‘Those are sacred death marks,’ the security man snarled.
‘Sacred death marks, how very jolly,’ the Doctor said. ‘So much more civilised than plain old guts and gore.’
The security man stepped forward and thrust his face threateningly close to the Doctor’s. ‘Have you defiled them?’
he demanded.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ the Doctor said, still smiling politely.
Define defile?’
‘Have you touched them?’
‘No.’
The security man leaned even closer, so that he and the Doctor were almost nose to nose. ‘You’re lying,’ he accused.
‘You have touched them.’
The Doctor did not move back from the confrontation or change his tone of voice. ‘No.’
‘You’re lying. I can tell by your voice that you’re lying.’
‘To tell someone’s lying by the sound of their voice is a rare and remarkable talent,’ the Doctor said. ‘Obviously it’s not one of your talents but it would be difficult to find fault with the ambition.’ He reached into the pocket of his long coat, rummaged about and pulled out a battered paper bag.
‘Would you like a jelly baby?’
‘You’re a liar, a blasphemer, a defiler of the holy arena,’ the security man intoned.
‘I take it that’s a no,’ the Doctor said.
The security man stepped backwards never taking his eyes from the Doctor’s face. ‘Are you looking for a fight?’ he asked in an abrupt and oddly formal way.
‘I’m looking for an orange jelly baby,’ the Doctor said, shaking the bag and poking around in it.
From somewhere high up in the dome there was an electronic crackle and then a disembodied voice boomed over the public address system, ‘What are you doing Jarvis?’
‘I’m declaring a spot challenge,’ the security man announced to the air. ‘Right here, right now.’
All round the arena fence tiny slots opened at regular intervals and small jewel-bright lenses extended slightly then retracted flush with the wooden surface. There were several hundred of them glittering in the sunlight like the dead irises of hidden glass eyes.
‘In the arena?’ the voice demanded. ‘Are you mad?’
‘It’s a legal challenge,’ the security man said, though he sounded defiant rather than certain. ‘I name and claim the ground.’
‘The arena?’ The voice was incredulous, almost amused.
‘You can’t fight in the arena, man. You haven’t earned it. Are you professionally ranked, I don’t think so. Are there any memorable kills in your reel, not that I’ve noticed. Has the arena just been cleansed, I do believe it has.’
‘This man has broken in and defiled it.’ The security man took another step backwards still watching the Doctor’s face and loosened the handgun in its holster.
‘You could be letting this whole defilement-contamination thing get out of hand, you know,’ the Doctor said. ‘Remember today’s habits and rituals are tomorrow’s obsessive compulsive disorders. I can’t remember who told me that. I don’t think it was Freud. One of the religious leaders perhaps. But which one, they all benefit from it after all...’
But the security man was not to be distracted or deflected.
‘He’s in violation.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a jelly baby?’ The Doctor proffered the bag. ‘There are no orange ones left, I’m afraid, but I can recommend the green ones.’
‘Nobody move!’ the voice on the PA ordered. ‘I’m coming to sort this out.’
‘Do you accept the challenge?’ the security man asked quietly.
The Doctor selected a green jelly baby and put the bag back into his coat pocket. ‘Aren’t we supposed to wait?’ he said, chewing appreciatively.
‘There’s no reason to wait,’ the security man urged. ‘The systems are recording. All the legalities are in place. You must fight me. You have no choice.’
The Doctor smiled and stuck both hands into his trouser pockets. ‘There’s always a choice.’
Once again the security man loosened the handgun in its holster. ‘You must fight me,’ he repeated. ‘You have no choice.’
‘Yes he has,’ Leela said, stepping between them.
‘A chancer,’ the security man sneered triumphantly. ‘Two kills should rank me.’ And he pulled the gun.
