Doctor Who: The Many Hands (3 page)

Martha stood, fighting for her breath next to the
Doctor. He just stood ramrod straight, holding
his psychic paper with one hand, and Martha's hand
with the other. With her back to the Castle at the top
of the hill, she had a perfect view of the city, all the
way back down the full mile of road to Holyrood
Palace at the foot of the hill. She could even make out
the deep blue of the Firth of Forth out there, and catch
the odd glimpse of the extinct volcano called Arthur's
Seat between the houses. She could see why the King
or Queen that owned the Castle had built it: it was a
beautiful view, even if it would be the last she ever
saw.

She saw the soldiers raise their muskets and
instinct told her to blink, as if her eyelids would stop
the bullets in their tracks. She didn't though: if the
Doctor felt safe enough to face the bullets down, then
so did she.

Even if the Doctor was clearly insane.

'Hold on,' said the grey-haired soldier, between
pants. 'He's right.'

Martha looked up at the Doctor in disbelief, but he
was watching the soldiers with that insane smile of
his spread all over his face. There was no way this was
going to work. No way.

'What d'you mean he's right?' one of the younger
soldiers snapped.

The muskets were still pointing at the Doctor and
Martha.

'He's right,' said the old, panting man. 'They made
part of the grounds the territory of Nova Scotia for
the sasine. And they're standing on it.'

'Oh, come on, Gordy!' shouted the other soldier.

Martha leant in close to the Doctor. 'What's sasine?'
she asked.

'It's part of the ceremony where they make you a
baronet.' The Doctor answered. He didn't take his eyes
off the soldiers' muskets, but still he grinned like the
Cheshire Cat that got the cream. 'They give you the
land you've been made baronet of – the sasine. Except
the Scots take it a little more literally here: they really
give you the land. But Nova Scotia is part of Canada.'

'Two months away,' Martha said, remembering.

'So it's much less trouble to make part of Old
Scotia a little piece of Nova Scotia, rather than sail to
the other side of the planet to pick up some dirt every
time you need to make someone a baronet.'

'And you just happened to know which bit to stand
on?'

The Doctor looked a little hurt.

'I am
really
a baronet,' he protested.

'Of Nova Scotia?'

'Bathgate,' he answered. 'But still...'

'Let's just shoot them,' one of the soldiers said,
raising his musket.

Martha looked at them, expecting the older soldier
to repeat that the Doctor was right, that he had the
power to order them away. He didn't. Instead he
looked at them with sad grey eyes and looked like he'd
much rather be somewhere else whilst somebody else
took the decision for him. Martha opened her mouth,
but the Doctor laid a warning hand on her arm.

'There's no need for any trouble,' he said, fixing
the older soldier with a look. 'You're just ordinary
soldiers: nobody's expecting you to know about
things like this. But if you get it wrong you'll be in all
sorts of trouble. There's not really a lot you can do, is
there?'

It sounded so reasonable the way he said it, Martha
half-expected them to lay down their muskets and
surrender right there. Instead, the youngest of the
soldiers had a brainwave.

'Gordy,' he said to the old soldier. 'You go back to
the Tolbooth and get McAllister. He's the high heid
yin: let him have the trouble.'

'Oh there's no need for that,' the Doctor said, a little
too fast. 'We can—'

'Gordy!' the youngster snapped. 'You go now.'

Gordy stood for a moment, wracked by indecision.
Martha could see it on his face, and the pair of them
could see that the youngster had his own particular
solution to the problem in mind. They both knew
that if Captain McAllister had wanted them dead, he
could have easily said so... but equally, they could see
that the young soldier had made his mind up. And
anything he did now would be his doing and his doing
alone: McAllister wouldn't have any call to spread the
blame around.

'Aye, Mac,' Gordy said, letting his head fall. 'I'll fetch
McAllister.'

He didn't look at Martha as he ran back down to the
Tolbooth. Probably his conscience wouldn't allow it.

The Doctor let out a satisfied sigh. 'Good,' he said.
'Now it's just the four of us.'

