No wonder the locals seemed malnourished. They had done their best, however, and had haggled and bartered and even traded in various trinkets and pieces of electronic circuitry that they had found in the boot of the bus.

'I hope we didn't give away anything Iris wanted to keep,' said Sam.

'Serve her right if we did,' Gila muttered.

They were attracting even more notice now, as a crowd started to a.s.semble in the town square. It was a rabble, chuntering all around them. 'Something's up,' Sam observed. 'Maybe we should wait aboard the bus.' A rock was flung and it hit Gila squarely on the back. He spun around snarling.

'It was him,' Sam pointed. A man they had bought bread from. They had paid him with what Gila had called 'a partially dismantled and useless etheric-beam locator'. The man had almost bitten off his fingers in his greed for the exotic-looking object. He had stowed the device away, pushed the loaves into their arms, and shooed them out of his shop.

Now he was hurling rocks at them. A few more were thrown, rattling against the bus. A skirmish broke out within the burgeoning crowd.

"This looks nasty,' said Sam.

'Get aboard,' hissed Gila.

Then, as if at some prearranged signal, the mob descended on them.

Chapter Twelve.

Queen of Misrule

For quite some time she had known she was very ill. This body had lasted a good long while and Iris had settled happily into it, knowing its shape, textures, its limits and the way it felt to be her. She almost felt mortal. Fatter and slower was what she had become, though the word she preferred was seasoned. It was with a certain amount of pride that she reflected on the fact that her current incarnation had outlasted and seen out five of the Doctors. Or should that be 'five of the Doctor's', with an apostrophe? What a difference a single apostrophe could make, she thought. That tiny fleck of punctuation denoted the exact difference between regarding the Doctor as separate, though mysteriously interconnected, beings, and seeing them as manifestations of one core, essentially unchanging being. That apostrophe expressed the precise ontological quandary of these lives that she and the Doctor endured.

Iris was given to thinking along lines such as these. They were the things she mulled over as she allowed herself to drift, whenever a bad bout in her illness cropped up. And they were happening with greater frequency nowadays. She would draw into herself, pulling upon reserves of strength to weather out the disease and its effects. A month ago she had woken on the top deck of the bus to find that she had been unconscious for three days. When she discovered this she'd become frightened for the first time.

She ached all over, she pa.s.sed out periodically, her hearts sometimes beat wildly out of synch. Sometimes she could hardly breathe, or felt that she had forgotten how to.

This is ridiculous, she thought. I have a TARDIS. I can seek the best medical help that has ever existed, anywhere. Somewhere in the cosmos there must be someone who can help me. And yet she put it all to the back of her mind, letting other, random concerns take her thoughts off her ailments. She'd done this until she discovered that she had lain unconscious for those three nights, suspended in the vortex.

That had convinced her that she wasn't getting any better. Radical measures needed to be taken. And so she had come to Hyspero.

Iris wasn't afraid of death. In her travels she had faced it many times.

Almost daily, in fact. She had encountered quite as many tinpot dictators, conspirators and deadly a.s.sa.s.sins as the Doctor. She had a greater sense of self-preservation than the Doctor, however, never quite endangering herself for the sake of others as he seemed to relish doing.

When the time came to relinquish this life and to pa.s.s almost seamlessly into the next, she would greet that new self with gusto.

Only a few days ago, as they shared the cab of the bus, Sam and Iris had discussed this. Sam asked if Iris ever worried about dying. A shiver pa.s.sed through the old woman as if a goose had walked over her grave, but she told Sam, 'I know that, in the end, I'll be all right. For a while, anyway.' She grinned. 'Remember I told you that I met my other selves, once? We were summoned, seven of us, against our wills to a terribly bleak, gladiatorial wilderness on Gallifrey. We were transported by the horrid revenants of Morbius. All us girls got together, put our heads together, in order to get ourselves out of the mess. I was number five - still am, in fact, and I had the pleasure of meeting my number six. I'm not supposed to remember this, but there you are, I do. So I know that I survive, in one timeline, at least. She's a gorgeous, slinky s.e.x kitten, looks about thirty in human terms, with ma.s.ses of honey-blonde hair.

