Dooms Day Book Page 4

  Gilchrist had apparently caught sight of him as he stood up. He half-turned, as if to walk back out again, but Latimer was already nearly to the table. Gilchrist followed, no longer smiling.

  “Is the fix in?” Dunworthy asked.

  “The fix?” Gilchrist said vaguely.

  “The fix,” Dunworthy said. “The determination of where and when Kivrin is that makes it possible to pull her out again.”

  “Your tech said it would take at least an hour to determine the coordinates,” Gilchrist said stuffily. “Does it always take him that long? He said he would come tell us when it was completed, but that the preliminary readings indicate that the drop went perfectly and that there was minimal slippage.”

  “What good news!” Mary said, sounding relieved. “Do come sit down. We’ve been waiting for the fix, too, and having a pint. Will you have something to drink?” she asked Latimer, who had got the umbrella down and was fastening the strap.

  “Why, I believe I shall,” Latimer said. “This is after all a great day. A drop of brandy, I think. Strong was the wyn, and wel to drinke us leste.” He fumbled with the strap, getting it tangled in the ribs of the umbrella. “At last we have the chance to observe the loss of adjectival inflection and the shift to the nominative singular at first hand.”

  A great day, Dunworthy thought, but he felt relieved in spite of himself. The slippage had been his greatest worry. It was the most unpredictable part of a drop, even with parameter checks.

  The theory was that it was the net’s own safety and abort mechanism, Time’s way of protecting itself from continuum paradoxes. The shift forward in time was supposed to prevent collisions or meetings or actions that would affect history, sliding the historian neatly past the critical moment when he might shoot Hitler or rescue the drowning child.

  But net theory had never been able to determine what those critical moments were or how much slippage any given drop might produce. The parameter checks gave probabilities, but Gilchrist hadn’t done any. Kivrin’s drop might have been off by two weeks or a month. For all Gilchrist knew, she might have come through in April, in her fur-lined coat and winter kirtle.

  But Badri had said minimal slippage. That meant Kivrin was off by no more than a few days, with plenty of time to find out the date and make the rendezvous.

  “Mr. Gilchrist?” Mary was saying. “Can I get you a brandy?”

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  Mary rummaged for another crumpled note and went over to the bar.

  “Your tech seems to have done a passable job,” Gilchrist said, turning to Dunworthy. “Mediaeval would like to arrange to borrow him for our next drop. We’ll be sending Ms. Engle to 1355 to observe the effects of the Black Death. Contemporary accounts are completely unreliable, particularly in the area of mortality rates. The accepted figure of fifty million deaths is clearly inaccurate, and estimates that it killed one-third to one-half of Europe are obvious exaggerations. I’m eager to have Ms. Engle make trained observations.”

  “Aren’t you being rather premature?” Dunworthy said. “Perhaps you should wait to see if Kivrin manages to survive this drop or at the very least gets through to 1320 safely.”

  Gilchrist’s face took on its pinched look. “It strikes me as somewhat unjust that you constantly assume Mediaeval is incapable of carrying out a successful practicum,” he said. “I assure you we have carefully thought out its every aspect. The method of Kivrin’s arrival has been researched in every detail.

  “Probability puts the frequency of travellers on the Oxford– Bath road as one every 1.6 hours, and it indicates a 92 per cent chance of her story of an assault being believed due to the frequency of such assaults. A wayfarer in Oxfordshire had a 42.5 per cent chance of being robbed in winter, 58.6 per cent in summer. That’s an average, of course. The chances were greatly increased in parts of Otmoor and the Wychwood and on the smaller roads.”

  Dunworthy wondered how on earth Probability had arrived at those figures. The Doomsday Book didn’t list thieves, with the possible exception of the king’s censustakers, who sometimes took more than the census, and the cutthroats of the time surely hadn’t kept records of whom they had robbed and murdered, the locations marked neatly on a map. Proofs of deaths away from home had been entirely de facto: the person had failed to come back. And how many bodies had lain in the woods, undiscovered and unmarked by anyone?

