Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  It had a rickety wattle fence around it, made by weaving green branches between stakes. The fence was scarcely knee-high and wouldn’t have kept a cat out, let alone the sheep and cows it was intended against. Only the gate had supports even waist– high, and Kivrin leaned gratefully against one of them. “Hello,” she shouted into the wind, “is anyone there?”

  The front door of the hut was only a few steps from the gate, and the hut couldn’t be soundproof. It wasn’t even windproof. She could see a hole in the wall where the daubed clay and chopped straw had cracked and fallen away from the matted branches underneath. They could surely hear her. She lifted the loop of leather that held the gate shut, went in, and knocked on the low, planked door.

  There was no answer, and Kivrin hadn’t expected any. She shouted again, “Is anyone home?” not even bothering to listen to how the interpreter translated it, and tried to lift the wooden bar that lay across it. It was too heavy. She tried to slide it out of the notches cut in the protruding lintels, but she couldn’t. The hut looked like it could blow away at any minute, and she couldn’t get the door open. She would have to tell Mr. Dunworthy mediaeval huts weren’t as flimsy as they looked. She leaned against the door, holding her chest.

  Something made a sound behind her, and she turned, already saying, “I’m sorry I intruded into your garden.” It was the cow, leaning casually over the fence and browsing among the brown leaves, hardly reaching at all.

  She would have to go back to the manor. She used the gate for support, making sure she shut it behind her and looped the leather back over the stake, and then the cow’s bony back. The cow followed with her a few steps, as if she thought Kivrin was leading her in to be milked, and then went back to the garden.

  The door of one of the sheds that nobody could possibly live in opened, and a barefoot boy came out. He stopped, looking frightened.

  Kivrin tried to straighten up. “Please,” she said, breathing hard between the words, “may I rest awhile in your house?”

  The boy stared dumbly at her, his mouth hanging open. He was hideously thin, his arms and legs no thicker than the twigs in the hut fences.

  “Please, run to the manor and tell the men in the stable come. Tell them I’m ill.”

  He can no more run than I can, she thought as soon as she said it. The boy’s feet were blue with cold. His mouth looked sore, and his cheeks and upper lip were smeared with dried blood from a nosebleed. He’s got scurvy, Kivrin thought, he’s worse off than I am, but she said again, “Run to the manor and bid them come.”

  The boy crossed himself with a chapped, bony hand. “Bighaull emeurdroud ooghattund enblastbardey,” he said, backing into the hut.

  Oh, no, Kivrin thought despairingly. He can’t understand me, and I don’t have the strength to try to make him. “Please help me,” she said, and the boy looked almost like he understood that. He took a step toward her and then darted suddenly away in the direction of the church.

  “Wait!” Kivrin called.

  He darted past the cow and around the fence and disappeared behind the hut. Kivrin looked at the shed. It could hardly even be called that. It looked more like a haystack—grass and pieces of thatch wadded into the spaces between the poles, but its door was a mat of sticks tied together with blackish rope, the kind of door you could blow down with one good breath, and the boy had left it open. She stepped over the raised doorstep and went into the hut.

  It was dark inside and so smoky Kivrin couldn’t see anything. It smelled terrible. Like a stable. Worse than a stable. Mingled with the barnyard smells were smoke and mildew and the nasty odor of rats. Kivrin had had to bend over almost double to get through the door. She straightened, and hit her head on the sticks that served as crossbeams.

  There was nowhere to sit in the hut, if that was really what it was. The floor was as covered with sacks and tools as if it was a shed after all, and there was no furniture except an uneven table whose rough legs splayed unevenly from the center. But the table had a wooden bowl and a heel of bread on it, and in the center of the hut, in the only cleared space, a little fire was burning in a shallow, dug-out hole.

  It was apparently the source of all the smoke even though there was a hole in the ceiling above it for a draft. It was a little fire, only a few sticks, but the other holes in the unevenly stuffed walls and roof drew the smoke, too, and the wind, coming in from everywhere, gusted it around the cramped hut. Kivrin started to cough, which was a terrible mistake. Her chest felt as if it would break apart with every spasm.

