I Hate Snakes
Eleven
In that year, and for more than one thousand years to come, the Pyramid of Khufu was the tallest manmade monument to ever be erected on Planet Earth. Therefore, trying to come up with a way to very quickly skirt the edges of it and find some way to scale the sandy monstrosity was no mean feat. It took them quite a while to spy a sufficiently suspicious opening in its hull, and then even longer to plot a route up the smooth, steep sandstone, with the Doctor tripping and sliding multiple times and very nearly resorting to calling the TARDIS down to try and fly them into it. Finally, though, after being out in the sun for more hours than he liked, he collapsed onto his hands and knees into the cool interior of the biggest pyramid of all, crawling into a corner to catch his breath and wait for the Ponds to complete their ascent. They were not quite as agile as he.
River Song, on the other hand, had been standing in the cave mouth idly shouting noncommittal words of encouragement at them, she herself still a hologram and able to teleport all over the place. It never failed to surprise Eleven when she did this, because he was still not used to people teleporting; Oswin hadn't been able to do it for months ever since she had started wearing her prosthetic leg again, and Clara was still incapable of teleporting at will unless she was in a life-or-death situation. River had been lingering and complaining about being bored, and now it was just she and Eleven and him collapsed on the floor staring at the low, sandstone ceiling. It was gloomy and stagnant, and he couldn't wait to worm his way deeper into the pyramid's layers where the desert heat could not permeate. The Doctor turned his head to watch River, who was paying her parents more mind than him, until she glanced away for a moment and caught him staring. She looked at her hands, pretending to be indifferent.
"Is there something you want?"
"I've never asked you," he began, "But now we're alone – is he really your boyfriend? Would you describe him as a boyfriend? Using that word?" She looked at him, then narrowed her eyes. "What? Isn't an ex-husband allowed to show a healthy interest in these things?" He sat up a little, and River only shook her head, though he caught the ghost of a smile in her shadowed face while she avoided his gaze.
"No, he isn't," she said finally, "It's none of your business, quite frankly. I don't ask you about Clara. But if I was desperate to stick my nose in your life, I suppose I'd rather inquire after Jenny than your child-bride." All of this, while the words themselves may be snide, was said with a joking tone the Doctor understood. Despite everything, he could no longer detect a trace of animosity between himself and River, or Clara and River – far from the other messy breakups they saw on the TARDIS (by which he meant, quite specifically, Jack and his daughter.)
"What about Jenny?" he asked carefully.
"Oh, I don't know. The two of you seem to have been getting on tremendously."
"Two of who?" Eleven made a start when Amy Pond interrupted them. She was a sweating mess when she collapsed over the threshold of Khufu's tomb, and the Doctor was shocked that she even found it remotely within herself to say anything at all. He was impressed, even. Rory followed close behind, and a moment later the pair of them were lying on the floor together.
"The two of us," said the Doctor, now getting to his feet and brushing himself down. He was more or less recovered from his trek up the side of the largest structure currently present on the planet (though it had nothing on the citadels of Gallifrey, despite how famous these pyramids were throughout the neighbouring galaxies.) "River and I. Tremendously. Best friends, aren't we?" River raised an eyebrow at him, but did not reveal his lie. The root of it was only that he didn't want people inquiring about Jenny. He himself did not mind in the slightest, but he knew that she was considerably more private and did not like people knowing things about her if she did not disclose them herself. And it took a lot of coaxing to get her to disclose things to begin with.
"I'm glad you've all made it; I've been investigating," River now declared.
"Have you?" Eleven questioned, "You didn't mention."
"If I'd have told you I would have had to repeat myself now," she said, "And I really can't be bothered." The Ponds said nothing. The Doctor wondered if they could even really hear he and River's conversation over the sounds of their own heartbeats pounding in their ears. Potentially not, then Song would have to repeat herself anyway. He cleared his throat.
"What did you find?"
"The sandstone is very worn around that entrance," she nodded at it, "Bits of rubble broken away. Lots of sand has blown in during that time, and the sand has made some rather excellent footprints." She indicated these footprints now, which the Doctor had not noticed because he had not actually been looking for anything, he had been recuperating and trying to pry irrelevant information out of his ex-wife due to boredom. But now he saw a whole host of footprints, and other artefacts lying in the crevices the high sun did not quite reach. "And do you see all of this? Discarded maps, an old torch-"
"There's been an expedition in here," he said.
