BBC Cult Dr Who - The Sands Of Time

by BBCi Cult

  The waiter led them to a table by the window. Snow was still covering the ground outside, but it was a bright crisp morning, the sun shining on the murky surface of the Thames just visible between the young trees lining the embankment. It reflected in rather more glory from the bronze hide of one of the sphinxes guarding Cleopatra's Needle.

  'Ideal,' the Doctor told the waiter as he surveyed the scene. Then he yanked out a chair and sat down, legs immediately stretched out under the table.

  'Thank you, sir.' The waiter smiled. 'You did seem quite comfortable here last night.' He pulled the opposite chair out for Tegan, pushing it gently into the backs of her knees to forcing her to sit suddenly and indecorously.

  'You mean at dinner?' the Doctor hazarded.

  'Indeed, sir.'

  Tegan gave a short humourless laugh. She was getting used to everyone knowing where they had been and what they had done before they had even arrived. 'I suppose you can remember what we had to eat, too,' she muttered.

  The waiter dropped a napkin into her lap. 'You had the cutlets, Miss Jovanka. You expressed some disappointment as I recall.' He smiled at the Doctor as he pulled the napkin from the Doctor's glass and politely handed it to him. 'Whereas the Doctor was kind enough to compliment the chef on his oysters.' He stepped back a pace, perhaps to double check the perfect alignment of the table against the window. 'Enjoy your breakfast, sir.' With a slight bow, the waiter turned on his heels. 'Madam,' his voice drifted back across his shoulder, as if as an afterthought.

  Tegan watched him across the dining room. When the waiter was well out of earshot she leaned across the table and grasped the Doctor's wrist. 'Doctor, what's going on?' She asked. 'And what are we going to do about Nyssa?'

  The Doctor was already busily checking the breakfast arrangements. He opened the lid of the heavy silver teapot and peered inside for a moment, then he counted his way through the cutlery and checked the temperature of the toast in the rack. 'Well,' he said at last, 'as to what's going on, I haven't a clue.' He grinned. 'Interesting, isn't it.'

  'And Nyssa?'

  The Doctor stopped mid-way through pouring the milk. 'Yes,' he said seriously, 'well, as I said last night, I think our best course is to attend this mummy party this afternoon and see what clues we can pick up there.'

  'And until then?'

  'Oh come on, Tegan, first things first.' He picked up the teapot. 'And the first thing I need is a cup of tea.'

  Kenilworth House was a large, imposing stone-clad building several storeys high. It was set back slightly from the embankment, the rear of the house looking out over the river. The Doctor and Tegan followed a narrow footpath round to the front of the house and found themselves facing a large gateway. The heavy ironwork gates stood open, and a pair of carved jackals looked down at the Doctor and Tegan as they passed.

  Tegan spared a hurried glance for the stone creatures as she and the Doctor started up the driveway. The skidding of carriage wheels on the gravel and the encouraging call of a driver to the horses drew her attention back to the house. The carriage was pulling away from the porch which jutted out over the front door, shielding it from the cold afternoon sun and shadowing the woodwork. The bay windows on the upper floors leaned towards them as if watching as they approached. Tegan did not look back for fear that the jackals on the gateposts had turned to monitor their progress. Instead she followed in the Doctor's footsteps as he crunched nonchalantly up the drive, hat on head and hands in pockets.

  The door was opened before the Doctor's hand reached the bell. It creaked inwards to reveal a tall thin man. It was the same man who had handed the Doctor the invitation the previous night.

  For a second nobody moved. The man stood framed in the doorway; the Doctor's hand hovered close to the bell pull. Tegan stood a step down from the Doctor, a chill running up her spine. Then the moment was broken like the tension on a lake when the first drop of a thunderstorm splashes into it.

  'Who is it, Atkins?' a gruff voice called from inside the house.

  The man in the doorway - Atkins - stepped back, opening the door fully and gesturing for the Doctor and Tegan to enter. 'The Doctor, sir,' Atkins said as the they entered the hallway, 'and Miss Jovanka.'

