'Don't you understand?' said the nobleman. 'Your friends aren't going to come back.'
'I don't belong here. I have to go, I have to get out of here!'
'Tepy, listen to me. Listen, sister. They are not coming back for you.'
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 of him. Blood was trickling from his mouth and nose, sluggishly. His eyes had flickered shut. flickered shut.
Oh, God.
Oh, my God.
The icy certainty she had known on the alien ship came back into her.
He really had died, hadn't he?
'It doesn't hurt.' She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to find some part of herself that wanted to cry. 'Why doesn't it hurt?'
Sedjet looked at her, his smooth face crumpling with very real grief.
No ruby slippers. 'I just feel cold,' she said.
'People from Perivale don't feel the cold.'
'I'm not from Perivale,' she whispered. 'I'm an Egyptian.'
52.
Chapter 5.
Yesterday, When I Was Mad
[Paris is] the only place in the universe where one can relax entirely.
(The Doctor, City of Death City of Death) Paris 1871 CE Normally, when he woke up, it was very sudden: snapping from oblivion into consciousness, sometimes so abruptly he had to think about it to be sure he'd slept at all.
But this was a slow return from the darkness. The first flickerings of awareness, becoming aware of awareness. He was drifting up through murky water, some dim light above him or below him, the weight of the ocean pressing against his eyes. There were doors he couldn't quite reach.
With an effort he forced them open.
The light made him blink. He tried to take in all the details. But it was gibberish, charivari, chiaroscuro, son et lumiere son et lumiere.
He closed his eyes again. Stick to the basics, one thing at a time. He was alive. Always a good start. He was lying down. There was a restrictive weight on his chest and arms, something plastic clinging to his face. His breathing made a noise. Plastic over his mouth and nose.
He rolled over and out of the bed, out from the heavy covers. The floor was cold. The respirator mask jerked part of the way loose and he batted it free of his hair.
The room reeled around him as he tried to catch his breath. He could see a door, upside down. A way to get out. He pushed himself to his knees, grabbed the bed and dragged himself to his feet. Keep moving.
He fell against the door and scrabbled at the knob. Locked. Simple lock. It wouldn't take long to pick it.
But there were sounds, sounds coming from behind the door! Someone was coming! He needed to get out, get out quickly.
He made it the few feet across the floor to the window, ripping the curtains open as someone put a key into the lock. The window was not locked. He wrenched it open, dragged himself through. Keep moving.
53.He found himself on a tiled roof. The sun! He raised a trembling hand against the physical force of its light.
The sky and the dancing buildings waved up and down like the ocean. He crawled across the roof, clinging hard to the tiles, tasting blood. He wasn't sure where he was heading, what he would do next, but it didn't matter. Keep going, keep moving, get away!
There was a shout behind him. He twisted his head around. Someone was leaning out of the window, yelling at him to stop, to stop being an idiot. She snaked out of the window and landed on the tiles, graceful as an animal, and came after him.
He lost his grip, rolling down the roof, snatching at the tiles as he fell. There was a lurch as he went over the edge, a fierce jerk in his shoulders. He opened his eyes, squinting against the burning sky, and realised he was holding onto the gutter. Perhaps someone was shouting below him. He didn't look down.
He remembered something falling out of the orange sky, falling, falling .
His pursuer appeared over the edge of the roof, throwing a cold shadow over him. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she shouted, and reached for him.
He let go of the gutter.
She snatched him out of the air, both hands gripping his left wrist. In a single heave she pulled him onto the roof.
He struggled, but her grip was like iron, and already the sun was ringing in his head like a funeral bell. She was behind him, one hand across his chest, the other clutching his wrist. 'Relax,' she said into his ear, 'Relax. I've got you.'
With a sound like a camera snapping, reality clicked into place. He melted into her grasp, his head falling back against her shoulder.
This was Earth, and he was safe, and there was no need to escape. No need to get away. Some part of his mind was broken like a renegade piece of a pocket watch, rattling loose inside the casing.
He was out of his mind.
He opened his mouth to cry out with the horror of it. But then he remembered, and was silent.
Two weeks later. Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart sat curled in a wicker chair in her underwear. She was watching the Doctor sleep.
The bump that indicated his toes was a good three feet from the end of the canopied bed. His arms were folded neatly on his chest above the covers.
She'd never seen anyone alive look so relaxed.
Weeks ago she'd got out of the nervous habit of checking whether he was still breathing. He took a couple of breaths a minute. His skin was cold enough that condensation sometimes formed on it.
54.He slept with a tiny smile on his face, as though sleeping were a new and exotic luxury he was determined to fully explore. As though spending several weeks comatose was something he'd intended to do.
Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never stay awake when you can sleep. Kadiatu had dropped off in the big wicker chair.
The upstairs bedroom was gently scented with pot-pourri, almost enough to overwhelm the distant smell of burning.
With the curtains carefully drawn, she could imagine she was anywhere, that she could walk down the stairs and into any street she chose. Not into the stinking Paris midnight, the hot air and the shouting.
She was awake before she was sure what had awoken her, uncurling from the chair onto her bare feet. The cold wooden floor made her shiver. She rubbed the back of her neck. A clock on the mantelpiece was ticking like industrial machinery.
He was blinking in the candlelight. 'Ruby?' he muttered, squinting at her.
'Ruby Duvall?'
She padded over to the side of the bed. 'Oh,' he said. 'Fancy meeting you here. Small world, isn't it? Where's Ace?'
Kadiatu unlocked a drawer and removed a handscan. 'She isn't here. It was just you.' She ran the scanner over him.
'Two psychics meet in the street. One says to the other, "You're fine, how am I?"' His voice was a little hoarse, which wasn't surprising, given that most of the epidermis of his throat had had to grow back.