"And recently," River added, "For what it's worth, my money is on Sati."
"Mmm," he agreed, "And mine." The Ponds were still lying on the floor. "Come on, now. On your feet. You can't go from strenuous activity to doing absolutely nothing – the shock will give you a heart attack. It's best to keep walking."
"The deeper we get into this pyramid the cooler it will be," River coaxed them, and this finally made them clamber upright, both bright red in the face and glistening with perspiration.
"Again, how are you not sweating?" Rory asked him, "I've had a stitch for the last ten minutes."
"Really? That doesn't sound good. Maybe you should talk to Martha?" the Doctor suggested. Rory gave him a flat stare.
"I'm a nurse."
"She's a doctor."
"She's busy," Amy interrupted, "Something… urgh. I don't know. She's been preoccupied, all over the place, I don't know what's wrong with her. Now then, can we keep moving? Since that's your wonderful idea?" She glared at Eleven, and he beamed in response.
"Of course we can. Now, Song, what were you saying about Sati?"
"I assume they passed through here trying to access the pyramid," she said, "If we're right about them now trying to buy-out the village in order to dig over there, maybe they came up short. But there's always the possibility we'll find something they missed."
"Excellent, positive thinking. Now, then…" he felt about rather blindly in the shadows on the floor until he managed to locate two large torches, wooden sticks with old rags wrapped tightly around their ends, and holding these in one hand he found a zippo lighter stashed in his pocket with the other. It was this he used to light the torches.
"Why have you got a lighter?" Rory asked him, "Did you used to carry a lighter?"
"It's not mine," he said, "It's the wife's. Useful thing to have though, incidentally, though I do wish she didn't smoke."
"Why do you carry her lighter around if you hate her smoking so much?" Rory questioned.
"I have her cigarettes in my pocket as well," he said with a sigh.
"Well, you're whipped."
"I'm what?"
"Whipped. It's a thing Americans say," she said, "It means you'll do everything she wants you to do and you won't even question it." He scowled and ignored this comment completely, and just to spite the pair of them he bestowed his spare torch on River Song, so it was she and the Doctor who were in charge of the lights. River crouched to examine some of the shreds of parchment littering the floor, picking them up and holding them to the flames so that she could decipher them.
"They look like maps," said Rory.
"They are, but they're poorly drawn ones…" she said, looking at a few sheets at once, "I think they're trying to map out the inside of the pyramid, but I'm not sure they've done a good job."
"Shouldn't we take them with us?" asked Amy, "You know, in case there are any booby traps." They all looked at her. "What? I've seen Indiana Jones. There are always booby traps."
"No," River said eventually, dropping the papers and standing back up, "They're terrible. They won't help us at all; we're on our own." There had been, this whole time, a shadowy doorway looming in the corner. The Doctor had not paid it much note until their torches illuminated it much more substantially, but after that the void of the entrance lingered in the corner of his eye. It was towards this River Song took off to, and he followed second of all with the Ponds lagging behind. Then they were well and truly on their way to discovering the mysteries of Giza's famous landmarks.
"How much do you know about the pyramids?" Amy asked, "Either of you?" The Doctor and River shared a glanced in the flickering torchlight. Rory was right at the back, them walking single-file through a wonky sandstone passageway.
"Shall I field this one, sweetie?"
"You are the archaeologist," he said, smiling with a trace of encouragement.
"I know that the interiors are a lot smaller than you'd expect," she said, "Smaller on the inside, I suppose you could say. This one, for instance, only has three real rooms. Whether they've been discovered yet, I haven't a clue. There's the King's Chamber, the Grand Gallery, and the Queen's Chamber. And of course plenty of room for all the slaughtered slaves they took into the Duat with them. But there's only really the one entrance, and if memory serves, the route we're taking now is not the one the tourists are going to use in two-thousand years."
"We're in an area nobody has ever seen before?" Rory called from the back. He was barely visible, hidden in the shadows, but Rory was often completely invisible so Eleven supposed it was an improvement to having his detached and ghostly voice echoing around them in the chambers. There were drawings all over the walls, and Eleven could not decipher them. What a good decision he had made in once marrying an archaeologist; River was very useful.