Leela ducked inside the arc of the draw and, before the security man could bring the gun to bear, she kneed him hard in the groin. He grunted and as he bent slightly with the pain she straightened up and hit the bottom of his jaw with the top of her head. His teeth clashed together and he began to tip backwards. She grabbed the wrist of his gun hand and pivoted, twisting the arm against the weight of his fall. His elbow cracked stickily and he let go of the gun. He fell heavily with the broken arm underneath him and lay sobbing with pain. ‘You wanted to fight,’ Leela said. She picked up the gun and threw it across the arena. ‘The Doctor tried to persuade you not to.’ She put her foot on the security man’s throat, drew her knife and reached down with it so that the tip of the blade rested on the bridge of his nose. ‘You should be more friendly.’
‘That’s enough, Leela,’ the Doctor said, pulling her away.
‘The man’s hurt. You’ve hurt him enough.’
The security man lay silent now, his eyes closed, his face screwed up against the pain. He seemed to be waiting for something to happen.
Leela sheathed the knife. ‘I was not going to kill him,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He was going to kill you though.’
‘A bit aggressive,’ the Doctor agreed, ‘even by the standards of your average security guard.’ The man’s eyes were still tight shut and he was still not moving or making a sound.
The Doctor squatted down beside him. ‘It’s all right, Jarvis.
That is your name isn’t it?’
Leela said, ‘He wanted you to fight him so that he could kill you.’
‘I gathered that,’ the Doctor said, ‘but he does seem to have gone off the idea now.’
Leela poked the fallen man with her foot. ‘He is pretending to be dead.’ She poked him again only harder this time.
‘Playing dead fools no one,’ she said loudly at his clenched face.
‘I’m going to try and get you some help, Jarvis.’ The Doctor stood up. ‘And in the meantime Leela’s going to stop kicking you. Aren’t you Leela?’
‘The man is not a warrior,’ Leela said contemptuously. ‘He challenges you to fight and when he loses he sulks like a child.’ She leaned down and shouted directly at his face, ‘Like a frightened child!’ Stubbornly the security man did not move or open his eyes. ‘Do you think I should cut his throat, Doctor?’
‘I think you should stop tormenting him,’ the Doctor said.
‘It’s probably not good for him and it’s obviously very bad for you.’
‘What is he waiting for?’ Leela demanded. ‘I do not understand what he thinks is going to happen.’
The Doctor peered up into the dome. ‘The disembodied voice claimed to be coming to sort this out. Maybe he’s in a lot more trouble than we realise.’ He surveyed the arena carefully. ‘There seems to be only one way in or out of this place.’ He nodded at the entrance to the tunnel they had come from. ‘So if there’s medical help to hand it’ll be somewhere in there presumably.’ He started to walk towards it. ‘Are you coming with me or are you staying to look after Jarvis?’
Leela trotted after the Doctor. ‘He can look after himself,’
she said. ‘It is not my fault that he is injured.’
But before the Doctor and Leela could leave the arena, several more security men, black-clad and burly, marched in double time from the tunnel entrance and formed out into a skirmish line in front of them. After a few moments a small, dapper man dressed in a soft grey uniform, which did not carry the anonymous identification that marked the others, bustled out of the tunnel. He stopped abruptly when he caught sight of Jarvis lying on the g
round. ‘Who did that?’ he demanded.
‘It was a misunderstanding,’ the Doctor said. ‘A clash of cultures.’
‘A clash of cultures? What does that mean?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘He lacked culture and there was a clash.’ He walked back to the fallen man. ‘His arm’s broken I’m afraid but it could have been worse.’ He flashed a grin at Leela. ‘A lot worse.’
‘A lot worse?’ The man in grey shook his head in a dumb-show of disbelief. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Trust me, I’m the Doctor,’ the Doctor said. ‘My companion was comparatively restrained.’
‘Your companion?’ The man in grey turned his attention to Leela. ‘You are responsible for this?’
‘I broke his arm if that is what you are asking,’ Leela said defiantly. ‘But he is responsible for what happened to him.
