TURLOUGH'S TALE

Chapter Twenty-One

"Quickly!" shouts Tegan, racing ahead to the Doctor's inert form. We all know that drowning takes almost no time at all and we don't know how long the Doctor has been there. He hasn't regenerated; that's hopeful – unless he was dead before he fell. Tegan quickly turns him to get his face out of the snow and then I am there with her turning him all the way over.

"Is he alive?" cries Alexandra, catching up with us.

"Yes," I say, feeling his faint pulses. "Let's get him into the TARDIS.

Tegan has her key out before I can fetch mine. "Hey," she whispers, "how was he going to get into the TARDIS if we have his only keys? I mean he made one for me but he gave you his. What was he thinking?"

We stretch him out on the console room floor. Alexandra takes the unexpected dimension in rapidly and joins us on the floor, then runs back outside and fetches blankets. We wrap the Doctor up and then continue to cover him. Although we know he is alive, he looks frozen, dead. We can't see him breathe. I put my hand on his chest. It does rise and fall, as it had in the woods, a lifetime ago it seems.

We've used all the blankets but he has no pillow to aid his breathing. I lift his head onto Tegan's knee. "Come on, Doctor," she whispers, "come on. Come back to us." She sobs: "Don't leave us!"

"We can't stay here," I blurt out, rising to go fetch pillows from my room, and then stop, realizing I can't tell anyone why we can't stay. "We need to get him back to the house!"

"He's safer here," insists Tegan. "Why do you want to move him? Why can't we stay here? What are you up to, Turlough?"

I have no explanation but I am sure the Black Guardian will sense the Doctor's life force, even as weak as it is, and punish me. My only hope is to stick close to the two women and trust that he won't want witnesses. My trust in that is as wan as the Doctor's pulse. Nonetheless I need to get pillows for the Doctor; Tegan can't move and Alexandra would get lost the moment she stepped into the TARDIS interior. I have no choice. It's on me.

The Black Guardian doesn't appear when I enter the interior, nor materialize in my room as I gather two pillows from my bed and two more from a cupboard. He doesn't show up on my way back to the console room either, although the pillows slow me down considerably. I hold the Doctor's head up so that Tegan can slip out from under it and stand up. "Oxygen," she says, and leaves the console room.

Gently holding the Doctor under his triceps and pulling him to the wall, I prop him up against it with the pillows. In doing so, I notice an ugly bruise at the Doctor's hairline. I find another, uglier one at the base of his skull. Apparently, someone is more skilled at thwacking than I turned out to be.

The last thing in the world I want to do now is kill the Doctor, the Black Guardian is nowhere in sight, and yet the thought crosses my mind that he is wounded and unconscious, I have pillows at hand, Tegan is out of the room and Alexandra is examining the console at the moment. How long would it take to suffocate him once and for all? I am horrified that I can even think of such a thing and drive the thought out of my mind so forcefully that the effort is audible and draws Alexandra's attention. "What is it?" she asks, coming to my side. I show her the bruises. "Oh, my," she says, horrified. "Who did this?"

"I don't know." Upon her look of terror, I add, "Not Danny. I buried him myself."

"I did too," she reminds me.

"After you buried him, he regenerated. I buried him a day dead. He won't have regenerated. The Doctor says he had used up all his regenerations. He won't be bothering anyone any longer."

"Then who…?"

"Or what." I know this was not a "what" but I am trying to reassure Alexandra. Who will reassure me?

Tegan returns with two small oxygen canisters and hunkers down beside me. Her eyes grow wide as I show her the two bruises. Then she asks, "Only those two?"

"I don't know." We strip off the blankets on him, unwrap the ones around him, remove the big parka, remove his multipocketed coat, lift up his jumper and draw it over his head, and then begin to unbutton his shirt. "He'll freeze!"

"It's not cold in here."

"He's cold to begin with, and probably in shock as well!"

"Leave his shirt on and roll up his sleeves," advises Alexandra, watching all this. We roll up his right sleeve, all the way to the shoulder. His arm is cold but uninjured. When we roll up his left sleeve we find bruises all up and down that arm, from wrist to shoulder.

"I want to know who did this!" growls Tegan. "I want to do the same to him!" She applies a small mask to the Doctor's face and administers oxygen from one of the tanks.

"He can't have got far," I say. "If the Doctor had been face down in the snow for more than however long he could hold his breath, he'd be dead or regenerated." I stand up and take a step or two toward the door, then hesitate.

"How do you hold your breath if you're unconscious?"

"You can't, but maybe he wasn't unconscious at first. Maybe he could hold his breath but then lost consciousness as he got weaker." Alexandra's theory makes sense.

"He's breathing, but just." Tegan continues to hold the mask to the Doctor's face. "He might not even need the second tank. We have more, at any rate."

"If we're lucky, he'll be able to tell us what happened." I was thinking to go outside and look for anyone lurking about but the time for that is now long gone.

"I'll be right back," says Alexandra, suddenly, and before we can stop her, she opens the door and steps outside. I race to the door and watch her as she fetches two items she apparently had hidden under the blankets. The two items are surprisingly similar in shape: an Irish harp and a metal recurve bow fitted with a metal arrow. She quickly brings them inside the TARDIS and from the console I shut the door after her. She lays the bow down near the door and carries the harp to where the Doctor slumps against the pillows, unconscious, in his shirt sleeves but covered up again, except for the arm that may as well be one big bruise, which I want to examine again. I kneel back down by him and pick up that arm, and am again, in my mind, back in the woods looking for a vein to cut. I'm the reason we're here on this planet, the reason the Doctor is barely clinging to life on the TARDIS floor. It's all my fault. "Doctor," begins Alexandra, as if the Doctor can hear her, "Doctor, I have a present for you, but you have to wake up if you want to see what it is."

It's a fair idea but the Doctor doesn't wake up to see his gift. His eyes do flutter open once and that catches our attention to be sure, but he just emits a long, deep sigh and closes them again. For one horrible instant I think he has drawn his last breath and let it out, but although we can't see his chest rise and fall with everything we've piled back onto him, we can still hear the soft, short breaths he takes every time Tegan removes the mask. He's used up one tank; she hooks up the other.

Only then does it suddenly occur to me to open the scanner, which I quickly do. We all gasp. Through the scanner we can clearly see a woman wrapped in furs not unlike Alexandra's, wielding what appears to be a headless ax handle and silently screaming.