Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 11
Library

Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 11

A quarrel had started up in a corner of the tavern, two meaty soldiers arguing about the fine details of some old campaign. ''Scuse me,' said Tepy.

She weaved over to the two men, who had knocked over their table and were grappling ineffectually. She tapped one of them on the shoulder, and when he turned around she smiled invitingly.

They both gaped at her. Tepy reached up and put her arms around the soldier's neck. Wine dribbled down his face and dripped off his nose while he grinned stupidly down at her.

She locked her hands together behind his head and slammed his body down as her knee came up into his groin. He didn't make a sound just a thump as he hit the floor. His friend stared down at him, still holding the handle of the broken wine jar.

Tepy gave him her smile, and he hoofed it for the door.

She sat back down with Sesehaten, picked up a bowl of beer from the tray, and drained it at a gulp. 'I double as a bouncer.' She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. 'One of the reasons the old bastard keeps me on. The other one is he's trying to get into my dress. It's just the same as Sedjet. It's just the same as Sabalom. He pays the bills, eventually he'll get what he wants out of me.'

'There must be some noble who would have you as his bodyguard.'

She shrugged. 'I'm too well known, I've lost the element of surprise. And I've lost my novelty. Sedjet showed me off too many times. So much is changing around here. I thought maybe one more change wouldn't make any difference . . . '

'There are thousands of years of ma' at ma' at to overcome,' he said, trying to sound consoling. 'Changing that is too great a test for one woman.' to overcome,' he said, trying to sound consoling. 'Changing that is too great a test for one woman.'

'Who fails the test feeds the Devourer,' she muttered.

'What?'

She fixed him with a dull eye. 'I hear a lot of politics, you know,' she said.

'Just one man's changing all those thousands of years of tradition.'

'Yes, but that one man happens to be the Pharaoh.'

70.'When I tried to join up, you know what I found out? Hardly anyone's going abroad to fight any more. There was a punitive campaign to Nubia, and a few troops sent to some of the vassal princes. But you know where most of the army is? Right here. Where the Pharaoh needs 'em. Because he's changed everything around. He's messed around with ma' at ma' at. And nobody's happy.'

She waved vaguely at the tavern's inhabitants. 'You should hear them start on their dreamer Pharaoh, when they've got a few bowls of beer inside them.

It's like a huge wheel trying to turn, but it's stuck on a rock and there's friction and sparks. Resistance.'

'I used,' said Sesehaten, 'to be a priest.'

'Is that right?' Tepy ran her finger around the rim of her bowl. 'There used to be a lot of gods, and now there's only one. And you're not allowed to worship any of the ones that Mr. Pharaoh killed. Which god did you worship?'

Why did you mention the Devourer?' asked Sesehaten.

'I had a dream.'

'Tell me about your dream.'

She was walking, descending on a long, labyrinthine path. There was a cold pain in her right wrist, and when she looked up, she realized she was being led by the hand.

The White Lady turned to her, as if wondering why she hesitated. The Lady had no face, only smoothness, like a pearly mask. Ace saw her own features reflected in that mask, and snapped her eyes away from it, worried in case the White Lady tried to take her face for her own.

They went through huge halls, great pillars shooting up towards the roof, the walls covered in the chiselled scrawl of a million scribes. There was incense everywhere, fogging the air, and through it Ace could make out figures, seated in rows, holding knives or busy with papyri. Sometimes eyes looked back at her through the scented clouds, and the eyes were not always human.

They came to a huge hall, huger than all the rest, seeming to stretch away into infinity. At the far end, miles away but perfectly clear and visible, was a raised bier, its roof covered in cobras.

'And inside the bier sat a green-faced man, attended by two ladies, with a lotus at his feet,' Sesehaten whispered.

Tepy had been staring into her bowl of beer. Now she dragged her sleepy eyes up to him. 'What is it?'

'The Hall of the Judgment of the Dead,' said Sesehaten excitedly.

'The pit of hell,' said Tepy. 'I thought all that stuff was banned.'

'It is,' said the scribe, 'but I don't think the law extends to dreams. Go on.'

71.There was a long, long row of figures sitting against one wall. Perhaps half of them had human faces. Each one held an ostrich feather or was it a knife?