He wished to fight. I fought him. He lost. Do you wish to fight me now?’ She looked from one to another among the security men. ‘Any of you?’
‘You haven’t killed him,’ the man in grey said.
On the ground Jarvis gasped softly and his closed eyes clenched more tightly shut but apart from that he made no sound or movement.
Leela said, ‘Of course not. Why should I kill him?’ She looked at the Doctor. ‘A warrior does not kill unnecessarily.’
The small man in grey sighed and shook his head again. ‘A challenge has been made,’ he said in a voice that suggested he regarded Leela as a rather stupid and recalcitrant child.
‘Blood has been spilled. You have prevailed. You must kill him. It’s not seemly to toy with him here. It may be the modern way. It may be the way the tri-dee audiences like it.
But that is not how it’s done here. Not here. Now kill him. Kill him! Kill him now!’
‘Now just a minute,’ the Doctor protested.
The man did not look at him. ‘I’m not talking to you,’ he said. ‘This does not concern you.’
‘It most certainly does concern me,’ the Doctor said. ‘I will not have this. You will not -’
‘I will not kill him,’ Leela interrupted, speaking as much to the Doctor as to the small man who confronted her.
‘This is the arena,’ the man went on in the same didactic slightly theatrical tone. ‘This is the theatre of dreams. You have no choice.’
‘There is always a choice,’ Leela said.
The small man in grey gave up. He gestured the security men forward. ‘Arrest her,’ he said waving dismissively in Leela’s direction.
‘Wait a minute.’ The Doctor put a protective arm in front of Leela. ‘You’re planning to arrest her for not killing someone?
That’s perverse.’
‘Who are you exactly?’ The small man in grey managed to make the question sound dismissive, more like an insult than a question.
‘I’m the Doctor. Who are you exactly?’ The Doctor echoed the man’s tone more or less exactly.
The man did not react. ‘Are you her agent, her manager, what?’
‘I’m responsible for her,’ the Doctor said. ‘And you didn’t answer my question.’
‘Question?’
‘Who are you?’
‘You really don’t know?’ The man looked theatrically sceptical.
‘Escaped lunatic,’ the Doctor suggested, ‘head of security, what?’
‘I’m the Senior Umpire and in this instance I’m the de facto match referee.’
‘Shouldn’t you be wearing black,’ the Doctor said. ‘I seem to remember there was a chant: who’s the person in the black?
No I don’t think that was it...’
‘I’m declaring a rule violation,’ the man said. ‘Your client has left me no choice. The contest is void.’
Jarvis opened his eyes. ‘Is that official?’ he asked.
The referee ignored him. ‘Your client will appear at the Court of Attack,’ he went on, ‘at which time I assume you will wish to represent her.’
Jarvis struggled up into a sitting position. ‘Give me back my gun,’ he said, ‘and I’ll deal with the little bitch now.’
The referee went to where Leela had thrown Jarvis’s handgun and picked it up. He bustled back with it.
‘There’s no reason to waste the court’s time,’ Jarvis continued, ‘on some scuffling chancer. Let’s see her outrun a bullet.’
The referee cocked the handgun. The Doctor stepped in front of Leela. ‘I don’t know what you people have got in mind,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t going to happen.’
Casually the referee shot Jarvis through the top of the head. ‘As I was saying; I assume you’ll wish to represent your client at the Court of Attack. Do you wish to accompany her into custody?’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said, staring at the body of the dead security man. Bone fragments, blood and brain matter had splattered into the sand and Jarvis had slumped forward, a sudden limp and sagging parody of life.
‘You do realise the seriousness of her position?’ the referee said.
Leela was trying to get past the Doctor but he held her behind him with a restraining arm. ‘I’m beginning to,’ he said.
‘I am not afraid of these people,’ Leela protested.
The Doctor said, ‘As contests go summary execution is a bit one-sided.’
