There were other chariots drawing up now. The man jumped down from his vehicle, strode over to her. His skin was the colour of copper, his head shaven, a stubble just showing on his chin. He wore a white kilt. He was much taller than the other Egyptians, and he had big brown eyes like a deer.
He looked down at her, probably wondering what the hell this pale-skinned woman was doing lying in the desert dirt miles from anywhere, trying to get herself eaten by the lions.
He held out a hand to her, and she took it. His palm was smooth and warm.
'I can't get up,' she said.
With a single movement, the same fluidity with which he'd shot the lioness, he bent down and picked her up.
By now his servants had come into the valley and were collecting the harrier, tying the lioness's paws together to slide a wooden pole under her feet. With a grunt three of them hefted the body, balancing the pole on their shoulders, the arrow still trailing down from the animal's neck.
Ace was looking at their clothes, their skin, half-remembering school videos and trips to the British Museum. Such a long time ago. 'I'm in Egypt, aren't I?' she asked.
'You've come a very long way to die in the desert,' he said, with the hint of a smile in his voice. She let her head roll against his broad chest, let him carry her like a bride in his powerful arms. Then she laughed, just once, a sharp bark from the bottom of her lungs.
'What's funny?' he said, carrying her to the chariot. His servants gazed at her curiously.
'Sorry,' she said, 'this is embarrassing.'
'Eh?'
'Take me home, Lawrence.'
She was sunburnt and frostbitten, and she was exhausted and hungry, and her hair and mouth were full of dirt. Her white knight had his women servants bathe and dress her. His personal physician paid her a visit, armed with a surgical papyrus and a box full of amulets.
33.She let it all happen, let them scrub her with some thick paste that lathered like thin soap, just stared at the ceiling as the physician checked her joints and eyes. There was nothing to do, there was nothing she could do.
'Well,' she said to the plaster roof when they had finished with her, 'here I am in Ancient Egypt.'
She laughed once more, another hoarse bark. She wanted to laugh until the tears rolled down her face, while the women servants peered at her from behind the curtains. Rescued in the desert by some macho nobleman, who swept her into his arms and carried her off in his chariot.
She had nothing. Nothing at all. Even the clothes she had been dressed in had been taken away, the woman servants intrigued by the curious, heavy fabric. She did not have her combat suit nor any of the things from her room in the TARDIS. She didn't have so much as a tube of toothpaste.
She wished she'd paid more attention on those trips to the Museum. She had no way of working out what year it was. No-one would know where or when she was. There wasn't going to be any rescue from this trap.
But she was alive, and, once she'd had some sleep, she would be in reasonable shape. And somehow, she could understand Ancient Egyptian. Funny.
She frowned slightly, her eyelids already starting to flicker as her thoughts started to tangle together. The wooden headrest was surprisingly comfortable. It felt good to be lying down.
They had both been lying on the floor. Ace could not feel the texture of the weird stuff it was made of, some rough material that looked like scales or bark. All she could feel was the deep cold spreading up from it.
The Doctor's eyes were closed. There was a great purple bruise on his left cheekbone, from the impact of a human fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow. He lay on his left side, facing her, his broken right arm curled against his chest. She was seeing him from a crazy angle, unable to move her head.
He opened his eyes and looked at her blankly. A drop of blood, brilliant red against his white skin, ran out of his nose. Some message pressed at her from behind his eyes, like an optical illusion she couldn't quite make out.
Often she had hoped he couldn't read her thoughts, but now she hoped that he could. Just know that I'm here, Just know that I'm here, she thought, she thought, just know that you're not alone. just know that you're not alone.
Hands strong with panic dragged Ace up from the floor. 'Come on, move!
We have to get out of here!' Bernice was still glowing faintly as the energy from the space-time rift drained out of her force shield. She looked like an angel, a guardian angel come to save them.
Ace tried to grab at Benny, but her muscles wouldn't work. A sharp, deep ache was working its way from her shoulders to her fingers. Benny grabbed 34 her wrist and snapped a force shield generator onto it.
Then she bent and grabbed the Doctor by the scruff of his overalls and stumbled backwards, trying to drag both of them at once, cursing with frustration.
Ace wanted to apologise for being so useless, but all that happened was her head lolled to one side and a rough moan came out of her mouth.
