‘And deep inside him, something Blue was itching, something Blue was wrapping itself around him like a shroud. It was possible, even probable, that he was not aware of it. But the Blue was there, an unnatural colour, a spreading stain in the soft greyness of his brain. ‘
What do the deaths of John Lennon, the sinking of the Titanic, the discovery of the great Pyramid of the Aztecs by workmen in Mexico City in 1978, the Aztec god of death Huitzilopochtli (the left-handed or southern Hummingbird of the title), a hippy flat in St Johns Wood and the deaths of tens of thousands of human sacrifices in Tenochtitlan have in common? Well you’ll need to read Kate Orman’s book to find out, I am not sure that I can completely explain it myself, but it is an interesting, complex and rich book from the Virgin New Adventures range and it is fair to say that it is never dull – switching as it does between Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, New York, London and the Atlantic ocean and back again and possessing for me one of the most striking foes that the Doctor has ever met.
There are 12 books between ‘Love and War’ and this one. The TARDIS crew are the Seventh Doctor, Ace (returned slightly older and more bitter after a stint in the Dalek wars), and Bernice Summerfield. As with most of the New Adventures the continuity to other books in the range can be rather dense and if uninitiated, you always slightly get the feeling that you are missing something. This one is part of a story arc, but I haven’t read the other parts (Blood Heat excepted) for quite some time and in any case it is pretty light touch here – basically someone is altering/manipulating history. There is a lot to enjoy here and in my view it is one of the strongest New Adventures, possibly my favourite.
Arriving in Mexico City 1994, The Doctor, Ace and Benny meet Cristian Alvarez who has contacted them via UNIT when they are in Geneva in 2030. He has met them before (in London in 1968), but they have only just met him – a precursor in some ways to River Song’s tortuous, tangled chronology or even Canton Delaware III. He has witnessed a mass killing spree in the city by killer known as ‘The Watermelon Man’ and sensed the presence there of a force known as ‘the Blue’, previously having witnessed an appearance by it when the Great Pyramid was found in 1978 and also in London in the 1960’s. Cristian is of Aztec blood and that is the link that binds the story together. From modern day Mexico City and the archaeological remains of Tenochtitlan, to the city at it’s height in the 15th century. There are also connections to both ‘Death to the Daleks’ and ‘The Aztecs’. For example, we get to hear the Doctor’s thoughts on the events of the Aztecs as he looks into the archaeological site in 1994:
‘He looked down into the pit of excavations. The stones loomed out of the night, dimly lit by the street-lights, angular, meaningless shapes. The odour of wet earth mixed with the smell of petrol fumes and garbage. Like all of Mexico City, the Great Temple was sinking into the swamp. This unexpected reminder of the past would eventually be swallowed.
He sighed, remembering the temple in its full glory, remembering Barbara’s futile attempt to change the Mexica. They were a proud people, ferocious, their entire way of life based on war and sacrifice. It had been their constant quest for sacrificial victims that had driven them from one shore of the land to the other. His companion had not known what she was up against when she tried to convert them, tried to do away with the killing. And that had been in their early period, before thousands upon thousands had died under the stone knives. He had tried to explain to her that you don’t just get up in the morning, eat your cornflakes, and go out and change history – change an entire way of life. ‘
Aztec history, mythology, hallucinogens, gods and human sacrifice run through the book and the time periods and locations that it skips between. Something that feels very much like modern Doctor Who.
The Blue, Blue Meenie
The main protagonist is Huitizilin – the Aztec warrior turned God (Huitzilopchtli – The Left-handed Hummingbird and Aztec God of war of the title) with a face half blue, half black. He is something akin to a psychic vampire feasting on the deaths and fear caused by the mass human sacrifices. The ‘Blue’ refers to the change of eye colour affecting people possessed by Huizilin and also the colour that seeps into the world that the victims and those sensitive (such as Cristian with his Aztec roots) perceive when Huitzilin is present. The mutation that caused Huitzilin to become the ‘the Blue’ is later revealed to be linked to an alien technology – the leaking fuel pod of an Exxilon spaceship carried by the Aztecs to a cave whilst on their way to found Tenochtitlan. The Exxilons were established as influencing the Incas in South America in ‘Death to the Daleks’ and so Central America isn’t that much of a stretch for their influence. In the process of mutating, Huitzilin has acquired great mental powers and become ‘time-permeable’ – past, present and future are all the same to him and he is waiting for the Doctor across the years. The connection with the story arc is that his timeline has been manipulated by some unknown agent who is meddling with time.