  The next few minutes seemed almost like a dream when Tegan tried to recall them afterwards. She remembered being greeted by Lord Kenilworth in the hallway. She was not quite sure how they knew it was Lord Kenilworth, perhaps they did not find out until later. But whoever they thought he was, the large man in his forties was genuinely pleased to see them. He seemed to radiate equal amounts of pleasure, relief and excitement as he pumped the Doctor's hand and clapped Tegan on the shoulder.

  'Thank heavens, Doctor,' he chuckled loudly. 'I know you said you'd probably be late, but you cut it a bit fine. We were quite worried, actually. Thought we might have to delay the big moment. Can't start without you, after all. Not after everything we've been through, eh?'

  'Quite,' the Doctor muttered, as he allowed himself to be led to the drawing room. Tegan hurried after them, trying not to trip over the hem of her dress.

  The drawing room was big and square. The dark walls were hung with portraits, the only subject Tegan recognized being Queen Victoria. A large fireplace dominated one wall, the burning logs sparking and crackling and throwing shadows of the people in front of it. And the room was full of people, or at least that was the impression Tegan got. Thinking back later, she decided they could only have been perhaps a dozen guests. But as they all stopped in mid conversation and turned to watch her enter the room behind the Doctor and Kenilworth, they seemed like a multitude.

  The small crowd parted for the approaching Doctor as if he were Moses. People stepped back respectfully, clearing a way through to the far corner of the room. To the area below Queen Victoria's stern vigil. To the sarcophagus.

  'I think, Doctor, that we might as well start right away,' Kenilworth said as they approached the trestles on which the ornate mummy case rested. 'Professor Macready has kindly offered to assist.'

  Macready was a small man with little round glasses and thin grey hair. He stood the other side of the sarcophagus, so his head seemed almost to rise out of it. He gave a nod and a smile as the Doctor and Tegan arrived at the coffin, as if they were old friends. Around its sides Tegan could see rows of intricate hieroglyphics, centuries old, blackened and beginning to fade. The coffin itself was shaped like a child's rough outline of a broad human form, arms pressed to the sides of the body, feet together.

  The lid had been removed from the sarcophagus. Tegan stood at the foot of the case as she looked inside. Her head was whirling, she was not sure quite what was going on or why they were there. Some part of her mind was aware that the Doctor and Macready were shaking hands across the sarcophagus, across the mummified body lying inside. Another part of her brain was beginning to realize that the Doctor was intended to perform the unwrapping, to remove the bandages from the body that had lain undisturbed inside the coffin for millennia.

  'How old, do you think?' the Doctor asked as he and Macready surveyed the bandaged form inside.

  'Oh, I agree with you, Doctor.' Macready's voice was thin and reedy. His glasses caught the flickering firelight as he surveyed the ancient form. 'Four thousand years at least.' He drew a pale hand up the length of the body. 'The sarcophagus is, as you rightly surmised, of the Middle Kingdom. And the bandages themselves would seem to date from the same period.' He peered closely at one of the bulges wrapped close into the side of the body. 'Notice how the bandage is rotting over this arm, Doctor.' The Doctor and Tegan both craned forward to see.

  'This side too,' the Doctor observed.

  'Indeed.' Macready nodded slowly. The crowd was leaning forward too now. Too polite to press closer, but eager to hear and see the deliberations. 'You will also notice,' Macready continued, 'that the legs are not so closely bound as one might expect.' He poked a thin finger as the wrappings. They gave slightly at his touch.

  'You think they were loosened a
fter burial?' the Doctor asked slowly.

  Again Macready nodded. 'Unusual, I know. But possible. One does hear rumours that this happened, though this would be the first case documented so thoroughly.'

  'What?' Tegan asked. 'What are you saying? That someone loosened the bandages - someone tried to unwrap the mummy?'

  The Doctor took a step towards Tegan. He seemed unsure whether to put his hand on her shoulder, and eventually settled for resting it on the lip of the coffin. 'Professor Macready is suggesting, and I think he is correct, that this poor unfortunate was bandaged up and then buried while still alive.'

