Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  At least Agnes was safe. She had not come near the barricade since Kivrin shouted at her. She had sat for a bit, glaring at Kivrin with an expression that was so fierce it would have been comical under other circumstances, and then gone up to the loft to fetch her cart. She had set a place for it at the high table, and they were having a feast.

  Rosemund was awake. She asked Kivrin for a drink in a hoarse voice, and as soon as Kivrin had given it to her, fell quietly asleep. Even the clerk dozed, the hum of his breathing less loud, and Kivrin sat down gratefully beside Rosemund.

  She should go out and help Roche with the steward’s children, at least make sure he was wearing his mask and washing his hands, but she felt suddenly too tired to move. If I could just lie down for a minute, she thought, I might be able to think of something.

  “I would go see Blackie,” Agnes said.

  Kivrin jerked her head around, startled out of what had almost been sleep.

  Agnes had put on her red cape and hood and was standing as close to the barricade as she dared. “You vowed you would take me to see my hound’s grave.”

  “Hush, you will wake your sister,” Kivrin said.

  Agnes started to cry, not the loud wail she used when she wanted her own way, but quiet sobs. She’s reached her limit, too, Kivrin thought. Left alone all day, Rosemund and Roche and I all off-limits, everyone busy and distracted and frightened. Poor thing.

  “You vowed,” Agnes said, her lip quivering.

  “I cannot take you to see your puppy now,” Kivrin said gently, “but I will tell you a story. We must be very quiet, though.” She put her finger to her lips. “We must not wake Rosemund or the clerk.”

  Agnes wiped her runny nose with her hand. “Will you tell me the story of the girl in the woods?” she said in a stage whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “Can Cart listen?”

  “Yes,” Kivrin whispered, and Agnes tore across the hall to fetch the little wagon, ran back with it and climbed up on the bench, ready to mount the barricade.

  “You must sit down on the floor against the table,” Kivrin said, “and I will sit here on the other side.”

  “I will not be able to hear you,” Agnes said, her face clouding up again.

  “Of course you will, if you are very quiet.”

  Agnes got down off the bench and sat down, scooting into position against the table. She set Cart on the floor beside her. “You must be very quiet,” she said to it.

  Kivrin went over and looked quickly at her patients and then sat down against the table and leaned back, feeling exhausted all over again.

  “Once in a far land,” Agnes prompted.

  “Once in a far land, there was a little girl. She lived by a great forest—”

  “Her father said, ‘Go not into the woods,’ but she was naughty and did not listen,” Agnes said.

  “She was naughty and did not listen,” Kivrin said. “She put on her cloak—”

  “Her red cloak with a hood,” Agnes said. “And she went into the wood, even though her father told her not to.”

  Even though her father told her not to. “I’ll be perfectly all right,” she had told Mr. Dunworthy. “I can take care of myself.”

  “She should not have gone into the woods, should she?” Agnes said.

  “She wanted to see what was there. She thought she would go just a little way,” Kivrin said.

  “She should not have,” Agnes said, passing judgment. “I would not. The woods are dark.”

  “The woods are very dark, and full of frightening noises.”

  “Wolves,” Agnes said, and Kivrin could hear her scooting closer to the table, trying to get as close to Kivrin as she could. Kivrin could imagine her huddled against the wood, her knees up, hugging the little wagon.

  “The girl said to herself, ‘I don’t like it here,’ and she tried to go back, but she could not see the path, it was so dark, and suddenly something jumped out at her!”

  “A wolf,” Agnes breathed.

  “No,” Kivrin said. “It was a bear. And the bear said, ‘What are you doing in my forest?’”

  “The girl was frightened,” Agnes said in a small, frightened voice.

  “Yes. ‘Oh, please don’t eat me, Bear,’ the girl said. ‘I am lost and cannot find my way home.’ Now the bear was a kindly bear, though he looked cruel, and he said, ‘I will help you find your way out of the woods,’ and the girl said, ‘How? It is so dark.’ ‘We will ask the owl,’ the bear said. ‘He can see in the dark.’”

