Author's Note: Like most Whovians, I really wanted to know what four things and a lizard the Doctor is dealing with at the end of "Blink". Equally, I was wondering why in the world our favorite time travelers are carrying a bow and arrows. Then while watching "The Unicorn and the Wasp", I noticed that in the Doctor's flashback about visiting the Ardennes ("I was searching for Charlemagne. He had been kidnapped by an insane computer"), he has...that's right...a bow and arrows. Since the Doctor is not known for carrying weaponry, I figured the two incidents had to be related, and this story is my attempt to stitch them together.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Doctor Who and make no profit from it.
Martha's eyes flicked between the razor-sharp arrow pointed at her throat and the hostile face of the soldier aiming it. "You know, Doctor, when you said we were going to a coronation, I was picturing something a little more posh and a little less I'm-going-to-die."
The warm early-morning drizzle had turned the Doctor's normal gravity-defying hairstyle into a limp damp curtain that threatened to obscure his vision. With his hands currently occupied by being raised in surrender, he had to clear his eyes with a toss of his head that sent drops spraying over his companion. "Yes, well, I may have been just a shade off on the time. And the location."
"A shade off? We're in the middle of a forest. And a few hundred years early, by the look of it."
"A few hun–? Whose coronation did you think we were going to?"
"I don't know. Queen Victoria's?"
"Queen Vic–?" His voice hit a new octave. "Why would I take you to see Queen Victoria? She hates me. Banished me for life, she did. Definitely wasn't amused. Of course, that was much later on; I suppose her coronation would be safe enough. Whoever said you don't get a second chance to make a first impression never met a time traveller, and–"
"Silence!" said one of the soldiers; his metal helmet, in contrast to the thick leather caps of the rest of the band, marked him as the leader.
The Doctor turned towards him, not looking the least bit cowed, although Martha noted that he was careful not to make any sudden moves. "Listen, you. I've got a half-dozen lethal weapons aimed at various vital organs. I'd think that the least you could do would be to allow me a bit of nervous wittering. And what exactly is your problem with us, anyway?"
"Well, she's a Moor." The soldier's tone made clear that this should be answer enough.
The Doctor looked at Martha as if seeing her for the first time. "Why, so she is."
"And you're consorting with Moors."
"Why, so I am." He raised his brows, shrugged his shoulders in universal body language that needed no TARDIS translation: So what?
"I am not a M–" Martha said, but the Doctor cut her off.
"You are to them. It's the only frame of reference they have," he said to her in an undertone. Then aloud to their captors: "What she means is that she has left her people behind to join herself to you."
"She can't be trusted. Moors are treacherous. Can't believe a word out of their mouths."
"Humans! You're such a parochial lot. It's a wonder you ever got out of the Dark Ages. Well, I suppose you haven't yet, have you?" The Doctor sounded properly exasperated now. Martha smiled in anticipation. An exasperated Doctor was usually a clever Doctor. "Listen, you lot, you're Franks, right? You've got loads of Moors living in peace among you. Well, more or less in peace – most of them were converted at swordpoint – but still… So why are you so suspicious of us?"
"We're suspicious of everyone since our lord went missing."
"And who is your lord?"
"Charles the Great, King of Francia."
The Doctor grinned and bounced on his toes. "Charlemagne? Brilliant! That's who we've been looking for. But missing, eh? That's not so good. We'll see what we can do about that."
As he started to reach into his jacket, Martha leaned in to mutter, "Doctor, if you're going for the screwdriver, please don't do anything that'll get us burned as witches."
"Please. I have done this a time or two, you know." His hand emerged with the psychic paper. "You can read, can't you?" he said to the leader of the troop.
The man's hesitation revealed the real answer, but he said loudly, "Of course!"
"Well, then, you will find that this decree charges me to track and recover his missing majesty Charles the Great, by the authority of his son Pepin, king of Italy. My companion and I, as well as His Majesty King Pepin, would appreciate your full cooperation and respect." He waved the paper under the soldier's nose.
"Pepin? King of Italy? Pepin isn't king of anything."
"He isn't? I'm a bit early again, I guess," he said, in a voice that Martha had to strain to hear. More loudly, he continued, "Well, it seems the news hasn't reached you yet." He returned the psychic paper to his pocket and then pulled it back out with a flourish. "Here I have another royal decree, this one signed by none other than His Majesty King Charlemagne, appointing his son Pepin as king of Italy. All very hush-hush, didn't even want his own men knowing about it till the deal was done."
The soldier wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat, looked doubtful. But not many men could hold out against the Doctor's air of unshakable self-assurance. He signaled his men, and the bows were loosened. Both time travellers breathed a bit easier. "How did Pepin even know of this matter, let alone dispatch you from Italy so fast? The king has only been missing for a day."
When the Doctor hesitated, Martha jumped in. "He had a premonition several days ago. A vision in the night. So he summoned us."
"We have been searching since yesterday, but we have found no sign of him. You really think you can do better?"
"Me? Of course. Tracker extraordinaire, I am. I can track a falcon on a cloudy day; I can find Charlemagne."
"Doctor," Martha whispered, "That's not you, that's Prince Humperdinck from The Princess Bride."
