'Handy friend to have,' said Sam.

Gila grunted. I hate cyborgs. She's useful, and that's all.'

The Doctor was peering into Iris's waxen face. 'Come on, old girl. Don't leave me now.'

The bearded major believed in doing things correctly. Though the troops of the Scarlet Empress might be at her door, she would still insist on her guests retiring at a decent hour and getting a proper night's rest. She set the bears on them, to serve and chivvy them into obedience, ordered them to usher Gila and Sam to a suite of guest rooms that had been made ready for them in a separate wing of the forest mansion. 'There's time enough in the morning to make some plans,' Major Angela said curtly and waved her hand.

Sam was exhausted and, at one level, only too ready to comply. At least they weren't being treated like prisoners any more. But she didn't want to leave the Doctor. He hovered, still worried, over the inert Iris. He looked up, as if catching an echo of Sam's thought. 'Go and sleep,' he said, in that particular tone that she knew better than to argue with.

'You should too.'

'Sleep is for -'

'Tortoises, I know. But you're a wreck, Doctor.'

"Thanks a lot.' He grinned ruefully.'Go to bed, Sam.'

'I think this is the weirdest place you've ever brought me.'

"They're all weird places,' he smiled.

Sam lingered in the grand doorway.

'Look,' he said. 'I promise. I'll wait till the d.u.c.h.ess returns with the bus, I'll get Iris aboard and then, honestly, I'll have a quick nap.'

Sam shrugged and went off upstairs.

The Doctor sighed and sat down heavily beside the table and Iris. In the warmth of the fire his mud-and soot-encrusted clothes had dried on him like a brittle armour. His hair was tangled and matted.

So this was a vigil. He was the one doing the watching and waiting this time and he wondered about the many times he had put his various companions in this position. He wasn't used to sitting round like this.

After some time he was rejoined by Major Angela, who felt her way into the room, bringing with her an object covered with a bright red damask cloth. She sat it on a side table and it rested there - a squat, heavy, covered object, about the size of a portable television. He was sure that wasn't what it was. She stood back, evidently waiting for the Doctor to ask what she had brought him. He was tired and impatient. He rubbed his eyes and got crumbs of soot in both of them.

'Oww.'

'You are part of the mission this woman has been sent on,' said Angela at last, stroking her beard. She spoke rather coldly to the Doctor, as if repulsed by him.

'By default,' he said. 'I thought she needed looking after. She would hate to hear me say that.'

'Do you know what her mission is?'

"That she had to find you lot, reunite you, bring you all back to Hyspero.

Beyond that, nothing.'

'I think I believe you,' said Angela.'I think you are too simple a man to lie very well.'

"Thank you very much. Do you know, I can't even lie straight in bed at night.'

'So you are merely this woman's a.s.sistant.'

He pursed his lips.'Yes, if you like.'

'I think,' said the bearded major,'that there was another aspect to this mission that the old woman never disclosed to you.'

The Doctor stared at Iris, her sunken cheeks, her closed and brightly lidded eyes, at her disarrayed home perm. 'Yes, I wouldn't be at all surprised.'

'She was coming after something I have in my possession.' The major gave a sudden gruff giggle that startled him. He thought, The poor old thing's off her rocker.'Do you want to see?'

He spread his grubby hands. 'Why not?' Then he straightened and walked over to her.

'Don't come too close.'

He towered over Major Angela and she wanted him at a safe distance as, carefully, she reached out to the object on the side table and then, reverently, she took a hold of the crimson damask and drew it carefully away.

Underneath was a very thick gla.s.s jar. It was sealed and filled to the brim with a glaucous juice. A shape, distorted by the thickness of the gla.s.s, could be dimly discerned within.

The Doctor sighed, thinking for a moment. It's the brain of Morbius all over again, he thought.

'See?' the major gave her strange giggle once more.'Do you see it? Do you see what I stole from the palace of the Scarlet Empress, more than ten years ago?' Fascinated despite himself, the Doctor drew closer.'Keep back,' Angela warned, sensing him.

He stared at the misty unguents within the jar.

Something was moving in there. Wizened, foetus-like, curled up about itself as if in amniotic suspension. Yet it rocked back and forth and, all at once, he could swear that the creature was shuddering in mirth.

'This is my genie in a bottle,' hissed the major exultantly. 'My evil genius, my vizier, my queen, my everything. My property.'

The Doctor's throat was parched. 'Who have you got in there?'

Now he could see more clearly. The shrivelled revenant in the jar seemed to swim around to face him, still convulsed in its silent laughter.

Now he could see the creased and seamed face of an impossibly old woman. Her eyes were sunken but brilliant, her tiny spindly arms clutched and modestly pressed in her ancient, wrinkled b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

He looked away.'Who is this?'

Major Angela laughed, as if in complete sympathy with her horrible property.'She is a queen. She is the very first Scarlet Empress.'

