The Scarlet Empress [Chapter 1 - draft]
Does Travel Make You Happy, Ms. Jones?
All day she had tried to ask him a question. Did he ever really listen, though? Sam tried to play it cool, to make it seem as if she didn’t really mind. She wandered along behind him, taking in all the sights and the rich, heady smells of the city. It was the only way to carry on with him, she had learned. Wait until he came back from whichever vague, abstracted realm he inhabited when he wasn’t in a talking mood, and absorb the atmosphere of the place in the meantime. Often this meant looking out for possible danger. He looked so guileless when he was out and about, as if nothing bad could possibly happen to him. Which was ridiculous, of course, given his past record. In some ways Sam thought of herself as his protector. She was his only link with the world of common sense. He was so blithe. He never seemed to learn. This was a city crammed with wonders. Steeples and minarets crowded the brilliant skies; onion and turnip domes, bronze and verdigris towers pricked and glinted and, when she stared up at their massiveness, Sam was overwhelmed by a kind of vertiginous awe. Something she wasn’t used to. Sam who took everything in her stride, who’d already spent a year or two knocking about the backwaters and unbeaten tracks of various worlds. Here though, in Hyspero, the capital city of the world Hyspero, Sam felt herself a mite close to becoming overwhelmed by the profusion, the teeming smorgasbord of alien life. Not alien, she reminded herself. Nothing is alien, as the Doctor occasionally told her, to a citizen of the universe. So she tried hard to feel at home in the bustling confusion of shark-liked bipeds, dancing girls, turbanned and scimatared warriors, Draconian princes in their jewelled robes of state, ambling tortoises, monkeys and yacanas, Spiridons in purple furs and Martians in armour. Hyspero was a world where people came for adventure, romance, local colour, the Doctor had explained, earlier that morning. It was a place where you could still believe in sorcery and where swords were still legal. And the shopping, he added, was fantastic. More exotic clutter for the TARDIS console room, she thought. The ship that Sam had made her home already looked like a collaborative attempt at a Gothic folly by Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Verne. Or so the Doctor had proudly declared one afternoon, gazing around at his ship, just after Sam had suggested that a really convincing space and time travelling machine ought to have an interior that was completely white and luminous, and looked a little more futuristic. That afternoon - yesterday - and not for the first time, she had hurt the Doctor’s feelings. He had put on that stung look, and went to watch his butterflies in the next room. Luckily he never held a grudge for long. She didn’t think he had the attention span for real grievances. Whereas, she reflected, I do. He smiled at her and led the way through the endless by-ways and through-ways of the marketplace. Here it was even busier. Hawkers shouted out their wares and competed with each other for the attention of the milling visitors. Sam knew their patter must have been in a thousand different languages, but by now she was quite used to understanding everything, immediately, by virtue of the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits. She was almost blase about being able to eavesdrop on anyone. The only downside to the instantaneous translation effect was, of course, not being able to learn an alien language if she wanted to. Not when everything came out in her own tongue; late twentieth, almost twenty first century, South London. So much for immersing herself in the exotic and bizarre. The way these market traders were yelling out, she might as well have been shopping down the Portobello road. Except it was hot. The sweat was streaming down her. She could feel it drying on her t shirt and ripped shorts. The sand of the city’s rough pavements was inside her boots already and, she imagined, burning blisters with every step she took. How contented the Doctor looked. He was an expert in simply pottering about, easing his way into crowded shop doorways, picking things up, sampling stuff, haggling away with burly, viridian-fleshed lizard women. Carpets and monkeys and coffee pots and mirrors; he was interested in everything. This was how he had made his way through life, Sam thought; picking up little bits here and there. Perusing and wandering. A browser. He filled his pockets with pomegranates and figs, he folded sprays of jasmine and other, more exotic herbs into his shopping bags, and inspected the ripest of cheeses. He thought long and hard about (and eventually decided against) buying a gaudy parakeet that was trained to answer back in the filthiest curses. He managed to ignore the even viler curses of the trader who thought he had made an easy sale to a gullible off-worlder. The Doctor simply wandered away, off to the next stall. Sam watched him produce from one of his capacious pockets a bag of glittering coins and she knew it would be the relevant currency for this time period. He walked with the insouciance of the extremely rich, and yet, in a sense, he had nothing. No real home, no proper role. Nothing to anchor him to life. This was one of the things Sam wanted to ask him about. All he had was his rackety, miraculous, ridiculous ship and his various fragmented friendships with beings scattered throughout the centuries. But what did he have that was really his? Sometimes she felt sorry for him, almost. He would never fit in anywhere and she was sure, somehow, that underneath his bluster and other-worldly finesse, that this Doctor really minded, even resented, his alienation. Sam realised that he had set about buying presents, accumulating a pile of packages and wrapped souvenirs and making out that he was far to busy to listen to her. All Sam wanted to ask him was this; ‘In the end, do you think all your travels have ever made you actually happy?’ She had woken up this morning with the question in her head. It was one of those questions that would go round and round inside her mind until she asked it and got a decent answer. Sometimes she could be quite persistant which, she thought, infuriated her companion. But that was what he was there for. Yet you had to be careful with his moods, sometimes. She had seen him flare up unexpectedly on a number of occasions. That was when she realised that this affable, somewhat bemused front he had wasn’t the whole story. There were such depths to him, Sam knew. And these were what fascinated her and kept her travelling - however erratically - with him. She knew that, in the end, at some level, her Doctor had all of the answers. If she stayed with him long enough, he would tell her the lot. He could be a laugh, too, when he wanted to be, and he was a wizard in the kitchen, and these things made it worthwhile, too. Today he seemed happy enough, and in the end she was content to troop around the sooks with him, listening to him gossip and barter in that way he had, assuming that every stranger he met was going to be a life-long friend. Sam was beyond the stage of being embarassed by his forwardness with new people. She hung back and let him try to charm his way wherever he wanted to go. One of those shark people was glaring at him with dull black eyes, champing its many rows of serrated teeth as he made small talk at a confectioners with some kind of crystalline being, and Sam urged him on, out of the shark’s space. Often she found herself watching his back like this. He was supposed to be an expert in some kind of Venusian kung foo, or had been at some point, but from what she had seen, he was a hopeless fighter. If someone was giving the Doctor evil looks, it was easiest just to get him out of the way. He protested that he had been trying to buy jelly babies. ‘And now I’ll have to do without.’ He sounded almost petulant. Sam tutted. She thought this jelly baby thing was just an affectation. It wasn’t like he actually ate them himself. He liked to offer them to people when he first met them. It put people - especially hostile ones - off their stroke. It never worked, as far as she could tell. ‘That shark thing was giving you the evil eye,’ she told him. ‘They always look like that! They can’t help it! Poor things.’ It was too hot today to argue or to pursue a point. It was far too hot this late in the afternoon to be tearing about the streets of the city still. She wanted to sit somewhere cool and catch up with herself. Her head was spinning, too, from drinking the strongest coffee she had ever tasted. About an hour ago the Doctor had sat them at an outside table of a cafe and downed his own glass in one skilful gulp. He had flinched but was otherwise unharmed. Sam had a fierce headache coming on. As they passed into yet another street, she saw that shoppers and tourists were taking siestas where they sat under brightly striped awnings, and in the deliciously cool recesses of shady cafes. How could he stand gadding about in that thick velvet coat? His waistcoat and cravat both still fastened and neatly tied and stuck with a diamond pin? He must be sweltering. She had never known him yet dress down for a trip abroad. Next to his habitual late Victorian foppishness she felt almost shabby.. Her candy-striped shorts and Throwing Muses t-shirt had attracted a few stares this afternoon. Look at the Doctor. Elegant and unruffled. He’d seemed almost upset when she asked him why he was wearing all those clothes. ‘It’s just me, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Do you really expect me to wear a t shirt? Come on! I’d look a fool. I was never meant to look casual. I can’t do it. Casual isn’t in my nature. Frenetic or languorous, yes. But nothing inbetween. And certainly not beachware.’ More affectation, she thought. At one particular stall the Doctor hunted through multi-coloured ropes of satin and silk, thinking of, perhaps, a waistcoat in turquoise. Hysperon merchants were well known for the silks they brought back from their travels. Sam’s having a go about the way he was dressed up made him start to think about it. She thought he over-dressed. She probably thought he looked ridiculous. But it had been a long time since he had cared at all about what he wore. His last two bodies had had awful dress sense. Everytime he saw a photo of either of them he gave an involuntary flinch. What had he been thinking of? He seemed to remember that a couple of his earlier selves rather enjoyed swanning about the place, forever in Edwardian evening dress. Like them he relished the idea of anachronism, of standing out in a crowd like a sartorial pun. He had caught a glimpse of himself, today, several times in fly-blown mirrors and he realised who it was he reminded himself of; those flowing locks, that jaunty stride, the starched wing collars ... I’ve made myself into Percy Bysshe Shelley, he thought, not unhappily. Swishing about in the Orient and making up rhymes. Or maybe I’m just Keats.
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific - and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise -’