  Gritting her teeth to keep from coughing, she eased herself down on a sack of onions, holding onto the spade propped against it and then the fragile-looking wall. She felt immediately better as soon as she was sitting down, even though it was so cold she could see her breath. I wonder how this place smells in the summer, she thought. She wrapped her cloak around her, folding the tails like a blanket across her knees.

  There was a cold draft along the floor. She tucked the cloak around her feet and then picked up a bill hook lying next to the sack and poked at the meager fire with it. The fire blazed up halfheartedly, illuminating the hut and making it look more than ever like a shed. A low lean-to had been built on at one side, probably for a stable because it was partitioned off from the rest of the hut by an even lower fence than the cottage had had. The fire wasn’t bright enough for Kivrin to see into the lean-to corner, but a scuffling sound came from it.

  A pig, maybe, although the peasants’ pigs were supposed to have been slaughtered by now, or maybe a milchgoat. She poked at the fire again, trying to get a little more light from the corner.

  The scuffling sound came from in front of the pathetic fence, from a large dome-shaped cage. It was elaborately out-of– place in the filthy corner with its smooth curved metal band, its complicated door, its fancy handle. Inside the cage, his eyes glinting in the firelight Kivrin had stirred up, was a rat.

  He sat on his haunches, his hand-like paws holding the chunk of cheese that had tempted him into imprisonment, watching Kivrin. There were several other crumbled and probably moldy bits of cheese on the floor of the cage. More food than in this entire hut, Kivrin thought, sitting very still on the lumpy sack of onions. One wouldn’t think they had anything worth protecting from a rat.

  She had seen a rat before, of course, in History of Psych and when they tested her for phobias during her first years, but not this kind. Nobody had seen this kind, in England at least, in fifty years. It was a very pretty rat, actually, with silky black fur, not much bigger than History of Psych’s white laboratory rats, not nearly as big as the brown rat she’d been tested with.

  It looked much cleaner than the brown rat, too. He had looked like he belonged in the sewers and drains and tube tunnels he’d no doubt come out of, with his matted dust-brown coat and long, obscenely naked tail. When she had first started studying the Middle Ages, she had been unable to understand how the contemps had tolerated the disgusting things in their barns, let alone their houses. The thought of the one in the wall by her bed had filled her with revulsion. But this rat was actually quite clean-looking, with its black eyes and shiny coat. Certainly cleaner than Maisry, and probably more intelligent. Harmless-looking.

  As if to prove her point, the rat took another dainty nibble on the cheese.

  “You’re not harmless, though,” Kivrin said. “You’re the scourge of the Middle Ages.”

  The rat dropped the chunk of cheese and took a step forward, his whiskers twitching. He took hold of two of the metal bars with his pinkish hands and looked appealingly through them.

  “I can’t let you out, you know,” Kivrin said, and his ears pricked up as if he understood her. “You eat precious grain and contaminate food and carry fleas and in another twenty-eight years you and your chums will wipe out half of Europe. You’re what Lady Imeyne should be worrying about instead of French spies and illiterate priests.” The rat looked at her. “I’d like to let you out, but I can’t. The Black Death was bad enough as it
was. It killed over a third of Europe. If I let you out, your descendants might make it even worse.”

  The rat let go of the bars and began running around the cage, crashing against the bars, circling in frantic, random movements.

  “I’d let you out if I could,” Kivrin said. The fire had nearly gone out. Kivrin stirred it again, but it was all ashes. The door she had left open in the hope that the boy would bring someone back looking for her banged shut, plunging the hut in darkness.

  They won’t have any idea where to look for me, Kivrin thought, and knew they weren’t even looking yet. They all thought she was in Rosemund’s bower asleep. Lady Imeyne wouldn’t even check on her until she brought her her supper. They wouldn’t even start to look for her until after vespers, and by then it would be dark.

  It was very quiet in the hut. The wind must have died down. She couldn’t hear the rat. A twig on the fire snapped once, and sparks flew onto the dirt floor.

