Dooms Day Book

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 muckhole 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 traveller 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 further north than the maps had indicated, and she was south of it, in Wychwood Forest.

“Ascertain your exact spatial and temporal location immediately,” Dr. 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 1970’s. 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 traveller 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 cowpath. So these were the wonderful highways of fourteenth-century England, the highways that were opening trade and broadening horizons.