by Philip Reeve
He touched a curious finger to the tip of the spear that the girl had levelled at him. ‘Ouch! Wooden, isn’t it? It seems very sharp.’
‘It is,’ said the girl, who didn’t appear to want to chat. ‘You’ll find out just how sharp unless you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here.’
‘Oh, we were just passing, you know,’ said the Doctor, smiling brightly. ‘Thought we’d look in. I’m the Doctor.’
The girl glared. The men behind her looked terrified. One said, ‘It is him!’ Another warned, ‘Be careful, Aggie! Remember, “The Doctor is a Master of Deceit”.’
‘Aggie?’ said the Doctor thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what that’s short for?’
The girl’s nostrils flared proudly. ‘My full name is Agony-Without-End-Shall-Be-The-Doctor’s-Punishment.’
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘You know, Leela, just between ourselves, I’m starting to feel that I’m not entirely welcome here.’
‘Chairman Ratisbon felt the tree wake, and sent me to find out what roused it,’ said the girl.
‘Chairman Ratisbon, eh?’
‘You have heard of him?’
‘No. Who is he?’
‘He is the one who has been chosen to be the instrument of our people’s vengeance,’ said Aggie proudly.
‘Well, good for him …’
‘Watch out!’
It was one of the spearmen, pointing to the mouth of the shaft.
Ven was so dishevelled and smeared with sap that they did not recognize him at first as he came scrambling up, gasping with the effort of the climb. Then Aggie cried, ‘Ven!’
‘He is the Doctor!’ said Ven, pointing. ‘He arrived in the Blue Box, just as the legends tell, and the great tree awoke and captured it to stop him from escaping.’
‘The great tree be praised!’ said Aggie.
‘But … He saved my life!’ Ven untied the scarf and handed it back to the Doctor. ‘I would have fallen into the digestion chamber, but he risked his scarf to save me … So can he really be the Doctor? The Doctor would not have done that, would he? And he looks unlike the carving.’
‘Perhaps he has disguised himself,’ said Aggie. ‘Perhaps he saved you for some purpose of his own.’ She looked at the Doctor again. ‘The day we have waited for so long has come at last. We must take him to Chairman Ratisbon.’
‘No,’ said Ven. ‘It is the Justiciar who leads us, not Chairman Ratisbon. You must take the Doctor to the Justiciar. She will decide.’
‘And because you are her son, do you think that gives you the right to command the Chairman’s guards?’ asked Aggie.
‘No, but … It is the ancient law: when the Doctor comes, the Justiciar will try him before all the people.’
Aggie nodded haughtily. ‘Very well. We shall take him before the Justiciar, and send word to Ratisbon to prepare the Chair.’ She beckoned one of her men over. ‘Stay here; guard the Blue Box. The rest of you, bring the prisoners.’
An odd splashing sound came from down below; a strange, wet rustling from deep in the digestion chamber. ‘What was that?’ asked the Doctor, as Aggie’s spearmen dragged him to his feet. ‘Did anybody else hear that?’
Nobody was listening to him, except Leela. She knew what the noises meant. The tree is angry, she thought, but she didn’t say so. He would only tell her that she was being unscientific.
Below them, unseen, something was happening in the complex of woody caves that formed the giant Heligan’s digestion chamber. Dark growths studded the walls and roof down there. They had been no bigger than footballs until now, but they were starting to swell, bigger and bigger, thorny spines pushing through their outer skin. Already a few were so large that their own weight tugged them free of the sockets they had grown in. They rolled down into the lake of green broth and bobbed there for a few moments like floating mines. Then, unfolding, putting out roots and feelers, they began to drag their way ashore …
3
Leela was uncertain just how far they travelled through the endless windings and twistings of the Heligan Structure. Gradually the passageways through which their captors drove them began to be walled with planks and panels rather than simply hollowed through living wood, and finally they entered the tree-house city in the out-branches. Once or twice they crossed broad thoroughfares, and passed openings that gave glimpses into great chambers where food was being prepared, and bark-fibres turned into cloth. Sometimes they went through busy spaces where people came crowding round to watch the strangers led past. Leela heard the news passing from mouth to mouth, crackling like a brush-fire: ‘It is the Doctor! The Doctor!’ People shouted it in the wooden arcades, spreading the news to distant branches. But Aggie and her companions would not stop, just jabbed the prisoners with their wooden spears and forced them onwards.