  Nobody knows where I am, she thought, and put her hand up to her chest as if she had been stabbed. Nobody knows where I am. Not even Mr. Dunworthy.

  But surely that wasn’t true. Lady Eliwys might have come back and gone up to put more ointment on, or Maisry might have come in from the stable or the boy might have darted off to fetch the men from the fields, and they would be here any minute, even though the door was shut. And even if they didn’t realize she was gone until after vespers, they had torches and lanterns, and the parents of the boy with scurvy would come back to cook supper and find her and would go and fetch someone from the manor. No matter what happens, she told herself, you’re not completely alone, and that comforted her.

  Because she was completely alone. She had tried to convince herself she wasn’t, that some reading on the net’s monitor’s had told Gilchrist and Montoya something had gone wrong, that Mr. Dunworthy had made Badri check and recheck everything, that they knew what had happened somehow and were holding the drop open. But they weren’t. They no more knew where she was than Agnes and Lady Eliwys did. They thought she was safely in Skendgate, studying the Middle Ages, with the drop clearly located and the Doomsday Book already half full of observations about quaint customs and rotation of crops. They wouldn’t even realize she was gone until they opened the drop in two weeks.

  “And by then it will be dark,” Kivrin said.

  She sat still, watching the fire. It was nearly out, and there weren’t any more sticks anywhere that she could see. She wondered if the boy had been left at home to gather faggots and what they would do for a fire tonight.

  She was all alone, and the fire was going out, and nobody knew where she was except the rat who was going to kill half of Europe. She stood up, cracking her head again, pushed the door of the hut open, and went outside.

  There was still no one in sight in the fields. The wind had died down, and she could hear the bell from the southwest tolling clearly. A few flakes of snow drifted out of the gray sky. The little rise the church was on was completely obscured with snow. Kivrin started toward the church.

  Another bell began. It was more to the south and closer, but with the higher, more metallic sound that meant it was a smaller bell. It tolled steadily, too, but a little behind the first bell so that it sounded like an echo.

  “Kivrin! Lady Kivrin!” Agnes called. “Where have you been?” She ran up beside Kivrin, her round little face red with exertion or cold. Or excitement. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” She darted back in the direction she had come from, shouting, “I found her! I found her!”

  “Nay, you did not!” Rosemund said. “We all saw her.” She hurried forward ahead of Lady Imeyne and Maisry, who had her ragged poncho thrown over her shoulders. Her ears were bright red. She looked sullen, which probably meant she had been blamed for Kivrin’s disappearance or thought she was going to be, or maybe she was just cold. Lady Imeyne looked furious.

  “You did not know it was Kivrin,” Agnes shouted, running back to Kivrin’s side. “You said you were not certain it was Kivrin. I was the one who found her.”

  Rosemund ignored her. She took hold of Kivrin’s arm. “What has happened? Why did you leave your bed?” she asked anxiously. “Gawyn came to speak with you and found that you had gone.”

  Gawyn came, Kivrin thought weakly. Gawyn, who could have told me exactly where the drop is, and I wasn’t there.

  “Aye, he came to tell you that he had found no trace of your attackers, and that—”

  Lady Imeyne came up. “Whither were you bound?” she said, and it sounded like an accusation.

  “I could not find my way back,” Kivrin said, trying to think what to say to explain her wandering about the village.

  “Went you to meet someone?” Lady Imeyne demanded, and it was definitely an accusation.

  “How could she go to meet someone?” Rosemund asked. “She knows no one here and remembers naught of before.”

  “I went to look for the place where I was found,” Kivrin said, trying not to lean on Rosemund. “I thought maybe the sight of my belongings might…”

  “Help you to remember,” Rosemund said. “But—”

  “You need not have risked your health to do so,” Lady Imeyne said. “Gawyn has fetched them here this day.”

  “Everything?” Kivrin asked.

  “Aye,” Rosemund said, “the wagon and all your boxes.”

  The second bell stopped, and the first bell kept on alone, steadily, slowly, and surely it was a funeral. It sounded like the death of hope itself. Gawyn had brought everything to the manor.

