It was somewhere in the Second Century BC, and feminism hadn't been invented yet. If someone had told Hasdrubal Boetharch as a young man that one day he'd take orders from a woman, he'd have slit them across their chests just for suggesting it. But it was a long time since he had considered himself a young man, though by counting it had only been three years.
The siege had been going forever for him now. He looked down at the Romans every morning from the citadel at the top of the city, a swarm of gray preventing any food from entering his world. This was the capital of the second mightiest Empire in the world, but you wouldn't know it to look at its people now. Even the strongest soldiers were pale and gaunt from starvation, showing signs of diseases that might prove as fatal as the war. Death had started its long hold on the city— but Hasdrubal knew how much harder it would grip if ever the Romans broke through.
"Tell me again," he said to the woman who was now his ruler. "Tell me about the prophecy.
The woman smiled and said the same thing she said every morning, in a voice someone thousands of years in the future might have said was a little bit Northern. Not that she was from the north of anywhere, of course: she was an alien, and she was a Time Lord.
But she was not the Doctor.
"Prophecy?" she said. "Grand word, that, when you're just talking about something that happens."
"Whatever you call it, I want to hear. I need resolve, now more than ever. I went hungry last night, did you know that? The chief defender of this city, and there's not enough for me to eat! An army can't survive on a woman's stories," he said. "But it helps us all go on when we understand what's at stake."
The woman smiled and began to tell her story.
"This city," she said. "Carthage. It's still great now. Name known across all of the world you know. But in the future that's from—" she gestured at the thing in the centre of the room, and shrugged— "nobody's really heard of you."
Hasdrubal swallowed. "Then we are forgotten?"
"Not completely. Does the name Tunisia mean anything to you?"
"Why would it?" said Hasdrubal, as he had done many times before.
"You wouldn't, if I hadn't already said. But it's a popular country in the future. Known for its ruins. Roman ones. Mosaics and coliseums where men fought to the death, far out there in the scorching desert sands. And underneath those ruins are some other ones nobody visits, all broken and ugly, forgotten. And hardly anyone knows how that proud country," she smiled, "might once have gone by another name…"
Despite himself, Hasdrubal gave an anguished roar.
"No more," he said. "That's horror enough for a morning like this. My stomach will give me the rest of the suffering I need."
The woman raised an eyebrow. "But you asked me to tell you the story."
"I always forget, 'till it's told. How it's a tale of something awful that will soon come to pass. And how close it is in beginning to begin."
"The Romans," said the woman, "think that prophecies can be changed."
The general gestured to the huge thing in the room. "And this is a way of changing it?"
"Oh, Hasdrubal. It'll make the sun set on their empire. And it'll do it in a very literal way."
"To wipe them out, as Hannibal once tried. That would be justice. You know what they say, in their senate back in Rome?"
"I've heard it!" smiled the woman. "Spent some time there, a life or so ago. We'd all be sitting through some boring speech or other, and then the worst of them'd be banging his fist on some passing stool or slave. 'Carthage must be destroyed!' he'd cry, and all of us would agree. We'd below it, again and again; banging our fists against everything in the building like we thought we were in Carthage there and then."
"It's a travesty," said Hasdrubal. "But we had weapons here before yours. I hope not to need the tricks of outspoken women," he snarled, "but I can't pretend I'm not grateful to have them now."
The woman looked at the thing she'd brought back to the past, barely even listening to what Hasdrubal was saying.
"It's funny, you know. My people'd say the same thing as those Romans in their senate. They wouldn't shout and scream, or do a drunken roar. They'd just all look very profound. As if that made them better, staying stern. Like the pomposity of it'd be enough to make them anything other than monsters."
"Do you see yourself as a hero, turning traitor?"
"I don't label it, except when there's a need to. Enough that the universe has its people a bit like me."
"And in the future where Carthage stands, will there still be people like you?"
The woman smiled. "People with mad beliefs that live far away from the world? Too right there will. No matter where history goes, there'll always be room for a monk."
Every Time Lord knew you should never change history, and what the consequences might be if you did. But like any bureaucratic people, there were times they made allowances— and like any all-powerful Empire, there were times that would help them sleep.
When the Doctor slept she would always have nightmares, and the ones she had would never feature the Monk. She had bigger things to fear – or so she thought – than a person who always just mocked her. Who said what they thought a real rebel should look like, and who only even threatened to make that rebellion real.
But the Monk had her nightmares also, and now they were coming true. She'd seen omens in the air and horrors in the sand, and she began to understand that a would-be-rebel might not have much time to become one.
So she'd come to a forgotten part of history, on which the entire future of the world might still depend. She wasn't thinking of the Doctor as she did it, as she bargained with corrupt officials in Siberia and formed her TARDIS round a thing too large for its shell. She was thinking of the forces she was fighting and the people who would never take action against them, who were too proud or heroic to do an unthinkable thing. And she had thought that thing, and she'd done it, and in doing it she had joined so many wars. She was mad. She was angry.
And she'd pointed a hydrogen bomb at Ancient Rome.