The Doomsday Book Read online

  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 canceled 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 1276 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, traveling to Evesham to fetch my brother, who’s lying ill in the monastery there, and we were set upon by robbers.”

  “By robbers,” he 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 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 corder 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 kirtle. 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.

  Please, Kivrin thought, please, wondering if Dr. Ahrens had suddenly decided Kivrin needed another inoculation or if Dunworthy had raced off to the History Faculty and gotten them to change the rating back to a ten.

  Whoever it was must be holding the door open—she could still hear the bell, though she couldn’t make out the tune. It wasn’t a tune. It was a slow, steady tolling that paused and then went on, and Kivrin thought, I’m through.

  She was lying on her left side, her legs sprawled awkwardly as if she had been knocked down by the men who had robbed her, and her arm half-flung over her face to ward off the blow that had sent the blood trickling down the side of her face. The position of her arm should make it possible for her to open her eyes without being seen, but she didn’t open them yet. She lay still, trying to listen.

  Except for the bell, there was no sound at all. If she were lying on a fourteenth-century roadside, there should be birds and squirrels at least. They had probably been shocked into silence by her sudden appearance or by the net’s halo, which left shimmering frostlike particles in the air for several minutes.

  After a long minute, a bird twittered, and then another one. Something rustled nearby, then stopped and rustled again. A fourteenth-century squirrel or a wood mouse. There was a thinner rustle that was probably wind in the branches of the trees, though she couldn’t feel any breeze on her face, and above it, from very far away, the distant sound of the bell.

  She wondered why it was tolling. It could be ringing vespers. Or matins. Badri had told her he didn’t have any idea how much slippage there would be. He had wanted to postpone the drop while he ran a series of checks, but Mr. Gilchrist had said Probability had predicted average slippage of 6.4 hours.

  She didn’t know what time she had come through. It had been a quarter to eleven when she came out of prep—she had seen Ms. Montoya looking at her digital and asked her what time it was—but she had no idea how long it had taken after that. It had seemed like hours.

  The drop had been scheduled for noon. If she had come through on time and Probability was right about the slippage, it would be six o’clock in the evening, which was too late for vespers. And if it were vespers, why did the bell go on tolling?

  It could be tolling for mass, or for a funeral or a wedding. Bells had rung almost constantly in the Middle Ages—to warn of invasions or fires, to help a lost child find its way back to the village, even to ward off thunderstorms. It could be ringing for any reason at all.

  If Mr. Dunworthy were here, he’d be convinced it was a funeral. “Life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight years,” he had told her when she first said she wanted to go to the Middle Ages, “and you only lived that long if you survived cholera and smallpox and blood poisoning, and if you didn’t eat rotten meat or drink polluted water or get trampled by a horse. Or get burned at the stake for witchcraft.”

  Or freeze to death, Kivrin thought. She was beginning to feel stiff with cold though she had been lying there only a little while. Whatever was poking her in the side felt like it had gone through her rib cage and was puncturing her lung. Mr. Gilchrist had told her to lie there for several minutes and then stagger to her feet, as if coming out of unconsciousness. Kivrin had thought several minutes was hardly enough, considering Probability’s assessment of the number of people on the road. It would surely be more than several minutes before a traveler happened along, and she was unwilling to give up the advantage her appearing to be unconscious gave her.

  And it was an advantage, in spite of Mr. Dunworthy’s idea that half of England would converge on an unconscious woman to rape her while the other half waited nearby with the stake they intended to burn her at. If she was conscious, her rescuers would ask her questions. If she was out cold, they would discuss her and other things besides. They would talk about where to take her and speculate on who she might be and where she might have come from, speculations with a good deal more information in them than “Who are you?” had.

  But now she felt an overwhelming urge to do what Mr. Gilchrist had suggested—get up and look around. The ground was cold, her side hurt, and her head was starting to throb in time with the bell. Dr. Ahrens had told her that would happen. Traveling this far into the past would give her symptoms of time lag—headache, insomnia, an
d a general botch-up of the Circadian rhythms. She felt so cold. Was that a symptom of the time lag, too, or was the ground she was lying on cold enough to penetrate her fur-lined cloak this quickly? Or was the slippage worse than the tech had thought and it was really the middle of the night?