An incredible light was sleeting through the cold chamber from behind them. Ace recognised the signature of the space-time fracture. Benny dropped her and swore.
The light was coming out of the fracture, flickering, exploding in pops and sparks from a patch of air that hurt her brain to look at. There was broken glass or plastic all over the floor.
Benny was stooped over the Doctor, frantically trying to get a response out of him. Blood was trickling from his mouth and nose, sluggishly. His eyes had flickered shut.
Ace wished she could tell Benny that the Doctor was dead.
But the light from the rift was echoing inside her head, and she felt herself being erased, wiped away until there was nothing left at all.
35.
Chapter 4.
Rent
More nonsense has been written about the Amarna period than any other in Egyptian history.
(Margaret Murray) Ill.
You don't have to do anything when you're ill.
Sometimes, when Ace was very young and she had a cold, her mother would stay home from work to look after her. Little Dorothy would play with Lego, crashing the spaceship set into the police station set. She had a jigsaw puzzle of a family at the beach, their little dog running away across the sand.
There was a piece of the puzzle missing. No matter how many times she put the picture together, there was always a piece missing.
Mum came in when she was looking under the bed for the third time. 'Into bed with you,' she said. 'And stay there.'
Little Dorothy lay tucked between the laundry-smelling sheets, listening to the rain on the window, listening to the sounds from downstairs. In Ace's memories the men's voices blurred together, blending into the sound of the television, a muttered buzz as comforting as the warm clasp of her bed.
Tiny hands gripping the bedclothes. Listening to her own heartbeat. Convinced that any second the internal sound was going to stop.
Ace slept around the clock twice, her skin peeling off. When she awoke, there was coarse, bitter bread, with tiny bits of stone mixed into the dough, and pale-tasting onions. When she was able to sit up properly, they brought her roast duck and a bowl full of beer that tasted like sandpaper.
She lay in bed, eyes tracing the wall paintings, and listened to the sounds of the household. The servants wandered in and out of her room without taking much notice of her. They were short, shorter than her in most cases. Her rescuer's nutrition was better, evidently.
In other rooms people spoke in liquid syllables, the words rolling in their throats. Outside, there was the honking of geese, shouts and laughter, the incessant grinding of stone on stone as flour was made from grain.
One night there was a party. Ace lay in the bed, listening, the wicker pressing into her back through the linen. The music was unfamiliar, but the sound of people getting drunk wasn't. Half-asleep, she half-expected to hear 37 the sound of her mother's voice rising into an angry whine, and the muffled thumps that might be furniture or fists.
After a week, she stumbled out of the room, wandered into the walled garden, and fell into the pool.
When she surfaced, plucking lily pads out of her sodden hair, the Lord Sedjet was watching her.
He didn't seem to understand her urgent need for clothing. After all, the servant girls who brought her a shift and tunic went about naked all the time.
He was seated by the pool, tickling a pet monkey under its chin, politely waiting. She tugged on the foreign garments, embarrassed by her embarrass-ment as Sedjet watched her. It wasn't an unfriendly gaze, not like the rake of restaurant eyes over her body.
The servants brought her a stool and she sat on it awkwardly.
Silence for a bit. Sedjet's monkey jumped into his lap, yawned pinkly and went to sleep.
'Is it always this hot?' she said at last.
'It is much colder where you come from,' he replied, formally. The physician who had visited her twice had spoken like that, when he'd said anything, in between feeling her elbows and peering at the whites of her eyes.
'You want to know all about me,' she said. 'My name is Ace. I come from a distant land called Perivale. My friends and I travel from place to place. We were attacked in the desert, and the bandits left me for dead.'
Sedjet took this in, nodding to himself. She'd been rehearsing it, taking it from the servants' gossip. Desert brigands were apparently a serious problem.
'I am sorry,' he said, 'but we did not find anyone else in the desert. Nor any bodies.'
'You didn't find anything, er, unusual?'
'Only you,' smiled Lord Sedjet. It was a good smile. She had to admit he rated at least an eight. There were muscles under that skin not the iron muscle of combat, but the firmness of exercise. He was wealthy, and had a lot of leisure time. He wore nothing but a kilt and jewellery armlets and collar of semi-precious stones.
A servant brought Ace breakfast, bread and dates. 'Tell me,' said Lord Sedjet. 'Where is the land of Perivale? Is it very cold there?'
