Doctor Who: Marco Polo

 

'It's freezing cold outside,' Susan
said, looking at the external temperature thermometer in the TARDIS,
'minus twenty.'

'Fahrenheit or centigrade?' Barbara
asked.

'Centigrade,' Susan replied. Ian did a
rapid mental calculation.

'Thirty-six degrees of frost,
fahrenheit,' he said. 'Chilly.'

'Chilly, where chilly, Grandfather?'
Susan asked. The Doctor went to the digital time-orientation printout
on the central control panel and pressed the appropriate button.

'Earth,' he said, 'in the year one
thousand two hundred and eighty-nine.'

'Certainly not the Caribbean, then,'
Ian muttered.

'There's no call for sarcasm,
Chesterton.' The Doctor sounded vexed. 'We'll move on.' He operated
the dematerialisation control and all the lights went out. Hastily,
the Doctor took his pencil-torch from his breast pocket and shone it
on the main fuse box.

'The circuit-breaker's jumped,' he
said, 'must've been a minor overload somewhere.' He reconnected the
breaker but nothing happened. 'I can't work by torchlight,' he added
testily. 'Open the door, someone.'

'What? In minus twenty!' Susan
exclaimed.

'Put on your coat, child,' the Doctor
replied, 'but open the door so that I can see what I'm doing.'

'It might be the middle of the night,'
Barbara observed.

'And it might equally be the middle of
the day,' the Doctor retorted. Ian opened the door and was hit by an
icy gust of wind. He shut it quickly.

'Daylight,' he reported.

'Then wrap up warmly,' the Doctor
advised.

'You'd think that something as
sophisticated as the TARDIS would have a stand-by emergency lighting
system,' Ian grumbled.

'It doesn't need one,' the Doctor
snapped. 'This situation can't happen.' Out of respect, the others
refrained from pointing out that it could and had.

Using the pencil-torch for light they
put on their warmest clothes and Ian opened the door again. The
sunlight reflected off the snow was blinding and they had to squint
against it whilst their eyes adjusted.

Ian, Susan and Barbara went outside.

'Where are we?' Susan asked.

'The Arctic, Antarctica, the Andes,
Siberia, the Himalayas,' Ian replied, 'but not the Alps.'

'Why not?' Barbara said. Ian grinned at
her.

'No one's yodelling.'

'Look at those.' Susan was awestruck as
she pointed to the huge prints in the snow.

'A yeti, an abominable snowman,'
Barbara ventured. Ian shielded his eyes and looked at the horizon.
There were mountains all around but the TARDIS stood on an undulating
plateau.

'I don't know where we are,' he
murmured.

'On the top of the world, perhaps,'
Susan said.

'Possibly,' Ian replied as the Doctor
came to the door of the ship.

'Chesterton,' he called, 'may I have a
word with you?' Ian went back into the TARDIS. On the central control
panel was a small black box with a hole burnt in one side. The Doctor
picked it up.

'We are in dire straights, young man,'
he said. 'This is the energy distributor for the TARDIS and it's gone
to pot. No heat, no light, no power, nothing.'

'How long will it take you to repair it
or make another one?'

'Three or four days,' the Doctor
shrugged, 'longer than we have to live. We'll freeze to death inside
because as it becomes colder the interior will turn into a cold
storage room.'

'And outside, we'll freeze to death
anyway,' Ian added. The Doctor nodded. 'Then I'd better find fuel for
a fire to keep us warm.'

'Up here?' the Doctor exclaimed, 'what
do you expect to find?'

'Heaven only knows,' Ian replied, 'but
I must try.' As Ian went to the door the Doctor asked him to send in
Susan to help him.

When Susan had gone, Ian told Barbara
the truth of the situation.

'What are we going to do?' she asked.

'Follow those imprints. You go in one
direction and I'll take the other. But not too far,' he warned.
'Remember how cold it is and you must be able to get back. So be
careful and shield your eyes as much as you can against the glare.'
Barbara nodded and they set off in different directions.

