Bep-Wor straightened his shoulders and made straight for the cart. A crowd of prisoners was already pressed around it, and more were converging all the time.
As he approached, Bep-Wor heard the prisoners’ whispered conversation.
‘Is the Doctor in there?’
‘Somebody should look.’
‘Here comes Bep-Wor. Let him through.’
Bep-Wor found the throng of prisoners parting before him.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘we can speak freely. The guards have gone to the farmhouse. We’d be free if it weren’t for these chains. Has anyone spoken with the Doctor?’
‘No, Bep-Wor,’ said a tall man standing at the tailgate of the cart. ‘We were waiting for you.’ Bep-Wor recognised the man as Lep-Tar: he had been a merchant and investor, based in Porgum, and had once refused to loan Bep-Wor the funds to purchase seed-corn. Now, wearing rags and chains, he deferred to Bep-Wor.
‘Help me up,’ Bep-Wor said. ‘Lep-Tar, make a step with your hands.’
Lep-Tar locked his fingers together to form a stirrup, into which Bep-Wor placed his left foot. He reached up and gripped the top of the tailgate. Lep-Tar straightened, lifting Bep-Wor up, and Bep-Wor was able to pull himself over the tailgate and into the cart. He landed with a jangle of chains.
‘Bep-Wor,’ the Doctor said. ‘How nice of you to drop in.’
‘Doctor,’ Bep-Wor said, crawling on his hands and knees and feeling his way. ‘Where are you?’ The interior of the cart was dark, and crammed with oddly shaped bundles any one of which could have been the Doctor’s chained body.
‘Up here,’ the Doctor said.
Bep-Wor raised his eyes and saw the unmistakable silhouette of the Doctor, with his hat perched on his head. He was sitting on a bulging sack, his knees drawn up to his chin.
Bep-Wor reined in his exclamation of amazement. He wondered whether he was beginning to get used to being amazed by the Doctor. He sat on his haunches.
‘Doctor,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re no longer in chains. How did you break free?’
‘Ah,’ the Doctor said. ‘Have I mentioned that I once knew Harry Houdini? The name wouldn’t mean anything to you, of course. He was an escapologist. Taught me every trick he knew.’
‘And which trick did you use to escape today?’
The Doctor’s teeth gleamed in the darkness. ‘None of them, as a matter of fact. I was getting very uncomfortable in the back of this cart. Appalling suspension. I was being jolted about like a die in a shaker. So I just wriggled, and the chain around me fell off. I think they forgot to fasten it. Then I pulled my hands through the manacles - it’s one of the advantages of having slim, artistic hands - and then, once I’d taken my shoes off, I did the same with the rings round my ankles. I think the chains were made for someone much larger than me.’
The Doctor rubbed his wrists and ankles. ‘It’s all very tiresome,’ he said. ‘Being held prisoner restricts one’s freedom of movement, I find. I haven’t got time for imprisonment. I really must get on with looking for Ace.’
Bep-Wor shook his head. He thought that he’d never understand the Doctor. There was a knocking on the side of the cart. The prisoners were impatient to know whether their saviour was safe. Bep-Wor had an idea.
‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘stand up. On those barrels. I’ll come up with you. Spread your arms.’
Bep-Wor could imagine how the Doctor looked from among the crowd gathered around the cart. The Doctor, with Bep-Wor beside him, suddenly appeared above the crowd with his arms outspread, wordlessly demonstrating that he had freed himself from the chains that had bound him.
The prisoners gasped in unison. ‘Doctor!’ one of them cried out, and others took up the shout, which became a repetitive chant. ‘Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!’
As the Doctor and Bep-Wor tried to silence the chanting, prisoners from all over the compound were drawn to the noise. Soon the rest of the stockade was deserted: all of the prisoners were in the barn, standing round the cart, looking up at the little man who could not be enslaved by poison or held by chains.
‘Someone’s coming,’ the Doctor said, and jumped down into the cart, out of sight.
Bep-Wor peered into the empty stockade, illuminated now only by the last glimmerings of the pale sky above the mountains and the dancing light from the torches. There were soldiers standing at the gates. Bep-Wor saw them looking about, puzzled by the absence of prisoners. They drew their swords, opened the gates, and proceeded cautiously across the packed earth. Beyond them there were more people, walking in a line, carrying burdens from the direction of the farmhouse.