"Is it?" He ruffled his hair. "Thought it sounded familiar. Well, so maybe tracking a falcon is a bit of a stretch, but I can definitely track a king." He squinted at the greenery around him. "So let's start with: Where exactly are we?"
The leader frowned at him. "You are a great tracker, and you don't know where you are?"
"Eh, look who knows so much about tracking! I don't have to know where I am to know where the king has been, do I?"
"This glen is known as Fairies' Grove."
"Okay, I was hoping for a little more big-picture than that. Where is Fairies' Grove?"
"Oh, come now! Surely you know the region you are in?"
"We've been keeping our heads to the ground, watching for clues. Haven't seen the forest for the trees."
The soldier threw his hands in the air. "Fine. You're in the Ardennes."
"The Ardennes? Ooh, the Ardennes! That rings a bell. Why does that ring a bell? Wait, what year is this?" The Doctor noticed Martha's eye roll, and said under his breath, "I already admitted my timing was a shade off, all right?"
"Are you an imbecile?" asked the leader.
"So I've been told. What year is it?"
"778."
"So, Ardennes, 778, Charlemagne in possible danger…What is so familiar about all this?" The Doctor paced back and forth, rubbing the back of his neck, muttering to himself. The troop watched him with a mixture of awe and wariness. Martha tried to look as if she knew exactly what was going through his head, figuring that was the best way to prevent the reappearance of the weapons. Finally, the Doctor spun to face her, jabbing a finger up in the air. "I've got it! The Song of Roland!"
The leader stiffened. "How do you know my name?"
The Doctor turned, his face softened. "Roland? You are Roland? Oh. I'm sorry. I truly am so sorry."
"Sorry? For what?" Roland's hand went to the hilt of his sword.
The Doctor blinked, caught himself. "What? Nothing. Don't mind me. I talk constantly. Hardly ever means anything."
"It's true," Martha said, "He does. And it doesn't."
"Right, so we'll start in the last place where you saw Charlemagne."
Martha stood in the middle of Charlemagne's campaign tent, watching the Doctor bound around, sniffing and tasting various objects. He had insisted to their escort that the trackers needed absolute privacy to begin their search, so Martha was at last free to ask, "So what was that all about – Song of Roland, 'I'm so sorry'?"
"The Song of Roland is an early French epic poem about a battle between the Franks and the Moors. Mostly over-embellished propagandistic poppycock, of course, but it does have some grains of truth. One of which is that the hero of the song, our good friend Roland, dies in the battle."
"So we're here to save him?"
The Doctor licked a wooden bowl and set it down with a grimace before looking at her. "Don't be daft. What good would that do? We save him, it just means he lives to kill someone else. It never ends with you lot."
"Don't say my lot. You don't see me with a weapon, do you?"
"Anyway, for our purposes, the salient point is that one verse relates a nightmare Charlemagne had about being attacked by a leopard from the Ardennes."
"And you think that's what really happened here?"
"What, do I think a leopard kidnapped Charlemagne? Of course not. Over-embellished poppycock, remember? The song has grains of truth, not whole boulders of it. Besides, leopards don't smell like this."
"Like what?"
"You can't smell that? That mix of chubernium and ionic energy? How bland your world must seem."
"Hold on, chu-what?"
"Chubernium. Commonly used in your higher-end hologram generators. And the ionic energy means it must be very high-end indeed."
Martha was trying hard to keep up. "Okay, a hologram in the middle of a medieval forest sounds like a sure sign of aliens. So you're thinking that Princess Leia kidnapped Charlemagne?"
The Doctor squinted at her. "Sorry, who?"
"Princess Leia? Star Wars? The beginning of the movie, she appears in a hol– Never mind, stupid joke."
"I don't know what you're on about, but you're right that there is likely an alien involved in his disappearance. You want to blend in on a primitive planet where you don't look like the natives, you're going to need either a shimmer or else a decent hologram generator."
"So we find the hologram, we find Charlemagne. You can follow the scent, yeah?"
He looked mildly offended. "Martha, I'm not a bloodhound."
"But you just said–" She sighed. "All right, so what's the plan?"
The Doctor dropped into a fencing stance, waving the screwdriver at her like a sword. "Simple enough. We use the screwdriver to scan for alien tech." He straightened up, his eyes clouded with a wistful, far-off look that Martha had secretly dubbed "The Rose". But mercifully, he didn't bring up the missing companion; instead, he gave himself a shake and forced a grin. "Right, then, allons-y!"
He dashed out of the tent and nearly ran headlong into Roland. "Sorry, Roland, can't chat, we're on the trail, gotta run."
Roland didn't move, just stared down at the blinking screwdriver. "What is that thing?"
"This? It's, um, it's the latest scientific advancement by scholars in Florence. Very complicated. No time to explain it."
"It looks like a tool of the Devil."
"No, trust me, the Devil doesn't have one of these."
"But that light, the flashing…it's ungodly."
"It's fireflies," the Doctor said straight-faced, while Martha fell into a coughing fit behind him. "Bunch of little fireflies under blue stained glass. Quite popular with the Italian nobility this year."
Roland, still looking befuddled, at last stepped aside, and the Doctor and Martha took off at top speed before he could think to question them further.