The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  The snow made it slow going, and he was already out of breath, the tightness in his chest like an iron band.

  “What do we do when we get there?” Colin asked, striding effortlessly through the snow.

  “You stay out of sight and wait for me,” Dunworthy said. “Is that perfectly clear?”

  “Yes,” Colin said. “Are you certain this is the right road?”

  Dunworthy was not certain at all. It had been curving west, away from the direction he thought the village lay in, and just ahead it bent north again. He peered anxiously through the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of stone or thatch.

  “The village wasn’t this far, I’m sure of it,” Colin said, rubbing his arms. “We’ve been walking for hours.”

  It had not been hours, but it had been at least an hour, and they had not come to so much as a cottar’s hut, let alone a village. There were a score of villages here, but where?

  Colin took out his locator. “See,” he said, showing Dunworthy the readout. “We’ve come too far south. I think we should go back to the other road.”

  Dunworthy looked at the readout and then at the map. They were nearly straight south of the drop and over three kilometers from it. They would have to retrace their steps nearly all the way, with no hope of finding Kivrin in that time, and at the end of it, he was not certain he would be able to go any farther. He already felt done in, the band tightening round his chest with every step, and he had a sharp pain midway up his ribs. He turned and looked at the curve ahead, trying to think what to do.

  “My feet are freezing,” Colin said. He stamped his feet in the snow, and a bird flew up, startled, and flapped away. Dunworthy looked up, frowning. The sky was becoming overcast.

  “We should have followed the hedge,” Colin said. “It would have been much—”

  “Hush,” Dunworthy said.

  “What is it?” Colin whispered. “Is someone coming?”

  “Shh,” Dunworthy whispered. He backed Colin to the edge of the road and listened again. He’d thought he’d heard a horse, but now he couldn’t hear anything. It might only have been the bird.

  He motioned Colin behind a tree. “Stay here,” he whispered and crept forward till he could see around the curve.

  The black stallion was tied to a thorn bush. Dunworthy backed hastily behind a spruce tree and stood still, trying to see the rider. There was no one in the road. He waited, trying to quiet his own breathing so he could hear; but no one came, and he could hear nothing but the stallion’s pacing.

  It was saddled, and its bridle was chased with silver, but it looked thin, its ribs standing out sharply against the girth. The girth itself was loose, and the saddle slipped a little to the side as it stepped backward. The stallion tossed its head, pulling hard against the reins. It was obviously trying to free itself, and as Dunworthy moved closer he could see it was not tied but tangled in the brambles.

  He stepped into the road. The stallion turned its head toward him and began to whinny wildly.

  “There, there, it’s all right,” he said, coming up carefully on its left side. He put his hand on its neck, and it stopped whinnying and began nosing at Dunworthy, looking for food.

  He looked for some grass sticking up through the snow to feed it, but the area around the thornbush was nearly bare of vegetation.

  “How long have you been trapped here, old boy?” he asked. Had the stallion’s owner been stricken with the plague as he rode, or had he died, and the panicked horse bolted, running until its flying reins got tangled in the bush?

  He walked a little way into the woods, looking for footprints, but there weren’t any. The stallion began to whinny again, and he went back to free it, snatching up stalks of grass that stuck up through the snow as he went.

  “A horse! Apocalyptic!” Colin said, racing up. “Where did you find it?”

  “I told you to stay where you were.”

  “I know, but I heard the horse whinnying, and I thought you’d run into trouble.”

  “All the more reason for you to have obeyed me.” He handed the grass to Colin. “Feed him these.”

  He bent over the bush and pulled out the reins. The stallion, in its efforts to extricate itself, had twisted the rein hopelessly round the spiked brambles. Dunworthy had to hold the branches back with one hand and reach in with the other to unwind it. He was covered with scratches within seconds.

  “Whose horse is it?” Colin asked, offering the horse a piece of grass from a distance of several feet. The starving animal lunged at it and Colin jumped back, dropping it. “Are you sure it’s tame?”