‘They’re not very hospitable,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘But you can’t help admiring them. They’ve built this whole world out of Heligan wood. Remarkable!’
Leela thought what was really remarkable was the way he could remain so light-hearted while they were being led to whatever awful fate these tree people had planned for them. He had that grin again. She supposed it was because he had lived so long and seen so many wonders. It must grow boring after a while. Anything new delighted him.
‘I suppose your ancestors were stranded here?’ he asked, looking back at Aggie and the spearmen. They would not answer him, so he tried calling out to Ven, who was still trailing behind. ‘Space-wreck, was it? And you salvaged just one Heligan and managed to turn it into a sort of living space station … Ingenious! How long have you been here?’
‘The great tree has been the home of our people for nine hundred years,’ said Ven. ‘Yes, our ancestors were trapped here …’
‘But there was no wreck,’ said Aggie fiercely. ‘It was you who stranded us, Doctor.’
‘Really? Me? No, I think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding …’ the Doctor began, but the conversation was at an end, and so was the journey. One of the spearmen opened a carved door, and Aggie shoved the Doctor and Leela through it into a big octagonal room with carved panelled walls. That side of the Heligan Structure was turned towards the sun, and leaf-dappled sunlight came dancing through a window made from a single translucent sheet of cellulose. A woman waited for them there; handsome, grey-haired, the hem of her tea-coloured bark-fibre robes brushing the floor as she rose from her seat and came forward to study the Doctor.
Aggie and her men forced him to his knees.
‘Mother,’ said Ven. ‘It is him!’
The woman frowned. ‘He is not like the carving.’
‘I saw the Blue Box,’ said Ven. ‘But …’
‘He admitted himself that he is the Doctor,’ said Aggie. ‘I shall fetch the Chairman. Justice shall be done.’
‘So you must be the Justiciar?’ said the Doctor, smiling up at the woman as Aggie left. He pointed at the chair that she had risen from; a thing of plastic and metal, quite unlike the rest of this wooden world. ‘That’s the pilot’s chair from a Wyndham-class starship, isn’t it? An antique, by the look of it …’
‘We have waited a long time for you, Doctor …’
The Justiciar’s voice was stern, but she looked troubled. All her life she had known of the Doctor. She remembered as a little girl being told by her grandmother, ‘Be good, or the Doctor will come and get you!’ But she had never really believed in him. A man who travelled through space and time in a blue box? It sounded so unlikely! She had thought he was just a symbol; a useful myth that the founders had invented to bind the people together and help them to survive in this strange place. When she was elected Justiciar she had sworn solemnly that she was ready to sit in judgement on the Doctor if he should return – but a hundred Justiciars before her had sworn that same oath, and he never had. She had never imagined that it would fall to her to deliver sentence on him.
‘For nine centuries our people have awaited their revenge,’ she said, looking into his wide, intent eyes
, and wondering still if it was really him. ‘Their glorious leader, Director Sprawn, promised our forefathers that you would come one day, Doctor. He designed the Heligan Structure to lure you. An intergalactic nosy parker like the Doctor will not be able to resist such a thing, he told them. And here you are.’
‘Now what is all this about vengeance?’ The Doctor started to rise, but the spearmen forced him down again. ‘Vengeance for what? I’ve never done anything to you!’
‘Perhaps you have betrayed so many people that you have forgotten us,’ said the Justiciar.
‘The Doctor would never betray anyone!’ said Leela angrily.
