Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  The pipes of the ancient furnace began clanging, but it didn’t seem to deter the priest. He went on for a good five minutes, mentioning a number of instances in which God had smitten the unrighteous and “brought plagues among them” and then asked everyone to stand and sing, “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen, Let Nothing You Dismay.”

  Montoya ducked in and sat down next to Colin. “I have spent all day at the NHS,” she whispered, “trying to get them to give me a dispensation. They seem to think I intend to run around spreading the virus. I told them I’d go straight to the dig, that there’s no one out there to infect, but do you think they’d listen?”

  She turned to Colin. “If I do get the dispensation, I’m going to need volunteers to help me. How would you like to dig up bodies?”

  “He can’t,” Dunworthy said hastily. “His great-aunt won’t let him.” He leaned across Colin and whispered, “We’re trying to determine Badri Chaudhuri’s whereabouts on Monday afternoon from noon till half-past two. Did you see him?”

  “Shh,” the woman who had snapped at Colin said.

  Montoya shook her head. “I was with Kivrin, going over the map and the layout of Skendgate,” she whispered back.

  “Where? At the dig?”

  “No, at Brasenose.”

  “And Badri wasn’t there?” he asked, but there was no reason for Badri to have been at Brasenose. He hadn’t asked Badri to run the drop until he met with him at half-past two.

  “No,” Montoya whispered.

  “Shh!” the woman hissed.

  “How long did you meet with Kivrin?”

  “From ten till she had to go check into Infirmary, three, I think,” Montoya whispered.

  “Shh!”

  “I’ve got to go read a ‘Prayer to the Great Spirit,’” Montoya whispered, standing up and starting along the row of chairs.

  She read her American Indian chant, after which the bellringers, wearing white gloves and determined expressions, played, “O Christ Who Interfaces with the World,” which sounded a good deal like the banging of the pipes.

  “They’re absolutely necrotic, aren’t they?” Colin whispered behind his order of worship.

  “It’s Late Twentieth Century Atonal,” Dunworthy whispered back. “It’s supposed to sound dreadful.”

  When the bellringers appeared to be finished, Dunworthy mounted the lectern and read the Scripture. “‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed…’”

  Montoya stood up and edged her way past Colin to the side aisle and ducked out the door. He had wanted to ask her if she’d seen Badri at all on Monday or Tuesday or knew of any Americans he might have had contact with.

  He could ask her tomorrow when they went for their bloodwork. He had found out the most important thing—that Kivrin hadn’t seen Badri on Monday afternoon. Montoya had said she was with her till she left for Infirmary, and by that time Badri was already at Balliol meeting with him. Badri couldn’t possibly have exposed her.

  “‘And the angel said, Be not afraid, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people…’”

  No one seemed to be paying any attention. The woman who had snapped at Colin was wrestling her way out of her coat, and everyone else had already shed theirs and were fanning themselves with their orders of service.

  He thought of Kivrin, at the service last year, kneeling on the stone floor, gazing raptly, intently at him while he read. She had not been listening either. She had been imagining Christmas Eve in 1320, when the Scripture was in Latin and candles flickered in the windows.

  I wonder if it’s the way she imagined it, he thought, and then remembered it wasn’t Christmas Eve there. Where she was it was still two weeks away. If she was really there. If she was all right.

  “‘…but Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart,’” Dunworthy finished and went back to his seat.

  The imam announced the times of the Christmas Day services at all the churches, and read the NHS bulletin on avoiding contact with infected persons. The vicar began his sermon.

  “There are those,” he said, looking hard at the priest from Holy Re-Formed, “who think that diseases are a punishment from God, and yet Christ spent his life healing the sick, and were he here, I have no doubt he would cure those afflicted with this virus, just as he cured the Samaritan leper,” and launched into a ten-minute lecture on how to protect oneself from influenza. He listed the symptoms, explained droplet transmission, and demonstrated the use of an NHS face mask.

  “Drink fluids and rest,” he said, extending his hands out over the pulpit as if it were a benediction, “and at the first sign of any of these symptoms, telephone your doctor.”

