But then, the Doctor always seemed to get away with it. After all, he was already incognito. There was no way to tell by looking that he wasn't human.

He turned to Chris and smiled. 'No one's been here for ten years,' he said, 'except for whoever carved that.'

He pointed with his umbrella at a single stone, standing by itself in front of the Castle. Chris saw that the surface was partly carved, with a human figure he couldn't quite make out.

The Castle was a charred ma.s.s of timber, its lines softened by seasons of snow and rain. The top storeys had collapsed through one another, falling down into the centre. The ornamental ponds were empty but for a chill slick of algae. The trees were tired collections of sticks.

15.'A shrine,' said the Doctor, examining the stone. 'A very basic one, but I expect it serves its purpose.'

'What purpose?'

'In this case, to shut in an angry spirit. Usually the shrines are small buildings, and the spirit is trapped inside, unable to hurt the living.'

'What happened here?' said Chris.

The Doctor said nothing, hands clasped behind his back, walking around the Castle as though it was a mildly interesting work of art.

Chris walked in the other direction, following the wall. There was no sign of a breach. There were no bodies or scattered pieces of armour, none of the paraphernalia of war. Maybe the Castle had just caught fire, and had been abandoned by a daimyo too poor to rebuild it.

There was a wooden ladder leaning against the wall. Chris tested a couple of rungs. The wood was still hard, after all these years. He climbed up carefully.

Wow, the view! It was just dawn, the horizon still a line of pink and orange.

Chris stood on top of the wall, breathing in deep lungfuls of the cold air. The Castle was high in the mountains. Jagged cliffs fell away to broad plains.

Distant peaks held lingering snow. He thought he could make out a town, a dark patch on the plain below.

In his time, the cities were a thick film that covered the Earth, even the oceans. No matter where you were, the air carried the same smell of industry and sweat. Years in his past, centuries into the future.

Chris turned to look down into the Castle grounds. You'd have to be out of your mind to haul yourself up to the top of the mountain and attack the place. Besides, the wall was undamaged. The fire must have been accidental.

A serious danger for the wooden buildings with their paper doors.

Behind the ruined building, he could see the TARDIS, a blue oblong standing between the barren trees. It was a long time since Chris had thought about how weird it was that all those hallways and rooms could fit inside that little box. The Doctor stopped beside his s.p.a.ce-time machine and gave it a gentle pat. He was carrying something.

Chris climbed back down the ladder, sandals slipping a little on the rungs.

He wondered if he could hide some proper boots under the baggy trousers.

The Doctor was waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder, holding a lacquered bamboo bow taller than he was.

'It looks so peaceful,' said Chris.

'It isn't,' said the Doctor. 'We've arrived smack in the middle of sengoku jidai sengoku jidai, the Age of the Warring States. More than half a century of constant warfare.

The Shogunate is collapsing, the land is in fragments. Rival feudal lords are fighting tooth and nail for power.'

16.'Oh yeah,' said Chris. 'And under feudalism '

' it's your count that votes.' The Doctor handed the bow to Chris. It ought to be splintered and rotting, but it was still whole. Chris raised it and plucked the string, experimentally, listening to the deep thwack and the echoes that followed. Even the string was still good.

'So have you been here before?' said Chris.

'Yes.' He reached into his pocket and pulled out an eggshaped thing the size of his fist, made out of something that wasn't gla.s.s. A rainbow slick of colours moved across its surface, flaring to white where the little man's fingers touched it. 'I had thought perhaps the temporal distortion was coming from here.'

Chris said, 'Time isn't quite right here, is it?'

Without warning, the Doctor tossed the egg at him. Chris s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air without thinking.

He looked at the oval shape in his palm. It fizzed like sherbet where it touched his skin. 'No,' said the Doctor, 'hold it with just your fingertips.'

Chris gingerly corrected his grip. Now the tingling was all in the concentration of nerve endings in his fingers. The colours swirled down as though to touch him, bleeding into white against his skin.

