The Scarlet Empress.

By Paul Magrs.

This book is for Jeremy Hoad, with love.

And it's with thanks to:Joy Foster, Louise Foster, Charles Foster, Mark Magrs, Nicola Cregan, Michael Fox, Jon Rolph, Antonia Rolph, Steve Jackson, Laura Wood, Lynne Heritage, Paul Arvidson, Alicia Stubbersfield, Siri Hansen, Meg Davis, Reuben Lane, Amanda Reynolds, Richard Klein, Paul Cornell, Lucie Scott, Vic Sage, Julia Bell, Kenneth J MacGowan.and Jeremy.

I might have missed out various companions who have seen me through other regenerations, so thanks to them too.

Welcome to Hyspero, everyone. Love, Paul.

Chapter One.

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 p.r.i.c.ked and glinted and, when she stared up at their ma.s.siveness, 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 few years now 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 sharklike bipeds, dancing girls, turbaned and scimatar'd 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 s.p.a.ce-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 had gone to watch his b.u.t.terflies 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 byways and throughways 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 practically 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: English, south London, late twentieth, almost twenty-first, century. 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 offworlder. 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 bl.u.s.ter and otherworldly finesse, the Doctor really minded, even resented, his alienation.

Sam realised that he had set about buying presents, acc.u.mulating a pile of packages and wrapped souvenirs and making out that he was far too busy to listen to her.

All Sam wanted to ask him was this:'In the end, do you think all your travels nave 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 persistent, 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 also made it all worthwhile.

Today he seemed happy enough, and in the end she was content to troop around the souks with him, listening to him gossip and barter in that way he had, a.s.suming that every stranger he met was going to be a lifelong friend. Sam was beyond the stage of being embarra.s.sed 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 Mack eyes, champing its many rows of serrated teeth as he made small talk at a confectioner's with some kind of crystalline being, and Sam urged him on, out of the shark's s.p.a.ce. Often she found herself watching his back like this. He was supposed to be an expert in some kind of Venusian kung fu, or had been at some point, but from what she had seen, he hadn't the heart to be a real 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 as if 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. And they'd told her it was decaffeinated. About an hour ago the Doctor had sat them at an outside table of a cafe and downed his own gla.s.s in one skilful gulp. He had flinched but was otherwise unharmed. Sam had a fierce headache coming on. As they pa.s.sed into yet another street, she saw that shoppers and tourists were taking siestas where they sat under brightly striped awnings, and in the deliciousty 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 was never meant to look casual. I can't do it. Casual isn't in my nature. Frenetic or languorous, yes. But nothing in between. And certainly not beachwear.' More affectation, she thought.

At one particular stall the Doctor hunted through multicoloured ropes of satin and silk, thinking, perhaps, of a waistcoat in turquoise. Hysperon merchants were well known for the silks they brought back from their travels. The way Sam had a go about how he was dressed up made him start to think about it. She thought he overdressed. 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.

Every time 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 serves 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 flyblown mirrors, and he realised who it was he reminded himself of, with those flowing locks, that jaunty stride, the starched wing collars: I've made myself into Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, 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 bis ken; Or like stout Cortex, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific - and all bis men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise - For a few moments the screen is black. Lines run across it horizontally, fuzzy and white. There is a thunk and a whirring as the soundtrack comes on. The screen lightens, bursts into colour.

This is somebody's hand-held video camera. Searing blue skies.

Impossibly blue skies, wheeling above us. Whoever holds the camera has terrible aim. The picture steadies, tries to focus. We see distant, blurry mountains, jagging the horizon. Miles of remote dunes swim in and out of our sight. This is a yawning dust bowl, open before us on the screen. The sand is the exact colour of dried blood. A salt lake winks in the glare of the sun. Cut to: The Doctor. His grey eyes shielded by his hand, squinting into the camera. He carries his green velvet coat bunched under one arm. His shirtsleeves are rolled, his wavy dark hair hangs down over his face.

'Iris. I'm not going to tell you again.'

He turns abruptly away from us.

'I'm tired and I've nothing to say to you. So switch your camera off. I've had it up to here with you and your -'

Cut to: The same desert scene, just as colourfully bleak, some time later. Sam is sitting happily on a rust-coloured rock. She is in the same Throwing Muses T-shirt and shorts. She wears shades, and the sunlight on her short blonde hair is blinding.

