The Spear of Destiny (3 page)

‘That’s remarkable,’ said
Jo.

‘She is a remarkable old girl in
many ways,’ said the Doctor. ‘Let’s move, shall we? We’ll be
warmer if we walk a little faster.’

They made their way deeper into
the forest. As long as there wasn’t another snowfall it would be
easy enough to find their way back to the TARDIS from the trail
of their footprints in the snow.

The woodland was on sloping land,
and they headed gently downhill through a mixture of birch and
ash and conifers until, finally, they saw the trees thinning out
a little in front of them.

‘I hear a river somewhere,’ said
Jo.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, nodding.
‘That way.’

Very soon they glimpsed clear
green water flowing rapidly in a wide and strong river, whose
banks were covered with snow and ice.

‘This way,’ said the
Doctor.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because rivers mean settlements
sooner or later.’

‘Sooner, I hope. I’m
freezing.’

‘I could still go back for my cape
…’

‘Look, Doctor! What’s
that?’

Jo pointed downstream to the
opposite bank, where there was a huge wooden construction. As
they moved closer, they saw what it was – a vast waterwheel fed
by a channel from the river. Then they saw that beyond it was
another one, exactly the same, and beyond that, more – six of
them in total – and all drawing water from the channel
underneath the heavy wooden wheels, which turned slowly but with
a power that was somehow threatening.

‘Fascinating.’

‘Is there a way across?’

‘Let’s head downstream. Maybe
there’s a bridge. I wouldn’t want to cross that river, even on a
summer’s day.’

The river was deep and moved in
eddying currents. Ice crusted its banks, and even looking at it
seemed to sap the warmth from Jo’s blood. She shivered.

As they approached the first of
the waterwheels a bridge came into view beyond it, but before
they could get any further they heard shouts from across the
water and quickly threw themselves in the snow behind some tree
stumps on the riverbank.

The Doctor lifted his head. ‘It’s
all right. They haven’t seen us.’

‘Who?’ Jo couldn’t hide the worry
in her voice.

‘There’s a group of men on the
other side, beyond the wheels.’ The Doctor took another look.
‘It’s safe, Jo. Have a look.’

Jo peered across the water.
‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor.
‘I think there are two groups. They don’t seem to like each
other.’

Jo saw what he meant. There were
definitely two groups of warriors facing off in a clearing
between the waterwheels and the forest. They wore leather and
furs: boots up to the knee strapped round with cloth bindings,
thick furred tunics and fur-lined caps.

They were shouting at each other
and waving metal – swords and axes. Not actually fighting, but
clearly no love was lost between them, and they appeared to be
on the verge of a scuffle at the very least. One man in the
left-hand group waved an enormous hammer above his head, roaring
like thunder as he did so.

‘Posturing, that’s all,’ said the
Doctor. ‘Although …’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe more to come.’

He was right. Without warning, one
of the hammer-man’s group charged forward, wielding a war-axe
above his head, screaming.

There was sudden silence from all
the other men, a silence into which one voice rang out. It
sounded like a shout of warning, but it came from
behind
the charging
man.

He alone ignored it.

And then, whistling through the
snow-still air, a spear came from nowhere. A huge throw, an
impossible throw, and the spear stuck into the man’s
back.

He took one more step and then
pitched forward into the snow, as dead as the landscape around
him.

There was silence. No one moved on
either side.

‘Gungnir?’ whispered Jo.

Before the Doctor could answer,
the thrower of the spear came into view, walking out of the
trees. It was hard to be sure at the distance they were looking
from, but the Doctor and Jo could see he was a tall man, taller
than the others. He appeared to be older too, with a long beard,
but no less powerful for that.

His own men moved away from him as
he approached; their enemies backed away too, heading for the
bridge back across to the side of the river where the Doctor and
Jo were hiding.

The spear-thrower walked slowly up
to the man he’d killed – his
own
man – and, putting a boot on his
back, pulled his spear free. He shouted a word to his men, and
they turned to go.