She was in a shiny plastic bikini cut very daringly, and thigh-length boots. She had a look of Jane Fonda about her.' Sam had seemed impressed.

What Iris hadn't told her was that if this disease continued at its present rate and ended up annihilating every cell of Iris's current body, then there wouldn't be anything left of her to regenerate into that next, voluptuous self. Everything would be changed.

She woke, with a jolt, in a dank cell, somewhere beneath the home of the Executioner of Fortalice. She gasped with pain. Dreaming of her illness again, she thought ruefully. It filled all her waking moments, too, until sometimes, recently, she had wanted to grab the Doctor by his velvet lapels and scream at him.'I'm dying,you fool! Stop blathering and save me!' Something always held her back. She had to get on with her mission. It was her only hope.

And now someone, or something, had taken her prisoner. Worse, she was alone. No one to help unshackle her, to help unpick the locks on the cell door, to come padding down the labyrinthine corridors that no doubt led away from this room. No one.

Her head still throbbed from whatever had laced that horrid wine.

'Let me out!'she wailed.

The door clicked and slid open.

She sat up and found herself unbound. Pulling her cardigan into shape, she stepped cautiously out into a stone hallway, lit by candles that dripped down the elaborate ironwork. Standard, dungeony accoutrements, she mused.

She listened. Through the thick sandstone walls she could hear the various noises of a crowd. The voice of the mob - jubilation and dismay.

Somewhere there was a riot going on, and she had a negligent jailer.

She crept along the pa.s.sageway, turning left at the corner, and left and left and left again. She decided firmly that she no longer enjoyed just her own company. Creeping about wasn't the same with no one to hiss at.

Perhaps Sam could be persuaded to defect from the Doctor's side.

More candles guttering in the lurid gloom.

Anything could step out of the shadows, but Iris was used to anything.

She and anything were old, old friends.

When she came to the room with the window above the town and the man who stood watching the fracas below, she wasn't surprised. He was her negligent jailer - a squat, ugly man in a vest and a cowled hood. He turned and gave her a sickly grin, from which many of the teeth were missing.

'You're awake,' he said. She nodded curtly. 'Come and see the bloodshed,' he urged. "This time they are really going for it. I'd be surprised if half the townsfolk aren't dead by nightfall.'

She found herself standing beside him at the parapet.

Below, the town of Fortalice had turned on itself. She could see perhaps a square mile of streets, all teeming with life, the details smudged with dust and a bewildering surge of bodies in motion. Bodies were being flung and strewn everywhere, bodies were being battered and torn apart by the bare hands of other bodies, which were pitching themselves heedlessly into the b.l.o.o.d.y melee. There were no sides or factions, as far as Iris could make out. Bodies fought the bodies beside them in a cacophonous and promiscuous Bosch-like vista.

Above the din she asked her captor,'Have they all gone loopy?'

'Yes,' he said. 'It is that day in the year when the Fortaliceans are permitted to go mad.'

'I take it you're the Executioner.'

'That is my function. Come with me, please.'

She snorted.'No thanks.'

'But you have your public to face.'

'My public?'

'You are the Queen of this misrule. A visitor. The quintessence of everything we deplore.You are subversion itself.'

He led her away from the view. She followed warily.'So?'

'So you must be crowned before the people. Your spectacle will still their... boisterousness.'

'I see,' said Iris and he led her downstairs. His quiet manner had subdued her. There was something so dark and una.s.suming about him that she didn't feel at all threatened. It was as if she was talking to n.o.body at all.

There hadn't been time to get into the bus. From what Sam had already seen of Iris's ship, she wasn't confident that it would protect them against the mob. Instead they were submerged in the surging ma.s.s of angry bodies. She and Gila were separated. Sam concentrated on pushing her own a.s.sailants away, on ducking and weaving through their ma.s.s. They were clumsy and drunk. The air, she realised, stank of drink.

Breathlessly, fired with adrenaline, she fought through them, looking for an escape route. During her travels she had learned a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat. The Doctor, of course, frowned on the hasty use of weaponry, but he himself wasn't averse to using his fists when the situation called for it. Sam sent a few of her attackers reeling with a series of desperate blows.