The referee handed the gun to one of the security men. ‘He should have been dead already,’ he said, flicking imaginary specks from his grey uniform. ‘And his attitude and behaviour confirmed the problem.’ He frowned up at the Doctor. ‘I realise you people don’t have to be qualified but you’re not going to be much help to your fighter without at least a rudimentary understanding of the rulebook.’
‘There’s a rulebook for such deliberate murder?’ the Doctor asked.
‘I won’t dignify that with an answer,’ the referee said.
‘It was a silly question,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘There’s always a rulebook. Every culture has a rulebook and they’re all different and they’re all convenient for somebody.’
The referee turned his attention to the squad of security men. ‘I want every particle of that cleaned up,’ he said indicating Jarvis and the mess that had been his head. ‘It cannot be allowed to contaminate the arena.’
‘No sacred death marks involved then,’ the Doctor murmured.
‘There was nothing sacred about any of this,’ the referee said. ‘It was a scuffle not a fight.’
Leela said, ‘A fight is a fight. If it is fought honestly between warriors it is honourable but it is just a fight.’
‘You should have thought of that,’ the referee said, ‘before you decided that the rules did not apply to you.’ He turned on his heel. ‘And take these two to the Court of Attack and put them in the lock-up,’ he said to the security squad as he bustled past them on his way to the tunnel.
* * *
A hunted man will usually go for a hiding place below normal eyelevel and his pursuers will look to the ground in their search for him. The instinctive crouch is common to hunter and hunted alike. This was why Keefer had climbed up into one of the trees to wait.
By full dark no one had come and he was satisfied that, for the moment anyway, his adversary considered him dead.
Whoever it was might be godlike in other ways, but at least they weren’t omniscient. He had thought while he waited, but for the life of him he couldn’t work out which of the two possibilities it was most likely to be. And that was the point: it was for the life of him...
Carefully he took a second night-sight lens from his weapons belt and dropped it into his left eye. He blinked rapidly to position the tiny image intensifier and waited for his optic nerves to adjust to the return to stereoscopic vision.
Some definition was lost now that both eyes contained the lenses but flat vision, no matter how bright and clear, was no good when you were moving. And moving fast and far was Reefer’s next priority. It was only a matter of time before the forensic team finished sifting the roasted crud they had scraped off the road and discovered that he w
as not one of the ingredients. He needed to be long gone before that happened.
At the base of the tree he paused briefly to allow his muscles to uncramp. He breathed deeply and slowly, consciously relaxing and boosting the oxygen in his blood to its optimum level. At the same time he switched a moment’s total concentration to each of his senses in turn. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, even the taste of the air around him was for a fleeting instant his only contact with reality, the only input his brain acknowledged. It was a personal discipline he had painstakingly developed and practised until it was virtually automatic. In a few seconds every sense was tuned and Keefer had become the perfect refinement of his ancestral line. The fine-honed instincts of the killer-ape were balanced and ready to be channelled by the brain of the thinking man.
He moved off, heading away from the road towards the fields on the far edge of the wood. As the trees and undergrowth thinned out he increased his pace, so that by the time he reached the last of the cover he was running.
Before he hit the open ground he changed direction suddenly, ran parallel to the boundary of the wood, then swerved again and headed out at a flat run.
Almost immediately a prickling blaze of small-calibre tracer bullets burned through the darkness. Thin streams of killing light smashed through the wood at the point where Keefer should have emerged if he had followed the direct line into the open. But he had not followed the direct line and this made the use of tracers a bad tactical error.
The incandescent brightness blinded the marksmen’s night-scopes leaving their target unseen and momentarily unseeable. That gave Keefer the edge. Although the sudden light blinded him too he plunged on, his eyes closed, his remaining senses hyped-up and compensating. And Keefer was fast.
The firing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. In the abrupt darkness Keefer dropped to the ground. Although his eyes were closed he knew he had flanked two firing positions.
Match of the Day Page 3