  The bellringers pulled on their white gloves again and accompanied the organ in “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” which actually sounded recognizable.

  The minister from the Converted Unitarian Church mounted the pulpit. “On this very night over two thousand years ago, God sent his Son, His precious child, into our world. Can you imagine what kind of incredible love it must have taken to do that? On that night Jesus left his heavenly home and went into a world full of dangers and diseases,” the minister said. “He went as an ignorant and helpless babe, knowing nothing of the evil, of the treachery he would encounter. How could God have sent His only Son, his precious child, into such danger? The answer is love. Love.”

  “Or incompetence,” Dunworthy muttered.

  Colin looked up from his examination of his gobstopper and stared at him.

  And after He’d let him go, He worried about Him every minute, Dunworthy thought. I wonder if he tried to stop it.

  “It was love that sent Christ into the world, and love that made Christ willing, nay, eager to come.”

  She’s all right, he thought. The coordinates were correct. There was only four hours’ slippage. She wasn’t exposed to the flu. She’s safely in Skendgate, with the rendezvous date determined and her corder already half-full of observations, healthy and excited and blissfully unaware of all this.

  “He was sent into the world to help us in our trials and tribulations,” the minister said.

  The vicar was signaling to Dunworthy. He leaned across Colin. “I’ve just gotten word that Mr. Latimer’s ill,” the vicar whispered. He handed Dunworthy a folded sheet of paper. “Will you read the benediction?”

  “…a messenger from God, an emissary of love,” the minister said, and sat down.

  Dunworthy went to the lectern. “Will you please rise for the benediction?” he said, opening the sheet of paper and looking at it. “Oh, Lord, stay Thy wrathful hand,” it began.

  Dunworthy wadded it up. “Merciful Father,” he said, “protect those absent from us, and bring them safely home.”

  Transcript from the Doomsday Book

  (035850-037745)

  20 December 1320. I’m nearly completely well. My enhanced T-cells or the antivirals or something must have finally kicked in. I can breathe in without it hurting, my cough’s gone, and I feel as though I could walk all the way to the drop, if I knew where it was.

  The cut on my forehead is healed, too. Lady Eliwys looked at it this morning and then went and got Imeyne and had her examine it. “It is a miracle,” Eliwys said delightedly, but Imeyne only looked suspicious. Next she’ll decide I’m a witch.

  It has become immediately apparent that now that I’m not an invalid, I’m a problem. Besides Imeyne thinking I’m spying or stealing the spoons, there’s the difficulty of who I am—what my status is and how I should be treated—and Eliwys doesn’t have the time or the energy to deal with it.

  She has enough problems. Lord Guillaume still isn’t here, his prive is in love with her, and Christmas is coming. She’s recruited half the village as servants and cooks, and they are out of a number of essential supplies which Imeyne insists they send to Oxford or Courcy for. Agnes adds to the problem by being underfoot and constantly ru
nning away from Maisry.

  “You must send to Sir Bloet for a waiting woman,” Imeyne said when they found her playing in the barn loft. “And for sugar. We have none for the subtlety nor the sweetmeats.”

  Eliwys looked exasperated. “My husband bade us—”

  “I will watch Agnes,” I said, hoping the interpreter had translated “waiting women” properly and that the history vids had been right, and the position of children’s nurse was sometimes filled by women of noble birth. Apparently it was. Eliwys looked immediately grateful, and Imeyne didn’t glare any more than usual. So I’m in charge of Agnes. And apparently Rosemund, who asked for help with her embroidery this morning.

  The advantages of being their nurse is that I can ask them all about their father and the village, and I can go out to the stable and the church and find the priest and Gawyn. The disadvantage is that a good deal is being kept from the girls. Once already Eliwys stopped talking to Imeyne when Agnes and I came into the hall, and when I asked Rosemund why they had come here to stay, she said, “My father deems the air is healthier at Ashencote.”

