The Doctor was not laughing now. Slowly, he dragged himself across the marble floor, back towards the centre of the room. He knew that if he could get himself far enough away from Thalia’s influence, the agonising laughter that was wracking his body would stop. Casting about to try and focus on anything but the laughter that still bubbled up inside him, he looked down at this own hand. Here, this cool piece of white marble he was dragging himself over. It was similar in texture and colour to the building material for the great lighthouse of Alexandria; it was possible the two had been quarried from the same place.
‘Good,’ he thought. ‘That’s a start, more like that.’
He forced himself to think harder about the marble, the way it had none of the give of wood, none of the brutal edge pieces of a mosaic floor. This marble was solid and smooth, quarried in big slabs, in Italy perhaps, or Greece, it had been laid with care and precision. Millennia ago it had been simple rocks, and heat and pressure, metamorphism, had turned it into this precious material, had changed crystal structures and chemical composition while the rocks themselves had stayed solid. They remained both their original selves, and the more precious quarry of pure white marble.
The Doctor was far enough away from Thalia now to stand. He pulled himself up, patting the marble in gratitude. The hall was in disarray, people shifting attention from one muse to another, a flow from anger to love to loss to laughter. The Doctor knew that the tricky thing would be not to stop the Muses, but to persuade his young companions that they did not want to dance a reel or discuss astronomy for all time. Standing in the centre of the maelstrom, the Doctor realised there wasn’t a great deal of time left. He had counted five Muses so far, which meant there ought to be another four. He craned his neck to look over the dancing, laughing, chanting, riotous crowd that now filled the hall, and thought he could just make out the veiled figure of Polyhymnia, muse of hymns. Which meant that Clio, muse of history, and Melpomene, muse of tragedy, couldn’t be far behind. The Doctor had no intention of waiting for it to end in tears.
He saw Zoe edging away from Urania. ‘Good girl,’ he thought to himself. ‘She must have spotted it too.’
He held out his hand and Zoe seized it, allowing him to draw her close to him.
‘That was astonishing,’ she said. ‘I had no idea there was so much else to know. But it’s not right, is it, Doctor? There’s something strange about them.’
‘There certainly is…’ he began, his voice a low murmur beneath the cacophony all around, trying not to draw attention to himself.
He needn’t have bothered, for suddenly all the attention in the room was on Polyhymnia.
The veiled woman raised her arms at the far end of the room and immediately there was a hush in the incessant noise, and out of the sudden silence first one person, then another, then more joined in, until the whole room sang in harmony and unison. The Doctor felt the soft music wrap around him, even as he tried to shut it out, the sound – and more, the feeling of sound – welling up within him. It was quiet yet full, a gentle chant, clearly in praise of something.
‘What are they singing about, Doctor?’
‘I think the better question is not what, Zoe, but who.’
The Doctor was about to explain when, from behind the now-united hymn-singers, came a new sound.
‘Oh no,’ he muttered. ‘Not that.’
‘Not what, Doctor?’ asked Zoe.
‘Can’t you hear it?’
Zoe listened, although the hymn also made her want to exult in song with unknown words forming in her mouth, and there it was, a single, fine, perfect note held behind the singing. One note, played over and over. One note from an instrument she thought she recognised.
‘Doctor, that sounds like…’
‘Yes Zoe,’ he frowned. ‘I’m afraid it does. It sounds remarkably like a recorder. It’s an aulos, and if I’m not mistaken that means it’s being played by Euterpe, Giver of Delight. Oh dear, if the punchline from an old joke had me in paroxysms of laughter for ten minutes, it doesn’t bear thinking what this will do.’
Even as he spoke, the note itself became more insistent, yet simultaneously more pure, and then it seemed that everyone in the room was now playing an aulos, part-flute, part-recorder, all lovely.
‘I’m sorry, Zoe, I know I shouldn’t,’ the Doctor said, reaching into his pocket as he spoke. ‘But there’s something about being part of a thing larger than oneself. I have to – I need to play too.’
The Doctor had his recorder at his lips, and Zoe saw a dreamy quality overtake his face as he took a light breath and pursed his mouth to blow. Then he suddenly stopped, looked around, and shook his head, shaking himself free of the hold the music had over him. ‘Where’s Jamie?’