'Yeah,' said Ace, around her mouthful of food. What year is this? Where the hell are the Doctor and Benny? 'People from Perivale don't feel the cold. But this heat!'
'Why did you leave?'
'Long story,' she said. 'I was bored.'
'Are you married?' he asked.
Ace almost dropped her goose wing.
38.I don't believe it. I don't mind older men, but this is ridiculous. Go on, tell him you've got a hubby and two point four children waiting for you back in the him you've got a hubby and two point four children waiting for you back in the mystical land of Perivale. mystical land of Perivale.
'No. I'm not married. I'm a soldier.'
Sedjet started to laugh.
Ace put her plate down on the ground. The monkey jumped down to in-vestigate. Sedjet was still laughing, great whoops of hilarity coming from his belly.
So Ace picked him up and threw him in the pool, dunking him until his wig fell off.
When she let him up for air, he was still laughing, his shaved scalp glistening in the morning sunlight. He twisted around to see how angry she was. But she was looking back at him without emotion. Just making the point.
That afternoon, he made her one of his bodyguards.
The scribe's name was Sesehaten. He wrote tiny pictures across a bit of papyrus, dipping his brush into a palette of black ink, his hand flashing over the coarse paper from right to left. Ace stood beside him in the foyer, watching as the little jackals and owls and people lined up on the page. Hieroglyphs were just something you saw on jars or in photos of tomb walls. She had never imagined anyone actually writing them.
Sesehaten was a slender man, around the same age as she was. Like Sedjet, he was taller than the other Egyptians more money, better diet, thought Ace.
He was still short, though, and not very threatening but the four thugs in Lord Sedjet's central hall waited politely for him to finish adding Ace to his records.
She'd broken a jug of beer over the head of the Assyrian, jamming the flat part of her foot into the ex-soldier's groin. That stopped him laughing. She'd been through it on a dozen worlds, when she was an Auxie, smashing bottles over alien heads and kicking Privates in the privates. Childish, really, like proving herself with scraped knees and bloody noses in the playground. But it gave her a chance to test out her body, see if anything wasn't working properly, see if anything had been done to her.
What the bloody hell had happened?
She remembered the giant ship descending on them, remembered fighting her way through crowds of panicking passengers as the Cortese Cortese went into emergency mode. Containment bulkheads were slamming down all over the place, while men and women in lightweight spacesuits were running up and down with equipment. went into emergency mode. Containment bulkheads were slamming down all over the place, while men and women in lightweight spacesuits were running up and down with equipment.
Then blackness. In the confusion it was entirely possible that she'd run smack into a bulkhead and knocked herself out.
39.Then a bad taste in her mouth, and cold so bad it stung. Then she was lying on the freezing floor, its coarseness scraping her cheek what was it made from? trying to get her eyes open.
There was a great purple bruise on his left cheekbone, the impact of a human fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow. fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow.
Shit happens, as the T-shirt says, and a lot of shit had happened while she'd been playing corpsicle.
At least she'd landed on her feet. She could look after herself here while she searched for the Doctor and Benny. They had to be here somewhere. She'd find them or they'd find her, they'd sort out who the enemy was, the Doctor would have a plan. And his plans always worked.
A drop of blood, brilliant red against his white skin, ran out of his nose.
Cruk it! What had happened?
She shook her head.
Sesehaten was saying, 'You'll be provided with weaponry. A bow, plenty of arrows, and a khopesh khopesh. You do know how to use the weapons, Tepy?'
First One, they called her Tepy, 'Of course I do. What's a khopesh khopesh?'
The ex-soldier and the half-Hittite grinned at each other. The Assyrian started laughing again. Out of his belt he pulled a heavy copper sword, shaped like a sickle a long straight piece with a wicked curve and a pointed tip. It looked like a question mark.
He threw it at Ace. She caught it, awkwardly, feeling the weight drag her wrist down. The tip thumped into the floor with a crack.
'I'll need some practice,' said Ace, shrugging. She flipped the sword up, gripped the hilt in both hands and had it at the Assyrian's throat before he could move, the flat of the sword thwacking his shoulder as it landed.
He stopped laughing. Ace started laughing.
Sedjet knelt, stroked the sand with his hands, long fingers sifting through the grains. 'We may have left it too late,' he said. 'Anything the bandits left behind may have been swallowed by the desert.'