  This is the first time anyone has mentioned the name of the village. There isn’t any Ashencote on the map or in the Doomsday Book. I suppose there’s a chance it could be another “lost village.” With a population of thirty, it could easily have died out in the Black Death or been absorbed by one of the nearby towns, but I still think it’s Skendgate.

  I asked the girls if they knew of a village named Skendgate, and Rosemund said she’d never heard of it, which doesn’t prove anything, since they’re not from around here, but Agnes apparently asked Maisry, and she’d never heard of it either. Ms. Montoya puts the “gate” (which was actually a weir) at 1360 or later, and many of the Anglo-Saxon place names were replaced by Normanized ones or named for their new owners. Which bodes ill for Guillaume D’Iverie, and for the trial he still has not returned from. Unless this is another village altogether. Which bodes ill for me.

  (Break)

  Gawyn’s feelings of courtly love for Eliwys are apparently not disturbed by dalliances with the servants. I asked Agnes to take me out to the stable to see her pony on the chance that Gawyn would be there. He was, in one of the boxes with Maisry, making less-than-courtly grunting noises. Maisry looked no more terrified than usual, and her hands were holding her skirts in a wad above her waist instead of clutching her ears, so it apparently wasn’t rape. It wasn’t l’amour courtois either.

  I had to hastily distract Agnes and get her out of the stable, so I told her I wanted to go across the green to see the bell tower. We went inside and looked at the heavy rope.

  “Father Roche rings the bell when someone dies,” Agnes said. “If he does not, the devil will come and take their soul, and they can not go to heaven,” which, I suppose, is more of the superstitious prate which irritates Lady Imeyne.

  Agnes wanted to ring the bell, but I talked her into going into the church to find Father Roche instead.

  Father Roche wasn’t there. Agnes told me that he was probably still with the cottar, “who dies not though he has been shriven,” or was somewhere praying. “Father Roche is wont to pray in the woods,” she said, peering through the rood screen to the altar.

  The church is Norman, with a central aisle and sandstone pillars, and a flagged stone floor. The stained-glass windows are very narrow and small and of dark colors. They let in almost no light. There is only one tomb, halfway up the nave.

  An effigy of a knight lies on top of the tomb, his arms in gauntlets, crossed over his breast, and his sword at his side. The carving on the side says, “Requiscat cum Sanctis tuis in aeternum.” May he rest with Thy saints forever.

  Agnes told me the tomb is her grandfather’s, who died of a fever “a long time ago.”

  Except for the tomb and a rough statue, the nave is completely empty. The contemps stood during church so there aren’t any pews, and the practice of filling the nave with monuments and memorials didn’t take hold until the 1500’s.

  A carved wooden rood screen, twelfth century, separates the nave from the shadowy recesses of the chancel and the altar. Above it, on either side of the crucifix, are two crude paintings of the Last Judgment. One is of the faithful entering heaven and the other of sinners being consigned to hell, but they seem nearly alike. Both are painted in garish reds and blues, and their expressions look equally dismayed.

  The altar’s plain, covered with a white linen cloth, with two silver candelabra on either side of it. The badly-carved statue is not, as I’d assumed, the Virgin, but St. Catherine of Alexandria. It has the foreshortened body and large head of pre– Renaissance sculpture, and an odd, squarish coif that stops just below her ears. She stands with one arm around a doll-sized child and the other holding a wheel. A short yellowish candle and two oil cressets were sitting on the floor in front of it.

  “Lady Kivrin, Father Roche says you are a saint,” Agnes said when we went back outside.

  It was easy to see where the confusion had come in this time, and I wondered if she’d done the same thing with the bell and the devil in the black horse.

  “I am named for St. Catherine of Alexandria,” I said, “as you are named for St. Agnes, but we ourselves are not saints.”

  She shook her head. “He says in the last days God will send his saints to sinful man. He says when you pray, you speak in God’s own tongue.”

  I’ve tried to be careful about talking into the corder, to record my observations only when there’s no one in the room, but I don’t know about when I was ill. I remember that I kept asking him to help me, and you to come and get me. And if Father Roche heard me speaking modern English, he could very well believe I was speaking in tongues. At least he thinks I’m a saint, and not a witch, but Lady Imeyne was in the sickroom, too. I will have to be more careful.

