Doctor Who: Combat Rock (11 page)

Kepennis and Wemus turned around to confront the Doctor. The warrior who had spoken so aggressively to them now ushered them to communicate with the group they had led into such peril. His balaclava was of black fur and he wore a necklace of bullets and a bracelet of bone. His eyes were malevolent as he waited for the guides to pass on his instructions.

Wemus looked cowed. Kepennis had dropped his machete and although his face was tense, he also appeared determined not to lose face in front of the tour group.

‘We are hostage of OPG now.’ he said simply. ‘Nothing we can do.’

‘OPG?’ asked the Doctor with obvious alarm. ‘What might they be, and what do they intend doing to us?’ His voice was full of stubborn indignation, but when the Papul with the black balaclava lifted his machete to prod at the Doctor’s gangly bow tie, he wisely stopped his blusterings and backed away a step, his mouth dropping open with almost comical dismay.

‘The Krallik order his men to take us to swamps in south.

They will negotiate with Indoni President for our release.’

Kepennis looked a little sheepish as he replied, as if it was all his fault they had fallen into this predicament. The real culprit, Wemus, seemed more interested in comforting Wina, who along with Santi, was looking rather wretched at this new eventuality. Jamie made an effort to aid in consoling the attractive Javee girl, but a guerrilla stepped in his way, bow and arrow raised meaningfully.

‘But who is the Krallik?’ demanded the Doctor, looking gingerly at the blade that still rested on his chest. ‘This...

ahem... gentleman here?’ He made a grotesque attempt at a smile for the benefit of the guerrilla, who was obviously the leader of the pack.

Kepennis shook his head. ‘No. Krallik only send instruction for tourist to be captured. He wait for us deep in swamp jungle far from here.’

Jamie had had enough. ‘Look, can ye no talk to them?’ he said exasperatedly, rounding on Kepennis and Wemus.

‘You’re Papul too: they’ll listen to you. We have tae find Victoria!’

‘Thank you, Jamie.’ the Doctor shushed him, fearful of excerbating the situation. ‘I’m sure you could put in a good word for us, Kepennis, and tell them the Indoni President wouldn’t possibly be interested in negotiating over us. We’re of absolutely no value at all!’

‘We are Papul too, you are right,’ Kepennis answered bleakly. ‘But these are OPG rebels who hate Indoni so very much.’ He paused. ‘And that mean us too, because we sell ourselves to Indoni for money, they think. To them, we betray our own people.’

As if to reinforce Kepennis’s words, one of the warriors cuffed Wemus around the head with a rifle butt as he attempted to put his arm around the dejected-looking Wina.

The guide yelped and backed off rapidly.

‘The OPG...’, the Doctor said ruminatively. ‘I take it they are Independence fighters opposed to Indoni rule in Papul?’

‘Operaki Papul Gallaki,’ Kepennis said warily. The leader was listening to the exchange in English with some interest and the Doctor could see that the warrior understood quite a lot of what was being said. Kepennis would do well to choose his words with care. ‘Freedom for Papul,’ he explained. ‘We are to aid them in their cause.’

The leader had clearly decided the hostages had received sufficient explanations. He barked an order to his men and the guerrillas began moving forward, corralling the tourists away from the burnt village and into the jungle.

The village smoked silently. A bird laughed and then the rain came. Hard and fast, pounding the leaves, pounding the hostages and their guards, turning the dirt to mud, the mud into streams.

The jungle welcomed them into its depths, closing around them like wet, slippery fingers.

Heads.

Everywhere it seemed. A reed bed of heads, rising above the water, above the pink mist, mugging horrifically at the canoe of guerrillas drifting across the lake towards the island.

Indoni heads mostly, but a couple of Papul faces joined the parade, traitors to the cause, or perhaps because they were simply too afraid to do what had to be done.

Wayun prickled with fear. He knew that was the desired reaction: the reason the heads were there, impaled upon the wooden stakes of the pier. Yet it was grotesque, horrible.

Were the tales true, then? Had the Krallik indeed gone mad?

He tried not to look at the array of heads, gazing instead at the black lilies floating in the water all around the boat. Yet the faces stayed with him; savaged expressions, butchery sculpted into every twist of mouth, convulsion of brow, insanity of eye.