'What do you feel?' said the Doctor.

'It's like putting a battery on your tongue,' said Chris.

'Try closing your eyes.'

Chris did as he was told. 'Oh,' he said. 'Time isn't moving normally here.

It's as though there's some sort of shadow. . . but it's left behind from a long time ago. There's something. . . newer and stronger. Somewhere close by.'

He opened his eyes. The Doctor was smiling at him, pleased.

Chris grinned and tossed the egg at him with a flick of his wrist. The Doctor yelped and grabbed at it.

'Somewhere below us, I think,' said Chris. 'Down the mountainside.' He turned to go back to the TARDIS.

The Doctor tucked the egg back into his jacket pocket. 'A walk in the fresh air will do us good.' He pointed his umbrella tip at the gate.

Chris hesitated by the wall, where the flower was growing, a pink eye staring out at them. He caught the faint tang of its perfume as he reached out to pick it.

The Doctor's hand was suddenly on his arm. 'Don't,' he said.

Chris took a step back. 'Why?'

'It's probably poisonous. This was never a healthy place.'

Chris followed the Doctor down the mountainside. The Time Lord followed a path that wasn't there, effortlessly negotiating boulders and fallen trees.

17.How long had they been travelling together? It was easy to lose track of time when one day didn't follow another. Chris knew he was somewhere around twenty-six. The Doctor was at least one thousand and three years old.

Chris smiled to himself, remembering that last birthday party. It was very difficult to surprise the Doctor, but Benny had managed it, quietly setting things up in a secluded room in the TARDIS and swearing Chris and Roz to secrecy. The astonished grin on the Time Lord's face had been worth those weeks of desperately trying not to give the game away.

The TARDIS, was so quiet, now that he was its only pa.s.senger. They still dropped in on Benny from time to time, and the Doctor had a millennium's worth of friends to visit. . . But it was just Chris and the Doctor now. Archery lessons and cookery lessons and long chats about anything and everything.

The Doctor and Chris, adventuring through s.p.a.ce and time, stopping here and there to save the universe.

Chris felt his smile fade away, remembering last night's half-written note.

The Doctor leant against a tree, waiting for his companion to catch him up.

"There's a monastery at the base of the mountain,' he said. 'We should be able to stay, briefly, while we track down the temporal distortion.'

'Hey, great, maybe I can get some tips on my shooting.' Chris mimed drawing a bow.

The Doctor scowled. 'Zen archery isn't a matter of technique, I'm always telling you. . . '

'I know, I was joking. How long do you reckon we'll be here?'

'Objectively or subjectively?'

'Subjectively.'

'You know,' said the Doctor, 'when we get to the monastery, you must talk to the Roshi, the old master, about subjectivity. He'll tell you one of those marvellous little Zen stories. Once upon a time, two monks called Tanzan and Ekido encountered a young woman in a silk kimono, who couldn't get across a muddy road. . . '

Whenever Chris lived through a fifth of September, he just counted it as another birthday. He'd had five in the last two years. He suspected that the Doctor tried to land in September whenever he thought Chris needed cheering up.

The Doctor was still telling his story. 'Tanzan picked the woman up in his arms and carried her over the muddy road.'

Roz Forrester, of course, had been rather annoyed by all the parties, but she always came along anyway, usually to get brain-stompingly drunk.

'Ekido was puzzled, but he didn't say anything until that evening, back at the monastery. "You know monks don't go near women!" he said. "Why did you do that?"'

18.If Roz was here now, Chris supposed, she would say she was the oldest one out of the three of them. And the Doctor would point out his several centuries of seniority, and Roz would say that she was dead and you can't get any older.

'And Tanzan said, "I left the girl there. Are you still carrying her?"'

Chris looked at the Doctor, who was leaning against a tree, gazing down the hill.