'All things considered, you're in pretty good shape. What do you remember?'
'Useless things, mostly. I remember drinking coca leaf tea in a hotel on Cloudcuckooland, above the cumulus on a mountain twenty miles tall.' His eyes darted around the room like searchlights. 'They said I could have my breakfast at any time, so I said I'd like to have it in Nineteenth Century France.'
'Eighteen seventy-one,' said Kadiatu. 'The furniture?'
'Your clothing.'
'You were just wearing some sort of coveralls.'
'Not much style,' he said.
'Where did you come from?'
'Where did I arrive?'
'At a friend's house.'
'This is your house?'
'It belongs to the friend. A black foreign single woman is conspicuous enough without also being propertied.'
'How long ago?'
'About two months.'
'I'm grateful.'
55.She shook her head. 'You're my exit visa.'
'Ah,' he said. 'Sans my TARDIS, that might be a bit tricky.'
'You'll think of something. Is there anything you want?'
'Universal peace. I'll settle for a glass of water.'
She brought him a glass of water. He sat up, shrugging his left shoulder awkwardly as though it pained him. He was wearing a brand new set of English silk pyjamas: She sat on the edge of the bed and watched him drink.
He found himself in the vanity mirror. There was a nasty scar across his left cheek, bright red, surrounded by a mass of bruised purple tissue. 'Odd,' he muttered. 'The peripheral damage should heal first.'
'You're lucky to be alive. What happened?'
'I hate it when a plan falls apart,' he said, slowly drinking the water. His gaze was reflected from the mirror and onto her. Her hair was short. Her eyes were shaped like almonds, sharp windows in her serious face. She was more than a head taller than him, long-limbed and muscular.
'I feel like eating,' she said. 'Are you hungry?'
Bernice closed her eyes. They felt like a desert, seared by the noonday sun and full of sand. She lay back under the canvas, in the shade, praying for the premature invention of air conditioning.
She and Denon had taken a detour, leaving Desaix to his forced marches for a few days. A short boat trip down the Nile and they'd be in Amarna.
She'd arrived in France months ago. She had fallen out of the rift alone and glowing like a light bulb, scattering the terrified peasants who had been picking apples. All she had had was her travel bag.
She unzipped it and took out her diary. Stuffed inside the bag were antibiotics, camping equipment things which might help to keep her alive, assuming she landed somewhere that didn't kill her instantly.
She'd spent almost a month aboard the TARDIS waiting for the Doctor and Ace to signal her. She slept in her clothes, the bag under her head, ready at a moment's notice to home in on the beacon.
The signal had jerked her out of sleep. The TARDIS automatically locked in on it. She bolted into the console room, the bag slung across her shoulders, force shield clipped onto her wrist. The TARDIS doors were already opening, a great spiralling corridor of light leading out into the Vortex. She could see a flickering portal at the other end.
She ran out of the doors, felt herself propelled through the time corridor, picked up at the last moment by the forces inside and flung out through the portal. Somehow she managed to keep her feet as she crashed through a temporal barrier, then a real one.
56.The corridor's energies surrounded her in a rapidly dissipating halo. Bits of shattered glass melted into droplets, falling like rain at her feet.
The Doctor and Ace had been there. Somehow, things had been worse than the nightmares she'd been having.
Bernice pulled the Doctor's Fedora down over her eyes. She wasn't sure why he had left it behind or why she had stuffed it into her travel bag. She was glad she had it with her. After all, it did keep the sun off.
The gold and the vodka had gone in the first month. She'd spent that time just surviving, struggling to polish up her high school French. The TARDIS'
telepathic circuits had spoilt her rotten as far as languages were concerned but puzzling out ancient tongues was an archaeologist's skill.
She had needed every bit of that skill. At first, everything had been totally alien the money, the food, the clothes, even how the loos worked. She couldn't hope to blend in, so she'd kept on the move, working her way towards Paris with a crazy plan in mind. If she hadn't spent part of her youth living in a forest, she'd have starved. As it was she'd been eating bugs by the time she made it to the capital.
Denon was the obvious choice. He more or less invented Egyptology and was one of the first archaeologists. She'd studied him; she'd be able to impress him. He had money and connections. He was a life preserver in the ocean of history.
It was good to get out of Cairo. Egyptian rebels were harassing French soldiers daily, the French had burned down mosques, and both sides were already responsible for shocking massacres. Napoleon had even poisoned all the dogs to stop them barking a warning to the rebels. Fairly standard stuff for a war, in fact.
Benny frowned sleepily. She didn't care to be on the conquerors' side, but there wasn't much she could do about it. It wasn't as though the French were the Hoothi or the Daleks no, this was just another dull stretch of human military history.
Even in her century the history books tended to be long, boring descrip-tions of battles and wars, lists of dates that didn't tell you much about the people who had lived and breathed in those times. To the average peasant, it probably didn't make a sou sou of difference who the Emperor was. of difference who the Emperor was.
Denon had been intrigued by the bizarre, ragged woman who had turned up on his doorstep. He wasn't impressed by her knowledge of Egypt he was astonished by it. French education was full of the details of Ancient Greece and Rome, but Egypt was still a mystery, its language untranslated and its monuments standing unnoticed in the sun.
Napoleon had set up the Egyptian Institute in a palace in Cairo, wanting everything in the newly conquered land measured, catalogued sketched. Denon 57 was just one of the team, gathering the details and illustrations that would eventually become Voyage de la Basse et la Haute Egypte Voyage de la Basse et la Haute Egypte. When he was done here he would go on to help Napoleon pinch European art treasures to stock the Louvre. He was taking everything in his stride, which wasn't too surprising for a chap who'd been sent on secret missions for the Emperor and had cheated Madame Guillotine.