  She talked on, making up the tale as she went, oddly comforted by it. Agnes stopped interrupting, and after awhile Kivrin raised herself up, still talking, and looked over the barricade. “‘Do you know the way out of the wood?’ the bear asked the crow. ‘Yes,’ the crow said.”

  Agnes was asleep against the table, the cape spilled out around her and the cart hugged to her chest.

  She should be covered up, but Kivrin didn’t dare. All the bedclothes were full of plague germs. She looked over at Lady Imeyne, praying in the corner, her face to the wall. “Lady Imeyne,” she called softly, but the old lady gave no sign she had heard.

  Kivrin put more wood on the fire and sat back down against the table, leaning her head back. “‘I know the way out of the woods,’ the crow said, ‘I will show you,’” Kivrin said softly, “but he flew away over the treetops, so fast they could not follow.”

  She must have slept, because the fire was down when she opened her eyes and her neck hurt. Rosemund and Agnes still slept, but the clerk was awake. He called to Kivrin, his words unrecognizable. The white fur covered his whole tongue, and his breath was so foul Kivrin had to turn her head away to breathe. His bubo had begun to drain again, a thick, dark liquid that smelled like rotting meat. Kivrin put a new bandage on, clenching her teeth to keep from gagging, and carried the old one to the far corner of the hall, and then went out and washed her hands at the well, pouring the icy water from the bucket over one hand and then the other, taking in gulps of the cold air.

  Roche came into the courtyard. “Ulric, Hal’s son,” he said, walking with her into the house, “and one of the steward’s sons, the eldest, Walthef.” He stumbled the into bench nearest the door.

  “You’re exhausted,” Kivirn said. “You should lie down and rest.”

  On the other side of the hall, Imeyne stood up, getting awkwardly to her feet, as though her legs had fallen asleep, and started across the hall toward them.

  “I cannot stay. I came to fetch a knife to cut the willows,” Roche said, but he sat down by the fire and stared blankly into it.

  “Rest a minute at least,” Kivrin said. “I will fetch you some ale.” She pushed the bench to the side and started out.

  “You have brought this sickness,” Lady Imeyne said.

  Kivrin turned. The old lady was standing in the middle of the hall, glaring at Roche. She held her book to her chest with both hands. Her reliquary dangled from them. “It is your sins have brought the sickness here.”

  She turned to Kivrin. “He said the litany for Martinmas on St. Eusebius’ Day. His alb is dirty.” She sounded as she had when she was complaining to Sir Bloet’s sister, and her hands fumbled with the reliquary, counting off his sins on the links of the chain. “He did not shut the church door after vespers last Wednesday.”

  Kivrin watched her, thinking, she’s trying to justify her own guilt. She wrote the bishop asking for a new chaplain, she told him where they were. She can’t bear the knowledge that she helped bring the plague here, Kivrin thought, but she couldn’t summon up any pity. You have no right to blame Roche, she thought, he has done everything he can. And you’ve sat in a corner and prayed.

  “God has not sent this plague as a punishment,” she told Imeyne coldly. “It’s a disease.”

  “He forgot the Confiteor Deo,” Imeyne said, but she hobbled back to her corner and lowered herself to her knees. “He put the altar candles on the rood screen.”

  Kivrin went over to Roche. “N
o one is to blame,” she said.

  He was staring into the fire. “If God does punish us,” he said, “it must be for some terrible sin.”

  “No sin,” she said. “It is not a punishment.”

  “Dominus!” the clerk cried, trying to sit up. He coughed again, a racking, terrible cough that sounded like it would tear his chest apart, though nothing came up. The sound woke Rosemund and she began to whimper, and if it isn’t a punishment, Kivrin thought, it certainly looks like one.

  Rosemund’s sleep had not helped her at all. Her temp was back up again, and her eyes had begun to look sunken. She jerked as if flogged at the slightest movement.

  It’s killing her, Kivrin thought. I have to do something.

  When Roche came in again, she went up to the bower and brought down Imeyne’s casket of medicines. Imeyne watched, her lips moving soundlessly, but when Kivrin set it in front of her and asked her what was in the linen bags, she put her folded hand up to her face and closed her eyes.