‘Hush, Leela …’
‘Nine hundred years ago,’ the Justiciar went on, ‘our forefathers were colonizing a world called Golrandonvar. They were from Earth. Their forest of Heligan trees was transforming the atmosphere; mining and construction operations were under way. And then you arrived in your blue box …’
‘Golrandonvar?’ asked the Doctor. ‘No, it doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid. But then I’ve visited such a lot of places … Did it look a bit like a gravel pit? You’d be amazed how many alien worlds look just like gravel pits …’
‘Mother,’ said Ven. ‘He saved my life. I would have fallen into the digestion chambers if it had not been for him. Why would the Doctor do such a thing?’
‘Because he is a good man!’ said Leela. ‘That is why he saved you! That is why he stopped me killing the angry girl and these curs with their toy spears! He would never let anyone be harmed who did not deserve it!’
The Justiciar looked at her.
‘I believe you are telling the truth,’ she said. ‘I believe you truly think he is good. But perhaps he has deceived you. Our people have a saying: “The Doctor is a Master of Deceit: even his smiles are stratagems”. He seemed friendly enough when he arrived on Golrandonvar nine centuries ago. But then he sided with the natives of the planet; vicious, primitive, swamp-dwelling creatures called the Thara. He helped them to rise up against our ancestors, and drive them from that promising world. One ship, that was all he left them, and just enough fuel to make it to this rock we orbit now. That is why, for all these years, we have awaited the Doctor’s return. So that he can be made to pay for what he did to us.’
‘Yet he did save my life,’ Ven said.
‘And I am grateful,’ acknowledged the Justiciar. ‘It shall be taken into account at his trial.’
The door crashed open again. Aggie stood there. Beside her was a tall old man, gaunt and fierce-eyed, his white brows bushy as an eagle owl’s. There were more people behind him; people with spears and clubs, peering nervously over one another’s shoulders for a glimpse of the Doctor.
‘There will be no trial!’ the old man boomed – his voice was nearly as rich and deep as the Doctor’s own. ‘None of your so-called justice for the Doctor, Justiciar! Have you not felt the tree-quakes? The Heligan is awake! It knows the Doctor is here, and it does not want justice. It wants revenge!’
4
Down in the Heligan’s rooty heart, the man who had been left behind to guard the TARDIS was growing bored. He walked all the way round that thicket of new trunks, peeking in through the gaps between them, but he could barely make out the Blue Box, and from the bits he could see it did not look nearly as scary or impressive as the old stories made it sound. It was supposed to be ‘bigger on the inside’, whatever that meant, but he could not see in through the windows.
Small noises came constantly now up the shafts in the floor: splashings and slitherings and strange, scratchy rustlings. He ignored them. The old tree was restless tonight, and who could blame it? It was trembling and shaking itself, full of new sounds.
Deep in thought, and studying the TARDIS, he did not notice the things that came squeezing out of the shafts all around him. As spiky as conker casings, as tall as men, they moved like crabs on their crab-leg roots, slow at first, then scuttling suddenly ...
The tree was restless tonight.
No one heard his screams.
‘Revenge?’ asked the Justiciar, turning from her prisoners to confront the angry newcomer who had interrupted her. ‘Yes, but it must be done honourably, Chairman. I am the Justiciar, and I say that we must have a trial. We must make certain that this really is the Doctor; he should be allowed to have his say before you put him to death.’
‘You are not fit to be Justiciar!’ sneered Chairman Ratisbon. ‘You are like so many others nowadays; you think the Doctor is only a fairy-tale monster to scare our naughty children with.’
The Justiciar blushed angrily. ‘Hasn’t everyone wondered that? Everyone with any intelligence? Even fierce old men like you, Cut-Out-The-Doctor’s-Living-Heart Ratisbon? But here he is, and he says that he is the Doctor, and by our ancient laws he must face judgement.’
‘There is no need,’ said Ratisbon. ‘Judgement was passed on this traitor nine hundred years ago. The sentence is agony and death, and it is my duty to see that it is carried out. Take him to the Chair!’
And although the Justiciar held up her hands and commanded them to stop, there was no stopping the men who poured into her chamber, who seized hold of the Doctor and dragged him roughly away. Leela, while her own guards were distracted, snatched back the knife that one had taken from her and ran to rescue him, but one of Ratisbon’s men felled her with a blow from a spear-butt. She landed on all fours, groggy, blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Ven ran to her, and his mother came and knelt beside her, dabbing at the wound with a cloth.