Ian spread out his gloved fingers and
held his hands at right angles in front of his eyes,
peering through the gaps as he followed the tracks. Barbara cupped
her hands in front of her eyes, looking through the space between the
sides of her palms and little fingers which meant she had no lateral
vision at all unless she turned her head from side to side.

The snow was crisp and hard. Barbara
thought it was probably very deep but packed, as her boots only sank
into it as far as her ankles. Suddenly, she saw a second set of
prints cutting across the ones she was following. She turned her head
and saw a furry monster standing on its hind legs staring at her.
Barbara's cupped hands dropped down to her mouth and she screamed. It
frightened the monster which lumbered off down an incline and out of
sight just as Ian stumbled breathlessly up to her. Barbara pointed
out the direction it had taken.

'A monster, all fur, except for its
eyes which were narrow slits, was standing upright and staring at
me.'

'A yeti?'

'About your height.'

'Then human perhaps, wrapped up against
the cold.'

'I don't know. I was just so scared.'

Ian put his arm around her. 'I'll take
you back to the TARDIS.' They retraced their steps and told the
Doctor and Susan what had happened. The Doctor looked at Barbara.

'Did you notice anything distinctive
about it?' he asked.

'Its eyes. They were narrow slits,' The
Doctor turned back to Ian.

'Snow blindness mask,' he said, 'which
would mean it's human. And if that's so, there
must be shelter nearby.'

'I agree with you, Doctor,' Ian
replied.

'Then we'll shut the shop and follow
the prints.' The Doctor was brisk and business-like, then he looked
at each of them in turn. 'After all,' he added, 'we've nothing to
lose and everything to gain.' The Doctor pulled down the side flaps
of his fur hat over his ears, tied the strings under his chin, put on
a heavy pair of gloves, wrapped a scarf around his neck and locked
the TARDIS when they were outside.

They made their way to the point where
the tracks crossed, by which time the Doctor was struggling for air.

'So rarified up here,' he gasped, 'will
you help me, Chesterton?' Ian took the Doctor by the arm as they
followed the second set of prints to the edge of the slope.

'Look!' Susan exclaimed. Below them
about two hundred yards away was a magnificently coloured tent
surrounded by smaller, more simple ones. There were also six covered
wagons with long-haired oxen huddled together.

Ian tapped the Doctor on his arm and
mouthed the word 'look', pointing to his own shoulder with his thumb.
The Doctor looked cautiously behind them. There were seven fur-clad
warriors with scimitars in their gloved hands. One of them, taller
than the others and more richly dressed, stood slightly in front.
Both Susan and Barbara gasped when they saw them.

'Don't move,' the Doctor murmured as
the leader came towards them and silently inspected each one in turn.

'We are travellers lost upon this
mountain,' Ian said, 'and we ask you for shelter.' He pointed to the
tents as a man came out of the main one. The leader unbuttoned his
collar to reveal a hard, determined mouth.

'Hear me, Mongols,' he proclaimed, 'in
these parts there live evil spirits who take to themselves our
likeness to deceive us and lead us to our deaths. So let us now
destroy these spirits while they still retain our form or else they
will destroy us.'

'That's not true,' Ian protested,
'we're not devils, we are human beings like yourselves.'

'Cut them down,' the leader cried and
the six warriors came towards them.

'Stop Tegana, put up your scimitars,
all of you,' yelled the man Ian had seen come out of the tent. Tegana
turned to him.

'Would you have us killed?' he
protested. 'These are evil spirits.'

'I command you, in the name of mighty
Kublai Khan, whose seal I carry, to put up your scimitars,' the man
replied. Reluctantly, Tegana obeyed and the others followed suit. The
man looked at the Doctor and then turned to Ian.