A gap opened up around her; the townspeople drew back, seeing the short work she had made of the men who had thought her an easy target. She paused, panting, wiping a trickle of blood from her mouth and found that the atmosphere had infected her. She was jubilant and spoiling for more. Through the gap she saw that Gila was bearing the brunt of the crowd's hatred. Because of his difference they piled on to him. He was marked as foreign to them, as a monster, and they vented the full force of their disgust and fear by concentrating on him. Gila raged and tore at them, pulling unruly drunks off his back and shoulders, but sheer weight of numbers was dragging him down. A great cry went up as he fell and disappeared under a heap of filthy townspeople.

Sam fought to get to him, screaming blue murder.

As she reached the fallen Gila and pitched into battle once more, she caught a glimpse of a great gout of flame from the front of the bus. Cries, shrieks, howls of dismay. The crowd fell back. Those holding GUa down and those kicking at his helpless form looked up and saw a woman approaching them. She was armed with what appeared to Sam to be a slim and active flame-thrower.

'Let the lizard go,' said the woman coolly. She was in blue robes, like a Renaissance Madonna. Her face gleamed with sweat and conviction.

The thrower belched another burst of flame, which rolled above their heads.

Sam stopped in her tracks and felt the sweat stand out on her arms. She turned to see that the others had shrunk back and away from her.

'Leave these two alone,' the woman commanded, and there was little or no argument from the Fortaliceans. She looked like a nun, Sam decided, as she was called over to help drag the wounded Gila out of the dirt.

'His injuries are superficial,' the woman told her.'Come with me.'

Gila leaned heavily on Sam, his rough hide sc.r.a.ping her skin. She winced as the woman led them, cutting a swathe through the stunned crowd with further hissing splashes of bright flame.

The blue-robed woman was taking them to the temple in the far corner of the square, Sam saw. Sanctuary.

'I must go down to them,' said the Doctor impulsively, pulling away from the ledge, high in the library, above the square.

Gharib shook his head. "They are already rescued, Doctor. Our Lady of the Flowers has got them. They are under her protection now.'

The Doctor stalked about the map room, muttering to himself.'How could I be so stupid? Letting them all wander off on a day like this.'

'You weren't to know,' the librarian said. 'You're a visitor.' He smiled gently at the Doctor now, as if warming to him at last. There was something appraising in that glance, too, as he looked his guest up and down.

From far below - they had clambered into the highest turret of the library - the noise of the street riot was resuming.

'And Iris is out there somewhere.'

Gharib was heaving open thin drawers, one after another, sending up great fans of blue dust.'You came here to see these. I am risking my life to show you them. Before you go, you might as well look.'

The Doctor hurried over. 'Have you got those maps with monsters drawn all around the edges? Sea beasts and dragons and mermaids lurking on the margins? I always liked those.'

Gharib slid out sheet after sheet of charts. 'All our maps are like that.

Because everything in the margins, just out of sight of the still, calm centre, is monstrous.'

'Anything you say,' muttered the Doctor, and started to pore over the maps, with his nose about an inch from their surface.

She was that rare thing in FortaJice: a visitor they had spared and allowed to live in the town among them. Over ten years ago she had wandered out of the hills in her blue robes and marched heedlessly into the town square.

There was something about her that made the people stop and stare.

She was calm, resolute, staring back at them, her face unlined, unmarked by time and anxiety. Neither were the faces of the Fortaliceans, existing as they did in their eternal round of self-renewal, but they were weathered by their environment, by the scathing, perennial desert storms. Our Lady, as they came to call her, seemed to them to be pure. The elements seemed never to have touched her or had a bearing upon her. Yet she claimed to have come from the mountains, to have lived there all her life. Some said that she had been raised by wolves, others said by angels. Whatever her story - and Our Lady was never very forthcoming - they spared her and let her live in their temple, an empty and neglected edifice of onion domes and broken spires. They had forgotten its original function and so Our Lady was allowed to take it for herself, which she did, wordlessly, as if it were her due.