‘Leave me alone! It is barely a scratch …’ Leela tried to fling them away, to run after the Doctor. They held her back. ‘Where are they taking him?’ she demanded. ‘I thought you were leader here?’
The Justiciar said, ‘I thought so too, but it seems not. Ratisbon is our executioner. It seems he is impatient to get to work.’
The room quivered. The whole tree seemed to be stirring restlessly, like some great animal troubled in its dreams. From outside the room came a rustling sound, like someone dragging a heavy bundle of twigs.
One of the men who had been lingering in the open doorway, not sure whether to stay with the Justiciar or follow Chairman Ratisbon, suddenly shouted out in fear. ‘Justiciar!’
He stumbled back into the room and tried to shut the door, but something shoved it violently open. The rustling sound was very loud, and the room was suddenly filled with the compost smell that Leela remembered from down below. She looked at Ven and his mother, saw fear and incomprehension on their faces, and stood up, knife in hand, ready to meet this new peril face to face …
Except it had no face. A hard greenish shell studded with sharp spines, a cluster of busy, scuttling, claw-like roots, delicate tendrils that groped and fluttered, a thick hairy stem, but nothing anywhere that looked like eyes or a mouth.
Behind her one of the Justiciar’s women shrieked, and the creature swung towards the sound. It’s blind, thought Leela, but it is not deaf … She motioned to the others to be quiet. She did not know if she could fight this thing – not alone. A few of the men in the room had spears, but they looked too scared to use them. Anyway, where did you stab a thing like that? What would its weak points be?
Someone whimpered. The thing twitched, creeping forward on its skirt of roots, tendrils reaching out to feel the air ahead. Leela held her breath, trying not to tremble as a tendril-tip came within a hand’s breadth of her face.
Then, from somewhere outside, there was another scream – there must be more of them, thought Leela – and the creature whirled around and scuttled out. More screams in the corridor; whispers from the huddled, frightened people in the room.
‘What was that?’ hissed Leela.
‘I don’t know!’ Ven whispered back. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘The Doctor,’ she said. ‘He will know what they are, what to do.’
‘But Ratisbon has the Doctor!’ said the Justiciar.
‘Then we must save him!’
&nbs
p; The Justiciar looked at her for a moment, then slowly nodded. To the people in the room she said, ‘You who have weapons, come with me; the rest, gather at the Hall of Justice. Be careful of those … those whatever-they-ares.’
Leela was already at the door. She acted as if she had forgotten that she had ever been their prisoner, and they did not try to remind her. Outside, the wooden corridors were filled with the rooty rustling and wet vegetable smell of the creeping things. Leela gripped her knife more firmly.
‘Where have they taken him?’ she asked.
5
They had taken him down stairs, and through carved and polished wooden corridors, until at last they came to a heavy door. Chairman Ratisbon himself unlocked it and flung it wide. And there, in a big, shadowy chamber, stood the Chair.
The Chair was Ratisbon’s own invention. For many years the executioner had sensed that belief in the Doctor was fading and the hunger for revenge growing weak. He had set out to remind his people of their old hatred, and show his own faith in the ancient legends, by preparing the device on which the Doctor would be tortured and killed when he finally showed up. Over the years he and his supporters had gathered wood and much of the remaining metal from the original colonists’ dismantled starship, and they had built the Chair.
It was a metal and plastic chair much like the Justiciar’s throne, but it was surrounded by a spiky halo of sharp implements mounted on articulated wooden arms. There were drills and blades and needles, syringes filled with the tree’s own acids, rubber tubes and electric terminals, ingenious devices designed to peel and carve and crush.
‘Did you think death would be quick, Doctor?’ sneered Ratisbon. He gestured to the Chair. ‘Please – take a seat.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’d rather stand, if it’s all the same to you.’
The chamber lurched; the walls creaked. Some of the people who had gathered there cried out in fear, and from outside came noises; shouts and screams, the crash of something falling.