'OK, OK, ask me. I've never seen myself on telly. What? Oh, introduce myself. I'm Sam Jones and this is me in the middle of b.l.o.o.d.y nowhere.

We're all on Hyspero, having the time of our lives. This is meant to be some kind of quest and it's all down to the mad old woman who's holding the camera. That's you, Iris. OK, so here we are, making home movies in the hottest place I think I've ever been. What? Oh, I'm from Earth.

London. I left in, let's see, 1997. Don't know what year it is now. Do you always interview your travelling companions? Yeah? I should get a camera. Some of the things I've seen recently. Here, give me a go. I'll film you.'

Later that afternoon they found they had wandered past the main tourist traps, and into the shadier, seamier side of town. The racial mix was less broad here. Most of the faces they saw were native Hysperon: the long, solemn visages, the beige flesh tones, the air of lugubriousness in the bearing of the city dwellers. 'They live under something of a regime, you see,' said the Doctor. "They're kept in line by a rather ruthless militaristic soldiery who are pledged to protect -'

As he said this they were pa.s.sing the doorway of a butcher's shop. The air was thick with heavy, rank and b.l.o.o.d.y aromas that congregated in the street like djinn. All the shops down this stretch seemed to be butchers. The Doctor didn't seem to have noticed the stench. Sam hated it. She looked down and saw that the gutters were running with blood: the deep magenta of Cabernet Sauvignon, soaking into the dirty sand.

She could feel herself start to gag. She turned to the Doctor and caught a flash of something running by at knee level. A small black lamb, shooting past out of the doorway of the shop nearest them. It was a ragged, pathetic-looking thing that darted through the Doctor's legs, making him stumble. He gave Sam an inadvertent shove and, as she tried to avoid treading on the escaping beast, she took a headlong fall on to the hard-packed ground. She swore.

'Sam!' chided the Doctor. He had dropped all of his shopping. Around her lay pieces of burst fruit, tissue paper, and bits of a pottery owl he had bought for someone. He bent to help her up, a stupid smirk on his face.

The lamb stood in the b.l.o.o.d.y gutter. It stared at them, squealed a very unsheeplike squeal and bounded off into the alleyway, soon losing itself in the crowd.

"That was a lucky escape for someone,' smiled the Doctor.

'Good thing, too,' Sam retorted.

Now seemed an appropriate time as any to ask her question. 'Doctor, are you -' She was swiftly interrupted by the butcher himself, who darted full pelt from the rank confines of his shop. He was swathed head to foot in black netting, from which dangled pink gobbets of mangled flesh. He bellowed incomprehensibly and waggled a duty-looking scimitar at them, holding it close up to his misshapen plum-coloured nose and brandishing it in a way that was likely to do more damage to himself than those he was accusing.

'He's furious,' the Doctor murmured, and quickly helped Sam to her feet.

She checked on her sunburned, lobster-pink knees and found they were gashed and bleeding.

The butcher gabbled at them, spittle flying out of his mouth and catching on his thick black beard. For some reason Sam couldn't understand a word he was saying. Either he was insensibly angry, or the TARDIS was refusing to translate. Sam didn't mind either way.

'He says we've taken his whole livelihood.' The Doctor surmised hurriedly, in that excitable way he sometimes had. He gripped Sam's scuffed elbow. "That straggly little beast was apparently worth a thousand dirnas. Either we reimburse him, or risk the consequences.'

Sam gulped.'I've got no money.'

'And I've spent every penny I had.' His parcels lay scattered up the pavement. 'I always do.' Some of his things had already been whisked away by pa.s.sers-by. Even the smashed pieces of the ceramic owl.

The butcher was still shrieking and waving his scimitar, but now he was crying for the Scarlet Guard.

'Is the Scarlet Guard the military force you said everyone was so scared of?' Sam asked.

"That's the one,' the Doctor nodded.'Terrible lot.'

Sam backed off into the crowd, dragging the Doctor by the sleeve of his green frock coat. She looked for a clear street to run into. Suddenly every route looked impa.s.sable. A whole host of curious, hostile faces were shoving in to see. Then she saw a particular, uncrowded alley.

'Not up there,' the Doctor said, pushing through. 'Over half the streets in this city fetch up in dead ends. That's one of them. Come on, this way.'