‘Oh my –’ said Jo, but she didn’t
finish because hands grabbed her.

She tried to scream, but a hand
clamped across her mouth and as she was pulled to her feet she
saw the Doctor being grasped by two men, who were dressed like
the ones they’d just seen. They dragged him towards the
river.

The Doctor struggled to fight his
way free, and Jo managed to bite the hand over her mouth. She
got a cuff to the back of her head, and her vision swam. As she
struggled to stay conscious, Jo saw the Doctor wrench free of
one of his attackers and dispatch a firm blow to the man’s neck,
sending him to his knees.

Then the other man swung at the
Doctor, who ducked. The man flailed past him, catching the
Doctor’s jacket as he fell. Jo watched in horror as both he and
the Doctor tumbled into the fast and icy river, and were swept
away.

Jo fainted, and her attacker
allowed her to fall limply to the ground.

When Jo woke up, the world was
upside-down. It also seemed that there was an earthquake in
mid-rumble. It took her a moment to realise that she was
hanging, her wrists and ankles tied, over the shoulder of one of
the Vikings, and that he was jogging with her through the trees
as if she were a paper doll.

The second thing she noticed was
the smell. The most terrible stink she’d ever had the misfortune
to come across, so bad it made her want to retch.
Must be bathtime tomorrow
then
, she thought, wrinkling her
nose.

The third thing she thought was
that it was actually terrifying being pressed so close to a hot
and sweaty Viking. She could feel the muscles in his shoulder
working, pushing into her stomach, and at that point she
screamed and tried to wriggle her way off.

Jo thought she heard him laughing,
but, either way, his arms tightened round her legs and she knew
she was going nowhere.

She could see other men running
beside her, though upside-down it was hard to tell how many.
They were silent for the most part, though from time to time one
of them would bark a single word that she didn’t catch.

And then, finally, she remembered
the Doctor.

She’d seen him washed away into
the powerful currents of the river, a river so cold there were
plates of ice tumbling along in its waters.

She told herself not to panic.
He’d be all right. He always was. Wasn’t he?

Apart from those times he’d told
her about when he sort of died and then sort of turned into
another version of himself.

Another version of himself who
might not even know who she was, and here she was almost two
thousand years before she’d been born.

She started to panic.

Get a
grip, Josephine
, she thought.
Get a grip on
yourself.

He’ll be
OK.

He’ll get
out of the river somehow.

He’ll see
these tracks in the snow and he’ll come and find
you
.

He’ll be
fine and the TARDIS will be fine because these
ignorant savages can’t even see it, just like the
Doctor said
.

From a distance the Doctor
watched as a group of about twenty men loaded the TARDIS on to
the back of a large low wagon pulled by four sturdy oxen. Then
it trundled away through the trees.

‘Well, it was just a theory,’ he
said.

He’d fought with the man in the
river for a long time, but finally the poor human had succumbed
to the cold and had been washed away to Valhalla.

The Doctor had managed to fish
himself out of the river and had stood dripping on the
riverbank, but within minutes the water had begun to freeze,
threatening to turn him into a living ice sculpture.

The cold didn’t worry him unduly.
Given that his normal body temperature was way below human
levels, the dip in the river had been no more than refreshing,
certainly not deadly.

But it was a nuisance being damp
and icy, so he began to walk briskly back along the bank, trying
to pick up Jo’s trail. One of the advantages of having a binary
vascular system was that he could always pump his blood faster
than normal if he chose to, raising his body temperature at
will. Very soon his clothes were steaming as he walked along,
and in twenty minutes he was as dry as a good martini.

‘As I always say,’ he said, ‘two
hearts are better than one.’

He soon came back in sight of the
waterwheels and the bridge, and hesitated for a moment. He had
to find Jo. But something wasn’t right about these waterwheels,
and he knew he should investigate.