Ace tried to squint through the smoke at the bizarre jury, but the White Lady's sharp grip was pulling her to one side of the hall.

There were figures standing in the hall, figures that rang tiny bells in Ace's mind. She'd seen them at the Museum, her schoolfriends touching their tiny hands to a fallen arm of Ramesses, ten foot of solid stone.

A man with a jackal's head was adjusting a set of golden scales, while another man with an ibis head wrote something on a piece of papyrus, the way she'd seen Sesehaten do it, moistened brush flicking across the paper.

There was something crouching under the scales, something she didn't want to look at yet.

'This,' said Tepy, 'This is the weird bit. This is the bit where it starts getting really weird. Not just normally weird, mind you.'

She knocked over her bowl of beer.

'Next,' said Bird-brain, who was suddenly wearing a suit and tie. His curved beak peaked out from under a bowler hat too large for his tiny head.

Dog-breath left the hall, stepping past Ace and the White Lady where they stood to one side. As he passed he momentarily became dizzyingly tall, as huge and fundemental as the moon. Names were banging away in Ace's mind: Anubis, Osiris, Horus, Isis. She wished she could remember which was which.

But now each of the forty-two jurors was busily scribbling a label in the air beside them, like subtitles. They weren't human gods any more, even though their pale, lean faces looked human, capped and collared in red and gold and heliotrope. Procrastination, one was labelled, sitting next to Predestination, who was chittering at Anachronism and Lull. Time, they were gods of time.

Ace risked a glance at the White Lady who had dragged her here. 'Which one are you, then?' she asked. But the Lady put an alabaster finger to her non-existent lips.

When the jackal-faced man came back he was accompanied by two ant-headed soldiers, marching at double speed, hands firmly gripping the arms of a captive being brought for judgment. The jurors hooted and shrieked as he was dragged in, the hall filling with their cries. The captive's hands were manacled before him, and he wore a beige coverall, and you know perfectly well who he is.

'Your friend?' said Sesehaten. 'The Sinu Sinu?'

'Yeah,' said Tepy.

72.The Ant-soldiers pushed the Doctor to his knees before the scales. The jurors sat up, waving their feather-knives and cooing at the sight of the purple damage to his face. Someone had embroidered a convoluted rose over the left breast of his coverall, where a pocket might have gone.

A great silence rolled through the hall. The jurors leaned forward, listening intently. Dog-breath stood by the scales, arms folded, looking utterly grim.

The silence continued.

'Well, come on, then!' said Bird-brain from underneath his bowler.

'Yes!' cat-called one of the jurors. 'Let's have the negative confession!'

'Have you robbed?' squeaked Twilight, waving his feather-knife in an excited circle.

'Have you destroyed supplies of food?' Blue Moon insisted.

'Have you stolen sacrificial offerings?'

'Have you told lies?'

'Blown up any planets lately?'

'Tell us!'

'Have you terrified people?' Ennui wanted to know.

'Have you been quarrelsome?' shrieked Second Last.

'You must protest your innocence!' Dog-breath told his prisoner, tiny at the feet of the god of Death. But the Doctor just looked him in the eye and kept silent.

'Tell us! Tell us!' Haste and Quarter To started a pitched battle with their feather-knives.

'Who cares for you?' Ace heard herself shout. 'You're nothing but a pack of pen-pushers! We've faced worse than you!'

The Doctor was smiling, just the corner of his mouth turned up. In contempt of the court.

The bird-headed god glanced at his wristwatch. 'Isn't there anything you'd like to tell us?'

'He died,' said Ace.

Silence fell like a stone. The gods leant forward, listening.

It came out reflexively from her throat. 'He died.'

'We know that-bit,' said Bird-brain. 'Everyone here is dead. You're dead, he's dead. This ' and he gestured with his brush ' is an ex-Time Lord. What's your point?'

'He left me,' she said in a tiny voice. 'He didn't come back for me.'

The jackal-headed man stepped forward, carrying something Ace hadn't been able to make out clearly before. Now she saw it was a pair of hearts.

In one of the scale's pans an ostrich feather was sitting, heavy, dragging the balance down towards it. 'The word truth and the word feather are the same 73 in hieroglyphs. Ma' at Ma' at,' the White Lady was hissing in her ear. 'The dead man's heart is tested by being weighed against ma' at ma' at.'