The others said nothing, grimly quiet as the canoe nosed in towards the dock, its dilapidated motor silenced. Great bubbles of volcanic disturbance broke the surface of the lake here and there, as if a giant were releasing his last gasps of air from below, drowning on the lake bed.

The prow bumped against the pier and Wayun looked up again involuntarily. There was a recently decapitated head banging directly above him, the ripped neck stump shoved rudely on top of the stake like a bloody glove puppet. The eyes locked with his, and he was staring into the face of his brother, Tumal.

He could hear the sound of swamp Kroons, he could hear the gentle lapping of water against the wooden sides of the canoe. He could hear the clatter as the men rose to climb out of the vessel. He could hear it all, but understood none of it.

Nobody spoke to him. He felt the light pressure of a hand on his arm, but that meant nothing to him either. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but there was no need. Tumal answered it for him, although Wayun was sure his brother’s mouth didn’t move. Maybe it was the unblinking stare of his brother that had communicated to him, telling him in a dead man’s language all he needed to know.

Wayun rose to his feet, the canoe swaying madly. The others were waiting for him on the landing pier, their faces guarded, saying nothing. He stepped onto the pier, and one of his friends caught him as he nearly fell. Wayun stared at the man as if he had never seen him before. More guerrillas were approaching them along the pier, having emerged from the curtain of palms behind the primitive dock. One of them was watching Wayun carefully. He stopped in front of the guerrilla, his courage faltering at the last moment, his gaze falling away. Wayun reached out a hand, cupped the man’s chin, lifted it until the rebel was forced to look him in the eye again. There was no need to ask anything.

‘He opposed the Krallik, Wayun,’ the man said slowly.

Wayun cocked his head slightly, saying... nothing.

‘He protested most strongly about the Krallik’s tactics.

You know his orders: all tribes along the south coast must be tortured or killed if they do not concede to the Krallik’s will and deliver Indoni traders to him. Tumal...’ he hesitated, fidgeted with the machete in the belt of his khaki trousers.

‘Tumal said he was a tyrant, no better sometimes than Sabit himself.’ A great convulsion of water from out in the lake as some unseen beast threshed in battle. Then silence again.

‘He believes in purity. There is no room in his philosophy for weakness. This is war, Wayun. We
have
to be as strong as Sabit to stand any chance of winning. There is a virus in our land, and to remove it, we must be pure in our savagery... he looked away again. ‘That’s the reply I received to my questions about Tumal. And Wayun... his eyes were almost beseeching now, ‘I
did
ask. You must believe none of us wanted this. Tumal objected to the torture of an Indoni fisherman captured last week. The Krallik was inflamed. He referred to your brother as being a part of the virus weakening and killing his people. His voice was so very loud in our heads.

Wayun said nothing. His eyes never left those of the man who had spoken. Now another guerrilla intervened, placing a hand on Wayun’s shoulder. ‘The Krallik may be a little mad,’

he said slowly. ‘But he will secure freedom for all our people.

We have suffered, and will suffer more. But the Krallik will give us back our land if we stand together.’

Wayun walked away down the pier, ignoring them all. He passed through the fringe of palms, and there was the temple ahead of him, in a jungle clearing on the island. He stopped, gazing at the temple as if seeing it for the first time, although since joining the OPG, he had been here on at least a dozen occasions.

The temple was higher than the tallest palm tree, made of thatched grass, bamboo and broad, strong leaves. It was fashioned in the rounded shape of a huge, screaming head.

Wayun’s gaze left the snarl of the doorway/mouth and climbed past the two eye hole windows to the bulging forehead and the stakes emerging from the roof like spikes of hair. More heads adorned these stakes, rotting now, some merely dirty bone, the flesh scooped away by hungry birds.

Just below the stakes, where there were no windows, where there would be no light, was the Krallik’s lair.

Wayun entered the temple.

Inside the mouth, a large gloomy room. Logs carved into stools, benches and tables scattered around haphazardly.

Hammocks of vine and leaf hung from the low roof like burst cocoons. There were maybe fifteen men in the hot, airless room. Their balaclavas of fur were stacked on a log against the wall as they busied themselves fashioning knives from animal femur bones.