  Dunworthy had incurred a near-fatal injury when the stallion jerked its head down for the grass, but he had the rein free. He wrapped it around his bleeding hand and took up the other one.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Whose horse is it?” Colin said, stroking its nose timidly.

  “Ours.” He tightened the girth and helped Colin, protesting, up behind the saddle, and mounted.

  The stallion, not yet realizing it was free, turned its head accusingly when he kicked it gently in the sides but then cantered off back down the snow-packed road, delighted at its freedom.

  Colin clutched frantically at Dunworthy’s middle, just at the spot where the pain was, but by the time they had gone a hundred meters, he was sitting up straight and asking “How do you steer it?” and “What if you want it to go faster?”

  It took them no time at all to return to the main road. Colin wanted to go back to the hedge and strike out across country, but Dunworthy turned the stallion the other way. The road forked in half a mile, and he took the left-hand road.

  It was a good deal more traveled than the first one, though the woods it led through were even thicker. The sky was completely overcast now, and the wind was picking up.

  “I see it!” Colin said, and let go with one hand to point past a stand of ash trees to a glimpse of dark gray stone roof against the gray sky. A church, perhaps, or a byre house. It lay off to the east, and almost immediately a narrow track branched from the road, over a rickety wooden plank bridging a stream, and across a narrow meadow.

  The stallion did not prick up its ears or attempt to speed its pace, and Dunworthy concluded it must not be from this village. And a good thing, too, or we’d be hanged for horse stealing before we could ask where Kivrin is, he thought, and saw the sheep.

  They lay on their sides, mounds of dirty gray wool, though some of them had huddled near the trees, trying to keep out of the wind and the snow.

  Colin hadn’t seen. “What do we do when we get there?” he asked Dunworthy’s back. “Do we sneak in or just ride up and ask somebody if they’ve seen her?”

  There will be no one to ask, Dunworthy thought. He kicked the stallion into a canter and they rode through the ash trees and into the village.

  It was not at all like the illustrations in Colin’s book, buildings around a central clearing. They were scattered in among the trees, almost out of sight of one another. He glimpsed thatched roofs, and farther off, in a grove of ash trees, the church, but here, in a clearing as small as that of the drop, was only a timbered house and a low shed.

  It was too small to be a manor house—the steward’s perhaps, or the reeve’s. The wooden door of the shed stood open, and snow had drifted in. There was no smoke from the roof, and no sound.

  “Perhaps they’ve fled,” Colin said. “Lots of people fled when they heard the plague was coming. That’s how it spread.”

  Perhaps they had fled. The snow in front of the house was packed flat and hard, as if many people and horses had been in the yard.

  “Stay here with the horse,” he said, and went up to the house. The door here was not shut either, though it had been pulled nearly to. He ducked in the little door.

  It was icy inside and so dark after the bright snow that he could see nothing except the red afterimage. He pushed the door open all the way, but there was still scarcely any light, and everything seemed tinged with red.<
br />
  It must be the steward’s house. There were two rooms, separated by a timbered partition, and matting on the floor. The table was bare, and the fire on the hearth had been out for days. The little room was filled with the smell of cold ashes. The steward and his family had fled, and perhaps the rest of the villagers, too, no doubt taking the plague with them. And Kivrin.

  He leaned against the doorjamb, the tightness in his chest suddenly a pain again. Of all his worries over Kivrin, this one had never occurred to him, that she would have gone.

  He looked into the other room. Colin ducked his head in the door. “The horse keeps trying to drink out of a bucket that’s out here. Should I let it?”

  “Yes,” Dunworthy said, standing so Colin couldn’t see round the partition. “But don’t let him drink too much. He hasn’t had any water for days.”

  “There isn’t all that much in the bucket.” He looked round the room interestedly. “This is one of the serf’s huts, right? They really were poor, weren’t they? Did you find anything?”

  “No,” he said. “Go and watch the horse. And don’t let him wander off.”

  Colin went out, brushing his head against the top of the door.

