local festival. I told you, the people out here are very odd.'

'At least they took notice of her.' Sam smiled at the absurdity. She'd never been rescued before by a flame-throwing nun.

They were met then by two children. There was a rustling behind them and two ragged figures appeared through the gaps. They were dirty and their eyes seemed almost all black.

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