Most of them looked up at Wayun. A couple, maybe ashamed, continued to work on their knives, as if Wayun was not there. Wayun chose them.

He took a bone knife away from one man, tilted it in his hands, examining the handiwork. Still, the man did not look up. Wayun handed him back his weapon silently.

The fear had left him.

There was only one emotion he could feel now.

The men in the room watched him carefully, apart from the shamed, the cowardly. They waited for some outburst, some sign of rage.

Wayun had never been a violent man, a bitter man. He was well liked amongst the OPG guerrillas. An amiable, thoughtful, polite young man, earnest and fair, strong but not overly skilled in warfare.

The men in the room looked at Wayun, and realized they no longer knew him.

A different man stood among them.

They wondered what this stranger would do.

The tourists thought they were lucky.

They’d survived the Mumi attack in Jikora, and fled to nearby Wameen, a teeming trading port in northern Papul. The soldiers who had also survived the attack duly followed them, and acting upon orders from the President himself, duly arrested them. Supernatural Mumi aggression would not be tolerated, was the buzz on the colourful, if grubby streets of Wameen. And nor would any tourists unlucky enough to witness the miraculous and terrible occurrence.

Soldiers were everywhere. They marched the streets, bullying the stall-holders, jeering at the Papul men in their traditional penis gourds, trigger happy, and rape happy. Jikora was closed. The Mumi would not be coming out to play with any tourists today. Or tomorrow for that matter. By order of President Sabit.

Sabit was being the jovial host, and entertaining those tourists who had witnessed the horror at Jikora. Or at least his men at the army barracks in Wameen were fulfilling that role for him. The offworlders were all guests of the Indoni military, and if any of them were stupid enough to voice their outrage (oh, and of course they were; they were on holiday after all, and they weren’t
Papul
, goddammit!), they were treated to a special kind of police brutality. There would be no leak to the tourist worlds beyond. Jenggel. Sabit had already prepared his press statement to explain their disappearance.

The OPG had murdered them. But not to worry, the perpetrators had already been caught and executed, and any future tourists wanting to come to Papul should certainly have no fear of rebel aggression against democracy. But just in case, there would be special military protection for all parties interested in exploring the unique wonders that Papul, this exotic jewel in the Indoni crown, had to offer.

By the time Victoria arrived in Wameen, another ‘guest’

of the Indoni army, the tourists who had so luckily managed to escape the crazy horror of Jikora were already dead.

The Doctor had made several attempts to engage the guerrilla leader in conversation as they made their way through the wet jungle. It had stopped raining as abruptly as it began, and now the jungle opened its throat more vociferously than before, a cornucopia of strange noises and cries surrounding them, the rainforest truly refreshed and wakened by its late-afternoon shower.

At first the Doctor suspected the man did not actually speak any English, despite being obviously able to understand a good deal of it. He had tried to communicate with him via Kepennis, but the guide looked more concerned about the gun barrel jostling him from behind than interested in chatting to their captors.

At last the man yielded to the Doctor’s incessant questions. He was walking behind the Doctor, a machete at the ready should the alien try any sudden moves. His face was weary, his eyes bloodshot, and the Doctor guessed that he had been travelling for some time with his squad of guerrillas. But despite the machete, despite the sternness of his expression, the Doctor could see a passion in the man’s large eyes that was not purely fanaticism. He was handsome in the broad-featured, animated fashion that all Papul men seemed to share. He was undeniably powerful and fierce-looking with it, but a gentleness shone through that spurred the Doctor on in his persistent attempts at understanding the guerrillas.

Of course, the Doctor knew exactly the right questions to ask too.

‘They different to us, alien. As different to us, as you.’ His English was imperfect, but up to now the Doctor had not known whether he could speak any at all, so that hardly mattered. ‘You can see,’ he lifted his machete to gesture at Santi’s rounded rump just ahead of them, the object of more than a few of the guerrillas’ appreciative glances, as indeed was Wina’s. ‘Indoni not look like us, so why they think we belong to them? Papul is independent country, alien. Our island separate –’ he was searching for the words, his passion rising to confound his articulation, ‘– in geography, in culture, in flora and... and fauna.
Everything
different here to Indoni islands. We been invaded...”diplomatically”...’ and here he spat into the dripping undergrowth beside him as he walked.