There was a real path there, widening at one point to accommodate a small shrine like the one near the Castle: a rock with a small carving. Someone was standing before it, a figure in a robe and a broad hat that hid his head and shoulders.

'A travelling monk,' said the Doctor.

'Heading for the monastery?'

The Doctor made his way down the steep slope, using tree trunks and limbs for support. Chris followed, carefully. The figure didn't look up until they reached the road.

It was a short, elderly man, with sharp eyes but a friendly smile. He held a fallen tree branch in one hand, leaning on his improvised walking stick.

' Hajimemas.h.i.te Hajimemas.h.i.te,' said the Doctor, with a bow. 'Are you headed for Doa-no-naiheya Monastery?'

The man nodded. 'Please accompany me,' he said, 'and I'll show you the way.'

The pilgrim didn't say anything for another half an hour. Despite his age, he walked down the mountain as though he was taking a stroll around a garden.

'Tell me,' he said suddenly, startling Chris, 'tell me about yourself.'

When the Doctor didn't reply, Chris realized the monk was talking to him.

Here we go, he thought. 'My family were Dutch. I was brought up by a samurai family after being orphaned in a shipwreck.'

The monk didn't look around. 'Now tell me who you really are.'

Chris glanced at the Doctor, who nodded slightly. Chris took a deep breath.

'Actually I was born about fourteen hundred years from now. I was I'm an Adjudicator, a sort of policeman.'

The monk nodded. 'Why did you give up your profession to follow the Doctor?'

'I didn't have any choice,' said Chris. 'Me and my partner Roz, we discovered a huge conspiracy among the Adjudicators. They'd have killed us if we hadn't gone.'

'I see,' said the monk. 'Now tell me who you truly are.'

'Sorry?'

'For example,' said the monk, 'let me tell you a story.' The Doctor gave Chris an I-told-you-so smile. 'You'll like it, it's about a pupil who was teasing his 19 master, Kosen, a great calligrapher. Kosen was preparing some words for a temple carving. He took up his ink brush and wrote "The First Principle". His pupil, who was always criticizing him, said, "That's no good!" So Kosen tried again, and again, but each time the pupil had some criticism of his calligraphy.

'Finally, the pupil stepped outside for a moment, and Kosen s.n.a.t.c.hed up the paper and quickly wrote "The First Principle". When the pupil returned, he exclaimed, "A masterpiece!"'

'Why?' said Chris.

'That is the question,' said the old man. 'Why?'

Chris thought, but nothing came out. The Doctor grinned. 'As I recall,' said the monk, 'you haven't given me a satisfactory answer to that question either.'

The Doctor's grin changed to an embarra.s.sed smile.

'Speaking if conspiracies. . . ' said Chris, putting his hands on his hips and looking between the two of them.

It was a conspiracy all right, thought Chris, as he swept the steps of the meditation hall.

The monastery was a small collection of low buildings, surrounded by an earth embankment that looked like it could keep out an army. Monks were hard at work everywhere, hoeing the garden, hanging out washing. It was midday, and the air just starting to get warmer.

Almost as soon as they'd arrived, he'd been handed a broom and sent out to sweep the steps. The Doctor and Kadoguchiroshi, who, surprise surprise, had turned out to be the chief monk, had disappeared into one of the other buildings, chatting.

He realized with a start that the slender monk sharing the sweeping was actually a nun. She worked silently, with the hint of a smile on her face. He wondered if it would be good manners to talk to her.

She had carefully swept away the last of the dust before she spoke. There was something about her movements, simple and graceful, as though sweeping was an art form and she was an expert. 'My name is Chiyono,' she said.

'What's yours?'

'Chris,' he said. She was in her thirties, he guessed. Her eyes were deep and dark.

'I saw you come in with Yukidaruma-san,' she said. Chris laughed out loud, and glanced around in embarra.s.sment. But the monks weren't paying him any more attention than before.

The nun was smiling at him. '"Mr Snowman"?' he said.