Doctor Who: The Myth Makers Read Free

concerned, they begin and end with the horse. That surprises you? Well, it’s not a bad idea, when you think about it: after all, it was their cavalry that put them where they are today... or rather where they were yesterday. They’d come riding out of their distant nomadic past to found the greatest city in the world; and they were properly grateful to the bloodstock for making it possible. They even had some legend, I believe, about a mythical Great Horse of Asia, which would return to save them in time of peril. But apart from that, they had nothing that you or I would recognize as a god, within the meaning of the act.
    So, when the TARDIS came groaning out of nowhere, of the three of us it was Hector who was the most put out; quite literally, in fact.
    As he fell to his knees, dumbfounded by this immediate, unforseen acceptance of his challenge to Zeus, Achilles rallied sufficiently to run him through with a lance, or whatever. Very nasty, it was!
    The thing pierced Hector’s body in the region of the clavicle, I would imagine, and emerged, festooned with his internal arrangements, somewhere in the lumbar district. Blood and stuff everywhere, you know! I don’t like to think of it.
    Well, there’s not a lot you can do about a wound like that –
    and Hector didn’t. With a look of pained astonishment at being knocked out in the preliminaries by a despised and out-classed adversary, he subsided reluctantly into the dust, and packed it in for the duration.
    A great pity; because, by all accounts, he was an uncommonly decent chap at heart – fond of his dogs and children, and all that sort of thing. But there it is – you can’t go barn-storming around, looking for trouble, and not expect to find it occasionally, that’s what I say! Always taken very good care to avoid it myself... or at least, I had up till then. But I mustn’t anticipate.
    So – there lay Hector, his golden blood lacing his silver skin (and that’s a phrase someone will pick up one day, I’ll wager; but it was nothing like the foul reality, of course) when suddenly the door of the TARDIS opened and a little old man stepped out into the afternoon, blinking in the sunshine. And now it was Achilles’ turn to fall to his knees...
     
     
    At this point I must digress for a moment to explain that I have met the Doctor on several occasions since, and find him a most impressive character. But he didn’t look so then, my word! I believe he has grown a great deal younger since, but at the time he looked – I hope he’ll forgive me if he ever hears about this –
    he looked, I say, like the harassed captain of a coaster who can’t remember his port from his starboard. A sort of superannuated Flying Dutchman, in fact: and not far out, at that, when you think about it.
    I gathered later, that for some time the TARDIS had been tumbling origin over terminus through eternity, ricochetting from one more or less disastrous planetary landfall to another; when all the poor old chap wanted to do was get back to earth and put his feet up for a bit!
    Well, he’d found the Earth all right, but unfortunately, several thousand miles and as many years from where he really wanted to be: which was, I gather, some place called London in the nineteen-sixties – if that means anything to you? He’d promised to give his friends, Vicki and Steven, a lift there, you see; because they thought it was somewhere they might be happy and belong for once. All very well for him, because he didn’t truly belong anywhere – or, rather, he belonged everywhere; being a Time Lord, he claimed, or some such nonsense!
    But the trouble was, he couldn’t navigate, bless him! Oh, brilliant as the devil in his time, no doubt – whenever that was –
    but just a shade past it, if you ask me!
    He blamed the mechanism of course – claimed it was faulty; but then don’t they always? We’ve all heard it before – ‘Damned sprockets on the blink!’ or something; when all the time, if