  “I assure you we have taken every precaution possible to protect Kivrin,” Gilchrist said.

  “Like parameter checks?” Dunworthy said. “And unmanneds and symmetry tests?”

  Mary came back. “Here we are, Mr. Latimer,” she said, putting a glass of brandy down in front of him. She hooked Latimer’s wet umbrella over the back of the settle and sat down beside him.

  “I was just assuring Mr. Dunworthy that every aspect of this drop was exhaustively researched,” Gilchrist said. He picked up the plastic figurine of a wise man carrying a gilt box. “The brass-bound casket in her equipage is an exact reproduction of a jewel casket in the Ashmolean.” He set the wise man down. “Even her name was painstakingly researched. Isabel is the woman’s name listed most frequently in the Assize Rolls and the Regista Regum for 1295 through 1320.

  “It is actually a corrupted form of Elizabeth,” Latimer said, as if it were one of his lectures. “Its widespread use in England from the twelfth century is thought to trace its origin to Isavel of Angoulкme, wife of King John.”

  “Kivrin told me she’d been given an actual identity, that Isabel de Beauvrier was one of the daughters of a Yorkshire nobleman,” Dunworthy said.

  “She was,” Gilchrist said. “Gilbert de Beauvrier had four daughters in the appropriate age range, but their Christian names were not listed in the rolls. That was a common practice. Women were frequently listed only by surname and relationship, even in parish registers and on tombstones.”

  Mary put a restraining hand on Dunworthy’s arm. “Why did you choose Yorkshire?” she asked quickly. “Won’t that put her a long way from home?”

  She’s seven hundred years from home, Dunworthy thought, in a century that didn’t value women enough to even list their names when they died.

  “Ms. Engle was the one who suggested that,” Gilchrist said. “She felt having the estate so distant would ensure that no attempt would be made to contact the family.”

  Or to cart her back to them, miles from the drop. Kivrin had suggested it. She had probably suggested the whole thing, searching through exchequer rolls and church registers for a family with a daughter the right age and no court connections, a family far enough up into the East Riding that the snow and the impassable roads would make it impossible for a messenger to ride and tell the family a missing daughter had been found.

  “Mediaeval has given the same careful attention to every detail of this drop,” Gilchrist said, “even to the pretext for her journey, her brother’s illness. We were careful to ascertain that there had been an outbreak of influenza in that section of Gloucestershire in 1319, even though illness was abundant during the Middle Ages, and he could just as easily have contracted cholera or blood poisoning.”

  “James,” Mary said warningly.

  “Ms. Engle’s costume was hand-sewn. The blue cloth for her dress was hand-dyed with woad using a mediaeval recipe. And Ms. Montoya has exhaustively researched the village of Skendgate where Kivrin will spend the two weeks.”

  “If she makes it there,” Dunworthy said.

  “James,” Mary said.

  “What precautions have you taken to ensure that the friendly traveller who happens along every 1.6 hours doesn’t decide to cart her off to the convent at Godstow or a brothel in London or see her come through and decide she’s a witch? What precautions have you taken to ensure that the friendly traveller is in fact friendly and not one of the cutthroats who waylay 42.5 per cent of all passersby?”

  “Probability indicated there was no more than a 0.04 per cent chance of someone being at the location at the time o
f the drop.”

  “Oh, look, here’s Badri already,” Mary said, standing up and putting herself between Dunworthy and Gilchrist. “That was quick work, Badri. Did you get the fix all right?”

  Badri had come away without his coat. His lab uniform was wet and his face was pinched with cold. “You look half-frozen,” Mary said. “Come and sit down.” She motioned to the empty place on the settle next to Latimer. “I’ll fetch you a brandy.”

  “Did you get the fix?” Dunworthy said.

  He was not only wet, he was drenched. “Yes,” he said, and his teeth started to chatter.

  “Good man,” Gilchrist said, standing up and clapping him on the shoulder. “I thought you said it would take an hour. This calls for a toast. Have you any champagne?” he called out to the barman, clapped Badri on the shoulder again, and went over to the bar.