He hesitated a little longer. The
most important thing was to find the spear. But then there was
Jo. Jo Grant. Loyal, funny, quick-witted Jo. If anything
happened to her … He’d had other companions before, of course,
and all wonderful people, in the various weird ways humans could
be, but none of them was quite like Jo …

‘Five minutes,’ he said to
himself.

A quick look at the waterwheels
and then find Jo. If they’d wanted to kill her she’d be dead
already, and five minutes wouldn’t help that.

He crossed the bridge to the far
side of the river, and as he approached the closest waterwheel
he saw something in the distance they’d missed before.

Through the forest, up and away on
a hill, was a clearing, and in the clearing stood a wooden
temple, towering and vast.

He felt a strong urge to go and
take a look; even from this distance and looking through the
trees he could see it was covered in fantastic carvings that he
longed to examine, but Jo had been taken the other way, and
there were the wheels, and the spear, and …

He hurried on.

There was no one in sight, but he
approached the first waterwheel cautiously – being shot at and
dunked in a river was quite enough fun for one day.

The wheel was a heavy undershot
device: a long wooden leat channelled water from the river to
the bottom of its fins, which turned constantly in the
flow.

He moved on to the next wheel, and
the next, and now, in the far distance, he heard the sounds of
axes and saws, of wood being chopped in the forest. He squinted
towards the direction of the sounds and watched as part of the
forest trembled, and then a gap appeared in the canopy as a tree
came down.

‘They’re making more …’ he said,
wondering why they needed all these wheels, all this potential
power – power that was useless unless it was feeding
something.

But what?

The axle of each waterwheel
entered a wheelhouse, and the Doctor approached the nearest one.
The door was locked; a big iron keyhole was set into the heavy
wood.

The Doctor pulled his sonic
screwdriver out of his pocket and, once inside, his eyes
widened.

There was no primitive set of cogs
and drive-shafts, no trip-hammers or cam-wheels. No milling or
grinding stones. Instead, the axle of the wheel went straight
into a large metal box, from which heavy-duty electrical cable
emerged and then disappeared into the dirt floor of the
wheelhouse.

Neither the cable nor the box
looked like they had anything to do with Earth in the second
century
AD
.

It was as he’d left the
wheelhouse that he’d heard the snort of an ox from across the
river, and that was when he’d seen the TARDIS being towed
away.

The Doctor put his head down and
made for the bridge.

‘Hang on, Jo,’ he said. ‘Hang
on.’

Jo knelt on a hard earth
floor.

In front of her stood a huge
warrior, his face almost obscured by a thick beard, though his
eyes were clear enough to see and burned down at her, making her
want to melt into the ground and disappear.

Around them were the men who’d
brought her, and around
them
was a vast dark hall. A fire-pit at its centre sent smoke
curling up into the thatch of the roof.

She’d been carried through a
village – a series of small huts and some larger houses – and
then brought before this man, who was evidently the
chief.

‘I,’ announced the man, ‘am
Njord.’

Jo understood him perfectly. She
knew the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS had a certain range,
and, although the Doctor had never said how great that range
was, she knew the TARDIS must be close enough for it to make her
hear the ancient Norse dialect as English.

Njord stepped a little closer to
Jo and began walking round her. Her wrists and ankles were still
bound. She longed to stand and give this old goat a piece of her
mind, but she knew she’d most likely fall over if she tried,
which wasn’t the effect she was after.

Njord grunted in satisfaction.
‘Everything is as Frey said.’

‘Frey?’ asked Jo. ‘Who’s
Frey?’

Njord ignored her. He clapped his
hands and gave a short laugh that sounded more like a bark. Then
he stopped in front of Jo and bent down, putting his face right
up close to hers.

Her nose wrinkled.

‘Where is the Healer?’ he
said.

‘The who?’ asked Jo.

‘My men say he drowned. He fell in
the river. But Frey says not to believe what you see with the
Healer.’

‘The Healer? You mean the
Doctor?’