  The baby lay on a bag of flocking in the corner. It had apparently still been alive when the mother died; she lay on the mud floor, her hands stretched out toward it. Both were dark, almost black, and the baby’s swaddling clothes were stiff with dried blood.

  “Mr. Dunworthy!” Colin called, sounding alarmed, and Dunworthy jerked around, afraid he had come in again, but he was still out with the stallion, whose nose was deep in the bucket.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “There’s something over there on the ground.” Colin pointed toward the huts. “I think it’s a body.” He yanked on the stallion’s reins, so hard the bucket fell over and a thin puddle of water spilled out on the snow.

  “Wait,” Dunworthy said, but Colin was already running forward into the trees, the stallion following.

  “It is a b—” Colin said, and his voice cut off sharply. Dunworthy ran up, holding his side.

  It was a body, a young man’s. He lay sprawled face up in the snow in a frozen puddle of black liquid. There was a dusting of snow on his face. His buboes must have burst, Dunworthy thought, and looked at Colin, but he was not looking at the body, but at the clearing beyond.

  It was larger than the one in front of the steward’s house. At its edges lay half a dozen huts, at the far end the Norman church. And in the center, on the trampled snow, lay the bodies.

  They had made no attempt at burying them, though by the church there was a shallow trench, a mound of snow-covered dirt piled beside it. Some of them seemed to have been dragged to the churchyard—there were long, sledlike marks in the snow—and one at least had crawled to the door of his hut. He lay half in, half out.

  “ ‘Fear God,’ ” Dunworthy murmured, “ ‘for the hour of His judgment is come.’ ”

  “It looks like there was a battle here,” Colin said.

  “There was,” Dunworthy said.

  Colin stepped forward, peering down at the body. “Do you think they’re all dead?”

  “Don’t touch them,” Dunworthy said. “Don’t even go near them.”

  “I’ve had the gamma globulin,” he said, but he stepped back from the body, swallowing.

  “Take deep breaths,” Dunworthy said, putting his hand on Colin’s shoulder. “And look at something else.”

  “They said in the book it was like this,” he said, staring determinedly at an oak tree. “Actually, I was afraid it might be a good deal worse. I mean, it doesn’t smell or anything.”

  “Yes.”

  He swallowed again. “I’m all right now.” He looked round the clearing. “Where do you think Kivrin’s likely to be?”

  Not here, Dunworthy prayed.

  “She might be in the church,” he said, starting forward with the stallion again, “and we need to see if the tomb’s there. This might not be the village.” The stallion took two steps forward and reared its head, its ears back. It whinnied frightenedly.

  “Go and put him in the shed,” Dunworthy said, taking hold of the reins. “He can smell the blood, and he’s frightened. Tie him up.”

  He led the stallion back out of sight of the body and handed the reins to Colin, who took them, looking worried. “It’s all right,” Colin said, leading it toward the steward’s house. “I know just how you feel.”

  Dunworthy walked rapidly across the clearing to the churchyard. There were four bodies in the shallow pit and two graves next to it, covered with snow, the first to die perhaps, when there were still such things as funerals. He went round to the front of the church.

  There were two more bodies in front of the door. They lay face down, on top of one another, the one on top an old man. The body underneath was a woman’s. He could see the skirts of her rough cloak and one of her hands. The man’s arms were flung across the woman’s head and shoulders.

  Dunworthy lifted the man’s arm gingerly, and his body shifted slightly sideways, pulling the cloak with it. The kirtle underneath was dirty and smeared with blood, but he could see that it had been bright blue. He pulled the hood back. There was a rope around the woman’s neck. Her long blond hair was tangled in the rough fibers.

  They hanged her, he thought with no surprise at all.

  Colin ran up. “I figured out what these marks on the ground are,” he said. “They’re where they dragged the bodies. There’s a little kid behind the barn with a rope around his neck.”

  Dunworthy looked at the rope, at the tangle of hair. It was so dirty it was scarcely blond.

  “They dragged them to the churchyard because they couldn’t carry them, I bet,” Colin said.