‘It’s all right,’ one of the soldiers shouted to the others. ‘I can see them. They’re all in the barn.’ Bep-Wor could hear the relief in his voice. ‘I was beginning to think we’d lost the whole lot.’
Bep-Wor gestured with his hands, telling the prisoners to move away from the cart. By the time the first soldier arrived in the barn the prisoners were milling about, silent and apparently purposeless. Bep-Wor could hear the Doctor moving: it sounded as if he was wrestling with the chains he had discarded.
‘Right then, you Twos,’ the soldier shouted. ‘Form a line.
One behind the other. There’s food on the way. Step forward one at a time. Take your food. Move away. Eat the food. Don’t come back for more.’
‘Help me get out,’ the Doctor said to Bep-Wor. ‘I have to taste the food.’
The Doctor had struggled back into his shackles. Bep-Wor pulled him up to the top of the cart’s side, and winced as he heard him fall to the ground. Bep-Wor followed. With their heads lowered, and walking somnolently, Bep-Wor and the Doctor emerged from behind the cart and attempted to look aimless as they made their way to the front of the winding line of prisoners.
The soldiers were paying little attention. They were slapping their hands against their arms, trying to warm themselves. A chill wind was gusting across the stockade.
The jangling of chains died away: the prisoners were standing in a line which snaked across the floor of the barn.
The Doctor was at the head of the queue, and Bep-Wor was behind him. Bep-Wor saw that the five women carrying food from the farmhouse were more of his people: Twos, unthinkingly obeying the instructions of the soldiers.
‘Set the cauldron down here,’ one of the soldiers said to the women, indicating a space just inside the barn. ‘Bread here.
You know how to serve this up? Half a loaf and a ladle of stew for each person.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the women said in unison.
‘Right then,’ the soldier said. He called to his companions.
‘We’ll leave them to it. They’ve all got their orders. Should be no trouble. Let’s get out of this wind and into that back parlour.’
‘Let’s get into that bottle of brandy,’ another soldier shouted back. They sheathed their swords and loped towards the farmhouse.
Wordlessly the five women began to prepare the food. One removed the lid from the cauldron; another stirred the contents with a ladle; the remainder started to unpack loaves of bread from baskets, and tear them in half. The loaves were hollow, and the woman with the ladle poured a helping of stew into the half-loaf proffered by her companion. The first meal was ready. The Doctor stepped forward.
Bep-Wor could hardly bear the suspense. The smell of the stew had made him suddenly ravenous, and he was sure that all the other prisoners shared his hunger. If the stew proved to be dosed with the potion, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to prevent himself, let alone anyone else, from eating it.
The brew from the Doctor’s flask was delicious and invigorating, but it wasn’t substantial. His stomach was keening for solid sustenance.
The Doctor bit into the bread and slurped at the stew contained within it. He chewed contemplatively. He craned his neck to check that the soldiers were out of sight and out of earshot.
‘It’s delicious,’ he said. And quite safe. The bread has been made with a yeast that coul
d prove dangerous to the Sontaran physiognomy, but I’m fairly sure it’s harmless for humans.’
There were times when Bep-Wor found the Doctor’s gnomic utterances particularly trying. His stomach rumbled. ‘So we can eat it, Doctor?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘Of course. Here, take mine.’ He handed his dripping half-loaf to Bep-Wor. ‘Shall we converse with the canteen staff while our comrades are taking their dinner?’
The Doctor and Bep-Wor stood by the cauldron while the women served stew to the prisoners one at a time. From their position they could reassure everyone that the stew was safe to eat, they could keep watch in the direction of the farmhouse - and the Doctor could chat with the women who were serving the food.
Bep-Wor took no part in the conversation at first, as he was completely preoccupied with filling his stomach. The stew was hot and tasty, and the bread was freshly baked. Never had a meal been so welcome.
‘Hello,’ the Doctor said, doffing his hat to the women. They didn’t look at him. ‘I expect you’ve been told not to talk to the Twos. But it’s all right. I’m not a Two. So you can talk to me.’