He really is one of the great Doctor Who villains for me, almost like an Aztec version of Sutekh, but tied even more closely to Aztec myth and story and a living connection to the more horrific side of the Aztecs. The story also rather ingeniously ties him into the myth of the god Huitzilopochtli.
Tenochtitlan 1487
The core of the story (or at least as far as there is one) is the Doctor and Ace travelling back in time to Tenochtitlan 1487 so that the Doctor can meet ‘The Blue’ face to face and find out more about it – resorting to hallucinogens to better perceive and understand his enemy. Benny remains in Mexico City to use her archaeological skills to research Aztec history to look for the Blue. The sequences in Tenochtitlan are fascinating – Ace rescuing an Aztec sacrificial victim and them journeying into the jungle in search of the source of the Blue – finding an Exxillon space craft in a cave, with ruptured fuel pod leaking radiation. The book is full of glorious detail about the Aztecs and the prose is rich and always interesting and surprising. It has a disorientating feel that I rather like – like being far from home in a hot, oppressive, strange country, taking strange unfamiliar drinks and drugs and slightly losing everything in translation. The easiest way to illustrate this is via a few short passages:
‘It was hot in the city of the Mexica. In the marketplace, sweat streamed down the faces of merchants, jammed side by side from one wall of the sacred enclosure to the other, each one sporting a halo of customers, all haggling at full speed. There were feathers and precious stones, skins of jaguars and deer, fruit and grain, wood and honey, rabbits and ducks, fish and fowl. And there were the slaves.
The sound of chisels rang out over the enclosure. The stone-workers called to one another, hurrying. They had a task to finish, perhaps the most important in their lifetime. The Great Temple – the very greatest temple – was to be dedicated in three days’ time. And if they did not complete the final work, well, they could see the slaves’ cages in the marketplace. ‘
‘It was the noise which struck Ace first – a blend of drums and human shouts, the long Nahuatl words running together in a rhythmic pattern. Everyone seemed to be talking at once; they were awash in the sound of barter and gossip. A macaw squawked somewhere nearby, its electric blue and red plumage catching her eye as it shimmered in the heat.
Each merchant had a blanket, or a collection of blankets, and their wares were arranged with geometrical tidiness. Grains formed squares of red and black and white. Different kinds of fruit were separated into neat piles. How did they keep it all in order with everyone so close together, treading on one another’s toes? Ace imagined one person falling over and knocking everyone else down like dominoes. ‘
There is also an extraordinary passage describing how a group of sacrificial feathered warriors commit suicide:
‘Four suicides. Ace’s mouth opened, but she didn’t know whether to shout a warning or a plea or just a shout. Each of the men wore a plume of white feathers on his head, and wings of large feathers on his arms. They were athletes, heavily muscled, standing with straight backs against the burning blue sky.
The crowd stepped back. As one, the suicides leapt off the platform.
Ace didn’t manage to look away – and then she saw that each of them had a rope tied to his legs. They spun around the pole, descending in rapid, violent spirals, their arms outstretched like the wings of eagles. It was bizarre, and beautiful, and over in seconds, as the eagles hung limply from their ropes, swaying gently back and forth. ‘
We even get an insight into the Doctor’s own thoughts on the horror and beauty of the Aztecs:
‘He had quite forgotten what an extraordinary people they were. Beauty and horror, Susan had said. They built tremendous buildings, they made floating gardens, they surrounded themselves with feathers and flowers and poetry.
And they slaughtered thousands of people in war and on the altar. Hundreds of thousands, by the time Cortés arrived to slaughter them. They tore out the hearts and burned them, peeled off the skins and wore them, ate the best parts of the flesh.
Somehow it seemed logical that whatever had assaulted them in 1994 might have sprung from this archetypal horror. There was a feeling in the air like the fizzing of sherbet, the tang of the approaching storm. He wondered if the Aztecs felt it as well. ‘
In a similar manner to Ping Cho telling the stories of the Hashashins in Marco Polo, here we get the myth of Huitzilin’s story narrated by an Aztec priest – Achtli:
‘Coatlicue became magically pregnant when a ball of hummingbird feathers fell out of the sky near her,’ Achtli was chanting, almost inaudibly. ‘She was sweeping, cleaning the temple, and she tucked the feathers into her skirt. When she looked again, they had vanished. When Coyolxauhqui learned that her mother was pregnant, she became so jealous that she gathered together her brothers, the stars of the southern sky, and they resolved to slay Coatlicue.