  'That's horrible.' Tegan wanted to turn away, but instead she leaned closer and looked into the bandaged face. It seemed so calm now, just decaying stained cloth. She tried to imagine the figure writhing and twisting, tried to imagine the heavy lid of the sarcophagus thumping down and entombing the still struggling form. Tried to imagine the darkness and the terror. 'Four thousand years ago,' she murmured as the Doctor reached into the coffin.

  With Macready's help, the Doctor managed to tease free a corner of bandage with a pair of tweezers that he had produced from somewhere. He held the edge of material for a moment, looking round the faces of the assembled crowd. Kenilworth nodded to him, and the Doctor tugged gently.

  The bandage pulled free and began to unravel like an old sweater. As Tegan watched in horrified amazement, the cloth fell away from the mummy's head. She watched in fascination, ready to look quickly away when the full horror of the face was revealed. She could imagine it already, the smell of the rotting bandages evoking half-remembered images of mummified faces from forgotten text books and childhood museum trips. Four thousand years.

  But as the flesh beneath the bandages glimpsed into view, it did not seem to have the pitted grey pallor of decay. Instead it looked smooth and white.

  'Good grief,' Tegan heard Macready mutter as a mass of brown hair untangled from the wrappings. 'Is this why you wouldn't let us examine her until now?'

  'Oh no,' the Doctor breathed, a tell-tale hand gripping the side of the sarcophagus.

  Tegan said nothing. From the end of the coffin she could see clearly the whole of the mummy. She could see the four thousand year old wrappings as they clung loosely to the bandaged form. She could see the tattered ends of the cloth pulled from the mummy's head. She could taste the stench of decomposition and decay rising from the corpse's ancient shroud and she could feel the weight in her stomach lifting and rising in her throat as she looked at the face of the mummy.

  The face was perfectly preserved. The eyes were shut, the mouth closed. The hair was a tangled mess from the millennia it had spent woven into the bandages. And now that she could see the face, Tegan could recognize the shape of the rest of the body, outlined by the sarcophagus and by the rotting cloth. The figure in the coffin, dead for over four thousand years, was Nyssa.

  Author's Notes: Instalment One

  Instalment Two

  The Legend of Osiris

  When Osiris the king returned victorious from the campaign, his brother Seth feigned friendship. Together with Nephthys, his sister-wife, Seth invited Osiris to a great banquet to celebrate his safe return.

  Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, and the sister of Nephthys and Seth, begged her husband not to attend, fearing some treacherous intent. But Osiris was in good humour, magnanimous in victory. He spoke to Isis and together they agreed to go to the palace of Seth.

  Seth had organised a great feast. There were grapes and figs, calves' heads, the forelegs of oxen and hearts of cows. There were geese and ducks. The wine flowed freely and all the royalty and dignitaries of Egypt were in attendance.

  Osiris was the guest of honour, made welcome by his brother Seth. He was seated at the head of the table, as befitted his position. And his brother Seth and his sisters Isis and Nephthys made merry with him.

  Then, when the feast was ended and the wine was almost gone, Seth had a great sarcophagus brought into the banqueting hall. It was traced in gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli. The casket was the best workmanship of the greatest craftsmen in all the Kingdoms of Egypt. And Osiris asked his brother for whom such a rich gift could be intended.

  Seth let it be known that the sarcophagus was a prize - the greatest prize in history. And the prize would be won by the man who best fitted the sarcophagus, that it should bear him in glory into the afterlife.

  So the nobility of Egypt each tried the casket for size, eager to win so great a gift from the brother of the king. But they were each by turns too short, or too tall, too fat or too thin. And it seemed that none of the guests could win so great a prize.

  Then Nephthys urged her brother Osiris to try the casket himself. Osiris at first declined, his wife Isis fearing some entrapment. But Seth laughed at his brother's apprehension, and Osiris agreed to try the test.

  So Osiris lowered himself into the casket, laughing with his brother Seth. It fitted Osiris as if it had been made for him. And so it had.