  Kivrin recognized some of them. Mr. Dunworthy had made her study medicinal herbs, and she recognized comfrey and lungwort and the crushed leaves of tansy. There was a little pouch of powdered mercury sulfide, which no one in their right mind would give anyone, and a packet of foxglove, which was almost as bad.

  She boiled water and poured in every herb she recognized and steeped it. The fragrance was wonderful, like a breath of summer, and it tasted no worse than the willow-bark tea, but it didn’t help either. By nightfall, the clerk was coughing continuously, and red blotches had begun to appear on Rosemund’s stomach and arms. Her bubo was the size of an egg and as hard. When Kivrin touched it, she screamed with pain.

  During the Black Death the doctors had put poultices on the buboes or lanced them. They had also bled people and dosed them with arsenic, she thought, though the clerk had seemed better after his buboes broke, and he was still alive. But lancing it might spread the infection or, worse, take it into the bloodstream.

  She heated water and wet rags to lay on the bubo, but even though the water was lukewarm, Rosemund screamed at the first touch. Kivrin had to go back to cold water, which did no good. None of it’s doing any good, she thought, holding the wet cold cloth against Rosemund’s armpit. None of it.

  I must find the drop, she thought. But the woods stretched on for miles, with hundreds of oak trees, dozens of clearings. She would never find it. And she couldn’t leave Rosemund.

  Perhaps Gawyn would turn back. They had closed the gates of some cities—perhaps he would not be able to get in, or perhaps he would talk to people on the roads and realize Lord Guillaume must be dead. Come back, she willed him, hurry. Come back.

  Kivrin went through Imeyne’s bag again, tasting the contents of the pouches. The yellow powder was sulfur. Doctors had used that during epidemics, too, burning it to fumigate the air, and she remembered learning in History of Meds that sulfur killed certain bacteria, though whether that was only in the sulfa compounds she couldn’t remember. It was safer than cutting the bubo open, though.

  She sprinkled a little on the fire to test it, and it billowed into a yellow cloud that burned Kivrin’s throat even through her mask. The clerk gasped for breath, and Imeyne, over in her corner, set up a continuous hacking.

  Kivrin had expected the smell of bad eggs to disperse in a few minutes, but the yellow smoke hung in the air like a pall, burning their eyes. Maisry ran outside, coughing into her apron, and Eliwys took Imeyne and Agnes up to the loft to escape it.

  Kivrin propped the manor door open and fanned the air with one of the kitchen cloths, and after awhile the air cleared a little, though her throat still felt parched. The clerk continued to cough, but Rosemund stopped, and her pulse slowed till Kivrin could scarcely feel it.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Kivrin said, holding her hot, dry wrist. “I’ve tried everything.

  Roche came in, coughing.

  “It is the sulfur,” she said. “Rosemund is worse.”

  He looked at her and felt her pulse and then went out again, and Kivrin took that as a good sign. He would not have left if she were truly bad.

  He came back in a few minutes, wearing his vestments and carrying the oil and viaticum of the last rites.

  “What is it?” Kivrin said. “Has the steward’s wife died then?”

  “Nay,” he said, and looked past her at Rosemund.

  “No,” Kivrin said. She scrambled to her feet to stand between him and Rosemund. “I won’t let you.”

  “She must not die unshriven,” he said, still looking at Rosemund.

  “Rosemund isn’t dying,” Kivrin said, and followed his gaze.

  She looked already dead, her chapped lips half-open and her eyes blind and unblinking. Her skin had taken on a yellowish cast and was stretched tautly over her narrow face. No, Kivrin thought desperately. I must do something to stop this. She’s twelve years old.

  Roche moved forward with the chalice, and Rosemund raised her arm, as if in supplication, and then let it fall.

  “We must open the plague-boil,” Kivrin said. “We must let the poison out.”

  She thought he was going to refuse, to insist on hearing Rosemund’s confession first, but he did not. He set the chrism and chalice down on the stone floor and went to fetch a knife.

  “A sharp one,” Kivrin called after him, “and bring wine.” She set the pot of water on the fire again. When he came back with the knife, she washed it off with water from the bucket, scrubbing the encrusted dirt near the hilt with her fingernails. She held it in the fire, the hilt wrapped in the tail of her surcote, and then poured boiling water over it and then wine and then the water again.