‘But Coatlicue’s brother helped her escape to snake mountain, and her un- born child spoke to her from the womb, asking his uncle how close the pursuing army was, telling his mother, “Don’t be afraid; I know what to do.”’
‘A telepathic foetus?’ whispered Ace, but the Doctor waved her silent.
‘When Huitzilopochtli was born, fully formed but for his withered left foot, he put on his battle gear. He picked up his feathered shield, he painted his face with children’s paint, he wore plumage on his head. On his left foot he wore a feathered sandal. His legs and arms were painted blue.
And he picked up the Xiuhcoatl, the turquoise serpent.
He struck his sister Coyolxauhqui with the Xiuhcoatl,
Send her tumbling down the mountain:
He cut off her head.
And left it lying on the slope of the snake mountain.
Her body went rolling down the hill.
Her hands fell here,Her legs fell there.’
Later we get the ‘real world’ version of this – Huitzilin uses the Xiuhcoatl – a powerful, very precise Exxilon weapon to destroy his sister’s army, taking over the Aztecs and leading them to the island in the lake that was to become Tenochtitlan.
‘And still Huitzilin didn’t move, just stood there with his eyes half-closed against the glare of the noon sun, as if listening to a voice none of them could hear. Abruptly he raised the Xiuhcoatl, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do. And now there was no forest, no stream. Where the army had been was charred earth and a great billowing cloud of steam that raced up the hillside and exploded into the sky, stinking of lightning and seared rock. Huitzilin’s warriors raised their arms against the scorching cloud, screaming. They’d never seen anything like this before. Huitzilin looked at the little device in his hand, and smiled. It was so simple, easier to use than a toy!
He looked out over the devastation he’d created. The plain, boiled down to the rock, was shimmering with lifeless heat. The vegetation at the base of the mountain was scorched and shrivelled, and here and there he could see parboiled corpses littered amongst the cooked trees.
He spotted the multicoloured shield part way up the mountain, and went jumping and running down the slope. Everything was covered in warm dew, and the air was like a steam house. But it felt good. He found Coyolxauhqui face down in the dirt, her back and legs seared by the steam. He pulled her to her feet. She tried to scream, but her throat was burnt, and her scorched eyes were full of madness.
‘You see, little girl!’ he spat in her face. ‘Everything you’ve built I’m tearing down. Everything you’ve done I’m wiping out. All the stories they’re going to tell, they’ll tell about me, not you, and then they’ll tell them the way I want them told.’ Laughing, he devoured her, the air trembling with the power of his hunger. He screamed at his men, ‘I’m not going to fight with witchcraft. I’m going to fight with weapons. My orders will be obeyed in every land from the east coast to the west. I’ll protect every border of our land. I’ll make sure we live in luxury. I’ll make our nation glorious, I’ll lift us up to the sky!’ They watched him from the bushes, from behind rocks, shuddering. ‘Our conquests will get us gems and gold and feathers and emeralds and coral and amethysts and animal skins and cotton,’ he said giddily. ‘I’ll have it all. He’d never have to use the weapon again. When they saw what he had done, the Toltecs weren’t going to put up much resistance. And from now on, every warrior would be called hummingbird. ‘
In one sequence, the Doctor takes magic mushrooms to see ‘The Blue’ and the mixture of hallucinogens and the horror of human sacrifice on a huge scale as Huitzilin feeds on the release of emotions and the Blue infects the Doctor are disorientating and horrific. Terrific writing.
‘The possibilities are endless’
You can almost sense the excitement and feeling that ‘possibilities are endless’ that the new authors must have felt – particularly in the early days of the internet making communications between authors and with their audience possible, a time when the show was effectively dead and this was supposed to be the official continuation. Some of the range is weighed down by lots of 90’s popular culture references, characters named after the author’s mates and also a sense of having maybe only one chance to fit everything you wanted to say into what might be your only chance to write. There is also a sense of the authors challenging all of the boundaries of what is possible within Doctor Who and sometimes just going too far for the sake of it – there is an example here – The Doctor taking magic mushrooms and LSD – which I think is fine – it works very well in the context of the story. However sometimes this manifests itself in other books stretching for the adult and only achieving adolescent or bending the format so far out of shape that it is no longer a Doctor Who story – merely a vehicle for the author to be published. That certainly isn’t the case here – what we have is a story that really stretches the format of the show in a series of interesting directions until it almost, but not quite breaks and a very skilful author, who clearly loves Doctor Who.