The two soldiers looked at each other nervously,
and kept their muskets high. The Doctor didn't even
seem to notice, and took a step forward, smiling
disarmingly. Not disarmingly enough: the muskets
were still pointing at him. Martha did her best to keep
a positive attitude, but an image of the Doctor lying
on the ground with a few extra holes in him kept
flashing into her mind's eye.

'Doctor...' she said warningly as he took another
step.

'Don't worry,' the Doctor said, a hand sliding slowly
into his jacket's inside pocket. 'There's only two of
them now, and I haven't shown you everything this
can do yet.'

In his hand, the sonic screwdriver glinted briefly.

The two soldiers looked at each other again, as
if trying to decide if the small wand was some kind
of weapon. Or perhaps they were deciding between
them if the Doctor was a witch, and this was his
magic wand. They both tensed and moved their
fingers towards the triggers. As they took their eyes
off him, the Doctor moved forwards again. Now the
musket barrels were pressing against his chest. Each
heart would get its own bullet.

'Doctor...' Martha said again.

The Doctor's hand moved.

Martha flinched, expecting both the crack of
gunfire and the sonic screwdriver to do something
strange and terrible. Neither happened: the Doctor
didn't even move to turn the screwdriver on. Instead,
he flicked it, rapping the younger soldier firmly
between the eyes with the blue-bulbed end. The
young soldier was so startled that he dropped his
musket and immediately began rubbing his head. As
he did, the Doctor stamped hard on the other's toes.
The soldier's musket clattered to the floor as he let out
a cry and started hopping up and down.

The Doctor performed a quick bow, during which
he scooped the two fallen muskets up into his arms
and spun to face Martha.

'Shall we run?' he asked politely.

Martha let out a laugh, and ran.

'I can't believe you got away with that,' Martha laughed
as she ran.

If he was entirely honest, neither could the Doctor.

'It's 1759,' he said by way of explanation. 'Scotland's
been dragged into the Seven Years War because of the
Act of Union: all the best soldiers are over in Europe
fighting the French. The ones that are left behind...
well, have you ever watched
Dad's Army
?'

'Doctor,' said Martha. She pointed down the side of
the hill, where a red-coated soldier was manoeuvring
a dead body onto the back of a cart before covering it
with a thick, oiled tarpaulin.

The Doctor couldn't see much of the body before it
was covered, but he thought it was a good bet that it
was their miraculous autopsy-surviving, stagecoachhijacking
friend.

'All right,' the Doctor said, rubbing his hands
together. 'Who fancies hitching a ride to the Surgeon's
Hall?'

'I'm not sure we'd make it very far,' Martha said,
pointing again.

The Doctor looked back down Castle Hill. Down
where the road turned into the Lawnmarket, he could
see a knot of red jackets racing up towards them. The
Doctor could practically hear Captain McAllister
throwing out inspirational barbs to keep the men
moving. Behind them, he could hear the two guards
he'd embarrassed starting to gather their wits: if the
two groups of soldiers met without the Doctor and
Martha between them, they'd search in every house,
under every tarpaulin, until they found them.

'OK,' the Doctor said, thinking fast. His eyes
wandered to the north, and the volcanic rocks
falling away to the Loch below. 'Here's what we do.
I'll examine the body and see if I can work out why
he was up and about this morning. You distract the
soldiers: if you go that way, you can lose them on
the side of the hill and double back to the Surgeon's
Hall. There's a secret path there I'm sure they'll have
forgotten about: Thomas Randolph used it in 1314 to
retake the Castle from the English...'

The Doctor tailed off as he saw the look Martha
was giving him.

'You don't know who Thomas Randolph was, do
you?' he said.

Martha shook her head.

'And you don't know where the secret path is?'

'Actually,' Martha said, trying to hide a smile, 'I
don't know where the Surgeon's Hall is either.'

The Doctor rubbed his eyes. He needed to see that
body again, but there was no time. Why was he always
living his life at such a frenetic pace, forever running
out of time when he was supposed to be a Time Lord?
Wouldn't it be nice to spend a couple of hours just
immersing himself in the atmosphere?