The five women paused in their work. They frowned.
‘I’m the Doctor,’ the Doctor said. ‘And I say that you are permitted to talk to me.’
‘The Doctor is our leader,’ Bep-Wor added, hastily swallowing a mouthful of bread. ‘He is the leader of the Twos.
You must do as he says.’
The women looked at the Doctor. ‘Yes, sir,’ they said together.
The Doctor recoiled slightly from their ardent gaze. ‘You,’ he said, beckoning to the woman who had least to do. ‘Come here and talk with us. This is Bep-Wor, my friend and companion.
‘ What’s your name?’
The woman stepped from her place behind the bread baskets and stood between the Doctor and Bep-Wor. Her expressionless eyes were directed at the Doctor’s face. ‘My name is Sab-Ma, sir.’
‘Where are you from, Sab-Ma?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Tilk,’ the woman replied.
The Doctor looked at Bep-Wor, who bolted down another mouthful in order to speak.
‘It’s a village on the island of Yollund,’ he said. ‘To the southeast of my island. Very warm climate. Good fishing.’
‘I see,’ the Doctor said. ‘And how long have you been working on this farm, Sab-Ma of Tilk?’
Sab-Ma frowned again. Bep-Wor assumed that she was out of the habit of thinking for herself. ‘Two hundred days, sir,’
she said, although she sounded uncertain and Bep-Wor thought it unlikely that she had counted the days. It was unlikely, after all, that her owners had instructed her to keep track of time, and Bep-Wor now realised that anyone who had taken the potion would do only those things that he or she was told to do. Sab-Ma did nothing of her own accord.
‘Are you happy?’ Bep-Wor blurted out. He needed to know what Sab-Ma felt about her new life as a slave on a strange world.
Sab-Ma looked confused.
‘Are you content?’ the Doctor put in.
At this, Sab-Ma smiled. She suddenly looked alive and attractive. ‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I am very content with my work and my accommodation.’
The Doctor smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘And have you been told that you should be content?’ he asked.
Sab-Ma continued to smile. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘The master and the mistress have told me that I must always be content, and I am.’
Bep-Wor closed his eyes. He had eaten his meal too quickly: he felt queasy. He considered how close he had been to drinking the soup containing the drug, and he felt even sicker. It was the most evil potion imaginable: its victims were left with no will, no personality, no feelings of their own.
The Doctor’s thoughts had apparently been running along the same path. ‘If this has been done to Ace,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I will never forgive myself. I must find her.’
Bep-Wor was determined to seek out whatever spark of individuality remained within Sab-Ma. ‘You are permitted to tell us your own feelings,’ he urged her. ‘You must have feelings of your own.’ The woman looked at him: her face was blank. ‘Has anything made you sad?’ he asked, his voice rising in desperation. ‘Tell me about something that has happened recently that you didn’t like.’
Sab-Ma’s face contorted as she tried to obey Bep-Wor’s instruction. ‘A new Two,’ she said at last. ‘A new one came, a few days ago. But the master sold her again, very soon. She’s gone now. It was good to have another Two at the farm. I was sad when she went. Her name was Kia-Ga.’
The Duchy of Jerrissar was not a single, contiguous tract of land. It was a name that Vethran had invented, when he had granted Kedin a dukedom, to encompass Kedin’s various landholdings. Kedin’s ancestral lands were small: a county in the north of the central continent, mountainous even in its most fertile parts and extending into the high, frozen wastes above the tropic. Kedin had added to this through chance inheritance, by purchasing small tracts of land, and through the generosity of Vethran, who gifted conquered territories to Kedin in return for Kedin’s military achievements and technological innovations.
To complicate matters further, Kedin’s influence extended over domains that were not included in the Duchy of Jerrissar: Tevana held lands in her own right, as to a lesser extent did a handful of aristocrats who were Kedin’s allies.
This patchwork of estates, from the largest, which contained an inland sea, to the smallest, which was no more than a town and the hill it stood on, constituted the bastions from which the onslaught on Gonfallon would be launched.