  She wondered if she was lying in the road. If she was, she should certainly not stay there. A fast horse or the wagon that had made the ruts might roll right over her in the dark.

  Bells don’t ring in the middle of the night, she told herself, and there was too much light filtering through her closed eyelids for it to be dark. But if the bell she could hear was a vespers bell, that would mean it was getting dark, and she had better get up and look around before night fell.

  She listened all over again, to the birds, to the wind in the branches, to a steady scraping sound. The bell stopped, the echo of it ringing in the air, and there was a little sound, like an intaken breath or the shuffle of a foot on soft dirt, very close.

  Kivrin tensed, hoping the involuntary movement didn’t show through her concealing cloak, and waited, but there were no footsteps or voices. And no birds. There was someone, or something, standing over her. She was sure of it. She could hear its breathing, feel its breath on her. It stood there for a long time, not moving. After what seemed like an endless space of time, Kivrin realized she was holding her own breath and let it out slowly. She listened, but now she couldn’t hear anything over the throbbing of her own pulse. She took a deep, sighing breath, and moaned.

  Nothing. Whatever it was didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and Mr. Dunworthy had been right: pretending to be unconscious was no way to come into a century where wolves still prowled the forests. And bears. The birds abruptly began to sing again, which meant either it was not a wolf or the wolf had gone away. Kivrin went through the ritual of listening again, and opened her eyes.

  She couldn’t see anything but her sleeve, which was against her nose, but just the act of opening her eyes made her head ache worse. She closed her eyes, whimpered, and stirred, moving her arm enough so that when she opened her eyes again she would be able to see something. She moaned again and fluttered her eyes open.

  There was no one standing over her, and it wasn’t the middle of the night. The sky overhead through the tangled branches of the trees was a pale grayish-blue. She sat up and looked around.

  Almost the first thing Mr. Dunworthy had said to her that first time she had told him she wanted to go to the Middle Ages was, “They were filthy and disease-ridden, the muck hole of history, and the sooner you get rid of any fairy-tale notions you have about them, the better.”

  And he was right. Of course he was right. But here she was, in a fairy wood. She and the wagon and all the rest of it had come through in a little open space too small and shadowed to be called a glade. Tall, thick trees arched above and over it.

  She was lying under an oak tree. She could see a few scalloped leaves in the bare branches high above. The oak was full of nests, though the birds had stopped again, traumatized by her movement. The underbrush was thick, a mat of dead leaves and dry weeds that should have been soft but wasn’t. The hard thing Kivrin had been lying on was the cap of an acorn. White mushrooms spotted with red clustered near the gnarled roots of the oak tree. They, and everything else in the little glade—the tree trunks, the wagon, the ivy—glittered with the frosty condensation of the halo.

  It was obvious that no one had been here, had ever been here, and equally obvious that this wasn’t the Oxford-Bath road and that no traveler was going to happen along in 1.6 hours. Or ever. The mediaeval maps they’d used to determine the site of the drop had apparently been as inaccurate as Mr. Dunworthy’d said they were. The road was obviously farther north than the maps had indicated, and she was south of it, in Wychwood Forest.

  “Ascertain your exact spatial and temporal location immediately,” Mr. Gilchrist had said. She wondered how she was supposed to do that—ask the birds? They were too far above her for her to see what species they were, and the mass extinctions hadn’t started until the 1970s. Short of them being passenger pigeons or dodoes, their presence wouldn’t point to any particular time or place, anyway.

  She started to sit up, and the birds exploded into a wild flurry of flapping wings. She stayed still until the noise subsided and then rose to her knees. The flapping started all over again. She clasped her hands, pressing the flesh of her palms together and closing her eyes so if the traveler who was supposed to find her happened by, it would look like she was praying.

  “I’m here,” she said and then stopped. If she reported that she had landed in the middle of a wood, instead of on the Oxford-Bath road, it would just confirm what Mr. Dunworthy was thinking, that Mr. Gilchrist hadn’t known what he was doing and that she couldn’t take care of herself, and then she remembered that it wouldn’t make any difference, that he would never hear her report until she was safely back.