'Right!' he cried, pointing at Martha. '
You
stay
with the body.
I'll
lead the soldiers away. But the next
time we're in the twenty-first century, I'm going to
have a good long talk with your tutors about their
curriculum.'

Martha smiled, and then she was gone.

The two young soldiers appeared behind him, and
the Doctor spun with a look of guilty surprise on his
face. Nine hundred years old, and he'd still make a
pretty good Hamlet.

The Doctor pointed to the north as Martha ran to
the south.

'Don't stop, Martha!' he yelled, introducing a note
of panic to his voice. 'I'm right behind you.'

And then he ran.

Thankfully, the soldiers quickly gave chase.

Martha heard the Doctor shout, but didn't turn.
Luckily, the soldier didn't seem to have noticed: he
was round the other side, securing the tarpaulin over
the back of the cart. Martha crept up to the side of the
vehicle and tried to keep the wheels between him and
her. As the soldier moved round to the front to pat the
horse patiently standing there, Martha snuck round
to the back and lifted the tarpaulin.

There was a smell that made her wrinkle her nose.

The body in the back was definitely the man from
the stagecoach: his shirt and trousers were battered
and ripped from when he'd fallen from the roof, and
Martha could make out the vivid red of the autopsy
scar down his bare chest. He wasn't the first body she
had seen, but he was the first that she was planning
on lying down next to and somehow she thought she
owed him some kind of apology for that.

'Sorry,' she whispered as she clambered up onto
the cart.

She slid under the tarpaulin, inching up beside the
body slowly, trying not to make any sudden wriggles
that the soldier might spot. The tarpaulin felt heavy,
and didn't let any light under it. The smell was almost
overpowering, but she knew that the soldier would
hear if she made a sound. Then she would be caught,
and the Edinburgh surgeons would do whatever they
did to bodies in the eighteenth century, and the Doctor
wouldn't be able to do whatever he wanted to do to
this particular body from the eighteenth century. All
the same, it was hard not to gag.

She closed her eyes and told herself how useful all
this would be if she had to take any history of medicine
exams when she got back home. Her leg started to itch,
but there was nothing she could do. She'd have to just
think about something else. Like the possibility that
the itch was a fleabite: how common was the Bubonic
Plague in the eighteenth century?

'Yar!' shouted the soldier, and the cart jolted
forwards.

The body jolted too.

Martha ended up hugging it most of the way
there.

The Doctor moved as fast as he dared, leaping down
the grassy slope of Castle Hill with all the abandon
of a mountain goat, but one that liked to stop and
enjoy the views every now and again. The soldiers
were coming down behind him, but much less surefootedly:
it was a delicate dance between them,
making sure they didn't get close enough to shoot
him but didn't get so far behind that they lost him and
started searching around the Castle again.

To make things more complicated, he didn't want
to go so fast that his pursuers lost their footing and
fell down the side of the hill. OK, so it wasn't Mount
Everest, but it was still a good drop to the bottom, and
even if they didn't break anything on the way down
they'd probably catch dysentery if they landed in the
water below. Edinburgh might be in the middle of its
Enlightenment, but it still hadn't invented the sewer
system yet. Unless you counted throwing it out the
window and letting the rain wash it into the Loch as
a 'system'.

He'd give Martha a couple more minutes, and
then he'd find Randolph's path and disappear. Over
in Ayrshire, Rabbie Burns had just been born: if he'd
been a little older, he might have been able to tell the
Doctor what happened to the best laid plans of mice
and men...

A musket cracked off a shot behind him.

It was a foolish attempt, and any good soldier would
have known it: the Doctor was too far away and too
skittish to hit. But, as he'd told Martha, good soldiers
were in short supply at the moment, and one of the
not-so-good ones thought he could make the shot. At
least he'd had the sense to stop running so he could
aim, for all the good it did as the musketball thudded
into the stone a few feet behind the Doctor.

The stone shattered, and shrapnel flew into the air.

