Dooms Day Book

“I thought you might attempt to break in and open the net,” Gilchrist said, “since you seem to have no respect for Mediaeval’s authority. I cut off the power to prevent that happening, and it appears I did the right thing.”

Dunworthy had heard of people being struck down by bad news. When Badri had told him Kivrin was in 1348, he had not been able to absorb what it meant, but this news seemed to strike him with a physical force, knocking the wind out of him so that he couldn’t catch his breath. “You shut the net down,” he said. “You’ve lost the fix.”

“Lost the fix?” Gilchrist said. “Nonsense. There are backups and things surely. When the power’s switched on again—”

“Does this mean we don’t know where Kivrin is?” Colin asked.

“Yes,” Dunworthy said, and thought as he fell, I am going to hit the console like Badri did, but he didn’t. He fell almost gently, like a man with the wind knocked out of him, and collapsed like a lover into Gilchrist’s outstretched arms.

“I knew it,” he heard Colin say. “This is because you didn’t get your enhancement. Great-Aunt Mary’s going to kill me.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“That’s impossible,” Kivrin said. “It can’t be 1348,” but it all made sense, Imeyne’s chaplain dying, and their not having any servants, Eliwys’s not wanting to send Gawyn to Oxford to find out who Kivrin was. “There is much illness there,” Lady Yvolde had said, and the Black Death had hit Oxford at Christmas in 1348. “What happened?” she said, and her voice rose out of control. “What happened? I was supposed to go to 1320. 1320! Mr. Dunworthy told me I shouldn’t come, he said Mediaeval didn’t know what they were doing, but they couldn’t have sent me to the wrong year!” She stopped. “You must get out of here! It’s the Black Death!”

They all looked at her so uncomprehendingly that she thought the interpreter must have lapsed into English again. “It’s the Black Death,” she said again. “The blue sickness!”

“Nay,” Eliwys said softly, and Kivrin said, “Lady Eliwys, you must take Lady Imeyne and Father Roche down to the hall.”

“It cannot be,” she said, but she took Lady Imeyne’s arm and led her out, Imeyne clutching the poultice as if it were her reliquary. Maisry darted after them, her hands clutched to her ears.

“You must go, too,” Kivrin said to Roche. “I will stay with the clerk.”

“Thruuuu…” the clerk murmured from the bed, and Roche turned to look at him. The clerk struggled to rise, and Roche started toward him.

“No!” Kivrin said, and grabbed his sleeve. “You mustn’t go near him.” She interposed herself between him and the bed. “The clerk’s illness is contagious,” she said, willing the interpreter to translate. “Infectious. It is spread by fleas and by…” she hesitated, trying to think how to describe droplet infection, “by the humours and exhalations of the ill. It is a deadly disease, which kills nearly all who come near it.”

She watched him anxiously, wondering if he had understood anything she’d said, if he could understand it. There had been no knowledge of germs in the 1300’s, no knowledge of how diseases spread. The contemps had believed the Black Death was a judgment from God. They had thought it was spread by poisonous mists which floated across the countryside, by a dead person’s glance, by magic.

“Father,” the clerk said, and Roche tried to step past Kivrin, but she barred his way.

“We cannot leave them to die,” he said.

They did, though, she thought. They ran away and left them. People abandoned their own children, and doctors refused to come, and all the priests fled.

She stooped and picked up one of the strips of cloth Lady Imeyne had torn for her poultice. “You must cover your mouth and nose with this,” she said.

She handed it to him and he looked at it, frowning, and then folded it into a flat packet and held it to his face.

“Tie it,” Kivrin said, picking up another one. She folded it diagonally and put it over her nose and mouth like a bandit’s mask and tied it in a knot in the back. “Like this.”

Roche obeyed, fumbling with the knot, and looked at Kivrin. She moved aside, and he bent over the clerk and put his hand on his chest.

“Don’t—”she said, and he looked up at her. “Don’t touch him any more than you have to.”

She held her breath as Roche examined him, afraid that he would start up suddenly again and grab at Roche, but he didn’t move at all. The bubo under his arm had begun to ooze blood and a slow greenish pus.

Kivrin put a restraining hand on Roche’s arm. “Don’t touch it,” she said. “He must have broken it when we were struggling with him.” She wiped the blood and pus away with one of Imeyne’s cloth strips and bound up the wound with the last one, tying it tightly at the shoulder. The clerk did not wince or cry out, and when she looked at him she saw he was staring straight ahead, unmoving.

“Is he dead?” she asked.