  “It is not meet to hold Lady Katherine talking in this cold,” Rosemund said, sounding like her mother. “She has been ill. We must needs get her inside ere she catches a chill.”

  I have already caught a chill, Kivrin thought. Gawyn has brought everything to the manor, all traces of where the drop had been. Even the wagon.

  “You are to blame for this, Maisry,” Lady Imeyne said, pushing Maisry forward to take Kivrin’s arm. “You should not have left her alone.”

  Kivrin flinched away from the filthy Maisry.

  “Can you walk?” Rosemund asked, already buckling under Kivrin’s weight. “Should we bring the mare?”

  “No,” Kivrin said. She somehow couldn’t bear the thought of that, brought back like a captured prisoner on the back of a jangling horse. “No,” she repeated. “I can walk.”

  She had to lean heavily on Rosemund’s arm and Maisry’s filthy one, and it was slow going, but she made it. Past the huts and the steward’s house and the interested pigs, and into the courtyard. The stump of a big ash tree lay on the cobbles in front of the barn, its twisted roots catching the flakes of snow.

  “She will have caught her death with her behavior,” Lady Imeyne said, gesturing to Maisry to open the heavy wooden door. “She will no doubt have a relapse.”

  It began to snow in earnest. Maisry opened the door. It had a latch like the little door on the rat’s cage. I should have let him go, Kivrin thought, scourge or not. I should have let him go.

  Lady Imeyne motioned to Maisry, and she came back to take Kivrin’s arm again. “No,” she said, and shrugged off her hand and Rosemund’s and walked alone and without help through the door and into the darkness inside.

  Transcript from the Doomsday Book

  (005982-013198)

  18 December 1320 (Old Style.) I think I have pneumonia. I tried to go find the drop, but I didn’t make it, and I’ve had some sort of relapse or something. There’s a stabbing pain under my ribs every time I take a breath, and when I cough, which is constantly, it feels like everything inside is breaking to pieces. I tried to sit up awhile ago and was instantly bathed in sweat, and I think my temp is back up. Those are all symptoms Dr. Ahrens told me indicate pneumonia.

  Lady Eliwys isn’t back yet. Lady Imeyne put a horrible– smelling poultice on my chest and then sent for the steward’s wife. I thought she wanted to “chide with” her for usurping the manor, but when the steward’s wife came, carrying her six-month ol
d baby, Imeyne told her, “The wound has fevered her lungs,” and she looked at my temple and then went out and came back without the baby and with a bowl full of a bitter-tasting tea. It must have had willow bark or something in it because my temp came down, and my ribs don’t hurt quite so much.

  The steward’s wife is thin and small, with a sharp face and ash-blonde hair. I think Lady Imeyne is probably right about her being the one to tempt the steward “into sin.” She came in wearing a fur-trimmed kirtle with sleeves so long they nearly dragged on the floor, and her baby wrapped in a finely-woven wool blanket, and she talks in an odd, slurred accent which I think is an attempt to mimic Lady Imeyne’s speech.

  “The embryonic middle class,” as Mr. Latimer would say, nouveau riche and waiting for its chance, which it will get in thirty years when the Black Death hits and a third of the nobility is wiped out.

  “Is this the lady was found in the woods?” she asked Lady Imeyne when she came in, and there wasn’t any “seeming modesty” in her manner. She smiled at Imeyne as if they were old chums and came over to the bed.

  “Aye,” Lady Imeyne said, managing to get impatience, disdain, and distaste all in one syllable.

  The steward’s wife was oblivious. She came over to the bed and then stepped back, the first person to show any indication they thought I might be contagious. “Has she the (something) fever?” The interpreter didn’t catch the word, and I couldn’t get it either because of her peculiar accent. Flouronen? Florentine?

  “She has a wound to the head,” Imeyne said sharply. “It has fevered her lungs.”

  The steward’s wife nodded. “Father Roche told us how he and Gawyn found her in the woods.”

  Imeyne stiffened at the familiar use of Gawyn’s name, and the steward’s wife did catch that and hurried out to brew up the willow bark. She even ducked a bow to Lady Imeyne when she left the second time.