'The aged one has mountain sickness,'
he said. 'We shall help him to the tent.' Ian and the man took the
Doctor, gasping for air, by his arms and virtually carried him down
the slope. Susan and Barbara were studying the man as they followed.
He was tall and handsome, in his mid-thirties, Barbara thought. He
wore a fur hat, a long leather coat with a fur collar and cuffed and
hemmed with fur trimmings.

'Who do you think he is?.' Susan
whispered.

'I was asking myself the same
question,' Barbara replied. 'He's not a Mongol, he's European and he
mentioned Kublai Khan, a great Mongol ruler who governed all of Asia
in the second half of the thirteenth century.'

'And according to the TARDIS, we're in
1289,' Susan added.

'Right,' Barbara said, 'and Kublai Khan
had in his service a young Venetian named Marco Polo.'

'I've heard of him,' Susan was excited.
'He told stories of his journeys and all the marvellous things he'd
seen. Do you really think it's him?'

Barbara smiled. 'Even if I'm wrong I'm
very grateful to him for saving us from Tegana, whoever he may be,
and his friends.'

As they reached the tent the Doctor
admitted he was quite out of breath. It was a tent inside a tent,
double-skinned to keep out the cold, and the inner one was lined with
furs to retain the heat of the fire which burned in the hearth at the
centre. The back of the inner tent was sectioned off into three
separate compartments. There was a carpeted hide ground sheet with
stools and small tables. Ian and the man took the Doctor over to a
stool beside the fire and sat him down. The man clapped his hands
twice and a pretty Chinese girl, of Susan's age, came out of one of
the compartments.

'Ping-Cho, we have visitors,' he said,
'who are cold and hungry.'

'Yes, Messer Marco,' she replied as
Barbara and Susan exchanged a glance. Ping-Cho went to a pot
suspended over the fire, took a spoon from the hearth, scooped out some liquid which she
poured into a goblet and handed it to the Doctor.

'Tea, my lord?' she asked in a small
sing-song voice.

'And very welcome too, my dear,' the
Doctor replied, sipping it. Marco smiled at the Doctor.

'I fear the liquid is not too warm,' he
said apologetically, 'but the cold is so intense it even robs a flame
of its heat.'

'It's not the cold,' Ian said, 'the
liquid boils at a lower temperature because there is so little air up
here.'

'The air is responsible?' Marco looked
puzzled.

'Rather the lack of it,' Ian replied,
'just as the lack of it gave the Doctor mountain sickness.' Marco
still didn't understand.

'Your family name is Polo, I believe,'
Barbara said brightly.

'It is, my lady. I am Marco Polo in the
service of the mighty Kublai Khan.' He smiled. 'But I do not know who
you are.'

'We're travellers,' said the Doctor
between sips. 'I am the Doctor. This is my granddaughter, Miss Susan
Foreman, Miss Barbara Wright and Mr Ian Chesterton.' Marco smiled a
greeting to each one.

'My companions are the Lady Ping-Cho
and the War Lord Tegana.' Susan smiled at Ping-Cho who joined her
hands in prayer and bowed to them. 'We travel to Shang-Tu,' Marco
added.

'That's in China, isn't it?' Barbara
asked. Marco looked perplexed.

'I have journeyed to many countries, my
lady Barbara, but I have never heard of China. Shang-Tu is in
Cathay.' Barbara put her hand to her forehead.

'Of course, it is,' she said, 'how
silly of me.' Marco looked at them, intrigued, and Tegana
stood suspiciously at the entrance to the inner tent.

'You must all be weary.' Marco set
about rearranging their sleeping accommodation, putting Susan with
Ping-Cho, giving his compartment to Barbara and adding that the
gentlemen would sleep in the main area. The Doctor stood up and
Ping-Cho took the goblet from him.

'We are deeply in your debt, sir,' he
said, 'for you have saved our lives twice-over.' Tegana's hand
tightened around the hilt of his scimitar. Marco smiled at the Doctor
and admitted that he was curious to know why they had been wandering
around on the Plain of Pamir with nightfall rapidly approaching.