  Badri stood looking after him, rubbing his arms and shivering. He seemed inattentive, almost dazed.

  “You definitely got the fix?” Dunworthy asked.

  “Yes,” he said, still looking after Gilchrist.

  Mary came back to the table, carrying the brandy. “This should warm you up a bit,” she said, handing it to him. “There. Drink it down. Doctor’s orders.”

  He frowned at the glass as if he didn’t know what it was. His teeth were still chattering.

  “What is it?” Dunworthy said. “Kivrin’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “Kivrin,” he said, still staring at the glass, and then seemed suddenly to come to himself. He set the glass down. “I need you to come,” he said, and started to push his way back through the tables to the door.

  “What’s happened?” Dunworthy said, standing up. The creche figures fell over, and one of the sheep rolled across the table and fell off.

  Badri opened the door on the carillon’s clanging of “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

  “Badri, wait, we’re to have a toast,” Gilchrist said, coming back to the table with a bottle and a tangle of glasses.

  Dunworthy reached for his coat.

  “What is it?” Mary said, reaching for her shopping bag. “Didn’t he get the fix?”

  Dunworthy didn’t answer. He grabbed up his overcoat and took off after Badri. The tech was already halfway down the street, pushing his way through the Christmas shoppers as if they weren’t even there. It was raining hard, but Badri seemed oblivious to that, too. Dunworthy pulled his overcoat more or less on and shoved into the crowd.

  Something had gone wrong. There had been slippage after all, or the first-year apprentice had made an error in the calculations. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the net itself. But it had safeties and layereds and aborts. If anything had gone wrong with the net, Kivrin simply wouldn’t have gone through. And Badri had said he’d got the fix.

  It had to be the slippage. It was the only thing that could have gone wrong and the drop still take place.

  Ahead Badri crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a bicycle. Dunworthy barged between two women carrying shopping bags even larger than Mary’s and over a white terrier on a leash, and caught sight of him again two doors up.

  “Badri!” he called. The tech half-turned and crashed straight into a middle-aged woman with a large flowered umbrella.

  The woman was bent against the rain, holding the umbrella nearly in front of her, and she obviously didn’t see Badri either. The umbrella, which was covered with lavender violets, seemed to explode upward, and then fell top-down onto the pavement. Badri, still plunging blindly ahead, nearly fell over it.

  “Watch where you’re going, won’t you?” the woman said angrily, grabbing at the edge of the umbrella. “This is hardly the place to run, then, is it?”

  Badri looked at her and then at the umbrella with the same dazed look he had had in the pub. “Sorry,” Dunworthy could see him say and bend to pick it up. The two of them seemed to wrestle over the expanse of violets for a moment before Badri got hold of the handle and righted the umbrella. He handed it to the woman, whose heavy face was red with rage or the cold rain or both.

  “Sorry?!” she said, raising the handle over her head as if she were going to strike him with it. “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  He put his hand uncertainly up to his forehead and then, as he had in the pub, seemed to remember where he was and took off again, practically running. He turned in at Brasenose’s gate, and Dunworthy followed, across the quad, in a side door to the laboratory, down a passage, and into the net area. Badri was already at the console, bending over it and frowning at the screen.

  Dunworthy had been afraid it would be awash with garbage, or worse, blank, but it showed the orderly columns of figures and matrices of a fix.

  “You got the fix?” Dunworthy said, panting.

  “Yes,” Badri said. He turned and looked at Dunworthy. He had stopped frowning, but there was an odd, abstracted look on his face, as if he were trying hard to concentrate.

  “When was…” he said and began to shiver. His voice trailed off as if he had forgotten what he was going to say.

  The thin-glass door banged, and Gilchrist and Mary came in, with Latimer at their heels, fumbling with his umbrella. “What is it? What’s happened?” Mary said.

  “When was what, Badri?” Dunworthy demanded.

  “I got the fix,” Badri said. He turned and looked at the screen.

  “Is this it?” Gilchrist said, leaning over his shoulder. “What do all these symbols mean? You’ll need to translate for us laymen.”