There was a crash then, from the vast main entrance hall of the major's homestead. They heard the noise of a belabouring engine and it shook them out of their reverie. The Doctor turned and hurried out of the dining room, in time to see Iris's double-decker bus being driven, large as life, into the pristine main hall. At the wheel, the cyborg d.u.c.h.ess solemnly acknowledged him, and pulled the vehicle to a halt. 'Help me get her aboard,' he told the cyborg, and realised that he could still hear that tiny old queen's malevolent laughter, as if his head were the jar in which she was kept.

Chapter Twenty.

Out of Body

This was me then, set loose from the hampered trappings of that old body, and the first thing I did was unravel or untravel our journey thus far. I wanted to go back and uncover our route, go back to Hyspero and see what the Scarlet Empress was up to. I wanted that insider's view and now, quite disembodied, while my feeble self tried to heal up on the bearded major's dining table, I saw that I had my chance.

I became... What? A bead of moisture on my own fevered, furrowed brow, pushed up through the opened pores and released into the air. A molecule, then, an atom, some random speck, an infinitesimal particle of my essence, that could climb into the ether and go exactly where it desired.

It wasn't my first out-of-body experience. I'm quite an old hand at experiences such as these.

Up I went. I looked down at the Doctor and breathed a sigh at his evident concern. I saw him being shown the stolen, earliest Empress in her jar. I saw the Major's insane relish at her prized possession. I saw the d.u.c.h.ess and the Doctor carry my poor body into my bus.

Then I climbed up through the roof of the house, shot up through the canopy of the Forest of Kestheven. I found a place in the steamy and turbid clouds and a safe spot in the eye of the storm. I hitched a ride over the mountains it took us so long to travel as corporeal beings.

Here I go, back, back through our journey.

This is what it's like to live without sensation.

It's no life, but it has its uses, this being too small, too insensate, to be true. I need to reduce myself to this tininess simply to find out what the Empress is playing at.

To cross the desert I join the molecules of a grub embedded in the rank flesh of a bird of prey as it wheels its way across the sky above the sands. I can feel the itching hunger of the grub and its insistent pleasure in its simple life is almost pure enough to make me succ.u.mb to the temptation of remaining like this, as a parasite for ever. The grub terrifies me with its easy and thoroughly contented lifestyle and that happily symbiotic relationship with the scavenger bird.

I manage to pull myself free of them somewhere south of Hyspero, where I become various elements in order to smuggle myself through the city and into the Palace of the Empress. I become water again, a bead of perspiration, wine, p.i.s.s, then silver worn on a n.o.bleman's torque, straw, hair and finally flesh. I am a particle in the blue tattooed flesh of one of the Empress's trusted guards. I settle here, at one with his indecipherable skin, knowing that he is bound for an audience with Her Majesty this very evening.

And so I see her again in her throne room, only a matter of weeks since I was last here. Now I have returned provisionally, only partially, and I congratulate myself on my curious skill at earwigging.

Let me tell you what she is like, the Scarlet Empress.

She has presence. The air here is stiff with majesty.

Simply because she has so much presence they have to keep her cooped up in court, in a jar. The Queen of Jam squats permanently in state. Her limbs are folded and unmanageable beneath her like a disused deck-chair. She needn't have a body at all. She could just be a head. But she radiates a fierce presence. And she is very sensitive. The slightest noise could shatter her eardrums. In her presence, her guards mutter and whisper everything to her and time moves very slowly.

In her throne room with its high ceilings and narrow-panelled walls, the lords and ladies in vivid, lacquered colours seem to flatten themselves to blend with the paintwork. As if to avoid her gaze these wary souls avert their eyes and try to make themselves part of the frescoes. But even the frescoes are afraid of the Empress.

The Empress is proud of her presence, her majesty; she is proud of who she is. And why shouldn't she be? The city of Hyspero, the wide world beyond, all of it is incontestably hers, she thinks. It has been shipped and mapped repeatedly by her Armada, her soldiers have tracked its more habitable zones. They have laid claim wherever she has sent them. Each carved-up and tenderly demarcated morsel of land, sea and sky is known to her. She has seen very little of her actual possession, but has it, through reports, by heart. Her people - most notably her tattooed guard - bring her messages all twenty-one hours of the day.

She gets it all on paper - or rather, vellum. Information on skin such as this lasts so much longer. And information is what she desires: facts, figures and personal impressions from trusted gatherers worldwide.

From all this compacted, received wisdom she compiles her magisterial sense of the world. Poised in her jar, the Empress catalogues the reports of envoys and mentally ticks over the parameters of everything she rules. From this site of received wisdom she sets herself up to hypostatise a world. She has to make it all up in her head, but it is enough. Imagining it all from the facts she gets daily, she can legislate.

Sometimes, she thinks, her physical removal from the world might make her rather brutal and capricious towards her subjects. But she tries not to let that thought bother her too much.