  When Osiris was lying in the casket, Seth slammed shut the lid and, still laughing, he sealed it. Then he called his guards, and had the coffin hurled into the Nile.

  As the coffin floated into the night, Seth's laughter mingled with the grief of Isis. And the tears of Isis dripped into the river and flowed after the entombed body of her brother and husband Osiris. And Nephthys saw her sister's grief, and she found it good.

  (Translated by Tobias St.John, from the inscriptions of the tomb of An'anka)

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  The water was clear, sunlight diffused through it like lemon juice. The liquid was warm and viscous. Tegan swam with increasing difficulty, her movements slowing as she struggled towards a surface that was not there. She had lost all sense of direction, and the light source had turned out to be the coral-covered expanse of the ocean floor. She twisted and turned, lost in the killing colour of the reef, her lungs bursting under the pressure, her eyes glazing. Then, as the strength slipped from her like the stream of bubbles rising from her mouth, she felt herself drifting, floating.

  As she sat hunched on the edge of a heavy leather armchair in front of the fire, Tegan relived the swelling terror of an afternoon swimming on the reef. She clutched a glass of brandy she could not taste, staring at the flickering of a fire she did not see. She remembered the raw panic which welled up in her stomach and slowly permeated her whole being as she realized she had lost all sense of direction. She began to swallow water and to splutter her life away. She was barely aware of the Doctor and Kenilworth behind her as they examined the body of Nyssa, half heard their whispered discussions. But she knew she was sinking and that the surface was receding from her. This time she would not suddenly break free into the cool breeze of the Australian afternoon and gasp in retching lungfuls of air.

  It had been difficult to cope with Adric's death. But even that had been so much easier. She had not actually seen him, had not actually looked into his dead face and seen the calm silent form which life had deserted. She had not begun to imagine the horror of his last desperate moments of existence, had not re-enacted them in her mind and relived them in her imagination. In a sense, Adric's death had been remote, reported, something written in a book or seen in a film. It was a death defined more by his subsequent absence that by the event itself.

  But this was different. This was the mind-numbing loss of a friend brought home with vicarious immediacy. When Adric had died, it had been a sudden shock. And Nyssa and Tegan had been able to help each other to cope with the loss, had been able to comfort each other in their grief, had shared emotions which the Doctor seemed unwilling or unable to risk.

  Now Tegan was alone, drowning in her grief. She sat before the fire, unable to bring herself to look at the coffin or the body of her friend behind her. She clutched the lead crystal of the brandy tumbler, feeling the gut-wrenching emptiness of the loss which she had refused to imagine the whole time that Nyssa was missing. She wondered how long the Doctor had suspecte
d the worst; wondered if he had somehow known; wondered why he seemed not to care.

  Then the Doctor was there, kneeling beside her, folding his hands round hers as they clutched the warm glass. She could see for the first time the depths of emotion and the years of hurting in his eyes as he looked at her. She could see that he too felt the pain and the loss, even if he could not show it in the same way as she could. She knew that it would be best for him if he could give expression to his grief and voice to his pain and set it free.

  'Oh Tegan,' the Doctor said. His voice was barely more than a whisper, flickering in time with the pale flames of the fire glinting off the cut facets of the glass she held so tightly in her fragile hands. As he held her, Tegan released her first painful sob. Her whole body convulsed with each heaving choke. She lowered her head till it rested on the Doctor's shoulder, and cried.

  'Why?' she managed to gasp between her tears. 'Why Nyssa?'

  He shook his head. 'I don't know, Tegan. I wish I did.' The Doctor turned and looked over Tegan's shoulder, back towards the sarcophagus still resting unmoved in the corner of the now deserted drawing room. 'It's strange,' he muttered. 'So long, and yet so perfectly preserved.' He shook his head slowly, still holding Tegan's hands around the glass. 'It's almost as if...' His voice tailed off, and he looked from the coffin to Tegan, then back again.

  'I wonder,' the Doctor said, leaping to his feet. He looked back down at Tegan, brow creased in thought for a moment. Then his expression suddenly brightened.