The Spear of Destiny Read Online Free

that she was
     hanging, her wrists and ankles tied, over the shoulder of one of
     the Vikings, and that he was jogging with her through the trees
     as if she were a paper doll.
    The second thing she noticed was
     the smell. The most terrible stink she’d ever had the misfortune
     to come across, so bad it made her want to retch.
Must be bathtime tomorrow
     then
, she thought, wrinkling her
     nose.
    The third thing she thought was
     that it was actually terrifying being pressed so close to a hot
     and sweaty Viking. She could feel the muscles in his shoulder
     working, pushing into her stomach, and at that point she
     screamed and tried to wriggle her way off.
    Jo thought she heard him laughing,
     but, either way, his arms tightened round her legs and she knew
     she was going nowhere.
    She could see other men running
     beside her, though upside-down it was hard to tell how many.
     They were silent for the most part, though from time to time one
     of them would bark a single word that she didn’t catch.
    And then, finally, she remembered
     the Doctor.
    She’d seen him washed away into
     the powerful currents of the river, a river so cold there were
     plates of ice tumbling along in its waters.
    She told herself not to panic.
     He’d be all right. He always was. Wasn’t he?
    Apart from those times he’d told
     her about when he sort of died and then sort of turned into
     another version of himself.
    Another version of himself who
     might not even know who she was, and here she was almost two
     thousand years before she’d been born.
    She started to panic.
    Get a
     grip, Josephine
, she thought.
Get a grip on
     yourself.
    He’ll be
     OK.
    He’ll get
     out of the river somehow.
    He’ll see
     these tracks in the snow and he’ll come and find
     you
.
    He’ll be
     fine and the TARDIS will be fine because these
     ignorant savages can’t even see it, just like the
     Doctor said
.

7
    From a distance the Doctor
     watched as a group of about twenty men loaded the TARDIS on to
     the back of a large low wagon pulled by four sturdy oxen. Then
     it trundled away through the trees.
    ‘Well, it was just a theory,’ he
     said.
    He’d fought with the man in the
     river for a long time, but finally the poor human had succumbed
     to the cold and had been washed away to Valhalla.
    The Doctor had managed to fish
     himself out of the river and had stood dripping on the
     riverbank, but within minutes the water had begun to freeze,
     threatening to turn him into a living ice sculpture.
    The cold didn’t worry him unduly.
     Given that his normal body temperature was way below human
     levels, the dip in the river had been no more than refreshing,
     certainly not deadly.
    But it was a nuisance being damp
     and icy, so he began to walk briskly back along the bank, trying
     to pick up Jo’s trail. One of the advantages of having a binary
     vascular system was that he could always pump his blood faster
     than normal if he chose to, raising his body temperature at
     will. Very soon his clothes were steaming as he walked along,
     and in twenty minutes he was as dry as a good martini.
    ‘As I always say,’ he said, ‘two
     hearts are better than one.’
    He soon came back in sight of the
     waterwheels and the bridge, and hesitated for a moment. He had
     to find Jo. But something wasn’t right about these waterwheels,
     and he knew he should investigate.
    He hesitated a little longer. The
     most important thing was to find the spear. But then there was
     Jo. Jo Grant. Loyal, funny, quick-witted Jo. If anything
     happened to her … He’d had other companions before, of course,
     and all wonderful people, in the various weird ways humans could
     be, but none of them was quite like Jo …
    ‘Five minutes,’ he said to
     himself.
    A quick look at the waterwheels
     and then find Jo. If they’d wanted to kill her she’d be dead
     already, and five minutes wouldn’t help that.
    He crossed the bridge to the far
     side of the river, and as he