  If she got safely back, which she wouldn’t if she was still in this wood when night fell. She stood up and looked around. It was either late afternoon or very early morning, she couldn’t tell in the woods, and she might not be able to tell by the sun’s position even when she got where she could see the sky. Mr. Dunworthy had told her that people sometimes stayed hopelessly turned around for their entire stay in the past. He had made her learn to sight using shadows, but she had to know what time it was to do that, and there was no time to waste on wondering which direction was which. She had to find her way out of here. The forest was almost entirely in shadow.

  There was no sign of a road or even a path. Kivrin circled the wagon and boxes, looking for an opening in the trees. The woods seemed thinner to what felt like the west, but when she went that way, looking back every few steps to make sure she could still see the weathered blue of the wagon’s cloth covering, it was only a stand of birches, their white trunks giving an illusion of space. She went back to the wagon and started out again in the opposite direction, even though the woods looked darker that way.

  The road was only a hundred yards away. Kivrin clambered over a fallen log and through a thicket of drooping willows, and looked out onto the road. A highway, Probability had called it. It didn’t look like a highway. It didn’t even look like a road. It looked more like a footpath. Or a cow path. So these were the wonderful highways of fourteenth-century England, the highways that were opening trade and broadening horizons.

  The road was barely wide enough for a wagon, though it was obvious that wagons had used it, or at least a wagon. The road was rutted into deep grooves, and leaves had drifted across and into the ruts. Black water stood in some of them and along the road’s edge, and a skim of ice had formed on some of the puddles.

  Kivrin was standing at the bottom of a depression. The road climbed steadily up in both directions from where she was, and, to what felt like the north, the trees stopped halfway up the hill. She turned around to look back. It was possible to catch a glimpse of the wagon from here—the merest patch of blue—but no one would. The road dived here into woods on either side, and narrowed, making it a perfect spot in which to be waylaid by cutthroats and thieves.

  It was just the place to lend credibility to her story, but they would never see her, hurrying through the narrow stretch of road, or if they did catch sight of the barely visible corner of blue, they would think it was someone lying in wait and spur their horses into flight.

  It came to Kivrin suddenly that lurking there in the thicket, she looked more like one of those cutthroats than like an innocent maiden who’d been recently coshed on the head.

  She stepped out onto the road and put her hand up to her temple. “O holpen me, for I am ful sore in drede!” she cried.

  The interpreter was supposed to automatically translate what she said into Middle English, but Mr. Dunworthy had insisted she memorize her first speeches. She and Mr. Latimer had worked on the pronunciation all yesterday afternoon.

  “Holpen me, for I haf been y-robbed by fel thefes, ” she said. />
  She considered falling down on the road, but now that she was out in the open she could see it was even later than she’d guessed, nearly sundown, and if she was going to see what lay at the top of the hill, she had better do it now. First, though, she needed to mark the rendezvous with some kind of sign.

  There was nothing distinctive about any of the willows along the road. She looked for a rock to lay at the spot where she could still glimpse the wagon, but there wasn’t a sign of one in the rough weeds at the edge of the road. Finally she clambered back through the thicket, catching her hair and her cloak on the willow branches, got the little brass-bound casket that was a copy of one in the Ashmolean, and carried it back to the side of the road.

  It wasn’t perfect—it was small enough for someone passing by to carry off—but she was only going as far as the top of the hill. If she decided to walk to the nearest village, she’d come back and make a more permanent sign. And there weren’t going to be any passersby anytime soon. The steep sides of the ruts were frozen hard, the leaves were undisturbed, and the skim of ice on the puddles was unbroken. Nobody had been on the road all day, all week maybe.

  She straightened weeds up around the chest and then started up the hill. The road, except for the frozen mudhole at the bottom, was smoother than Kivrin had expected, and pounded flat, which meant horses used it a good deal in spite of its empty look.

  It was an easy climb, but Kivrin felt tired before she had gone even a few steps, and her temple began to throb again. She hoped her time-lag symptoms wouldn’t get worse—she could already see that she was a long way from anywhere. Or maybe that was just an illusion. She still hadn’t “ascertained her exact temporal location,” and this lane, this wood, had nothing about them that said positively 1320.

  The only signs of civilization at all were those ruts, which meant she could be in any time after the invention of the wheel and before paved roads, and not even definitely then. There were still lanes exactly like this not five miles from Oxford, lovingly preserved by the National Trust for the Japanese and American tourists.