The book moves dizzyingly from location to location and between time periods, but with the verve and confidence to pull this off. It is a bit like Steven Moffat at his very finest, when it all really works – a very difficult task to pull off. At times it does feel like there are too many elements, too many threads – too many plates being spun. For example, the Macbeth thread – a former UNIT operative who investigates the paranormal, who dies in Mexico in 1994, but they later meet at a hippy ‘happening’ in London in the 60’s. This also applies to the John Lennon connection – his death in New York in 1981 and the attempted attack on the “The Beatles’ on the HMV roof (Huitzilin wants to feed off the huge emotional release) it is maybe an element too far. Each time though the book manages to pull things around though, powering along and it is simply brimming with ideas and with a sort of zest and it is never less than entertaining and interesting.
Another example of the sort of idea that made the leap from Season 26, via the New Adventures and into the new series is the questioning of the morality and perspective of the Doctor. Here we get Huitzilin asking the Doctor about his own role in the deaths of others:
‘He grinned at the Doctor. ‘Are words your food, world killer? All this talk, and still the healer is becoming the warrior. How many people have you seen die, killer of worlds?’
We see this same aspect in numerous new series stories – from Davros (‘Stolen Earth’, ‘Witches Familiar’ etc.) to the Slitheen (‘Boomtown’), via ‘The Pandorica Opens’, ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ and ‘Death in Heaven’ – the tension between the warrior and the healer present within the Doctor.
We also see a tie in to real world events, which is less explored, for obvious reasons in the TV series:
‘And you left with the Spaniards.’ ‘I’ve travelled the world. Going wherever the action is hottest. I’ve never had to sing for my supper. Disappearances in Chile. Famine in East Timor. China fighting Viet Nam. Rhodesia fighting itself. Terrorists in Brazil. A menu, a great menu spread out for me. I have caused nothing. ‘Nothing?’‘The rioters and the terrorists and the murderers need no prompting from me.’ He laughed again, the flute becoming the beating of flamingo wings. ‘Nothing.’
All of this leads to the finale aboard the Titanic about to encounter an iceberg off Newfoundland. On board is an Aztex codex (‘The Codex Atlaca‘) that both Huitzlin and the Doctor want. The Doctor is fighting ‘The Blue’ that has been within him since Tenochtitlan and Huitzilin is slowly taking him over.
‘Huitzilin straightened, stretched luxuriously and came across the cabin like a jaguar.
The Time Lord gasped as the Aztec reached down and hauled him into the air by his collar. Huitzilin wrapped an arm around his throat, a ghostly and intangible arm, suddenly horribly real and strong. They were converging. It was happening.
The Doctor reached for the constricting arm, but Huitzilin grabbed his wrist and gripped it so tightly he thought it would break. He tried to kick backwards at the psychevore’s shin, but he didn’t have the strength.
Huitzilin smiled, and sank his teeth into the Doctor’s neck.
Cristián’s hand was resting against something on the floor.
The image in front of him was changing, melting. He could see through the Doctor. The Time Lord was becoming transparent as Huitzilin tore the reality out of him. The scream was growing weaker as the Doctor faded, becoming a ghostly echo, going on and on, just an echo, a memory of pain. Cristián wanted it to stop. It had to stop, it had to stop, it had to STOP – IT HAD TO STOP. Cristián snatched up Anna’s gun from the floor and shot the scream.The Doctor was a ghost. The bullets went right through him.Huitzilin was thrown backwards, stumbling. He dropped his victim, tripping over a chair, tumbling backwards until he struck the wall of the cabin. He roared in pain. Cristián watched, his eyes round as saucers. Huitzilin put a hand to his chest, where blood was sizzling.
‘I always wondered,’ he said, and died. ‘
So in the end Huitzilin, a ghostly figure who feeds off death on a massive scale, himself dies in the moment when he was starting to come back to life.
Kate Orman is a novelist rather than a TV writer, but I do feel that her work at least indirectly influences the TV series, not least via her influence on the writing of Paul Cornell (she helped plot out Human Nature) and other writers. I don’t know whether the story of Cristian – where the Doctor meets him out of sequence or the general skipping between times and places (Ok if I must – Timey-wimey-ness) had any influence on Steven Moffat (the book pre-dates his experiments with this approach in Coupling – which started in 2000), but it is hard to escape thinking that as you read this book. Anyway, although it won’t be to everyone’s taste, I can’t recommend the book enough – it is rich, dense, layered, disorientating, violent, horrific and very, very clever. I can’t really sum it up sufficiently in this review – it is dizzying.
A Journal of Impossible Things 