Behind the throne room there are three chambers once used for dancing. The Empress has had them cleared and suited to her own purposes, since dancing is no longer permitted her in the Scarlet Palace.

In the first room there is a yellow waxed floor and a gla.s.s roof and twelve painted doors, each at a separate o'clock. The Empress has herself wheeled here each afternoon and placed in the exact centre, where she is the hub. She has a tattooed guard open each of the twelve doors around the room's curving wall.

On castors come the Empress's dozen dresses. Of course, she no longer wears the frocks she abandoned when she took up residence in her ma.s.sive, opalescent jar. In they come, though, worn by motorised mannequins with faces too blank to exert any kind of personality, let alone one that would eclipse her own. Frocks in a dozen colours, from salmon through saffron through tangerine to verdigris. Each has colossally hooped skirts so that they seem to hover, Dalek-like, as they sweep about the room in a graceful circle.

Of one accord the dresses hold hands or rather, clasp handless sleeve ends, as they encircle the Empress. And then they begin to dance, in a relentless, automated ring. The Empress indicates to her guards that they should leave her to watch the dance and then, alone, she revolves herself in her jar of thick unguents, gasping in pleasure at the gorgeous fabrics'of her dancing mannequins.

I watch this for a while, until my tattooed guard, whose flesh I have joined, is forced to leave. Fleetingly, then, as he returns to the throne room, do I see the other two hidden chambers. Both of these rooms verify two separate rumours about what the Empress keeps sacrosanct.

In one, the second room, is that circle of poles, each one surmounted by a severed head. Her council of bodiless viziers. As we pa.s.s by, their eyes are shut, as if they need to rest. The air is chill and dark and it stinks in here, of course. Look at the k.n.o.bbly skeletal ends of spine that terminate just below their blackened throats.

In the third room - just as grisly,! suppose - are the flayed and gorgeous hides of all her dead tattooed guards. Each is individual and distinct, their markings wonderfully preserved. This Empress knows a lot about marking and curing, it seems. Each still holds the rough shape of a man, each stretched out on a frame or loom, all along the scarlet walls. Here and there you can still see fingers, nostrils, haired eyelids.

Then we are in the throne room and waiting, waiting until the Empress calls on us again. We are at her whim.

I wonder whether I'm really going to learn anything by being here. The Empress plays her cards very close to her withered chest. I think about pulling myself free of the flesh of this guard and taking myself back off to be with the others, in the Forest of Kestheven. Then, quite unexpectedly, she returns.

I feel my guard, the one I have joined, flinch as she wheels into the room. His flesh creeps and, because I have stuck myself to it, I creep too. All of the guards gather about her. We live in terror of her commands. At any time, I realise, she might desire any one of us more as an ornament than as a servant; more as a wall-hanging than a living man. Yet always she prefers us on display, so she can perpetually observe our markings. This is another way in which she can feel she has access to the many sights of Hyspero - we are tattooed with images of this world's manifold flora and fauna. Each guard, while inside the palace of Hyspero, is forced to carry out his duties quite naked, subdued before her avid gaze. The cloaks are left hanging outside this inner sanctum.

How bright and blue we all look, gorgeous, against the red plush of these walls and floors. Together we make quite a display.

When she speaks, her voice comes from nowhere and everywhere.

Quietly. Because I have such a partial view of all these proceedings I can't quite make out whether it is telepathy, or some kind of electronic broadcast, or what. At any rate, her smooth voice resonates from within the tall, stoppered jar.

'My viziers tell me that our friends have discovered their objective.'A murmuring among the tattooed men. "This whole affair has already cost us dearly. A number of my beautiful guards have been killed in that forest. The whole platoon.'

My guard speaks up, carefully. 'All of them, Empress?'

'All of them.' She sounds appalled. "Their skins are quite irrecoverable.'

Everyone acts as if this is the worst thing about it.

'That wicked little woman we sent out seems, against all of the odds, to have succeeded.'

I start at this. She's referring to me. But she doesn't know I'm here, I'm sure of it. For a second, however, that was almost like being discovered.

'So,' she says,'things draw to a head. We must have them intercepted.

Successfully this time. My viziers seem to think that they will have to cross the sea. I can see they have a point. Alert my daughter, and have her prepare that ship of hers, the Kristeva. Tell her to set sail for the peninsula of Keld. Tell her to find this... ensemble and bring them back to me with all speed. And the rest of you can go straight into the forests.

This time, I want that daughter of mine to do exactly as she is instructed.'

With that, the Empress took herself slowly off to the room of flayed skins.

The tattooed men set about their orders.

I decided that now was my moment to unstick my tiny self from the flesh of my guard, and return to the others.

It took some doing. When you attach yourself like that to another being, the flesh finds it tricky, after a little while, to find itself free once more.

I fled the palace, the city, and made my way over the desert, mountains and forests, back to the Doctor and the others. It was terribly tiring, transforming again and again. At my age, that amount of self-reinvention can wear a girl out.

I opened my eyes.