Most of the territories were, like Gonfallon itself, in the planet’s central continent. Some of Kedin’s holdings were, in feet, within the Duchy of Gonfallon, and were held by him as fiefs from Vethran; the remainder were dotted around and threaded between the sprawling lands which Vethran had accumulated for himself.
In theory, since Vethran had proclaimed himself King, all lands in all three continents belonged to him and were held by others entirely at his pleasure; in practice Vethran still relied on the ancient families to administer those lands which he did not directly rule.
The estates of Kedin Ashar - even the province of Harran, whose highly productive prairies stretched like a golden carpet into the heart of Gonfallon - were particularly safe from Vethran’s acquisitive nature. Kedin and Vethran, Jerrissar and Gonfallon, were dependent on each other. Each was the other’s most valuable trading partner. And Kedin’s troops were a match for Vethran’s.
Therefore, although the overthrow of Vethran would be carried out by shock troops arriving directly from the space station, the attack would begin on land: a multiplicity of pincer movements, emerging from Kedin’s domains and striking into Gonfallon.
Madok was bringing the order of battle to the commander of Kedin’s household troops.
Jerrissar - the province, rather than the entire duchy on which its name had been conferred - was one of Kedin’s earliest territorial acquisitions. He had bought it, cheaply, from the old Count of Larriman, who had considered Jerrissar the least valuable of his lands, and who had then lived long enough to see Kedin and Tevana transform the province’s lower slopes into fertile terraces growing profitable crops of silk, tea and spore-seed.
Kedin’s motives in buying Jerrissar had not been entirely economic, however: the province straddled the equator, and provided Kedin with a domain that lay adjacent to Gonfallon and midway between his northern and southern estates. And while Jerrissar’s lower slopes could be made productive, the mountainous hinterland had the advantage of being impregnable.
On his infrequent visits to his least favourite domain, the Count of Larriman used to stay in the palace in Jerris, the province’s only large town. Kedin had other plans. He used explosives to blast a new road from Jerris into the mountains, and he appointed masons and engineers to rebuild and modernise the ruined fortress known as the Bridge.
Jerrissar was a province with its ba
ck to the sea. At its front, the mountains - often snow-capped despite their latitude - sloped relatively gently, down to Jerris and the fertile terraces, and then down again to the Tavent, the river that separated the province from Gonfallon. On the other side of the province, the mountains dropped precipitously, in vertical curtains of stone, to a narrow coastal strip. Here the inhabitants of a dozen villages, strung along the shore, made their living from fishing and remained almost unaware that they were part of Jerrissar. Only one track wound back and forth from this coast, up the steep cliffs, into the mountains and through a narrow defile between the highest peaks in the range.
From this pass the track continued, down slopes that were gentle only by comparison to those on the seaward side, to Jerris.
And at the highest point, on the levelled peaks of the twin spires of rock that formed the pass, in centuries past a lord of Jerrissar had built two fortresses. His successor, anxious to outdo his father’s monumental work of building, had had a wide stone bridge constructed to link the two forts. Hundreds of labourers, it was said, fell to their deaths on the road below during the building of the bridge. The newly-unified fortification took its name from its most notable feature. It proved costly to maintain and was abandoned within five years of being completed.
The Bridge was now Kedin’s communications centre. The new road, guarded by five strategically-placed forts between the Bridge and Jerris, provided rapid access by land to the main commercial route alongside the Tavent, and to Gonfallon. A funicular railway transported goods, vehicles and passengers in fifteen minutes from the Bridge to the coast, where one of the fishing villages had been developed into a deep-water port.
Madok had first visited the Bridge while the improvements were being made, and he had been back several times since.
The first sight of the fortification never failed to leave him speechless, however.
The vehicle - a six-wheeled, self-propelled vehicle with a goods container behind the cabin - had grumbled and roared up the new road. It was all uphill work, twisting back and forth up the breast of the mountains. The sun had sunk behind the summits, and the road was in deep shadow. At each of the steepest points the vehicle would struggle up to a peak, and there Madok would find himself staring into the mouths of the big guns squatting in one of the defensive forts. The higher the self-propelled vehicle crept, the taller and more vertiginous the surrounding mountains became.
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