  “When was what?” Dunworthy repeated.

  Badri put his hand up to his forehead. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

  “What?” Dunworthy shouted. “Slippage? Was there slippage?”

  “Slippage?” he said, shivering so hard he could hardly get the word out.

  “Badri,” Mary said. “Are you all right?”

  Badri got the odd, abstracted look again, as if he were considering the answer.

  “No,” he said, and pitched forward across the console.

  Chapter Three

  She heard the bell as she came through. It sounded thin and tinny, like the piped-in bell music they were playing in the High for Christmas. The control room was supposed to be soundproof, but every time someone opened the anteroom door from outside, she had been able to hear the faint, ghostly sound of Christmas carols.

  Dr. Ahrens had come in first, and then Mr. Dunworthy, and both times Kivrin had been convinced they were there to tell her she wasn’t going after all. Dr. Ahrens had nearly cancelled the drop in hospital, when Kivrin’s antiviral inoculation had swelled up into a giant red welt on the underside of her arm. “You’re not going anywhere until the swelling goes down,” Dr. Ahrens had said, and refused to discharge her from hospital. Kivrin’s arm still itched, but she wasn’t about to tell Dr. Ahrens that because she might tell Mr. Dunworthy, who had been acting horrified ever since he found out she was going.

  I told him two years ago I wanted to go, Kivrin thought. Two years ago, and when she’d gone to show him her costume yesterday, he was still trying to talk her out of it.

  “I don’t like the way Mediaeval’s running this drop,” he’d said. And even if they were taking the proper precautions, a young woman has no business going to the Middle Ages alone.”

  “It’s all worked out,” she’d told him. “I’m Isabel de Beauvrier, daughter of Gilbert de Beauvrier, a nobleman who lived in the East Riding from l276 to 1332.”

  “And what was the daughter of a Yorkshire nobleman doing on the Oxford-Bath road alone?”

  “I wasn’t. I was with all my servants, travelling to Evesham to fetch my brother, who’s lying ill in the monastery there, and we were set upon by robbers.”

  “By robbers,” he had said, blinking at her through his spectacles.

  “I got the idea from you. You said young women didn’t travel anywhere alone in the Middle Ages, that they were always attended. So I was attended, but my servants bolted when we were attacked, and the robbers took
the horses and all my goods. Mr. Gilchrist thinks it’s a plausible story. He said the probability of—”

  “It’s a plausible story because the Middle Ages were full of cutthroats and thieves.”

  “I know,” she’d said impatiently, “and disease carriers and marauding knights and other dangerous types. Weren’t there any nice people in the Middle Ages?”

  “They were all busy burning witches at the stake.”

  She had decided she’d better change the subject. “I came to show you my costume,” she’d said, turning slowly so he could see her blue kirtle and white fur-lined cloak. “My hair will be down for the drop.”

  “You have no business wearing white to the Middle Ages,” he’d said. “It will only get dirty.”

  He hadn’t been any better this morning. He had paced the narrow observation area like an expectant father. She had worried the whole morning that he would suddenly try to call a halt to the whole proceeding.

  There had been delays and more delays. Mr. Gilchrist had had to tell her all over again how the Doomsday Book worked, as if she were a first-year student. Not one of them had any faith in her, except possibly Badri, and even he had been maddeningly careful, measuring and remeasuring the net area and once erasing an entire series of coordinates and entering it again.

  She had thought the time would never come for her to get into position, and after she had, it was even worse, lying there with her eyes closed, wondering what was going on. Latimer told Gilchrist he was worried about the spelling of Isabel they had chosen, as if anyone back then had known how to read, let alone spell. Montoya came and stood over her and told her the way to identify Skendgate was by its church’s frescoes of the Last Judgment, something she had told Kivrin at least a dozen times before.

  Someone, she thought Badri because he was the only one who didn’t have any instructions for her, bent and moved her arm a little in toward her body and tugged at the skirt of her robe. The floor was hard, and something was digging into her side just below her ribs. Mr. Gilchrist said something, and the bell started up again.