One of the soldiers was caught in the face by it.

He let out a cry that mingled with the sharp bark
of Captain McAllister, calling the gunman a selection
of choice words. The injured soldier threw his hands
up to his face, but he didn't stop running: he tripped
over his own feet and went tumbling down the side of
Castle Hill, towards the Nor' Loch and its foul waters
below.

'Of course,' the Doctor thought to himself, 'I could
always keep going.'

He altered his course without slowing, charging
down the side of the hill himself at a speed almost
impossible to check. Large chunks of volcanic rock
seemed to throw themselves under his feet, and he'd
use them as springboards to launch himself away
even faster. Two hundred years later, he told himself,
and there would be a nice gentle footpath going
down here. And a fairground waiting for him at the
bottom.

'Fire!' McAllister shouted, letting the Doctor know
he'd strayed within range of the muskets.

They missed. He'd have some time while they
reloaded.

The soldier was still tumbling, no longer struggling
to try to stop his fall: now he just fell limply, either
resigned to his fate or knocked unconscious by a
glancing blow from the old volcano. The Doctor
hoped he was still conscious: he'd do himself less
damage if he fell limp, but a blow that made him
insensible could easily do so permanently.

'Hold on,' he shouted, and launched himself again.

The Doctor dived, cutting across the path of the
falling soldier and grabbing him like he was a long
64
lost love. Arms wrapped tight around each other,
the two began to roll sideways across the hill, all
downward motion halted by the force of the Doctor's
impact. For a few more moments, they rolled, and
then the Doctor spread out his legs and an arm and
suddenly he was lying on his back on the grass. The
soldier was lying across his chest, his head face down
on the ground.

For a moment, the Doctor admired the clouds
again.

'Can you hear me?' the Doctor asked.

The soldier let out a little whimper.

'It's all right,' the Doctor said softly. 'You're going
to be all right.'

Gently, the Doctor slid himself out from under the
soldier. He held the boy's head as he rolled him onto
his back. He was little more than sixteen. There were
streaks of blood rolling down his face, and tiny stone
chips imbedded in the flesh of his forehead. His eyes
were screwed tight shut, and he was clutching his
arm. The Doctor didn't have to look long to see that
it was broken.

'What's your name?' he asked. 'I'm the Doctor.'

'Craig,' the boy grunted.

'All right, Craig,' the Doctor said. 'I'm just going to
look at your eyes.'

The Doctor carefully lifted each eyelid in turn: no
damage from flying shrapnel. The arm was broken,
but it would mend. It could have been a lot worse: he
could have broken his back, or his neck, or his skull.

'All right, then,' the Doctor said, and then stopped.

'Don't move,' McAllister ordered.

Ten soldiers stood behind him on the hill.

Each had a musket trained on the Doctor.

McAllister looked down on his prisoner, and sneered.
He was dressed like a traveller, his long coat being able
to hide any number of things. His hair was too short,
and that grin that he affected was decidedly manic.
But he wasn't grinning now. No, he was glaring at
McAllister as if he had ten muskets behind him and
McAllister was the worst kind of criminal. Even if he
hadn't attacked the colonial's transport, McAllister
would have found some reason to lock him away in
the Tolbooth.

Farr lay on the ground where he had fallen. There
was blood seeping through the arm of his uniform.

The pathetic boy looked as if he were about to cry.

'His arm needs setting,' the prisoner said.

It was a challenge.

'Don't concern yourself about the welfare of my
men,' McAllister advised. 'I know what's best for
them. On your feet, Farr.'

The boy didn't move.

'On your
feet
!' McAllister repeated sharply.

With a groan, the boy slowly pulled himself to his
feet. The prisoner made to help him, but a nod from
McAllister made sure that three muskets pushed him
back again. All he could do was glare impotently as
Farr tried to straighten himself into attention, whilst
still holding his arm. It looked like it was broken: he
would be no use for the moment.

'Sir,' Farr said weakly.

'Get yourself to the infirmary,' McAllister ordered.

'Sir,' Farr repeated.