'What is it?' Ace whispered. Her throat had tied itself in knots.

'Truth, justice, and the Egyptian way. The order of the universe, the order of society. If his heart is heavier, he fails the test.'

'But that's not fair,' Ace was trying to say. 'He has two hearts.'

'Who fails the test feeds the Devourer,' the White Lady whispered in her ear.

Under the tipping scales, the moving thing resolved itself into a patchwork she-monster made out of pieces of animals, her mouth wide and hungry as a crocodile's.

As Bird-brain started filling in a papyrus in triplicate, the guards stepped smartly away from the Doctor, leaving him alone in the centre of the floor.

The rose over his left heart blazed.

The Devourer came for the Time Lord.

He started to laugh.

'You know the weirdest thing?' said Tepy. 'I felt like I was just a bystander, an extra. Like it was his dream, and I just happened to be there.'

'A funeral dream,' Sesehaten said, 'indicates grief. It is good, it means that there is something left of him inside your mind. It is good to dream of friends, especially when we can't see them again.'

'I don't want to dream about him,' said Tepy heavily. 'I don't want to think about him, I just want to get on with it. And I'm not there's no I'm not grieving.'

'You don't believe he's dead, do you?'

'You don't know him. He's crukking unstoppable. Crukking unkillable. The only way he'd die is if he planned it himself.' She blew out an angry sigh. 'If he'd have landed here instead of me, he'd be telling the Pharaoh how to tie his shoelaces by now. He'd have the Zargoids eating out of his hand. 'Cept there are are no Zargoids.' no Zargoids.'

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. 'You know, I was always dependent on him, too. And he could always get me to do what he wanted, one way or another. I can't move without him. He never stops moving, only one thing could stop him moving. And I saw it happen, I actually saw it happen. And I didn't care.'

Sesehaten said, 'When Sedjet's first wife died, he hired a bevy of wailing women to tear their hair and throw dust on their faces. He never shed a tear himself. But he had to keep up appearances.' His lip curled. 'Mourning when you feel no grief is just an elaborate lie.'

'Don't I love him? Didn't I love him?' Her voice was cool, even with therich 74 beer. 'He didn't even die for a good reason. 'Slike the Sarge used to say, anything you can do can get you shot, including doing nothing. And I don't care. I just don't care. I didn't really love him, and now he's gone. And I'm stuck here. Wasted. Because I can't fit into a box.'

'Listen to me,' said the scribe. 'You're a separate person. Are you the eye of your friend? Are you his hand? He's dead, but you are still alive. And not everyone shapes themselves into a box.'

Tepy's eyes were watery with booze. She wasn't listening. 'One thing about the Doctor, wherever you go, he always has powerful friends, and if he doesn't have them he makes them, and if he can't make them he becomes powerful himself. People think he's a god or an official or something. But I threw away the only powerful friend I had.'

'You said you were an Egyptian. But you don't fit in.' Sesehaten sighed. 'I can't imagine you fitting in anywhere.'

'Yeah, I'm a woman of Set,' she snorted. 'What the smeg does that mean, anyway?'

Sesehaten opened his mouth, closed it, then spoke with precision. 'Before our beloved Pharaoh established his new religion and built this city to worship his Aten, Set was worshipped as the breaker of rules, the upsetter of order.

Chaos is just as much a part of the universe as order; the Nile swells every year at the same time, but sometimes it floods the villages. We pay our taxes but we get drunk. Ma' at Ma' at says you should be a lady. But some of us have to break the rules.' says you should be a lady. But some of us have to break the rules.'

'I can break all the rules I like,' said Tepy. 'I'm still stuck in this crukking tavern. I'm off the board, out of the game. I'm going to die here, and someone will paint me with tar and bury me in a patch of sand. Jesus, listen to me. You said you'd been looking for me,' she said abruptly. 'Why?'

The scribe took a mouthful of beer. 'You know that stretch of desert you used to visit? Where Sedjet found you?' She nodded. 'I just wanted to warn you that demons have been seen there. You should avoid the place for a while.'

'Demons?' Tepy let go of her hair, pushed it cut of her flushed face. 'What the cruk kind of demons?'

'Some soldiers saw them. Giant scarabs, or some kind of insects, shining like the sun.'

'How many? What were they doing?'