There was a talent that Our Lady had, alongside her beguiling purity, that prompted the Fortaliceans and their then current Executioner to keep her as their prize. In this arid, thwarted land, she had the knack of cultivating the most extraordinary plant life. She came here with nothing but, almost as soon as she was installed in the ruined temple, she set about provoking an unprecedented growth of vegetation. She specialised in exotic flowers - useless, flaunting, ostentatious creations which crammed inside the inner courtyards, the cells, the pa.s.sageways and the whole vast interior chambers of the dank building.

The Fortaliceans drew closer to see what she had accomplished in her short time here. The rest of the town lay as barren and dusty as ever, but within the temple of Our Lady there thrived and rustled a monstrous cornucopia. Thorned vines festooned with roses reached to the domed ceilings, and swagged down to snare the unwary. Lily heads like trumpets, gilded and glistening with mysteriously perfumed dew, thrust themselves out of the gloom, and anemone heads the size of the local, stunted cabbages furled their secrets to themselves and exuded a cloying scent - and it was this that pulled the townsfolk in. But it also revolted them, this smell and this display, with its hint of longings for times and places other than their own. Plants that gave forth their gaudiness and their scents colonised the whole interior; it seethed with life. It was said that those who sneaked in to visit the temple rarely came out again. The Executioner of that time decreed that none of his people should venture into that seductive, vegetative realm.

Our Lady of the Flowers hardly ever emerged. She sat in her jade factory and let the various desert breezes take the dangerous smells of her flourishing home to seep through the town.

Slowly, and by degrees, the endlessly pragmatic, phlegmatic Fortaliceans came to worship her. They brought their wares to honour her, laying samples of their own pathetic cultivation at her steps.

Pumpkins like death's heads, onions like rocks. These withered tributes would vanish overnight and be replaced in the morning - as if some alchemical change had occurred through the intervening hours - by the most scandalously ripe and tempting fruits that had ever been found in this region. The populace would fall upon these wares with abandon, breaking out in violence for Our Lady's favours. Sometimes the fruit would be squashed and ruined in the kerfuffle. Our Lady had a particular talent for pomegranates.

'Doesn't talk much, does she?'

They had been left in a small, overgrown chamber. The light was shot through with green. As Sam sat herself down on damp stone to wait, she thought she could even hear the chlorophyll chugging through the fat, translucent veins of the plants around her. Now she was safe here, safe from the crowd, she was glad to relax and soak up the contemplative stillness.Yet she was still stirred up and spoiling for a fight. She dipped a hand into the dark pool by which they had been left and ran it through her blonde hair, enjoying the silvery cool.

The pool dappled what could be seen of the stone walls with eerie, subterranean light.

Our Lady had gone, swallowed up by the green.

Gila lowered himself into the water. It was so thick with weed, with a bottomless, viscous opacity, that for some moments Sam could see nothing of him but a rea.s.suring trail of tiny, joyful bubbles. Sam was reminded of hippos in the zoo, and of tramping around with her parents - both of whom were outspokenly appalled at the senselessness of keeping intelligent creatures in paddocks. There had been three hippos face down in water, bobbing slowly like leathery, obese horses, taking it in turns to suddenly plunge to the bottom of their filthy pool. Sam had taken bets with her parents - who were fascinated despite themselves - over which hippo would sink itself next. They operated in a tacit, obscure rotation system, and emerged violently, with green water pouring from their colossal, tusked jaws. Sam had stood too close, of course, hypnotised by their awesome power.

Gila came splashing out of the water now, raising great spumes of froth, reminding her of his own strangeness. His hide and his narrowed, avaricious eyes were gleaming, making him seem every inch an alligator man.

'Whoever she is, we owe her one,' he said.

'What was going on out there? That mob was fighting itself as much as us.'

Gila lay back on the stone floor and shrugged carelessly. 'Some kind of local festival. I told you, the people out here are very odd.'

'At least they took notice of her.' Sam smiled at the absurdity. She'd never been rescued before by a flame-throwing nun.

They were met then by two children. There was a rustling behind them and two ragged figures appeared through the gaps. They were dirty and their eyes seemed almost all black.