  “Did you put the stallion in the shed?”

  “Yes. I tied it to a beam thing,” he said. “It wanted to come with me.”

  “He’s hungry,” Dunworthy said. “Go back to the shed and give him some hay.”

  “Did something happen?” Colin asked. “You’re not having a relapse, are you?”

  Dunworthy didn’t think Colin could see her dress from where he stood. “No,” he said. “There should be some hay in the shed. Or some oats. Go and feed the stallion.”

  “All right,” Colin said defensively, and ran toward the shed. He stopped halfway across the green. “I don’t have to give it the hay, do I?” he shouted. “Can I just lay it down in front of it?”

  “Yes,” Dunworthy said, looking at her hand. There was blood on her hand, too, and down the inside of her wrist. Her arm was bent, as though she had tried to break her fall. He could take hold of her elbow and turn her onto her back quite easily. All it required was to take hold of her elbow.

  He picked up her hand. It was stiff and cold. Under the dirt it was red and chapped, the skin split in a dozen places. It could not possibly be Kivrin’s, and if it were, what had she gone through these past two weeks to bring her to this state?

  It would all be on the corder. He turned her hand gently over, looking for the implant scar, but her wrist was too caked with dirt for him to be able to see it, if it was there.

  And if it was, what then? Call Colin back and send him for an axe in the steward’s kitchen and chop it out of her dead hand so they could listen to her voice telling the horrors that had happened to her? He could not do it, of course, any more than he could turn her body over and know once and for all that it was Kivrin.

  He laid the hand gently back next to the body and took hold of her elbow and turned her over.

  She had died of the bubonic variety. There was a foul yellow stain down the side of her blue kirtle where the bubo under her arm had split and run. Her tongue was black and so swollen it filled her entire mouth, like some ghastly, obscene object thrust between her teeth to choke her, and her pale face was swollen and distorted.

  It was not Kivrin. He tried to stand, staggering a little, and then thought, too late, that he should have covered the woman’
s face.

  “Mr. Dunworthy!” Colin shouted, coming at a dead run, and he looked up blindly, helplessly at him.

  “What’s happened!” Colin said accusingly. “Did you find her?”

  “No,” he said, blocking Colin’s way. We’re not going to find her.

  Colin was looking past him at the woman. Her face was bluish-white against the white snow, the bright blue dress. “You found her, didn’t you? Is that her?”

  “No,” Dunworthy said. But it could be. It could be. And I cannot turn over any more bodies, thinking it might be. His knees felt watery, as though they would not support him. “Help me back to the shed,” he said.

  Colin stood stubbornly where he was. “If it’s her, you can tell me. I can bear it.”

  But I can’t, Dunworthy thought. I can’t bear it if she’s dead.

  He started back toward the steward’s house, keeping one hand on the cold stone wall of the church and wondering what he would do when he came to open space.

  Colin leaped beside him, taking his arm, looking anxiously at him. “What’s the matter? Are you having a relapse?”

  “I just need to rest a bit,” he said and went on, almost without meaning to, “Kivrin wore a blue dress when she went.” When she went, when she lay down on the ground and closed her eyes, helpless and trusting, and disappeared forever into this chamber of horrors.

  Colin pushed the door of the shed open and helped Dunworthy inside, holding him up with both hands on his arm. The stallion looked up from a sack of oats.

  “I couldn’t find any hay,” Colin said, “so I gave it some grain. Horses eat grain, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” Dunworthy said, leaning into the sacks. “Don’t let him eat them all. He’ll gorge himself and burst.”

  Colin went over to the sack and began dragging it out of the stallion’s reach. “Why did you think it was Kivrin?” he said.

  “I saw the blue dress,” Dunworthy said. “Kivrin’s dress was that color.”

  The bag was too heavy for Colin. He yanked on it with both hands, and the side split, spilling oats on the straw. The stallion nibbled eagerly at them. “No, I mean all those people died of the plague, didn’t they? And she’s been immunized. So she couldn’t get the plague. And what else would she die of?”