And then he was off.

They pelted through the stifling, fragrant, chaotic hugger-mugger of the souks. And behind them they could hear the wailing of some kind of horn. "That'll be the Scarlet Guard; said Sam.

'All this for a sheep!' gasped the Doctor.

'Do you do this on purpose?' Sam asked. 'Every time I try to ask something personal?'

They shot down a clear, bright, stone corridor, sand rasping on heated stone. It was the height of the afternoon in the city of Hyspero and too close to go dashing about. He looked at her and tossed his hair out of his eyes.

'Were you asking me something?'

'I was only asking about your journeys,' huffed Sam. 'Are you really happy in the end, always moving about?'

'Down here!' he called, turning to a dark side-alley, where they had to tiptoe madly through dank pools and across the strewn bodies of beggars who seemed to have given up the ghost.

'I dislike a.n.a.lysis and deconstruction and psychology and psychoa.n.a.lysis, you see,' the Doctor said/all that stuff. It's just prying.

That's why you don't hear me spilling out my confessions all over the place.'

'And what confessions they'd be!' Sam laughed.

'Indeed,' smiled the Doctor grimly, and stopped running. 'Maybe we can pause for breath; They couldn't hear anyone shouting after them. The blare of the horns had died away.'Do you know, sometimes - while we're on the subject of happiness - I don't think I'm ever happier than I am when I'm running away from someone.'

'm.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t.'

'Oh, don't say that! I'll start worrying about myself. That's what I mean about a.n.a.lysis. Sometimes I think you're better off not knowing too much.' He leaned against a filthy wall and took a deep lungful of the fetid air.

Sam shrugged.

'Honestly, Sam, it isn't so long since I was a terrible old duffer who wouldn't tell you what was going on, would shout at you as soon as look at you, would expect you to be quiet and do what I said, and be there to untie me in cellars and scream out when you saw danger heading our way...'

'Here comes danger,' she said, as, round the corner of the empty street came the butcher and two city guards, in their flowing scarlet robes. Sam had a glimpse of their crimson finery, and also the bobbing pates of their bald heads. The guards' skin appeared to be entirely blue.

'Tattoos,' said the Doctor. "The Scarlet Guard are tattooed over every inch of their bodies. Each one different. Come on, run!'

Off they went again.

'They don't take kindly to thieves here,' said the Doctor.

'I didn't even steal that sheep! I didn't want a sheep!'

"This whole world has a literature that celebrates the daring deeds of thieves and a.s.sa.s.sins,' said the Doctor.'But only the ones who don't get caught.'

Experts at being chased, the Doctor and Sam eventually managed to shake off the guards and the butcher.

They hid in the murky doorway of a shop that dealt in old books and scrolls.'Have we escaped?' Sam gasped.

The Doctor nodded. 'If we get split up, you remember where the TARDIS is, don't you?'

She gave him a withering look.'How long have I been knocking about with you?'

He mumbled an apology and picked a faded and cracked volume from a table in the doorway.'And does travel make you happy, Ms Jones?'

'I wondered if places and faces started to look the same in the end.

You've been round the block a few times.'

'If I ever get bored; he said, 'I'll let you know.'

They stood in the stifling heat, looking at each other. The air smelled of ancient, sun-bleached paper. The Doctor thought about telling his companion where vellum came from. How they skinned calves ripped fresh from the uterus. How it took fourteen to make a single, precious volume. How this small shop must crowd with the unquiet souls of unborn cows. Sam would sympathise. Then he saw that she was in no mood to be lectured on interesting topics. He sighed. She so rarely was these days.

'You never answer anything, do you?'

'To be honest, I think I've forgotten half the things I've got myself into.'

He was examining the book in his hands. Its binding was the colour of dried blood. He sniffed it and got a whiff of sand and dust.'It's an adventure story,' he said, frowning. "This shop seems very good value.

This is very cheap.' Then he remembered he had no money. He smacked his forehead with his palm.

Then Sam realised that in all his exertions he hadn't even worked up a sweat.'And all my presents! Lost in the street.' Sam knew he would never have got round to delivering them. She felt a twinge for him, at the way he couldn't hang on to anything. And yet he was such a h.o.a.rder.

She asked,'What's the book?'