  They moved Rosemund closer to the fire, the side with the bubo facing it so they could have as much light as possible, and Roche knelt at Rosemund’s head. Kivrin slipped her arm gently out of her shift and bunched the fabric under her for a pillow. Roche took hold of her arm, turning it so the swelling was exposed.

  It was almost the size of an apple, and her whole shoulder joint was inflamed and swollen. The edges of the bubo were soft and almost gelatinous, but the center was still hard.

  Kivrin opened the bottle of wine Roche had brought, poured some on a cloth, and swabbed the bubo gently with it. It felt like a rock embedded in the skin. She was not sure the knife would even cut into it.

  She picked up the knife and poised it above the swelling, afraid of cutting into an artery, of spreading the infection, of making it worse.

  “She is past pain,” Roche said.

  Kivrin looked down at her. She hadn’t moved, even when Kivrin pressed on the swelling. She stared past them both at something terrible. I can’t make it worse, Kivrin thought. Even if I kill her, I can’t make it worse.

  “Hold her arm,” she said, and Roche pinned her wrist and halfway up the forearm, pressing her arm flat to the floor. Rosemund still didn’t move.

  Two quick, clean slices, Kivrin thought. She took a deep breath and touched the knife to the swelling.

  Rosemund’s arm spasmed, her shoulder twisting protectively away from the knife, her thin hand clenching into a claw. “What do you do?” she said hoarsely. “I will tell my father!”

  Kivrin jerked the knife back. Roche caught at Rosemund’s arm and pushed it back against the floor, and she hit weakly at him with her other hand.

  “I am the daughter of Lord Guillaume D’Ivrey,” she said. “You cannot treat me thus.”

  Kivrin scooted out of her reach and scrambled to her feet, trying to keep the knife from touching anything. Roche reached forward and caught both her wrists easily in one hand. Rosemund kicked out weakly at Kivrin. The chalice fell over and wine spilled out in a dark puddle.

  “We must tie her,” Kivrin said, and realized she was holding the knife aloft, like a murderer. She wrapped it in one of the cloths Eliwys had torn, and ripped another into strips.

  Roche bound Rosemund’s wrists above her head while Kivrin tied her ankles to the leg of one of the upturned benches. Ro
semund didn’t struggle, but when Roche pulled her shift up over her exposed chest, she said, “I know you. You are the cutthroat who waylaid the Lady Katherine.”

  Roche leaned forward, pressing his full weight down on her forearm, and Kivrin cut across the swelling.

  Blood oozed and then gushed, and Kivrin thought, I’ve hit an artery. She and Roche both lunged for the pile of cloths, and she grabbed a thick wad of them and pressed them against the wound. They soaked through immediately, and when she released her hand to take the one Roche handed her, blood spurted out of the tiny cut. She jammed the tail of her surcote against it, and Rosemund whimpered, a small, helpless sound like Agnes’s puppy, and seemed to collapse, though there was nowhere for her to fall.

  I’ve killed her, Kivrin thought.

  “I can’t stop the bleeding,” she said, but it had already stopped. She held the skirt of her surcote against it, counting to a hundred and then two hundred, and carefully lifted a corner of it away from the wound.

  Blood still welled from the cut, but it was mixed with a thick yellow-gray pus. Roche leaned forward to dab at it, but Kivrin stopped him. “No, it’s full of plague germs,” she said, taking the cloth away from him. “Don’t touch it.”

  She wiped the sickening-looking pus away. It oozed up again, followed by a watery serum. “That’s all of it, I think,” she said to Roche. “Hand me the wine.” She looked round for a clean cloth to pour it on.

  There weren’t any. They had used them all, trying to stop the bleeding. She tipped the wine bottle carefully and let the dark liquid dribble into the cut. Rosemund didn’t move. Her face was gray, as if all the blood had been drained out of her. As it had been. And I don’t have a transfusion to give her. I don’t even have a clean rag.

  Roche was untying Rosemund’ hands. He took her limp hand in his huge one. “Her heart beats strongly now,” he said.

  “We must have more linen,” Kivrin said, and burst into tears.

  “My father will see you hanged for this,” Rosemund said.

  Transcript from the Doomsday Book