  (Break)

  I went out to the stable again (after making sure Maisry was in the kitchen), but Gawyn wasn’t there, and neither was Gringolet. My boxes and the dismantled remains of the wagon were, though. Gawyn must have made a dozen trips to bring everything here. I looked through it all, and I can’t find the casket. I’m hoping he missed it, and it’s still by the road where I left it. If it is, it’s probably completely buried in snow, but the sun is out today, and it’s beginning to melt a little.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kivrin’s recovery from pneumonia came so suddenly she was convinced that something had happened to finally activate in her immune system. The pain in her chest went away, she stopped coughing, and the cut on her forehead disappeared completely.

  Imeyne examined it suspiciously, as if she suspected Kivrin of faking her injury, and Kivrin was infinitely glad the wound hadn’t been duped. “You must thank God that He has healed you on this Sabbath day,” Imeyne said disapprovingly, and knelt beside the bed.

  She had been to mass and was wearing her silver reliquary. She folded it between her palms—”like the corder,” Kivrin thought—and recited the Paternoster, then pulled herself to her feet.

  “I wish I could have gone with you to the mass,” Kivrin said.

  Imeyne sniffed. “I deemed you were too ill,” she said, with an insinuating emphasis on the word “ill,” “and it was but a poor mass.”

  She launched into a recital of Father Roche’s sins: he had read the gospel before the Kyrie, his alb was stained with candlewax, he had forgotten part of the Confiteor Deo. Listing his sins seemed to put her in a better mood, and when she finished she patted Kivrin’s hand and said, “You are not yet fully healed. Stay you in bed yet another day.”

  Kivrin did, using the time to record her observations onto the corder, describing the manor and the village and everyone she’d met so far. The steward came with another bowl of his wife’s bitter tea, a dark, burly man who looked uncomfortable in his Sunday best jerkin and a too-elaborate silver belt, and a boy about Rosemund’s age came in to tell Eliwys that her mare’s forefoot was “amiss.” But the priest didn’t come again. “He has gone to
shrive the cottar,” Agnes told her.

  Agnes was continuing to be an excellent informant, answering all of Kivrin’s questions readily, whether she knew the answers or not, and volunteering all sorts of information about the village and its occupants. Rosemund was quieter and very much concerned with appearing grown-up. “Agnes, it is childish to speak so. You must learn to keep a watch on your tongue,” she said repeatedly, a comment which happily had no effect whatsoever on Agnes. Rosemund did talk about her brothers and her father who “has promised he will come to us for Christmas without fail.” She obviously worshipped him and missed him. “I wish I had been a boy,” she said when Agnes was showing Kivrin the silver penny Sir Bloet had given her. “Then I had stayed with Father in Bath.”

  Between the two girls, and snatches of Eliwys’s and Imeyne’s conversations, plus her own observations, she was able to piece together a good deal about the village. It was smaller than Probability had predicted Skendgate would be, small even for a mediaeval village. Kivrin guessed it contained no more than forty people, including Lord Guillaume’s family and the steward’s. He had five children “And a new-christened babe,” according to Rosemund.

  There were two shepherds and several farmers, but it was “the poorest of all Guillaume’s holdings,” Imeyne said, complaining again about them having to spend Christmas there. The steward’s wife was the resident social climber, and Maisry’s family the local ne’er-do-wells. Kivrin recorded everything, statistics and gossip, folding her hands in prayer whenever she had the chance.

  The snow that had started when they brought her back to the manor continued all that night and into the next afternoon, snowing nearly a foot. The first day Kivrin was up, it rained, and Kivrin hoped the rain would melt the snow, but it merely hardened the crust to ice.

  She was afraid she’d have no hope at all of recognizing the drop without the wagon and boxes there. She would have to get Gawyn to show it to her, but that was easier said than done. He only came into the hall to eat or to ask Eliwys something, and Imeyne was always there, watching, when he was, so she didn’t dare approach him.