"Nobody except the people who built it," River said, "I suppose this passage will be sealed up at some point. There could be dozens more ways in we don't know about. It's an awfully big monument to bury just the one king, I always thought." The passage opened out a little, into more of a hallway, a large one you might expect to find in a castle, but still relatively enclosed. There were sparse support beams carved out of the solid stone running down the middle. The Doctor wandered over to the nearest wall to try and look at the images.
"Can any of you hear that noise?" Rory asked, but the Doctor was distracted by the hieroglyphs.
"What do these mean?" he asked whoever wanted to answer him. Amy came to hover at his side and get a look as well. It looked to be images of somebody wrestling a snake, a very large snake.
"It's the story of Ra and Apep," said River, "They're mortal enemies."
"The Curse of Apep is what's ravaging the village," Amy reminded them.
"Perhaps it's not a coincidence that that's the name being used. After all, there are probably a dozen nasty gods to choose from who might want to wreak havoc out there. I don't think we can ignore the same image being repeated like that."
"Seriously, the noise," Rory repeated.
"So, what's the story?" Amy asked.
"Ra is the sun god and the most important god in Ancient Egyptian mythology, Apep is a demon of chaos and destruction who takes the form of an enormous water snake. Every night they do battle and ultimately Ra always wins, because the sun always rises the next morning. They would have whole temples dedicated to praying to Ra to bring about his success," River explained.
"It sounds like hissing…"
"I was just talking about snakes yesterday," Eleven mused, "Clara ran into a mad scientist calling himself 'Professor Ouroboros'-"
"Snake eating itself? What a typical thing for your wife, of all people, to find," River quipped. She found it amusing, just like the Doctor had when he had been told about it the previous day.
"If one of you two would bring your torches over here, I could get a look and see what that- ARGH!" Rory Williams screamed and cut off his own sentence.
"Rory!?"
"Father!?" Amy and River exclaimed together, which sort of weirded Eleven out a little bit. He felt that River often tried to avoid calling Amy or Rory by any kind of name, be it their first names or their parental 'titles.' They followed the sound of his scream – and the banging and resounding thud and groan – and found that Rory had fallen down a hole.
"Only you could manage to do something like that in a place like this," said the Doctor, peering over it. It looked as though the hole wasn't supposed to be there, like someone had made it either with explosives or simple brute force. He thought the latter was most likely. It wasn't really large enough for more than one person to go through it at once, and easy enough to avoid now that he and River had taken the light sources over there.
"Oh my god, are you alright!? Rory!?" Amy shouted into the hole, kneeling on the ground to look into it.
"Careful, the floor might be unstable," Eleven warned.
"Clearly it is bloody unstable since my husband just fell through it! Rory!"
"Yep, I'm alright," his voice finally reached them, "Might have a few bruises."
"Bruises!? I don't care about bruises, as long as you're still alive," Amy said.
"I'm definitely still alive, although… uh-oh…" They could just about see him when they squinted, pasty and obvious in the gloom.
"What? What is it?" Amy implored, but Eleven could see what it was. He could see what looked like a hundred writhing, shining bodies down there surrounding Rory Williams.
"That hissing I heard… this room is full of snakes."
"Snakes!?"
"Shh, you might agitate them," River told her.
"What kind of snakes?" the Doctor called.
"I don't know, I'm not a… snake-ologist."
"Herpetologist," River corrected. Amy looked at her. "An expert in snakes would be a herpetologist. Snake-ologist isn't… never mind – look, I'm going to drop the torch down, you'll have to catch it."
"Catch it!? It's on fire!"
"Snakes don't like fire," she said.
"I don't like fire!"
"On three – one, two," and then she dropped it, and Rory yelped and stumbled away from the torch, which landed on the sandy floor in front of him. He was very lucky it was not extinguished by this fall. The snakes under and around it scattered, crawling all over each other to try and escape from the blaze, and Rory reached over to pick it up, now occupying a tiny little circle free of all reptiles.
"They look like cobras – are they cobras?" Amy asked the Doctor.
"Well, cobras are native to Egypt and far from extinct – so it's highly likely that they could be cobras."
"And what happens if one of them bites him?"
"And he's down there? In that hole? I suppose he could be dead in half an hour," said the Doctor.
"Then do something!" Amy shouted at him.