He stood for a moment, swaying, and looked back
up the hill he had tumbled down. McAllister said
nothing. He turned to the prisoner, who looked as if
he might have some words for the occasion but was
biting them back. So he was clever enough to know
that McAllister wouldn't take any suggestions in front
of his men.

'You two,' McAllister barked at the two muskets
furthest back. 'Help him get there.'

The prisoner didn't say anything. But his eyes said
thank you. McAllister kept his face blank, and paced
over to the prisoner, standing behind him to face his
men. Eight muskets stared back at him, and he knew
if he'd done his job right, at least three of the soldiers
holding them would be tempted to fire: there wasn't
a leader alive who could be loved
and
effective. The
prisoner didn't turn though; he had military blood
in him somewhere, and resisted the urge to face the
enemy.

'My men tell me you have a passable Scots accent,'
McAllister said casually.

'Well,' the prisoner demurred.

'But I don't believe you are Scots born,' the Captain
continued. He leant in close to the prisoner's ear and
hissed: 'Am I right?'

'You could definitely say that,' the prisoner agreed.

'And you attacked Mr Franklin's stagecoach.'
McAllister pretended to consider. 'Or did you?'

The prisoner turned and faced McAllister at last.
There was something about his eyes. Not just the
depth of sadness in them, or the certain fact that they
had witnessed battle. No, it was simply that they didn't
once flicker, didn't once try to look at anything but the
Captain's face. There were ten men with muskets and,
although he could no longer see them, the prisoner
cared not a jot for them.

'I didn't attack that coach,' the prisoner said.

Captain McAllister nodded briskly.

'Mooney,' he called to one of the older soldiers. 'Have
the prisoner taken up to the Castle and hanged.'

'Sir,' Mooney snapped and shouldered his musket.

McAllister sniffed dismissively.

'You are a Scot sympathiser,' McAllister sneered.

'Well,' the prisoner answered him with feigned
disregard, 'I did know a man who fought at
Culloden.'

'You may think you have a common cause with the
colonials,' McAllister said, staring hard at the prisoner.
'You may even think you may learn from each other.
But let me tell you: for fifty years England and Scotland
have faced their fortunes together, and together they
shall face them for a hundred more. Whatever your
unpatriotic kind may do. Take him away.'

Mooney stepped forward to obey his orders.

'There is just one thing,' the prisoner said casually.

Now it would come, McAllister thought. The
depressingly familiar protestations of innocence,
followed inevitably by the cries of justification and
the outrage at the English subjugation of the noble
Scot. McAllister had served here for ten years, and
he knew there was nothing noble about them: the
more he endured, the more he thanked the Lord that
his parents had seen fit to escape to London and raise
him properly there.

'The Loch,' the prisoner said instead. 'I bet it's had
quite a few ghost sightings in its time, yes?'

McAllister raised an eyebrow. 'The stagnant water
gives rise to vapours that gather in the Closes and
make the weak-minded think they have seen things.
Only a fool would believe anything otherwise.'

'Oh, of course,' the prisoner said, nodding in
agreement. Why hadn't Mooney taken him yet? What
was the man staring at? 'Except of course, we're not in
the Closes now, and I don't think they look like scotch
mist.'

McAllister's men were all staring over his shoulder,
their mouths hanging slack in a manner that shamed
their uniforms. The prisoner didn't seem so surprised,
so clearly whatever trick this was he'd been well
warned of it. He nodded over McAllister's shoulder,
an expression of innocence on his face intended to
convince his captor that he wouldn't bolt.

All the same, McAllister looked.

His mouth fell open.

The thick, dank waters of the Nor' Loch were just a
few feet away from where they stood, and they boiled
in a way that was not natural. Stinking gas broke from
every bubble, filling the air with a thick sulphurous
mist. McAllister couldn't tell if it was simply the
product of the boiling of the waste the townsfolk had
been dumping in the water for years. Somehow, it
didn't seem important to ask.

Coming up out of the water were dozens of weedstrewn
corpses.

Each was walking.