"Oh – right – yes, sorry. I'm coming down! Look out!" he declared.
"You're – what!? No! Don't-!" But the Doctor was gone, jumping down to follow Rory's misplaced footsteps. He landed right on a snake, too, which hissed and turned as if to strike him, but he got out of the way just in time and tripped until he fell right into Rory. The damaged snake slithered away in anguish, but there were so many more he hardly thought that mattered.
"We haven't got any light up here now," River called after him, "Why did you jump down? You're an idiot."
"Yes, it does seem like a bit of an error of judgement in hindsight," the Doctor said. Amy groaned loudly, and within a moment she had dropped down as well. The Doctor smiled at her. "Hello! What brings you to these parts?" She looked like she wanted to punch him.
"You're unbelievable." With a flicker, River appeared in the room next to them, a move which again made them jump. "Well. The gang's all here. Now what?"
"I didn't think that far ahead," said the Doctor, "Anybody have a flute? I could do some snake charming." One of them hissed nearby and was rearing its head to strike.
"Over there, in that corner, there's some slats propped against the wall," River pointed out, "There could be something behind them, a way out. Or a way away from the snakes, at least."
"Then let's go," Amy decided, snatching the torch out of Eleven's hand. Waving the torches at the ground, it was now the Ponds who led the way, forcing the snakes to flee because of the heat of the flames. It worked quite well. "I told you I've seen Indiana Jones." River pushed between her parents to remove the wooden barricade from the wall, which sure enough revealed a new crevice which did not appear to be the source of the dozens of restless snakes. It was when they were ducking through to make their escape that the Doctor felt a shooting pain in his calf, and his legs gave out and he fell through the hole behind them. And then Amy shrieked, and he turned to see there was a cobra with its jaws clamped around his leg sending hot venom into his bloodstream.
"Uh-oh," he said, "Get it off me, one of you!" River went to wrench it off, and succeeded despite the snakes strength, though in the process she seemed to tear out one of its fangs. She threw it through the gap behind them and dragged the barricade back across, while Rory went to see what was wrong with the Doctor's leg. "Leave it, I'm fine."
"Fine!? What happened to dead in thirty minutes?"
"A human would be dead in thirty minutes. Believe it or not, I've been bitten by a cobra before. Jenny got bitten by a rattlesnake once and she was fine, a long time ago," he said, though in all likelihood he was not going to be fine. That bite was going to swell and bruise and he was going to be bedridden for a day or so while his immune system fought it off – or perhaps his run-in with the infection induced by the Anobine Cartax weeks earlier had strengthened him enough to manage.
"At least let me get the fang out, it's still in there."
"Fine," Eleven grunted, but he felt as though he were in a compromising positon, lying on his front on the stones with Rory fumbling around with his leg. Amy looked like the stress was getting to her, and he resisted the urge to remind her this had all been her idea. He could have spent the day in bed with Clara not getting bitten by a snake, but here they were. In some chamber.
"I think those snakes were put there on purpose," River said. She was looking around again, having taken a torch from Rory so now it was she and Amy with the lights. "I said it was too much of a coincidence to have all this Apep imagery, and then all these snakes. Snakes don't just accumulate naturally in old ruins, no matter what George Lucas believes. I'll bet it was Sati. To ward off intruders."
"Intruders to what? This is a dead end," Amy complained, "How are we going to get out of here?"
"If worse comes to worst, we do have emergency teleporters," Rory reminded her. Then the Doctor felt another sharp pain and he flinched.
"Is that it out? It's like having a tooth pulled."
"It doesn't look very good, are you sure you're not going to end up regenerating?" Rory asked carefully.
"I'll just have to stay in bed after this," he sighed, trying to get up.
"Stay there, I'm doing you a bandage." The Doctor grimaced.
"What are you looking for?" Amy addressed her mother. River was peering very closely at a large and solid wall. "There can't be anything in here. If there was, then they wouldn't be trying to excavate that village out there, would they?" she challenged.
"Maybe," said River, "Or maybe we can find something they missed."
"Like what? You're going to push a special brick in the wall and a secret door is going to open?" Amy asked snidely. And then River pushed a special brick in the wall, and what could only be described as a secret door did open, sliding apart like the entrance to Diagon Alley in technology the Doctor thought was beyond even the Egyptians. "Oh. I stand corrected."